These are the recollections of my years as the Psychology department's Chair (1986-89), for our Historical Archive. Because I completed only one 3-year term (still a record for brevity), it might be expected that an ultra-brief account is warranted. However, as I began to write out my recollections in June 2003, almost 15 years after the fact, the account turned out to be rather lengthy, and for this I apologize to anyone who reads this. My defense is that the Psychology faculty of that time engaged enthusiastically in a remarkable effort to begin improving the Department's standing in the College of Arts & Sciences and in the University, and to alter our governance structure in ways that resonate today. I wanted to summarize these important developments as best I could, and some others that were personally meaningful to me. Those who were in the Department in 1986-89 may remember some details differently that I have done, or may feel that I have omitted some developments or details that should have been included. I invite them to submit corrections and addenda to this document. I have organized my recollections in four main sections. The first two sections provide my view of the administrative contexts in the University at large and the Department in particular in the 1980s. Section 3 recounts several salient developments in the Department during my years as chair; here, I have simply listed the developments by name as links that an interested reader may go to for detail. Section 4 describes my reasons for not continuing as Chair after 3 years. Finally, the Acknowledgements section gives some important credits. 1. THE UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATIVE CONTEXT IN THE MID-1980s 2. THE DEPARTMENT ADMINISTRATIVE CONTEXT CIRCA EARLY 1980s SALIENT DEPARTMENTAL DEVELOPMENTS
During my years as Chair, Bernie Sliger was President, Gus Turnbull was Provost, Bob Johnson was the VP for Research, and Werner Baum was Dean of the College of Arts & Science. Most of my interactions were with Werner Baum. Werner was one of the original scientists hired at FSU in the late 1940s and by the time I interacted with him he was a seasoned administrator who had held several high-administrative positions early on at FSU, as well as the Presidency of two other Universities (Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Rhode Island). He was called out of retirement to become Dean of Arts & Sciences here in the 1970s, as I recall, when a search failed to achieve its targeted candidate. My pre-chair impressions of Werner were gained almost entirely from comments made by Joe Grosslight at our Departmental faculty meetings over several years. My own experiences as chair confirmed that Joe was right in characterizing Werner as an extraordinarily tight-fisted, demanding and often-confrontational Dean. Werner was an administrative Darwinian: we were in charge of our own departmental destiny, and it was up to us to make the thing work (with as little fiscal help as possible). I also learned that Werner Baum had the "right academic stuff", expressing a healthy continuing skepticism in public and private about the many administrative fads that materialized from above in that era (e.g., the 5-year strategic planning exercises). Werner was a man of the old school - and I must say that I respected him for this trait very much. In what I recall as our many academic battles, he taught me sound lessons about administration. At this point, I am not even sure that there were that many battles. Such things have a way of fading out. I have four small and humorous memories to recount. For part of Werner's Deanship, he had an administrative assistant named Joy; I often felt it might be his dark sense of humor to have the Dean's Office phone answered: "Dean Baum's office, this is Joy". Second, when facing Werner across the desk in his very crowded office, there was a spray-can on the supplicant's side that remained uncomfortably in the visual field throughout interactions; it had a label that said "Bullshit Repellent". Third, at one of the day-long "Chairs and Deans" meetings convened each term by the Provost to discuss administrative nuts and bolts, Werner leaned back in his chair, as Dean of Faculties Steve Edwards was droning on about some procedure or other, and said quite audibly to the assembled science-department chairs in the row behind: "This is the sort of thing that went on before the fall of the Roman Empire." Finally, after a particularly raw fiscal decision by Werner that went against the Department's best interests (in my opinion), I responded by asking Joy to tell him that I was making available "a gift certificate for unlimited psychological services at our Psychology Clinic". I never heard back from him on this offer, but I thought it was a good use of the Department's resources to deal with questionable administrative actions.
I took over as Department Chair in Spring, 1986, following an election in which Joe Grosslight and I were the candidates. It was a tough decision to run against Joe. He was hired in 1966 as a department Head, rather than as a Chair. By the 1980s, Joe had hired the majority of the faculty, including me. In 1986, he wanted to stay on for one last 3-year term; he would have had total of 23 years as Chair. Since 1966, Joe Grosslight had had an open-ended term of office. I do not recall that we were ever asked to evaluate his performance as Head/Chair. In the early 1980s, however, the relationship between Joe and Dean Baum seemed to be deteriorating (by Joe's account and by the grapevine), and there were indications that the Department's budgets and its role in the College were being hurt by this situation. Out of the blue, all faculty members in the Department received a memo from the Dean that announced we would have an election for Department Chair every three years as was done in all the other departments of the College. This memo triggered an outburst from several of us. For example, I recall going to his office and telling him that what we did in our department was our business, not his. I later learned that the Dean took these outbursts as further examples of the naiveté of the psychology faculty; after I became Chair, he told me several times that his annual meetings with the Department were like "meeting with a tribe from Zimbabwe". But when many of us were hired, Joe made it clear that it was our job to be scholars and teachers, and it was his job to take care of all the administrative nonsense on- and off-campus that would otherwise distract us from our work. This seemed like a good plan to me (and I think to the others), and Joe reinforced its wisdom over the years by making detailed reports at every faculty meeting about the latest battles he was waging for us against the administrative forces of evil that seemed to take up enormous amounts of his time in meetings and memo writing. Consequently, for many years most of us worked in a focused scholarly atmosphere in the Department, with only a dim awareness of administrative goings on. It was a very good time to be a young faculty member. I am grateful to Joe for having set up the situation in this way. The Dean's instruction that we must elect a Chair was followed, of course. However, we were determined to show him who was really in charge here, and in the first election we unanimously nominated and (probably) unanimously voted for Joe. (It came as news to most of us tribal types that the Dean actually chose the person to serve as Chair; our vote was only to "recommend" candidates.) Soon, however, indications mounted that the Department may not be getting its fair share of College resources and that the Dean may be down on Psychology. In a memorable faculty meeting at which Dean Baum made his annual appearance (with the Department in full "tribal" mode), I recall Karen Berkley relentlessly pursuing the Dean regarding whether he personally viewed Psychology as "a science". Unable to escape Karen's persistent questioning, Dean Baum eventually commented to the effect that: a) the true mark of a science is its ability to predict events, b) his wife (Shirley) had once been a social worker and, consequently, he knew first-hand some of the things we did in this Department, and c) with the exception of the Psychobiologists in the department, he personally felt that Psychology was a kind of voodoo. Later the Dean amplified point c for me: he felt that two of our three areas of graduate training were questionable as Arts & Sciences enterprises (a Social Psychology area Joe Grosslight had initiated had not jelled and several "social" faculty had departed by the early 1980s). In his view, our longstanding APA-accredited School Psychology area was more properly situated in the College of Education, our longstanding APA-accredited Clinical Psychology area was highly successful in attracting students but was far from a scientific field, and only our Experimental Psychology area was a proper fit for the College ("Experimental" included the Psychobiologists as well as researchers in what would now be called cognitive psychology). I think it was Werner Baum's view of our Department that drove many changes we undertook to alter our graduate training emphases and reposition our Department in the College. [A humorous note. At Joe Grosslight's retirement dinner a few years later, Wally Kennedy served as Master of Ceremonies. He skillfully pointed out that Dean Baum's presence gave the event an elevated scientific status, but then proceeded to skewer the Dean's own field of science in a most humorous way by showing how meteorologists had failed miserably in predicting landfall for a hurricane that had threatened Wally's river home.] Gradually, sentiment grew that the Department could benefit from some new leadership. At the next 3-year election point, at least one candidate from the faculty challenged Joe. As I recall, Darryl Bruce and Joe ran, and Joe was re-elected for another term. Three years later, as Joe's 20th year as Department head/chair was ending, he made clear that he would accept a "final" 3-year term. Nevertheless, several colleagues persuaded me to put my name in the race. The argument was that for the good of the Department someone needed to step out of their scholarly cocoon, and that if I would "go first" others would be "right behind". My wife and best friend, Carol, provided her usual excellent perspectives on what such a decision might mean for us. My good friend and colleague Jim Smith was a principal advocate of the view that I was well-suited for the Chair position. Others were also quite supportive. I agreed to let my name stand. As I recall, Joe then attempted to withdraw his name, but I think it remained on the final ballot. I was elected Chair early in the Spring term, 1986. Joe bowed out from Chair duties almost immediately, and I was asked to assume the work of the Chair, including preparing faculty salary recommendations for the Dean a few weeks after the election. Consequently, my 3-year term began about 6 months earlier than scheduled. I would like to add that Joe and I resumed our good friendship after a short healing period. He died unexpectedly during surgery for a heart valve replacement at the University of Alabama Medical School in 1988. His many contributions to the Department and to the profession are noted elsewhere on this web site. A few days before he left for his surgery, he came into my Chair's office, told me he was worried about how the surgery would turn out and observed that Dean Baum, too, had heart problems. With moist eyes, he said: "Why me? Why not Werner?" Joe was showing some of his well-known humor -- but I think he felt that justice would have been done if his administrative nemesis had been going to Alabama rather than him. It seemed that a lot of changes needed to be made. An overriding goal for the Department was to re-position itself in the College of Arts & Sciences as a major player among the science departments. It was also necessary for us to revamp the governance procedures of the Department to make broad faculty participation the norm. As a symbol that things were different, I moved the Chair's office to the opposite end of the Main Office complex and painted the faux-wood walls gray. I photographed some architectural details of our buildings and mounted them in my new office. (Some faculty asked what buildings these photos showed; I enjoyed saying that they were our buildings, and that I hoped we would now look at our Department in a new way.) I sent out a note to faculty saying that I would be available in the Chair's office for half days and in my lab the other half (badly underestimating the reality of the time demands of being Chair). I consulted with my friend Larry Abele, who was Chair of Biological Sciences, for advice on chairing a "life sciences" department (a term I liked to use in the Dean's presence to provide us with a "science" label). I bought some self-help books on how to be successful as a manager of a large group and learned for the first time such tricks as how to end meetings (by standing up). A very important ingredient that made it all work out was a four-member "core team" of faculty and staff who were enthusiastic for changes and willing to take on some very time-consuming tasks. George Weaver had been Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Affairs in Joe Grosslight's later years and, fortunately, he agreed to stay on. Russ Clark, a member of the social psychology faculty (who left the department some years ago), agreed to take over as Director of Graduate Training and to enhance our computerized records. Nancy Leasure, Joe Grosslight's administrative assistant, agreed to stay on also. Nancy brought a level of focus and discipline to my Chair life, and to the Department's fiscal and procedural records, that made order out of seeming disorder. I am still trying to recover from finding those lengthy color-coded "To Do" lists on my desk each morning. Finally, Stan Warmath agreed to stay on as Manager of Laboratories (which evolved into his current position as Facilities Manager). Stan thought clearly and creatively about all practical matters related to space and facilities for faculty and graduate students, and he could get any task done promptly and at minimal cost. One of his important projects was to undertake a computerized inventory of all the Department's space holdings which proved invaluable on many occasions for administrative purposes. Together, George Weaver, Russ Clark, Nancy Leasure, Stan Warmath, and I planned what we called "new initiatives", many of which were proposed for consideration by the faculty. In addition to the Core Team, many members of the broader faculty agreed to take on new roles, or to work temporarily on important projects such as drafting bylaws needed to get our new "self-governing" Department up and running. We were able to make a good start towards the goal of re-positioning the Department as a main force in the College (a goal that has been reached in more recent years). I was most fortunate to have the enthusiastic participation of the faculty at large while I was in the Chair position. The Department's longstanding culture of collegiality was exactly what we needed for this venture. Everyone pitched in with the best of humor, and with hard work, to mold our new future. We all thought we were doing something quite special. It was a collegial and exciting time. I think that even Werner Baum became a fan of our group. In this section, I summarize what I consider to be the most salient developments in the department during the time I served as Chair. As I wrote about these developments from the perspective of 2003, I found myself reminded of issues and details that I had forgotten or repressed. In the interest of the historical record (and because it would be a real hassle to edit this material down), I have included these details in the links below.
One of the important initiatives in re-positioning Psychology as a "science" department in the College of Arts & Sciences was stimulated by Werner Baum's negative view of our School Psychology graduate program. It was pointed out that School was more properly situated in the College of Education, rather than in Arts & Science. In fact, I believe ours was one of only two School Psychology programs in the country that were located in a psychology department. Furthermore, we had experienced a recent accreditation site visit that insisted we add more faculty in that area with "school" credentials (read: "education") and neither our faculty nor Werner Baum were very disposed to us moving in that direction. Joe Torgesen was the head of the area, and in consultations with him and the other School faculty, the idea was floated that we might give up the School program in favor of some kind of a cognitive-focused area which was more in tune with national developments in psychology departments. This was not a universally popular idea, and it carried many issues to be resolved (such as where would some current School faculty be best located in the Department's area structure). But after lengthy deliberation among the new Executive Committee members and faculty from all areas, and consultation with the Dean about implications of such an action ("positive"), a memo was sent to the faculty and graduate students on December 1, 1986, outlining a proposed new graduate training program in "Cognitive and Behavioral Science" that would involve phasing out the School Program by 1991 (while protecting current School graduate students). It would also include a realignment of the Department's graduate training areas such that a) Clinical would remain as our APA-approved program (and that it would move towards a more scientific orientation in its training), b) the Experimental area would be eliminated and that some of its members would join CBS while others would constitute a Psychobiology/Neuroscience area, and c) current School faculty would elect to join either the new CBS area or the Clinical area. The CBS area was meant to include a focus on "practical cognition" (a term used by Darryl Bruce in our discussions) which we envisioned as including faculty working on practical intelligence, reading, eyewitness testimony and other social psychology processes, and applied behavior analysis. The new combination was a bit of a stretch, but the argument was made that the new area, freed from the demand of School's education orientation, could become a research area that would be "scientific", attract significant grant funding from NIH and NSF, and attract graduate students with strong research interests. The plan was eventually approved by the faculty, the Dean, and other administrative powers, and we moved ahead as a reorganized graduate training department in which 2/3 of our training areas could clearly fall into the "science" column of Dean Baum's ledger. Furthermore, we argued that the Clinical area was itself becoming more scientific in its training orientation (which would encourage more research grant funding), so that the 2/3 "science" content was a conservative estimate. The willingness of the faculty to consider these large changes in our traditional organization, and to do so with goodwill and enthusiasm, was a very big plus in providing our faculty and students with new training possibilities and in moving the Department into a more acceptable position in the College, from which we expected good things to flow now that we had taken action. I think these changes proved to be positive and they have provided a basis for the subsequent success of our Department in attracting new faculty and good students. During my time as Chair, two important issues surfaced concerning the Psychobiology/Neuroscience area (PBNS). One was that a new Life Sciences Building was planned (eventually the Biomedical Research building) and the possibility arose that the Psychology animal researchers in PBNS, who were housed in the Kellogg Research Building, might move to that facility. That possibility was ultimately rejected, primarily because the Technical Support facilities in the basement of the Kellogg Research Building could not be accommodated, and also because of political issues surrounding the question of whether the shops were the province of PBNS or the Department. In the end, the second-floor research labs in the new building were occupied by researchers from Biological Sciences, and by our new Psychology colleague, Charlie Ouimet, whose research needed specialized facilities offered there. The other matter to surface was a proposal for a separate doctoral degree in Neuroscience that was written in 1988 by Michael Meredith (Biological Sciences) and Mark Berkley (Psychology, PBNS). That proposal was ultimately approved by the Board of Regents and the first degree in Neuroscience was awarded in 1991 to a Psychology student, Larry O'Keefe. Prior to that time, students received their "neuroscience" degree as a Psychology or a Biological Sciences degree.
There was also a need to provide an administrative structure by which the graduate students would interact on a regular basis with the Department Chair so that issues could be addressed in a secure fashion. The bylaws included a student-elected committee (Graduate Student Advisory Committee) which served this function and proved very useful to all concerned.
Briefly, I worked closely with Larry Abele (who chaired Biological Sciences which was also seriously affected) to get background information on the actual regulations and I worked with the University Auditor (Ernie Williams, a good guy), more or less under cover, to have him track the fiscal implications of the Registrar's policy and to provide a more-or-less authoritative interpretation of whether the state regulations were being followed. Russ Clark had all of our students report back on their meetings with the registrar. One student's lawyer-brother drafted a threatening letter to the Registrar based on the claim that the Registrar was not properly following state regulations. In one particularly creative moment at the end of February, 1989, I phoned the Registrar Offices at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and FSU, posing as a clinical psychology graduate student who had just been accepted by the institution and who was trying to decide whether to come. I said I was from out of state and that my call was to get an authoritative statement about what my costs would be if I decided to accept their "offer" to enroll as a student. Strikingly, all except the FSU office were welcoming and positive; FSU's tone was punitive and listed 5 explicit classes of documents that had to be provided as proof of one's intention to be a resident, including notarized income tax forms showing independence from parents, evidence of home ownership (!) and of having received the homestead tax exemption, proof of "full-time employment" for the past 12 months, etc. Abele and I met with the Registrar in his office (with tea, no less, served on porcelain!) and described the problem as we saw it, and requested a resolution (we got a nuanced memo of understanding based on our meeting, with promises to pursue the matter with State Officials). Various upper-level University Officials were made aware of our efforts and, finally, this rogue Registrar operation was brought to a proper mode of functioning with all the students. Late in the Spring term of 1989, I received a nice note from Werner Baum expressing his thanks for our efforts and noting how much money our efforts had saved the College.
Three factors persuaded me that 3 years as Chair were enough. First, my three years as Department Chair coincided with a 3-year commitment I had made before I agreed to run against Joe Grosslight for the Chair position. The Psychonomic Society was an important research society for experimental psychologists that sponsored an annual convention and some journals. I had been a member since my early days at FSU and had attended most meetings. The Secretary-Treasurer of the organization at that time had the responsibility of collecting dues, arranging the annual conference program, scouting out hotels years in advance for future meetings, organizing the Board of Governor's meetings, and so on. It was a big job. On the basis of a recommendation by the former Secretary-Treasurer, Bruce Overmier, with whom I had co-authored a book on Animal Learning, I was asked by the Board to take on the three-year job as Secretary Treasurer. I thought this would be fun (particularly the hotel-selection part which involved being treated royally by candidate hotels interested in the Society's business). After talking carefully with Bruce, and my wife, I agreed to do the job starting in Fall, 1986. I never would have been able to do both this job and the Chair job without the help of Nancy Leasure who I was able to hire outside her Department time with Society money to do fiscal work and to help with preparation of the annual convention's program. Nevertheless, the coincidence of these two jobs, in addition to research and teaching proved to be a heavy load for me. Second, in the 1980s I was in the process of changing my research focus to include energetics and feeding in animals. This change got underway in the early 1980s when Werner Rautenberg (an expert in thermal physiology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany) and I obtained a NATO grant to begin a productive collaborative research effort involving both labs. In 1989, I successfully obtained the first of my research grants dealing with this topic (National Science Foundation, "Thermal and feeding strategies for coping with food scarcity and cold," 2/1/89 - 1/31/93; $171,864). Third, in December, 1988, as I recall, I had surgery related to a familial problem (diverticular disease) that involved resection of the lower colon. When the possibility arose that I would seek a second 3-year term as Chair, I declined. In part, I wanted to make a statement that a regular faculty member could come into the Chair position and leave it, while maintaining a research life. In part, I felt that the original enthusiasm of my colleagues for me to "go first" included the sentiment that many of them were "right behind" to become the next Chair so there would be no dearth of candidates. In part, I felt that, together, the entire faculty had already done many of the things we had agreed upon to begin moving the Department towards a more "scientific" position in the College. In part, I was ready to get on with my laboratory's new research focus. In part, I was tired of the administrative hassles within the University that often seemed mindless and driven by considerations that I did not feel should be part of a university's influences. In part, I wished I was a junior faculty member again and that someone like Joe Grosslight would take care of all the administrative nonsense while I did my scholarly thing. In part, as I often said at the time, dealing with Werner Baum was not included in my original job description at FSU. So, I packed it in and returned to the faculty, grateful that George Weaver could be persuaded to step in as the next Chair. As of now, I am the person who has served the fewest years as Head or Chair (excluding the single year that Howard Baker spent as interim Chair in 1965 between Hugh Waskom and Joe Grosslight). Looking back now, my 3-year term was filled with good humor, many adventures, and much learning about how to work with the wide array of colleagues in this Department and how to deal with the broader administrative context in which we found ourselves at that time. From today's perspective, I am glad I served as Chair. I hope that this too-lengthy account of a short 3-year period will provide future readers some deeper understanding of the high enthusiasm of the Psychology faculty, staff and graduate students at FSU in the mid 1980s. Together, we began a process of change in the Department that has arguably been for the better. I remain grateful for everyone's good will and support for the Chair in those years. This document was prepared in June, 2003, at the dogged insistence of Stan Warmath, the webmaster for the Department's Historical Archive and a long-time friend and colleague. He shamed me into getting my thoughts together. The length of the document is great. It would have been much shorter except for the obsessive behavior of Nancy Leasure who made archival files of memos and documents from my years as Chair. I did not know that these files existed until Janet Kistner pointed them out to me in her Chair office in Spring, 2003. These files, now in the Department's Historical Archive, stirred too many recollections, but I have tried to be selective in recounting what I think were important contextual and specific events. Finally, Dr. Carol Rashotte was a mainstay of calm and good advice to me in the three years I was Department Chair. Her good sense and keen analytical abilities made many positive differences in how I proceeded during those years (and in all the years I have known her). |