Oral history interview with Dr. Timothy Johnston, 2016

Lacey Wilson: All right, currently recording. Today is Thursday, December 8th, 2016. I am interviewing ... Wow. Sorry about that. Right at the beginning. I think I may use the pencil now. Okay. I'm interviewing Dr. Timothy Johnson, or Johnston?

Dr. Johnston: Johnston.

Lacey Wilson: Johnston, for the Special Collections, 125th Memory Collection. So we'll just sort of start at the beginning to get the biographical details as we go.

Dr. Johnston: Okay.

Lacey Wilson: So where were you born?

Dr. Johnston: I was born in Manchester in the northwest of England.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And when was that?

Dr. Johnston: 1949.

Lacey Wilson: What did your parents do?

Dr. Johnston: My father was a doctor, a general practitioner. My mother taught high school English literature.

Lacey Wilson: Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah. I have four sisters, four younger sisters. All of whom still living in England.

Lacey Wilson: What do they do?

Dr. Johnston: My older sister manages a village store and post office in the Lake District. My second sister just retired from a long career as a hospice nurse. My third sister retired some years ago from a career in health administration in the National Health Service. And my youngest sister is a social worker.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So when you were in high school, what subjects were you drawn to?

Dr. Johnston: The English high school system is, of course, different from the American. So at the age of about 16 I had to decide on a particular concentration for my last two years. And we had a limited number of opportunities available. I had always been interested in the sciences and so in 00:02:00my last two years I studied almost exclusively biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. And that really constituted the bulk of my classes and what would be the equivalent of junior and senior year of high school.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And then when you were applying for a Bachelor's degree, where were you looking?

Dr. Johnston: I was very interested in animal behavior and wildlife management and that was what I wanted to go into as a career. There were not very many programs available and I decided that I would apply only to the University of Edinburgh where there was a Bachelor's degree in Ecological Science with a concentration in Wildlife Management. So my teacher suggested that this was a bit risky to apply to only one university but I decided that I would give it a 00:03:00try. If I didn't get accepted, then in the school system that I was in, there was the option to stay on for an additional year of high school.

Dr. Johnston: So I decided that if I didn't get to do what I wanted to do, then I'd exercise that option and stay and think about other things. But I was accepted to the University of Edinburgh so I went and started that degree in 1967, a three-year degree. Undergraduate degrees in England and Scotland are three-year degrees rather than four-year degrees.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. And you liked Ecological Sciences?

Dr. Johnston: Yes. It was an interesting program to study. There was a lot of fieldwork. We spent a lot of time outside doing work in the field. I got 00:04:00particularly interested in Animal Behavior more, I think. Then my interest started to shift from Wildlife Management more towards Animal Behavior. I took a couple of courses in animal behavior which really excited me. And so I decided as I was finishing up my undergraduate degree and thinking about graduate work, that I would move more in the direction of Animal Behavior and away from Wildlife Management.

Lacey Wilson: And so where were you looking for your graduate work at that point?

Dr. Johnston: Well, I was particularly interested in primate behavior, non-human primate behavior. And there were not many opportunities to do that kind of work in England. I went and met with people at a couple of universities and one in particular, a man named John Crook at the University of Bristol, whom I met, said that he couldn't admit me to his research group because they didn't really 00:05:00have any vacancies and he advised me to look to the US for graduate programs here.

Dr. Johnston: So I applied to three or four programs in the US in Animal Behavior and was accepted to a couple of them and decided to go to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, working with a animal behavior expert called John Emlen who had students working on a very wide variety of animal species, including primates. Quite a few quite well known animal behavior scientists worked with Emlen over the years.

Dr. Johnston: He was sort of coming towards the end of his career when I started working with him and, in fact, he retired very soon after I finished my degree there. But it was a very stimulating group to work with. We were about eight or 00:06:00ten students working with him. I think everyone was working on a different species of animal and so there was a lot of diversity, both of animals and of interests.

Dr. Johnston: Madison, at that time, was an exciting place to live. This was right around the height of protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War and Madison of course was a hotbed of radical student protests. So I found myself thrown into a fairly stimulating political and social environment at that time. It was quite a difference from what had been a much more sort of conservative and laid-back student culture that I was used to in England.

Lacey Wilson: Was it a difficult transition to make?

Dr. Johnston: In some ways it was. There were a lot of differences, obviously. I 00:07:00was connected through, I don't remember the name of the organization now, but there was an organization that hooked me up with a family in Madison with whom I stayed for the first couple of weeks that I was there. That was sort of nice because they were able to show me around the area and I didn't really get to know them very well but it was a way of sort of easing the transition into a new culture.

Dr. Johnston: I lived in a sort of private dorm, I guess you would call it, a housing cooperative off campus which had quite a few international students living in it, as well as American students. And there were about 40 or 50 people in that house. And that was a really good way to start of, I think, because I 00:08:00immediately had a lot of contacts and knew a lot of people through that living arrangement. I didn't feel at all isolated. Madison was very diverse culturally, lots people from all over the world and all over the US.

Dr. Johnston: So I feel like it was a very good way to get an introduction to a new culture. I'd met a few English students there but I didn't really make any particular effort to isolate myself with people from my own country. I found it more interesting to get to know people from the US and different areas of the US. So I stayed there for four years before graduating with my Master's degree and that was a most enjoyable time. Madison was then, and still is, I think, a 00:09:00great place to live.

Lacey Wilson: Have to been back any time recently?

Dr. Johnston: Not recently, no. I went back a few times after leaving. I've gone from time to time for conferences over the years but not really spent a great deal of time there.

Lacey Wilson: You mentioned the protest culture there. Were you involved in any of that or did you just sort of watch it around you?

Dr. Johnston: I wasn't involved. As a visitor to this country, I didn't think it was appropriate for me to get involved in a lot of political protesting. Of course, I knew a lot of people who were very involved with the protests. And it was hard to exclude yourself from them. I mean, during the big protest days the entire town would be sort of taken over by people marching in the streets and on campus. So I knew people who were passionately involved in protesting against 00:10:00the war and attended events to listen to hear what people had to say and learn more about the different points of view and the different attitudes and so forth, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So, back to the academics. What was your focus at that point for your Master's degree? What was your big, final ... thesis is not the right word. Dissertation?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah. Thesis.

Lacey Wilson: Thesis. Okay.

Dr. Johnston: Yeah. That's what we called it, thesis. It was a project on the communication systems of a species of monkeys, Japanese macaques. My adviser, John Emlen, had worked in Japan. He had a doctoral student with whom I spent quite a bit of time during this period, Gordon Stevenson, who had done his Ph.D. dissertation or was finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on Japanese monkeys and had 00:11:00worked in Japan with Emlen. And in the course of those projects, Emlen made an agreement with the Japanese scientists who studied the monkeys in Japan to move an entire troop of monkeys from Japan to the US.

Dr. Johnston: There was a troop there that had been growing in size and lived on the outskirts of a town and was causing a lot of damage to property in the town - breaking into people's houses and destroying gardens and so forth. And so the local government had decided they wanted the animals rounded up and either killed or moved. And so Emlen arranged for them to be moved to a location in southwest Texas, near Laredo, where a wealthy landowner donated a couple of hundred acres of land for the animals to live on.

Dr. Johnston: I was involved in that project. I spent one academic year in the field down in Laredo, acting essentially as a kind of caretaker for the animals with a pair of researchers from the University of Calgary in Alberta. I collected data on the animals' communication patterns. took that back to Madison and spent my last year there analyzing those data and writing them up into my thesis.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. And then you finished and presented there. When did you graduate with a Master's?

Dr. Johnston: So that was in 1974. Since I had original thought that I would 00:13:00stay on at Madison to do my Doctorate, but Emlen was retiring and so there was no way of working with him anymore and there were no other people in the department that shared the sorts of interests that I had that I really wanted to work with. So I started looking around for other places to go to do my Ph.D. and I was encouraged to look at a fairly recently created new department at the University of Connecticut. The Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, which had been formed by bringing together scientists looking at the behavioral sciences from a wide variety of perspectives, primarily biological.

Dr. Johnston: So the faculty was made up of people working on the nervous system, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, looking at the endocrine system, 00:14:00looking at behavioral genetics. There were people doing both lab work and field work there. So they sort of encompassed the whole span of biological organization from the cellular level all the way up to the behavioral level. And I enrolled in that program in the fall of 1974 and continued working with primates but from a different perspective. Looking at the development of locomotor skills in young animals.

Dr. Johnston: I worked primarily with a woman whose primary appointment was in the Psychology Department, named Martha Wilson, and then began to develop interests that were not really quite in line with what she was doing. But I was 00:15:00able to make contact through one of the other faculty members there with a scientist at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle where there was a primate research center. A man called Gene Sackett. And Sackett agreed that I could come work in his lab for a year, which I did, so that would have been in 1977, I guess. '76 or '77.

Dr. Johnston: So I went out to Seattle and conducted experiments with infant primates, looking at their locomotive patterns and the way in which locomotion develops, in his lab. And then, after my year there collecting data, I came back to Connecticut and worked on my dissertation. I also worked very closely through 00:16:00some coursework that I did, with a small group of faculty in the Psychology Department there with interests in an area of Ecological Psychology. Michael Turvey, who worked both at Connecticut and at the Haskins Labs in New Haven at Yale University, was the leader of this group and they were particularly interested in understanding the way in which the ecological setting, the ecological circumstances in which people, primarily, but non-human animals as well, function, helps us to understand the way in which the psychological processes work.

Dr. Johnston: This is a branch of psychology developed in the 1950s by J.J. Gibson at Cornell University and, for a long time, was known as Gibsonian 00:17:00Psychology. So I got very interested in this from a theoretical point of view and worked fairly closely with Michael Turvey and some other people affiliated with his group. Turvey and I published an article together shortly after I left Connecticut. And I think that was, in some ways, a really formative experience because what it helped me to do was to focus theoretical interests that had been developing over the course of my graduate study and really gave them some direction and led me to continue working on ecological problems in psychology and the development of behavior.

Dr. Johnston: And that's really the way that my career has gone since finishing 00:18:00my Ph.D., mostly. Although I've done empirical lab work, most of the work that I've done has been more theoretical in orientation. And I really credit Turvey and some of the other people in that group with helping me sharpen those theoretical skills and focus them on the development of a productive program of research and scholarship.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah. It sounds very fascinating, the ecological psychology stuff.

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, yes. Yeah, it's never been part of the mainstream of psychology but it's always, since the 1950s or so, it's been a sort of fairly vigorous offshoot of more mainstream psychology and has its own International Society of Ecological Psychology and its own journal. So it's sort of developed 00:19:00itself with its own identity in the field.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. And that got started in the 1950s, and you were studying this in the late 1970s.

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, mid '70s by that point.

Lacey Wilson: Was it reaching a peak at the point? Was there a bit more of a shoot at that point? I'm just trying to place it.

Dr. Johnston: I think that it had, by the early '70s, it had really attracted a lot of interest from people looking at a wide variety of psychological processes. Gibson himself and his wife, Eleanor Gibson, were primarily interested in perception, sensation and perception, and how the perceptual systems work. James Gibson worked particularly on visual perception and the way 00:20:00in which we perceive complex layouts of environments. Eleanor Gibson was a developmental psychologist who looked, in particular, at the way in which perceptual systems develop during childhood, but also the way in which perceptual skills mature and can be acquired later in life.

Dr. Johnston: So the foundations of this area of the discipline were really focused on the perception of the world but one of Turvey's main interests was in motor control and how we control our behavior and relationship to an environment. So what he was interested in was linking Gibson's insights about perceptual systems to a series of ideas about how the motor systems, the motor control, works and how we feed perceptual information into the execution of 00:21:00motor activity so that we avoid obstacles, walk through doorways rather than bumping into them, how we navigate slopes and judge the size of openings in an environment, how we navigate through a complex world.

Dr. Johnston: He had a close collaborator who later came to join the faculty at Connecticut, Robert Shaw, who was more interested in what we think of as higher cognitive processes or problem solving and reasoning, and tried to provide an ecological interpretation of those cognitive processes. We had people who were interested in auditory perception as well as visual perception. So that sort of series of interconnecting research interests really kind of created the focus 00:22:00for the group at Connecticut which really was, I think, in many ways, that was the center of this kind of research for a long time. And many of Turvey and Shaw's students over the years went on to acquire faculty positions at other institutions and sort of developed a network of researchers. As my interests moved more in the direction of development, I lost contact with a lot of these people. But I still have, over the years, still connected with the folks who are continuing that work on ecological psychology.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So you're graduating with a doctorate in what year?

Dr. Johnston: So I finished my work there in 1978 and I completed, defended my 00:23:00dissertation in 1979. In 1978, I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina for a postdoc position. I'd been looking for opportunities and looking at a variety of opportunities and went to Raleigh to what was then the North Carolina Division of Mental Health Research Unit at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh. That unit had been established back in the 1960s and the man I went to work with, Gilbert Gottlieb, was well known as a very important contributor to the study of the early development of behavior.

Dr. Johnston: The work I'd done for my dissertation was developmental and I had 00:24:00become more and more interested in thinking about the development of behavior and how we understand and can analyze behavioral development and I had read a lot of Gottlieb's work. He had published a whole, long series of articles on the early development of behavior in ducklings using techniques that allowed him to manipulate the experience that the ducklings had prenatally, before they hatch from the egg. And he had also written a lot of theoretical articles on developing conceptual frameworks for understanding development more broadly, beyond just the particular kinds of behavior that he was looking at.

Dr. Johnston: And it seemed to me that this would be a really good opportunity for me to develop and expand my theoretical interests while also learning 00:25:00important empirical research skills in the lab. So I went down to meet with Gottlieb and gave a presentation to his lab group there. He invited me to come work in his lab and I moved there in, I guess it would have been in the fall probably of 1978.

Dr. Johnston: Gottlieb and I did a number of studies together. We published empirical database studied. And I continued my work on theoretical issues on the development of behavior. I completed the work that I'd been doing with Turvey and we published that theoretical work and Gottlieb and I worked on a couple of theoretical projects together. In 1981 the North Carolina Division of Mental 00:26:00Health decided that they were going to close down the research group at Dix Hospital. That was a group that, even though it was affiliated with a mental health hospital, what it looked at was a variety of basic biological and psychological problems.

Dr. Johnston: So the people there were working on the development of the nervous system and development of animal behavior. There were four or five separate labs in the unit. And the state decided that they wanted to change the focus of the research group away from basic research to essentially program and treatment evaluations. So none of the people who worked there did that kind of work and so all of them were essentially terminated and had to seek positions elsewhere.

Dr. Johnston: Gilbert Gottlieb come here to UNCG as Head of the Department of Psychology. Other leaders of the labs, one went to Duke, one went to White Forest. And because I was being paid from Gottlieb's research grants as a research associate in his lab, of course I moved to Greensboro with him. We moved the lab from Raleigh to Greensboro, which was the night the University renovated a large part off the basement floor of the Eberhart Building, where the psychology department's located, for Gottlieb's research program. Which was a very large operation. He had two couple of full-time technicians and several graduate students working with him. So it was quite a big operation to move.

Dr. Johnston: We set up his lab, got the experiments started up again, and so I continued working with Gottlieb for another year or two as a postdoc research associate. And then the Psychology Department advertised for an assistant professor in the area of animal behavior and I applied for that position and was hired as a faculty member in 1983. So I came here in 1982 as a research associate and then-

Lacey Wilson: You became a faculty member.

Dr. Johnston: ... I became a faculty member in '83.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. So you were here for a full year but not as a faculty member beforehand.

Dr. Johnston: Right.

Lacey Wilson: Just doing research in the lab as an undergrad.

Dr. Johnston: That's right. Yeah, yeah.

Lacey Wilson: So when you came on as faculty, though, because that's a bit of a 00:29:00transition. Had you taught before?

Dr. Johnston: No. Well, I had done a bit of teaching as a graduate student at Wisconsin.

Lacey Wilson: As a TA?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah. So when I was at Wisconsin in the Department of Zoology, I had a teaching assistantship and I taught general zoology labs for the first two years that I was there. Because the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences at Connecticut didn't have an undergraduate program, it was only a graduate degree program, I didn't do any teaching when I was at Connecticut. So I hadn't really had very much teaching experience. I'd enjoyed the teaching that I had done at Wisconsin. Of course, it wasn't in psychology, it was in zoology. But I certainly was looking forward to teaching. I had certainly, by that time, had my eye on an academic career. And teaching was something that I was looking forward 00:30:00to the opportunity to do.

Lacey Wilson: What was the first class you taught? Do you remember?

Dr. Johnston: I am pretty sure that in my first year I undoubtedly taught the undergraduate course in animal behavior. I think I taught a graduate seminar on learning, and the ecological study of development, which is what I had been publishing in, and the area in which I was contributing most at that time. I also, either in my first or second year, I taught a course in the psychology of learning. Then I subsequently taught a variety of other courses in the department. I began teaching general psychology, which, for someone without a degree in psychology, was quite a challenge. But it was certainly a good way ...

Dr. Johnston: ... of learning about the field. It's a commonplace in the academic world to say that you don't really understand the subject until you've tried to teach her. And there's a lot of truth to that. And it was certainly something that I found tremendously valuable about teaching general psychology was that it gave me the opportunity to really read and think about how the whole discipline is put together to educate myself about areas of the field that I knew nothing about. From my graduate work, there were some areas where I was pretty familiar with the theories and the ideas and perception of learning and cognition from the work that I'd done with Turvey and Shaw at Connecticut from work on development that I knew about from my own research and the readings that I had done.

Dr. Johnston: But of course, I knew practically nothing about clinical psychology or social psychology. My knowledge of developmental psychology was rather narrowly focused. So teaching that course, which I did regularly throughout my career in the department was something that I enjoyed. I primarily taught very large lectures, 250 students. And so developing the skills to keep a class of that size involved and interested in what you're doing it's a bit of a challenge, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed the opportunity to teach both these large lecture classes where one is really trying to do is to maintain people's interest and attention and get them to take away some sense of what the discipline is about rather than a whole lot of in depth factual knowledge, which I think is very difficult to communicate in a setting like that.

Dr. Johnston: On the one hand, two and on the other hand, small doctoral level seminars with a dozen students, where we delve very deeply into the research literature in a restricted domain. Those are the two ends of the continuum of teaching. And of course I taught medium-size classes, the upper level to undergraduates and found it all, for the most part, very rewarding obviously. It comes with its own frustration and annoyances and so forth. But in general, I think it's very rewarding part of an academic career.

Lacey Wilson: For sure. How do you think you did as a teacher, your first year because it was the first time you really tell like a class?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, well, I did a fair amount of stumbling around. And I'm sure 00:34:00I tried things that didn't work very well. I did spend some time sitting and talking with colleagues who had had experience teaching these classes and getting ideas and suggestions from them. While I was at Wisconsin, one of the professors there whom may worked for as a TA, a man by the name Don Buckland, had really devoted his entire career to undergraduate teaching. He had a research career. By the time I met him, he had really stopped doing research and focused entirely on teaching. And he was very knowledgeable and very passionate about the importance of engaging undergraduates and the study of science in particular.

Dr. Johnston: And working with him and the other TA's who worked with him, I felt that I had been brought into contact with a range of thinking about 00:35:00teaching, not just the anecdotal experiences of people who've learned by doing, but the work of people who've actually done experiments on teaching, who have looked at the effectiveness of different teaching style and different pedagogical approaches. And Buckland insisted that all of his TA's spend some time reading in the literature on university teaching. And he himself had contributed to some of that literature. So I felt, five or six years later, that I was at least aware of the existence of the literature on pedagogy.

Dr. Johnston: There is a journal in our field called The Teaching of Psychology, which publishers, as its title suggests, work on teaching and reports on the 00:36:00effectiveness or ineffectiveness of various strategies that people have tried over the years. So I subscribed for a number of years to that journal and feel like I got a lot of good ideas out of that. I think that my experience was much the same as that of other faculty at most universities, that is, you learn to teach to a certain extent by trial and error. And one of the things that I feel characterized my teaching with the exception of the very much lecture classes was that I always considered it really important for students to learn to write about the subject. Writing in my own education in England and in Scotland ... practically everything we did was writing.

Dr. Johnston: There were very, very few exams. I never took a multiple choice 00:37:00exam at any point during my undergraduate career. Every exam that I took was an essay exam. And we spent all of our time in our courses writing papers. It just felt to me that was the way that you learn about a subject as you read about it, you think about it, you listen to lectures from your professors, and then you write about it and you try to make sense out of it. So even long before we had writing across the curriculum program at UNCG. I was requiring students in all of my classes where the size permitted it to write a short reflective pieces, longer essays, research papers and so forth.

Dr. Johnston: Judging from the comments that I got from students, although they obviously found this to some extent a bit onerous, and I think some of them 00:38:00probably wish that I wasn't asking them to do so much writing. I do think that by the end of the course, most of them would agree that the writing assignments were really beneficial to them. And that was something that really was a key part of my own pedagogical approach, writing combined with good, well-organized lecture presentations that laid out the structure of the issues for students, and then periodic opportunities for us to debate and discuss what it was that we'd been learning about.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. So do you have any memorable colleague from your time in the Psychology Department?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, lots, some of them are still here.

Lacey Wilson: You can go through a list if you like.

Dr. Johnston: My colleague in the department who also worked on animal behavior 00:39:00was Cheryl Logan, who studied Mockingbird song. She started the Mockingbird population on campus.

Lacey Wilson: Oh, that's cool.

Dr. Johnston: And was interested in animal behavior broadly and animal communication. She had been teaching the animal behavior course, both at the undergraduate and at the graduate level. And I switched off with her when I joined the faculty. I spent a lot of time talking to her about teaching. We both had interest in history of the discipline. And in after three or four years, I think on the faculty, teaching the course and the history and systems of psychology was one thing that I started doing. I got a lot of advice and pointers and suggestions from her. I enjoyed talking to a lot of the people 00:40:00working in the area of development. All of whom worked on human development while my work had been on development of nonhuman animals. But I was particularly intrigued by the connections between the work that I was doing and the work that was in some ways been the mainstream work in psychology. The connections and to some extent also the lack of connections, I sometimes felt that we knew things from the study of animal development that had not been sufficiently imported into the study of human development.

Dr. Johnston: And we had a very strong developmental group at that time. The department is still strong in that area, but I think at that time it was particularly strong. Gottlieb, of course is the department head in that area. 00:41:00Robert Guttentag, who is still on the faculty here, who's had a long career studying cognitive development in children. Tony DeCasper, who was head of the department in later years, who died just earlier this year, who was very well known for studies of prenatal development in human infants, looking at the ways in which the fetus in the womb actually learns features of its mother's speech that allow it to recognize its mother's voice and distinguish the mother's voice from the voice of other women after birth. It's really quite groundbreaking work that he began in the 1960s and '70s I guess.

Dr. Johnston: So I interacted a lot with Tony. We had another developmental psychologist on the faculty at that time, Marc Marschark, who again was 00:42:00interested in various aspects of cognitive development in human children. I interacted a little bit with faculty in the clinical area, an area that I'd had no familiarity or connection with at all. Susan Keane, who's still on the faculty joined... we both joined the faculty at the same time. We were hired as faculty in the same year. So we were a cohort in a way. And I feel from my interactions with her I learned a lot about clinical psychology as a profession, as well as the ways and which it fit into the curricular structure of the department.

Dr. Johnston: I actually one year taught a graduate seminar with the clinical faculty member, Ira Turcout, who left to go to... I can't remember where Ira 00:43:00went to. But he and I taught a graduate seminar on animal models of psychopathology, which was a really interesting experience and gave me the opportunity to interact with clinical students and to give them some familiarity with the way in which study of psychological disorders can be informed by looking at analogs and nonhuman animals of one kind or another.

Dr. Johnston: So all of those were people who, in a variety of ways, I felt that in my early years there when I was still trying to get my feet in the ground as a faculty member were important influences on me. Others that I remember, Russ Harter, who was a neurophysiologist, very accomplished scientist and somebody who was very... who was one of the people in the department who taught the 00:44:00general psychology course and from whom I got a lot of ideas and suggestions and good conversation about teaching that course. And Aaron Brownstein and Rick Shull, who worked in the area of the experimental analysis of behavior, both trained in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning, a theoretical perspective that I have very little sympathy for him.

Dr. Johnston: Actually had written quite a bit of criticism of, but I found them both, Rick in particular, very stimulating people to work with. Over the years, I served on the dissertation committees, have a lot of Rick Shull's a doctoral students. And he served on the dissertation committees as many of my students. I 00:45:00feel that our very different theoretical perspectives were stimulating for the students to hear about and to see that it was possible to hold fairly markedly different theoretical positions on issues and still have a lot of respect for one another and gain a lot from the interactions and the back and forth.

Lacey Wilson: Sure. Yeah, I got that. That's stimulating. So let's talk about your transition to the Dean of Arts and Sciences. What year did that happen?

Dr. Johnston: Well, so that happened in 2002. But before I became Dean in 1990, I was asked to serve as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Joanne Creighton had come here from Wayne State University as Dean of the 00:46:00college. And Henry Levinson in the Religious Studies Department had been serving as Associate Dean of the college for awhile. He had serious health problems and wanted to step down from the responsibilities of that position. Joanne asked me if I would take that job. So in 1990, when still an associate professor, I moved into the Dean's office in the Foust building as Associate Dean with a variegated portfolio responsibilities. All of the non-departmental, interdepartmental programs reported to me. So what was then the Women's Studies Program is now the Women's and Gender Studies Program. What was then the Black Studies Program, now 00:47:00African American and Africana Studies Program. Reported to me Linguistics, Archaeology, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. So I worked with the directors of those programs, provide oversight.

Dr. Johnston: It was during Henry Levinson's years as Associate Dean that the college started the Freshman Seminar Program. It was a very small program at that time, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I took over that program. I ran the grant until it expired. And then we began to expand the program using college resources. And I feel one of the things that I accomplished as Associate Dean was maintaining and growing the Freshmen Seminar Program.

Dr. Johnston: I also served as director of the then developing, writing across the curriculum program, which Walter Beale had started as Head of the English Department. And when Walter was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and I continued to work with him as Associate Dean, we worked together on building and strengthening the writing across the curriculum program. And I took over the day to day direction of it, working with Karen Meyers, who was a lecturer in the English Department, who directed the Writing Center. And Karen and I gave workshops of faculty, teaching and writing intensive courses.

Dr. Johnston: And I felt that my experience, having used a lot of writing in my own teaching up until that point, was valuable in that regard, both because I felt like I knew quite a bit about how to use writing in teaching, and also because it gave me a certain amount of street cred, talking to people about how 00:49:00to use writing, and that teaching is more persuasive and effective if you've actually done it yourself. And you can talk from firsthand knowledge about what works or what doesn't work and so on and so forth.

Dr. Johnston: I also ran a... which was another outgrowth of the NEH grant that established the Freshman Seminar Program, a group called the Faculty Fellows Seminar. We had a group of between 15 and 20 faculty from around the college, from all the different departments in the college who met once a month on a Friday afternoon to discuss books that we all read. So over the course of the year, we'd read a series of four or five books on a variety of contemporary topics, loosely related to academic issues, one kind or another. We always tried to invite the authors of those books to come to give a talk and to meet with the 00:50:00group to discuss the work that we'd been reading.

Dr. Johnston: That was a very enjoyable experience for me to direct that. And I think everyone who participated in it really found it very rewarding. It gave me the opportunity to meet colleagues across a wide variety of departments, which was valuable to my work as Associate Dean, which obviously involved working with and interacting with faculty across the college, as well as being really intellectually stimulating by sitting around reading a book and talking to people coming from the backgrounds of History and English and Physics and Math and Biology and Sociology. You get a very wide range of different perspectives and takes on these issues. I think all of us found that really educational in the best sense of that word.

Lacey Wilson: Does that group still meet?

Dr. Johnston: No, it didn't. After I left the Dean's office... well, after I left the position of Associate Dean, I think it carried on for a year or two. And then for reasons that I don't really understand entirely, it sort of fizzled away. I think part of the reason for it, it wasn't an expensive thing to run, but it did cost a little bit of money. And we were starting to suffer from budget cuts at that time. And I think that Walter Beale as Dean was looking for ways to cut back on inessential activities in order to preserve the core programs of the college. I know that he, as I did later, had to make a lot of difficult decisions about budgets. And I suspect that was something that at some point he just said, "Look, we got to let that go."

Dr. Johnston: So I served as Associate Dean for seven years, which is quite a long time to do that. Joanne Creighton appointed me and then immediately left UNCG. I had to go to a position as Provost at Wesleyan University. And Walter came in as Interim Dean for a year and then was appointed dean the following year. So those seven years I spent and really worked with Joanne very much, except during the transition when she was leaving. Most of that entire seven-year period was spent working with Walter Beale and the other people who came in and served as Associate Dean over those years. And then in 1997... let's 00:53:00see, yes, it was 1997, Tony DeCasper had been serving as Head of the Psychology Department after Gilbert stepped down and retired from the faculty. And Walter asked me if I would agree to serve as Department Head in Psychology. So I became Department Head in Psychology in 1997 and worked in that capacity for five years.

Lacey Wilson: So what are the responsibilities as a Head of the Department?

Dr. Johnston: Well, the roles of an Associate Dean, which would be my primary administrative experience at that point and Department Head are very different. As an Associate Dean, you're essentially in a staff position supporting the work of the Dean. The Dean is the person who makes the final decisions about things that most of the workers so even though obviously I was delegated responsibility 00:54:00for various areas of operation. Ultimately, if I was undecided how to proceed or if there was some point on which Walter thought we should do something and I thought we should do something different, he was the final decider. As Department Head, you're reporting to the Dean. But in terms of your responsibilities for the Department, you're really the person doing the deciding.

Dr. Johnston: And so one of the things that I think was a difference between being Associate Dean and being Department Head was that one is more on your own as a Department Head. Obviously, there are colleagues in the department with whom you consult about. And I'm trying to consult as much as possible pretty much all of the decisions that I made with the department faculty. But when it comes right down to it, you're the one making the decisions. So there is that 00:55:00sense of administrative loneliness. I had a very good relationship with Walter. And I knew that whenever I was really uncertain about what I should be doing or had some problem that I needed to help thinking through that he would assist, and of course he was there to provide assistance and advice.

Dr. Johnston: But I also knew that of course he didn't want me in his office every couple of days, expected me to do my job running the Department. One of the things you have to learn is the willingness to take responsibility for decisions, willingness to understand that the decisions that you make are rarely going to please everyone in the department. That no matter what you do, somebody is going to be upset. And that the job involves establishing a relationship with your faculty. So even though from one decision to the next, various people are 00:56:00saying, "I wouldn't have done that. I don't think that was a good idea. I wish he hadn't decided this." In aggregate, they agree that you are making basically good decisions and that the reasons for the decisions are understood.

Dr. Johnston: And so that even if Joe Blow is a faculty member may not agree with the outcome, at least he understands why the decision was made and is willing to say, "Well, okay, you're the boss. It's your decision and we'll support it." I think I had continued to teach in the Department as Associate Dean. I can maintain my research lab there. And I continued to be involved in the ongoing work of the Department. So I felt that I still had a good relationships with the faculty there. And I think that the things that I focused 00:57:00on as Department Head were establishing that sense of trust and confidence, so that on the relatively few occasions when I needed to make a decision that I felt was the right one, even though some number of people in the department felt pretty strongly that that was not the right decision to make, there would be an acceptance of it. There wouldn't be a rebellion just because people didn't agree with me.

Dr. Johnston: And I think I was successful in doing that. As Department Head, of course you have a lot of responsibilities that you don't have as Department Dean... excuse me, as Associate Dean. As Associate Dean, I really had nobody reported to me in any serious sense other than my Administrative Assistant. But the faculty whom I worked with were not really reporting to me in a true sense of the word. Whereas as a Department Head, the faculty do report to me and they 00:58:00know they're responsible to me for their work and their actions. And I'm responsible to them for the decisions I make and for the resources that I control and so forth. And so learning the process of... you don't manage faculty the way you manage your direct reports in a business organization.

Dr. Johnston: But to work with faculty in a Department Head faculty member relationship, I inherited a Department which had very little in the way of written policies and procedures, or the stuff had been done for years in a kind of communal, "Well, this is the way we've always done it." And I had as a faculty member have felt a certain amount of discomfort with this, because anytime you run a Psychology, 20 to 25 faculty as a fairly large department, and 00:59:00inevitably people's memories of how we've always done things will differ. And so one of the things I did from the get-go as Department Head was I told the faculty we're going to develop a set of written policies, so everybody knows, including new faculty. So new faculty that would come to the department is actually something for them to read about how decisions get made and what the policies are about this, that and the other. Activity and operations that we have to engage in, they don't have to pick it out by talking to people and getting different stories from everyone and ending up feeling confused about what the order of businesses are.

Dr. Johnston: So we developed a policy manual, policies and procedures manual, some of which was just essentially codifying things that everyone pretty much 01:00:00agreed on and not really controversial. But in some areas, it became clear that we didn't really know what we were doing. And that would require a little more focus and a little more pushing of people to make some decisions about things. But I do feel after the first year or two that people were comfortable with the feeling that they knew how decisions got made in a way that they hadn't known before, how resources get distributed, how both financial resources in terms of money for graduate assistantships and money for travel and money for equipment and so on and so forth. But also things like lab space, I mean how much lab space does someone get and how do we decide that? And once they get that lab space, do they just have it forever or other decisions about giving it to somebody else? None of that had really been clear and obviously in an 01:01:00environment of constrained resources, which we all live in, some clarity about how these resources get allocated out is necessary.

Dr. Johnston: So I feel that was a useful thing that I did. We undertook some couple of curriculum revisions, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. That's an ongoing process in any department. I was responsible for hiring. We hired quite a few faculty over those five years that I was Department Head. We did a lot of tenure and promotion cases, which the Department Head is responsible for, some of them difficult and contentious, and the other's not. And it was my responsibility to ensure that those processes were all carried out in an organized and fashion with integrity, and that everybody... once again,

Dr. Johnston: ... even people who didn't agree with the outcome eventually were satisfied with the process that led up to the outcome, which is really all you can hope to do. We undertook a number of renovations of space in the Department. That wing of the Eberhart building had been designed, I think the building was built in the '60s, and it had been designed for the faculty that were in place at that time, with the particular research interests that they had and the needs for certain kinds of lab space and so on and so forth.

Dr. Johnston: Of course over the years the faculty had changed, the kind of research going on in the Department had changed quite radically, and the physical layout of the space really wasn't appropriate anymore. People had kind of, you know, fit themselves into the space, but it was clearly not really well 01:03:00designed. I negotiated with the Dean to get funds to begin a process of renovating a large amount of the research space in the building. We tore out a lot of inappropriately configured space and put in better space that we hoped would be more flexible to the recognizing that we were going to be in this building for a while, and the faculty were making the decisions at that time about space. We're going to be around 20 years from now, so we needed to have some sense of flexibility and kind of general use space. Those were some of the things that I did, or that were done in the department under my headship.

Lacey Wilson: That's quite a bit of work there. Are you doing research during all of this?

Dr. Johnston: Yes, I had a research lab going that had pretty much been wound 01:04:00down. After I'd gotten my faculty position, I began a program of experimental research on early development of behavior in rodents and worked with hamsters and voles, and we had a hamster and vole colony that I and my students worked with. When I went into the Dean's office, I kept that lab going, but after several years as Associate Dean, it became clear that I was not really able to maintain that kind of a research program at that level, so I gradually wound the experimental research down, but I continued working on my theoretical work and my theoretical research. I continued doing that as Department Head, in addition to teaching a couple of courses a year.

Lacey Wilson: How long were you Head of the Psychology Department?

Dr. Johnston: Five years.

Lacey Wilson: Five years.

Dr. Johnston: Then in 2002, Walter Beale, who'd been dean of the college for I think 12 years or so at that point, decided that enough was enough, and he was going to step down from that position. There was a national search for his replacement, which ended rather unexpectedly. An offer was made to a person who accepted it. The other candidates were told, thank you very much, we've filled this position, we appreciate your interest, and so on and so forth. Then the person who'd been hired was given a better offer by another institution and decided he had to take that, so at the very last minute, Walter was leaving and there was no Dean.

Dr. Johnston: Provost Uprichard asked me if I would step in as Interim Dean for 01:06:00a year, which I agreed to do. I think Tony DeCasper sort of came back as Interim Head of the Psychology Department. I decided during my year, my interim year in the position of dean, that I would apply for the job, so I applied for the job and interviewed for it and was hired during that year, and Provost Uprichard made my appointment as Dean as opposed to Interim Dean formal in the spring of 2003. Then I remained in the Dean's office, in the position of Dean until last year, left after 14 years of being Dean.

Lacey Wilson: Wow. Congratulations. That's quite a bit of time.

Dr. Johnston: Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, you know. The College of Arts 01:07:00and Sciences at UNCG was founded in 1969, and including John Kiss, the new Dean this year, has only had five Deans during that period, which is unusual. You know, apart from Joanne Creighton, who left after ... I think she was only here three or four years before she went to Wesleyan. Bob Miller, who was the founding Dean of the college, I think was dean for, gosh, I don't know, 20 years maybe. Maybe not that long. 15. Walter was Dean for 12, 13 years, 14 years.

Lacey Wilson: Yeah.

Dr. Johnston: There's something of a history.

Lacey Wilson: People seem to stay in that position generally.

Dr. Johnston: Yeah.

Lacey Wilson: What did you think being Dean now, because you'd been Associate Dean before, so now you get the final word.

Dr. Johnston: Right. Yeah, yeah. I must say I really enjoyed being Dean. I 01:08:00enjoyed all of my administrative appointments. They all had different positive aspects to them. Being Dean gave me the opportunity to do some things that I felt were very rewarding. I very much enjoyed ... the thing that appealed to me about being Dean and that continued to be a great source of satisfaction through all of those years was the opportunity of working with people from so many different disciplines, and being able to think about the academic enterprise as it's carried out in disciplines as different as Chemistry and art and English and History and Philosophy. You know, all of those 21 departments that made up 01:09:00the college for most of the time that I was Dean.

Dr. Johnston: You know, they have a lot of things in common. I mean they're all educating students, they're doing research and scholarship, they're providing service to the institution and to the profession, and in various ways to the community, but they're all doing it in radically different ways. The problems faced by the Head of the Chemistry Department are so different in so many ways to the problems faced by the Head of the English department. I think I've always had a fairly broad intellectual curiosity and been interested in lots of different areas of academic inquiry. That's not for me.

Lacey Wilson: It's never run in here before, either. I can cut it out once it stops ringing.

Dr. Johnston: So working with people in all of these different departments and learning about, getting to know the work of the disciplines, knowing in obviously not firsthand, or you know, in any kind of hands on way, but knowing with some degree of intimacy, you know, what are the challenges faced by researchers working in organic Chemistry and inorganic Chemistry, and what do they need to do, what do they need in order to do the work that we've hired them to do? In the sciences, one of the things I learned as Dean was that we were not very well equipped for cutting edge doctoral level research in the departments in which we were building doctoral programs, so at the time I became Dean, we 01:11:00didn't have doctoral programs in either Chemistry or in Biology. Those were some of the areas in which we built several ... the Chemistry that we'd been talking about Chemistry Ph.D. and a Biology Ph.D. for some time, and we were able to move those along with the support of the Provost and the Chancellor and the general administration in Chapel Hill.

Dr. Johnston: It became clear that we had a physical plan with lab facilities, research facilities that were adequate to a master's level program, but really not adequate to the level of research that we needed to be able to develop in order to mount credible Ph.D. programs. One of the challenges that I faced was figuring out how do we build and equip lab space that is appropriate for a Ph.D. 01:12:00level department, where we're expecting faculty to go out and get major grants from federal agencies, we're expecting them to be able to train doctoral students and post-doctoral associates in their labs. I learned a lot about what that means. We have to be willing to invest in pieces of scientific equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then we have to be willing to hire technical staff who will run those instruments because you can't expect faculty to do their research and train their students and maintain these extremely complicated, very expensive instruments. I had to figure out ways of funding staff positions in these departments that would manage the instruments so the faculty could do the research. We were very fortunate.

Dr. Johnston: One of the things I'd had the great good fortune to do as Associate Dean was to work on the planning committee for the Sullivan Science 01:13:00Building, which at that time was just known as the new science building. I had learned through my work on that planning committee and working with the design firm that we hired to design the building and the architects who put the whole thing together and got it built, was I developed a fair amount of sort of, not expertise, but at least familiarity with how you build a science facility and what you have to think about in terms of, you know, trivial sort of stuff like power supply and air conditioning capabilities and so on. That was very helpful in working with the heads of those departments to try to figure out how are we going to be able to equip these departments in a way that will support successful Ph.D. programs.

Dr. Johnston: Over the years we spent a lot of money, and most of it was money provided just from the college's budget. We did not have a great deal of financial support. We had some, but not a great deal of financial support from the University. There was a lot of budget creativity that we needed to develop to figure out how to free up funds to make these investments possible.

Dr. Johnston: You know, on the other side of campus we'd had a Ph.D. program in English for a long time, and we were getting ready to start a Ph.D. program in History. The needs of faculty in the humanities for research support are obviously very different from those in the lab sciences. Historians and scholars of literature don't need labs or expensive equipment, they need time. One of the things that I did as Dean was to develop a fellowship policy for the college 01:15:00which provided what I ... even though I know most faculty don't think it's generous enough, I believe is a pretty generous support policy for faculty who get fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities or the NEA and other agencies that support scholarship in the humanities. You know, typically then amounts of money that come with those awards aren't enough to pay a faculty member's salary for the entire period of the award. They're intended to supplement support from the institution. We developed a fellowship policy that spelled out exactly what faculty members could expect when they secured a grant in the form of a fellowship in the way of support from the college.

Dr. Johnston: Once again, this was something that, when I became Dean had been handled on a sort of ad hoc basis over time. In fact, when a member got a 01:16:00fellowship, you know, they and the Department Head would sit down with the dean and they'd work something out. I was dissatisfied with that because it meant that faculty couldn't count on anything when they were thinking about applying for a fellowship, and it also raised questions about equity, sort of everybody getting treated the same, so on and so forth. We developed a policy that made clear that everyone would get treated the same and this was how they were going to be treated. I think that was very helpful for Department Heads for planning, helpful for individual faculty. They had a document they could look at and say, okay, well fine. If I get this fellowship from this foundation or this agency, this is what I can expect from the University. Is that going to work? You know, if it's clearly not going to work, then they need to go look some place else for that support.

Dr. Johnston: We also established a policy that provided a one semester leave, 01:17:00research leave for faculty prior to tenure, which I think was very beneficial for us in terms of recruitment. When we were interviewing faculty, we let them know that once they have been ... served a satisfactory three year probationary period, they would get a semester's leave in the following year in order to really get their research moving, write up papers, get that book, manuscript on route to the publisher before they came up for tenure. I think that helped us with recruitment. Over the years that I was Dean ... Actually, you know, I was thinking in preparation for this interview that I should go back and try to figure out how many faculty we hired over those years. You know, it was a couple of hundred at least, I'm sure. I think we were able to hire some extremely talented and productive people over that period of time. Some of the things that 01:18:00I implemented as Dean I think were part of our success in that regard.

Dr. Johnston: In the sciences, for example, when I became Dean, we rarely provided more than perhaps $100,000 in the way of start up funding for people in the sciences, which is simply not really competitive when you're trying to operate as a research university with Ph.D. programs. During my deanship, where necessary, and of course everything was sort of individually negotiated, but we were able to put together recruitment packages of up to, in some cases, $600,000 to hire the right faculty in the sciences. As a result, I think we've seen a great increase in the level of grant support that people have been able to bring in, as well as the contributions that they've made to the disciplines through publication.

Lacey Wilson: Very good. Okay. We're going to shift over to campus culture now. 01:19:00You've been here for quite a number of years. What is your senses of campus culture here at UNCG?

Dr. Johnston: Well, over the ... I've been here, what, it'll be 35 years I guess at the end of this academic year next summer. Obviously there have been huge changes over that period of time. The university has grown dramatically. When I started teaching here, I believe our enrollment was about 7,000 students, and now it's pushing up against 20,000 students, so there's been a more than three fold increase in the enrollment. We have added graduate programs at both the Master's and especially at the Doctoral level, not just in the college but in the professional schools as well. As we've added those Ph.D. programs, the 01:20:00expectations about the University's research profile as a generator of research and scholarship have increased. Some of those expectations coming from the administration, but a lot of them coming from the faculty. As we have hired people with their own aspirations to be well established scholars and researchers, they have looked to us for support for those aspirations, so the two things have gone hand in hand. A succession of chancellors have looked for ways to built the University's research profile and the faculty that we have hired as we have undergone that growth have brought with them their own increased expectations for research and scholarship and concomitant support for those activities from the institution.

Dr. Johnston: I think that over those 30 years, you know, I think the University has seen a growth in emphasis on its research and its mission as a research campus, its contribution to doctorate level, graduate level training. I do think, and this is something that I think all administrators are expected to say about their institution, so it can come across as a kind of pro forma statement, but I do think that despite that increase in the research profile of the University, there has continued to be a strong emphasis on the education of undergraduates.

Dr. Johnston: Over the years, as dean I would interview not all of the faculty who we were interviewing for positions here, but as many of them as I could, and the stock question that the Dean asks of faculty candidates is, what is it that 01:22:00interests you about UNCG as a place to build or develop or establish your own academic career? I was always surprised and pleased at the number of people who would say some version of, you know, I really want to develop my research. I want support for my research and scholarship, but I want to work at a place that values my work as a teacher, and it looks to me like UNCG is such a place. I think we've been able to recruit faculty who have been looking for somewhere where they can be taken seriously and supported as researchers and scholars, but where their contributions to the classroom won't be seen as just a kind of after thought of something, that they've got to do to keep their job, but no one takes 01:23:00it very seriously.

Dr. Johnston: That's something that I think has been preserved successfully in the culture at UNCG, I think when you look at the strength of the Office of Undergraduate Research and scholarship and creative activity and the support that's been provided by that office by a succession of provosts and chancellors, you know, that demonstrates a strong commitment institutionally to the importance of engaging undergraduates in the scholarly research work of the University. Having reviewed literally hundreds of promotion and tenure dossiers over my time as Dean, I can say that across the college, from the small undergraduate departments to bigger Ph.D. granting departments, the faculty who put together these portfolios on their own behalf, as candidates coming up for promotion and tenure, the senior faculty will review them, and the Department 01:24:00Heads who give their evaluations, pay close and serious attention to the work that these people have done as teachers in the classroom, in the lab and the studio. I think that that is something that UNCG has been able to preserve and can be proud of. When we represent ourselves as a research university with a serious commitment to undergraduate research, I think that's truth in advertising.

Lacey Wilson: That's good. What changes have you noticed during your time here at UNCG?

Dr. Johnston: Well, you know, the changes that I've talked about. I think one very positive change has been the improvement of the physical facilities at UNCG. When Pat Sullivan became Chancellor, one of the things that she made clear 01:25:00in her first couple of years was that she was going to find ways to improve the physical appearance of the campus, and I think at that time when she made those remarks, I think probably a fair number of faculty responded by saying, "you know, what do we care what the flowerbeds look like and stuff. We should be investing money in faculty salaries and research" and et cetera, et cetera. She was right. You know, she did implement a lot of changes, the change in College Avenue with the median strip, the pedestrian walkway in front of the library and so forth, a lot of improvements in the grounds.

Dr. Johnston: She was great with, of course assisted in this by the construction bond issue that was passed in 2000 that enabled us to build a science building, 01:26:00the humanities building, the art building, the education school came from money that came later. A lot of renovations, a big renovation of the Petty Building and others. You know, that was all money provided by the state through the bond issue. She made it clear that improving the physical appearance of the campus was going to be a priority for her. I think that her success in that regard has made the campus a much more pleasant place to be.

Dr. Johnston: You know, before your time, obviously, but when I came here, there were an awful lot of parts of campus that were just unappealing. There was no particular attraction to them. There were limited places where you felt you might want to just kind of sit quietly on a bench and wait between classes or prepare for your next meeting, and I think that the improvement of the 01:27:00appearance of campus has had improvement in quality of life for people who work and teach here, and it's helped us in recruitment. I think when students come to visit, hey, this is a cool looking place. Certainly for faculty recruitment. I've, over the years, talked to a lot of faculty, many of whom come here and interview, never having heard of UNC Greensboro before, and saying to me, you know, you have a real university here. This is an impressive place.

Lacey Wilson: They're pleasantly surprised.

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, exactly. You know, that makes a big difference in recruitment. I mean obviously people are thinking of salary and classes they're going to teach and colleagues they're going to have, but they also say to themselves, you know, I'm going to be living and working here for a while. I want to feel like ... and while that may not be something that is actually on 01:28:00their list of things to think about, I think when they go away from their interview here, feeling like this is an attractive place to live and work, it counts in our favor. When they're weighing the options, that's something that can tilt the decision in our direction.

Lacey Wilson: Definitely. We're going to talk about past Chancellors, and then we've got wrap up questions after that.

Dr. Johnston: Okay. Yeah.

Lacey Wilson: You came in '83 as a faculty.

Dr. Johnston: That's right.

Lacey Wilson: You were here before here, so that was under Sullivan or Moran?

Dr. Johnston: No, that was under Bill Moran.

Lacey Wilson: It was under Bill Moran.

Dr. Johnston: Yes. I never really knew Bill Moran as Chancellor. I was a faculty member. Faculty members in general don't have a great deal of contact with the Chancellor. You know, I met him at social events. When I was appointed Associate Dean, he was still Chancellor and I made an appointment to go and introduce myself to him and let him know some of the things I wanted to do. I don't really 01:29:00have a very good feel for what kind of Chancellor he was. Obviously he had, towards the end of his chancellorship, he had fairly difficult relationships with the faculty and decided to resign from the Chancellor position rather abruptly.

Dr. Johnston: Pat Sullivan, after Bill Moran stepped down, he stepped down in the middle of the year in December, and we had Debra Stewart, who was Dean of the graduate school at NC State came in as Interim Chancellor for one semester while the Board of Trustees conducted a search for a new Chancellor. Pat Sullivan was hired. I would say at the time she was hired, the reaction of the faculty was not overwhelmingly positive. I think, you know, she had given a good interview. I think that some people felt like she did not have strong academic 01:30:00credentials, which is probably more important to faculty in a Chancellor than it maybe should be.

Dr. Johnston: She very quickly, though, won everybody over. She was very popular. She did a lot of good things. Very out-going person. I think as an individual she was a little shy and a little reserved, but she knew that as a Chancellor, being the public face of the University was an important responsibility for her. I think she taught herself, or learned one, way or another, to be comfortable in front of big groups and in one on one interactions, and succeeded very well in that regard. I think that she gained the trust and affection of the faculty. She certainly had the great confidence 01:31:00of the Board of Trustees, several Presidents of the University System. I think she was a very effective advocate for UNCG at the system level.

Dr. Johnston: You know, I mentioned the work that she did on campus improvement. She oversaw all of that construction that we did during the bond construction, you know, which is a huge responsibility for a Chancellor. Again, obviously there are people in the physical plan office and the business affairs office and so forth who are handling all the details, but you know, the plans for the building and the final approval, those are the things the Chancellor takes to the Board of Trustees. She was really the one looking at how all this was going to fit together across the campus as a whole.

Dr. Johnston: She was very supportive of the academic enterprise. She hired, well now, let me think. I'm trying to think of the Provosts there. Yeah, Don DeRosa came here as Dean of the Graduate School under Bill Moran, I believe. I think I'm remembering this correctly, and Bill appointed him as Provost. Then Don worked with Pat Sullivan for, I don't remember how many years. Maybe only a couple of years, and then went to be President of the University of the Pacific in California, and Pat hired Ed Uprichard, who at that time was Dean of the School of Education, as Provost, and she and Ed worked together for, I think 01:33:00they served together as Chancellor and Provost for 12 ...

Dr. Johnston: ... or 13 years, which is, in higher education pretty much unheard of. Presidents don't last that long, Pat was Chancellor for 15 years. The average lifespan of a President or a Chancellor is more like five years. Provosts can rotate even more quickly than that. But we had one Chancellor and Provost, for 12 or 13 years, and they were a really good team. They worked really well together. Ed was a phenomenal Provost, and they really provided stable, visionary, strong leadership for the University, for a long time.

Dr. Johnston: Pat retired, we didn't know it at the time, but she had pancreatic 01:34:00cancer, and died within the first year after she left the position of Chancellor. And, Linda Brady came in. Linda, I think, was trying very hard as Chancellor. I think she had a very unhappy relationship with the faculty, which never really seemed to improve itself. It was contentious, and when it wasn't contentious, it was tense, I would say, and a bit fraught.

Dr. Johnston: I think that Linda was handicapped, to some extent, by having followed someone who was as popular as Sullivan. Linda did accomplish some good things. And I think she did some things which I know the faculty didn't approve 01:35:00of, but which nonetheless, were probably the right things to do - building the new residence halls, and the recreation center. I know there was a lot of opposition to those decisions, but I think they probably will stand the University in good stead and enable us to maintain undergraduate enrollments, which is going to be really critical for us going forward.

Dr. Johnston: We went through, during my period as Dean, we went through savage budget cuts, both cuts imposed by the legislature, in Raleigh, as well as cuts resulting from enrollment losses. And that was a feature of a good part of my tenure as Dean, which was pretty difficult to deal with. I think we're coming out of that really difficult budget situation now. I think that the continued 01:36:00fiscal health, of the University, is going to depend upon being able to sustain strong, undergraduate enrollments.

Dr. Johnston: We know that undergraduates, these days, are at least as interested in physical amenities of the campus, as they are in the academic programs. We've got to be able to provide both of those things in order to keep our enrollments up and maintain the fiscal health of the University. I think that those were good decisions to make. I was Dean during the whole of Linda's chancellorship, and I'd say we had a good relationship. I enjoyed my interactions with her. I found her an extremely pleasant person to talk to, both formally and informally.

Dr. Johnston: She certainly was very supportive of the work, of the academic work of the University, and of the college. I think we've been very fortunate, the College of Arts and Sciences, that the last three chancellors, Sullivan, Brady, and Gilliam, are all out of Arts and Sciences backgrounds themselves and have had, or have, faculty appointments in departments in the College. I consider that to be really important. The College is the core of the University's strength, and to have a Chancellor who understands that, through their own academic history, rather than just because it's something they've learned, in the abstract as an administrator, I think strengthens the College and thereby strengthens the University as a whole.

Dr. Johnston: Frank Gilliam came in, in September or October, of last year. I 01:38:00overlapped with him for the first nine months or so, of his chancellorship, while I was on my way out as Dean. I think he was a great recruitment for the University. I think he brings tremendous experience to the institution. I think coming from a flagship research university, like UCLA, he knows what it takes to run an institution.

Dr. Johnston: We're not as big as UCLA. We don't have the same kind of stature and we don't aspire to be like UCLA. But, we aspire to do some of the things that UCLA does, and having somebody from that kind of background, I think will be very beneficial for us. He's already shown himself, I think, to be a 01:39:00tremendously effective advocate and liaison for the University to the community, which is tremendously important for us as a state university, as an urban university with a lot of dependence on Greensboro, and the Triad, for support from business leaders and community leaders.

Dr. Johnston: And, I think Frank is great. He had that role as Special Assistant to the President at UCLA. His work as a political scientist, I think, with a lot of interest in community development and community issues, is a natural fit for that aspect of our role here as a community-engaged institution. I think that he will be a great advocate for the ways in which UNCG is trying to develop over the years ahead.

Dr. Johnston: It seems to me that, Chancellors and Provosts vary a lot in how 01:40:00they work. And I think that the most successful kinds of partnerships that I see when I work around the country, and I talk to people at other institutions, is when the Chancellor or the President really sees themselves as the advocate for the campus, as the liaison to alumni, to external groups, to the legislature in the case of a public institution working with a board of trustees, essentially an externally-directed set of responsibilities, and the Provost runs the programs on the campus.

Dr. Johnston: It seems to me that's the relationship that Frank and Dana Dunn have established, which I think is the right relationship. I think that Chancellors, or Presidents, who try to get too involved in the day-to-day workings of the institution, and the focus and direction of academic programs, 01:41:00get in the way of a Provost, who then feels like his or her authority is not quite secure. And, that makes for confused leadership, which is never a good idea.

Dr. Johnston: My impression is that Frank is really attending to the external relationships and the overall vision of the campus as a whole, and leaving up to Dana to manage the academic enterprise, as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor. That gives her a first among equal status, among the other Vice Chancellors, and makes it clear where the priorities of the institution lie. I have a great deal of hope in that regard.

Lacey Wilson: Good. All right, so we're just going to do these rap up questions, and then we'll be done here.

Dr. Johnston: Okay.

Lacey Wilson: How do you think you've served beyond UNCG in professional organizations and the community of Greensboro?

Dr. Johnston: My primary external responsibilities have been in an organization 01:42:00called Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, which is the national, it's international, primarily U.S., but it is international in scope, organization for Deans and Associate Deans of Arts and Sciences, across the nation. I've been a member of CCAS, practically since my first years as associate dean, and regularly attended their annual conferences.

Dr. Johnston: I was elected to the Board of Directors in 2013, I guess, or 2012, and then was elected President-elect, and President of the organization. I served as President in the '14-'15 academic year. That was an opportunity. My 01:43:00involvement with CCAS, generally, has been very valuable, because it's put me in touch with Deans of Arts and Sciences at universities around the country, to learn what initiatives they have been engaged in that we might want to try here.

Dr. Johnston: People have told me about things they've tried that they wished they hadn't tried, and have been signal to me that's not something that is necessarily a good idea to embark on. It's given me a network of colleagues and friends, around the country, doing the same job that I was doing as Dean. I mentioned that being Department Head has a little bit of loneliness associated with it, but at least you're on a campus with other Department Heads.

Dr. Johnston: Dean of Arts and Sciences has the same sort of loneliness. There are other Deans, but the Dean of Arts and Sciences is running half the university. Each of the other academic Deans has a piece of the other half. It's 01:44:00a much bigger job and it's different, in a lot of ways, from being the Dean of one of the professional schools. So it was very valuable, through CCAS, to be able to connect with Deans of Arts and Sciences, feeling the same sort of pressures and responsibilities that I was feeling. That was very beneficial, professional networking.

Dr. Johnston: I was very pleased to be elected President, of the association, and provide some leadership, help shape the direction of that organization. Under my presence, we developed our third strategic plan, which my successor in the presidency is now carrying out. The organization does a lot of things for Deans, around the country, in terms of professional development, and mentoring, and consulting, and so forth. I was able to be involved in all of those things 01:45:00and that was beneficial. That's been my primary service role outside of the campus.

Lacey Wilson: Okay. What social or academic events stand out, in your mind, during your time at UNCG?

Dr. Johnston: Yeah, I don't know. Some of the things that Deans participate in, commencement, winter and spring commencements, and that's always fun. It's always fun to see the relief and ecstatic expressions on students' faces-

Lacey Wilson: Relief.

Dr. Johnston: As they finally make it to the end of their careers. And, we've all been through that, most of us multiple times, so we all understand that.

Dr. Johnston: I'm not someone who always feels entirely comfortable with a lot 01:46:00of pomp and ceremony. But, I understand the value of that particular pomp and ceremony for a lot of students. On a smaller scale, some of the things that I've been involved in, I think the kind of thing that you're talking about.

Dr. Johnston: A few years ago, Rosann Bazirjian, the Dean of University Libraries, proposed that we have an annual recognition of tenure and promotion for faculty. They had done this at one of the institutions she worked at previously. She offered to host and organize this through the library. I think that was a great idea. Every fall all of the faculty, who got promoted or tenured in the previous year, are invited to a reception. They're each invited to select a book that becomes part of the library's collection. It's just a wine 01:47:00and cheese get-together, but it's a public recognition of the accomplishments of the faculty.

Dr. Johnston: Promotion and tenure tends to be something that happens in silence, essentially. The names of people get published, in Campus Weekly, but this was the first time that there had been any real public recognition and celebration of these accomplishments. I always found that to be a delightful event to attend. I know that the faculty really enjoyed it and loved it.

Dr. Johnston: In the College of Arts and Sciences, under my deanship, we started something called an annual celebration of scholarship, where we would simply invite faculty who had, during the past academic year, published a book, gotten a major grant, served as an officer of a national academic organization, to come 01:48:00together one evening, to just again, simply celebrate these accomplishments. We usually held this at an off-campus location somewhere downtown. Once again, there were no speeches made or awards given out, it was just an opportunity for people to come together and be recognized for that big event.

Dr. Johnston: When Dana Dunn became Provost, I invited her, in her first year, to come to the College's celebration, which she did, and she liked it so much, she decided she wanted to do it for the University. Now we do a University celebration of scholarship, in the spring, each year. The College does one in the fall, and the University does it in the spring. Academic research and scholarship can be a very private, isolated business, and people often get more 01:49:00recognition for the work they do, from their colleagues in the same discipline at other institutions, than they do from their own campus.

Dr. Johnston: I think these events, that have brought the faculty together, to recognize the scholarly accomplishments of everybody who does these things, is really important. You may know, as a faculty member, what some of the colleagues in your own department do, and you may hear from them when they publish a book, or they get a grant, whatever. But, chances are you never hear about this from people in the building across the street. I think it's a nice opportunity to give some visibility to these accomplishments.

Lacey Wilson: Very much so. What are you most looking forward to, as you think about returning to the Psychology Department next year?

Dr. Johnston: A couple of things, reconnecting with my academic discipline. I'm 01:50:00on leave this year, and have the opportunity to do some wider reading in Psychology and learn more about what's been going on in the field in the 15 years that I've really been out of it as Dean. Getting to know the colleagues, in the Department, there are I think only three people, on the faculty, that were here when I came in 1982. Although some of the people were hired, while I was in the Department as Department Head, a lot of them have come in the last 15 years and I don't really know them as well as I'd like to, so reconnecting with them.

Dr. Johnston: I'm certainly looking forward to getting back into the classroom. I have a feeling it's going to be different from what it was 20 years ago when I was teaching on a regular basis. I'm working on developing some new courses, 01:51:00which I think are going to be fun to teach, and I'm sure I'll be teaching some of the courses that I taught when I was a faculty member in the Department.

Dr. Johnston: I'm not planning to try to resurrect any empirical, experimental research program. But I do intend to keep publishing and I've been involved, over the last few years, doing some scholarly work in the history of Psychology. And I've published a little bit in that area and am planning to focus on that as an area of scholarship until I retire.

Lacey Wilson: All right, last two here. Tell me how you think UNCG has affected your life and what it means to you.

Dr. Johnston: It's the place where I've been able to develop my academic career. When I came here, as an Assistant Professor, it certainly was not my plan that I would spend my entire academic career at UNCG. I don't think one necessarily has 01:52:00clearly formulated plans about what your career is going to do when you start. You are more focused on the day-to-day getting the job done. But, I think if anyone had asked me, and possibly people did although I don't remember, "What do you see yourself doing in five years, 10 years, 15 years?" I would have envisioned myself being here, for five or seven years, and then moving on to some other institution with different opportunities.

Dr. Johnston: In a variety of ways, the University really provided me with the opportunity to do the things that I wanted to do, I never felt at any point in my career, here's this thing I want to be able to do, and I can't do it here. I've got to go find an opportunity somewhere else. When I was running a lab, I had adequate support, from the institution, to train those students and do that 01:53:00research. Over the years, a variety of administrative opportunities became available and that was something that I had, while again, nobody goes into an academic career, I don't believe, thinking that they're going to be an administrator.

Dr. Johnston: Administrative work had always attracted me in a casual sort of way. When those opportunities, when Joanne Creighton invited me to be Associate Dean, I thought to myself, "That could be cool. That could be a lot of fun. Let me give this a try." When Walter asked me to serve as Head of the Psychology Department, I thought to myself, "Yeah, that's a logical thing to do." I think, by that time, I had said to myself, at some point, "I think I'd like to be a Dean, and if I don't do it here, then, I'll go to ...", and I had applied for positions at some other institutions.

Dr. Johnston: Becoming Head of the Psychology Department was, up to a point, a 01:54:00useful career preparation for becoming a Dean. But it was also an opportunity to accomplish some things, for my own department, which I looked forward to. And then, when the opportunity to become Dean made itself available, I thought to myself, "Well, this is actually a pretty good university. It's going in some interesting directions, so why not serve as Dean here?" And then, there comes a point in your career, I think, when you say to yourself, "Okay, this is where I'm spending the remainder of my career."

Dr. Johnston: I think, as Dean, the decision I needed to make for myself was, do I stay dean until I retire, and then just go? Or, do I leave the deanship and go back to the faculty? That was a conscious decision, I did think to myself, "14 years is probably long enough," both for me and for the College. But, I did want 01:55:00to retire, from the deanship, at a time when I could still go back to the faculty, and rejoin the work of the academy at the level of a faculty member.

Dr. Johnston: Even though, as I say, I never said to myself at any early point in my career, "I'm just going to stay here and maintain my career with this one institution." I feel like it worked out pretty well. I'm certainly satisfied with the way the career worked out. And, I'm pleased also with the things that I've been able to contribute to the development of the University over those years.

Lacey Wilson: These interviews are part of the 125th anniversary of the University from next year, which is an excellent opportunity for reflection, but also helps us think about where we're headed in the future. What is the future for UNCG? Where do you see UNCG going, as an institution, in the next 25 to 50 01:56:00years? And, that will be it.

Dr. Johnston: If there's one thing that I've learned, from 35 years in academia, it's that making predictions about what's going to happen, more than two or three years out, is a really, really risky business. I think that we have a lot of opportunity, for positive developments, at UNCG over the decades ahead. I think that we are well-positioned as an important player in the state university system in North Carolina. We're going to have to fight to keep that position, 01:57:00because there are ... a 16 campus system in the state the size of North Carolina is a very big system.

Dr. Johnston: It's not absolutely clear that the state can afford to maintain so many campuses in the long-term. I hope they will, but there are always complaints and concerns about, "Do we have too many campuses? Is there too much duplication? Shouldn't we think about merging or closing campuses?" I think it will be important for UNCG to maintain its position in the system as a strong campus with some distinctiveness, so that whatever decisions may get made, in the future, about merging or closing campuses, we're not part of those conversations, we're not one of those considered in that way.

Dr. Johnston: I think our move to establish community engagement, as an 01:58:00important part of what we do here, was a very good thing to do. I think getting the Carnegie Foundations, and [inaudible 01:58:14] tours, and community-engaged campus was a smart move. Because it connects us with the community, so that the community then becomes our supporter. I'd like to see more of that go on, and as I say, I think that's going to be a priority for Frank. It's something that the campus will continue to do. The more the Greensboro Triad and state community sees us as a valuable resource, in a whole variety of different ways, the more secure our position becomes. To the extent that we're seen as disconnected from the community, then we put ourselves in jeopardy. I think maintaining that connectiveness, so that we get the support of political leaders, community 01:59:00groups, business leaders, they see the value of UNCG.

Dr. Johnston: And if there's ever talk of, in the legislature of, "Do we really need two branches of the university system in Greensboro," that there will be influential people talking to the legislature saying, "Yes! We do." You've got to keep supporting both us and A&T.

Dr. Johnston: I think that maintaining and building our research profile is really important. That's your trajectory, that was set a good, long time ago, and I don't think we can give it up. I think it would taken as a sign of failure. And, it would weaken us, in other ways, if we were not to continue pursuing that sort of growth. I think that maintaining the central role of the Arts and Sciences in the University's mission is really critical. We can have a 02:00:00whole separate conversation about the importance of that, but I think there is so much emphasis, nowadays, in the public on vocational training even at four year colleges, as the most important thing for undergraduates that we have to be a counterweight. We have to push back against that argument.

Dr. Johnston: There are so many important things that a liberal arts education does for our undergraduate students. We cannot allow that vocationalization of higher education to take off. It worries me very much that the new Trump Administration is not going to be a supporter, I mean to the extent that the federal government gets involved in higher education, there's not going to be strong leadership from the Trump Administration, supportive of the Arts and 02:01:00Sciences. I think it's very hard to know what their priorities are going to be for higher education, because there have been no coherent statements, and the person whose been nominated as Secretary of Education has absolutely no track record of any kind in higher ed. I think what we can hope for is that they'll just kind of forget about us, and we can just keep doing our thing.

Dr. Johnston: North Carolina has historically been supportive of higher education, but that support has weakened over the last decade or so. And so there's a lot of work to be done to ensure that the long-term value, of universities, not just turning out people with four-year degrees who can go get jobs, but in other much longer term and more integral ways to the intellectual and political health of the society. It's really important that our leaders 02:02:00continue to make that kind of argument, over and over, and over, and over again to the people who hold purse strings and who ultimately control our future in the legislature and the Board of Governors.

Dr. Johnston: We can't assume that these people are either educated about, or supportive of, the mission of higher education. And, we can't assume that simply telling them once or twice, and having them nod sagely and supportively, is going to be enough. The institutions have got to be just constantly in their face making sure that they don't lose sight of this. And that those of them who don't come into that position as understanding it get educated about it.

Dr. Johnston: It's our responsibility, as the people working in higher education, to provide that education to our representatives, both at the state 02:03:00level and nationally. That's the responsibility, obviously of the Chancellors of the system, and with the President, but also of academics, generally, to make sure that we keep sending that message, and that it doesn't get lost amid all the other voices crying out for prioritization and recognition. If those things can be done, then I think the future of this University is okay.

Lacey Wilson: All right. Did you have anything you'd wish I'd talked about more?

Dr. Johnston: No.

Lacey Wilson: Okay, than I'm going to end it here.