Archives & Special CollectionsJohn Halsted

Transcript of Interview with John Halsted

[0:01] Doug C. Wilson: Uh, today is October 18, 2002, and I'm Doug Wilson from the College's Public Affairs office, very happy today to be interviewing John B. Halsted, who is the college's Winkley Professor of History, emeritus. John came to the faculty in 1952, 45-- and then taught here for 45 years until his full retirement in 1997. And John, we might start by a trick question to ask you if you know who Henry Winkley was, for whom your professorship was named?

[0:39] John B. Halsted: I can dredge up a little bit of recollection. There was a time when, in fact, I, I was sent, I think, maybe by the dean to look up the list of all endowed chairs. 

[0:56] Wilson: Uh huh.

[0:58] Halsted: And so I collected the list as far back as I could and got the names and I found Winkley, who I believe was a businessman. Uh--

[1:07] Wilson: He was.

[1:08] Halsted: I can't recall for sure what business he was in-- 

[1:11] Wilson: Well, I disc-- [crosstalk] 

[1:12] Halsted: --probably retail.

[1:13] Wilson: Yes, and I discovered what the business was, it was crockery. 

[1:16] Halsted: Crockery.

[1:17] Wilson: He sold crockery in the 19th century in New York and Philadelphia, I believe. Anyway, that's Henry Winkley-- [crosstalk]

[1:26] Halsted: I will not pun on that. 

[1:27] Wilson: No, we won't, we won't go there, as they say these days. [both laugh] 

[1:30] Um, so you've, you taught at Amherst for 45 years and the history department has changed considerably since then, as has the College. History faculty, I calculate, was about 10 people when you came here, 20 people when you retired. The number of history courses offered was ‘bout 38 and 95 when you retired, and the number of students, I guess, doubled as well. So there's been a lot of both change and continuity that we'll certainly talk about. But I thought we might start at the beginning. You were born in Belgium. And I wondered how that happened, that you were there.

[2:15] Halsted: My father was employed by International Telephone and Telegraph in the ‘20s and had his posting in Antwerp. And he and my mother and my older sister moved there from New York area and my older brother and I were born there. Uh, my own birth is worth a comment. Uh, I was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on American soil under the American flag, because my mother, recently reading about Napoleon and L’Aigon, and the birth of L’Aiglon in the, uh, in Vienna, had her sister bring Garden City dirt which was put in boxes under the four posts of the bed. 

[3:02] Wilson: [laughs]

[3:03] Halsted: And over the bed, there was an American flag. Uh, so all that was recorded in the consulate in Antwerp because she was so concerned that I might not otherwise be able to be President of the United States.

[3:18] Wilson: [laughs] But you, is, is that the way the law works? That if you're not born here, you, you were an American citizen although you were born abroad. [crosstalk]

[3:25] Halsted: I was an American citizen, and I'm not sure my mother knew exactly what she was doing. She was in an advanced stage of pregnancy! [laughs]

[3:31] Wilson: [laughs] But she was, she was playing it safe, playing it safe and having no idea at all that you would be the Winkley Professor of History. 

[3:36] Halsted: That's right. 

[3:37] Wilson: Well, sounds as if she had an interest in history. Is that where you first--? [crosstalk]

[3:41] Halsted: Well, she was-- she educated my brother and myself for our first few years. And she monitored our education as much as possible for many years but she was, she did not have any advanced education herself.

[3:57] Wilson: Uh huh, uh huh. And--

[4:00] Halsted: She was a pretty good teacher.

[4:02] Wilson: Was she a teacher? Professionally? [crosstalk]

[4:03] Halsted: No, she just was a pretty good teacher of us. 

[4:03] Wilson: Yeah. Oh, great. How long did you live in Europe before you came?

[4:07] Halsted: Until I was five. And then we were, then came the Great Depression. And, uh, we returned to this country and lived in Washington, DC, and then in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and then in Englewood, New Jersey.

[4:21] Wilson: Um hmm. I think Dwight Morrow came from Englewood, didn’t he?

[4:26] Halsted: And eventually we built on a lot which was in, within 100 yards of the Dwight Morrow property. 

[4:33] Wilson: Yeah. Great, great. John, what, and I'm skipping ahead now, but what attracted you to college te--? Well, first of all, what attracted you to the field of history? Sounds as if your mother was an influence right there.

[4:47] Halsted: Well, I think she had other ideas like the ministry or something, that sort of thing. [laughs]

[4:51] Wilson: Or the presidency. 

[4:52] Halsted: [laughs] Yes.

[4:53] Uh, I got to Wesleyan University, um, partly because a Wesleyan graduate also lived near us in New Jersey. Um, got to Wesleyan, went into the service, and upon my release from the service, I began to be very doubtful that to be an English major was the future I wanted. 

[5:17] Wilson: Hmm.

[5:18] Halsted: Lit crit was not the most exciting so I started taking history courses, and a professor there on one of my exams, wrote “You are an historian manqué.” And I thought about that and I figured there was enough of a chance he was right. So I talked about changing the major and became a history major while finishing out.

[5:42] Wilson: Yeah. And you decided his emphasis was on “history” and not “manqué.” 

[5:47] Halsted: Well, uh--

[5:49] Wilson: You went ahead and--

[5:50] Halsted: I was, I was, yes, I was, I was not totally mistaken. And, uh, did, did decide to do history and picked up an MA at Wesleyan while beginning work at Columbia, and went on to Columbia for the PhD.

[6:06] Wilson: And then you taught briefly at Stevens, was it?

[6:09] Halsted: At Stevens Tech. Uh, the first job’s always hard to get, and fortunately, the professor who had put me, who had begun me as a historian, knew someone at Stevens Tech and heard there was an opening and it was a tough job market in those days, and they had seven people teaching the humanities, everything except science at Stevens Tech. So I was there teaching history and literature and composition--

[6:35] Wilson: Oh, my.

[6:36] Halsted: --and the like for a couple of years, until that job, just being a two-year appointment ended. So I communicated again with the same professor who had been a PhD student under Charlie Cole. And he wrote to the appropriate people. And that was the genesis of the job at Amherst.

[6:55] Wilson: And was that, we want to talk a little bit about the way things were done in those days, and how they're different now, but the hiring process was quite different, wasn't it? Was it a phone call?

[7:06] Halsted: It was pretty much a phone call from, from whoever one's mentor is to whomever they know, at other institutions to get insight on where the openings were. And, um, it happened that George Funnell in Humanities was looking for someone to teach a Humanities section, and of course, Cole as President knew it. So originally, the, the initiative to hire me for Amherst was as a teacher of Humanities. And they talked Lawrence Packard into opening up a History 1-2 section to fill out the time. It worked out great for me.

[7:37] Wilson: And all of that, both the humanities and the history were, at least for the first year, required courses, weren't they?

[7:51] Halsted: They were required courses, yes. And it, there was a lot of staff; there were, there were many essentially rotating instructorships. People in and out for 2, 3, 4 years at the most, and then some appointed assistant professor and kept for a little longer.

[8:09] Wilson: Did you have some feeling looking back that that system which might be called “the old boy network” to an extent, um, was as good as any, or did it have dilatory effects that--?

[8:25] Halsted: Well, it was very-- [crosstalk]

[8:25] Wilson: People were cloning themselves.

[8:28] Halsted: [laughs] Oh, maybe to some degree, but it made for a very narrow employee market. Um, and probably a rather narrow employer market because one as a, as a job seeker, really had very little ready insight into where the jobs were. And so you began working the friends of friends of friends, um, unlike using the American Historical Association or some other big agency that has a listing of everything in the country. And similarly, the sort of people, their training, was very narrow. Ted Green and I were the first non-Harvard or Yale people to come into the history department. And we-- [crosstalk]

[9:14] Wilson: Columbia being so, such a radical departure. [crosstalk]

[9:17] Halsted: Columbia was such, and I think it maybe helped a little bit that President Cole had been at Columbia. Uh, but it was a great breakthrough for the history department to have a couple of people from Columbia come in. [crosstalk]

[9:27] Wilson: Huh. That’s amazing to think of now. 

[9:28] Halsted: So, one did get a feeling, amongst the faculty, that most of them were Harvard and Yale.

[9:37] Wilson: Um hmm. And now, of course, they come from Kenya and they come from University of Wisconsin and due to much broader searches. Uh, do you think the faculty in any other ways, other than the fact that it was all male, which of course is not the case now, was, um, different in other ways as a result of that hiring, those hiring limitations compared to what it has become in more recent years?

[10:10] Halsted: I think, probably, there was a greater sense of immediate ease amongst new faculty and their, and their elders. Uh, they'd all been through pretty much the same kind of thing. And there wasn't the sort of questioning that one might have for someone coming from an institution totally, totally different. Uh, I recall what a big step it was for the history department to begin to hire people from large Midwestern universities.

[10:41] Wilson: When, about when did that start? 

[10:42] Halsted: That was under Cal Plimpton. 

[10:44] Wilson: Uh huh.

[10:45] Halsted: So it would have been in the later years of the, of the old New Curriculum--

[10:54] Wilson: Um hmm.

[10:54] Halsted: --and about the time the old New Curriculum was beginning to stagger just a little bit. And people who had just these radically different educational experiences were being hired.

[11:04] Wilson: People like Bill Ward from Minnesota, I take.

[11:07] Halsted: People like Bill Ward from Minnesota. And I remember several in the history department who, who had never been to a small New England college and had never been to an Ivy League school and who thought about education in very different ways and, and did us a world of good to educate us, so--

[11:24] Wilson: Was Wesleyan very much like Amherst in those days?

[11:27] Halsted: Wesleyan was very much like Amherst as long as it remained small, yeah. And it was most of the time smaller than Amherst. 

[11:37] Wilson: John, I think people love to hear about what faculty customs were like. There was much more rigid order, wasn't there, a kind of pecking order and formality, or am I wrong about that? 

[11:50] Halsted: No, you're not wrong. 

[11:51] Wilson: Tell, tell us a little.

[11:52] Halsted: We had, we, we had a calling card left at, in our mailbox--never before, never since have I had a calling card--but we had a formal calling card left soon after we arrived in town. Um, and it was traditional to pay such calls, uh, even on Sunday morning when the recipients were still in their pajamas, entertaining their children amidst the Sunday papers. 

[12:21] Wilson: [laughs]

[12:22] Halsted: Yeah, we learned things about. about the way people behaved in the town of Amherst that we really hadn't expected.

[12:28] Wilson: And a calling card meant that you--?

[12:30] Halsted: A calling card meant that we call back, yeah. [laughs] But it meant someone had formally paid attention to the fact that we'd arrived in town.

[12:37] Wilson: That you existed.

[12:38] Halsted: That we existed and, and that was kind of heartwarming. Um--

[12:41] Wilson: [laughs]

[12:42] Halsted: And there was, there was a regular tendency to, for every gathering, like the faculty club dinners, or a presidential cocktail party or the like, that some elder faculty member would take under his wing the younger faculty member and make sure they got there and got home and were introduced around. It was, it was a kind of thing of which relatively little was done after the ‘60s and ‘70s, it, uh--

[13:12] Wilson: But that did last until at least the early ‘60s?

[13:15] Halsted: Oh, yeah. 

[13:16] Wilson: Yeah.

[13:16] Halsted: And, and I think it made for very good feelings amongst faculty members. Um--

[13:22] Wilson: What were faculty meetings like, were they in the, still in the Octagon in those days?

[13:25] Halsted: They were in the Octagon pretty much until the Red Room came into existence with the, with the rebuilding of Converse.

[13:33] Wilson: And in that period, did they have the junior faculty sitting at, sitting in the back and the senior faculty sitting in the front, or was that earlier? [crosstalk]

[13:41] Halsted: That was exactly the way it, it was supposed to be, yes. 

[13:44] Wilson: And as a junior faculty member, were you supposed to remain silent?

[13:48] Halsted: Yes. And, of course, most of what was being talked about, one had no idea what the nature of the subject was so that, and, and there were, there were a lot of in-jokes that were impossible for newcomers to, to adjust to. Um, they weren't very businesslike meetings. The, uh, the elders tended to give speeches, just as elders always have. Uh, it was very difficult to, to judge speakers, the backs of whose head you saw. [both laugh] But, but we did sit, sit in the rear and behave ourselves.

[14:24] Wilson: I find in just recent years, the elders don't speak as much as they used to. It's almost as if they've told themselves “I'm an elder and therefore I'm going to refrain from preaching it, my gospels and let the younger Turks have--”

[14:42] Halsted: In one of the first meetings I attended, rising from his very deep armchair because he was a very heavy man, uh, one of my elders rose, “I am old and full of sin.” 

[14:56] Wilson: [laughs]

[14:57] Halsted: And then he proceeded to tell us about the sinfulness of the campus he was now part of, but he was ready he was, that was Warren Green. He was ready to give a speech at almost any meeting and on almost any subject.

[15:12] Wilson: [laughs] What other faculty customers do you remember that would sound odd today, perhaps?

[15:19] Halsted: Gathering in the basement of the, of the now admissions building in the basement to, to be given large slabs of roast beef, which one would cart to a trestle table where we would sit eight or 10 to a table and, and overeat with no women present.

[15:41] Wilson: And there was alcohol, wasn't there? 

[15:43] Halsted: Well, we all came well-fueled.

[15:44] Wilson: [laughs]

[15:45] Halsted: There were, there were faculty cocktail parties all over, but the, there wasn't, there wasn't drink served with the food. It was just--

[15:55] Wilson: I see. Now, are you talking about the noontime meal?

[15:58] Halsted: No, this is, this is the monthly dinner.

[16:00] Wilson: I see.

[16:01] Halsted: The monthly dinner at which somebody spoke. I, he would rise and tell about his recent trip to France or something of the sort.

[16:09] Wilson: Was it always a colleague?

[16:10] Halsted: It was always a colleague, yes. No outside speakers, but it was in fact a very good way to get to know virtually the entire faculty.

[16:19] Wilson: Uh, compulsory chapel served a bit of that purpose, as well. At least, I remember as a student, feeling that that was a way to shop for faculty, you know.

[16:29] Halsted: [laughs]

[16:30] Wilson: Because different faculty members we, would be expected to give an 8-minute talk in Chapel.

[16:36] Halsted: I found in my files 8 or 10 of those.

[16:39] Wilson: Talks?

[16:40] Halsted: Talks, yeah. Terrifying experience, uh, to, to go into, into that setting and know you have this, this very strict time limit. And--

[16:51] Wilson: Well, I should think an 8 minute limit would be particularly terrifying for a professor.

[16:56] Halsted: Yes, because we, we say nothing in less than 50 minutes. 

[16:59] Wilson: [laughs]

[17:00] Halsted: And to boil something down to people who have just barely gotten out of bed, uh--

[17:07] Wilson: Yeah.

[17:07] Halsted: Most of them never having had breakfast before. 

[17:10] Wilson: [laughs]

[17:11] Halsted: Um, I can't, I really can't fathom. There were some who were very successful in speaking to these young people, and--

[17:18] Wilson: George Whicher apparently was very good at it.

[17:20] Halsted: Yeah. I, I don't know what the trick was, I just know I had a feeling I didn't reach them. [both laugh]

[17:28] Wilson: And your, uh, invitation to be the speaker came how long before the morning that you were expected to speak? [crosstalk]

[17:34] Halsted: Oh, you usually got a week and a half, something like that. 

[17:37] Wilson: Talk about something?

[17:38] Halsted: Come in and talk about something. Once I was asked to talk about a particular subject.

[17:43] Wilson: What was that, would you remember?

[17:44] Halsted: Uh, I had become associated with the State Conference of the AAUP and I think it was Cal Plimpton--I'd had some dealings about an AAUP issue with him--and he said come in and tell the students what, what the AAUP is.

[18:00] Wilson: Oh.

[18:01] Halsted: That one was easy. Uh--

[18:04] Wilson: Did you get to proselytize a little bit?

[18:07] Halsted: Well, actually at that point we were interested in the rights of students. 

[18:11] Wilson: Oh.

[18:11] Halsted: Which the AAUP eventually published one of its many, many documents of standards on. [crosstalk]

[18:18] Wilson: Great.

[18:18] Halsted: So that there were some things to talk to stud--, this was in the day students were very worried about student rights. Uh, a little early on, but they got more worried about student rights.

[18:29] Wilson: John, what kind of faculty mentoring occurred? Um, did, were you, were there formal programs to instruct new faculty about pedagogy at Amherst or were there mentors who sort of took you under their wing and said, “when you go into a classroom, don't ever do this,” or…? 

[18:50] Halsted: I don't remember that.

[18:52] Uh, however, there was, there was a lot of mentoring. In fact, the entire curriculum when I first came was set up for mentoring. And perhaps one of the great losses of the, of the large scale, all-encompassing, uh, introductory courses was that they did not have large staffs, including, they, there no longer were large staffs including elders and youngers. Um, for example, in the introductory humanities course, each new subject was introduced by someone with an expertise in the area.

[19:26] Wilson: with a lecture?

[19:27] Halsted: To us. 

[19:28] Wilson: Oh, to you?

[19:28] Halsted: Not to the students.

[19:29] Wilson: Oh, to you.

[19:29] Halsted: We would have, we would have our weekly or biweekly meetings of the staff and we would turn to a, a subject in the Bible. And Al Martin of the religion department would come in and give us a lecture; “If I were to be teaching this, these are the matters that I would find of greatest importance,” or, and so on, and opportunity to ask questions and the like. It was, and, on occasion, the younger people would be asked to prepare a suggestion for a class and pass that around to their colleagues who would comment on it. Uh, so that kind of, that kind of mentoring, bringing us together as a staff to teach a course, uh, I think was pretty widespread. I think it was done in the sciences, uh, pretty clearly in English.

[20:21] Wilson: Um hmm.

[20:22] Halsted: Not done a lot since the ‘80s, I wouldn't think.

[20:24] Wilson: It occurred to me one thing that may still create that kind of learning experience for faculty is, um, the interdisciplinary teaching that is now popular. You taught a course with a couple of biologists and under, under the ILS program, didn't you? 

[20:45] Halsted: Yeah. 

[20:45] Wilson: And you probably learned some biology, some more biology in that process.

[20:50] Halsted: And one learns about other teachers’ tech, techniques. 

[20:52] Wilson: Um hmm.

[20:53] Halsted: You sit in a classroom or try to run a seminar with, with an economist or a, a philosopher or a literary specialist or a scientist, and one discovers that the questions they think of asking as the most appropriate questions with regard to a piece of, piece of work are utterly different from the questions that you think of asking. And, and it is very educational to, to find out, uh, how far you can go.

[21:22] Wilson: But pedagogy itself wasn't, uh, instruction in that, per se, wasn't passed on from--, except in that way?

[21:32] Halsted: It has been--

[21:33] Wilson: There weren't seminars for new teachers or--

[21:35] Halsted: There have not been seminars for new teachers. Uh, there, when the ILS courses were initiated, Prosser Gifford tried to set up a seminar to put together the seminar teachers to talk about the subjects they were teaching. This may actually have begun back with the freshman seminars.

[21:55] Wilson: Hmm.

[21:56] Halsted: So there have been some tries at getting the several teachers of several different courses in a program to talk to one another, because most of those courses were taught separately. Um, I guess it worked some, but it, they never lasted very long.

[22:16] Wilson: Did you detect or adopt or observe any particular Amherst classroom style that might have been somewhat different from what you experienced at Wesleyan or at Stevens or was there…?

[22:35] Halsted: I think I was very well-introduced at Wesleyan to the sort of thing that I would face or be expected to do at Amherst. Uh, small classes, people who had been trained in. in many different subjects. Uh, the fellow who put me onto history had been originally teaching in the Columbia Introduction to Western Civilization program, you may vaguely have heard of it. It's one of the, one of the great general programs that's just a--

[23:08] Wilson: Is that the one that still exists?

[23:09] Halsted: Still exists.

[23:10] Wilson: Yeah.

[23:10] Halsted: Goes on and on and on. Uh, interdisciplinary, team-taught, uh, many meetings amongst the teachers and very freewheeling discussions. It wasn't as if you went into a history course to talk only about the past. 

[23:27] Wilson: Um hmm.

[23:28] Halsted: One might well find oneself talking about issues relating to the present and to the self and to the, and so on. Um, it was a kind of thing that was quite easy to translate here.

[23:41] Wilson: Leo Marx gave a valedictory when he moved on many years ago in the late ‘70s, I guess, to MIT, and he described Amherst when he came, um, which wasn't until ‘58, I believe, as being a kind of boot camp, that, uh, teachers were pretty hard on their students and students were hard on each other. Was that a fair characterization? Or did it depend very much on the individual professor?

[24:15] Halsted: I think--

[24:16] Wilson: Uh, cruel remarks on papers and things like that when they were handed back.

[24:22] Halsted: There was a tendency, I don't know whether boot camp’s the phrase, but there was a tendency to be much stricter and, and to be much more willing to express disapproval than after the ‘70s and into the ‘80s. And I think there has come to be a tendency to be much more genteel about the ways in which one suggests any insufficiencies in the work done. Uh, it’s probably all part of the, of the self-esteem movement, and concern lest the self-esteem of young Amherst students be seriously undercut.

[24:58] Wilson: [laughs]

[24:59] Halsted: That always, that's always--

[25:00] Wilson: Say more about that. Where did that come from? 

[25:03] Halsted: [laughs] Which? The self-esteem? [crosstalk]

[25:04] Wilson: The self-esteem movement.

[25:06] Halsted: The self-esteem movement has been afoot, I think., probably since, since the ‘60s into the ‘70s. 

[25:11] Wilson: Uh huh.

[25:12] Halsted: Um, and, and it pretty clearly has related to changes in primary education, in the belief that the young, the young probably already are made, rather than the earlier view that the young were to be made. That is, one doesn't rebel until one is in a situation to rebel. And as students began to rebel, there was a very widespread tendency to believe that they were prepared to.

[25:48] Wilson: Um hmm.

[25:49] Halsted: Am I making, am I communicating it? [crosstalk]

[25:51] Wilson: Yes, and is part of that the treating them more like adults than they used to be treated and more like consumers than they used to be treated?

[26:01] Halsted: I think it's both those things. Certainly more like adults.

[26:04] Wilson: Yeah.

[26:04] Halsted: And more like equals.

[26:05] Wilson: And is grade inflation, uh, part and parcel of all of that?

[26:09] Halsted: It's probably part and parcel of all that, but it's also a change in the student body.

[26:14] Wilson: You mean they're brighter and they deserve those high grades?

[26:20] Halsted: The poorer students who came in the ‘50s, uh, many from prep schools, who earned C's and D’s would not have succeeded in getting into Amherst by the late ‘60s or ‘70s. 

[26:39] Wilson: Okay. 

[26:40] Halsted: That is, it was pretty clear that as, as Bill Wilson spread his net, included more and more students from, from public schools, uh, as the student body increased in size and heterogeneity, the lower few simply dropped away and the group that was to be judged was much more similar top to bottom. That's a big part of grade inflation. 

[27:08] Wilson: Hmm.

[27:08] Halsted: Entering students were on the whole better.

[27:10] Wilson: So that there's less of a curve imported to begin with.

[27:13] Halsted: Yeah, it's a smaller curve, I think. I don't know where you’d get the statistics to prove a generalization like that. 

[27:22] Wilson: But that's, that’s interesting because grade inflation, just conventionally, has a pretty bad name, but you make it sound as if it's based on something real, or something--

[27:34] Halsted: No, I think it came from something real.

[27:36] Wilson: --something, something involving merit.

[27:40] Halsted: Most of the, of the youngsters whom I gave low grades to in the earliest years of teaching at Amherst would not have gotten into Amherst a decade later, it just--

[27:49] Wilson: I may have been one of those students!

[27:50] Halsted: Oh, no, you were not.

[27:52] Wilson: I don't remember my grade. [both laugh]

[27:54] Halsted: No, you were not. 

[27:57] Wilson: Um, so you taught in the required introductory history and introductory humanities courses, to what extent--we’d talk about interdisciplinarity now--but to what extent were those courses at all coordinated with the introductory science course or the introductory English course?

[28:20] Halsted: More in theory than in fact, they were not really coordinated. 

[28:23] Wilson: Um hmm.

[28:24] Halsted: Um, and probably the least coordinated was introductory history course, which was, into the ‘60s, pretty much a standard survey course.

[28:39] Wilson: Um hmm. I was going to ask you, but I'm thinking of Dwight Salmon, who taught that for years, but before that, Lawrence Packard. Did you work with Packard at all? He--

[28:48] Halsted: The first two years here, yeah.

[28:49] Wilson: Yes. 

[28:51] Halsted: Uh--

[28:52] Wilson: What, what colleagues were your own personal mentors as you look back on it now? Or do you credit with having been the most-- 

[29:02] Halsted: Within the Amherst faculty?

[29:03] Wilson: Within the Amherst faculty.

[29:06] Halsted: Well, people like, like Alfred Havighurst who, who was very willing to make suggestions as to how to get through the political jungle one was confronted with in, in an institution like Amherst. Uh, our neighbor early on, Murray Peppard, from the German department was very helpful taking a young faculty member under his wing and introducing him to, to members of all kinds of departments and, and getting me more interested in doing interdisciplinary things partly because he increased my confidence about it. Uh, subsequently, I think I learned a great deal from Hugh Aitken. He was the first member of the economic--

[29:52] Wilson: You taught with him at one point?

[29:53] Halsted: I taught with him at one point. Um, he was the first member of the economics department with whom I really became quite friendly. And, uh, he made me stop being quite so totally, totally unsecure with regard to matters economic, which had trailed me from freshman economics at Wesleyan. And, and that was, that was very important to my self-esteem.

[30:16] Wilson: Great, great.

[30:17] Halsted: But those, those are some of the faculty who--

[30:20] Wilson: You mentioned, uh, in connection with Havighurst, a “political jungle.” Can you say more about that? Was it just faculty politics you mean, or?

[30:30] Halsted: Well, there were, there were within departments, um, clashes for territory, prestige, and power. And, and a number of departments in their histories have had, uh, notorious conflicts between their members lasting over many years. Um--

[30:50] Wilson: The people even not speaking to each other.

[30:52] Halsted: People even not speaking to one another. Which meant that, that any negotiation with those departments required probably two negotiations at the very least, and sometimes a third to coordinate the other two.

[31:04] Wilson: [laughs]

[31:05] Halsted: Um, when I arrived at the, at the history department, Lawrence Packard was my boss, that was, I was working under him. Um, but Dwight Salmon was also a senior professor who had immense popularity. Many, many of the students were working with him on honors theses, which we had, which we dealt with. And then after Lawrence Packard died in the second year I was here, uh, Dwight Salmon took the course over, and I and several others were Lawrence Packard's choice selectees. So it took a little bit of maneuvering to, uh, help lead Dwight Salmon to be certain it was all right for me to work with him.

[31:56] Wilson: Delicacy.

[31:57] Halsted: Delicacy, the word I was hunting, yes. [crosstalk]

[31:59] Wilson: Diplomacy. [crosstalk] 

[32:00] Halsted: Thank you. [laughs]

[32:00] Wilson: Diplomacy.

[32:01] Halsted: Uh--

[32:02] Wilson: But Dwight Salmon was beloved of many, many students. But just from having taken a course with him and taken a course with you, I would venture to say your styles were a little different.

[32:14] Halsted: Quite markedly.

[32:15] Wilson: And one thing that he was an exponent of was the survey course. Um, has, has the history department moved away from, did you watch it move away from survey courses? And was that a--

[32:31] Halsted: I kept-- [crosstalk]

[32:31] Wilson: --if so, was that a good thing that happened, or?

[32:34] Halsted: I kept being on committees that, uh, moved it away from being an old style survey course. Uh, on the one hand, we had virtually no one who had the self confidence, the sheer assurance to be able effectively to teach the young from the ancient Greeks to nearly yesterday.

[32:57] Wilson: Except for Dwight Salmon.

[32:59] Halsted: Well, and, and he did it beautifully, but people like that are very few and very far between. [crosstalk]

[33:04] Wilson: Yeah.

[33:05] Halsted: Uh, so that as he began to give the course up, we tried various other emphases which would allow us to spread the labor, spread the emphasis, other people would lecture on subjects near and dear to their, to their expertise. And since his day, all the big introductory courses have tended to be something other than sheer surveys. 

[33:30] Wilson: Um hmm.

[33:31] Halsted: We've had efforts to introduce the social sciences and, and, and other odder inventions that we tried out.

[33:40] Wilson: I suppose one of the risks of survey courses is superficiality. On the other hand, there are people today, and I find I'm sometimes one of them, who deplores how the, the lack of knowledge students have today of history, not knowing whether President Polk was before for President Harding or afterwards and that kind of thing, people almost say there's no history anymore. Is, is that all nonsense, or, or is it something to lament? It, does it exist and is it something to lament? [indistinguishable crosstalk]

[34:16] Halsted: I think we should lament it, whether it exists or not. Um, it is, it is a good thing to lament. It is immeasurable, I, it is unmeasurable and what we might think of as history, I'm putting you in my generation, which is unfair, but--

[34:35] Wilson: Uh, close.

[34:36] Halsted: --but older people might think of history as being effectively comprehended by some very large calculable list of names, dates, and places and events with a little bit of interpretation thrown in. Uh, people 10 or 15 years our juniors would vary greatly that list of events. And that which is the significant history to be in anybody's head is, depending upon the definer, immensely variable. It always struck me that the history we need, we can go and get, and it is extremely easy to find books in libraries and to discover the history that we need for whatever issue we want to deal with. But problems of interpretation and the discovery of the difficulties of determining that history that we look at, these are, these are the questions that you need teachers for.

[35:40] Wilson: Um hmm, um hmm. And also to teach how to go and get.

[35:45] Halsted: Teach how to go and get it and how to doubt it.

[35:47] Wilson: And how to doubt it, yes.

[35:49] Halsted: And, and, uh, I think that's what troubles me about those who suggest we should, we should give people a history. Because if you give it to them, you're not teaching them to think for themselves and doubt it. 

[36:02] Wilson: In a way, that goes to what Amherst says it's all about across all of the disciplines. 

[36:07] Halsted: Yes.

[36:08] Wilson: Teaching how to learn and how to think. I was amused, uh, I was reading a syllabus of one of your courses and, or one of the staff courses, the introductory course, I think: Problems of Inquiry with de Tocqueville and the question popped up, “what do historians mean when they say something causes something else?” And to me that sounded just like an English 1 question.

[36:36] Halsted: Which suggests that members of the faculty, since English 1, were influenced, yeah. But you see, English 1 appeared at a time when within the profession of history, there was a lot of navel gazing, a lot of concern about methodology.

[36:54] Wilson: In, in the profession of history? [crosstalk]

[36:55] Halsted: In the profession of history. And, and the real popularization of the philosophy of history really comes in the, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and it's declined considerably since the ‘70s. But it worked its way into courses of this sort and that, that course on Tocqueville, best fun we had, favorite course of all of those. [crosstalk]

[37:19] Wilson: Oh, really? Tell, say more about it, then, because I was going to ask you about your favorite course. [crosstalk]

[37:24] Halsted: Well, that was I think, of those introductory ones. I had done a Master's essay on Tocqueville, so, so I felt, I felt I knew what I was doing. [laughs]

[37:31] Wilson: This was the French, French, French Revolution book? [crosstalk]

[37:34] Halsted: Uh, actually, I, I, I worked on his moral and religious position, as, as it showed up in his various works. 

[37:42] Wilson: Um hmm.

[37:43] Halsted: And so, I looked on Tocqueville as someone who was both a student of America and a student of Europe, but we worked on his, in the course, we worked on his French Revolution book. 

[37:54] Wilson: Um hmm.

[37:54] Halsted: Uh, but we took it seriously that he'd had a life and that he was a practicing politician who wrote books that related to his practical concerns, as well as being a practicing Catholic who had philosophic and religious views that related to his historical work, and so on. And, uh--

[38:17] WIlson: And in that course, you read how other historians treated the same general topics--

[38:22] Halsted: Yes.

[38:23] Wilson: --uh, differently from, from each other and from Tocqueville?

[38:26] Halsted: In the hope that students would see that this could be done in a number of different ways. [laughs] And maybe they might want to do it a different way themselves.

[38:34] Wilson: I take it part of the reason that it was your favorite course was the student enthusiasm about it. There's--

[38:40] Halsted: Well--

[38:40] Wilson: Was that one of the factors?

[38:41] Halsted: It was certainly one of the factors but it was also faculty enthusiasm; all of us knew, in that course, that virtually everything we read was doing us good. This was first-rate stuff.

[38:52] Wilson: Oh, great.

[38:53] Halsted: This was a great mind we were working on.

[38:54] Wilson: Yeah.

[38:55] Halsted: We were not reading some junky textbook that, that pandered to people who don't want to think. This was, this was serious stuff from beginning to end and we were putting it in front of students, and in the hopes that they’d join us in getting enthusiastic. And many did. I think enough did so that it lasted three or four years. [laughs] [crosstalk]

[39:15] Wilson: Yeah. In some settings, two is enough, right? Or three is enough. 

[39:19] Halsted: Oh, yeah.

[39:20] Wilson: Yeah.

[39:21] Halsted: Yeah. If--

[39:22] Wilson: And all this while you also advised, uh, on theses. About how many a year did you average, would you say?

[39:29] Halsted: Oh, three to five. 

[39:30] Wilson: Yeah. And is that a particularly pleasant part of the teaching job, or?

[39:35] Halsted: There were some wonderfully pleasant parts, some immensely frustrating parts. It's, it’s good stuff to do, it's good training for the teacher. And it does give the opportunity really to see a young mind at work. Uh, and if it, if it produces something that the student is proud of, uh, I don't think there's any better moment. I mean, one doesn't have a lot to, a lot to do with the final production, it's the students, but, but it's nice to watch. That, that's a good end product for the educational experiment. 

[40:07] Wilson: Would you think that it's a good enough experience for students that everybody should do it?

[40:17] Halsted: Yeah. 

[40:19] Wilson: That was my feeling about it after I ate, after I drank the cod liver oil. [both laugh] I'm not sure how I felt during. [crosstalk]

[40:26] Halsted: After you saw the process. Yes, I think--

[40:29] Wilson: And I--

[40:30] Halsted: And, and this, this with full recognition that some people would discover it wasn't for them.

[40:35] Wilson: Um hmm, um hmm. You told me a while ago that the arrival of Dick Douglas on the history faculty, uh, instituted some kind of change in emphasis. [crosstalk]

[40:44] Halsted: Well when he came, when he came, uh, it was the beginning of the end of the old survey course. 

[40:52] Wilson: Um hmm.

[40:53] Halsted: Um, Charlie Cole was beginning to try to change the character of the history department. And he hired Don McKay from Harvard who was around for a couple of years. And he hired Dick Douglas. And over the course of some five years, uh, the introductory course was transformed. And we began to hire people from other fields also. And by breaking up the old--

[41:22] Wilson: Would Aitken be one of those?

[41:25] Halsted: I don't think he came in quite yet.

[41:27] Wilson: Okay.

[41:27] Halsted: I think he was a Plimpton appointee, but soon thereafter, but we got someone who was formally in Far Eastern Studies, which had been taught as, uh, an afterthought by people like Dwight Salmon, and others, and we got a Latin Americanist who was around for a few years. You remember Charlie Hale, does he mean anything to you?

[41:49] Wilson: No.

[41:49] Halsted: Yeah. Um, so that there was the beginning of an effort to, to have the various histories of the world represented By specialists in those fields; it, it made for a very different kind of introductory survey. And, uh--

[42:07] Wilson: This was still before, um, well, it was after Sputnik, certainly, but before Vietnam?

[42:14] Halsted: Yeah.

[42:16] Wilson: So the, the reach for greater geographic and cultural diversity in courses presented was spurred by just that people thought it would be a good thing to do, or was there a cultural--?

[42:31] Halsted: I think it was spurred primarily by the fact that the people were coming through the pipeline. That is, uh, the, the products of the Korean War, the second war, uh, were beginning to show up in--

[42:47] Wilson: Oh, okay.

[42:48] Halsted: You see, there were about three graduate schools in the country seriously doing Far Eastern Studies.

[42:52] Wilson: Would Ray Moore have come in about that time? 

[42:54] Halsted: Ray Moore was one of those, yeah. And I think he had one predecessor who was here for a couple of years before Ray was hired. Um, but this was, the change was primarily the people were available, because the graduate schools had some students who were studying these fields. About the only place in the country that was doing, uh, Middle East Islamic Studies back in the ‘50s was Princeton. And, and there was about one school doing this then.

[43:26] Wilson: Would John Petropulos be an example?

[43:28] Halsted: John Petropulos was an example of those, yes, he came in just about 1960, yeah. Uh, when all of a sudden-- [crosstalk]

[43:35] Wilson: With his Middle Eastern, uh, expertise. [crosstalk]

[43:37] Halsted: --we had someone with Greece and the Middle East, yes. Uh, this was, they were available, they were finally getting trained. And I think that had more to do with it, than--the interest was there was just getting the people.

[43:50] Wilson: So to, to think of it as a grand expression of changing culture, it wasn't necessarily?

[43:57] Halsted: I think the culture was changed enough for them to be there and get hired, yes. [crosstalk]

[44:01] Wilson: Yeah, yeah. But war was one of the things that had changed it. Like Korea, and--

[44:06] Halsted: Oh, yes. 

[44:06] Wilson: Yeah.

[44:06] Halsted: Yeah. Uh, the, the old historical establishment was on the east coast.

[44:14] Wilson: Um hmm.

[44:15] Halsted: And it was mostly Ivy League and so on. Uh, when you get the West Coast in, all of a sudden, Asia exists.

[44:22] Wilson: [laughs] Okay. Pacific rim. 

[44:24] Halsted: Yeah.

[44:25] Wilson: John, for many years Amherst has been perceived as a faculty-run institution and there are stories, probably exaggerated, about people who refused to be president here because the faculty runs the place and runs, often ends up running them out of, out of town. [laughs] Um, but is that characterization exaggerated? Yes, but does it have some truth to it and how different was it 50 years ago in that respect?

[44:53] Halsted: Well, I really, I didn't have enough of the faculty power 50 years ago to be very learned about that. Uh, 50 years ago, faculty power was centered in about a dozen elder faculty members who rotated positions on the, on the Committee of Six. And they were pretty constantly voted into office--as one retired another, another came in--but they were profoundly trusted by their colleagues. And they were given a great deal of authority to make the major decisions and the faculty meetings did not, in those first few years I was around, seriously debate what the Committee of Six proposed. It was, and we didn't have a lot of other committees proposing things that the Committee of Six then fought over. So it was pretty much not until we got to Plimpton’s years that, that there was, in my recollection, serious conflict and debate in the faculty to arrive at decisions, some of which were probably imposed on presidents. Um--

[45:59] Wilson: And also some things that were second-guessing the Committee of Six?

[46:04] Halsted: Yeah.

[46:04] Wilson: Yeah.

[46:04] Halsted: Yeah. I do recall a sequence somewhere, maybe late ‘50s, early ‘60s, when there was a movement of young administrators and--not young, middle aged administrators--and faculty to try to get somebody else on the Committee of Six. And I remember--

[46:27] Wilson: Heaven forbid.

[46:27] Halsted: Well, heaven forbid, I remember the, the sort of behind-their-hands conversations about “can we work up a slate and get somebody” or, and I still remember the names that were on the list. And, uh, that was put down, that was put down before there was any voting, before there was any alternative list. [laughs] It was a very powerful group, and, uh, probably it wasn't regrettable that, that the group continued for a while longer. In comparison to other institutions, the faculty probably continued to be more powerful than at any comparable place for many, many years.

[47:07] Wilson: Of course, they were powerful even back in Meiklejohn’s era, and Meiklejohn learned that the hard way. 

[47:12] Halsted: Yes. [laughs]

[47:13] Wilson: Uh, you said something about a letter that John Esty wrote in connection with--

[47:18] Halsted: Oh, yes. Um, we were, we were running a search for a new dean of admission. And to do that in the ‘80s, it was appropriate to put an ad in the paper. And the ad described the job. And it said, “decision making regarding admissions procedures is in the hands of the faculty,” which is what the handbook says, it is true.

[47:47] Wilson: I think it even goes back a bit to the charter.

[47:49] Halsted: Probably goes back to the charter.

[47:51] Um, but I got this long letter from John Esty who had been a dean at the College for many years and was working with some major educational institution, the name of which, at the moment, I forget, uh, but he said, “you're not going to get anybody. Nobody will come to an institution to be a dean of admissions if policy is made by the faculty.” I remember that lengthy letter. “But John, what should I have said? It's true!” [both laugh] 

[48:18] Wilson: It's true. 

[48:19] Halsted: But we got, we got a fine dean, we did very well. And they seemed to be willing to work with a, with a committee, a committee made up of faculty--by now it's faculty and students, of course, and it's, it's rather different. Um, but that simply described the case. And the fact that policy is made by the faculty does not mean that the faculty follows up on the policy it makes, and it does not seriously inhibit an administration that wants to make administrative decisions.

[48:51] Wilson: Um hmm. We had the recent debate, however, on the, uh, admission of athletes, and I think the faculty became concerned there and revisited the whole notion of the faculty being, having the ultimate say, and things got changed quickly enough and significantly enough that the issue subsided, but--

[49:15] Halsted: But the faculty did voice its view.

[49:16] Wilson: They did voice their view, and, and was basically honored in its preferences.

[49:24] Um, from your observation, how have the roles of and activities, even, of the presidents and deans changed over the years? You had a close up view of, of both just before you retired because you were-- [crosstalk]

[49:44] Halsted: I had close, yeah, yeah, and that's, and that's the way that it's done now, which, which was a little shocking, actually, you get to work in the office and see what I had only imagined from the outside which is the total, totally impossible proliferation of paperwork. The, the inundation of all those upper level administrative offices with a variety of forms and demands and requests and necessary correspondence and necessary record keeping partly by, in terms of legislative requirements.

[50:20] Wilson: Um hmm.

[50:21] Halsted: Uh, many of them in terms of legislative requirements, but--

[50:24] Wilson: You worked hard on the reaccreditation exercise--

[50:28] Halsted: And--

[50:30] Wilson: --which is a lot of paper.

[50:31] Halsted: That's a lot of paper and a lot of interviewing of a lot of people. And, and it really was an illumination to discover that deans and presidents occasionally can think about matters other than keeping up with the paperwork. 

[50:47] Wilson: Hmm.

[50:48] Halsted: The, uh, and there's a lot of it that can't be totally shed on, on, uh, people who manage only paperwork; there have to be, there have to be decisions made and there have to be serious questions answered. And it is sometimes simply surprising that anything new gets done because the things that were done weeks ago are still being mopped up after. [crosstalk]

[51:12] Wilson: And it's probably hard to avoid boiler, boilerplate after a certain point and “let's just answer that one with how we answered”--

[51:20] Halsted: Yeah.

[51:21] Wilson: --”the one two years ago.”

[51:23] Halsted: And that may do, although people can compare. But it gave me a lot more sympathy with deans and presidents and, and the difficulties that they confront in trying to, uh, manage the constituencies they confront. It, it's very, very difficult and my own earlier frustrations seemed very small.

[51:46] Wilson: Was email holding sway by the time you retired? It was, wasn’t it? [crosstalk]

[51:50] Halsted: Oh yeah. 

[51:51] Wilson: And that has really changed the culture in ways I guess we've barely begun to think about, the instant question, instant reply.

[52:02] Halsted: Yeah. And that, that messes up the paper trail, of course.

[52:05] Wilson: Messes up the paper trail. 

[52:06] Halsted: That, uh, people have become used to having the paper trail to, to track back: “Oh, yes, this question was asked that way two years ago and we responded that way,” but it's much harder to keep track by email. Yeah, there's been a lot of change in the, and the other thing that this, this demand for constant immersion in, in, uh, paper has led to is the separation of the administration from the activities of the faculty. In those early years, there were always deans, and even, even occasionally a president who was in the classroom. And to have deans and presidents to such a large degree stop directly teaching is, I think, distressing. I mean, just troublesome. [crosstalk]

[52:54] Wilson: John, John, tell me I'm wrong, but my impression in observing that change some time ago was that the faculty became a bit more territorial about “the classroom is for us to be in charge of and you're a dean of such and such, but you're not qualified to teach English literature.” 

[53:16] Halsted: Yes.

[53:16] Wilson: Uh, is that not fair that, that--

[53:18] Halsted: That is perfectly fair.

[53:20] Wilson: --that some fences have been put up by a kind of professional sense of difference?

[53:28] Halsted: And without trying to justify anybody's position, the number of people who might have been seeking part-time teaching work while doing part-time administrative work has also increased so that the number of people either to approve or object to has increased. Yeah, these problems exist and I think it's, it's an aspect of the change of the institution.

[53:56] Wilson: Yeah. Um, I want to ask about the characteristics of students over the years, aside from the fact that we're now coeducational, which is a major change in their characteristics, which I want to, I want to ask you about coeducation, but you spoke of grade inflation being explained in part, possibly, by the fact that there’re, there're brighter students coming in--

[54:25] Halsted: Or better trained.

[54:25] Wilson: --across, or better trained across the board. But are there other ways in which you experienced a change in the student body? In the quality of students?

[54:38] Halsted: In the early years, the biggest perceptible change was in the increase in the number of students who were not graduates of prep schools. And, and there was a diversity that came into the classroom as you got out, particularly the New England prep schools, which is not to belittle a prep school sometimes the students who were making a difference in the classroom, making the classroom seem different, were not better prepared. They were just different. And, and in that sense, interesting.

[55:10] Um, in the ‘80s, particularly, late ‘70s and into the ‘80s, began a very serious effort on the part of the admissions office to expand its geographic pull. And I recall being very conscious when the first students appeared in my classes who were, were trained in Florida, Texas, Southern California. Uh, I remember having a couple of San Diegans show up in a seminar. And I had my first real view of a laid back Southern Californian in the midst of, of a bunch of fairly traditional Amherst students. It was, it was a revelation. It was useful, extraordinarily well-prepared students, but extremely relaxed. [both laugh] And, and this, this is quite a part-- [crosstalk]

[56:05] Wilson: Relaxed in a way that manifested itself by?

[56:09] Halsted: By their unwillingness to get seriously upset about the issues that I was trying to broach as if they were really exciting. [laughs, crosstalk]

[56:19] Wilson: Oh, upset that--. [laughs]

[56:20] Halsted: These are, these are some of the changes that, that I've noticed in the student body. Then I had a, an office on the lowest floor of Chapin, which overlooked a main walkway over toward Valentine. And if I had the windows opened in the spring and in the fall, in the last decade, I would suddenly hear groups pass by all speaking a foreign language. 

[56:19] Wilson: Hmm.

[56:48] Halsted: And, you know, I taught here for 40 years before I heard that.

[56:51] Wilson: That's, that’s telling. [crosstalk]

[56:52] Halsted: But groups would come by speaking Spanish or French or Russian or whatever. And, and that again, I thought was, was an indication something's really happening here.

[56:58] Wilson: Um hmm. Great. Speaking of Chapin, you were here when, during the famous midnight filling-in-the-hole--students didn't like the design of Chapin so they all got their wastebaskets. 

[57:15] Halsted: That, that just preceded me.

[57:16] Wilson: Oh, just preceded you?

[57:17] Halsted: Just preceded me. It was something I heard of is one of the exciting events of the recent past.

[57:22] Wilson: The story is that, uh, students didn't like the design of Chapin Hall; it looked too much like Howard Johnson's. 

[57:31] Halsted: It did. 

[57:32] Wilson: So after the, the basement was dug, students got their steel wastebaskets at midnight and an army of them went and filled in the, the entire hole which had to be--

[57:42] Halsted: [laughs] [indistinguishable crosstalk]

[57:43] Wilson: It made the New York Times, I think.

[57:45] Halsted: And, and they still found when, when the hole was filled in and they dug it out once again and put the basement in, the basement leaked.

[57:52] Wilson: [laughs]

[57:53]Halsted: The, the corner, the corner office, uphill corner office of the basement for, it's now the history department reading room. That corner office was constantly leaking and they were constantly digging around it and draining it and, yeah.

[58:13] Wilson: John, you were here, of course, during the turmoil over Vietnam and the moratoria and so forth. I want to hear a little bit about your impressions of that period. Uh, some of your colleagues are, feel quite nostalgic about it with hindsight and they miss the, the excitement and the adrenaline and the, all of the agitation. Uh, I won't name names, but I know there are people who feel that way. Uh,how did it, how did you look at it at the time and in hindsight now?

[58:46] Halsted: I had, I had difficulty being immensely sympathetic with the, with the protest, not as one who, uh, was favoring a war, my, the focus of my concern was having two teenage sons. Uh, and, and the, the war from my personal viewpoint was not something confronting a generation, it was not something confronting, confronting the College and its students, it was something very close to home, very personal and something relating to two people I love very dearly. And so the, the problems of their draft status and their education and the like were the real focus of my concern during those years. And sometimes I felt that students who were well-located in a exceedingly good college and were free from the draft until they graduated, uh, did not have the same kind of problem as others who were draft bait and so on. [coughs] So, uh, I don't look back on it as something I, with any pleasure at all.

[1:00:01] Wilson: Now, did you go to all the large all-campus meetings where people spoke and--?

[1:00:10] Halsted: When required, yes.

[1:00:12] Wilson: But not, not happily? [crosstalk]

[1:00:13] Halsted: I wasn't a volunteer, voluntary goer.

[1:00:16] Wilson: I see. Your classroom, you told me, was invaded at one point?

[1:00:21] Halsted: Yes. 

[1:00:21] Wilson: Tell me about that.

[1:00:22] Halsted: I wish I could remember what the course was, um, but we were discussing, as usual in my classes, history of ideas in Europe. And a, uh, it was a 2-hour seminar of an afternoon, and there had been some warnings, I'm pretty sure, that there were students who didn't want to have classes on that day. A number of us faculty felt that our primary obligation as faculty members was to offer a class to students who wanted to get educated. And there was a pretty good turnout of the students who had signed up for the, for the class. And our discussion had begun, and I guess maybe some six, eight or 10 students appeared. They had signs. And they told us that they thought we should not be carrying on the class because it should be a day of, of, uh, non-teaching and concern for a variety of problems relating to Vietnam, Vietnamese war. And really with no effort on my part, the students in the class decided to engage the students who broke in in a discussion.

[1:01:30] Wilson: Oh.

[1:01:31] Halsted: And they tried to draw them into a discussion and, uh, after about a half an hour of quizzing by the students who were in the class, the invaders became disillusioned and left.

[1:01:44] Wilson: Oh.

[1:01:45] Halsted: And, um, so we went on to finish the class.

[1:01:47] Wilson: Was this a particular time like the bombing of Cambodia, or?

[1:01:52] Halsted: I wish I could spot it for you. I'm sorry, I can't.

[1:01:55] Wilson: Well, that's a wonderful way to have it resolved because it became an educational--

[1:02:02] Halsted: It was a-- [crosstalk]

[1:02:02] Wilson: --seminar in a sense.

[1:02:04] Halsted: For, for some of them, I think it really was useful.

[1:02:07] Wilson: Um hmm.

[1:02:08] Halsted: Um, and those who didn't want to engage in any discussion just didn't discuss and, and either sat there or left.

[1:02:16] Wilson: Now, there were outcomes for the governance and, and, uh, questions of that sort for the College. You were on a summer commission?

[1:02:28] Halsted: No, no, I wasn't on that summer commision. 

[1:02:29] Wilson: Oh, you weren't on the summer commission?

[1:02:32] Halsted: No, I just was one of the, received much of the paper that they produced.

[1:02:36] Wilson: I see.

[1:02:36] Halsted: And they, they made studies of virtually every aspect of the College and made suggestions for administration changes, for changes in committee assignments, for, for curricular changes and the like. Many of which didn't get adopted, but a good many of which also did get absorbed into the way in which the College was run. [crosstalk]

[1:03:00] Wilson: One, one being that students got representation on committees that previously they hadn't.

[1:03:06] Halsted: And probably the most important was the College Council. The College Council really became one of the two or three major committees at the College from that point on. And I remember we soon began working on a judicial system and a grievance system for the College and the like.

[1:03:23] Wilson: Um hmm. You said something once about the, um, your experience with the AAUP and how you discovered that Amherst really was a fairly fortunate place, in, in some respects, can you say--?

[1:03:40] Halsted: Well, for whatever reason, Tom Yost, uh, I don't know why he decided that I would be interested in the AAUP but he took me to a couple of meetings of the local chapter. And, uh, you may remember Tom Yost--

[1:03:54] Wilson: Oh, yes.

[1:03:55] Halsted: Real live wire, and, uh-- 

[1:03:57] Wilson: Biologist.

[1:03:58] Halsted: Biologist, yeah.

[1:03:59] And he was a member of the National Council and he went to regular meetings in Washington. And he set up a couple of minor committees of the local chapter, uh, which related to, to issues dealing with our own faculty concerns, matters of leave and pension policy and such. And got me on a couple of such committees so that I began regularly attending the local chapter and had a couple of stints as local president. And, uh, then I got into the state cha--, the state AAUP. And I guess I was secretary of, or something of the sort--did a lot of correspondence, I remember that. And went to meetings, mostly nearer Boston, because we in Western Mass were fewer colleges and had less representation. And it was there that I learned most about the differences between Amherst and the great public institutions in the rest of the state and the rest of the country. And one did begin to feel immensely privileged that one had a fairly amenable administration, that there were meaningfully defined benefits--tenure policy, retirement policy-- over and over again, things that faculty at other institutions could only dream of and fight for. 

[1:05:28] Wilson: Yeah.

[1:05:29] Halsted: And these were long traditions at Amherst that one needed to have pointed out to be appropriately grateful about; it was, it was not the way the rest of the world was all working. So-- [crosstalk]

[1:05:41] Wilson: One of the obvious ones being that a lot of institutions have to keep a state legislature happy. 

[1:05:46] Halsted: Yes.

[1:05:47] Wilson: And therefore cannot avoid politics. This is going way back, but I'm trying to remember, would the McCarthy era have been in full swing when you first started here? 

[1:05:58] Halsted: Yeah. 

[1:05:58] Wilson: And was that, was that a chilling time in that regard for a place like Amherst, or?

[1:06:06] Halsted: In a distant sense, I don't know of individual faculty or, or issues directly relating to the College that were, were impacted by that. I don't, I don't know of them.

[1:06:18] Wilson: I think there may have been a case with Colston Warne where to their credit, the trustees and the administration backed Warne against criticisms coming from--

[1:06:32] Halsted: I think--

[1:06:33] Wilson: --from the McCarthyites.

[1:06:33] Halsted: I think you're right, it, that does sound right that that was, that Colston was one of those looked on as, as amongst our more radical faculty members and, and, uh, he deserved a backing.

[1:06:50] Wilson: What, um, I wanted to ask you about the core curriculum. What, what do you feel may have caused its demise which, I guess, really came to conclusion in the mid ‘60s?

[1:07:06] Halsted: Yeah, I think it was replaced in ‘64.

[1:07:09] Wilson: By Problems of Inquiry?

[1:07:10] Halsted: Yeah.

[1:07:11] Wilson: Which, which is the favorite course you've mentioned the--

[1:07:14] Halsted: Well, one of them. [laughs]

[1:07:15] Wilson: --the introductory history course was--

[1:07:17] Halsted: Uh, re--, trying to reply to your question, I have, I have believed that the difficulty was twofold. The first was it became increasingly difficult to get faculty to teach that curriculum. If the faculty was going to be more diverse and drawn from different educational backgrounds, there was less sympathy on the part of new hirees for going outside their fields and teaching in general education courses, because their training was narrow, that is, the graduate training they had led them to be whatever kind of historian they might be but not ready to go in and teach social science and economics and the like. Uh, so that it became increasingly difficult to get faculty members who were ready to go beyond their discipline. And the whole argument to persuade them was not part of their long term training. It was not habituated for them. 

[1:08:23] Wilson: I see.

[1:08:24] Halsted: Similarly, if the students were coming from a greater diversity of backgrounds and questioning the more the way in which the College--

[1:08:35] Wilson: Authority wasn't held in the same esteem that it had been.

[1:08:38] Halsted: No, it was steadily declining. [laughs] [crosstalk]

[1:08:39] Wilson: It was harder to, harder to tell people, other people but to do. [laughs]

[1:08:43] Halsted: Uh, so, so the resistance to the requirements on the one hand, on the part of the students and the resistance on the part of the faculty, I think those combined just to make it impossible bit by bit by bit; it would be, one would spend weeks trying to collect the staff to teach a, an introductory course. And, uh, it happened right on through the period we did those Problems of Inquiry courses, where you tried to get people from different disciplines to work in the, in the large scale required course. And they were, there'd always be these people who were desperately needed by their departments. And so one field or another would be omitted and it was distressing.

[1:09:32] Wilson: Were there, um, benefits to the core curriculum that it was too bad to lose in your viewpoint? And then also what were the gains from its demise?

[1:09:46] Halsted: There were great benefits for the faculty. And since I think those faculty were engaged in teaching on the whole enthusiastically, there are always those who are dragooned into it but teaching on the whole enthusiastically, students had good class time. There was nothing to criticize, in my view, about, about what was being taught. These were good things to teach. A lot of hours of a lot of good brains went to work, thinking of ways to put together materials that would interest students and introduce whatever the subject might be. Uh, Problems of Inquiry in the Social Science of Totalitarianism, and bring to bear on it from all over the place, a variety of viewpoints, excellent stuff. The students read good things, and they talked about them with good, with faculty who were interested themselves--

[1:10:41] Wilson: John--

[1:10:42] Halsted: On the whole, that's all positive.

[1:10:45] Wilson: Another positive thing that, from a student's point of view, at least in my, with my hindsight, from that point of view, is that because they, all students were studying the same questions, the same American Studies, uh, debates and things of that sort, the, the discourse spilled out of the classroom and into all of the other parts of campus life, you would have dinner and continue to debate whether Jackson should have abolished the National Bank or not that kind of thing. And it's probably easy to romanticize that but it did have a kind of electric effect. 

[1:11:26] Halsted: And that died. 

[1:11:27] Wilson: And that died, too. 

[1:11:29] Halsted: And that died probably shortly after 1970. Uh, so that, so that the common experience of students was reduced, while the common experience of faculty was reduced, which makes the place more individualistic and anarchic, I guess.

[1:11:46] Wilson: What, uh, what gains may have followed from not having to, not having the core curriculum? More freedom to teach what you really love? [crosstalk]

[1:11:58] Halsted: Yeah, well, yeah, some people got to teach what they really wanted. Um, and I think there came to be more specialties available for student choice. The entire curriculum expanded in all kinds of ways. So you get a full scale offering in Russian Studies, German and so on. Uh, this, and we ended up with neuroscience and, uh--

[1:12:26] Wilson: First in the country for an undergraduate college. First program, yeah. [crosstalk]

[1:12:29] Halsted: Yeah, a number of these things that, that simply don't exist elsewhere and, and are products of enthusiasm and training, sometimes with people who did get a boost from working in interdisciplinary fields. This gives students a lot of things to choose, but it supposes that students want to or are ready to make those choices. Uh--

[1:12:50] Wilson: Is that a--?

[1:12:51] Halsted: They may be, they may not be.

[1:12:52] Wilson: I see. One argument that one hears against the core curriculum is that it is not a good thing to have students in class who don't want to be there. Do you think that argument has merit or that the captive audience--?

[1:13:14] Halsted: I can't imagine any class anywhere in which every participant is an enthusiastic participant. I don't think there exists or has existed a class where everybody was an eager, didn't feel they were put upon, didn't feel somebody pushed them in there, that they were taking it because they were required to take it. And if one changes the name from Problems of Inquiry to “Modern European Thought,” or the “History of Modern Europe” or whatever, and make it a pure elective, there'll be people in there who are taking something that is listed as a pure elective not because they particularly want to, but faute de mieux, they couldn't think of anything else. Uh, they'd much rather be somewhere else when they're in there. It, uh, there is nothing, it seems to me, to suggest that by offering an elective you get enthusiasts.

[1:14:16] Wilson: That's, I never heard that, but that's well put.

[1:14:20] Halsted: [laughs] Just total cynicism coming out.

[1:14:25] Wilson: [laughs] Then there were curricular, curricula that followed. Problems of Inquiry was the first one. Can you characterize the stages of evolution or devolution, or?

[1:14:36] Halsted: Well, Problems of Inquiry died and was replaced after the, after the summer commission, uh, with the freshman seminars, and that was an interesting and I think valuable experiment for the half-dozen years as it, it exist--, it may not have existed half a dozen years. But you may know that that's, that's the course where in a faculty member and a student taught the course. And so one inv-- [crosstalk]

[1:15:08] Wilson: I wasn't here at the times, but--

[1:15:10] Halsted: It was, it was a real, for Amherst, a real novelty to involve students in the teaching. It was partly because there were real doubts about the advisory system, and the thought was that if, if a senior could be involved in the whole education process in a course, students working with the senior as well as with a faculty member, would feel more at ease, get better advice on their work, and the like. And I had good luck with a couple of seniors who worked with me, people who were very skilled, very interested in what they were doing, and, uh, fine rapport with the other students. And, uh--

[1:15:48] Wilson: It must have been a revelation to them to it, to learn what, how much is involved in preparing a, a class or, uh, or coursework. [crosstalk]

[1:15:58] Halsted: Yeah. These would of course be honors students in your field.

[1:16:01] Wilson: Right, right.

[1:16:01] Halsted: And, uh, so they'd be amongst the top students and, and usually they'd be ones who had some notion of going into, into teaching or some similar field. I think part of the decline in the, the decline in the popularity of the freshman seminars was finding faculty members willing simply to teach outside their field to invent a course that could work with a, with a student. Um--

[1:16:33] Wilson: But it's happened to a remarkable extent at Amherst--

[1:16:37] Halsted: Yeah, yeah.

[1:16:38] Wilson: --in those programs. Uh-- [crosstalk]

[1:16:39] Halsted: The student, just, just for one more second, if I may, the student I remember most clearly, Bill Schwartz, uh, was editor of the Student. And the course I'd thought of was contemporary history and so he was able to think of journalism in the context of contemporary history. And we were able to work on the question of defining what constitutes contemporary history as opposed to journalism and the news. [crosstalk]

[1:17:12] Wilson: Terrific.

[1:17:13] Halsted: And it was, at least for us, we had a great deal of fun, I hope some of the students did. [crosstalk]

[1:17:17] Wilson: It sounds like fun. Being an editor of the Student is almost a full time job.

[1:17:20] Halsted: Yeah, I don’t think he-- [crosstalk]

[1:17:21] Wilson: And then to, and then to be--, become a, a co-professor must have really been--

[1:17:24] Halsted: I don’t think he did much else. [laughs] Yeah. 

[1:17:28] Wilson: That makes me think of the criticism, one doesn't hear it as much nowadays, but I remember when alumni would pejoratively say that faculty really have the life of Riley, they teach x hours a week and they get the summers off and they get all the holiday--, well here at Amherst, we don't get any holidays, but a lot of places they get all the holidays, and so forth. I taught only once and it was a mini course during interterm. And it was an eye opener for me because I found out how many hours go into preparing one hour of classroom. But talk a little bit about a professor, from your experience what a professor's hours are. They don't end at four o'clock.

[1:18:15] Halsted: Oh, no. Uh, and they're erratic. And they are, they are scheduled when one begins a semester and prepares a syllabus and then the rest of the world around you prepares your committee meetings and department meetings and the like. So that, so that you have, you have a number of schedules that are establishing your day's work, um, usually some, some time ahead. And this, this demands that simply to do the preliminary reading and classroom preparation to--preparing the notes and, and outlining the lectures and that kind of thing--to do a good deal of scheduling well in advance. 

[1:19:07] Uh, at least from my viewpoint, the worst thing that could happen was to get caught short walking into a class feeling insufficiently prepared. And I'm not quite sure how you define sufficiently prepared. Uh, but it does mean that there's a good sense of the groundwork that is really stored in the brain and not on notes in front of you. Not in the books, but it's there, ready to draw on when the question comes up in the class. So it's anticipating students’ questions and then, of course, thinking of the really nasty questions you can bring up in class to get them talking. That always was the most fun.

[1:19:47] But there, this is, this is, this can be done, sitting for hours at a desk. This can also be done if you're willing to get up from the dining room table and go write down the note that you just thought of. It's not, it's not schedulable hours. And the easiest thing to schedule is the time to grade papers, to read theses and so on, you know, you can have five, six hours, whatever. As long as your eyes hold out, you're going to sit and do it.

[1:20:13] Wilson: But that's probably after dinner. 

[1:20:15] Halsted: That's probably after dinner. Uh, but the other stuff is you catch the minutes when you can catch them. And there are the students in the office and there are the faculty in the office and, and the like. 

[1:20:27] Wilson: Students to advise. 

[1:20:30] Halsted: So I don't know whether I've answered your question.

[1:20:31] Wilson: Yes, you have, it’s-- [crosstalk]

[1:20:32] Halsted: I always found it, I found it, that, that the commitments I had were always sufficient to fill up the time I had. And I never, I never really went out looking for more work.

[1:20:46] Wilson: You mentioned committees. Tell, tell us about some of the, uh, more memorable committee assignments you've had and whether that, that part of a professor's life is, uh, is it all stimulating or dead--, or is it deadening? [both laugh] Probably both. 

[1:21:04] Halsted: It could be both, it can be both. Uh, a number of the committee assignments were ones where I really learned something. Being in the, on the committee of, on, on admissions, I really learned how the process worked and I had not known. And we were asked to read some of the admission folders and sit in on the discussion of the decisions to rank the students. This was a really very illuminating. It was work and it took time, but I felt coming out of that I knew a big piece more about how the College worked in the world and the students came, how the students came to be there. Uh. work on the College Council when we were, we had a few discipline problems but discipline problems are, are the unpleasant ones. But we prepared a grievance procedure and we prepared a judicial procedure. And here, this was my first real contact with legal issues. And Jim Bishop was dean at the time, and he's a lawyer. And he helped guide us. And we got other legal advice. But again, I just learned an awful lot about, about rights, about procedures, and about the ways in which processes should-- [crosstalk]

[1:22:25] Wilson: Due process.

[1:22:25] Halsted: --due process--should be carried on. And in consequence, I kept winding up on various disciplinary committees for my sins. Um, but that was, I would not have been able to deal with them if I hadn't had this preliminary introduction to these subjects. I'm very glad I got it. Uh, but for some-- [crosstalk]

[1:22:46] Wilson: Tell me, in, in, um, deference to our hosts, tell me about work on the Library Committee, which you've been on for a long time, haven't you?

[1:22:58] Halsted: Well, I was on and off a number of library committees, maybe it won't be too self-serving to take you back a little bit on this one. When I first came, the positions were rotating instructorships. And after a couple of years, the question came up as to whether I would be carried on forward for, I guess it was either a three- or four-year appointment, to the tenure decision. And that decision was, I'm pleased to say, made in my favor, and we got to the tenure decision. And I was called into the president's office. And the president told me, we have a position available in the library, half-time teaching, half-time working with Newt McKeon.

[1:23:51] Uh, that was my option as alternative to, to--that was my option because I was not to be kept on. And, uh, I had a grace year, everybody had a grace year when one reached the termination point. And I had this choice sitting before me of, of becoming Newt McKeon’s tutee. And, uh, after much discussion, we came to the conclusion that probably I should try to continue getting a teaching job. And so I had all the feelers out and--

[1:24:27] Wilson: Was this because you didn't want to be half a non-teacher--

[1:24:31] Halsted: That was it.

[1:24:31] Wilson: --an administrator?

[1:24:33] Halsted: The question was, “did I want to continue as a full time teacher?” and so I figured I'd go look for another job. And, uh, we were looking for one and the fall of the, of the grace year, and Dwight Salmon came up and rang the bell and said your case has been reconsidered and you're going to be tenured. And it was delightful moment, a very-- [crosstalk]

[1:24:57] Wilson: It must have been! [laughs]

[1:24:58] Halsted: --a very happy moment, and we pulled all the letters back and said we don't want any of these other alternative possibilities. Uh, but there was that, that six months to a year when, when there was a real possibility that the whole future was going to go in the library and that I might become, do you remember Ted Laugher?

[1:25:16] Wilson: No, no.

[1:25:17] Halsted: Well, Ted, Ted Laugher worked for a bit under, under Newt McKeon. [crosstalk]

[1:25:20] Wilson: Was this similar to what Dick Cody did later?

[1:25:22] Halsted: And this is what Dick Cody did later, uh, and Dick Cody eventually temporarily replaced Newt and ran the library. But you were saying background for the producers of this there's that, that terribly threatening image, you see, of, “no, no, no, Will Bridegam.” [laughs]

[1:25:41] Wilson: John Halsted and--

[1:25:43] Halsted: But a long, a long live John Halsted going on forever. [laughs] 

[1:25:47] Ah, well, uh, so, but my interest was great and, and it had been great from the very beginning,  partly ‘cause Newt McKeon was a very, very warm friend. Newt and Mary Maury were just extremely nice to Betty and me. And Newt and I and Ted Baird competed for the successive volumes of the, uh, Lord of the Rings trilogy as it came out. That's where I really got to know those two gentlemen. Uh, so I was not surprised when I got--

[1:26:17] Wilson: You mean to try to get them out of the library before the other--?

[1:26:19] Halsted: Before the other two got them, yes, yeah. And a couple of times I did, I was very proud of myself. [both laugh] Uh, maybe, maybe that's why Ted Baird didn't speak to me later. Anyway, the, uh, Library Committee. I served on the Library Committee, I guess, two terms. Standard faculty library committee, three faculty members, we'd meet with Will and talk about the accessions for the year and other problems of the library. The big library committee was the Library Expansion Committee, and the duties of that went on for a better part of five years.

[1:26:54] Wilson: Have you always found the, uh, the Amherst library adequate to the needs of teachers, of professors and students in the, in the field of history? [crosstalk] 

[1:27:03] Halsted: I have found it always, it always did what I wanted. The only thing I regretted was the end of the Dewey Decimal System because I understood the Dewey Decimal System. [crosstalk]

[1:27:12] Wilson: I think there's still a little buried somewhere in the--

[1:27:14] Halsted: A little buried somewhere.

[1:27:15] Wilson: C Level or somewhere. 

[1:27:16] Halsted: But I could always find things much faster--

[1:27:19] Wilson: Yes, yes.

[1:27:19] Halsted: --when, when they kept to the Dewey Decimal, that was, that was my one great regret. 

[1:27:23] Wilson: And Dewey, of course, was an Amherst graduate, so.

[1:27:27] Halsted: And he deserved that, yes.

[1:27:28] Wilson: So he deserved it.

[1:27:31] Halsted: Um, yeah, the, the committee. When we were talking about expanding the library, I felt that my main duty, being in general ignorant of everything but sitting in a chair and reading, was to talk about sitting in a chair and reading. And, um--

[1:27:45] Wilson: [laughs]

[1:27:46] Halsted: So every time anything would come up about furnishings, I'd be the primary spokesperson for comfortable chairs-- [crosstalk]

[1:27:52] Wilson: For chairs.

[1:27:52] Halsted: --well-lit. [laughs]

[1:27:52] Wilson: Good.

[1:27:54] Halsted: And I can't help but feel I had a tiny effect here and there. 

[1:27:57] Wilson: Do you have a, did, did you have a study in the library?

[1:28:00] Halsted: I, I did not. I had, I had one temporarily. 

[1:28:03] Wilson: I see.

[1:28:04] Halsted: I've used one temporarily. But, but that's, that's a workspace, that's not a comfortable place to read in the library. 

[1:28:10] Wilson: There you are, there you are. Let's talk about coeducation because it, it is, it looms in the history of the College. Uh, what year are we talking about? ‘76, I believe? 

[1:28:24] Halsted: I think you’re right.

[1:28:25] Wilson: I think the first women came in ‘76. Um--

[1:28:28] Halsted: Serious talk began just after 1970 and decision about then, yeah. 

[1:28:33] Wilson: Uh, when you look back on that coeducation debate, what, what stands out in your memory? For instance, what among the arguments for and against may have seemed most compelling to you?

[1:28:48] Halsted: Well, I remember being very impressed over and over again by the arguments with regard to the increase in the size of the College. That is, would it be, the question being, “would it be possible to maintain the quality of education bringing in a larger number of students?” And this, this is, this is not simply a coeducation argument, but the coeducation decision hinged in part on increasing the student body and, uh, I think that was a hurdle that one had to overcome.

[1:29:25] Wilson: Was that hand in hand with freezing the, the number of faculty?

[1:29:29] Halsted: Yeah, I worried less about that. Because, in fact, I knew perfectly well I could handle, most of us could handle, a class of 15 as well as 12 or 18 as well as 15. But a student group jumping from 800 to over 1000, something of that sort, the community of their experience, the ability of individual students and faculty to know the student body, to know their fellows, was going to shrink, and it was going, it was going to be a very, quite apart again from coeducation, it was going to really change. Years back, I had been at Wesleyan when the civilian undergraduate body was 80. 

[1:30:12] Wilson: Oh my goodness.

[1:30:13] Halsted: And then I went into service and came back and it was 800.

[1:30:18] Wilson: Did it, is that when it became a university, or?

[1:30:20] Halsted: Oh, no, it'd been a university.

[1:30:21] Wilson: Oh, it had?

[1:30:22] Halsted: But, but everybody’d been drafted. And-- [laughs] 

[1:30:25] Wilson: I see.

[1:30:25] Halsted: And then so I had this little bit in a tiny school, and then came back to, to this school of about 800 and finished my, my stay there and I had a feeling, “golly, you get much bigger than this, and nobody's gonna know anybody.”

[1:30:38] Wilson: [laughs]

[1:30:39] Halsted: And I brought this to Amherst where, again, the student body was right around 800. And I had a feeling you're not going to get much bigger than this and have a real community.

[1:30:49] Wilson: Were those, did those fears prove to be groundless, or?

[1:30:53] Halsted: Oh, no, I think I was right. 

[1:30:54] Wilson: Think you were right. [crosstalk]

[1:30:54] Halsted: I still, I think, I think many of us noticed it as, for example, we sat at commencement and the kids trooped across the, the, uh, podium and one began to calculate, how many have I had in class? How many have I ever met? How many names have I even heard spoken of? 

[1:31:14] Wilson: Um hmm.

[1:31:15] Halsted: And, um, it isn't simply, I think, growing old and moving to the sidelines, it was “the student body is increased in size, and we individual faculty are not keeping up with the whole of it,” we’re keeping up at best with a part of it.

[1:31:29] Wilson: Um hmm.

[1:31:30] Halsted: That, I think it means that the entire place changes.

[1:31:34] Wilson: Um hmm. Of course, there are other kinds of community and one being defined by the curriculum, core curriculum as distinct from an elective, fully elective curriculum. [crosstalk]

[1:31:44] Halsted: Yes, yeah.

[1:31:45] Wilson: But then when women came into the classroom, did that have an effect on the nature of the classroom? 

[1:31:55] Halsted: Yeah.

[1:31:55] Wilson: And what, what were the effects, if there was more than one?

[1:32:00] Halsted: Well, I suppose it would vary from, depending on the women and depending upon the men, but, uh, early on, there was an anticipation that women would feel and might allow themselves to be overwhelmed by overweening men who habitually had dominated classrooms in Amherst. And the background for that fear was, in part, the experience of Smith and Mount Holyoke women coming into Amherst classes, uh, under the Five College interchange and, and there had been some thought that, that women who came in mostly sat back and let the men dominate. Uh, one of the, one of the things that was surprising and pleasant was to see how quickly that fear dissipated and that amongst, at least most of the classes I confronted--even though, of course, there were shy women and shy men, people who didn't speak up very quickly--uh, from very early on, there were women who were as willing to participate as there were men. Um, so after a couple of years, I didn't find that an issue, the, the possibility that it would remain excessively male in that regard.

[1:33:24] Uh, I think the, the range of considerations did expand. And I know in my own teaching, I was much more prepared to think of questions that dealt with issues of women's history. And I think I started doing it just about as soon as coeducation occurred. And I kept learning a whole lot in the process. So from my point of view, it was, it was a learning experience--

[1:33:53] Wilson: Broadening--

[1:33:54] Halsted: Yeah.

[1:33:55] Wilson: --experience.  

[1:33:55] Halsted: --to take on a good many of these questions. And the other, the other place where, where it hit me the hardest was I had been teaching a course called Victorian England. And all of a sudden I found the population was mostly women. And what they wanted was to read either the great Victorian novels or the background of the great Victorian novels. And so it became a course on, [laughs] much of it on the background to great Victorian novels and it, it was great fun.

[1:34:25] Wilson: What you said earlier might be, um, interpreted to mean that Amherst women were more assertive than women coming from single sex women's colleges. Is that--?

[1:34:40] Halsted: that might well be true.

[1:34:43] Wilson: Whereas the argument for women's col--, one of the arguments for women's colleges is, is that it's a place where they can realize their full potential and not have the competition from--

[1:34:55] Halsted: But when one thinks about what might motivate a young woman to apply to a hitherto men's institution, it does suggest a certain--

[1:35:07] Wilson: Causation.

[1:35:08] Halsted: --a certain self assertiveness, a certain confidence--

[1:35:11] Wilson: Yes.

[1:35:12] Halsted: --that I think we were very lucky to get. I remember comparing that with a situation at Wesleyan where they had two years of entering classes of upper class women; before they let any freshmen students in they'd let in juniors and seniors, and they were preparing a, a body of senior mentors, slightly older women in the school, before they brought in a freshman class. Amherst didn't follow that technique, um, and seems to have done very well without it. On the whole, I think, I think Amherst progressed into coeducation very smoothly.

[1:35:55] Wilson: Amherst seems always to be, um, a bit delayed compared to other institutions, I'm thinking of Williams, uh, delayed in going coed, delayed in abolishing fraternities. Um, but maybe it studies these things quite, quite thoroughly before; it looks harder before it leaps. And--

[1:36:18] Halsted: And also with-- [crosstalk]

[1:36:19] Wilson: And with good results in the end, ultimately.  

[1:36:23] Halsted: But the fraternity decision, uh, at Amherst resulted partly from the earlier decision to take the eating places out of the fraternities.

[1:36:35] Wilson: Um hmm.

[1:36:36] Halsted: And the fraternities at Williams were eating places and they had no central dining room. Uh, the removal of a ce--, the establishment of a central dining room, uh, did--

[1:36:46] Wilson: In ‘48, I believe?

[1:36:47] Halsted: Yeah, it did a big part--

[1:36:49] Wilson: Yes.

[1:36:49] Halsted: --of undercutting the authority, the power of the fraternities. [crosstalk]

[1:36:52] Wilson: Yes. And then coeducation, uh, sort of tied the knot on the end of the fraternities because--

[1:36:59] Halsted: Except for those one or two young women who had just achieved the position of president of a fraternity just before it was closed down.

[1:37:05] Wilson: [laughs]

[1:37:06] Halsted: I remember my, my great sympathy for them. 

[1:37:09] Um, but also with regard to, to coeducation. Williams had, somewhere in the distance, Bennington. But, but there was nothing like the situation of Amherst--

[1:37:21] Wilson: Right, right.

[1:37:21] Halsted: --between Smith and Mount Holyoke.

[1:37:22] Wilson: Let alone the University being nearby. 

[1:37:24] Halsted: Let alone a university.

[1:37:26] And, and that always constituted, for anyone who wanted to drag his or her heels, a, uh, a reason for slowing down and thinking it through and “what would be the effect on, on Smith and Mount Holyoke?” I don't think that's even clear yet.

[1:37:40] Wilson: John, I think there are two all male colleges left in the country, one being Hampden-Sydney and one being Wabash. And probably because of that fact, they have had sharp drops in their applications and admit almost 80% of their applicants.

[1:38:00] Halsted: I hadn't realized Wabash was one. 

[1:38:02] Wilson: And I think there may be a lesson there that Amherst did the right thing when it--

[1:38:08] Halsted: I think there was real fear that the quality of our student body was going to decline if it hadn't already begun to, yeah. [crosstalk]

[1:38:16] Wilson: Um hmm, um hmm. John, we've been discreet and not talked a lot about personalities, but do you have any observations about the particular, particular distinguishing qualities of presidents you've worked with or deans that you've worked with? I'm sure we all have mixed impressions of people, but--

[1:38:39] Halsted: Well, I never knew Charlie Cole very well. Um, I do remember the, uh, his being intimidated by Laurence Packard’s wife. When, when I came up for our, for our, after our interview to get the job, uh, Betty was pregnant with our second child and we were to be shown housing. And we looked at some housing and there wasn't any housing presented to us that wasn't more than the salary I was being offered. And we mentioned this to Packard who was trying to hire us. And his wife was in the room and she got on the phone and called the president. And we were told to go over to see the president, he'd been totally intimidated. [both laugh] And, uh, uh, he immediately told us that, that we had an alternative housing available and so on. I thought that was just a wonderful moment.

[1:39:32] Wilson: Was it the Riot Act that she had--?

[1:39:33] Halsted: She gave him the Riot Act, yes. “You can’t hire these young people who, and not offer them housing that they can live in.” That, that I, that was kind of surprising. [crosstalk]

[1:39:41] Wilson: Sounds like some basic sense.

[1:39:44] Halsted: Uh, you probably have heard that Calvin Plimpton had you come into his office and he had chairs of different heights across the table from him. And he would sit and curiously watch as you tried to judge which was the appropriate height chair for you to sit in. 

[1:39:59] Wilson: [laughs]

[1:40:00] Halsted: And this, this, oh, I don't know, this kind of one-upmanship always amused me. I didn't, I never knew quite how to deal with it, but it was, it was a striking thing.

[1:40:10] Wilson: Did you go to the notorious, uh, Plimpton cocktail party where people were carried out on stretchers after the triple martinis were served? [crosstalk]

[1:40:18] Halsted: Oh I can remember, I remember the, they would serve Manhattans in Old Fashioned glasses, they didn't have any cocktail glasses, they were all these big, heavy Old Fashioned glasses. And the, the Manhattan, I remember, I had one and was a little dizzy afterwards. Uh, but it was mostly whiskey. It was, oh, that was a terrible party, very embarrassing party. [both laugh]

[1:40:44] Uh, when, I hardly knew Julian Gibbs at all--

[1:40:50] Wilson: He was here only for four years, really. [crosstalk]

[1:40:52] Halsted: --yeah, and had no real dealings with him.

[1:40:56] Um, Bill Ward was a historian. And his dean, Prosser, was a historian. And that looked like it might be a very interesting moment for members of the history department. And, uh--

[1:41:08] Wilson: For good or for mischief?

[1:41:10] Halsted: Well, we didn't know. You see, the last, the last historian who'd had the presidential chair was Charles Cole. And Charles Cole in his last couple of years had tried some hiring which was pretty clearly intended to change the history department.

[1:41:24] Wilson: Hmm.

[1:41:25] Halsted: And, uh, some of this kind of thing occurred with, with Bill Ward--

[1:41:31] Wilson: Bill Ward, yes.

[1:41:31] Halsted: --and, and Prosser Gifford. And they were, they were people you could work with, but they had, they had agendas that went beyond anything that was afoot in the history department. Um, and one of them, one of them that produced conflict was the desire to establish a, uh, Black Studies or Afro American Studies department and, um, it involved the hiring of historians so that the president and the dean did some hiring, and then asked for retrospective approval, which--

[1:41:51] Wilson: A Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, or?

[1:42:12] Halsted: It was a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It worked out and, and there wasn't, there wasn't long-held irritation, but there was, it was the kind of thing that could have been avoided, and, and was surprising from two people who had just been on the other side of the divide, that they didn't touch base a little more smoothly. Um, suddenly, suddenly I'm beginning to run out of presidents. We, we come to--

[1:42:39] Wilson: Pouncey and Gerety. [crosstalk]

[1:42:40] Halsted: Pouncey, Pouncey and Gerety. And I worked for each of them, wrote letters for them. [crosstalk]

[1:42:45] Wilson: Both different, two very different personalities.

[1:42:48] Halsted: Yeah. And, again, I didn't know them very well.

[1:42:50] Wilson: Um hmm. John, you were the first professor to take the new phased retirement plan. Tell, tell me about that and, and what its benefits are for the institution as well as for the individual. [crosstalk]

[1:43:09] Halsted: Well, it had been being broached for some time. And after I, uh, found I was having more and more trouble with reading and so on, I was talking to Dick Fink, who was then dean, and, uh, it appeared that this might possibly be a sensible option to consider. And so he helped me gather information and talk to personnel and so on. And when I came to the appropriate age for the proposal, it turned out there had never been a contract written so that Dick was figuring out how to write the contract with the, with the trustees and the lawyers as he was preparing my contract.

[1:43:54] Wilson: Were there any models from other institutions? [crosstalk]

[1:43:56] Halsted: There must have been, there must have been, I, I didn't ask that. But there were two or three times when it was “let's change this phrasing” and so on. It's, it's a very good deal for the faculty member. And particularly good if the faculty member is ready to reduce the amount of teaching he/she does, uh, which I pretty necessarily had to be.

[1:44:23] So it worked very well. But the, the way he helped me to work out models of income flow and the various kinds of thing you get nervous about, um, with retirement were very illuminating; it was, it was a very smooth, very comfortable, very considerately worked out set of arrangements for which I am ever grateful, very grateful that the College worked out the system, and that it worked out in such a way as to treat me so, so well. Um, and hence, I became a kind of proponent for it, and found that the chief concern was that one, that the College avoid placing large numbers, a large, over a dozen, a large number of senior faculty on phased retirement earning, still, a significant portion of their original income so great as to make it impossible to replace them with younger faculty at assistant professor pay.

[1:45:34] It is a program that you must avoid letting it get so expensive that it does not leave, it does not save enough to allow for the hiring of incoming junior replacements. As the, as the time available to the older faculty declines, you've got to have it taken up by someone at the lower level, who is at least an assistant professor and earning a significant pay. Uh, this means, this means, requires some very careful calculations on the part of the College as to what it can manage and some projections as to the length of time the faculty will stay on phased retirement, the length of time they will continue on salary, and the length of time they will be on pension and on Social Security. Um, this is, this is a kind of thing I got involved in during that period and, again, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about pension politics and so on. [laughs] But what was done at other colleges and, uh, there are a lot of very creative plans for getting older folks out of the, out of the mix. And sometimes--

[1:46:43] Wilson: But it also has the benefit of keeping them in the mix.

[1:46:46] Halsted: I'm delighted to see that now there is a group of local emeriti meeting regularly. Um, they've had a series of lunches, they're talking about their common problems and they're working on, on various ways to get, uh, internet access and computer use available for them. 

[1:47:08] Wilson: Do they call themselves something? 

[1:47:10] Halsted: It's, I, Peter Czap knows, its the emeriti.

[1:47:14] Wilson: This is diff--, then, totally different from Learning in Retirement, which is-- 

[1:47:17] Halsted: Oh yeah, this is just local Amherst emeriti and they've met a few times and talked about what problems they found. And, uh, I really can't say more than that because I have met with them, I've just gotten letters about it. And I'm absolutely delighted that they are doing it because there are a good many emeriti, present and to be.

[1:47:41] Wilson: We should explain you’re, one reason you're not doing it as you’re, you live up in New Hampshire now and at some distance.

[1:47:48] Halsted: At some distance away. And we had the property and it, uh, it made good economic sense to get up there. 

[1:47:55] Wilson: Okay. [laughs] No income tax.

[1:47:57] Halsted: No income tax. Yeah, and, and you don't have to own two properties either if you want to keep it, as, as would have been necessary for you to continue to live in Amherst.

[1:48:08] Wilson: There are many things we haven't talked about. Is there anything we haven't talked about that we really, definitely should talk about before we conclude?

[1:48:19] Halsted: I'm running down. So I think, I think maybe, it'll probably occur to me as I drive away, but-- [crosstalk]

[1:48:26] Wilson: Right. We'll just come back.

[1:48:29] Halsted: Sure. [laughs] But I think, I think this is, this is uh, thank you for--

[1:48:35] Wilson: Well, thank-- [crosstalk]

[1:48:35] Halsted: --for all the leading questions and I hope I haven't been too misleading in the answers. [crosstalk]

[1:48:38] Wilson: --thank you. I hope I haven't been too leading. [laughs]

[1:48:42] Um, well, wonderful.