ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH Dr. CHARLES O. BURGESS Digital Services Center, Perry Library Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia Part 3: July 29, 2010 by Karen Vaughan, Old Dominion University Libraries   Listen to Interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Vaughan:  Ok.  It’s July 29, 2010.  This is Karen Vaughan and I’m continuing my interview with Dr. Charles Burgess.  We’ve wrapped up the 70s and we want to start talking about the 80s and when you returned to teaching in 1981.  How do you feel your years as an administrator impacted your teaching?

Burgess:  Oh in several ways.  First of all, I had not taught for ten years. That was a mistake.  I never made that mistake again, even while I was Dean I continued to teach class.  So I had to pretty much reinvent myself as a teacher.  I had lost out on about ten years of Shakespeare scholarship in the meantime.   Besides, the department had hired a great Shakespearean, Mike Andrews, to take my place, and it certainly wouldn’t make any sense for me to come back and displace him.  So I had to take a look at the departmental needs, and the person who had been teaching advanced composition, Wayne Bowman, had just retired, so I decided I would concentrate on building the advanced composition program.  And, going back to one of my first interests, which was comparative literature and world literature, since my doctorate was in English and comparative literature.  And actually that’s something I’ve continued with since then as one of my main interests.  So I created some new courses, and built some new courses around the comparative and the advanced composition areas.  This also enabled me to get involved of course in lots of other things because I didn’t have all these responsibilities I had as Provost.  

Vaughan:  So what other kinds of things did you do?

Burgess:  Well… in some ways this is my most productive period, these 5 years in the faculty.  Jerry Weiner, whom I mentioned before as the very entrepreneurial International Programs Director, had just gotten a major Fulbright grant that had as its purpose introducing African studies into the university curriculum.  We had paid no attention to Africa anywhere in the university before that.    It involved taking a group of faculty members spending three weeks in Ivory Coast and three weeks in Tanzania. This was an interdisciplinary group—in fact it was an inter-institutional group:  there were a couple of people from Norfolk State and Hampton University involved with it too.  And, it was beautifully organized.  Jerry was a quirky person, but an amazing organizer.  He got us to see things that tourists would never see, just by his sheer hutzpah.  I remember on the plane over, for example, he happened to be talking to the man who was sitting next to him.  It turned out this was the Clerk of the Legislature in Ivory Coast, so he immediately made arrangements for us to have a tour of the legislative building, and learn more about the government there.  And then he was a member of Rotary, so he would go to the Rotary meetings in these little tiny villages all over Africa where the only members would be the head men around there.  And he would make special arrangements for us.  So we all got to do things in our fields.  I met some significant authors in Ivory Coast and a number of faculty members at the university dealing with literature.  Lou Lombardo in Criminal Justice, for example, got to tour prisons pretty regularly.  It was a trip that really made a difference, in the university and for many of the people on the trip.  Nancy Bazin was the other person from the English Department, for example.  African literature became one of her specialties after that.  She wrote heavily and spoke heavily in the field.  I didn’t get into the scholarship as much, but it really has informed my teaching ever since then.  It was a fascinating experience and just an example of how the right kind of person, the right kind of position can do something.

Vaughan:  How long did you spend there?

Burgess:  We had three weeks in Ivory Coast and three weeks in Tanzania.  He chose them because Ivory Coast at that point was a stable, highly-prosperous, capitalist society-- it’s kind of fallen apart since then-- and Tanzania was attempting to be essentially a socialist society, a state-run society.  And the differences between the two of them were the reason we chose them.  By the way, we got a session with the president of Tanzania, who was one of the heroes of the African liberation movement.  So, it was just a great trip.  That was first.

Then because of my advanced composition interests, I became involved with a program that had been started by Carole Hines, I think, in the English Department, who was Director of Composition, a program on writing across the disciplines, which involved building a series of workshops for faculty in all colleges to help them to introduce writing, not just to help students improve their writing, but also as a teaching mechanism as well.  And that became very popular.  We got regular funding for it.  It went on for several years.  It ended up there was a group of four of us -- we called ourselves the “gang of 4” – Carole and I and Denny Wolfe in Education, and somebody in the writing center whose name is one of the ones I can’t remember... I think her last name was Gay but I’m not sure.  But there were four of us, and we really interacted with people all over the university.  And the fact that I had contacts around the university I think helped a little bit too.  We identified a number of people who turned out to be stars.  One of them was Lou Henry, who ended up becoming a very successful director of the Honors Program, and ultimately Honors Dean.  He was just quietly out there teaching Economics, until we got him involved in this program.  So that was an interesting time.

Vaughan:  Did you find time for your acting once you were out of your administrative roles?

Burgess:  Yeah.  I could take on a regular role-- I continued with the Shakespeare group-- but I could take on a regular role because my time was my own basically.  And so the most rewarding things I did were at the Riverview Theater, which was then the University Theater; Paul Dicklin was running it.  And I played the Burgomaster in Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” and my most… one of the roles I’ve enjoyed most in my life really… I played the William Jennings Bryan part in “Inherit the Wind” against the best actor in the region, Gerry Rowe, who unfortunately died a couple years ago.  He was a very good friend and really the most professional theater person in the region.  He was just a joy to work with.

Vaughan:  So that was a good time for you that you had time to be in a play.

Burgess:  It’s not as if I wasn’t doing anything else.

Vaughan:  Right, it just seemed like you had a lot more time.   You were chair of the committee to revamp the general education requirements.  What was the intent to the changes in the program and what was the outcome?

Burgess:  Well, that was my third major activity outside the classroom, and in many ways I think I had more influence at least on the teaching side of the university doing that than I ever did as an administrator.  Essentially what had happened nationally was that, what with all the student unrest and student power business in the 60s and 70s, most universities, not all by any means, but most universities had relaxed their general education requirements, relaxed them considerably.  In fact, they had basically come to the idea that maybe students know best what they should be taking and we shouldn’t be telling them what to take.  So, essentially, it got to the point where many of us felt that a college degree didn’t really have a clear meaning at all.  There wasn’t anything you could say that somebody who had a bachelor’s degree had or could do because it was all a mish-mash.  And there was a second problem with it, and that is when the university requirements were relaxed so that there were virtually no real university requirements, except maybe Freshman English and a couple other things, then the departments, particularly the professional schools, started adding on requirements of their own, so that the students would end up getting a very, very specialized, and very narrow education because of all the courses in their own field they had to take, which strangely enough increased the number of student credit hours that those departments were generating.   By that time, Tom Wallace was Provost.  I had appointed him the Science Dean when I was Provost.  To my mind, he probably was the best of my successors in the Provost’s office.  He was very sharp; he went on to become president of two different institutions in Indiana and Illinois before he retired.  And, he saw this problem as I had seen it.  He appointed me to chair a committee, a university-wide committee, to investigate and make recommendations concerning the establishment of a real general education program here.  Well, that started two years of very, very intense committee work, and of course a lot of consultation – we brought in a couple of consultants. We examined what was going on at other institutions and we did a lot of other things. But mainly we were hashing things out among ourselves, because of course some of the faculty on the committee, especially those from professional schools, did not want to be told that their students should take anything other than their own field.

Vaughan:  How many people were on the committee?

Burgess:  I don’t remember. About a dozen.  It was very widely represented. All colleges were represented, and several different… more than one department in each college.  So, it was a broad committee.  We finally came up with, after all this, a concept which was originally proposed by Lou Lombardo in Criminal Justice, of setting up a system whereby all graduates of the university would have been exposed to courses that taught skills, particularly in writing and mathematics, but that also -- this was the greatest thing --that also taught perspectives… expose them to different perspectives, with the concept that different disciplines had different ways of analyzing the world.  So that there would be the social science perspective, there would be the natural science perspective, and there would be courses that would be set up not just to get them the facts of those areas but also to teach them the methodology, the way of thinking  – that social scientists think differently from natural scientists who think differently from humanists.  And, the program was set up that way.  So that ultimately after these two years, we got to a marathon six meetings of the Faculty Senate in which this was taken up.  Oh, by this time, I’d also gotten involved in faculty politics again, so I was on the Faculty Senate again.  So I was the floor manager for trying to get this thing through the Senate.  And, again there was, as you can imagine in any discussion of this kind, there were vigorous debates of all kinds.  We got the vast majority of it through.  There were a couple of things we couldn’t get through.  We had thought that there should be some reinforcement at the upper level, for example, with these courses that were the general education, freshman and sophomore courses, and that got shot down.  Some other things got shot down. But basically, it worked.  Basically we got it through. And so we had a total revision of what students were required to take.  One thing that pleases me is that there have been two or three general education committees set up since then to revise this, but basically the structure is still there.  We just went through it, and basically the same structure is still there.  So, what we did, we did I think pretty well.  And I’ve got to give other members of the committee credit, and I’ve certainly got to give Tom Wallace credit because he gave the impetus to it and stayed on top of it all the way through. 

Vaughan:  In 1985, you became Interim Dean of Arts & Letters.  How did that come about?

Burgess:  Totally by accident.  First of all, Heinz Meier who was the dean I had appointed and who was a very strong dean and a strong personality -- unfortunately was diagnosed with leukemia and he had to step down as dean. He went back to the History Department and taught for as long as he possibly could; he wouldn’t give up.  Ultimately, he succumbed to the disease.  So we had to hire a new dean.  We went through a national search.  We got one very strong candidate, and some other less strong ones.  And the candidate that I and the department, and the Provost and everybody else supported -- I think her name was Mary Richards, as a matter of fact -- ended up turning us down and going to Delaware.  And so there wasn’t an alternative and that was coming fairly late in the year.  Also, this was the end of Rollins term.  He had already announced that he was going to step down as president.   So they didn’t want to make a quick appointment of a permanent person when there was a new president coming in.  So Tom and Al-- I guess, I don’t know why -- but they asked me if I would become Interim.   I think part of it was that one of the main jobs of the Dean of Arts and Letters was to develop an implementation for this general education program.  They thought it might be useful to have somebody who really knew it in that position.  In any case, I said “OK, you know, I’m enjoying myself, life is good.  I don’t want another administrative position, but I’ll step in here until we can run a good search.”   I did make the decision—again, my administrative experience had taught me a few things—so I made the decision that, ok, if I’m going to be interim, that does not mean doing nothing.  You’ve go to take charge; you’ve got to make decisions; you’ve got to do planning – even if though it’s only for a year.  Or things will just fall apart, run adrift.  So I remember the first faculty meeting after I accepted the Interim thing, I quoted from Hamlet.  Somewhere in the fifth act of Hamlet, while he is waiting for that final confrontation and all of that, and he says that there are some things I can do.  And so he has the phrase “the interim is mine.”   So I quoted the phrase, “the interim is mine,” which was intended to say, 1) I definitely was interim, I did not expect to stay there; and 2) nevertheless, I was going to be active and doing things.  And so, I came in and…

Vaughan:  Ok.  But three years later, you became dean!

Burgess:   But then somehow or other, we kept “interiming” me for a couple of years,  and then finally I was asked to continue as dean, and by that time I had already gotten involved in so many things, and there I was stuck again.

Vaughan:  What were some of your biggest challenges and accomplishments as dean?

Burgess:  Well, this will take a little while.  But doesn’t everything?

Vaughan:  Yes.  [Laughter]

Burgess:   My first big job was the implementation of general education.  And that was a major job because this was a seismic shift in the university and required not just faculty to change, but also the administrative offices to change, to know all the details – the Registrar’s Office, the counseling people, the student services, and all of that.  So we got a grant from the State Council --   a fairly decent amount of money, I can’t remember how much it was -- to engage in a two-year implementation of the program.  And Heinz’s Associate Dean, whose name in fact was John Broderick, not to be confused with “John Broderick,” decided he did not want to continue as associate dean.  He was very much tied to Heinz and was pretty well broken up about what happened to him.

Vaughan:  And, that’s John “P.” Broderick.

Burgess:   Yep, right.  So I hired someone from the English Department whom I knew well, Conrad Festa, as associate dean and also-- I’ll come back to why-- also a guy named Rick Skinner.  So I ended up with two associate deans, as a matter of fact, because of this project and because of something else, which I’ll get to.  They ran this implementation beautifully.  We had a whole series of conferences; we had lots of interdisciplinary conferences.  We went off campus one time to a place near Williamsburg and got everybody together in what was both a social and a working session.  It actually developed to the point where we ended up with an interdisciplinary, male/female, poker group that lasted many years after that.  And I think we brought about this change with a minimum of difficulty. There were problems, of course, but a minimum of difficulty.  It worked, because all the courses had to be approved.  The committee had set the standards, but hadn’t written the course descriptions, of course.  And all the mechanisms had to be set up, and all the advisors all over the campus had to know what was going on.  Everything had to happen. And it worked very well.  But it was a huge job.  As a matter of fact-- I should have mentioned this before-- State Council really liked this program, this general education program.  And so State Council ran a conference in Williamsburg for us to present our general education program to the other universities and colleges of the state, as a model.

Vaughan:  Wow.  Little ODU.

Burgess:   Yeah.  I think it was one of the things that got us, or began to get us taken seriously in the world.

Vaughan:  And did others adopt it then?

Burgess:   They didn’t adopt the same thing, but they certainly did make changes along these lines.  So that was a major thing for my first couple years. 

Now, to go back to Rick Skinner....  Rick was a very creative guy and he had gotten the idea that the university should have an honors program, that we should have some way of not just attracting the local students who came in here, but actually having something special to offer to bring some of the top-level students – valedictorians and others – to decide to come here because we would offer something special in an Honors Program.  And originally he had talked to Dana Burnett, thinking this would be something to go to Student Services.  But when they asked me to be Interim Dean, I had heard about this and knew about this, I’d talked to him about it.   And I said I’d only make one condition -- and this was interim so I wasn’t going to make many conditions -- but I would make one condition and that is that the Honors Program be moved to Arts and Letters.  And Al agreed.  And so Rick became the second associate dean and director of the Honors Program.   He did establish it; he did some wonderful things with it.   That’s I think one of the things I’m proudest of, that was accomplished in my term as Dean.  Again, I didn’t do it by myself, but I fostered it and I worked with him, and we got it going.  He sort of burned out after a few years and left.  That’s when I appointed Lou Henry, and of course the rest is history, because Lou kept building it and building it – with encouragement from Jim Koch particularly – kept building it and building it until it finally became its own college.   And that was what we kind of hoped for from the beginning.  So that was one of the things I got involved with that had some impact.

Vaughan:  Not as challenging as the general education program. 

Burgess:  No, but definitely something that impacted the university.  I did some little things.  Heinz Meier was very much a European intellectual and academician -- rather stiff, rather formal -- except when he was relaxing:  I was in a poker group with him too!  But… and he was very authoritative and kept pretty much everything in his own office.  His associate dean didn’t really have much responsibility.  Lots of people have stories of going in and talking to him and his sort-of playing “Lord Bountiful” in order to do what he wanted to do.  There was nothing wrong with it, and it worked.  His principles and his instincts were all right.  But that wasn’t my style.  So when I got into the Dean’s office, I did such things as change the furniture. He had this great big desk.  You came in and had to sit down there opposite that big desk, and he was looking over at you.  So I got a little desk and put a table in there and mostly had people sitting around the table, and I was talking to them on their level – just a stylistic thing to change the way in which it worked.  And also, I made much more use of the associate dean. By this time, I had learned to delegate, as I mentioned earlier.  And so I worked with the associated deans almost an equal __________.

Vaughan:  So, at that point, Conrad Festa was the only associate dean, because Rick Skinner had gone…?

Burgess:  No, Conrad left too after a while to take a job as provost at the College of Charleston.  And, that is another thing I’m kind of proud of:  a number of my people who have worked for me ended up moving up to other things.  He ended up with several major positions in South Carolina. So, again I did something that surprised people.  I hired as Associate Dean, I hired Paul Schollaert. And Paul Schollaert, who had been chair of the Sociology Department, had gotten into a big fight with Heinz, because he wanted to establish a separate school of Social Sciences, and he had opposed the general education requirements.  Since he was a sociologist, he really did think -- and as a product of the 60s – he really did think that “let every flower bloom, let them vote with their feet.”  But he was bright; he was organized; he understood computers; he was a demographer and had been into the computer business early.  And so he helped educate me on a lot of things -- insofar as I’m educated.  And, he turned out to be a brilliant choice, because he could just… he was reliable and honest and steady and energetic and worked beautifully at it.  He left to take a dean’s job at Illinois State.  He was my strong right arm in the dean’s office.  So, I made a number of changes like that. 

I wanted to continue the development of International Studies and I worked with the departments to introduce more international studies and I helped the establishment of a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies.  As a kind of elite degree, requiring, for example, three years of language and requiring a very strong course program and that has developed nicely.

I had a little less success – I finally, finally got the first doctoral program in the College of Arts & Letters – we didn’t have any doctoral programs at the time. 

Vaughan:  What was that?

Burgess:  That was International Studies.  But I can’t claim I made a big success of it at first, because I didn’t do a good job of appointing the first director.  He turned out to be a very difficult person to work with, and alienated lots of faculty members and all administrators.  So I finally had to get rid of him, and by that time the program was going, but a little shaky.  That’s not one of my successes.  At least I was trying to build international studies as a major emphasis. 

Of course there are lots of just routine things that a dean does, looking at weak departments and trying to figure ways to strengthen them.  My main success – I won’t mention failures anymore – but my main success in that area was we had a little department which was called the Speech Department, and basically it taught public speaking and didn’t have much ambition or ….   It actually had a chair who would turn back money, because he couldn’t figure out what to do with it.  And, I hired as chair a guy who was at Goucher, as it happens, who turned out to be Gary Edgerton, who has been one of our big stars.  And he built that department into one of the largest and one of the strongest departments in the college, which stopped being speech and became Communications, as it should have in the modern world.  So that was one of my successes.  I had a success from time to time.

The thing that I devoted a lot of my time to – again, was almost as successful but not as much as I’d like -- was the development of the arts programs.  That was really close to my heart.  I really wanted to see ODU become a center in the community for the arts.  We hadn’t been really.  We had individual faculty members like Sibley and others, but we hadn’t really become the kind of focus I’d like to see us become.  So I managed to wrangle from the Provost and using a little money I could find here and there, getting a position as Arts Administrator.  I appointed Lane Dare, one of the most energetic people imaginable, and a half-time position of fund-raiser for the arts, Julie McDonald, who was also very entrepreneurial and got us all kinds of funding.  She even once got some money from the Liberace Foundation.  That team and I really began to develop something that I think would have really been wonderful for us.  And Lane organized and ran for a couple of years, a spring arts festival at the university, focused on avant-garde art, cutting-edge we called it, bringing in some of the major people in the field in all artistic disciplines.   And, we had just gotten to the point where Julie had gotten the National Endowment for the Arts to agree to send representatives down and evaluate the program and see if they were willing to put some serious money into it, when a budget crisis hit.  It destroyed it.  I couldn’t justify cutting faculty positions and leaving these administrative positions in the Dean’s Office.  So I had to eliminate those positions.  I still remain very good friends with both of them; they knew what it was all about.  That was a lot of fun, and it was a great time. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more with it.  That was one of the big possibilities that we missed.

Vaughan:  How did the Arts faculty respond to that?

Burgess:  Variously, but most of them got into it pretty strongly.  There were some people who didn’t want to change anything, who went their own way. 

Speaking of the arts faculty – a digression again – the art department was one of the most interesting things I had to deal with, because the art department really enjoyed being provocative in any way it could.  I like that; I enjoyed that too.  But it kept getting us in trouble with the community and the administration.  Two incidents:  At one point... well, the art gallery was down on Granby Street…  I don’t know why exactly, but somehow or other, they rented a gallery down on Granby Street – I have a suspicion so that they could get away from the university and nobody would notice them.  They would put on shows there almost designed to provoke.  They had one show, I remember, I think it was somebody who was an alumnus actually, who did what amounted to radical political cartooning as art.  The picture that attracted the most attention was a picture of a room with a large television set in it, and two figures sitting on stools with their pants down who were very clearly Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and the title of the painting was “Let Us Shit in Your Living Room.”  [Laughter]  This did not go over well with the conservative religious community.  And I began to get masses of calls from them, including a number of threats, but nothing ever came of it.  But it was a good example of the kind of thing they did. The second instance was probably my most unusual job as Dean – not the kind of thing that’s in the job description of being a dean.  They also gave opening parties down there -- of course they served alcohol -- and one of their opening parties was on a very warm night – they didn’t have any air conditioning in there – and so naturally people took their glasses and walked out in the street to get away from the heat inside.  Well somebody obviously reported this to the police, so the police came and busted the Art Department.

Vaughan:  The whole art department? [Laughter]

Burgess:  No, just the people they caught out on the street.  So one of my most unusual incidents as dean was when I was sitting in the front of a police car, trying to talk the policeman out of taking Ernie Mauer -- who was a full professor in the Art Department -- trying to go down to the police station and book him.  Of course Ernie was sitting in the back seat, and he was enjoying it – he thought it might have been fun. 

Vaughan:  Now, were you at the opening?

Burgess:  I was there at the opening.  That’s one of the things that you do.  I went to the opening.  It was a lot better than going to the Nutcracker.  [Laughter]  So, I managed it. That was one of my successes.  I managed to talk the cop out of taking him down to the station and booking him.

Vaughan:  Interesting.  Interesting.

Burgess:  That’s a digression.

Vaughan:  Right.  And they didn’t have a video camera in the police car in those days, right?

Burgess:  No.  I hope not! I’ll talk a little bit later -- I think you’ve got it as one of your later questions -- about affirmative action and what I was working with from the dean’s office in that area too.

Vaughan:  What about the Women’s Studies Department?  Did they get their program during your time as Dean?

Burgess:  Yes.  It had existed… there had been a part-time director of Women’s Studies before that, originally Nancy Bazin.  I appointed the first full-time director of Women’s Studies and got through the Bachelor’s degree.  So that was one of the crucial things that came up on gender issues. Do you want me to talk about other affirmative action issues now, or …

Vaughan:  Sure.

Burgess:  One of the big challenges was that there was still a fair amount of the “good ol’ boy” culture, especially in certain departments within the college.  And one of the things I had to work at was not only to try to bring salary equity and other…  that kind of personnel thing, but also particularly in hiring – to try to expand the number of women faculty who were in the college because we were in a field where highly-qualified women were available.  But there were departments that were resistant, and I will mention particularly the History Department.  So, I had a running battle with the History Department for several years there.  They… every time they got a position, they would make a national search and, by George, the finalists would always be men.  And then finally when they realized that I wasn’t going to buy that -- because it actually went to the point a couple of times of me just saying “Ok, we won’t hire anybody this year.”  I couldn’t get away with that now, but I did then.  Then one year they came up with a man and a woman, and the woman was so completely unqualified and obviously would have been a disaster, that they felt they got me, that I would have to take the man.  I wouldn’t let them hire that year either.  And this was an early modern European historian they were looking for.  So, finally the next year after stormy faculty meetings at which I was accused of absolutely everything, they somehow or other managed to find Annette Finley-Croswhite.  And it’s been a great pleasure to me to see her career develop.  She’s just finished a couple of very successful terms as Chair of the Department and just published a major book that’s gotten a lot of good publicity.  And the department now is, I think, probably about 50% female.  But that was the kind of change, a kind of cultural change that I had to try to work on within the college.

Vaughan:  She was the first woman hired in the History Department?

Burgess:  No, Lorraine Lees had been there, but she had been pretty well marginalized. 

Vaughan:  Ok.  What about Dorothy Johnson?

Burgess:  And Dorothy Johnson had been too.  She had retired by then.  But, yeah, Dorothy Johnson had been there, and she had sort of been respected, but they just didn’t want any more.

Vaughan:  Tell me what else was going on as far as affirmative action during those years?

Burgess:  Well, obviously the other major attempts that were being made university-wide, but also by me, were in building African American Studies and African American faculty presence on campus.  We were now already beginning to get a fair percentage of African American students, and it became more and more obvious that we needed to build the faculty more.  I was only able to partially succeed in that.  We did hire some African American faculty, but we also began establishing an African American studies program, originally headed by a very strong political scientist named Charles Jones, who is now head of the African American studies program at Georgia State, and then picked up by Mike Hucles in the History Department who really developed it into the degree program that it is now.. So we began – again – broadening the nature of the faculty and the nature of the programs and the nature of the university.  That’s something that I’m proud of, that we got as far as we did.  It’s gone further since I stepped down, but I’m glad to see it.

Vaughan:  What…  I know ODU was growing building-wise and in facilities in the 80s, what was happening in the College of the Arts?

Burgess:  Well, as part of my emphasis on the arts, I did finally get support.  I got support from Joe Marchello, as a matter of fact, and from the state for the building of new arts facilities, or the renovation of arts facilities.  The main building is what is now the Diehn Fine Arts Building.  That was a huge project.  Now, a large percentage of the oversight of it from the Dean’s Office was done by Paul Schollaert, who again did a wonderful job with this, sometimes having to fight the university’s architects because the art faculty was extremely demanding, and rightly so.  The nature of the building – I mean, you don’t want to have music studios where the sounds leaks from one to another. And you don’t want to have ballet studios where the flooring is such that it will damage the feet and legs of the dancers. So there was a lot of controversy between the contractor, not so much the architect, but the contractor and the College of Arts & Letters without as much help as we’d like to have gotten from the administration’s architectural office.  But we finally did get, I think, a building which the faculty is very pleased with.  There was only one major glitch with it.  And that is that somehow or other the contractor had messed up the main auditorium, the Chandler Recital Hall.  First of all the architect, rather strangely, had made it below grade.  And secondly, the contractor had not sealed it sufficiently.  So, when the building opened, at the first major rain, the recital hall began to fill with water.  And we had massive problems with that, because it happened more than once.  Again, the university’s architectural office said “Oh don’t worry about that.  It’s a once-in-a-century storm.”  And then it happened the following week. [Laughter]  So that was a major issue.  But I think… I’m very happy with that building and then later we were able to get the addition of the music library and the Diehn Composers Room on it too.  It’s a nice building.

Now, there were two major renovations of current arts facilities.  One was for the fine arts building on the mall where we had an interesting argument there, because the arts faculty of course wanted to do something different.  And the bureaucrats wanted to have all the buildings look alike.  So we ended up with what its opponents refer to as the “red roof inn,” which is the arts facility.  But again it was designed around the needs of the art department.  We had to argue, for example, for wooden flooring in the painting studios, so that people didn’t have to stand on concrete floors while working in there.  And elaborate ventilation for Ken Daley’s materials in the print shop, and a lot of other good things like that.  Now I’m very sorry to see that they’re abandoning it.  They’re going to move the arts facility across the street.  I hope they’re as sensitive to the art faculty in building that.  Will it have the practical facilities that the art department needs that are very different from what the college of business needs?  And, then the music department, before Diehn was built, had some of its facilities in an old stables that actually was a National Guard’s stables behind what is now the Health Sciences building. And they were going to tear it down.  But some people had the idea of saying, “Ok, let’s make this into a black box experimental theater.”  And so we managed to do that.  Again, it is totally flexible space that you can use in all kinds of wonderful ways as a theater.  So that was one of the things I enjoyed working on, as a theater person.

Vaughan:  And did you perform there?  [Laughter]

Burgess:  No, I didn’t perform there.  Not in a play, I mean, I held meetings there and that kind of thing.

Vaughan:  Well, that was good that you had all the facilities being improved and stuff because there were lots of budget crises in the 80s as well.  How much of an impact did that have on you and the College of Arts & Letters?

Burgess:  Well, I’ve already mentioned how it totally destroyed the Arts Program in the Dean’s Office.  It was worse than that.  Luckily Paul Schollaert had taught me how to use an Excel program by then, because I would spend hours trying to juggle departmental budgets and the college budget to make the cuts that we were required to make.  The most painful thing that we did, and the most painful thing for a dean ever to do was I had to cut a program.  I had to cut the Russian Language program.  There weren’t very many students in it, and there was only one faculty member by that time.  Besides, the cold war was basically over, so the people weren’t as interested in Russian any more.  But it was still very painful to do and it involved a faculty member and it involved a lot of meetings with faculty committees.  But the whole process I tried to make as open as possible, as transparent as possible.   And so I had a faculty budget committee that I met with regularly.  I worked with… I communicated with the faculty every step of the way.  So, I tried to make sure that it wasn’t something that just came down from on high, but something that was full consultation, that was accepted – but, gloomily.  And there were a couple of people who were really angry about the Russian program.  I had to do some other things like take two small offices that humanities and interdisciplinary studies had and put them together in a hallway and have just one secretary for the two of them.  You know, I did things like that that nobody likes.

Vaughan:  Dr. Marchello was president from 85-88.  What were your thoughts about his administration, as far as your involvement as Dean?

Burgess:  Well, Joe Marchello was not particularly interested in Arts & Letters.  He was an engineer and he was definitely from an “ol’ boy” culture.  I did not have any huge confrontation with him as Dean of Arts & Letters, but I didn’t have much support either – except in facilities, I’ve got to be fair to him.  He really did push the fine arts building which became the Diehn building.  Unfortunately he did it so doggedly and perhaps not in the Virginia way that the people in the legislature and the people in Richmond finally told him “you’re not going to have any more facilities there at all, because you’ve been too pushy about this one.”  So, there was actually supposed to be a phase two and phase three of that building, and they were shot down.  But he did help with that.  I understand from people that I trust that he was a very good engineer, that he knew his field well, and taught engineering well and did some important research.  So he had various strong qualities, but they weren’t the kind of thing that appealed to academics in colleges of arts and letters.  He was much more comfortable with other type of people.

Vaughan:  Another thing, in 1989 you received an award from the newly-formed Coalition of Black Faculty and Administrators.  Can you talk about that?

Burgess:  I can’t remember all the details exactly, but I do remember that the coalition was formed because of a perception – it may have been a true one – that the administration, particularly the president, was not interested in equity for or affirmative action for black faculty and administrators.  And they had a number of specific instances of being passed over for positions or salary inequities and other things like that, that they were complaining about.  I can’t remember how I was appointed to chair the committee to look into that.  I don’t know why, but it was a strong committee with some good people, both African American and Caucasian in it, and we looked into the charges and basically we found them to be true.  And we presented the results to the president and the board. And I wasn’t at all sure that I was going to continue as Dean after all that, because it was very clear that he didn’t want to have anything to do with this and didn’t like any of these people and that this is totally a bad idea.  And so we had our meeting with him.  It was a very strange meeting.  He literally gritted his teeth and agreed to everything that we said, and agreed to all these changes we wanted to make.  And I think it made some real difference in the morale of and the position of the African American faculty and administrators here on campus, and a number of good people who have been here since then and worked with us as a result of that.  But, it was not his thing.  And I think the Coalition gave me credit because I was chair of the committee but obviously the committee did the work.

Vaughan:  So, after Dr. Marchello left, Dr. Spong was president.  What were your thoughts about his presidency?

Burgess:  It was a breath of fresh air.  [Laughter]  By this time, I’ve got to say that Marchello was not popular with either the faculty or the board.  It may have been a matter of style – I don’t want to make judgments – I do want to make judgments, but I won’t.  [Laughter]  But he was…  Paul Schollaert and I were at a meeting of the National Association of Colleges of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta and had been in a meeting.  We got back to the room, and Paul’s wife had called him.  He called her back and she gave him the news that the board had dismissed Marchello, and so Paul and I went down to the bar and had a drink.  [Laughter]  I heard later – whether this was right or wrong, I won’t say – but I heard later that a group of the faculty in Arts & Letters gathered in the conference room on the 9th floor and celebrated.  One of them actually went around claiming he was forming an organization called FAT – Former Atheists of Tidewater – because there has to be a god.  It may have been totally unfair. Anyway, that was the general feeling.

So, Spong came in to a difficult situation, a very difficult situation, a tense situation, because Marchello did have his supporters too.  And he handled it with humor and tact and a real understanding of people.  And he was honest, totally, and he was straightforward.  I would say he’s the finest person we’ve had as president.  He also knew enough, because although he had been Dean of the Law School at William & Mary, he was basically a lawyer and a politician, and he wasn’t really an academic.  But he knew that.  So he brought in as his assistant, the retired Provost of William & Mary, who happened also to be a good friend of mine from my Provost days, and who was also a very sane and calm and sensible and honest person, a straightforward person.  It just brought stability. It brought a feeling of hope for the university again.  He was wonderful in that position.  And he was wonderful in Richmond of course because he had all the right connections; he knew the Virginia way of doing things.  And he did an amazing job of fence-mending up in Richmond.  I can’t say anything bad about Bill Spong.

Vaughan:  So that made Koch’s entrance in 1990 probably a little easier.

Burgess:  Oh, much so, much more.  By that time, the university was ready, I think, for – I mean Spong in his position couldn’t really start any new initiatives or do any major planning or do anything like that.  So the university was ready for somebody to come in and give a tone and give direction to the institution.  And Jim Koch was highly qualified.  He had literally written the book on being a college president, and he was indefatigable worker and took everything – not very good at small talk – but took everything very seriously and did everything with conviction.  Other people didn’t always agree with everything he did, but I certainly always respected his integrity and the way he was operating. 

Vaughan:  How did he work with you as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters?

Burgess:  Uh, he was supportive.  And, I could certainly talk to him and work with him.  And he knew what he could do and what he couldn’t do.  I’ll go back to that incident of the picture of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson – of course the president’s office got all kinds of calls on that too.  And basically he said exactly what a president should have said.  He said “this is a matter of the artistic freedom of the art department.  I’m not going to interfere with it.  I myself am not going to go see the show – I’m not interested in it.  I may not approve of it, but I respect them.”  He handled it, I think, just the way it should have been handled. It calmed down; whereas, it’s kind of a contrast to the Gadfly incident back in the 60s because it could have gone that way.

Vaughan:  So, in 1994, you announced your plans to retire and to teach part time.  Can you talk about that decision?

Burgess:  Well, yeah.  As I’ve said, I think there’s a limit to the number of years one should be in the same administrative position, and I’d really overstayed that limit.  I’d been in the Dean’s office for 10 years.  And I did get to the point where I think I actually remember hearing myself say “We tried that five years ago, and it didn’t work.”  [Laughter]  I should say by the way that by this time Paul had left to take the position at Illinois State – Paul Schollaert.  I had appointed Janet Katz as Associate Dean, who also was extremely, extremely efficient, and still is.  That’s one of my appointments that has lasted.  So I knew that there would be continuity in the office, that she could handle… she knew everything because that was my system with associate deans to tell them everything and she knew everything that needed to be known.  I was just lucky because she spent two terms as acting dean since then.  At 65, I really didn’t think there was much chance of my going out and finding another job, and I had kind of missed…  I had continued to teach a class a semester while I was dean, but I had to sort of do it with my left hand, and I wasn’t able to concentrate on it very much.  So, the idea of getting back to teaching appealed to me too.  And, it didn’t hurt that there was an extremely good retirement package available that year.  [Laughter]  So, I decided…  I guess I should say one other thing, to be honest about it.  I had kind of gotten convinced that there really wasn’t any other major initiative that I could succeed in as Dean.  That the things I had wanted to do, I’d either done or found that I couldn’t do.  And Jim Koch had made it clear that he did not see the university as taking a major… making a major mark in the arts.  He was more interested in the sciences and other areas of development.  So, I didn’t see anything really that I could build any more.  Maybe another person could, but I didn’t see anything that I could.  So, all of those kind of fell together.

Vaughan:  And you had a lot of accomplishments, you had a lot of challenges -- what would you say was your happiest time as Dean.

Burgess:  Oh, there were a lot of happy times.  It was really a very satisfying… in fact more satisfying than being provost really.  Not as satisfying as being a senior faculty member, but more so than being provost.  Obviously the height of the arts work, that was great; and renovating the facilities; the affirmative action business was great; and the development of the honors program, and all of those things.  But, the “moment” was a personal moment.  I had the opportunity of awarding a Bachelor’s Degree to my daughter.  As an actor, I always made something of a performance of commencement anyway.  People joked with me about it because I, as Dean of Arts & Letters, I was always the first dean to come up.  And, so I would always make a big gesture and say “Will the candidates from the College of Arts & Letters please rise.”  This time – this was in Scope, we’d been holding commencement in Scope, so everybody was there, huge thing – this time I said “Mr. President, I have the honor of presenting these candidates from the College of Arts & Letters, including Elisabeth Owen Burgess.”  [Laughter]  I had not told anybody I was going to do this.  I hadn’t told her.  I certainly hadn’t told Joe Marchello, because he probably wouldn’t have wanted me to.  But, nobody complained.  It was great fun.  She went on to… she had had a wonderful experience here – Karen Polonko in the Sociology Department had kind of been a mentor for her and she’d also worked with Anita Fellman in Women’s Studies.  And Karen helped her get into the doctoral program of the University of Southern California.  She ended up getting her doctorate there.  She’s now a tenured faculty member at Georgia State and doing very well.

Vaughan:  Is this in sociology?

Burgess:  In Sociology.

Vaughan:  So, wrapping up the 80s and 90s, I have to ask you about your arts involvement.  You were active in the Norfolk Arts Commission, Virginia Opera Board, and other philanthropic groups.  Can you talk about how you saw your role in the community in that regard?

Burgess:  Well, the Norfolk Commission of the Arts and Humanities was one of my great pleasures.  And that continued after I retired.  I stayed on that Commission until five or six years ago, I think, when they finally decided that Minette Cooper and I, who were the two remaining members who had originally been appointed when the Commission was created, had been on there long enough and they should put a term limit on it.  That gave me an opportunity not only to meet with the other commissioners, who represented kind of the power structure in many of the arts areas in town, but also to get to know all of the arts organizations in the city, because of course they had to submit their recommendations and make presentations to us to be invited to everything.  And so I really felt that I was on top of what was going on in the arts in the city, able to enjoy it, able to support good things and new ideas.  I got the most satisfaction out of that.  I’ve always been interested in opera.  I was a supporter of the opera from the first performance of Traviata that Peter Mark did over 25 years ago.  But the Opera Board was not a particularly interesting thing to do.  Pretty much all the decisions are made by an executive committee – the Board is sort of just to talk to.  As a matter of fact, I just resigned from the Board a month or so ago.  I just didn’t… I felt I was not contributing that much there.  I still support the opera very much.  And I just wandered in and out of other activities from time to time.  I’m not a big joiner, but I got into things from time to time.

Vaughan:  Ok.  I guess now we just have some overall questions to ask.  If you look back at the English Department over the last 55 years, what would you say were some of the most important events or changes in the department?

Burgess:  Well the changes were of course enormous.  I came to a department which was basically a community college department, teaching composition and introduction to literature.  We now have a department which encompasses professional writing, a major creative writing program, there’s an MFA program that runs a writing affair every fall, a significant linguistics program, which offers a Master’s degree in Linguistics and trains teachers of English as a second language.  The English department has, like other academic departments, taken a major role in teacher preparation.  And, rhetoric has developed, which was nothing in my day, has developed into a major program and is actually the basis of a PhD program, because the department‘s now finally got a PhD.  So, and the faculty in size and quality has increased commensurately in that period.  In literature, it’s gone past me in various ways.  The big emphasis in the last 20 years in literary theory is something that I’d never heard of when I was in graduate school.  I sort of am representing the old literary studies in the department and I think some people appreciate that someone with the old kind of training is still there, doing some teaching there.  Of the chairs, I’ve mentioned Ed Stephenson from the 60s; Phil Raisor certainly later on was the one who created the creative writing program and made a big thing out of the creative writing program; Jeff Richards who just retired, stepped down as chair after two separate periods of times has helped strengthen the literature side of the program.  There’s been a lot of good people there.

Vaughan:  Ok.  Can you make any general statements about how students have changed since 1955 – their abilities, their expectations, any other characteristics?

Burgess:  Well I’m not one of these people who say, “Students aren’t what they used to be.  In my day, they were smarter and knew more.”  Well, they didn’t know more, they knew different things.  I don’t see…  I think in fact we’re getting a somewhat better qualified group of students as our admissions requirements have gone up.  We were initially an open-admissions institution, and now our requirements are going up, so some of the lowest rank is no longer there.  That may change with football – but, anyway….   One of the…  obviously the electronic revolution has changed an enormous amount – as of course it has with library work too – in what students know, and what they do, and how they communicate, and how they gather information, and all the rest of it.  It’s very different.  One unfortunate thing, but it’s understandable, is that I no longer have any students who aren’t working.  Now, originally, as an urban institution, we had a lot of working students anyway.  We were not a country campus with people having been sent off there by their families so they wouldn’t have to do anything.  We also had a group of what you’d call “regular students” who were being supported by their parents in college.  That just doesn’t exist any more.  So, I have to work with students who have work obligations, family obligations, and sometimes they have to take a bit longer to complete degrees.  That’s a difference I think.  But they’re just as bright as they always were.  They’re just as nice as they always were.  I just enjoy being with them.

Vaughan:  Well that’s good, and that points up the fact that even though you retired in 1994, you’re still teaching.  Do you want to talk about the current course?  Do you just teach one course?

Burgess:  Right now, yes.  After I retired I tried a lot of different things. I even taught some of the introductory honors courses.  I created and taught some courses for the Master of Arts in Humanities program, sort of integrating literature with history and other areas.  I even taught some courses in women’s literature, but now I’ve kind of focused back on one thing that I think that I can contribute that there isn’t anybody else in the department that can right now.  And that is comparative literature of the older periods.  We’ve got lots of good people who can talk about post-colonial literature, who can deal with contemporary literature in an international setting.  But, there aren’t very many people who -- there isn’t anybody really, maybe one -- who can really deal with the Greek and Roman classics, the ancient Tang dynasty Chinese poetry and things like that.  And so I’ve kind of developed a niche in that area of the department, which I continue.  I’m happy to say that up to now, my classes fill, so….  I keep going at it.

Vaughan:  How do you feel that you’ve developed as a teacher over the past 50 years?

Burgess:  I can’t [laughter] I don’t know.  I mean obviously a lot of rough edges have been worked off.  I made all kinds of mistakes in the early days.  On the one hand, being too palsy-walsy with the students and not getting the respect – on the other hand, being a little intellectually arrogant toward them and not being at ease.  I think right now, I’m a lot more at ease in the classroom.  I still emphasize many of the same kinds of literary values and the relationship of literature to society, which I was interested in back then.  One thing I can say probably has nothing to do with me or the students, but just for the passage of time.  When I first started teaching, I was practically contemporary and maybe a little bit too much fraternization might have been expected.  Then I became like a parent, and what student-age people think of their parents.  Well, now I’m like a grandparent, or even a great-grandparent.  And, you know, so I can have a nice relationship with them.  It’s a different kind of thing.

Vaughan:    Do you have plans to ever stop teaching?

Burgess:  When the students tell me to.  [Laughter]  I look at the student evaluations every semester and if I begin to see that they’re saying “What is this old fool doing here?”  I’ll stop.

Vaughan:  Ok. Ok.  Now, we’ve talked a lot about ODU presidents.  Can you just make any general statements about their strengths and limitations?

Burgess:  Yes, and a lot of this will be repetition, but I think it may encapsulate much of the history that I’ve been talking about.  The president about whom I’ve totally revised my opinion is Lewis Webb.  I mean, I was one of the rebels in the 60s.  I thought he was dreadful.  I can now appreciate that given the possibilities that existed then, we absolutely needed somebody like him, who could relate to the community, who was not pushing the envelope too far -- because that was not a time when envelopes could be pushed – and who actually had a set of values and a sense of humor.  But he was under a lot of constraints, first by Chandler and the William & Mary crowd and then by people like Governor Godwin and others.  And so he, I think, did a wonderful job.  We wouldn’t be here without him.

Jim Bugg, I’ve said before, I think is the president who was least appreciated.  There’s a building named after every other president except him before Marchello.  But there’s no building for Bugg, and I think that’s a travesty, because in his administration not always diplomatically, not always with a sense of the touchy-feely, he really did pull together the strings to put us in the direction of becoming an actual university, and not just a little community organization.  And I think he should get a lot more credit for it. 

With Al Rollins, Al did have a set of academic values in the background and also a warm personality and sense of humor that certainly fared well.  I think he lost some of his spunk after his wife died, and there weren’t many new initiatives, except he did some good things in affirmative action.  He made some good progress there, but not as much in the way of innovation. I don’t think I want to say any more about Marchello.  Obviously I have a very strong opinion.  That’s too bad. And I of course just talked recently about Bill Spong, whom I admire so much, and about the major contributions that Jim Koch has made, even though they weren’t always in the direction I wanted to go.  But, the professionalism was there and the energy, and by the way the other thing about Koch that I hadn’t mentioned is that I think he helped establish the state-wide presence of ODU much more than the others.  He made a real effort to go out to every legislative district in the state.  He took groups of faculty and administrators out on recruiting trips.  He made a real effort to make this not just a regional southeast Virginia local institution, but one of the universities of the state.  So I think he did a fine job on that.  I did not know Roseanne Runte that well, and I really don’t have an opinion.  John Broderick, I did know in his previous job and liked and admired him very much, but I really don’t have any way of judging him as president.

Vaughan:  Ok.  Have you reevaluated your initial feelings about some of the issues you faced during your time on campus?  And, if so, how?

Burgess:  Well, I’ve already mentioned that I changed my mind about Lewis Webb in many ways.  I think being Provost and also being active in general education and other areas gave me more of an appreciation of the roles of the sciences and the professional colleges.  I formed some, you know, strong friendships, particularly with some of the Engineering deans and some of the people in Engineering.  I think I said… it has broadened me.  That type of experience has broadened me in many ways.

Vaughan:  What would say have been your chief satisfactions and principal disappointments during your time at ODU?

Burgess:  Well, in terms of satisfaction, I think I can talk of one in a very broad way.  One of the things I feel very happy about is having been a part of the development of the institution in so many ways.  I mean, the fact that I had the opportunity to help build the first graduate program, to help professionalize some of the graduate programs, to do the planning for and development of new degree programs, and building of general education – all of the things that I’ve been involved with over the period – development of a more multicultural institution – all of this I am proud of ODU and I’m proud of the part that I’ve had in it even though obviously it’s been one small strand of many people who have been involved.  We are now...  we’re not an Ivy League school; we’re not even a flagship state university – but we are an extremely credible institution.  We do some things very very well; we’re the most diverse in student population in the state.  And I just feel very good about that.

Vaughan:  How has the university’s role in the community changed over the years?

Burgess:  I don’t know if I can fully answer that.  But when I came here, we were a product of the community.  We were only here because the community demanded it, and we were totally dependent upon community… the local community… basically, Norfolk.  If you look at the advisory boards that Lewis Webb had before separation from William & Mary, you’ve got a picture of the movers and shakers of Norfolk who were there saying “You’ve got to be there.”  Now we’ve developed to the point where we’re one of the largest employers in the area.  We have all kinds of clout of our own, and perhaps are not as dependent; in fact, are able to make contributions ourselves.  So I think there’s a major difference there.  I think we have maybe … we’re not as close to the community as we once were.  But I don’t know that that’s anything that we could have avoided.  I think it might have been inevitable as we became a university standing on our own feet.  The community around us is…   I’m sorry that we’ve lost a little of that sense of urban university that was part of what Jim Bugg and some of the others of us were trying to push, that we were perhaps going more toward being traditional like every other university. I won’t go back to football, but you know the large resident population and other things that go on like that, that sort of made us a traditional university that happens to be in the city, more than an urban university, perhaps.  But not really, because I see in my classes I’ve got many of the same kind of students I’ve always had:  first generation college students, people who come from working, lower class families, and there’s still a lot of the same tradition there. That’s kind of rambling, but that’s…

Vaughan:  That’s ok.  Another important thing to me is that you are an important friend of the library and have been president of our Friends of the Library.  Can you talk a little bit about your involvement with that organization?

Burgess:  Well, can I go back before that?

Vaughan:  Yes you may.

Burgess:  I’ve always been, you know, a supporter of libraries --  obviously, it’s in my field -- and always been very interested in the way in which the library was developing, even the little two-room thing that it was when we originally came here.  I was proud of the fact – I remember telling friends around the country – that when the Division built its first building on its own -- it was not part of the Williamsburg campus -- it was a library, which was the Hughes Library.  Of course I spent…  I moved with the English Department took over the second floor of that building when it first was going, so I was very close to it.  That was when Bill Pollard was librarian.  There was an informality and a closeness there between librarians and faculty as was between faculty and faculty.  Maybe some of it was not particularly kosher.  My brother, for example, my brother Dean, who also had the theater bug, more than I did, had tried to make it in New York City in the theater.  Finally, he decided it wasn’t going to work and he came back to live with my mother and me before I was married.  He couldn’t find a job, couldn’t find a job.  And finally I talked to Bill Pollard and said, “Have you got anything in the library for him, maybe temporarily or something.”  So Bill gave him a job as a receiving clerk.  And he was working with Louise Bethea, who was the cataloging department at that point.  So he would take the books in and put them on the table, and she’d catalog them.  But she taught him about cataloging and she taught him a little bit about library work while he was doing that and he got totally hooked.  So, before you knew it, he ended up getting up a position as a library assistant over in the Portsmouth Public Library and going off to Chapel Hill – in those days you couldn’t do anything by computer – so he went off to Chapel Hill to get his MLS.  And he ended up as Director of Portsmouth’s library system…

Vaughan:  and, still?

Burgess:  Well he’s retired now.  So, ODU Library started him off in his career.  Then, while I was provost were the interesting years of Brewster Peabody which I won’t go into.  And then I was the one who appointed Cynthia Duncan, the first woman to be director.  I think we began to see more professionalism develop.  Cynthia was, uh, Cynthia, but still there was a, I think, a definite improvement.  Of course, the first version of this building was built.  I remember the first of the security gates we ever had – that you went through to check on whether you’re actually taking the books out – were established.  And they were a disaster.  They were made by a company which was appropriately called “No Go.”  We had a terribly time getting that thing up and working, but that was minor.  Of course, good people got appointed, and we saw more and more development.  And then Jean Major of course came in and really built up the professionalism of the library.  I worked with all of these people and had a lot of respect for the library and what it did.  And, I had a number of friends who’d been on the Friends of the Library and wanted to do things to help out – Carole Hines was one of them.  I agreed to go onto the board; actually I almost campaigned for it because I really wanted to see if we could do more, get more faculty involvement too to help with the Library.   And, the term of the current president had come to an end, and they asked me to step in as president, so I did.  And I revised the constitution, revised the committee structure, tried to build more enthusiasm about what we could do to help the library.  I had some disappointments; I really found how constrained we were at fundraising for example.  I had hoped that we would be able to do more in the way of fundraising, but what with the structures that were already here, like the book sale already being not a Friends activity and the constraints from the development office, I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped.  But I think we got some good things started.  It was a fun time.  I’m still on the Board.

Vaughan:  Have you taken on any other projects in your later years here?

Burgess:  Not really.  I was on the board of the cultural alliance for a while, and I’ve popped into theater again from time to time in different ways.  My wife was extremely active in the Generic Theater, and was president of it for a number of years.  I also worked down there and performed down there a couple of times.  That was fun.  But, basically, you know, I’m 81 years old.  I’m winding down a little bit.  [Laughter]

Vaughan:  Is there anything else you want to add to this interview?

Burgess:  No, except that the opportunity to do the interview has been very good for me, and I’ve saved all my notes.  As I mentioned to you before we started, I do hope to actually do a narrative of my own, do some writing of my own.  But if I do that, I’ve got to do some research, because right now I’m only telling you what I remember, and some of it may be wrong, and some of it isn’t happening.

Vaughan:  So, here’s one of those projects you have to work on.

Burgess:  Thank you very much.

Vaughan:  You’re very welcome.  Thank you.  It was very interesting.

End of Part 3 of Interview