Oral history interview with Dr. Robert Wineburg, 2018

Lacey W. : So today is the 24th of January 2018. I'm interviewing Dr. Robert Wineburg, and we're going just sort start at the beginning, and just work our way through. So where were you born?

Robert Wineburg: I was born in Utica New York, January 23, 1950.

Lacey W. : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes, because it's still your birthday.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, exactly.

Lacey W. : What did your parents do?

Robert Wineburg: My parents, when I first was born, ran Wineburg's Creamery. They were dairy people, my grandfather was a milkman. And they had the dairy store in the Jewish/Polish ghetto. By 1955, the Jews had moved out, the Poles had moved out, and the ... I think it was the 1947 Housing Act created the 00:01:00projects, and they built the projects down in the Jewish/Polish neighborhood. And so my folks being survivors cut the store in half, half dairy serving ice cream, and then half variety goods. And by '56, something like that, the whole store was a variety store catering to the black community.

Lacey W. : Okay. Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Robert Wineburg: I still have one brother. I had an older brother who died when he was 42 years old. I'm the middle child, as you probably will find out going through this interview.

Lacey W. : I'm glad you pre-serviced that then. So when you were in high school, did you think you would be going into service work? Did you have any idea what you'd leaning toward attention at that point?

Robert Wineburg: I didn't even want to go to college. I hated school. I was the 00:02:00intellectual runt of my mother's litter, and I wasn't going to go to college, I was going to stay another year in high school, and play around, and have fun, and my mother said, "Yeah, that's fine, but you're not living here." So I sent $10 to a college service, in those days it was $10, and I got about 100 responses, and I ended up going to Long Island University in Brooklyn for my first year. My father died on the second day of my sophomore year and I had a 10-year-old brother at home, and I kind of felt relieved that I dropped out of school to be with him, and be back home. I didn't quite understand that my mother was a widow, and she'd have to run the store, and I didn't quite get any of that stuff. But I came back and helped run the store, helped hang out with my younger brother, and my older brother was in law school. And I think you're 00:03:00leading to social work.

Lacey W. : Yeah.

Robert Wineburg: And during that time, I picked up coaching baseball with my brother who was eight years younger than I was. So I took his little league team as a brand new team and expanded, and I did that for the next eight years, and really loved being involved in that kind of youth work. And I went to Utica College one time and I failed out, but I got a medical withdrawal because I was kind of nuts. My father died, it was the 60s, it was crazy time. Then I went to a community college for a little while, didn't flunk out of there, but I quit. And then I was ... the cook at Utica college where I ended up graduating, was one of my baseball mentors for years, and he called up my mother and said, "Does 00:04:00Bobby want to play baseball for Utica college?" And my mother without asking me, said, "Yes, he does." And I had an interview with the coach and the Director of Admissions, and to this day you won't find an application for me in that school.

Robert Wineburg: I made a promise to myself that I would study as hard as I put in the work for baseball, and that's when I became pretty good, and somebody said to me, "Why don't you major in social work?" "Social work, what's that?" And they said, "Well, it's helping people, and working with kids." And I said, "Well, I'm already doing that." And I said, "I'll major in English." I wasn't terribly worldly or terribly bright, and perhaps some would say I'm not now, but I couldn't imagine getting a college degree for doing something that I love and that was reading. "You're going to give me a degree for reading?" The short of it is that I didn't read a novel for 15 years after I was an English major, because that wasn't reading, that was just boom, boom, boom, test, test, paper, 00:05:00paper. I had a young woman that was a friend of mine, very close for five years during that period of time, and we got married in 1973, and we became VISTA volunteers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

Lacey W. : Okay. Where was that?

Robert Wineburg: You wouldn't find it on the map, but Browning, Montana, around Cut Bank Montana, in between Browning and Cut Bank. We lived in a little enclave of 128 people, and that's where my soul got burned, and I said, "Oh, I want to do this for the rest of my life, I want to help people, I will solve this poverty stuff, I really want to do it." And that was the beginning, I applied to graduate school, went to Syracuse, went to Pittsburgh. After you've got to work for two years, so I worked at the Central Association for the Blind after my 00:06:00master's degree, and was an advocate for blind people and college students at the time. There was no ADA, so it was really tough, because the teachers would talk like this to blind students ...

Lacey W. : Just increase the volume of the ...

Robert Wineburg: ... because like they think they can hear ...

Lacey W. : Yeah, just increase volume, that will make them understand.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Or see. And I got to Pittsburgh, and my second week there, there was a notice on the bulletin board, "Researcher needed at Pittsburgh Blind Association." And Pittsburgh Blind Association was from here, to perhaps the library from where my office was at the University of Pittsburgh. So I went to my chair, and I said to him ... he wasn't my chair at the time, he was my research teacher, and I said, "There's a job at Pittsburgh Blind Association for a researcher, but I don't really know how to do research." 00:07:00He says, "By the time they start the project, you will." And it was true. I did. And so I worked the rest of my doctoral program at Pittsburgh Blind Association, and wrote my dissertation on services to the blind. Then I had one job offer, one, and we had a baby. My dissertation was defended on June the 28th, because that's when we thought his due date was going to be the 29th or 30th. It wasn't till the 8th of July. So we came down here with a three week old, and he'll be 38 in July. And it was my only job.

Lacey W. : So you took it?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. I got offered another job later, and then during the course of my career I've been solicited for work elsewhere, but we've built a nice family here, and set of friends here, and to me teaching, I couldn't care 00:08:00less whether I taught the kids at Harvard or the kids here at UNCG. To me, teaching is a calling, and what difference does it make who you got, the diamonds or the diamonds in the rough? And it's actually better dealing with the diamonds in the rough, because you can ... most of the kids they go to these Harvards and Stanfords, they come in as diamonds, there's no work to be done with them.

Lacey W. : There's no challenge.

Robert Wineburg: No challenge. So that's it in a nutshell, why I'm here.

Lacey W. : Okay. First impressions of UNCG?

Robert Wineburg: Man, I was awed by the smart people, because there were the remnants of Women's College was still left over, it was not a machine like it is now.

Lacey W. : Got you, what year did you arrive?

Robert Wineburg: 1980.

Lacey W. : 1980, okay. So that's long after they had already allowed men to join.

Robert Wineburg: '63, but it took a while for the board and the people to try to turn this into a university. It was still a small college atmosphere, ideas counted, teaching was important, you didn't have to have a list of publications a mile long, you didn't have to chase money to keep this big greasy machine going. It was in the air, you could tell. When they hired Moran, that was the change that we were going to become a corporate university. And so then there was talk of money, but there was no grants' office when I got here, people were happy to get a publication, not forced.

Lacey W. : By the atmosphere, they were just ...

Robert Wineburg: Right. And we had some great scholars here, Dick Bardolph, Warren Ashby, Allen Trelease. Had a long history of tremendous women, Harriet Elliott, Mereb Mossman, and my mentor and the person instrumental in hiring me, 00:10:00Virginia Stephens was hired by Mereb Mossman to start social work. And it was the first year that I came that it was a department, but it was out of anthropology and sociology. That was how Mossman put it. And Virginia just did a little section of a social work kind of minor. Then in '80 we became a department and anthropology and sociology were our neighbors. And they didn't think we were ... they just thought we were teaching people how to serve soup at the soup kitchen. And that spirit has remained at the underpinnings of many of our documents around promotion and tenure and things like that, that social work was just ... didn't have a knowledge base, it was service oriented, and, "What 00:11:00the hell do you need a doctorate or a bachelor's degree for serving at Greensboro Urban Ministry?"

Lacey W. : Mm-hmm (affirmative). But that's not the case.

Robert Wineburg: No. And to give you snapshot, one of my favorite people of all times here at the university, there's a guy named Bill Knox. He was a sociologist, but always jabbing at social work that we weren't smart, but he sort of thought maybe I had a little bit of a brain, because we'd joust now and then, and there was intellectual elitism that takes place in the university. It still takes place, the college people think that they're the owners of the knowledge, and that they ought to be the head of designing what the liberal education is all about, which maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But Knox was the Chair of Sociology, and I was the Chair of Social Work at the time, and I didn't get it because I rose through the ranks as the smartest guy in the block, I got it because the two next people in line took jobs elsewhere, and nobody was 00:12:00going to give us new positions, so they just jacked me up to the chair.

Lacey W. : You just happened to be in the room at time.

Robert Wineburg: Exactly. And Knox had a picture of Rodin's Thinker sitting on the bulletin board where they did all the advertising, and it said, "Get civilized without ever leaving your chair," because at that time sociology was big in data sets and demography and doing analysis, and you could crank out publications. So I walked into Knox's office, I said, "Hey Knox," and I called him that, and I said, "You know the difference between sociology and social work?" And Knox was sitting there with his glasses and his gray hair, and he was ... he would be your ... oh, god, your kind of intellectual liberal white, Waspy guy. Wonderful man, and he said, "No." And I said, "Well, you guys think you can 00:13:00get civilized without leaving your chair, and we don't believe you can be civilized until you leave your chair." And that, it ruffled him a little bit, then they started to do a couple of courses in groups, and things like that. "Hey Bill, sociology of groups, you know what that is?" He'd go, "What?" I'd say, "Social work." So I was kind of mouthy from when I got here.

Lacey W. : Sounds that way.

Robert Wineburg: But I was a trained community organizer. And so I came from a part of social work that wasn't touch-feely and therapy. Now, my wife's a therapist, and if I said touchy-feely in front of her ... and my daughter is a therapist, but they're committed to the kinds of things that when you go in social work and do the macro piece of the communities and organizations ... My 00:14:00wife was precinct chair for 11 years in our precinct, and always involved in elections, and very much involved in community affairs and social work, that that's your responsibility even if you go down the therapeutic pipeline. Not any longer. People who want to become in social work now just want to be therapist, they couldn't give a hoot about ... they give lip service to justice, but they don't get off their chair. That's what I look like as a community organizer.

Lacey W. : Like a man in a mane, yes.

Robert Wineburg: How far down did I get on these questions?

Lacey W. : Well, we had stopped when you had just arrived, because it had just become a department of social work. So tell me about Virginia Stephens hiring you. Did she find you at a conference or something or?

Robert Wineburg: No, they hired somebody else who turned them down, a guy named 00:15:00Gary Bowen, now he's a dean at Chapel Hill. And so they were desperate.

Lacey W. : Right. So they find you, and they bring you down south ...

Robert Wineburg: But Virginia wasn't ... Tom Scullion was the chair, but Virginia was the Southern impetus behind social work, she was a feisty ... She's still alive, she's in a home in Raleigh. She's about 86, 87, and I'm 68. But she taught me how to be Southern.

Lacey W. : So what does that entail?

Robert Wineburg: That if you're going to write a letter to the editor, you're going to get a haircut before you go down there and they take your picture. Nobody ever talked to me like that, but Virginia, I got it, I understood it. She was one of the most committed people that I'd met. She was her own kind of community organizer. She would help start Greensboro Urban Ministry, she started the Alzheimer's Support Group, which is now its own office, and very much 00:16:00involved in the community. So I took my cue as it was okay to be out in the community from her, not from my boss Tom. And he didn't kind of like it. They brought us, the three of us in at the same time, Betty Spakes, Jerry Finn and me, to be able to compete in this cranking of papers out, and with the rest of the social scientists in the College of Arts and Sciences. So for me to be constantly running out in the community being involved in this event or that event, really didn't sit well with Tom Scullion.

Robert Wineburg: We used to have a little thing, like in an office where you check-in and you check-out, but it served as a behavioral modification thing, when you saw everybody in their offices. But I never missed a meeting with a student, I never shirked any responsibilities, but I also added the 00:17:00responsibility of being out in the community, and teaching, and working with organizations.

Lacey W. : Mm-hmm (affirmative). And that was different from the rest of the department aside from Stephens at that point?

Robert Wineburg: When you do social work, you feel do feel field education and you get connected up with agencies, and sometimes you do research with them or evaluation with them. But nobody really started anything out there, nobody ever got engaged and had as much respect in the community as they did in the university. I probably have more in the community because I speak English and try to help get things done, and in the university we speak space-time continuum language, and talking street in the university doesn't go over very well. But where I'm from, I'm from Utica New York, and it's a working class town, and I never lost my working class upbringing. I'm not Southern, I'm from South Utica, 00:18:00New York, and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm not Southern, and my Southern friends are not ashamed to say, "You aren't Southern." It's what's on your inside, not where you were born.

Lacey W. : Right. Yeah. So you come here, it's a new department of social work, do you start teaching right away? Did you get here like the summer before the fall semester or?

Robert Wineburg: Oh, man, it was crazy. I had to teach three courses right out of the blocks.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Like 100 level?

Robert Wineburg: No. 300 level, intro, policy 1, policy 2, and then you did the field placement. You were supervising people out in the field. And I didn't have any of these courses, but I did teach at Duquesne while I was in Pittsburgh, so I had framework for course brews, a little bit more advance because it was in the graduate program there at Duquesne. And so I had to retool, and revised 00:19:00everything, and I got it all. Oh, there goes my therapy ball. I don't use this stuff anymore, but ...

Lacey W. : All of your old syllabi.

Robert Wineburg: All my old yellow papers and stuff like that. I wouldn't use them because I lectured, and I realized like about 25 years ago that I was a boring lecturer.

Lacey W. : Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you just get up there and you just talk.

Robert Wineburg: No, I started to read about education, and started to engage the class, and showed videos on big old clunker machines that we had and the ...

Lacey W. : The giant televisions and the projectors.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, and I'd evolved into trying to understand the millennials, and how to cordon off a course so that you don't get yawned all day.

Lacey W. : Yeah. That's a particular kind of set of skills for that.

Robert Wineburg: And they've been researched and they work.

Lacey W. : They do.

Robert Wineburg: They work. I call it the yawn factor. I try to get through a 00:20:00whole class without a yawn, but you got to break it up. You got to put them in groups, show a video, do a little bit of lecture, have them talk and engage, and ...

Lacey W. : So you got here and you're teaching, but do you ... if you're getting out in the community already, where are you getting out first?

Robert Wineburg: Well, when I got here, Ronald Reagan cut the budgets, and poor people were lining up at the armory to get surplus food, so I was writing at the beginning to write about wow, what these cuts are doing to the people, and at the same time I was working with agencies and organizations to ... they were getting cut, to how to retool. So I was on the board at the United Way, and I worked with Greensboro Urban Ministry, and got fascinated by my wife who ran a project at Urban Ministry called Project Independence, which was using a refugee resettlement model, which I worked with Lutheran Family Services, with a guy named Raleigh Bailey who started the Center for New North Carolinians. Which we 00:21:00were just friends, and I was able to cook up an appointment for him in our department, so he had a place for a desk. But he developed that, but I used to bring his agency and staff to class, my policy classes, and we would discuss the Refugee Resettlement Act, and it was an interactive community engage. I was just everywhere.

Lacey W. : Just everywhere, as far as you could possibly be.

Robert Wineburg: It was a mess out there, it was like the Wild West when Reagan cut those budgets. I mean, we haven't seen anything since like that. And I felt, "God, I've got community organizing skills on how to bring people together. Let me offer what an academic that knows about this can offer." So in my mind, not in the mind of people who are making decisions around here, I was connected to the community, I was the equivalent ... a public intellectual writes a lot of 00:22:00stuff in the papers and things like that, but an engaged scholar is just taking his or her wares out, and trying to get organizations to become better at what they do, because I'm reading about things, and I'm following things on organizational development, congregations involved in community. And so I would bring what I knew out to the community and try to help them do better.

Lacey W. : So with all these cuts and this sort of like need for people to be these community-engaged work, is there like a rise in people looking to social ... students towards social work?

Robert Wineburg: Now, we're off the charts, we have to turn people away. Back then we were just getting departmental status, you could still have a college 00:23:00degree, and you still can have a college degree and be called a social worker in state departments of social services, because in rural counties you can't get somebody who's often a trained social worker, so you got to have somebody with a college degree. So the human service directors had been lobbying against having just to hire social workers because they can't get them. It could be like a nurse practitioner versus a doctor or something out there.

Lacey W. : I guess, yeah.

Robert Wineburg: Not exactly, but ... So yeah, the question did I ... I forgot the question.

Lacey W. : Was there a rise in students going towards social work?

Robert Wineburg: Increasingly, yeah. We used to have classes of 10, 12, 14, 20 then I got 50, and by my second decade in here, there was a drop in the demographic. So what they asked me to do, because I got fairly good in the 00:24:00classroom, is to teach the intro classes as a lure to get people to become majors. And so I taught intro for 15 years, and then I hadn't taught it forever. Now, that's all I do, is teach intro, and I love it.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Okay. Well, what were some of your favorite classes to teach?

Robert Wineburg: Grant writing.

Lacey W. : Yeah.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, I was on the board at the United Way in the 1980s, '81, '82, I think in '83, and they had the Bryan Venture Grant, and I chaired that committee, and grants would come in from agencies, and there wouldn't be any programs inside. The grant was kind of like just begging, "Give me money, we need it. There's a hole, we got to help these people." And you work with business people on these community venture grants, and they're saying, "I wouldn't give money to this, look at how lousy this budget is. There's even no program plan here." And I said, "Hmm, I think I'll develop a course called 00:25:00Social Agency Program Development, and wrap the course into writing a grant to develop a program." And that's been my signature course, I've done that for 25, 30 years now, on and off, to the point where I did it down at the Self Help Center, where there are 28 agencies right in the Self Help Center, and I did it with my community partner this guy right here, that guy.

Robert Wineburg: We were community partners, still are since 1996. So he taught with me down there, so you taught with a practitioner, and it was a university-wide course, and then the politics of the University got such that we weren't getting the FTEs in social work. Public health was getting them, because we also had a public health professor. And I said, "Well, if they're getting FTEs, and I designed the course, and I do all the work, and then they get the FTEs, let them teach it. Bye." And then I went back. I taught grant writing 00:26:00here, and so for the past three years I've just been doing it in our department. But since all of our students are connected to agencies, it's still in real time, that's still ... were still doing the real work.

Lacey W. : That's good. Yeah. That's the important thing as it is anyway. So next question I have is about memorable projects in UNCG, and I have Inaugural Director of Community-Engaged Scholarship.

Robert Wineburg: That wasn't my most memorable.

Lacey W. : Okay. They told me to ask you about it.

Robert Wineburg: I'll get there.

Lacey W. : Okay.

Robert Wineburg: My most memorable is in 1982 or 1983, there was a rape on campus, and I was sitting there, and the student said to me, "What are you going to do about it? What's this university going to do about it?" I said, "The University is going to do nothing about it, what are you going to do about it?" So we marched our little behinds over to the new women's studies program, and 00:27:00they sat on the floor in there and listened and talked, and listened and talked. Well, you see the lights on campus? Do you see the escort service on campus? Do you see the telephone things on the campus? That all came from that class. Evolved over the years, but the pressure that was put on inside of the system by the constituents of the system made a large change. That was my most memorable engagement. The second most memorable engagement here on campus was I was a senator, and they used to give us ...

Lacey W. : The Faculty Senate?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. I did it six years, I did it two terms. You've been around for 38 years, you've done many, many things, and the parking on this campus in those days, very much like today, but a little bit softer, they were like the KGB. So they would come, and if you parked illegally, they'd tow you 00:28:00away, but what they were doing is towing people away at night, and they mostly were women students, and they had to walk down Lee Street, now Golden Gate Boulevard, or Gate City Boulevard. They had to walk down at night to get their car, or call somebody to get their car. Scared the bejeebies out of them. So every senate meeting, we have 15 minutes. So for about four years myself and a guy called Lloyd Band, who's now emeritus at Stanford, but he was here at the time, we would stand up and talk about it inside to get petitions going, to get these guys to be more human.

Robert Wineburg: And one of my letters to the chancellor, I wish I had it, I said, "You guys got to remember that everybody you tow here today and scare them, is an alum in the future, and their biggest memory is going to be about you guys towing them, and they were scared, and there goes your money." And that 00:29:00was a sort of weird concept to these guys because they're law and order parking people.

Lacey W. : Right. Which chancellor was this?

Robert Wineburg: Moran.

Lacey W. : Okay.

Robert Wineburg: And it rolled into Sullivan because they didn't ... So then they started booting, and they started doing warnings at the beginning of the semester because new people on campus didn't really get where to park, and they were scared, and they ran to classes. And they finally started to get a sense that, "Oh, this is a community here, maybe we ought to soften up." And so now you'll get booted, you won't get towed until you've been booted twice. But that's my most memorable. Now we can go to the community engagement. Because this is my community. This is my home. You got to clean up at home too before you can go out and change another community.

Lacey W. : Yeah. That makes sense. So now you want to talk about the community-engaged scholarship.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, there was no such thing as community-engaged scholarship, 00:30:00there is only scholarship. And increasingly as we became corporatized, the way you ... since you couldn't get down on the trenches and really understand people's work outside of the department, at the macro level, the increasingly further away the people who judged this stuff got from the work, the more they would just count numbers. So you had to had the X publications, Y publications. Well, we as a department went along with that, but the reality of community-engaged scholarship, if I were a biologist or a chemist and they were going to hire me in, one of the incentives would be help set up my lab, and perhaps a graduate student. Well, when you're an engaged scholar, you come to a new town, you have to go out and develop relationships in agencies and organizations. You have to develop trust, and then perhaps you may offer up to 00:31:00do a little evaluation two years in after building all these relationships.

Robert Wineburg: So you're hustling to get a publication, maybe you'll talk a little bit about the history of your relationship in the community, but you don't have any data, you don't have any data. So the only thing that was the same in promotion and tenure between a biologist and a community-engaged scholar was the six years that you had. So over the years I pecked away, and pecked away, and pecked away at changing the promotion and tenure guidelines because it was like measuring apples and oranges, the "scholars" of what we call discovery, as I said, thought that the work you do out in the community is like serving soup. But you could have never called my plumber to do some of the work that I did with some of these organizations and help building their infrastructure. And 00:32:00engaged scholars worked as zigs and zags, and nobody ever accounts for the time that it takes to build the relationship in the community. So Laura Sims in HES, the dean, saw this effort and wanted to start some of her faculty recognized.

Robert Wineburg: So she made me the Director of Community-Engaged Scholarship. And then when Celia came in, she asked me if I wanted to head up a committee, I said, "No, I'm already the director, I'll do it." And that's when I went about develop ... I thought I was going to be in the position for a long time, so I went about developing the program the way I thought it ought to be developed based on data. So I surveyed all the faculty and HS, and we have a lot of social 00:33:00scientists who know about survey methods, but they didn't sort of like mine. I like to have almost a complete population study, so I got 87%, over 85% response rate from the 130 faculty, but I had the dean robocall the faculty the night before, and that pissed off a lot of people, it turned me into a junior leaguer. I didn't care, I wanted the data. But that turned me into a junkyard dog as a researcher and robocall. I didn't care about the robo-, I wanted to know who, how many, what departments, what rank were people engaged in, and how were they engaged.

Robert Wineburg: And I got some beautiful data. 87% of the faculty in this school are affiliated with an agency, an organization on various levels, from 00:34:00working on their governance structure, to helping them write grants. And that took me a good solid year in change to get that data, to analyze that data, and then ... because she didn't give me a staff, so I had to beg, borrow, and steal statistical help, and do the analysis with somebody else, and finally I had it in my head where we ought to be headed, not beheaded, headed, but where we ought to be heading. And by that time, the other forces in public health really wanted to take over community engagement, they didn't care about doing it the right way, they cared about owning the title because public health is supposed to be out in the community, not social work, like really collecting data and doing stuff. So it was a really interesting political dynamic that took place.

Robert Wineburg: I lasted for three years in there and then ... I'll never forget, the dean showed me the survey that she sent out, and two people said 00:35:00that they didn't know what I was doing, three quarters of the responses were saying that they did, and it was good, and because of the two she told me that my position was ended. That's the politics of the University, that's got nothing ... the University is like a theater, it creates its own mythology, and its own reality, so when people walk in they take on a role, and if there's a bully in a department, and the dean's not as strong as the bully, or the department is theoretically the big money winner, then they get to kind of call the shots of how the rhythm of the school works. It's not necessarily based on truth. And my truth simply has been, I'm an employee of the state of North Carolina, and I'm here to teach young people to do the best thinking they possibly can do, and to 00:36:00provide my knowledge for the community, and the rest of it is fiction.

Lacey W. : So you just do what you were doing?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, and that's why people in the community like me a whole lot better than ... This new generation of faculty really like me, the old generation really thought I was just nothing.

Lacey W. : Yeah, just going about things the wrong way.

Robert Wineburg: Except I got a lot of money.

Lacey W. : So they were confused and upset.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. Right. And I got money from places that ... like the Lilly Endowment for Religion, because I study how congregations contribute to public life, and was funded by them for 10 years. Well nobody over there in religion department could get Lilly grants. So I was like a high school class president getting grants before we got a grant office, and at the same time how could the dumb guy over in social work be getting Lilly grants? So it was a kind of weird relationship that I had with everybody but ... So be it.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Any other memorable projects you want to talk about?

Robert Wineburg: Oh, God. Yeah.

Lacey W. : We can go through them.

Robert Wineburg: Our Health and Faith Summit that we did at Mount Zion Baptist Church. My community partner, we've developed a 100 million dollar nonprofit organization that we put people to work, and we started documenting in 2006. We started in '96, but we really started documenting in 2006. So we documented putting 1,000 people to work, people that were on the system, off the system into jobs, changed their lives. And every other year we would do a summit on poverty. So we did 16 summits, and we did two in a row, the Health/Faith Summit, which was our biggest draw over at Mount Zion, and we had 760 people, and it's not much different than a conference room. We could gather all the people who 00:38:00are smart in a particular area in the community, and they develop the workshops, and teach people, and teach each other. So it takes eight or nine months to plan.

Robert Wineburg: So we had tremendous coverage, we had the White House here, and my colleague and I became consultants for the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood partnerships under Obama. And then we did one on mental health, where we outed mental illness in the center of town, and that's when I was asked to be visiting scholar on religion at Greensboro College, and Odell my colleague looked and said, "Wine, what do you see?" He calls me Wine. I said, "I see the Jefferson Building." He says, "Exactly, this is the center of town, this is where we're going to do the summit, let's see if our model works outside of the church, and we're able to get close to 500 people there." And the best part of it, our speaker who was self described schizophrenic and psychotic, on meds, and 00:39:00he jumped off the Golden Gate bridge but lived, and he was a dynamic speaker. We had somebody who was mental ill get a standing ovation in the center of Greensboro.

Robert Wineburg: That was the metaphor that I thought was, "Wow, I won an accomplishment," and that was working with my community partner, that was working with Greensboro College, that was working with UNCG, we couldn't have ... we bussed everybody from up at those parking decks. It was a German training system, that we had it down to a science. That was one of my happiest, engaged moments.

Lacey W. : Yeah, that sounds very impressive.

Robert Wineburg: And we videoed ... We raised the money, and I begged, and the school got really pissed off at me because they're supposed to raise money, and 00:40:00I wasn't going to sit around waiting for them to come up with a system, and an approach, and flowers, and fancy letters to people, and then another meeting, and a lunch, and then they ask, the time would have been over. So I raised the money for that, and raised enough money to video about 15 of the 21 sessions that we have. And I use it for class, and I've sent it to other people to use for class because we cut the videos to 15, 16 minutes, good talking points. So those were my accomplishments. And you see the community teaching, and I bring the community into my class and they teach. So I'm proud of that. But not many people know about it, because it's not in their educational Bailey book. But those 450 people that showed up, they knew, the mental health community knew, the faith community knew, and that's all I cared.

Lacey W. : Yeah. It's the important people anyway. So the next question I have is what change has occurred under the department of social work during your time here?

Robert Wineburg: Well, I was hired here for the Joint Master's Program in Social Work, but it took about seven years, the racial stuff between UNCG and A&T was horrible, and I'm not going to lay the blame on either side. Both sides deserve equal blame for putting their institutional interests ahead of what could have been a signature program that could have been showcased around the country for innovation and helping solve, manage, and prevent some the major problems that we have in this community. But we never put social work first, we put race and our institutional interests first, and I got out of that thing, and never looked back until they asked me to teach it once in a while, when accreditation came 00:42:00around, because the people that do my stuff were always getting complained about, but when the creditors come around, you don't want hear student complaints, you want the students ... So they'd ask me to teach the administration course during the time of accreditation.

Robert Wineburg: But then they switched, and they went to become therapists, and the reason ... they won't say this, nobody who will say this. People weren't passing the licensing exam, so what they decided to do is go completely therapeutic and add more therapeutic courses. The problem is we didn't have the guns for it, we didn't have the people to do it, so we had to farm out in the community to get adjuncts to teach the courses that were supposed to be the core of our curriculum, where you get the stars to teach that stuff. And my daughter happened to go a ... while this was all going on. My wife is a clinical 00:43:00therapist who goes to a gazillion workshops and things like that, and my daughter went to Smith College for social work, and she passed that course with flying colors, because the curriculum prepared her for it. These guys ... you got to get better faculty to pass the test.

Robert Wineburg: And they had a course now to how to take the exam, and I get teaching a course to the test, the curriculum's supposed to do that. And I, as you can tell by now, I speak my piece, and I said it was a bad idea. And when you say something's a bad idea to people in two schools, and they buy into the idea, and you keep saying it's not a good idea, it's not going to work real well, you become toxic. They're not toxic, I was toxic, and I still believe the 00:44:00same way. Everything is going on out in the community, and we're wasting a lot of energy teaching people how to sit them in a chair like you and I are doing, and fix their problem, as opposed to working with the systems to fix the problem. Now, I'm going to a little overboard here, we have an incredible program called the Congregational Social Work Initiative, where we get people in the master's program out in agencies working with nurses, congregational nurses to help broker services that nurses don't know how to do while the congregational nurses that are cutting the cost of the hospital by doing in-home or in-congregational nursing.

Robert Wineburg: So that is a terrific program that we've done for 10 years here, and they still have the students take the clinical track, but a lot of their work is the kind of work that I consider community work.

Lacey W. : Got you. Okay. So that's a difference, and that's a sort of shift over time through the department that ended up ...

Robert Wineburg: Yes. We're up to about 3 million dollars in this HRSA grant to get social workers out in the community. They're still taking the curriculum. Like there's a whole bunch of courses that you can learn like program development. Nobody in the master's program takes my grant writing class. Agencies are getting pummeled out there, and I've got one master's student in social work taking my course. When I taught it school-wide, I had doctoral students, and public health students, and nutrition students, but here in social work there's still that, "Stay away from him, we've got this curriculum to do, we got to make sure that they get licensure, and that just a peripheral course," even though the reality says, "God, wouldn't it be great is somebody got out of social work and came into an agency who had a case load, but also could sit down and conceptualize and write a grant, just to grow a program." And that not where they're at right now.

Lacey W. : Right. They're focusing on the ... not the whole illness, but just 00:46:00like one particular part of it.

Robert Wineburg: Right. In their head they know that things are connected, there's the person and the environment, but to have the skills to change the environment. They don't want to take my course and that saddens me.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Any other changes in the Department of Social Work or should we move on to when you were chair?

Robert Wineburg: Well, the broad changes now is that I've outlived my second set of enemies in this university, and we've got millennials or Xers who really believe in engagement and bigger picture stuff here. So things are changing tremendously. It's a wonderful atmosphere. I love it.

Lacey W. : Yeah. It's much better now in that sense?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, I can die now satisfied.

Lacey W. : Not during your birthday week. You have a bit more to go.

Robert Wineburg: No, I still have a lot of energy.

Lacey W. : Yeah, and plenty more to do I'm certain.

Robert Wineburg: I do.

Lacey W. : And then you were the guy left in the room, and became Chair of the Social Work Department.

Robert Wineburg: I became chair of the Social Work Department, and I did it for five years. We were the people ... I was a founder of master's program, I brought the documents down to Chapel Hill and sat around with the 16 graduate deans, with my colleagues here, Kirka at A&T. And Sarah I didn't do a lot of work on this. And we used to meet over at the City Club, and one day I said, "She's sitting there taking a lot of credit for all of this," and finally I said, "Do you call something equal when somebody does 80% of the work and somebody does 20% of the work?" and I got called a racist in front of everybody there, and I left the room almost crying, and I quit the chair right that 00:48:00following summer, I said "I'm not coming back, because I'm not going to be called something that I'm not." Now, everybody would say everybody's racist, but you can see my colleague the Reverend Odell Cleveland, we worked for 22 years together on a regular basis, and he said to me, and I quote, "Wine, if you're racist, I'm white."

Robert Wineburg: And so he couldn't believe that I was called that. But that's how the game got played for a long time in developing this program. That's why it went to nowhere. And it limped along, and every other white savior came in and thought that they could win with A&T, finally we got the right formula, and that was that we hired somebody, a black guy who got tenure at A&T and tenure here, Jeff Shears, and that changed the nature of the communication back and forth between the universities. We should have had that from the beginning.

Lacey W. : Yeah, you should have.

Robert Wineburg: So, I love being the chair, I love ... I hired many of the people that turned out to be chairs in this department, and I loved it, but I could not think of myself walking in and out of meetings, in and out of meeting developing this master's program with that cloud hanging over my head. They weren't thinking it, they said it. And so I said, "I don't have to do this," and then I hankered down with my scholarship and it turned out to be the best thing.

Lacey W. : Yeah. So my next set of questions are about chancellors here that you've worked under. So you came in under Moran?

Robert Wineburg: I did. I was interviewed by Stan Jones who was the vice chancellor under Ferguson, and I ended up on a committee with Ferguson, a real gentleman and kind, but my first academic chancellor was William Moran, and we 00:50:00both came in at the same time.

Lacey W. : Right. And so what were your impressions of Moran?

Robert Wineburg: He was strictly corporate, and like I wrote you in the email, he was given a charge to turn this into a male-dominated university. "Get more men on campus, we'll get more science, we'll get more sports, we will become like the other universities in the system, recognized not for our girl tradition, but for our science penis, our sports prowess." It worked like ... we still got 66% women here, and my argument the whole time was this, that we had a powerful, powerful women's tradition here, and in social work, one of the principles that we're often taught, whether it's whether you work with an organization or an individual, is that you start building off their strengths, you don't try to fix all the weaknesses, you try to build off strengths. And 00:51:00they saw women weakness and they tried to build off strength in the male part of it. It never really worked. That was Moran in a nutshell. He did everyone in his power to corporatize, systematize, and turn us into a guy school.

Lacey W. : What were his methods?

Robert Wineburg: We would get memos from his buddy, his guy Fred Drake, they signed a contract with Barnes and Nobles and they told us that we couldn't buy books at Addam Bookstore. Those were the methods, corporate. "This is how you're supposed to behave." Like I told you, I work for the students in North Carolina not Bill Moran. So he did some stupid things, he fired the housekeepers because of Fred Drake. They wanted to privatize the housekeeping staff, so they, right 00:52:00in the middle of the semester, they changed the time that they had to arrive on campus, they had to arrive at campus at 5:30. They used to have to arrive when the first bus got here, which was 6:00, and all of a sudden they were getting demerits and things like that. So I brought together a group of faculty members and challenged him for nine months, because there's no union, they didn't have a union. And Marian Wright Edelman has a saying. Are you familiar with Marian Wright Edelman?

Lacey W. : I'm not.

Robert Wineburg: She's the Head of the Children's Defense Fund, and a great American lobbyist for children. She said, "A bunch of fleas can't kill a mean dog, but sure can make him feel uncomfortable." And so I made Moran uncomfortable with emails and letters all the time about how unjust that was to 00:53:00screw these housekeepers. I kept saying, "Look, they clean our toilets, and you're being mean to them." But they thought in terms of finance. So if you contract out housekeeping then it would save money so that they can put into the new soccer stadium or the baseball stadium. And they didn't like the flea, and that right there, that's a Sullivan era, but that's the type ... that was ... I wasn't afraid to say things in public. I believed in seeking and speaking the truth. That was in the handbook the first day I got there, "Seek and speak the truth." So I did, and not I'm being arrogant or anything, there's just a lot of bullshit that goes on in the university. And you know it's 40 to 1, but I hung 00:54:00in there.

Lacey W. : Sure. And then after Moran, was Sullivan.

Robert Wineburg: Sullivan. I really respected her and liked her a lot. She didn't like me personally because I challenged her, and I wrote stuff in the paper, and I challenged her in the senate, but I never saw ... I don't see any of this stuff as personal, I really don't. I believe that honorable people can disagree, and if you have the right for free speech, then you can exercise it. People should praise you for the free speech and get mad at you for your idea, get mad that, "I don't agree your ideas but you're not a bad human being." Well, that's not the way these things played out. So Sullivan was a terrific ... she lobbied like hell for this university, she was a great politician. And she got a little bloody nose when she tried to get come in and just knock down the building. And it was for what Moran was doing, it was to have an entrance for 00:55:00Barnes and Noble to the bookstore.

Lacey W. : Right. They were going to knock down the chancellor building.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. See where the entrance is, that's where it was. So that's what this was all about, this was not about student education, this was like a corporatism. This was not about faculty rights, which I started off the conversation about, this was about, "I'm the boss," and the faculty stood up to her, and I kicked it off, but I wouldn't say ... then everybody coalesced around that building, and actually it worked out for the best.

Lacey W. : We need to explain that entire story for the recording, because we like chatted about it off camera and off the recording.

Robert Wineburg: Well, Sullivan and her minions decided through backdoor channels that there was going to be a book entrance to Barnes and Noble, and one 00:56:00day I wake up in morning and I read about it in the newspaper, and then she called the meeting and explained it all to the faculty, and I'm seething inside, and so were a whole bunch of other faculty, so were a lot of historical preservationist, because the building is one of five by this famous architect who I couldn't name. 'Cause I didn't care about the architect. And we started talking, and I was stewing, and stewing, and stewing. We had a faculty senate meeting, and while it was faculty time, I got up and read that letter. And it started the ball rolling, and then community groups asked me to come out and speak, the League of Women Voters asked me to come and speak to their meeting about it. And I didn't pretend for a second that I cared about the architecture, I cared about the lack of community.

Robert Wineburg: And one thing led to another, and Perseveration North Carolina 00:57:00put some money in to up fit the building, the prior family gave a million dollars to build and help move the building. And all of the preservationist were real happy because the building was going to be saved, and it turned out into be our welcome center. And so what started out to be administrative fiat, turned out to be a good fundraiser, a good community building thing, and that's what happens when you become an autocrat, that you throw away the other possibilities of what good minds can do when you give them an opportunity to work together. I just went after her autocracy, and as the picture shows, I won.

Lacey W. : You did.

Robert Wineburg: And she never really liked me for it because her chief 00:58:00fundraiser was an alum, and she happened to be one of my favorite students. And so she asked me to give the speech when she was named junior alum of the year, and I talked about what an angel she was because she babysat for my kids, and if you trust somebody babysitting for your kids, you know that they've got a soul. Sullivan came up afterwards and in between Michelle and myself, the woman's name was Michelle Schneider, she says, "Oh, you are human after all." But she was a tough thick-skinned biologist from New York with no children, and she was hard-nosed, and this university became her sort family and child, and that's who she advocated for. So somebody like me went after what she thought was good business. She could see me as not human, but she ... one of the board members 00:59:00was a friend of mine, and she called me her problem child.

Robert Wineburg: First of all, I never considered myself a child here. I'm a scholar, and so she wanted ... that's how you undo people in the university and talk about them. But the building is still there, so my ego is not that hurt. The building is still there. Otherwise, I thought she was a terrific ... she gave the Center for New North Carolinians a boost like you wouldn't believe and she advocated it. Now we've got our place on campus. So just because she went after me a little bit doesn't mean that she wasn't a terrific administrator and advocate for this university, and she deserves the building over there. I don't care how much she left, her work, her legacy is worth having a building in her name.

Lacey W. : Definitely. And then was Brady, is who we we had after there.

Robert Wineburg: Brady?

Lacey W. : Yeah.

Robert Wineburg: Well, whoever looks at this in the history is going to know that I call it like it is. She was completely incapable of running a hot dog stand let alone the university. She had no personality. She did not know how to connect with the people. She got a mandate from whomever that it's the new normal, we're in the recession, she's going to cut back programs, had people doing assessments with the underlying narrative that there's going to be changes made here, which meant cuts, and was just a lousy atmosphere with her. And then 01:01:00she brought in a new PR guy, guy named Mason, I think his name was, and she basically told him to clean up that office there, advancement office there. And so they found them doing some stupid things like working on their own time doing photography and making some money on their own time, because they were salaried people, so sometimes salary ... like I worked all weekend this weekend on my classes. If I were on salary, I wouldn't, but I didn't work a whole lot yesterday, I read my novel. Because Monday I taught 12 hours. I taught two classes, and I was here for a candidate and stuff.

Robert Wineburg: The hours just don't work out, when you're ... Are you salaried or hourly?

Lacey W. : Hourly.

Robert Wineburg: You're hourly, so when you're off the clock, you're off the clock. Not when you're here, Brady ... so Brady fired those people with stupid 01:02:00claims, and then plastered in the newspaper the picture of Lyda Carpen that she cheated in the university. That woman was about as much a cheat is as Jesus is a cheat, she's no cheat. Brady was just nasty, and she set a tone here as ... and it filtered through. Sometimes the organizational goals of the few in the organization become the goals of the many. And the mean-spirited carrot stick tenor of behavior turned this increasingly more into a scared corporation as opposed to an academic institution where you wake up in the morning, and love to get into your class, and then love to walk outside, and love to see your colleagues. All the scuttlebutt was, "What is the wicked witch of the East going to do today?" So I wrote a letter, an op ed in the paper, I don't know if you guys got that or not.

Lacey W. : I don't remember if we do or not, I'll check with Scott.

Robert Wineburg: So that letter, the subtext of it was more important than what I said in the text. Yeah, I was only given 800 words, but I got credits a mile long down at the bottom, it says, "Jefferson Pilot Excellence Professor, Fulbright Scholar, the Scholarship ... only living pro-' It doesn't say, "Only living professor," but I am the only living professor who has a scholarship is his name that I didn't endow, there's another guy in computer science that's an excellence professor, but he put a chunk of change in there. And they said, "Well, you don't need to have all that." I said, "They'll take my excellence professor away in a minute, they'll take it away in a minute." I said, "You got 01:04:00to make them wrestle through the fact that it wasn't some stumble bum that wrote this thing, because despite what the word on the street here is in the university, I'm a top scholar, and I ... You know what they say about humility, "once you recognize it, you lost it."

Robert Wineburg: But I don't go running around saying that I am, but I had to put those credits up there, so that ... because those are our values, we want people to be authors, and have scholarships named after them because they're good teachers, and be recognized as one of the top performers. This is what the goal of everybody that walks in here is. They can't stab that to get to me. And Doug Clark didn't get that at the paper, and he said ... I said, "If they come after me, what are you going to do it?" And they said, "We'll back you 100%." So they put all those credits in. And it really is hard to ... you can't just say, 01:05:00"Oh, you're a lousy scholar, you got three books or four books," in a place where citizenship counts. You can't do that. Administrators can't say that about me. They might say, "He's got a big mouth," but they can't, "He doesn't produce." So what do you want from a faculty? Good teacher, scholarly production, money, or can you put up with a big mouth? Now, if I had a big mouth and none of that other stuff, that'd be different.

Robert Wineburg: So did that answer your question about Brady? Brady was awful ... I just, I couldn't ... not as a human being. I've been in a bunch of meetings with her, and we sat, and we chatted, and she's was a negotiator with the Russians. She said she couldn't get tenure if she weren't engaged when she was at Vanderbilt. I don't hate any of these people because this is theater here.

Lacey W. : It's not personal.

Robert Wineburg: And it's theater, when you walk in everybody plays a role. So I 01:06:00don't hate anybody.

Lacey W. : And then we come to our current Gilliam Jr.

Robert Wineburg: I find him fascinating.

Lacey W. : Really?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, he read the tea leaves very well. He came in and put himself on a golf cart, and just drove around campus shaking people's hands, but trying to get a feel in his gut what this place was really all about. And I think he's got an incredible vision about what's going on in the community. However, he's not touchy-feely and out there with faculty and stuff like that, at least for the first three years. Anna Dunn has been implementing all of his stuff from my perch and other people are ... and it seems to be going in a direction that I'm pretty happy with. This is a ... it has a 20,000 member town, and so you just can't nail it all in one swath. I mean, sure I could be a 01:07:00nitpicker and pick on some things I don't like, but generally speaking I thought I liked Moran personally because we were in so many meetings together. Sullivan and I, I liked her, she's didn't like me, so we didn't have any time. Brady I liked sort of personally, but I thought she did the worst job, and Gilliam, I don't know very well.

Robert Wineburg: He actually knows my community partner Odell Cleveland better than he knows me, because Odell is the second in command at Mount Zion which is the largest black church from DC to Atlanta. So with his community stuff that Gilliam is doing, he needs Odell, because Odell is very prominent in the community.

Lacey W. : Right. That makes sense.

Robert Wineburg: So Odell talks to him more than I do.

Lacey W. : Yeah, that's okay though. So my next question is, do you have any thoughts about any other administrators during your time here?

Robert Wineburg: I love Alan Boyette. I think he's the most honest person that 01:08:00could be in a position that feeds information to the chancellor and to the provost. He's honest whether they implement his honesty is secondary, he's honest. Ed Uprichard was about as moral as you could get, he was a provost, and he actually stewed on how to do the right thing within the context of no matter what you do in a place like this, you're a shooting target, or you're a dartboard, and Uprichard tried to get as close to the bullseye with the right thing as much as he could. And he was Sullivan's Chancellor and they worked well together, two Catholics from Long Island in Waspy North Carolina. So was Moran. I mean, we've had a lot of Catholics here.

Lacey W. : And any other thoughts about other chairs of social work while you're here?

Robert Wineburg: John Rife was efficient, effective, anti-disagreements and stuff, but we kind of cruised along, but a lot of shit was taking place behind the scenes. We had a couple of EEOC suits because he didn't ... just didn't want to deal with the mess that was underneath the ...

Lacey W. : The what suits?

Robert Wineburg: EEO suits.

Lacey W. : EEO suits. What does that stand for?

Robert Wineburg: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in other words it's discrimination, whether it's age, race, stuff like that. And one was dropped, one was won, and that was under his watch. And then the other one kind of got handed over under the Lindsay, Betsy Lindsey, and I didn't ... John I worked 01:10:00with fine, I could not work with Betsy Lindsey. I asked the Dean to get somebody else to supervise me, and that's when I became Director of Community Engagement. So they kind of gave me title so that they could keep the ...

Lacey W. : Keep that away. Yeah. All right, and then any ...?

Robert Wineburg: I loved Betsy, don't get me wrong. We chat and stuff ...

Lacey W. : It's not personal.

Robert Wineburg: ... and we're friends, we email back and forth, we both got back problems. When they got in their role as boss, I disagreed with that and I wasn't disagreeable with them as people, I was disagreeable with their ideas, and that is a very hard thing to do, and even in an university, is to say, "You're a fine person, I'd hate those ideas. I'll fight against those ideas." And it didn't work like that, it worked like it was personal with them, and the 01:11:00were, "[inaudible 01:11:02]."

Lacey W. : Yeah. So the next question is colleagues who've made an impression on you here.

Robert Wineburg: Like the whole university?

Lacey W. : Yeah.

Robert Wineburg: Terry Nile, Rob Cannon, Henry Levinson, Jo Leimenstoll, Melissa Floyd-Pickard, my chair now, Yarneccia Dyson, Danielle Swick, Meredith Powers, Tanya Coakley, these young ... Tyreasa Washington. They're all out there doing stuff, they're doing stuff, they've made such an impression. It's kind of like you're in battle, and you're wounded, and you're walking around with wounds and then all of a sudden somebody comes up with a miracle salve, and that's what we've got here now. Daniel Rhodes, Raleigh Bailey, Marianne LeGreco. I mean, 01:12:00just people that are the next generation. Deb Cassidy, oh my god. Let me go off on Deb Cassidy here for a second. Are you familiar with our childcare center?

Lacey W. : I've passed it I think.

Robert Wineburg: Well, that's the childcare center, but it's a huge research operation, and our part of the human development family studies has the child, the applied part, and Deb Cassidy was the director that brought millions and millions of dollars in. Because of bad framing, we called this the what it is part of child development. The fact of the matter is, is that it is the research and development arm of the childcare industry in North Carolina because it gives all those certifications for each childcare center. And they developed the protocols for it, they do the research, they do the certification. And so this 01:13:00is ... let me go back to where we started, had Moran, and then Sullivan had the eye glasses to see this as an economic development piece that women can actually do, we would have a big huge center right now as opposed to a brand new school, and what education I shouldn't say, but soccer stadiums and baseball ...

Robert Wineburg: We would have pumped that energy in our institutional brains into developing this industry. And those are kinds of things that they just missed. They missed. And I've been trying to convince these guys in there now, Linda Hestenes, "Call it the Childcare Industry's Research and Development arm, call it that, talk about its economic development and all the people that you keep employed, and if they don't behave themselves in those center, that you're 01:14:00making the families better by upholding the standards," but we're still in that corporate, this is still a women's school. Do you get what I had meant now by the not building off the strengths?

Lacey W. : Yeah, I do. I just wanted to make sure it was explained in like a narrative as we were going through. That's all it is. But you said, Danielle was working on that on now.

Robert Wineburg: Linda Hestenes and her crew. She's got a partner there, but since Deb died, I kind of felt weird being around that department. I loved Deb Cassidy, I just loved her. The others, some great, great, great people. Ken Kenvine, another one, he helped write the promotion and tenure document for engaged scholarship, and he was completely against it when he started.

Lacey W. : You turned him?

Robert Wineburg: I didn't turn him. Good ideas turned him. Good scholars. When 01:15:00you see ... you got to be able to change your mind if the data show that your mind wasn't in the right direction, and Ken was that wise, was that good of a scholar. So he ended up writing the document. Nice to have the enemy write the document. And a good example of that is that we were in the ... See I was on the promotion and tenure committee here in first HES, School of Human Environmental Sciences, and then for a year, bridging when we became the school of health and ... but I wrote the documents, I worked with the university lawyers, and then because I was the chair for so many years, the University Promotion and Tenure Committee took three years to write the engaged measures and engagement into our 01:16:00document. But most of the schools rotated, either the chair would rotate ... it's hard work to be the chair.

Robert Wineburg: And it was an elected position, and nobody ran the first year, and somebody said, "Would you run?" And I said, "Yeah." And then nobody ran the second year, and they said, "Would you run?" And I said, "Yeah." And then by the third year, I was learning about the guts of this, and I was involved with the lawyer, and I said, "Okay. Yeah I'll do it." And then every year they'd say, "Are you going to run again?" And nobody ran against me, so I ended up doing it for 13 years, and I learned a lot about how the bowels of the university work, because when you write promotion and tenure documents, and you sit in those meetings, and your review dossiers, and you review what departments say about people, and then you're on the University Tenure Promotion, tenure committee, 01:17:00you get to meet the other people in other schools, and you get to know the narrative, you get to know the bowels.

Robert Wineburg: So Ken was this College of Arts and Sciences chair one year, the final year that we had got this stuff in, and we were screaming at each other in the meeting, but Ken's an Italian from downstate New York and I'm a Jew from upstate New York. And so the flailing of the hands and arguing with people and Ken and I ... we're personal friends, we were family friends. So we kept on screaming at each other in this meeting, and it's really against the tenor of UNCG to scream at anybody in a meeting. But this was over a really important issue, that he were saying that the engaged scholarship is bullshit. And then we walk out, and he puts his arm around we, and we're giggling, we're laughing. So one of the faculty members in nursing saw me walking up this ave here from the 01:18:00parking deck passed the School of Nursing, and she goes, "I can't believe that the two of you had your arms around each other after what he said to you." I looked at her, her name was Trish, I said, "Trish, this wasn't personal, this was about two differing sets of ideas about scholarship is. Ken and I are friends."

Robert Wineburg: But she thought it was the worst thing that could have happened on earth, but once Ken was convinced that, "Oh, yeah, this is engaged scholar is different from me going to the library, and looking up some 18th century technological scientist, and tracing ... It is different. It takes more time, and it is scholarship." And then he is so brilliant that he was cutting and pasting without a computer. Just look at the document and saying, "Oh, that's going to be moved there, that's going to be moved there," and he was basically responsible for getting the narrative in there correctly.

Lacey W. : Wow, very impressive.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, it was. But the 13 years that I was in the trenches allowed me to be on that committee for three years. I was the only committee member that had the continuity, and could kind of hold it. I think Laurie Kennedy-Malone was on there for three years as well. She was another person that I really loved, Laurie Kennedy-Malone. Stalwart in community engagement, probably one of the hidden figures in community engagement. Looked throughout all the tenure documents in the whole country, and tried to figure out what it ought to be here. She should get three stars.

Lacey W. : Yeah?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. My others, Andrea Hunter. I love Andrea Hunter. Do you know Andrea?

Lacey W. : I don't.

Robert Wineburg: Human development, family studies, switched to becoming a 01:20:00narrative writer, switched from this social science about black families, and her narratives, she's such a ... I told her, I say, "Andrea you're from another planet, you're from another time. You're so, soulful." And so she switched her academic, not career, but the way she does research from social science studies to kind of writing histories, family histories and in a narrative style, connecting to social, economic, and political rhythm of the time, and I just love her. I love UNCG. I've loved the students. I mean, one of my favorites are Stacy, Stacy Galligan Vogel, she was instrumental instrument in starting the 01:21:00Wineburg Scholarship, but was the young woman that said, "What are we going to do about this with the rape." And there she was sitting on the floor, and now she's a big donor to the university. But she started the Wineburg Scholarship. That's when I had cancer, and she said, "Well geez, I don't want to acknowledge him when he's dead."

Lacey W. : Acknowledge him while he's here.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. Michelle Schneider who raised funds for this place. Bob Griffiths in political science from my home town. Ruth DeHoog, instrumental in studying nonprofit. There's just a lot of people I really, really, really like here a lot.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Good, yeah.

Robert Wineburg: I might be perceived by some administrators as a big bad wolf, but I'm not. Terri Shelton, I think she's one of the smartest people on the planet. I don't agree with the directions that she's gone in, but she started 01:22:00real research out in the community with the Center for Children and Families, and evolved to become a muckety-muck. I like her a lot. I like Celia, my dean, I like her more as a friend than an administrator, but I like her. So yeah. That answers your question?

Lacey W. : I just don't want you to forget me by now, I was going to let you keep going.

Robert Wineburg: Oh, my god, Harriet Cupferer. Oh, Harriet Cuperer. She was an anthropologist, and she ... I wrote my first paper in a journal called Public Welfare, so I gave it to her to review. She beat the shit out of it. Oh my god, I hadn't had a critique like that, even my doctoral dissection advisor didn't beat me up like that. Oh, she kicked from one end to ... and her message was "Wineburg, you ain't smart, you're still young you got a lot to learn." And boy, 01:23:00every time I saw her I just kind of said, "Yes ma'am, yes ma'am." Yeah, Harriet Cupferer, wow. Yeah, that's about ... I can name others, but those are the ones that pop to my head.

Lacey W. : Okay. So the next question was, could you get any sense of what campus culture is like as a professor? How would you describe UNCG campus culture?

Robert Wineburg: Getting better, getting better.

Lacey W. : That's a good sign.

Robert Wineburg: Yeah. I mean, the faculty center was put up when they ripped out the faculty, and the home economics building is actually in this building. We used to have a cafeteria down at the bottom here, and the cooks, the hotel management, and hospitality, we had nice lunches here all the time, that's where the faculty met. And Elizabeth Zinzer came along and just ended that, and we 01:24:00bitched at her, and they put Faculty Center up there. That ain't a faculty center, that's just a building up there to placate the faculty. So we never really had a campus culture until this kid Justin, can't call him a kid, Justin Harmon came along and started to do community engagement monthly beer nights, and now it's lasted, it's in its second year. And so he's creating a campus culture at least for a slice of people. The students, they run through some of their organizations, and I can't be honest with you, I really don't know, I spend most of my time in community. Not doing a lot. I used to work with student organizations and stuff like that, but not anymore.

Lacey W. : Okay. That's a fair answer. And I've got some stuff on asking about your current projects, and then I've got wrap up questions. So under current projects, I've got Jefferson Pilot Excellent University Professor of Social Work.

Robert Wineburg: Well, that's my title, and within that role, I'm a university professor, which means I'm ... this is my home, social work, but I have a responsibility to the University, so when anybody calls me and asks me to do something, I do it. So I sit on these committees, I mentor these younger faculty on how to put together their promotion and tenure dossiers, I would look over their grants if they want me to do it. I broker stuff out in the community for engaged scholars. That's being a university professor, and I do a lot of it, and a lot of it's hidden. And then the other things is that I'm on a bunch of dissertation ... well I'm on three dissertation committees. One here, one at A&T, and one in Canada right now. So I do external, out of social work work. Other faculty do too, but usually not in a small department like social work with no doctoral program. They don't usually ask unless you get a specific expertise.

Robert Wineburg: And I'm on call with my colleague right now, we haven't done anything in a while. He did, he took me to the doctor to get a shot in the spine, and they asked who was out there, and I said, "My reverend." But we can do anything any time we want over at the church, it just depends on what we're going to do there. We're working on something, but it's not worth talking about even if this is not shown for a hundred years, around gangs. So we'll see.

Lacey W. : Okay. Any other current projects you got on right now?

Robert Wineburg: Yeah, I am. I'm going on research leave in the fall.

Lacey W. : Okay. To do research on what?

Robert Wineburg: My area of expertise for the last 30 years has been how the religious community contributes to public life, and a year and a half ago I 01:27:00finished editing a special edition of a journal out of Switzerland called Religions, which covers all kinds of religion stuff, and they asked me if I would be a special guest editor on a thing called, a title, Religion, Welfare and Service: Common Ground. And I started this field of research 30 years ago, and a lot of my colleagues like me had to fight because we were engaged scholars, we were sort of outside of our discipline, and now this stuff has become mainlined in a lot of disciplines, and they've had a lot of their doctoral students go on to become prominent scholars. So I got 15 articles that came out in the special edition, but since it's an online edition, the articles come in, and the way they come in, is the way they read, and the way they land. 01:28:00So the journal asked me if I would put together a book.

Robert Wineburg: Order the articles, write an introductory chapter, and then do a opening for each section, because there are some incredibly good themes. And my colleague Jay Poole who directs the Congregational Social Work Initiative here wrote ... he's lead author on a beautiful piece on the Cone family, and its philanthropy, all the way up to the Cone Health Foundation sponsoring and supporting financial this Congregational Social Work Initiative now for a decade. Jay is going to be co-editor with me, and he's going to have the lead article, because it is really shows the ... there's another article in there that shows the chicken and egg piece of philanthropy and religion from Richmond, and it will be right next to Jay's article, but that shows the kind of stuff 01:29:00that we have done for ... I have done and others now for 30 years, and it's 15 articles that we will edit and make it read like a nice decent book. And that's what I'm doing research leave on next semester.

Lacey W. : Okay. So is there anything else you'd want to talk about before I hit these wrap up questions?

Robert Wineburg: Hit the wrap up questions.

Lacey W. : All right. So what do you think makes our social work department stand out?

Robert Wineburg: Leadership. Melissa Floyd-Pickard is an incredible leader, and she's a servant leader. She allows people to do their own thing and trust them. She's not worried about the little things.

Lacey W. : What social and academic events stand out in your mind or in your time at UNCG as faculty?

Robert Wineburg: Well, 911. That was earth shattering. And everybody has the 01:30:00same story, they know where they were or what they were doing. The Reagan budget cuts, HB2, the bureaucratization of UNCG.

Lacey W. : Kind of a running theme throughout the whole interview.

Robert Wineburg: Well, we have to take all these little tests now on ... You can't move forward, they sort of imply you're not going to get paid if you don't take a test on cybersecurity, and you got to take seven or eight modules on it and pass. So we had to do something on confidentiality, and I said to the Provost, I said, "I would really like to have a meeting with all these people who develop all of this stuff, and have them take a workshop on "what is the 01:31:00role of the faculty? What do faculty do? How important are they to the university? How should you talk to them. I mean, they are blood and guts of the place." And she just giggled, because what can you say, it's the truth. Send them home for a month, and school will still get taught. Send us home for a month, and no school gets taught.

Lacey W. : That's true.

Robert Wineburg: But it's in terms of pay and importance, do you think that they're the most important people here?

Lacey W. : What were some of your proudest accomplishments at UNCG?

Robert Wineburg: Getting the Lilly Grant before there was really a grant office, that was an accomplishment. Just got one yesterday.

Lacey W. : Congratulations.

Robert Wineburg: Zick Nomallo, one of my students whose mother I had, not Nomallo, Ensano, got into the University of Chicago. Remember we're a mid major here, we're a mid major social work. Then last year it was Clint Styles, scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Year before that Joseph Skipbarber, Columbia university. Those are my accomplishments.

Lacey W. : And then we've got our last two, which are just kind of reflection overall questions. Tell me how UNCG has affected your life and what it means to you?

Robert Wineburg: It's like being a doctor in medical school. I had a cadaver for my entire life. I watched it grow, and then die, and then I could pick it apart. I know the insides. With UNCG, being here all of these years has really ... When I walk around campus or when I hear things, I know where the history and tradition come from. Sometimes it's really funny to see the look on somebody's face when you tell them, "Well, those 500 level courses were never required for any reason except that our two faculty were going to leave if they didn't get courses taught at the level that they expected to teach after three or four years." "You mean, that's not real, it's not a ...?" I say, "Well, we made it a requirement." To live long enough to A, outlive my enemies and the people in 01:34:00parking were my enemies, to see some of the things that have happened. I was there, I mean, they weren't my ... I didn't really hate any of them, I just thought they did the wrong things confidently.

Robert Wineburg: And just being able to know the beginning, and the middle, and the end of many of the things that are going on on campus, and not have to jump in try to figure it out, that has been the beauty of my life here.

Lacey W. : Mm-hmm (affirmative). And then our absolute last question is, these interviews are for the 125th of UNCG, which is a good time to reflect, but also a good time to look into the future. So where do you think UNCG is going to be in the next 25 to 50 years?

Robert Wineburg: Chasing after football perhaps, trying to become a better division one basketball player, basketball team, giving a lot of lip service to 01:35:00community without the resources that go along with it, many more adjunct professors, it will lose whatever sense of community that it has, it will have to cordon down to a little isolated hamlets of community. And we still won't be able to beat an ACC basketball team with regularity.

Lacey W. : All right.

Robert Wineburg: That's where I see us going.

Lacey W. : Okay.

Robert Wineburg: And yet, it's still a great place to work.

Lacey W. : Yeah. Okay.

Robert Wineburg: All right.

Lacey W. : That's it.

Robert Wineburg: Thank you.