Oral history interview with William E. Moran, 1991

RC: [silence] January 28, 1991.

WM: Let me get started, Bob, and, if I'm heading into directions that don't seem useful or as though perhaps I'm misunderstanding the directions that you have in mind, why just check me. I understand you to be asking me about first impressions of the place from the point of view of what the chancellor needed to do and could do coming on the scene cold. I didn't have at all a clear idea about what this system really looked like on the inside or how it worked when I got here. I had, of course, been a part of an even larger system at SUNY [State 00:01:00University of New York] when I was at Stony Brook. But the one from which I was coming was about as different as it could be. Michigan really had no system. Each of the campuses was dealing directly with the legislature, and, by and large, effectively. The University of Michigan, which had three campuses, encouraged direct exchanges between all three campuses and the legislature. And when I came here, I sensed that this was going to be - looked to be on the surface, very different from both SUNY and from Michigan. I wasn't quite sure what the board of trustees was here. I had had a citizens' advisory group at Michigan for the Flint campus. They had very few powers. And I had been dealing 00:02:00directly with the regents there because the heads of all the campuses met with the board of regents monthly. There were only three - within the University of Michigan there were only three campuses. So as I arrived, I wanted to get a sense of how things were done within the university, that is, within the university system and to get some sense of what the trustees really were around here and what they weren't. Leaping ahead a year or two from that arrival point, let me say that I was a bit concerned about what I saw in regard to the general design of things, for obvious reasons. The university had no direct access to 00:03:00the legislature, and yet our funds were coming from there. And the powers of the trustees were, of course, nothing like the powers of the regents that I had known. And I was not meeting with the board of governors here. So the disconnect - the two disconnects - were very, very significant to me, seemed significant to me, in that both direct access to the board of governors and direct access to the legislature, which I had thought of as quite useful, both were omitted here. And of course, I came to know that the trustees have certain statutory powers, though the board of governors retain for itself three or four of the most consequential - the approval of major appointments, approval of programs, 00:04:00approval of budgets, in the sense - let me say that even more precisely. The board of governors had control of new funds flowing to the university. And they had control, finally, of tenure. Those are the four most important decisions that are made in a university, and they all were at that level. So it was clear to me that with that much insulation between the campus and legislative and university policy makers, there could be some real problems here. So that's a 00:05:00first impression that I recollect very keenly. The second first impression that is very sharp, Bob, was the puzzlement I felt - and I think I spoke about it on one occasion to a faculty group - to the relatively modest amount of graduate student support that I saw. I didn't know how to reconcile that with the abundance of advanced programs here and doctoral programs, too. I knew that there was a lot of pride taken in the fact that senior faculty taught at all levels. And that struck me as a very good thing, too. But the - what - this 00:06:00perhaps is to overstate it - the, I won't say distaste for TAs [teaching assistants] and graduate students - that's overstating it a little bit - seemed to me at odds with the - that and the absence of support for them seemed to me at odds with what looked to be some major responsibilities of the university, assigned official responsibilities of the university. Third, I was concerned at signs of physical deterioration in the campus, and I knew enough about that to know that there was probably a lot of money involved in addressing that problem. 00:07:00Whatever other difficulties were here, that was going to be a major task in every respect, administratively and financially and so on. So those are sort of first and second impressions, picked up immediately but retained for a year or two as matters of concern. And it was some time before I got an inkling as to how things are done. I have a pretty good understanding of that now, but I was more concerned than I let on at that time as to what the consequences of these 00:08:00needs and all of that insulation were going to be over time. I'd only been here a short while when I thought also that a review of the basic purposes of the university would be a good idea because I knew that whatever directions I was going to take, insofar as I could shape those directions, and, of course, I had some opportunities in that regard. But whatever directions might emerge from a new administration would at some point prompt concern all around as to whether 00:09:00there was a coherence to what was happening or whether it was whimsical. That's - perhaps not whimsical, but coming out of one person's head. And to the extent that the new directions looked - would look at odds with the track of the place down the road five or six years likely would be some difficulty of rethinking purpose made all the more complicated, perhaps, by virtue of the fact that some specific issues would be on the table at that time. That's the worst time to get first principles reviewed, when you've got real decisions underhand. And so I did encourage a rather lengthy review of the general purposes of the place. 00:10:00And also, of course, and at the same time, a review of the physical resources of the university. What I did not get into at that time, though I knew there was a problem, was the question of the operating base for the university. It looked bad to me, but I didn't know how bad. And there was an odd feature to it in that the faculty base looked to me pretty good, both - certainly qualitatively but also quantitatively. Student-faculty ratio was very good. So in any event, the academic and the physical planning began, and after three or four years, I would say, I had a pretty good sense then of what was here and in a rough-and-ready way what the strengths and the weaknesses of the place were in a competitive 00:11:00environment. And it didn't take a great student of the field of higher education to see that the environment was getting more and more competitive. I anticipated that we would have some enrollment softness, and there was a little bit of that but a lot less than I had thought there might be. Conversely, I thought that some of the good effects of changing ourselves a bit academically and physically would take longer to produce results than it did. Actually, those good changes, I think, took hold a couple of years ago. And there's more to do, of course, but the benefits of the physical and academic planning came on a little bit faster than I would have imagined. Well, that's just a kind of a welter of first 00:12:00impressions. I did not have much of a sense-there was no way I could-of how the university used to be administered. I, of course, knew Jim [Ferguson, former chancellor] and liked him. And he was very helpful to me and talked to me about many features of the place, about the staff, and about the system, about many of the things that I've mentioned to you here. It was also clear to me that he had earned the respect of the faculty very broadly and that that respect was returned - that he had a great regard for the faculty. I felt, too, you know, in thinking about the transition, Bob, that - and in thinking about some of 00:13:00these problems that I could see at the front end and wanted to get on with, that I was something of a foreigner here to this culture. It was stranger than it looked. I mean by that that it didn't have the appearance of a - of what the movies showed as a southern town or a southern environment or culture. And yet it did have the feel of something very different from anything I'd known before in the way business was done, both formally and informally. So that gave me a certain, I won't say unease, but as Jim was pulling out I had a very clear sense 00:14:00that he had a much better understanding of this place and of North Carolina than I was going to have for a while. The transitional difficulties had been a little bit hard for my family, too, because this house that we were living in was all torn up. And so I felt my own roots to be exposed to the air for a long time before they finally went down into the ground and began to nourish. So what was, I guess, a very significant time of change for the university was really one for me, too, in lots of ways. And it took some years, I'd say, for everything to settle down for my own purposes. The budget problem that I spoke of before, 00:15:00which I sensed but couldn't confirm except anecdotally, stayed with me. And in the very early days, I spoke to [University of North Carolina System] Vice President [of academic affairs Raymond] Dawson about it and indicated that I wanted to do some kind of a comparative study to see just where we were. I didn't realize at the time that that's a very tender business inside - comparative studies - inside a university system, which it is. I knew that it was an important subject. I didn't appreciate how tender it was. And it wasn't really until about two or three years ago that I really, finally got to the bottom of that question and added empirical, good empirical information, to the anecdotes and to the instincts of those early days. Now you have really been 00:16:00inquiring about the transition, and I have been speaking to that in large part, though I've gone forward a bit as well. I'll stop here and be directed by you now, as to whether you want any of this filled in or get into some other things.

RC: No. This is very much the kind of - I mean, I think the utility of a document like this will be that it will give an overview for historians before they turn to the files, and a lot of the detail on this will be in your papers. I suppose one thing that came to mind as you were talking was - well, two things. Let me just ask about two items. You were comparing - you were saying about the differentness between a southern - at least in North Carolina, maybe an upper South - university of what you were used to in Michigan and maybe also 00:17:00in New York, and so I wonder if southern institutions like UNCG really are in the process of being more like Midwestern institutions with what we seem to think have impressions of a much higher level of faculty participation in - or much a more complex process of faculty governance.

WM: Here than there? Is that your point?

RC: There than here.

WM: There than here, yeah.

RC: That's something that's coming from the North, maybe even especially from the Middle West. And then, I wonder if you've ever talked to other heads of institutions, chancellors and presidents, to get any sense of if this has been a typical settling-in process for you as compared to people who go other institutions of comparable size.

WM: No, I don't know much about that, Bob. To really understand that, one has 00:18:00to have quite personal exchanges with a variety of persons because that sort of thing, sometimes it gets published but usually not. Now I don't have much on that. So I don't know whether my own transition was very difficult. When we moved earlier from Stony Brook out to Michigan, it really had been a very simple thing. I didn't sense that much difference. There were, of course, differences from the East Coast to the Middle West by and large, to the advantage of the Middle West, but it wasn't as difficult a change. And, of course, the children in that move were very, very young. And when they came down here, they weren't, and they were in the ninth, tenth grade and so on. It was a much more difficult move. That was a part of the discomfort I felt. But let me go to the first of the two questions that you've raised, Bob, and see if I can add something more 00:19:00on that, because I do - I did have some first impressions about the governance side of this place that puzzled me a little bit. That is, I was puzzled by the impressions that I had. The SUNY system was quite new, and I would say the governance - the tone of governance there - was a little rough for a lot of reasons. I was there during the Vietnam crisis, and the campus was growing very, very rapidly, and so the norms that lubricate intercourse on campus had not been developed and it was a very rocky time. The governance system at the University of Michigan was very different. It was beautifully worked out. There were, of 00:20:00course, only three campuses there, but one of them is worth mentioning, especially in light of some points I made earlier concerning insulation in a system such as this one. The governing board there was a constitutional creature. That is, it existed - the regents there exist alongside the legislature. They weren't created by the legislature. And, of course, they have to get their money from the legislature. And the board is elected, so it has that kind of natural standing which elected bodies tend to have, and it had the constitutional authority which created agencies cannot have. So that was an 00:21:00important feature of governance which I noted, of course, right away. But on campus, the principal reaction in the first year or two here was surprise that the governance of the place seemed to work as well as it did because it looked to me - it was - is still - much less refined with the roles of all the agents and agencies worked out than the one from which I had come. It had been around for a long time and had basically been working the way it's working now for a long time though. Of course, every university changes a lot over time. The powers of the faculty in the academic units came directly from the governing 00:22:00board there to the units. That is, the powers of the faculty were quite separate from those of the president, and the faculty did not take actions contingent on presidential approval. I'm speaking rather broadly, but it's nonetheless correct. And as I read the documents here describing the relationship of the administration to faculty on campus, I was a little bit surprised that so much authority was placed in the hands of the chancellor. I had not seen anything like that before. Now having said that, the place didn't - obviously didn't work 00:23:00a lot differently from Michigan. So it seemed to me it was working in the classical way, but it didn't read in a classical way. And that hit me early on. Now of course, we are making some changes that I would say are moving us, in 1991, into a more classical structure of faculty and administration and so on, and it probably makes some sense now at this point in the life of the university. But just to finish up a point made earlier - what surprised me and puzzled me a little bit, as I guess I suggested, was with a governance system that seemed very different and much more oriented towards the role of the 00:24:00chancellor making decisions, the place actually worked quite well and better than well. And I came away from the first few years here thinking that I probably had exaggerated the significance of the formal governance structure and had underestimated how much good can be done when there is a history of civility and decency of administration and faculty working together because this place really did have that, at least as far as I could see. Now there may have been differences in earlier years, but clearly Jim Ferguson was working with the respect of the faculty, and they had his. And that turned out to be a lot more consequential than I had imagined, and the significance of a beautifully crafted 00:25:00classical governance structure was a little bit less than I thought it was. After a few years, it seemed to me less than I had thought originally.

RC: Well, these really cover of points I had in mind. I think this document is going to be very helpful as we come back to it.

WM: Okay. Well, I hope you get a good one out of it.