VI
THE SEVENTIES AND THEREAFTER

It is a commonplace of administrative theory that, in any organization, each level will be viewed in one way by those above and in a totally different way by those below—and in still another way by those doing the work. The organization of American universities has undergone a great deal of change in the last century. When I came to the University of Virginia in 1938 that university had what was only its second president—there had been none before 1902! When I came to the University of Kansas ten years later I found that on almost any matter of importance—and many of little importance—one needed to talk to the chancellor (or the ever- present, ever-knowledgeable, ever-courteous Mr. Nichols). And KU was by no means alone in its haphazard, incremental approach to the challenges of management. George Beckmann is not to blame for his desire to see his responsibilities clearly defined; John Augelli battled for what in later years would be called “turf”—and could not get an answer.

Recall that until 1963 the University of Kansas did not have an office or an officer responsible for its main purpose—the academic venture. When such a job was created, it was decided that its scope should not extend to medical education—understandably, given the fact that for a dozen years the chancellor, as former dean of medicine, was the person best informed on matters of medical education. Using terms from corporate organization, the chief academic officer is the chief operating officer, but even in corporations that term may not always signify the same thing, and may not remain constant.

KU’s experience with the search for a proper scope and authority for the person administering its international programs bespeaks that proposition. Between 1964 and 1974 KU had six different persons serving in the job which, a decade or so later, came to be called “dean of international programs.”
Yet the amount and the range of programs continued to grow. Largely as a result of Toni Burzle’s contacts and efforts a junior year became available in Bonn (West Germany) in 1963. In the same year, as a result of an agreement I had reached with my counterpart at the University of Colorado, ten KU students went to Bordeaux for their junior year under CU auspices. A few years later we were sending undergraduates to Leningrad and Zagreb, and graduate students to Guadalajara, Mexico. Creating more foreign study opportunities was a high priority, perhaps at the expense of others.

The weakness of our administrative structure for international programs was compounded by the creation in 1961 of the Mid-America State Universities Association (MASUA), initially a grouping of the Big Eight Universities (Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, plus Colorado State. The purpose was to encourage joint ventures, especially in the light of expressed Congressional preference for cooperative undertakings, on the (untested) premise that this would reduce expenses. George Beckmann had reported that the Ford Foundation would operate in like manner. But the very first cooperative venture that Beckmann helped to bring about after his return to KU involved, in addition to Colorado and Kansas, Washington University in St. Louis—not a MASUA member but a logical partner for the project in question.

The MASUA arrangement had been fashioned by the presidents and chancellors of the Big Eight institutions, acting rather on their own. To compensate for their failure to include faculty input in the founding they let it be known that faculty initiative would be encouraged. John McNown, the energetic dean of our School of Engineering, had become interested in the need for engineering education in the new countries in Africa, especially the francophone states in West Africa (where he had been as a Fulbright scholar). Reading the MASUA by-laws, he solicited participation from the other engineering deans and took a proposal to the Ford Foundation. That was when Beckmann first learned about the venture. It was another instance that contributed to Beckmann’s decision to leave KU.

I must bear major responsibility for the university’s failure to define clearly its international mission and to address the problem of the most effective way to organize for this mission. In retrospect, the several programs and international programs as a whole would have been better served if I had not encouraged the minutiae of their management to accumulate on my desk. I can advance reasons why this was the case, but I knew, even as this happened, that it was not the best way to serve the university’s interests in the international arena.

One reason was that the second half of the decade saw a noticeable slowing down of the growth pattern in international education. It began with the failure of the International Education Act. Early in 1966 Paul Miller, the president of West Virginia University, was appointed an assistant secretary of education (in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) with the specific charge to draft and secure Congressional approval of an International Education Act, a law that would lay the foundation for long-range planning and funding for international education.

Waggoner and I were included in a group of about fifty educators from the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains areas who met with Miller and his staff at the University of New Mexico where he announced that the proposal for the International Education Act would be launched by President Johnson in an address at the Smithsonian Institution. Miller’s staff then gave each of us a list of newspapers and other media in our hometown or region and briefed us, with the aid of a sheet of “talking points,” on tactics to help create positive reactions to the President’s speech. We came away full of enthusiasm for the President’s plan.
There was only one contingency for which there no plan: on the day of the President’s address the Washington media, of all kinds, were all closed down by a strike. Nobody not present at the Smithsonian heard one word of what President Johnson said; there was no broadcast and no press association carried any news of it. A bill to enact an International Education Act was introduced six months later but it was, as the media reported, “dead on arrival.”

The war in Vietnam began to be foremost in the minds of the American people. Unrest disrupted campuses (including Mount Oread), as students demanded that instruction be “relevant.” Some administrators left for less troubled environs, as Clarke Wescoe did in 1969; others yielded, as Chancellor Chalmers did in 1970. Then, in 1972, for the first time in nearly forty years, the Kansas legislature provided zero budgetary increase for the state’s institutions of higher learning. At KU and elsewhere on the state’s campuses, some people began to question the importance of international education.

When older Lawrencians, town or gown, speak of “the troubles,” they do not think of Belfast and Londonderry, or Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip but of Lawrence and KU in the period from 1969 to 1972: the arson fire of the Kansas Union; mass rallies in front of Strong Hall; a huge meeting in the stadium with the chancellor proclaiming that the university would remain open while in the same breath allowing students to do whatever they wanted; two students killed by law enforcement officers; the bombing of the computation center—the troubled chancellorship of E. Laurence Chalmers.

Whether under these circumstances another chancellor might have been more successful than “Larry” Chalmers will never be known. The fact is that, from the day of his installation in September 1969 to his final meeting with the Board of Regents in August 1972, the new chancellor was confronted by one crisis after another. In many respects the situation at the University of Kansas was not unique: the generational conflict exacerbated by the increasing unpopularity of the country’s involvement in Vietnam, the older members of society outraged by the apparent lack of respect accorded them by the students of the day, by their involvement with narcotics and their demands for “relevance” in education. Lawrence was not the only community where merchants found it appropriate to keep fire arms (and ammunition) in their stores.
Nor was the state of Kansas alone in its reaction. Legislators and governing boards insisted on higher degrees of accountability by universities—alumni of the pre-World War II days were now trustees and regents, with often idealized memories of their student days overshadowing the realities of campus life and learning expectations. In the days from Malott through Wescoe members of the Kansas Board of Regents often served successive terms, sometimes for as much as twenty years; the board’s staff was minimal in size and often depended on councils and committees made up from the institutions to provide the staff studies needed by the regents. It was not until the late sixties that the regents decided that the board’s secretary—the title itself bespoke his limited authority—was given an assistant whose task it was to review, for the regents’ use, changes in the academic activities on the campuses. The compensation provided for this official was so modest that none of the first three incumbents served more than a year. The size of the room where the board met was so small that only one of the institutional leaders could sit with the regents at any one time.

Even as the regents’ office underwent rapid growth, other parts of the state government also changed. The state legislature had not been redistricted since 1911; the leadership was therefore almost always in the hands of members from small rural counties who faced little or no opposition at the polls. When the federal courts began to insist on equality of representation (“one person, one vote”) this pattern of state politics gave way and leadership came to change with increasing frequency. Individual members now exercised greater influence and became more deferent to local concerns. Being a regent had long been an honor; now it became a demanding chore, with single-term tenure the rule rather than the exception. One by-product of this development was an ever greater dependence of the regents on the staff; it may be symbolic that the staff, once headed by a “secretary,” is now directed by a “president,” and turnover among the staff has sharply increased. In the process, familiarity with conditions on the campuses tended to decline.
George Waggoner has been quoted to the effect that there was no better administrative job in a university than the deanship of the College but neither Robert Cobb nor any of those who succeeded him would likely echo that sentiment. Administrative stability was clearly at a premium.

That such stability had been wanting by the early 1970s as far as international programs were concerned has already been noted. It became even more of a problem in the latter parts of the decade. The area programs believed themselves being squeezed out by the traditional departments. Persons with split appointments (department + area program) complained that, in salary as well as promotions and tenure matters, they were being discriminated against. Area studies directors worried about ways to improve their office space. On a broader scale, questions were being raised about the validity of area (or regional) approaches in the light of a perceived trend toward “globalization.” John Augelli, returned in the capacity of dean of international programs, resurrected Beckmann’s cry for a clearer (and more influential) role for the dean of international programs—only to have the area programs oppose the scope of control he considered necessary.

The situation became further confounded by the illness and subsequent disability of George Waggoner. Although he partially overcame aphasia, he found it necessary to relinquish his deanship. When Augelli resigned the international programs position, Ronald Calgaard, now vice chancellor for academic affairs, and Delbert Shankel, by this time executive vice chancellor, considered that Waggoner’s popularity among the faculty—especially faculty relating to international education—would help to overcome the tensions that had surfaced in the course of the earlier debates over the place and status of international education. Chancellor Archie Dykes approved their recommendation that Waggoner should become associate vice chancellor for international programs, in the office of academic affairs. Carol Prentice, an efficient and notably tactful member of the staff in that office, was assigned to assist Waggoner. Eventually Waggoner’s health put an end to this arrangement and his duties were shifted to George Woodyard, added to his duties which placed him in supervision of graduate work.

When David Shulenburger became vice chancellor for academic affairs in 1993, his prior experience in that office put him in a good position to direct a redesign of the infrastructure. It helped that the Board of Regents, historically suspicious of any increase in administrative staff on the campuses but now themselves possessed of a substantial bureaucratic structure, allowed expansions where in earlier days they would have been adamantly opposed.

The present structure of international education responds to many aspirations of the faculty while giving priority to the needs of students. The driving force comes from the provost’s office and has found its most significant expression in the report on internationalization of the curriculum.

The final chapter describes this most recent evidence of KU’s movement toward a clear institutional approach toward international education.

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