First Dean of the School of Education at Old Dominion College.

Q: First, Dr. Fink, I would like to ask you some questions about your background. Could you tell me something about your undergraduate education, at Swarthmore College and the influence of Dr. W. Carson Ryan in your choice of a career?

Fink: I started out as an economics major and then as a student assistant I was assigned to Dr. Ryan, as a secretary. Through his influence he persuaded me to go into teaching, so I switched my major at the end of my sophomore year and took education courses, did my student teaching and embarked upon a career of teaching.

I also followed him later on to do my masters degree, and did my doctorate degree under him at the University of North Carolina. So he had a profound influence on my education and background. In fact he was sort of a second father to me. I brought him here to give the commencement address in 1957 with our first graduation of education majors. He always remained a real good friend. He and his wife both did that.

Q: Could you tell me why in 1931 you chose to move to the Virgin Islands to the junior and senior high school there to begin your teaching career?

Fink: Actually we went in 1928 on the recommendation of Dr. Ryan. They were seeking a principal of a high school down there, junior and senior high school, and I had taught one year and then had had a year with an uncle of mine in the hotel business. After a year of that I decided I wanted to go back into teaching so I walked into the office of Dr. Ryan on the day he received a cable from St. Thomas asking for recommendations for a principal.

I didn't feel qualified after one year of teaching to become a principal, but he said I could do anything that I made up my mind to do, so I set sail from New York in 1928 and arrived there in time for the opening of school in August. I stayed until 1931, when I returned home.

At the time the Navy was transferred out of there and the Interior Department took over the running of the islands. We had some three hundred children in the high school. I established the first eleventh and twelfth grades. Their school had only gone through the tenth grade. We had five children who wanted to go on, and had the ability and had the resources to go on to college. So I established there a program, very similar to what we had at Swarthmore, honors work of only going to class once a week and I divided the year up into three major subjects. In the Fall

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they studied in the junior year American literature and American history and mathematics that year. We had no science because we had no laboratories or anything to do science work. Then we did the same kind of program, only with English literature and world history and college math in the senior year, and graduated those five. It was the first five children in 1931 who had ever graduated from twelve years of schooling from St. Thomas. All five went on to further schooling, so it was a real interesting experience.

We met them only one day a week. They were free to roam the school, and study and work by themselves on a novice program. I met with them once a week to establish their studies so they could go on.

Q: Did you ever have any idea of staying in that job permanently, or did you just think of it as a temporary job?

Fink: No, I didn't think it was a permanent job. I was asked by the Navy to go on from there to the schools in Samoa, but I hadn't been home in three years, hadn't seen my family, and I thought it was time I moved on and came back to the States, if I was going to stay in education.

Q: Your subsequent teaching jobs were in Delaware and Pennsylvania. You taught in a public high school in Delaware and a private elementary school in Erie, Pennsylvania. Could you compare these experiences and did you find yourself at this time becoming more interested in elementary education than any other phase of education?

Fink: I had started out as an English teacher. That had been my major at Swarthmore. I taught English at George School, a private school run by Quakers for one year. Then when I returned from the Virgin Islands in '31, I moved to Glencoe, Illinois and taught English in seventh and eighth grades. I left there to be in the English Department of the high school in Seaford, Delaware. During that course of time I realized that high school students were hard to change their attitudes about things. I felt I had a little more interest in the younger child. You could help mold him a little bit into his character, whereas in high school, their characters are pretty well set.

So it was at that time in 1935 that I moved to Erie, Pennsylvania to head up the Erie Country Day School, which was a private elementary school, with approximately one hundred and sixty students at that time. The school is still in operation and still running as a private school in Erie, and I was there five years.

Q: During World War II you helped establish a school system on the island of Saipan for four thousand Japanese and Korean and Samoan children. Would you recall the highlights of this experience and how it affected your career?

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Fink: Again this was a kind of happenstance. I was trained by the Navy in military government affairs. I was trained for the invasion of Taiwan or Formosa, which really never occurred, so I was changed then to be the educational officer for the military government in Saipan. Before going out to Saipan, I spent one year at Columbia University at the Japanese Language School and Military Government School, and one year at Fort Ord, California in a Japanese Language School. Our job on Saipan was to take care of camp. This had nothing to do with the prisoners of war, who were in a separate camp, the Japanese soldiers. These were children of the civilian population who were caught up in the war, and the military government establishment had charge of seeing that the schools were set up.

The curriculum was very limited. Everything we wrote, we had to write in three languages, in fact four languages, with English. We did have to write in Japanese, Korean, because there were very many Koreans there, also Samoan, who were the native population of the island, really, until the Japanese came. Then in English. So we were very limited in what we could teach.

The Admiral of the Pacific fleet who was in charge of all the works in the Pacific said that no history could be taught. We were not to indoctrinate the children about the history of Japan, the United States, and other things of that sort. So our basic thing was to teach the English language and what geography of the Marianas we could teach, and what little science we could teach. Things of that sort, but not to mention anything about Japan and the history of the rest-of the world. We did-have geography and we could teach a map about the different continents and that sort of thing. But it was, I thought, a very fruitful experience, and I found it to be interesting to me personally because we did a great deal for the children at that time. We had no supplies, everything was done by rote learning and I think this probably sums it up. I was there a little over a year doing this work. Finally the Japanese and Korean children were all returned to the mainland, to the home island. So we just set up schools for the Samoan children and the school is still in operation out there.

Q: After the war you became the director of the Peabody Demonstration School in Nashville, Tennessee. Could you explain what this school was?

Fink: I came back after the war to finish my degree. I was halfway through with my doctorate when the war came along. So I returned to Chapel Hill to complete my degree. I was chosen then to go to Peabody by President Henry Hill, from Peabody College, to be the director of the Demonstration School.

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Demonstration School is like a special school set up like a model school and we had kindergarten all the way through high school with some five to six hundred children enrolled. Just one class of each grade level all the way through. The school was built originally in 1925 at a time when schools in the South were pretty poor. It was set up as a demonstration school or a model school to show teachers who came to George Peabody College for Teachers to see how a model school should be running. The schools they were in, which was nearly true throughout the South, were pretty poor. So, we had better facilities and more equipment. The students at Peabody did their student teaching in the demonstration school and not seeing really what was going on in the outside schools. It was then that I made the decision to give them half of their experience in the county schools. That way they would see how it ought to be done, in the one case, and how it was actually being done out in the county schools.

Q: Why did you decide to come to Norfolk, to the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary in 1954?

Fink: This was a strange decision because I had just returned from the Korean War. I had been recalled in 1951, and I served in the Korean War. I had come home in March of 1954 and reopened my house, which had been rented while we had been away. I settled down again, not in the demonstration school, but as a professor of education in the main college. This opportunity to come to Norfolk was based on a recommendation by a good friend of mine, Dr. William Clemmons, who later became president of Appalachian State College in Boone, North Carolina.

He said they were going to open up a whole new four year program in Norfolk and he thought I might be interested in going there and talking with them. It seemed a challenge at that time. We were pretty well established again in the house and it seemed from March, when we first got there, until August when we sold and came over here, it was kind of futile packing and unpacking. I felt it was a challenge though to set up a whole new program in education and the fact that it was connected with William and Mary was a strong attraction. If it had been Norfolk Community College, I probably would never have left Peabody's because they had a very good reputation for a teachers college in the South. The fact that it was connected with William and Mary was a real attraction at that time, so that was one of the reasons why I came. I thought it would be a good move, professionally to set up a whole new program.

Q: What were your first impressions of the school and the education program as it existed here when you arrived?

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Fink: There wasn't anything here except the first two years of undergraduate education. There were no books in the library dealing with education, there were no education classes taught. So I had to establish a course of study. I thought the basic courses that were taught, such as English, History, and Science were basic requirement courses that any college would offer. President Webb gave me one hundred dollars to buy all the books I would need for the first year I was here to put in the college library. We would have suffered had I not turned over my whole personal library to the college library, because a hundred dollars, even in 1954 didn't buy very many books. Fortunately, I had a rather extensive library, and turned all of those over to the librarian at that time, Mr. William Pollard.

The background of basic education was all right, and we put in the program beginning in the junior year.

Q: Briefly, how did you conceive the program as you had it in mind taking up your new duties. Did you have a lot of specific courses that you wanted to institute in the program?

Fink: I had of course been at a college for teachers, so I knew basic education courses that would be required. I worked out a tentative program of the courses I thought should be offered, such as the Introduction to Education, courses in language arts, the teaching of mathematics. Remember, originally this program was established as an elementary program. The teaching of science in the elementary school, education psychology, such courses as that, we put in the basic program. This program had to have the approval of the curriculum committee which was composed of the faculty here at the college. I also had to be approved by William and Mary in Williamsburg, and it had to be approved at the state level by the State Department of Education. It went through these various steps, and at the time I had had enough experience at student teaching to know that an hour or two at a time in between other classes was not a sufficient kind of program. So we were the first school in Virginia to establish one full semester's work of student teaching- for which they got fifteen credits. I also had learned from past experience that not setting part of the hours for the student to return to campus had been a mistake. So in the establishment of the student teaching program, for the fifteen hours for the semester, -we made three of those hours into a three hour seminar here on campus to which the students returned once a week. In that way they kept some contact with the people here at the college and still had their full time in the public schools.

Q: How cooperative did the school administrators in the Tidewater area prove to be in respect to student teaching and other matters that concerned you? Did you get the impression they appreciated the work that you were doing?

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Fink: Yes, we had very good cooperation with the Norfolk public schools in the beginning. We only went into Norfolk schools for the first year or so. The number of students we had were sufficiently spread around so that Norfolk could take care of them. An agreement was drawn up between the President and the Superintendent of Schools, and no monetary value was placed on this service. This was a service which was considered to be part of professional training by professional teachers in the Norfolk City Schools.

As the program grew, we expanded of course into Virginia Beach and Chesapeake and Portsmouth. Those were the first four systems that we used. Later on we went across the water to Newport News and Hampton. Originally we started out locally and had very good cooperation and I think they appreciated and saw the chance for recruitment by getting these people into their schools. In the beginning nearly all the people stayed right in the Norfolk Public Schools.

Q: I believe you taught a course in community relations. Could you describe that course?

Fink: Well, it seemed to me our students ought to have some acquaintance with the community. Originally, we called it "Home, School and Community". We wanted students to have experience with parent groups. We wanted them to have experience they would have in the schools. We wanted them to see relationships of the schools to the community.

Historically, the schools set up fences around themselves and still do to some extent, but the school really belongs to the community. We tried looking into the various aspects-of social services in the community, the community's impact on schools, the schools' impact on the community, how schools helped the community through the educational program to improve living and other things in the community. So we felt this was a very essential part of the program. Now they're talking in terms of so-called "urban education" and a "inner city core education", but I really think we did those things under the terms of the home, school, and community relationship we had in that course. We brought in outside speakers from the community to tell about the various social services and programs like that they had at that time.

Q: In 1955 you suggested teacher internships. What did you have in mind by that?

Fink: Teacher internships grew out of Dr. Conan's study in which he felt the liberal arts students also ought to be equipped, if they wanted to teach and we thought an internship type of thing, following the completion of their liberal arts degree, in a year's program would earn them the necessary credits for state accreditation to be qualified to teach. This is known in some places as the "fifth year program". California, for instance, required a "fifth year program" in order to be certified in the State of California. The internship program was not used by a great many. They were really able to work all of their courses within the framework of their original 124 credit hours needed to graduate. We had suggested it

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as a possibility for students who wanted to get a liberal arts degree, but still be certified for teaching. So we did have some who did that. We served I think mainly in this type of program to upgrade and establish certification requirements for the many teachers who had been graduates of the two year normal school and who had been teaching for many years, but needed a degree by coming back and finishing their work. I think many people used the program in that way to do that.

Q: In the 1950's there was a much publicized teacher shortage. First of all, did you look upon this thing as a long-term phenomena?

Fink: A teacher shortage is a kind of volatile or cyclical thing. It goes up and down. We were of course by that time, training both elementary and secondary and physical education people because we had the three programs going at that time. I don't think there was any real local shortage. They took nearly all of our people who wanted to remain in this area. The shortage of teachers I think came about because teachers were poorly paid. When I came in 1954, I took a teacher's salary, a beginning salary for something like $2700. Of course this went up as time went on and the salaries increased. But the shortage was mainly because salaries were so low.

I would say some 97% of our original graduates in the first three or four years, perhaps, went into teaching, which was a very high percentage. And most of them remained in this area. Of course, we are a migrant area because of military families and people of that sort who move. About half of our group were older people who were coming back to finish degrees. Half of our people were married. But nearly everyone who wanted a job, could get a job, except perhaps later on in the fields of English and Social Studies, which were very overcrowded fields. The students were warned of this early in the program, that these were going to be difficult fields. We did try to persuade some people to move out of the overcrowded fields.

Now there's really been no teacher shortage. It's just been a case of getting the people to move to the areas where the shortages exist. Even in the fields of Social Studies and English, there have always been jobs that have come up in later August that people could go to, but they're either tied to Norfolk or Tidewater or that sort of thing and hadn't been able to leave the area and consequently didn't get a job in the local schools.

Q: In the 1950's were there more jobs than teachers? Were there not enough teachers around to fill the jobs that were available?

Fink: Yes, that's true. There were not enough teachers. That's the reason the local school systems were so anxious to cooperate with us, because they felt that this way doing their student internship in the schools, or their student- teaching in the schools, they would encourage these people to come into their school systems. So they were very happy to have a college nearby where this kind of work was going on.

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Q: How did you view the Parent-Teacher Association in Norfolk? Did you feel that they were strong or weak and did they do anything to try to raise the salaries of the teachers?

Fink: I don't remember that the PTA did anything outstanding to raise the salaries. I think they were necessary organizations and were always encouraged to work closely with the schools and they were strong in the elementary schools, but not quite as strong in the high schools. There was some feeling that adolescents did not want parents coming to the schools, in fact some of the high schools in Norfolk had no PTA as such. But I think they served a real purpose in the elementary school. I don't remember any concerted effort they went to bat about raising teachers' salaries, or things of that sort to benefit teachers.

Q: In 1955 you made a speech at

Q: In 1955 you made a speech at the Kiwanis Club, and you said that slow learners should be promoted (at least this is what the newspapers said) because there is nothing to be gained by keeping a larger boy or girl with the smaller ones. Could you explain that?

Fink: This had to do with a problem of social promotion which caused quite a bit of controversy, especially when children are moved on and cannot read and cannot do arithmetic, and things of that sort and cause problems in the upper grades. But we also have to look at the fact that children's needs are important. Their social needs are important and when you keep back a boy eight or nine years old in the first grade because he could not read, seemed to me as a futile way of educating the children. My feeling was if you take a child where he is, regardless of his ability of that point, and you move him on so he is with his own social group and can compete in other things on that level. But to have a big boy or a big girl sitting in the first grade, mainly because of reading as a reason for not moving them on, was a futile thing. So we did have social promotion, but many children arrived in a high school and couldn't read or write or do anything very well and special classes had to be set up for them to try to bring them up to date. But there was a great deal of discussion about social promotion. I thought it was important to bring this point out at the Kiwanis Club.

Q: Did you set up any programs for a recent liberal arts graduate to come in the summer and get their teaching certificate? And would this be the same teaching certificate that graduates of the regular education program would get?

Fink: Yes, and this again was part of the idea of the internship program or the upgrading of people who had graduated with a liberal arts degree and found out they couldn't get a job doing what they had expected to do and decided then they wanted to teach. So we did have many students who came in the summer to take the necessary courses provided by the state in order to be certified.

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A good many liberal art graduates, in fact, the education students were 48% teachers. If you add the liberal arts students to that program I would say that approximately over the years 50% of the total number of graduates at the college went into teaching. This is a very high percentage. When I first came Mr. Webb asked me how many students I thought we would have. In most liberal arts colleges, which we were at that time, I said that perhaps only fifty would be a good number, but in all that time the numbers grew and grew so that we are still graduating four or five hundred students a year in education.

Q: You displayed an interest early in the use of electronic media in the classroom. I believe you attended a conference at Purdue on the subject. How did you see radio and television fitting into teacher training and the school curriculum in the 1950s?

Fink: Well, television of course had been established and radio established for a long period of time. I had used radio in teaching as far back as the thirties, for students to tune into certain programs. I'd always been interested in that, because the mass media seemed to me to be growing and television by 1950 had been pretty well established. We were interested at that time in getting children to look at television. I was interested in a program which the public schools were attempting later on in their establishment of teaching by television. We encouraged our students to look at these programs and take part in these programs as well as they could.

I think you have a question later on how they participated in this. We had opportunities to put some of our students over in the Hampton Roads television station when it was finally built, and these students did their regular student teaching, but for a certain part of their student teaching experience, they worked in the studio. They worked with the teachers preparing the lesson. I think any media of this sort is an important adjunct to that, and we did buy later on a television piece of equipment so we could go in and televise the student teachers actually teaching. This was a critique kind of thing that we could actually show to the students and say, "Now why did you do this particular thing, or why did you do that?" We could see them doing these things on television, and this had some success I think in improving the program with television and audio-visual materials.

Q: I would like to ask you a couple of questions about Industrial Arts education. First how it got started at the college and how you found your relationship working with the people in the Technical Institute when you set up the program

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Fink: Let me clarify one thing first. This had nothing to do with the Technical Institute first of all. The Technical Institute was a training program for various mechanics, auto mechanics, or radio repairmen. This was a two-year program set up as an apprentice course. So we had no relationship with them in setting up Industrial Arts. But the public schools throughout the state do have industrial arts programs with the junior and senior high schools. At the time I came to Virginia, VPI was the only school in Virginia offering a course certified by the state for industrial arts teaching and they were turning out about eleven per year. There were some hundred and fifty places available in Virginia for eleven students graduating from VPI.

So it was our thought to set up an industrial arts program. Again with state approval and approval of the curriculum committee. This we established about 1959. I'm not sure of the date without looking it up, but I would think around that year. We hired a man to start the program and brought in a second man the second year of the program. Then I got rid of them because they didn't seem to be doing what we wanted, so we then re-established the program with a whole new staff. But we did and have turned out a good many people and they are always in demand because VPI and ODU are the only two schools in the state who are turning out people in industrial arts.

Q: In 1958 you set up a workshop for kindergarten and nursery school teachers. Did you advocate and work for public kindergartens in Norfolk?

Fink: Yes, of course I had had experience with both by private school in Erie and the Peabody Demonstration School. I myself had gone to kindergarten some fifty years prior in Washington D.C. Only five communities in the state of Virginia had kindergartens, and there was a very active group here called the Tidewater PreSchool Association. I worked with them and tried to help them as much as I could by offering courses and workshops and summer courses to improve their own background in this kind of thing. The only school near us that offered kindergarten education was Hampton Institute under Dr. Powell. In my report to the Board of Visitors in 1953 I recommended that preschool education be offered as a course for certification for teachers and so I did work actively to support kindergartens in this area. Most communities now have kindergartens because the state has contributed quite a bit of money, although we do not have a kindergarten at every school even now in the Tidewater area. I believe this will come in time. Eventually we will have a kindergarten for each school.

The government program of Headstart also was an incentive at the same time to try to bring about kindergarten for the poverty children. I did help with that and encourage it.

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Q: Now I would like to get into your experience in 1958 when the Massive Resistance laws were in operation. You were appointed by the faculty to head a committee to provide for continuation of the children's schooling while their partners filled their teaching posts at the college. I would like to ask you about the school and where it was located, what kind of teaching techniques were used, and what limitations you felt you were having and how successful the program was.

Fink: At the time of the Massive Resistance and the closing of the schools, we did establish a private school in two abandoned homes on 49th street just north of where the Hughes Library is located. The school was open to all the children of high school age who were children of faculty members and staff members. The classes were arranged around the hours at which college instructors of the various subjects were free. The usual high school courses were taught and they were taught by college faculty. We said we had the highest number of degrees by any faculty, but not one of them would be certified by the state since they did not hold a teaching certificate. Needless to say the children did very well and they were all accepted in February when the schools reopened. No one lost any credits and all the conditions seemed to be met when they returned to their public high schools.

I was principal of the school. We held faculty meetings to go over schedules, we had a PTA. We used some of the people from the Phys. Ed. department to have a little intramural program of game playing and that sort of thing, trying to emulate all the activities that students would have in a normal high school situation.

Q: Did the students regret having to go back to their regular schools?

Fink: No, I think they had a real loyalty to their own schools, but they-were grateful that they hadn't lost a semester and have to finish it up in summer school, but we had a little problem along about that same time with our student teaching program. Since public schools did not open in Norfolk, we had to... I had made arrangements earlier in the summer with the superintendents of the other school districts and asked if they would take the Norfolk student teachers. It meant a great sacrifice to some of them because the students had to travel longer distances to go out to Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and Portsmouth then they would have had they been able to stay in Norfolk that semester. The other systems were very glad to cooperate at this time and they took all of our students so no one lost any time.

Q: How difficult or easy was it in the late fifties or early sixties to recruit and build up and retain, a good faculty in the Department of Education?

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Fink: Well, it's always difficult to get a good faculty, what you think is a good faculty, and retain them. I think our biggest obstacle of course was money and perhaps lack of a real interest on the part of administration. After all we were a liberal arts college and the administration was a little more interested to my way of thinking, in the liberal arts students rather than those in the profession of teaching. So our salaries were, we were never allowed as much money as other people were paid in other departments, so it was difficult to get people. Also, we wanted people with experience and this is not necessarily true in other departments. We couldn't take a student who had just received his bachelor's degree and put him into a classroom with teachers who had been teaching for twenty years, and were coming back to finish their degrees, when they themselves had never taught a day in their lives. So it was difficult to find someone who had had a good deal of experience in an elementary school or a high school to go into the courses which we needed to be taught. We had sufficient staff, with a few thin years. On the whole, we had enough people to service the courses that we had and were offering at that time.

Q: Did you have any programs for in service training for teachers already employed in the community?

Fink: I think I've answered that by saying that we had many teachers who had taught for many years come back to finish their degrees. Many of these people were graduates of the two year normal schools and were teaching on a normal certificate, but by 1970 all teachers had to be fully certified by a degree. So there was a time limit on this kind of thing and people were coming back to complete their degrees and get fully certified. We did serve a real purpose for this through our night classes and our extension classes as well as some of our late afternoon classes which they came to.

Q: You made a speech one time that I've heard other people talk about on the subject that men don't go into elementary education, it's mostly one sex in the elementary teaching field. Why did you feel that men were so reluctant to go into it, and did you have any success in attracting men into elementary education?

Fink: Well, originally men didn't go into elementary education because there was a difference in salaries. The elementary school teachers were paid less than the high school teachers, and there was also some status symbol in the idea that "I'm a history teacher," or "I'm an English teacher," rather than "I'm a fifth grade teacher'. This is historically true because almost anybody can teach elementary school, but it took someone with more training to teach subject matter area, such as history or english. So there was a stigma attached to men being in elementary education, "this is women's work". This was long before women's lib came along.

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We did encourage men, especially those in certain areas, such as the field of social studies and in english where jobs were going to be scarce, to go into elementary work. We told them this was their field and there were men who were becoming elementary principals. The way to attain this kind of status was to teach in the elementary field because the state had finally put into practice the idea that no elementary principal could be appointed who had not served at least two years as a teacher in an elementary school. So we did encourage men to go into it, and we had a good many who did go into it, and have done very well over a period of time. Many have become principals, now as I see back over the twenty years, and a good many of these people have gone into administrative posts. But it's still difficult to assure a young man that he has just as much opportunity. There is now no differential in the scale for teaching. Elementary teachers and high school teachers get the same, for the same amount of experience and background. That hurdle has been jumped and we hope that more men will go in, and I think there was a need felt too for the male dominance at least in the high schools and the elementary schools that had always been controlled by women. There had been no men associated with children at that point.

Q: It was mentioned in an article that you foresaw a role that the Education Department would have in follow-up counseling for teachers after they had graduated and completed their work here. What did you mean by counseling for teachers? Would this be a formal thing, or that you would be there if they wanted to come back and talk with you, you would be available?

Fink: Well, right from the beginning we established a follow-up program of our students. We followed them for two years by sending out a questionnaire to their principals asking how they have done and what strengths or weaknesses they felt they had, so we could in effect, change our program if necessary to meet the needs the principals felt these students had. We also had close contact with the students because our group was small and we were continually going out into the schools to visit student teachers. We had really the nicest relationship with our students because when we went to see a student teacher in a school, there was generally one of our graduates from the year or two before also teaching in that school. They were very anxious for us to come and visit them in the school. So there was a close relationship so they felt they could come back and visit with us at any time, or when we were in a school visiting with other student teachers, we could come and talk to them and help them with their problem. After two years we felt that they were on their own. The Southern Association asked that question and in our Southern Association study we were able to tell them that we did follow up on our students for two years. We were always there for counseling at any time. A student could come in after school and be free to

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talk over a problem that he had. All of us on the staff tried to do that kind of thing. We felt it was important for us to have this close relationship with a student who had graduated from the college.

Q: How-often do they have to renew certificates and you participated in that and aiding them to renew certificates, didn't you?

Fink: Yes, the early certificates were ten year certificates and they had to take six hours of work which could be in anything, although the principals suggested things that they could take. This has since been changed, and the certificate is now a five year certificate. The requirements for such have not been changed, it's still six hours of work over and above their degree. So we didn't do anything extraordinary about this.

Q: In respect to the practice teaching I wondered if there was any discussion over whether or not to go into the private and parochial schools, because I know there is teaching done at Norfolk Catholic and perhaps some of the other private schools, Was there any opposition from the department to students going in there?

Fink: No, there was never any opposition to it except there was a state requirement that we were a state institution, many state funds were being used, and many of our students were on state scholarships which meant that they had to repay their scholarship by teaching in the public schools. So our students were approved for teaching only in those schools which were approved by the state, and in the beginning the private and parochial schools were not approved by the state as such. So those students especially who were on state scholarships had to do their student teaching in the public schools. Also we had no standards for private schools, so we had no way of knowing whether our students would get as good of experience as they would get in the general public schools which they would have to go to eventually. The restriction was really a state restriction at that time, I think this has since changed and students now are teaching in many private schools.

Q: What kind of reports did you get back on the first class and maybe the second class of graduates that you sent out into the community?

Fink: We've always had a very good report on our teachers on the whole. This follow-up of two years has been done on every class, and we've checked through the reports as they've come back. They are sent out in the summer following their first year of teaching and in the summer following their second year of teaching. We check off the comments made. Those who seem to fall short of certain things, in the early days when numbers were small, we sent for those students and talked over their problem and tried to help solve their problem. We have encouraged them to seek guidance and counseling through their own school, through the principal and through their supervisors if they had some real difficulty. Some of the reports were negative and some reports indicated that

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some few students were let go in the middle of a term. Some students had discipline problems, and things of that sort, but on the whole I would say that ninety percent of our students were doing very well and better than average for beginning teachers.

Q: One thing that struck me from reading the paper especially since I have known several recent graduates from the School of Education and the problems they've had in obtaining a position was that back in the late 50s apparently you encouraged, and the City of Norfolk cooperated, by sending your own graduates, or actually seniors before they took their degree. Was Norfolk given first choice in this or was it just that the school was in Norfolk?

Fink: No. Probably in 1958 we established a placement office. This' was at a time when Mrs. Lippincott was in charge of public relations and she was getting ready to set up a placement office for students in business and other areas of the college. We talked it over and we decided in education we would help place our own teachers and run our own placement office because we had their records and we knew the students very well. We also had a close relationship with the supervisors and the people in the schools with whom we worked in the student teaching program.

So it wasn't a case of Norfolk being first in this. Recruiters came from the five Tidewater areas on a regular basis. Eventually Norfolk stopped coming and Virginia Beach stopped coming because the numbers got so great that they felt it was easier for the student while he was teaching out at Virginia Beach and in Norfolk to go directly downtown to do this. Recruiters came from all over the state and from many other states. We've had recruiters from Indian reservations in the West, and from Boston and Philadelphia to interview our students. So it was simply a program that just grew out of the placement office which we maintained in the School of Education. This was abandoned in June of 1973, and moved into the general placement office so there is no longer a teacher placement office.

Q: Could you discuss your connection with the Norfolk Chapter of the education fraternity, Phi Delta Kappa?

Fink: Let's say I'm the oldest living inhabitant, probably. I'd been initiated into Phi Delta Kappa at the University of Pennsylvania following my graduation from Swarthmore and I had maintained an interest in it. I had been president of my chapter in graduate school at the University of North Carolina and in about 1961 Dr.. John Long from the Mathematics Department had just returned from graduate school having received his doctorate in Mathematics Education and had been initiated into Phi Delta Kappa. The two of us got together and the headquarters sent us a list of people

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who lived in the Tidewater area and we began to work on getting those few together and finally we set up a field chapter that has been running continuously ever since. We have monthly meetings throughout the school year. For the last few years we have been having them at ODU. In the early days we used to move around from one school district to another because we came from both sides of the water. Newport News and Hampton had a group and sometimes we would meet over there, and sometimes we would meet on this side. It is an honorary educational fraternity and most school people and school administrators are members. It's always good to get together and talk over the problems and study educational problems. We have our field chapter on the campus, in a continuous state I think it will be from now on.

Q: You were an enthusiastic advocate of the year-round school. I found a speech and also a letter that you wrote to the newspaper about this. Could you explain why you took this position and what are the advantages of such a schedule?

Fink: I became interested in the all-year school about 1933 when I taught in New York in a school for problem children, in the summer. This was a school really set up to take care of some children who had caused difficulty during the winter session and I found it amazing that New York City would turn out a million children in the summer and have the schools all locked against them except for the few little classrooms or the play spaces we had to use for the play schools. When I returned to graduate school I decided I would look into the all-year school because it seemed to me important that schools be open.

A school business is a big business. Billions of dollars are invested in plants which are closed for the summertime. At least it was at that time. I believe now that people are beginning to come around to this idea of the all-year school, but they are still fumbling and still not really understanding the basic philosophy of the all-year school. I wrote my Masters thesis on the all-year school in 1942, and I have been interested in it all these years. Many schools were operated on an all- year basis long before that time. Schools in Allequipa, Pennsylvania and Nashville, Tennessee were open all year round.

Originally schools in the colonies ran all year round. It was only when we became an agrarian nation and we moved farther westward and schools were far and help was needed on farms that the school term was shortened. So, historically there is some basis for going to school all year round. The early schools that tried it used it as a space saver kind of thing, which is what I think Virginia Beach is doing right now in their indoctrination program on this kind of thing. But basically the schools ought to be open all year. It ought to be a community center which it no longer is. It ought to be there to serve the needs of people

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on a year round basis. I cite as examples of our own Maury High School here in Norfolk which has gym facilities and a library, yet across the street from Maury is a public library which opens at the time Maury High School closes. Two or three blocks away there's a Boys Club which opens when Maury closes. When all these facilities are already there and could be used by the general public to serve the area, but most people just don't have that philosophy. Parents object to it, teachers sometimes object to it, and yet teachers are crying that they can't work all year. They're only paid ten months of the year. They need to seek other jobs. If school were open all year round, those who wanted to teach, could teach and those who didn't want to, wouldn't have to teach. Parents object sometimes because they want all the children off at the same time. Well, our life patterns have changed now. Schools used to be closed in the summertime and that was vacation time. But now many people take vacations in the winter and many people would like to be able to take the children to Florida say for a quarter of the year. Schools are no longer hot; they're air conditioned. There are just many, many reasons for the operation of a school on a year round basis, but people have to understand the basic, philosophy of it as an enrichment program. Or even as an accelerated program for students going into professions like medicine, dentistry or law which require extra years. To finish high school in eleven years instead of twelve years and gain a year would be advantageous to many. There are many reasons why a year round school year would be beneficial, but people will have to see this and have to experiment with it enough to really make it worthwhile. Our college goes all year round, and there's no reason why children can't go to school all year round. There is no vacuum in the summer. Learning doesn't stop in June.

Q: In 1961 you were successful in having the Education Department accredited, elementary, secondary and physical education. What was the accrediting body and was the accreditation study a thorough one?

Fink: Well, the accreditation comes from the state and at that time it was done by the Division of Teachers Certification for the State Board of Education. Now there are more accrediting boards. There is an accreditation board for elementary schools, for instance and there is a board for the accreditation of high schools. These things have come out of the Southern Association of Higher Education and accreditation takes place through these associations. I think the study of the program is a study internally by the faculty of the school offering the program and by the state on the basis of its recipients of the degrees of the institution, so these programs were all approved by the state at that time and as far as I know we've never had any difficulty in getting accredited. Now we have two or three

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accreditation kinds of things. There is a State Board of Higher Education now which must approve all our programs that are offered in colleges. We have also been accredited by the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges. We also have an NCATE accreditation. These are periodic accreditations and are renewable from time to time so the programs must be kept up to date and in line with the standards that are set for them. At that time the original accreditation was done by the State Board of Education.

Q: In 1962 a workshop was held on materials and methods and the practical arts for the mentally retarded child in the classroom. I was wondering if there was any beginning in your tenure as chairman or dean toward offering a degree in special education?

Fink: The workshops were begun by 1961 or 1962 in order to help the people who were working with special education classes in the city schools to gain accreditation from the state. No classes had been offered in this area locally, so we did offer them as workshops and brought in people from the outside and these continued up through 1964. We offered one or two each summer, enough to allow these people enough variety. Also the state accreditation for special education could be taken into account. In my report to the Board of Visitors in January 1964 the whole area of special education and preschool education was offered to the Board as suggested programs. These were things to be offered which we felt on a regular basis and they subsequently have been offered. So we do now have a Department of Special Education and we do have a Department of Early Childhood Education, and I think these things grew out of the work we did in the workshops, and the recommendations made to the Board of Visitors at that time.

Q: Politically, you sponsored the Young Republican Club on campus. Did you see yourself as a conservative politically and did this tie in at all with your philosophy of education?

Fink: Well, I'm conservative I think and I have been a Republican all my life. But when I moved to Virginia I found there was no Republican primary, there was no registration by party. In fact there was only one party at all, Democrats, in Virginia, so I worked with a few people in the community to try to arouse interest in a second party. At the time the students came to ask me to be the sponsor for the Young Republican Club, I suggested they go to someone in the History Department, but they said, "They're all Democrats, and we can't get a sponsor out of the Democrats." So I assumed the job at that time and helped them organize a little bit on that. I'm still Republican and basically I am conservative.

Q: In 1963 the School of Education was created and you were appointed the first dean. Did you find that your duties were any different

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than what they had been as Chairman of the Department of Education?

Fink: Well, the duties were a little different. There was a good deal of organizational work to be done and a great many meetings to be attended by the various deans. Yet we all had some teaching responsibility. I was not interested in being dean of a school. It was mainly due to the fact that it was going to be a twelve month job and I wanted to reserve the right to myself to be able to take off any summer I wanted to. I didn't really want a twelve month job -every year. I had really had it up to that point for ten years and I was very glad to turn it over to someone else to operate and run. I think it was important to establish the schools when President Webb wanted to establish them and so I didn't find that my jobs were any different. I was still teaching classes, I was still running the teacher placement office, and I was still running the curriculum laboratory. I was doing all the things I had done before and in addition was attending a great many meetings that took up a lot of time in getting the school set up and getting it organized and things worked out. So I was very glad to turn it over to Dean Franklin Ross Jones who followed me in 1964.

Q: You served on the Academic Council in 1963 when it was formed in that year. What were its functions?

Fink: The Academic Council was simply made up of the deans, really, to approve programs. You see no graduate courses had been offered and it was time a group would get together. So heads of departments and the deans formed an academic council to pass on new programs and authorize programs to be submitted to the state for approval for the graduate level.

Q: You also served that year on the ODU Graduate Council, at the time when they decided what would be the first areas of concentration for a masters degree. How did you decide which areas should offer the graduate degree and if you yourself had any problem in justifying the degree in elementary education?

Fink: Mainly the problem was twofold: one was staffing; having the money to staff and having the right number of people with proper degrees in their field; and the second problem was the status of the library. Our library was not really strong enough all the way through to approve all the graduate programs that were presented and wanted to be offered at that time. So the Graduate Council had to decide which programs could be utilized and we had been well established in education, elementary education and we felt this was a program we could sponsor. We had enough staff at that time and people with degrees who could do the work in that, or we had access to people who had the degrees. On an evening basis. We could allow teachers to come in the evening to complete their work on degrees. So I justified the elementary program on that basis. We had the staff and could

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do that and the President promised at that time that we would build up the library as fast as we could. So I think we were able to manage that problem.

Q; Did you outline a specific purpose for the masters program in elementary education? Was it just to go deeper into the subject than the bachelors level or were there any new dimensions that you might go into?

Fink: We went deeper into the program. We offered some different types of courses to strengthen the students' undergraduate program. In the original setup we also prescribed a thesis to be written. This has since been done away with by using projects or other kinds of things, but not the writing of a thesis. This was put in because it was also a requirement of William and Mary for a masters degree and we were still affiliated in a way with William and Mary so we patterned our program pretty much on the program being offered there. I think those things have been changed now so there are other things being used than a thesis.

Q: You indicated that you were not too satisfied with the post of dean. The newspaper that I read said that you had stepped down because of illness. Were there many reasons why you stepped down so quickly from the deanship or was it just disenchantment with it?

Fink: I was ill. I had diabetes and I was in the process of losing weight. I also knew at that time that my wife had multiple sclerosis and I felt that she and I could not carry the burden of the job of being dean on an all year basis. So I really felt that I should step down and I was approaching the age of sixty, in fact I was over sixty at that time, and felt that a younger man should come in, I had-five more years to serve and I thought somebody else ought to come in and establish the program he wanted to put in and would have a longer time to serve.

Q: During the time that you had left, you were Chairman of the Department of Elementary Education and I noticed that you didn't give as many talks or seem to become as involved in the affairs in the community, at least from the press notices. Did you feel that perhaps that was the province of the dean and you would be competing with him or something of that sort?

Fink: I suppose it was just a declining interest in the whole program. I did think that it was the province of the dean to do those things and he was a new person and I think new people are called in to bring new ideas and things of that sort. I faded to the background purposely although I'm sure I spoke wherever I was asked to speak. Maybe by that time the newspapers weren't reporting my speeches anymore since I was no longer a dean. But I felt it was towards the end of the program for me as far as I was concerned so I probably wasn't getting out and doing as much as I had earlier. I think that's generally true when you move into a community and then towards the end of some of the years, people have heard you so they don't hear you again.

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Q: Could you give me your estimate of the School of Education in the eleven years or ten years since you retired as Dean?

Fink: Well, it hasn't been ten years since I retired, but yes it has been since I was the Dean. I think they've made tremendous progress. I think that Dean Jones put into implementation many of the things that were recommended in the letter to the Board of Visitors in January 1964. I think the speech and hearing center which was being built before he came was opened and at that time special education and the early childhood education programs were established. He was very instrumental in getting the Lions Club to complete the building which had been started by the Kiwanis Club of Norfolk. They put the programs in for people with hearing and speech problems. I think the graduate program started really under his impetus because they had no graduate programs until he came in the summer of 1964, So the whole graduate program progressed really fast under Dean Jones. The plans for the new building had been authorized and I served on the committee but Dean Jones really worked on that program too. I also served on the committee for the selection of the new president. I think the program has moved along and then following Dean Jones came Dean Tonelson and the program added the Army Reserve Training Corps and the curriculum library was set up and established from the beginnings that we had made back in the early days. I think with the coming now of Dean Newell I noticed a great deal of change in programs and areas of instruction and a whole new framework of setups by committees and things of that sort which would naturally come about by the larger number of faculty they have. After all I started with myself, then added one person then added another, dropped back one, then added two or three. But when you get fifty, sixty to a hundred people now it is a big job and it has really grown by leaps and bounds in the ten years since I have been away from it.

Q: In everything I have seen the education field seems to be in a great crisis today because of the vast oversupply of teachers in elementary and secondary education as well as college teachers. Could you discuss how we might alleviate this problem? Is there any solution that you can see to what could become a very grave national problem in the next few years?

Fink: I don't believe there is a great of shortage of public school teachers as we are led to believe. I think there are many people not going into teaching because of the problems with education at this time. The problems of busing, the problems of financing, of unions and strikes have driven people out of teaching. I think there's still a need for good teachers: people who are really interested in children and want to work with children.

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But they're not going to work in conditions in which they find themselves today. Many of our people who start out in teaching give it up because conditions are such that they do not want to work in it. As far as the college teaching is concerned, I know very little about that because I never had much experience in placing or locating people in college jobs. So I don't know whether there is an oversupply I'm sure there is in some fields. Good people are still probably hard to find. I think there are lots of people who want to teach but aren't really interested in doing what it takes to be a good teacher. We always had a saying that the worst college teacher was the young PhD who never taught a day in his life, who starts out to teach without any background at all for teaching. I think this probably drives a good many people out of teaching, that and the salary sometimes, although salaries have increased a great deal over what they used to be. I've no solution to the problem. I still think there are teaching jobs available to those who really want them, but they have to go, they have to be mobile. They won't always find the jobs they want right in the community where they live.