Interview with
DR. HEINZ MEIER

Interviewed by Kim Snyder
April 10, 1981

Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA
Listen to Interview

This is an interview with Dr. Heinz Meier, Dean of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University. Dr. Meier was born in Switzerland and then moved to the United States, where he received his doctorate in history from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1959. Dr. Meier began teaching at Old Dominion in 1960. From 1967-1973, he was the director of the graduate program in history and then was the head of the department from 1973-1975. He has held the position of dean since August of 1975. This interview is being conducted on April 10th, 1981, in Dr. Meier's office. The interviewer is Kim Snyder, representing the Old Dominion University Archives.

Snyder: O.K., first of all, I want to explore your background a little bit. I've got some of the facts but, like for me, I'm a person that's never been outside the United States, very much - never to Europe - and I'd just like some indication of what it was like in your environment growing up in Switzerland. If you could just kind of reminisce on that, what kind of a environment you had.

Meier: Ya, it's not only Switzerland, it's also the time, hmm? The time - pre-World War II, that's the 1930s. The world has changed tremendously since then, and the changes would have been similarly pronounced in this country, as in Europe. What it was, was a society that hadn't become mechanized to the extent that we are nowadays. It is, in some ways, much simpler, still life, with many fewer appliances in the household, many fewer cars around, you know, you walk, or if you can afford it you have a bicycle. There are, of course, trains and street cars. You don't have refrigerators. If you want to have the butter relatively hard in summer, you put it under running water during the night. Milk is being brought every day and it gets sour two out of three or two out of five times a week. That kind of thing, you know, you also are much closer to nature still or to the life of peasants, or just one or two generations removed from parents having been peasants, grandparents, they still have lots of relatives in the countryside, you go there and help in the summer - it comes in handy during the war when they have some things to give you, meat or other foods that otherwise would have difficulty buying because everything is rationed.

Snyder: What was the atmosphere like with Germany next door? Was there much real concern about what might happen in Switzerland?

Meier: There was quite, quite an atmosphere, of course of disgust and also fear because Germany was detested. Hitler was recognized as being a very dangerous person. The Germans beating Switzerland might as well become part of a greater Germany as Austria did, and so Switzerland got prepared for the war. We used to go down to the basements regularly during practice alarms. Put up food down there and have in the attics everywhere have

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sandbags in case firebombs were dropped, and have drills in the apartment houses, and teams designated to do various chores, and rationing early on in the war. There was no love lost between the Germans and Swiss, they had all kinds of dirty names for each other.

Snyder: So at the time the war broke out you were, like, ten years old, and so you remember things.

Meier: When the war broke out.

Snyder: You mentioned your family background had some peasantry in it, what was your father at this time?

Meier: My father was a policeman with the city, with the Zurich City Police force, and the salary was lousy. What he gave for our small family was not sufficient, so my mother worked all the time in the so-called cottage industry, except it wasn't done in a cottage, it was done in an apartment, and she was sewing for clothes manufacturers.

Snyder: It's called cottaging?

Meier: Cottage Industry, that's the term in England, you know, when these kinds of things are being farmed out. Rather than the people going to the factory, they do the work at home. Your're not familiar with that term?

Snyder: I'm sorry.

Meier: In Switzerland, the term is more "Home Industry." So my mother was always sitting behind a Singer sewing machine, always working, day and night. Sometimes the jobs were better, other times piece work, changing for clothes sales, outfits, women's dresses. Anyway, the financial or economic situation wasn't rosy, but of course we didn't suffer for it. And my goodness, we always had enough to eat.

Snyder: You didn't necessarily expect it to be much better.

Meier: No, I mean, what does that mean "much better?" Why should one have meat every day? Once or twice a week meat is fine, you see?

Snyder: In class, you mentioned something about your Puritan upbringing. Could you elaborate on that?

Meier: Ya, you see Puritan is, of course, a misnomer in the Swiss context. It wasn't Puritan--that's not the right word. It was deeply religious because my mother, and at one time my father too, belonged to the Baptists. The Baptists are a very small group in Switzerland. Most Swiss are either Protestants or they are Catholics. So, the so-called "free" churches were really sects and they were looked down upon. My mother was and still is a faithful, believing Baptist. My father at one time was too, not anymore when I grew up. So I went there from early childhood to the Sunday School and participated very intensively. I got baptised myself and went on the youth excursions, proselytizing on street corners, handing out literary literature and inviting them to come to our services so that they could be saved, and conducting small youth choirs in the villages, and so on, singing in the village square (laughs). And you see, if you are a real believer, you do not do the things that are sinful. And among the sinful things when I grew up was to go to a movie theater. I never went to a movie theater. During the war, we finally went to some of the patriotic movies, and then we began slowly to realize it must not be necessarily sinful, to go to the movie theater, or to any other theater, or going to the soccer matches with a somewhat bad conscience on a Sunday.

Snyder: You also mention like in your schooling, I remember one professor who used Newton as an example of -

Meier: Yeah that was our pastor, more or less, you see our clergymen, not in the school itself. Schools were neutral on religion.

Snyder: What kind of schooling did you have?

Meier: It was all public schools. The best schools there are - you see private schools are for misfits or retarded.

Snyder: Do you really believe that?

Meier: Yeah - you see that's how it is in Switzerland. Private schools are for people who are misbehaving and therefore have special problems and presumably are better taken care of in a small private school. Or they are for people who cannot follow the regular course and need special attention, again in a smaller setting. Or are children of parents who do not have time for them and therefore put them into "internaught" meaning, what is an internaught, schools that you send your -

Snyder: Boarding schools?

Meier: Boarding school. But the public schools are the best schools, and everybody goes to the public school.

Snyder: Well when did you come to the United States? I didn't see an exact date in your resume.

Meier: I came here in 1955.

Snyder: For what purpose?

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Meier: I just had gotten married, and my wife and I, before I would settle down in some small place in Switzerland teaching school, you see I was a schoolteacher, so was my wife. We were going to see something, and there was by chance an opening at here at Emory University in Atlanta, somebody was on leave for a year and my wife's sister read about it and felt that if a French teacher is on leave for a year they probably need a replacement.

Snyder: So you didn't come over with the intention of staying?

Meier: Not at all - we came over here for a year. As a French professor down there you also want to learn something, you know, I started almost immediately taking courses in history. You see I din't know English real well, but well enough to follow and read those books. After a year, we decided it was just too soon to go back. We had just gotten over the stage of being completely critical of everything we encountered here (laughs). My wife suggested that I should study for a PhD. They [Emory] didn't have a PhD in French nor in German there, so the next best thing was history, which I had also had at the University of Zurich. So they accepted me into the PhD work, PhD program at Emory. And I decided that one doesn't come to the United States to study European history, therefore, I would do American history, even so I had never had one hour of American history. They still accepted me from the University of Zurich as the equivalent of a master's degree, and I got familiar with all of those things that played a role in American history, took my courses, and within two years, I had my PhD - or within two and a half.

Snyder: What kind of adjustments did you have to make coming from Switzerland to the United States? Was there much of an adjustment as far the society, or was it a pretty easy transition?

Meier: You see its far back and I don't know what adjustments - most things struck me as being somewhat different or strange, that people should pay you a compliment for wearing a certain tie. Some of the food was strange, you know I still don't eat any bread, if I can help it, because the bread is just not - its just not right.

Snyder: It doesn't measure up to the -

Meier: Its just not right, you see its not bread. Its something or other. I mean I eat bread, lots of it, but just to eat a piece of bread with butter, no. While in Switzerland, you would eat a snack, cut off another slice of bread in the evening, there are no loaves here to do that with (laughs). Lots of little things that I kind of have forgotten. We found a very nice Baptist church, we found, of course, the people to be very friendly, open. They, of course, found me to be probably much of the time too critical. It didn't hurt. I always had , of course, my wife with me, and she is a great person, you know ,and she is always positive and helpful. And I think, on the whole, we had no major difficulty in adjusting. About roughly half a year after - no - four months after we arrived here, we had our first baby while I was teaching French, our first child born in Atlanta. It was nice. We stayed with a relative of the husband of my wife's wife (laughs)in an upstairs - it was fine.

Snyder: Now of you course you didn't go have anything like a PhD in Switzerland, but can you make some kind of comparison between your Swiss college experience and your American, as far as the value and quality?

Meier: You see, in Switzerland, you don't have, really, "college." You have the "mittleschule," the "gymnasium" type of thing, and then you go to the university where you study for an advanced degree. The bachelor's degree as such does not exist. I found that the work here at Emory University, graduate work, was more demanding than the work at the University of Zurich, but, in some sense, also more degrading.

Snyder: Could you explain that a little bit?

Meier: Yeah, you see, everything is being checked -- you are being treated like a school child here, you are a grown person, and you have to turn in term papers, and they take tests and give you a grade, right through your graduate work. University of Zurich, no attendance, no tests. In the seminars, of course, you are supposed to write a seminar paper. Toward the end of your study you will have exams, written and oral, but on the way towards it, you are really free. The system here, I think, gets more out of the students because you work harder if your work is checked.

Snyder: So you think that the American college system does bring more? I mean does that -

Meier: You see, what I used to say, and I still think its probably basically correct, that the American young person is far behind the European young person at the end of the public school years, when he is 18. There is

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just no comparison with the kinds of demands that schools make on young people here, that they used to make on young people in Switzerland - to emphasize "used to" because times change over there, too. But, once they enter the university, they catch up fast here. By the time they have their doctorate, I think, people here with their doctorates are the equivalent of those over there with the doctorates. As a matter of fact, doctoral dissertations here are more substantial than doctoral dissertations on the whole, in, lets say, Switzerland or Germany.

Snyder: So you feel pretty favorable about that?

Meier: Yeah - I think it's fine.

Snyder: What guides you, educationally, your philosophy in your position right now, in other words what are you aiming at, what [is the] basis [of the] foundation of the way you think about education that motivates what you do?

Meier: (laughs) What are you looking for?

Snyder: Ahh, well, people have philosophies.

Meier: Do you think, should I tell you I think that the world should be saved?

Snyder: Well thats not necessarily what I'm getting at, I'm saying what, I guess it involves methodology.

Meier: What does one get an education for?

Snyder: I guess so, and how do you get there.

Meier: Why should one study history or philosophy?

Snyder: Thats a good place to start.

Meier: I think a very important element there would be just to, first to do something. Not just sit around and watch the asinine television or something to keep your mind occupied and busy, to make you acquainted with the thoughts and ideas and the work of human beings through history. To make you aware of questions that have been asked and answered differently over the course of time. I imagine in order to enrich your own life, so that you do not just vegetate. I think thats really, I think thats the basic goal of a liberal education.

Snyder: You mention some things that have been changed since you've been in charge, things you've tried to do.

Meier: In charge of what?

Snyder: Being the dean of the school. What things stand out or are most important to you of the things that you've been able to introduce into the program?

Meier: You see, we have gone through various phases here, as the whole American educational system. We are part of the larger whole. When we started out here, I started here 20 years ago, we had a very rigid curriculum. And then in the late '60s, everything was thrown out. So what we have tried is to bring some of it back into some core program of some liberal arts general education, so that the students who come through here would encounter at least some aspects of various fields or disciplines that make up the liberal arts, the sciences as well as the social sciences, the humanities. The School of Arts and Letters, we have increased that to include foreign languages and some of the arts. Its very difficult to see some people think the package should be much neater. And if I was the director of a private school, a private college, and you would have complete freedom, I could put a neat curriculum together. But I would start by having instead of 15 hours a week, having 30 or 40 hours a week. Just put more there because then I wouldn't have to make a choice between philosophy and history -- they would have philosophy and history.

Snyder: Take everything, right?

Meier: Yeah - you see, thats of course another reflection of what used to be done to us. We went to school for 40 hours and had all of the sciences, and years of foreign languages. Side by side, French and English and some Italian. Of course, all the time German, all the time literature and grammar and writing and composition.

Snyder: But does that mean that you feel like, maybe the students don't get enough of a broad education?

Meier: We try to give them a broad education or at least, let me say, to make them aware of the fact that there is something like a broad education. The criticism is that it's not really structured. And indeed, they just nibble here and there a bit and there a bit. And if a course that they are taking is not designed well enough, or taught well enough, then they may lose that, on top of having very little. So it's not possible to squeeze in more because the system is just not set up that way. It's not really possible, in my opinion, to single out the individual courses. Why should one have to take Western Civ and not Introductory Philosophy? I do not think that there are convincing criteria to make one the preferred over the other. Historians will say Western Civ is it and Philosophers will say philosophy. So, in a way the critics may be somewhat right by saying that we educate as we abdicate, we do not fulfill the responsibility by choosing, by prescribing to the student what should go into the package - let him choose. To me its not abdicating, to me it really does not make much difference whether he chooses Western Civ or Philosophy or Literature. Of course, I'd like for him to take them all. But since he's an engineer or business administration person, he cannot take them all. But at least he has had, in one of these areas, access to what we call the Humanities. And if the teacher has done a good job, his interest may have been awakened sufficiently for him to try to go back on his own.

Snyder: What are you thinking, more specifically, in the future? Do you have anything specific you are trying to accomplish, you're looking forward -

Meier: You mean curriculum?

Snyder: The curriculum, yes.

Meier: You see I still wish we could introduce some general language requirement in the whole university, that's probably the one thing. For the rest, I have to try to prevent an undermining of what we have. Every time you start talking about changing the basic curriculum, you open the door to all kinds of possible mischief.

[Snyder: Please turn the tape over at this point and rewind it to the start.

The remainder of this interview with Dr. Meier is being conducted on April 15, 1981, again in his office.]

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Snyder: I would like to finish up, just on a few matters, go back and retrace a couple of matters at least. First of all, some of these associations that you are involved with at the present time, I'd just like to have a little bit of information about those like the Swiss-American Historical Society. Are you still active in that?

Meier: Yes, the Swiss-American Historical Society is probably the one organization I have been connected with where my participation was most important. The Society, which had been founded back in 1927, was practically dead at the end of the '5Os. It was revived in the early '60s. The person who was instrumental in getting it going again was connected with the Swiss Embassy in Washington, and he enlisted my participation from the start. So when it began, it was revived, I was elected the president of it, and I have been the president of it for a number of years - six, seven years. When that person left the Embassy in Washington, I then took over the editorship of the newsletter. I got permission from this University here to have it published at University cost. It is still being published here and I'm still the editor, and we are now in the seventeenth volume of that thing. I had the first sixteen volumes bound. They look very neat. I gave a copy to the library, and anybody who thumbs through it sees how much I had put in there, as president, as editor, as book reviewer. It is quite a substantial piece, and I plan to continue doing that. One of these days I will tell somebody else to ask their university to carry the cost.

Snyder: What kind of activities does the Society do to promote -

Meier: The Society is largely held together by the newsletter. We have an annual meeting and sometimes there are regional meetings. The reports of the annual meetings are also in the newsletter. We try to find things that are worthwhile publishing. So they published a book of mine, a booklet which is the history of the Society at its 50th anniversary. We have a genealogical guide for people interested in doing genealogical research on Swiss ancestors, which is a rather complicated thing. And we also try to make other things available to our members. See, it's all on a voluntary basis, and if you do not have the money to have a secretary or an executive secretary, you do not want the Society to grow too much. So we have around 250 members which is all we really can take care of.

Snyder: Do you miss Switzerland?

Meier: No.

Snyder: You don't visit very much?

Meier: Oh yes, of course I visit it every time I can, which used to be for a while almost every year. But now since I am no longer a faculty member with all of that beautiful free time in summer, I can't really afford go every year, because its not worthwhile, in my opinion, to go to Europe for two or three weeks.

Snyder: It has to be a longer period.

Meier: Yeah, I want to go six, seven, eight weeks at a time. I probably go once every two or three, years now. But, I mean with Switzerland, its always nice to go and visit, but I haven't been homesick.

Snyder: Since you came here and decided to stay then.

Meier: Well you see one doesn't make those decisions--those decisions evolve. We talked about how we came here last time.

Snyder: Yes.

Meier: We traveled down here with the family.

Snyder: I don't remember that, no.

Meier: No - you see, I got a letter from here, telling me that they would like for me to be an assistant professor, I think, for $5,300.

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And Regula, my wife and I decided "yeah, fine, lets go back." We were in Switzerland and had all our furniture packed. We had three children, the youngest one was three months old. We bought a car, drove through France, put it on the boat, came to New York, unloaded and drove down here in August heat. We knew nobody here, almost nobody. There was one former fellow student from Emory here, Dr. Tirro [sp?]. And I started working here, see how things would turn out. That's how things evolve in life. I do not think that many people plan to extent that they sit down and say "this year we'll do that, and next year that, and in five years I want to do that." Perhaps there are those creatures, I haven't encountered them.

Snyder: OK, let me ask about another thing, the World Affairs Council of Hampton Roads. Could you explain that?

Meier: That was something that was carried to me by a former faculty member here who had been involved. That was also defunct--it had gone out of existence. An yet he felt that it would be good for the region to have such a thing and it would be good for the university to kind of spearhead the effort of reviving it. And since we had added the international theme here and had an international programs director, I was willing to do that. And so I became president and we found people to make up the Board, and we started writing letters to prospective speakers and advertised our sessions, and connected them with the university, make use of speakers coming through for the Armed Forces Staff College or our International Programs. And before we knew, within a year or so it was really flourishing again. So I stayed there as the president of that World Affairs Council for two years. I do not think it's good for the same person to be in charge all of the time. As a matter of fact, with the Swiss-American Historical Society I rewrote the constitution and had it adopted that the president may succeed himself only once in a three-year term, because a society that does not have the people to run the thing, that is dependent on just one or two persons, is not worth maintaining, in my opinion. So, after second year of World Affairs Council I stepped down.

Snyder: Is that what it mainly does, it brings speakers in?

Meier: That's correct. You see, we had the ambassador of China and the ambassador of Germany and State Department functionaries and World Bank officials. Its a wide-open field, you know, and there are lots of interesting things going on. You could have an event every week. We had one every month, and they liked our cafeteria food so much so they have a dinner meeting now almost every time they meet!

Snyder: That says a lot for the cafeteria.

Meier: Yeah, you see they are very reasonable there and they have pretty good meals. And of course, you know it tied in with what we did as a School of Arts and Letters with Dr. Weiner with his international forums. So, it was a good coincidence here, it was a good idea of that faculty member to insist that I took it on.

Snyder: So you are still involved with it, its just that you're -

Meier: I'm still on the Board, but I'm not very active.

Snyder: Its not possible to be active in everything.

Meier: Yeah, as I said you know you have to be able to give up some of these things and let others do theirs.

Snyder: OK, lets get back to something we talked about then, before, we covered some of these basic things. You talked about, well, what I want to get into is what you basically have gone through in your thought processes through the years and what you've come to believe, whether you want to call it intellectually, a "World-view" -

Meier: Thats of course very difficult to analyze -

Snyder: Right, can you pinpoint it a little bit? For instance, you talked about your Baptist upbringing, and the activities involved with that, and the things that you believed. Can you pinpoint any time when things started to change as far as your -

Meier: Well you see, the more educated I became, the more I changed. As a matter of fact you see right through graduate school I continued in that mold, I mean down at Emory. I was an active member of the Baptist church, one of the Baptist churches there, in Atlanta they have many of them. I think to my 30s that was, beginning even here, when we came here, its really hard for me to understand how this came, again its an evolution. I imagine if you get involved in history, you know, if you really start studying history you don't see a design. Hah! I don't see a design in it. The idea that somebody

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had a plan from way back and we are a part of that plan begins to be increasingly doubtful. And I know in my earlier years here I used to be more radical in my statements than that. I had some very heated exchanges with colleagues who were still in the old mold. I said that you cannot be a historian and a Christian haha-ha-ha. Which was very upsetting to the person. Just have to jettison that. Have to also jettison, I think, the belief that there is life after death. I just don't believe it anymore.

Snyder: Why is that?

Meier: Because it doesn't make sense.

Snyder: Why doesn't it make sense?

Meier: Because we are dust and we will go to dust. [laughs] Is that a good answer? Its of course not a good answer, its just a flat assertion.

Snyder: Well what maybe, who might have led you to this, I mean -

Meier: Not any one person.

Snyder: Are there people who are influential in your thinking-- any writers or or any thinkers that you maybe admire?

Meier: In general I would think that some of the German writers and philosophers, I'd say and Goethe or Nietzsche, some 20th century philosophers. But again it's not a single individual or a single work. It's an accumulation of reading and thinking and contemplation. I would imagine that I almost would have to call myself an atheist at this point. Which is of course, something one shouldn't say, especially if its being taken on tape and being put in the archives.

Snyder: Thats up to you. You mentioned last time also about the education - I was kind of asking a little bit about your philosophy as to you know why you're doing and you mentioned it was mainly, if I remember correctly, mainly to keep people's minds active, and so forth, so that they aren't, kind of like, degenerating, you know, and developing their abilities. Do you see that as an end in itself for a person, then, or what?

Meier: Yeah what other end is there. What other end is there? You see, it's the end that we get more shuttles up to the skies. Its the end that we see if we could live 150 years. Or is it the quality of life that counts?

Snyder: What is the quality of life?

Meier: Is it the accumulation of money that is the measuring stick? When is life a "good" life?

Snyder: Could you define "good" and "quality"?

Meier: "Good life" yeah, you see again, obviously that has very different meanings for different people. I don't think it's a good life if you have to run after the buck from early in the morning until late at night just so on Sunday when you take an hour's time or so you have some more dollars accumulated on the balance sheet. Money is not worth anything if you cannot use it. What do you use it for--to have a television set in every room in your house? To have season tickets to the Redskins games? The good life is a life that is a combination of work and the enjoyment of work, of leisure and the enjoyment of leisure. In which you have a relatively good relationship to your fellow human beings, especially important to your mate, your children, colleagues where you have a basis for interchange. While you may go fishing, you see, with them, you have to be able to talk about something while you go fishing. Or you also want to meet with them in another context and have to have some basis for intellectual nourishment. So, thats why we go to college, in my opinion, thats what we are doing. Thats why we are teaching history. If somebody also learns of how to improve things thats fine, but thats just incidental.

Snyder: That's not the goal.

Meier: That's not the goal. Not in my opinion, because it's much too dangerous to teach lessons from history because these guys always learn the wrong lessons.

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Snyder: Are there things that can be taught from history?

Meier: Not to be stupid, perhaps. [laughs] But what does that mean, you know? I don't think history teaches, I mean to an extent. You see I think history teaches by example, alright so there are the good guys and the not-so-good guys, or you actually find some instances where you think "Yes this should be imitated" or "No I do not want to be that way." But there is not a general lesson, and certainly no specific lesson. History is for one's enjoyment because there is a natural curiosity about "Where did we come from? What happened that we have the kind of situation we have now? How did it come about we live the way we live?" Its part of a human's interest, I think, to have answers to such questions and history provides them.

Snyder: Considering the background you had, does it bother you, any now, to see the big change that took place in your thinking, that has taken place in your thinking?

Meier: Not at all, not at all. I feel a little bit sorry for my mother, who of course thinks I have gotten off the straight path. However, she cannot say that I have fallen into sin because I'm morally, at least, outwardly as far as people can tell [laughs] I'm as upright and as ethical as any Christian. So she's not worried about that, but she knows that I'm no longer going to church and so on and so forth, and I really do not believe those things anymore, so she continues praying for me, which is nice. I hope she continues for a long time. There will be a big void there once she dies. She's now in her eighties. But otherwise, why should it bother me?

Snyder: Why would it be a big void?

Meier: My mother not being there anymore? Yeah, you know, then I have even less reason to go back to Switzerland.

Snyder: What do you, when you either retire or [laughs] or you die or whatever takes place first, what do you hope is left out of the work you've done, kind of like a legacy?

Meier: I think compared with most human beings, a lot is left. You see, without being - this is just factual, its not looking down or deprecating on others - you see I would say the vast majority leaves nothing behind of anything tangible. As a matter of fact the only thing thats left behind are memories. And when people who do not remember you any more - who remember you also die, then you have been wiped out. And then at some future time, a genealogist may come and find you and then you are a name on a chart. Thats for those who have families that are interested and can trace you. Now, for a historian who has published, for anybody who has published, there are at least things in writing. And if I have written a history on US-Swiss relations in two volumes, the only one in existence, that will stay on until the atom bomb destroys everything and they start from scratch again, in which case all that we have done will be more or less forgotten.

Snyder: What do you think people will remember you for, at this point?

Meier: People who have known me?

Snyder: Well, not just that but I mean as far as your position here, what do you, you know, done -

Meier: Yeah, you see that depends on the, lets say the writers of the history of this University. Dr. Sweeney - how much did he put about me in his history of Old Dominion?

Snyder: Did he do you justice? [laughs]

Meier: How could he? He had too many people to take justice, so I have to be tickled that he mentions me a couple of times. Perhaps, who knows, somebody may write the history of the School of Arts and Letters? In that case, I will appear very prominently. So far, very positively. If things get very bad and they cut our budgets and I get in trouble with my faculty you see, that good image may disappear. But before that happens I will give up the job. So people will remember me, some people will remember me as having been a bastard. If you have 160 faculty members, professors, and you have to make decisions on them with regard to salary increases, with regard to reappointment, with regard to tenure, and you decide against tenure, or against reappointment, and they have to leave in today's situation and have to struggle to find living somewhere else, they blame you - that is me - for it. For them, I'm a bastard, or worse. So there are a few of those.

Snyder: You're always going to find a difference of opinion.

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Meier: But if I do not have the feeling anymore that a clear and decisive majority of the faculty members in this school, and the people who work here, think that I am doing a good job, and that I am at least as good as anybody else who might be in this office here, if that changes I will step down. From one day to the other.

Snyder: I'm not trying to put you in an early grave or anything, but up to this point, has life been worth it?

Meier: Absolutely - it's great! Its marvelous! I don't see how people - practically nobody does not like to live, even if they groan and grumble and complain. Otherwise they would disappear, voluntarily. They wouldn't make every effort to get seven or eight operations, and go through that hospital bit if they wouldn't really cling to life with every fiber. So, even those grumblers and complainers and people in despair still think life is worth living. I haven't had that kind of experience and I hope I won't have it. For me, its great, its great! I also think we'll live in the best of all possible worlds at the best of all possible times. [laughs] What else can you wish? That may change. I hope it doesn't.

Snyder: Some people would ask if you consider yourself an atheist, if a hard time comes - life may seem good now, what about if it isn't so good later?

Meier: What does that have to do with atheism?

Snyder: Do you feel, would you feel like you have any real support or reason -

Meier: You see, you imply that religion gives you support.

Snyder: Or reason for being or doing.

Meier: Why does religion give you a reason for being? In which sense? Christian religion doesn't give you any reason for being at all, except that it says "just suffer through through this veil of tears, the great thing is ahead of you," if you are lucky enough to be among the few elect. Now that, to me, is not the justification for life. Why is life justified by the idea that there will be life after death? It doesn't make sense to me. So religion, you see, as such, I do not think makes a difference on my approach to life. I don't think it really does in most people's cases. It's just something at the surface. Its really the character of an individual [that determines] how he is disposed towards life.

Snyder: Well I thank you for your time.

Meier: Yeah, its of course all kinds of dangerous things that I said, and if you start analyzing them, you probably would need to go further in trying to sort out some of these statements.

Snyder: Well I thank you for being willing to share so openly.

Meier: Right.

Snyder: Thank you.

Meier: You're welcome.

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