ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
with

PROFESSOR EDGAR A. KOVNER

[April 3, 1975]
Listen to Interview

Q: Professor Kovner, could you provide me with some information on your background, your education and what careers you pursued or planned to pursue before you entered college teaching?

Kovner: I have a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from the City College of New York from 1939, and a masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940. I then worked as an engineer for a refining company in Catlettsburg, Kentucky. I worked as a marine engineer for the Navy Department in Norfolk and Washington and as a chemical engineer in some other industries before I inadvertently came into college teaching. That was by way of the special war training courses which were operated by Louis Webb and Lee Klinefelter and I began to teach for them in 1943 and I came to the college fulltime in 1946.

Q: Were there any special circumstances that were involved in your accepting a teaching position at the College of William and Mary in Norfolk in 1946?

Kovner: Louis Webb was starting a technical program here and he needed an individual to handle the refrigeration and air conditioning courses and having worked together he was familiar with my qualifications and I respected him as a person I would like to work for, and he offered me the job at a ridiculously low salary. I said, "If you don't mind, I will have to keep my refrigeration business going on the outside while I do this." He said it was quite all right and I did that for three years until the salaries caught up to the point where the college salary alone was enough to support a family.

Q: Did you teach mainly refrigeration courses when you came to the Technical Institute and was the curriculum geared to producing skilled technicians when you first came?

Kovner: We thought basically of a trade school because in the curriculum we had mathematics, and physics courses as well as the trade specialties and I taught in all those areas. Sometimes there was much as forty hours a week of classes. Among some of the early students in the classes were Bill Thornton who is now a registered professional engineer and head of our electronics department in our technology program. He got his masters in engineering from Old Dominion University. He was in the first class we had.

Q: How diligent were the students you had in the first two or three years here? Were they older people than your average college student?

Kovner: The first class had a seventy-one year old, and they certainly were an older group and rather independent, especially from the point of

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view of a young faculty member. Younger than most of the students. They were quite diligent. They were there for a purpose and they knew what it was.

Q: In 1947 and for three years after that you served as the Lacrosse coach at the College of William and Mary. I would like to know how you became interested in this and how successful the teams were and why the sport did not gain more popularity and was discontinued after the 1950 season?

Kovner: I had been a player all through college and had helped coach the University of Pennsylvania team when I was a graduate student there. I played for clubs in New York and Baltimore and Philadelphia. It seemed like an ideal sport for those in the Norfolk Division, since we couldn't play football since football had been discontinued in 1940 after a season where we lost eight games and hadn't scored a point. So Lacrosse looked like a physical outlet for some of our aggressive male students.

We got off the ground and won one game in the first year. There was harassment all the way. The athletic director didn't want any part of it. He would lock us out of the locker room, and use every ploy he could to try to prevent our playing. He would even discourage the visiting teams in the locker room. We persevered, nevertheless, and the second season we won again one game. Beat the University of North Carolina varsity. In the third year, we had a very successful season playing teams like Princeton, Penn State, Duke, Washington-Lee, and Virginia. Where the other teams on this campus were playing the Norfolk Naval Air Station and naval base teams. We won four, lost six in the final season including victories over the Penn State freshmen lost to the North Carolina varsity, beat Washington-Lee, beat VPI varsity so it was a pretty successful operation for a two-year school.

Then the Korean War came and the man power disappeared off the campus. The lacrosse squad declined to twenty-five to thirty players on the squad. There weren't enough players to have a good team so we very reluctantly dropped it. We had a fine schedule for that last year which included Yale but we had to cancel. We then revived the team as a local club. We played in 1952 with a combined air station team. Then in 1953 and 1954 several of us played with the Richmond lacrosse team, which lost to the national champion Virginia team by one point- Then that ended it in 1954, I was too old.

Q: During the early 1950's you were head of the refrigeration and air- conditioning department. How great was the demand for such technicians in those days? Did the Technical Institute supply enough for the Tidewater area?

Kovner: We basically trained mechanics and they were in high demand and were successful in their careers and I imagine we saturated the area pretty well. Then inadvertently another field opened. I attended a meeting in Richmond of the National Education Association and wandering around I talked with some engineers who were monitoring a display of school equipment. This happened to be the training company which provided

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a lot of school-oriented heating and air conditioning equipment. They told me of a need for a service engineer in this part of the country. In describing the job, it sounded very much like one that our fine mechanics or technicians could handle. I described the qualifications to one lad who was graduating. They came down and interviewed him and were very impressed and brought him up to Richmond and in short he was hired as the service manager of the Gene Tate Training Service Agency, handling the large training equipment, big centrifical machines, office type and building equipment and so on. It was at what was then a terrific starting salary of over $800 dollars a month plus a percentage of the materials used in the servicing. This was in 1954. The boy's name was Andy Mueller. As a result of Andy's success, a whole new vista for our students was opened up. The training company would hire them for these jobs which previously had been filled by mechanical engineers. They hired them in Atlanta and Indianapolis and all over the country. Anyone who we recommended would be hired, These men, most of them, became international specialists. Andy Mueller became international chief of training. He's in charge of all international installations whether it is in Calcutta, Rangun, Saigon or what have you, or anywhere in South America. Others of our people moving out of Atlanta, Greensboro, or the Washington area will go to Bermuda, South America to these tremendous installations. This also includes the troubleshooting and our people were especially qualified because in addition to knowing the practical engineering aspects of the equipment, they also were physically trained where if nothing else prevailed they could slip in and do mechanical work themselves, which would not be true of an engineer.

Q: In 1953 you established a music camp. I would like some information about that. Where it was and what your goals were in setting it up and how successful it was?

Kovner: I don't know where we got the idea about a music camp. We decided to try it one summer. We rented a 352 acre farm for a few dollars and the improvements we put into it. We got the cows off the farm and let a bunch of kids in. I got up there early and installed the electrical equipment in the house, a hot water heater, a shower stall, and the range and the washer, etc. We had a wonderful eight weeks there and set up a barefoot concert series for local people and it was really a humdinger. This was in Buchanan, Virginia, a town of about 1400, twenty-five miles northeast of Roanoke. It was very successful and we began to look into the idea of purchasing land for a permanent camp. I was going to go out of the teaching business and into the music camp business. At that time we had a real severe drought out there. Water became not as reliable as it was and many people in that area started selling their farms and simply took jobs in the community to earn a living when they weren't farming. But the land prices did not go down and since it would, I thought, involve an excessive amount of investment it did not look too encouraging. This water supply was based on mountain stream, not your city reservoir.

Q: During the 1950's you and your wife played in a symphony orchestra.

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I was wondering how long you played in the orchestra and is it true that you met your wife in the orchestra and what your specialty was?

Kovner: My wife had played with the symphony for quite awhile. I'm not at liberty to mention the first year she played with them, however I can say right now she's the oldest member of the orchestra in terms of service and years. I joined when I came to Norfolk during the 1940-41 season. I played violin it at that time. Later I switched to solo flutist. My wife was head of the viola section, and she also played in the violin section. We did meet in the orchestra. That's how it all came about. Later our children all played, and all five of us played in the orchestra together and they are all string players other than myself and all of them still participate in music actively. My son is still in the orchestra with my wife, I'm not in it.

Q: I wondered if the University community supported the symphony and was interested in it in those days?

Kovner: In short answer, not particularly. They weren't except for a few individuals who participated. There was no great support from the University community.

Q: Would you comment on the physical conditions of the buildings and the equipment that you used and had in the 1940's and early 1950's? I understand you suffered from serious overcrowding in the old building in the 1950's?

Kovner: Well, from time to time the institute started in 1945 until we got a new building in April 1959 which was a fourteen year period, we worked in an old Navy barracks which was certainly unsuitable. They were fire hazards and several of them burned down. Not the ones we were in, but others burned down. We collected the insurance on them we blocked out the fire engines, so they couldn't put out the fires.

There was no hope for the future until one day a state committee visiting the campus looking into the needs for the new library, happened to bypass into the wooden shack that we used as the Technical Institute and one of the gentlemen walked into a light fixture which was hanging to low and gashed his forehead. This slowed the group down and they had to take a look around and they asked if this was what we operated in and we answered yes. Whereupon the head of the commission turned to Lewis Webb and said, "Before you get a new library, you're going to have to get a new building for this outfit." So that's how we got our new building.

Q: From what sources did you recruit faculty in those days, in the forties and the fifties? Did you develop a strong faculty?

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Kovner: During the forties and fifties the faculty basically came from retired Navy captains and admirals. It did not make a strong faculty.

Q: I was wondering if the Russian space satellite, launching in 1957 and the consequent discussion of technical education that occurred in the newspapers and news magazines caused a heightened interest in the courses that you offered?

Kovner: On the contrary, it made us look even worse than we were. All of a sudden education became very science oriented and we appeared to be more gross than before. Something did go for us. There was tremendous flooding in our shops under the stadium and we had to go more to the classrooms since we could not operate laboratories which meant we had to add courses which were essentially engineering courses which were mutated into technical types. That is a calculation course which required extensive mathematical work could be done by other graphical means and so we inadvertently upgraded the program. Not intentionally but because of the fact that we could not do the normal shop work. So the time came when opportunity presented itself to run an upgraded program and we were already there. We never intentionally planned it that way, it just happened.

Q: Did the faculty in the Technical Institute feel that they were a part of the college? Were they accepted by the faculty in the more traditionally academic areas?

Kovner: The answer is no. They were not accepted. They were looked upon as a thing that shouldn't be there. As a matter of fact when the college eventually went up for four year accreditation in 1961, they specifically excluded the technical program. I think the reason I was later made Director of the Technical Institute in 1959 was that I was probably the only one that had a foot in both camps. I was the only one with a masters degree and the only one that could speak the language of the liberal arts people in the areas of music, theater and whatnot. This is sort of a negative reason for giving somebody an appointment. So there was a complete dichotomy. They even put us across the street. On none of the campus plans that were ever developed did they ever consider putting a technical program in the same complex with the rest of the college. That's why we are to this day (the Technology Building) across the street, across Hampton Boulevard. They wouldn't allow it on this side of Hampton Boulevard.

Q: What criteria did you use in the 50's for the admission of students and how have these criteria changed over the last twenty years?

Kovner: There were no criteria for this at all, except that the student be seventeen or eighteen years old. When Lee Klinefelter retired and I was given the position in 1959, I changed that. I required a high school graduation plus two years of algebra, plus a year of geometry, plus the chemistry course which would have to be remedied if they had not had the chemistry in high school. When I put these to the State

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Department of Education declared that they would cut off our state funds, and I said, "Okay, cut them off." Then they backed off, so they permitted us to set standards even though they claimed the Vocational Education Act which supported two thirds of our faculty salaries prohibited such a move. The other part was to reduce the load of our students. The Veterans Administration which supported many of our veteran students in those days specified that programs of our nature required thirty hours a week of classes. That length of class led of course to low quality work. We wanted more theory and less shop-type classes. When I reduced that to twenty-five as a first step, the Veterans Administration threatened to withdraw the approval of the VA from our students. Once again I said, "Go ahead' basically. I cited to them where they were wrong, that their interpretations were wrong and I took up the challenge and they backed off. So we were able to establish some standards in both ways by simply standing up to the federal government and the state government. These criteria for a two-year program, I think, were quite excellent and as you see later, it led to our accreditation as a junior college, by the Southern Association. We were only the second two-year school in the country to ever achieve collegiate accreditation, the first being Oregon Technical Institute on the West Coast.

Q: What courses were the most popular during the 50's and 60's?

Kovner: Our radio and later television servicing was what we started with. When I first came to this school it was nothing but a course for training radio mechanics. This later became an electronics program, an electronic engineering program. It was always the most popular. I would say it always represented about half the student body then all the other disciplines put together would represent the other half. There was no real second choice, the others were more or less equal in small amounts. Electronics was always the number one glamour field. It attracted the best students, it paid high salaries. I think the strength of the electronics department was what really brought this school along.

Q: You mentioned before that you pursued a history degree at this time. I was wondering was it really at this time in the fifties that you went for a bachelors in history?

Kovner: No. I did that around 1962, 1963, and 1964 when my oldest child began college here. I figured it would be a chance for me to come back and take a few courses too- But she dropped out after a while to get married on the West Coast, but I continued towards a history degree.

Q: In 1958 a chapter of the Sigma Delta Phi was established at the Technical Institute under your sponsorship. Could you tell me more about this organization?

Kovner: Well in the engineering field there is a Tau Beta Pi honorary fraternity, the equivalent of the Phi Beta Kappa in the liberal arts field. Down in Atlanta they formed the Sigma Delta Phi fraternity for two-year technical programs and we were very honored to be allowed to establish a chapter.

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We were quite active. Now of course we've had the four-year tech program for a number of years, and I don't know what there is in the way of honorary fraternities in this field.

Q: Is it true that in 1953 you did some writing for the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot in connection with programs at the Museum of Arts and Sciences?

Kovner: No, it was the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch. I covered some of the programs for the paper, over a period of about two years. I can't say they were brilliantly written but it was fun.

Q: What did the new building mean as far as the program of the Technical Institute was concerned? Were you better able to obtain more suitable equipment to go into that new building?

Kovner: Now you say new building, you mean old building. The old building was a 1959 building, and the new building was a 1968 building. Yes, it was a fabulous building. We planned it ourselves. It was whatever the barracks were not, it was. It meant a lot of equipment, because the architect, when the building went out on bid, was very fearful of the high bid and wanted to cut out one wing of the building. Naturally that wing involved my air conditioning, refrigeration, electrical areas and I protested and said we should keep the shell of the building and cut out interior things, which we could always add later. You can't add a wing to the building without great expense, so we took out half the lights and took the tile off the floors, and didn't put any heating in some of the classrooms. Bids came in $100,000 low, a 25% low and of course the State immediately grabbed for the money, but somehow we were able to prevail upon them to leave this alone and we spent that $100,000 putting the tile back in, etc. Our students installed the heating equipment in the classrooms, and the air conditioning units were done by our students. So the result was that we got some fabulous equipment, which involved large chunks of money that we could normally not have accumulated at one time. The result was that we were very well equipped. We got a centrifugal machine which put us in the very enviable position of having as a laboratory piece of equipment, a fifty ton centrifugal training machine that other schools were happy to show pictures of their graduates working with one of those on a job somewhere. Here we had one for our own instructional purposes. But to put a load on it you needed some part of the building to load it, so we air conditioned the offices and classrooms. We may have been one of the first in Virginia to do this because it was strictly illegal. There was no way the State would approve the air conditioning of classrooms and offices at that time. But we did it and we claimed it was the only way we had of putting a load on the equipment.

Q: In 1959 you became the Director of the Technical Institute upon the retirement of Lee Klinefelter. Could you give me an estimate of Mr. Klinefelter's achievements as director?

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Kovner: In 1950 the five year old Technical Institute was headed right down the drain under its previous director, and Lewis Webb who had started it and still had a strong feeling for it, persuaded Lee Klinefelter, who was teaching in the engineering program, and our engineering program then was just the first two years of VPI. He asked Lee to develop this thing and take over which Lee did from 1950 to 1959. We must say that it was entirely due to his efforts that the thing flourished, succeeded, and was able to grow, so you can't say much more than that. He sort of lifted it up on his back almost entirely on his own efforts.

Q: You already mentioned the change in the curriculum and entrance requirements for the Technical Institute when you took over. I wonder if you felt positive about your responsibilities in 1959 and what goals you had.

Kovner: I mentioned the immediate changes which I thought were necessary to upgrade the program. We had been a very disorganized group. Lee Klinefelter was not a strong leader. He was very gentle and he would defer to President Webb on everything and was easily discouraged. He lacked ruthlessness that was required. I didn't lack any of that at all. What we needed in the position now was somebody who would knock all the heads together and be a dictator and would organize things regardless of whose toes were stepped on and whose feelings were hurt, so I guess that's why they got me.

The first thing I did was, unfortunately, fire the most important faculty member we had, the man who headed our electronic department. I saw him as a block in the organization of the school into an efficient basis. So he had to be let go, which produced a minor revolution which quieted itself very quickly and from then we had a good operation. The support of the faculty I think was evident in the fact that we had almost zero turnover during the years I headed the program. It was not a democratic operation, but I think the faculty appreciated the work that was being put into it and the fact that we could do a better job. I think if I had felt I had lost the support of at least 20% of the group, I would have resigned the position. But I felt that I always had 100% or very close to it. So that was how we operated. Of course those things don't operate that way today. Today nobody has that authority.

I might mention for instance that we decided to give an associate degree. I just decided this, and fortunately the college was so busy with its own populations, they didn't pay too much attention to what we were doing. We didn't go to the State Council of Higher Education, and we didn't go to Richmond, we just started giving the associate degree. I don't know to this day if they ever discovered in Richmond that we did it illegally. There may be a couple thousand people in the community who have illegal associate degrees. But this was what was required, the forcefulness, and making the move without approval of other people.

Later on we talk about Dental Hygiene, I will give you an indication of how we put the Dental Hygiene program in against the will of the state legislature, against the will of the medical college and a few other people.

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Q: In 1961 you were quoted in the Virginian Pilot as saying, "We want a man who can do anything with his own pair of hands" and you noted that today's engineers cannot repair complicated machinery. How could the Technical Institute provide assistance to that kind of engineer in this area?

Kovner: Well, industrial we could. On the campus we could not be of help. The committee came down to investigate a possibility of setting up a four-year engineering curriculum on this campus and one of the main points in favor of setting this up was the operating technical program. They thought this would be a strong base upon which to build the expertise and the assistance that the engineering school would need.

Of course, when the school was set up, they didn't want any part of us. They didn't want to even speak to us. But this was envisioned by the group that set it up. It is true that our graduates have had to bridge the gap between the theoretical engineer on the one hand and the mechanic on the other. This was in the fifties and the sixties, it's not true today. Today even we cannot do that. The spectrum is so wide that we've been forced to move along with the engineers and our graduates to this day are losing a lot of the manual skills that we used to train. One of our strong points is now going by the way.

Q: In the early 1960's was the Technical Institute beginning to attract students from beyond the immediate Tidewater area?

Kovner: Only on the same basis as the rest of the college. It wasn't until dormitory facilities became available that any appreciable number of students would relocate from other areas. So I would imagine our proportion of out-of-the-area students would be the same as the whole.

Q: Did the Technical Institute begin to have a close relationship with the industries in the area? Did you have any difficulty during the early 1960's in placing your graduates?

Kovner: We never had any difficulty at all except in certain areas, In the early 40's we trained aircraft mechanics and aircraft engine specialists. After saturating the local airport, we found there were no jobs for them and we discontinued the program. We trained some fine machinists but they weren't used by the local federal facility because they had their own apprentice programs and didn't want to hire anybody from outside. So we dropped that program. But those that survived and as it happens, they have to survive the crucible of time, and the job market which is really the main one, they had no problem really. We furnished a fine service to this area and to the country. Our graduates, of course, have been hired all over the country. At the Sandia operations in Albuquerque, one of the brain operations Of IBM for nuclear research and that sort of thing, we had an interviewer call and want to come visit our school because he had heard about it and he couldn't understand why such a fine school was at that time not accredited.

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So he came out of curiosity and hired two of the students, and they went to work out at Sandia. I think if you were to check with the alumni and check out the geographical locations of our graduates right down to the first class in 1947-48 you would find our students all over the country.

Q: Did you have a good working relationship with the department and later the School of Engineering? Specifically how did your program differ from theirs?

Kovner: We had no relationship whatsoever unfortunately Dr. Lampey who built the engineering school despised technician training and was instrumental in its being downgraded in the state of North Carolina. He just about destroyed our program. After we had become accredited as a reward, President Webb ill-advisedly put us under the Engineering School and in a year we were almost out of operation. In fact at the end of that year we didn't even have contracts for the faculty. Lampey wouldn't send in the requests so I had to go to Webb and get special permission to go to Richmond and discuss it with the people up there at this late date. Finally they set a salary scale.

In January 1963 I resigned. I sent Webb a letter and told him, "No way. Get somebody else. I'll go back and teach history." This led to the formation of the community college division. The Engineering school not only didn't want us around, but they actually tried to put us out. This was the policy of one man. When he was replaced by Dr. Rotty the policy reversed itself. Dean Rotty was very much in favor of coexistence, in fact I think he became a very big supporter of our program. The new dean, Dean Weese, is really a very fair man. He sees no difference in equality between both types of programs. The engineering program is more mathematically oriented, our four-year tech program is more applications oriented. He thinks they are entitled to equal treatment and I think we are getting it.

Q: In 1962 the Technical Institute was the first such school accredited under the "special purpose" classification of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. How did you go about getting this accreditation and did you have to meet rigorous standards? Also, what did the accreditation mean to your program?

Kovner: I mentioned to you earlier that in 1961 the college ignored us in going for Southern Association accreditation of a four-year college. They couldn't do that today because after awhile the Southern Association got tired of that Mickey Mouse stuff and all future accreditations by colleges and universities in the Southern Association area had to include everything in the program. They couldn't put anything under the carpet.

The "special purpose" classification recognized the fact that a school of this type would have a different slant or would carry a slightly dif-

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ferent orientation in its distribution. Remember now, this was junior college. Our distribution in the areas of social studies would have to be different from the standard junior college which as the first two years of somebody's four year program, usually in the liberal arts. Most junior colleges at that time were liberal arts oriented. So we put in, as soon as this "special purpose" classification became available, for it. The committee that inspected us was headed by Gordon Sweet, who was head of the Southern Association. The man with him was a professor of moral philosophy from southwest Memphis. Another member of the committee was Georgia Tech's chief of extension work for the School of Engineering, and the fourth man was a junior college man from Pensacola who was pretty active in junior college technical work. This committee came up and really put us through the grinder.

For instance, the professor of moral philosophy came into my office and said, "Mr. Kovner, I want you to sit down while I watch. I want you to write a one page dissertation on your philosophy of technical education. So I had to do that right there while he was looking at me. It was a very traumatic experience.

They didn't appreciate the fact that our English was being taught by a retired admiral. Well, I explained the fact that he was a cheap man, and we could get him for low salary because he was on a Navy retirement. Dr. Sweet said it was not acceptable. At which point, being the kind of person I am, I told him what he could do with his accreditation in a less than polite way. Whereupon Lewis Webb, who up to this time had said, "No, we can't afford it. I can't get you an English teacher. There's no budget for it", suddenly said, "Well, now, wait a minute. We can work this thing out. Now if we hire an English teacher for this purpose, would that meet the objections of the Southern Association?" Dr. Sweet said it would. So, we hired Conrad Festa, who is now on the faculty. He was the man I hired. So by throwing a temper tantrum, I was able to get what I wanted when I couldn't get it any other way.

We went through it with flying colors in 1962 at the meeting and as a result I got a nine week vacation in Europe. I caught Lewis Webb at a weak moment. We had just gotten the accreditation and everybody was feeling good. So I said I want to go to Europe for nine weeks, So he asked if someone could cover my work and I said, "Sure". So that was my reward for all the years of vacations missed.

Q: In 1962 you pointed out in a speech that today's engineering technicians "supervise, instruct, sell, plan, design and inspect, and many technicians rise to even more responsible positions, some carrying engineering titles." Did you feel that some of your own students might go on to become graduate engineers?

Kovner: Before they became graduate engineers a lot of our early graduates even from the forties went on to top positions. Mason Gammage, out of the 1950 class, went on and became the planning commissioner for Princess Anne County. Tom Noah became planning commissioner for Hampton, and I saw just last week he was designated Assistant City Manager for the city of Hampton. Cliff Holstrum became the

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engineer for the city of South Norfolk, before there was a city of Chesapeake. Another lad became city engineer of Covington, Virginia out in the western part of Virginia. So many of our graduates went on and assumed engineering designations or positions, in jobs that were really routine enough so they wouldn't require modern research oriented engineers. A certain number of our people became graduate engineers by passing the professional engineering licensing examination. Others went on to Other training and did go on to, for instance, North Carolina State and take graduate engineering degrees. Incidentally, when Dr. Lampe found that they were giving us credit for our two years of technical work, he blew his gasket, stormed down to North Carolina, and soon I got a very reluctant letter from the school saying they could no longer give our students the credit even though they were doing fine. This was because of Dr. Lampe's objections.

Q: By 1962 the Technical Institute could hardly be described anymore as a "trade school", but I wonder did its image in the community change?

Kovner: Not really. I would expect to this day, and here we are in '75 there will be faculty here who will come in here wanting to know if we still grind scissors or repair television sets. I don't think we've changed everybody's mind. The community is a hard thing to work with. There is a lot of inertia in it. I expect that people old enough to have seen us grow and develop to think of us as a trade school. That's not really what counts; what counts is what does industry think of us. The situation now is where I would suspect short of the B.S. in Graduate Engineering, the B.S. in Graduate Engineering Technology is a high-dollar man. In the Philadelphia area it's even better than that. The tech man is behind only the chemical engineer, but the tech graduate is ahead of the electrical engineer, civil engineer, and graduate mechanical engineer, so it's one of the top things now. With the economic situation as it is, the area least affected, is the applications engineering. So where I would again suspect PhD engineers and masters degree engineers are hunting in vain for jobs, the B.S. engineer and the B the B.S. engineer and the B,S, engineering technology graduates are finding plenty of jobs.

Q: What elements of the liberal arts were included in the training of the technician?

Kovner: I gave a speech on that subject at the American Society for Engineering Education meetings of 1966. I became an advocate of a large liberal arts curriculum. When I was on a committee that went down to Georgia Tech to accredit their technical program I had to make some strong recommendations that they upgrade their liberal arts curriculum; As a matter of fact we did them a favor. They were in a situation where Georgia Tech was pushing for a large gym, athletic facility, first, and a library, second. After inspecting their facility, we demanded a meeting with the president of Georgia Tech. Having established that meeting, we informed him, remember now I was then a member of the Southern Association, that unless they reversed the priorities and put the

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library first, we would not recommend accreditation for a southern technical institute. He was very agreeable, and agreed to reverse the priorities and put the library first. It was a real need then. So, I think I can say we required a solid background of liberal arts. We required social studies, history, and we had our own faculty for all these courses.

Q: You remarked in a 1962 interview that you were having some difficulty presenting the Institute's case to students during high school career days. Could you explain why this was so, and did this problem continue throughout the decade of the 1960's with so many technological advances?

Kovner: The then director of Admissions was another gentleman who had no use for our program. So when he would present the merits of the college at career days, we would not be mentioned. He would lose no opportunity when he could to explain that our program was only temporary, we would be discontinued very shortly, and it wasn't worth having.

The only presentation we could make on career days was to get our own representative in. Sometimes this was difficult to do. They very often wouldn't want two representatives from one campus. It was an uphill fight. I would imagine that perhaps to this day it's still an uphill fight to achieve a reasonable amount of promotion or support from the admissions office. I hope that has changed and now with the four-year program, we receive the same support that any other program receives. Just in case we're not, Dean Weese has set up two-man teams to visit schools. For instance, Dr. Goglia, head of the mechanical engineering department and myself as head of the mechanical engineering technology department, visited some high schools and gave a joint presentation in engineering, engineering technology, the differences, the merits, the disadvantages in a very dispassionate way since I think we are friends. And we can support each other's program.

Q: During the spring of 1963 the Atomic Energy Commission announced a grant of $10,000 to the Technical Institute to begin a program of training nuclear technologists. How did you go about determining the need for such a course and what was the significance for the Institute in its development in offering such a program?

Kovner: I will have to back up on that. When I sent the letter of resignation to President Webb in early '63, 1 heard nothing from him for two or three months which was very disconcerting. Then I received notice of an appointment to a committee of three including Bell from Chemistry and Webb from the School of Business. We were to travel up and down the coast looking at junior colleges and community colleges. We had to do a survey on the needs of industry or technical types in the Virginia area and report back. So we travelled very widely up the coast. We did a very comprehensive survey on industry.

As a result of our travels a new division was formed. All the less than baccalaureate programs were lumped together in one school called the Community College Division and I was made the dean of that. This

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was before there was a community college system in Virginia. Unfortunately when they set one up, they didn't particularly want to look at us. I suspect we were too high a model for what they would attempt. So they set up a community college system completely disregarding us and we of course had to change our name later, because we no longer could use that name. As a result of this survey, we detected a need for chemical technicians, and nuclear technologists.

We applied to the Atomic Energy Commission for a grant. We received a grant of $10,000 which in those days was a large grant. We were one of two technical schools and fifty-three universities to receive them, which was quite a feather in our cap. As a result of it, we obtained a program. Eventually we discontinued it as we began to retrench.

There was a story about how we reached our peak of students which was four hundred technical students. About this time the college made a pact with the State Council of Higher Education where we would go into doctoral work, more heavily into the masters and doctoral work in return for giving up our associate degree.

The first I knew of it was an article in the Pilot, a big headline "Old Dominion to Discontinue Associate Programs". Of course we haven't really discontinued that. There are some that are still phasing out, but of course that cost us students right and left, when it appeared in the paper. Our student body immediately went downhill and we had to begin to consolidate and we lost the nuclear program because of that. We couldn't afford the option.

Q: Was your resignation which you mentioned, from the faculty as a whole or just as director of the program?

Kovner: No, that was just as any kind of administrator, but I would go back into teaching. See, I had tenure as a teacher, but there's no tenure in the administrative business.

Q: Did many women begin to enroll in the Technical Institute's courses in the early 1960's? I noticed that a Helen Soo Hoo was the second female graduate of TI. Who was the first? Miss Soo Hoo graduated with honors. Generally how did the women compare to the men students?

Kovner: We never had many girls in the program. Irene Colas was the first She married another graduate which very often happened. She married Hiram Ferguson and Irene is still with the Corps of Engineers in Norfolk. Helen Soo Hoo graduated and married a classmate. I have to admit that when she went out she commanded quite a bit higher salary than he did. I don't know where she is now. She had been offered a job at Sandia and didn't take it. She did go with the Newport News shipyard, but I've lost track of her now. The women we've had have been very good, top students.

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Q: In 1963 you took a trip to Europe and the Virginian-Pilot wrote it up and they said you travelled on a "pay-as-you-go" plan. I wondered if you could explain this.

Kovner: It wasn't "pay-as-you-go", it was "play-as-you-go". We had the nine weeks off and we got a Eurail pass and no budget to speak of. We had the directory from the amateur Chamber Music Society people who played music in various countries, so we corresponded with some of them and had firm dates. Others we simply would pick up the phone and call up and ask to play some music with them. The experience was unbelievable.

I don't know how the newspaper got a hold of it. We got a call from someone who wanted to hear about it, so we related our experiences. We went to a small town in Switzerland where the people spoke German and my wife spoke German and knew some Spanish from having lived in Argentina, and she is also Italian, so we got along fine. We played chamber music with some people in Switzerland and wound up sleeping in their bedroom for two days. We couldn't get away.

We played in some concerts, and had similar experiences everywhere. We missed more streetcars, and busses at two or three in the morning when we would finish a session and go out to find there was no more public transportation so we would walk a mile or two through a city which you could do in Europe without any fear of transgressions. It was quite an adventure. I carried my flute with me and everywhere we went we either borrowed a violin, or as in London, we rented one. We played some concerts also with the London Musical Society.

Q: In the mid-1960's you son, Fred, became the star player on some outstanding Old Dominion College baseball teams. How did you feel about your son's achievements, and did he pursue a career in professional baseball?

Kovner: I had always contended that you can mix sports and music, so Fred had to, as a youngster, more or less force to participate in both sports and music. He is today a cellist in the Norfolk Symphony. He played baseball all through his growing period and when he came to Old Dominion he set his heart on a professional career. So he neglected his studies, we might say. He was the second choice of the first baseball draft for the White Sox and a very high bonus. It was way up in the five figures, which made me the poor father of a rich son.

The first year in the minors was not exceptional. The second year he was playing good AA ball, then he was in an auto accident. He played out the season and at the end of it the White Sox put him in the hospital and he was in traction for a month or so, due to a back injury. Eddie Stanke, the following year brought Fred and Bill Melton down early with the White Sox as pitcher and catcher, He said they would be his hitters in the future. Fred was put in the outfield. He was an outstanding glove man; he wore a major league glove but he wasn't a major league hitter, So Stanke wanted to work on him. Fred got in condition and played in the

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grapefruit circuit and was doing real well. He was batting 333, and then I got a phone call from him, and he was almost in tears. He had been doing calisthenics and his back went out. The ligaments had stretched and a nerve had been caught. From there it was straight downhill: A1~A, AA ball, swinging one-handed. He couldn't hold the bat with two hands.

The next year when they offered him a contract I said, "Don't take it. Your back is out and you can never be a professional ball player again. Everytime you slide, everytime you put any strain on there, you are going to stretch those ligaments again and pinch a nerve." So he went back to school and got his masters degree and became a systems analyst. He still plays fast-pitch softball sometimes. He's been to Seattle in the world tournament so he's keeping active.

Q: In 1964 the Mace and Crown reported that the Technical Institute was placing more of a stress on liberal arts, and that you had hired a teacher competent in history and economics and one who taught English. Why did the TI hire someone in these areas when the college had many instructors in these areas? Why did TI seek to become, what the college newspaper called self-sufficient?

Kovner: As I said, we were across the street and they didn't want to have anything to do with us. Our students were not welcome into their classes. They would bring entering freshmen in give them a library orientation. But we had to fight like the dickens to get them to take our freshman on an orientation to the library. At graduation ceremonies, their students would receive their diplomas individually and our students would just stand up in a group. There was always this dichotomy, we were always treated as second-class citizens.

So when the Southern Association accreditation came up, we hired our own people. Only after we became accredited, then the college said, "Tut, tut, tut you know after all you are college-level. Why do you have to have these separate departments? Let's merge." So we did. Then Conrad Festa went back into teaching in the English Department. Others went back into the regular academic departments and others we phased out. When they left to go on to other jobs, we didn't replace them.

I think the catalyst for the merger was John Johnson, the Provost at that time. He was a man with no prejudices and no pre-conceived notions. He didn't know about the past history; he had just come in there. As John said, the only reason he came to Old Dominion was because it was so disorganized and so badly handled, he just wanted to see if it was possible for anybody to pick up the pieces and reorganize. It was more of an intellectual pursuit for John Johnson. He had been president of a PhD college which merged with another PhD college and he was offered the number two post, but declined. Old Dominion was more of a challenge.

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He would approach everything on a factual basis. When he saw a program that was accredited (we had just been accredited before he came), and he saw a college here and saw no reason for duplication. I must say that John went overboard to give us first-class citizenship. He went above and beyond the call of duty in trying to redress previous wrongs.

Q: In 1964 you remarked that you needed a new building badly. Did the administration see this request as premature since you had only been in the other new building since 1959?

Kovner: This was projected on a growing enrollment plus since we now had a Division of Technology, we were going to add a complete spectrum of courses. So we planned to present two-year programs in theater, arts and crafts, dental assisting, dental hygiene, law enforcement, and we even looked into opthalomological work, but decided not to go into that. We looked into other needs partly because of a survey. It was obvious that our facilities could in no way handle it.

First we couldn't run a theater or arts and crafts operation on a campus that had zero theater. There was no theater for anything. There was hardly a meeting room of any kind. The reason we built a theater in there was ostensibly for the two-year Theater and Arts and Crafts program.

The State saw it as reasonable to give us a new building, now the way the State operates they say, "Here's a lump sum of money, get what you can." I can't understand it. The lump sum they gave us was $500,000, which was no way near enough. We wanted to put a dental clinic in there for instance, plus classrooms, the theater, a place for arts and crafts, woodworking, locker room and a dressing room, etc. So I asked Lewis Webb to hit somebody for matching federal funds and he came back after checking into it and said there was no way. So, I asked permission to go to Richmond myself and he said I could. I called the architect, Ray Pentacost, who was a VPI graduate. I asked him to go to Richmond with me. He said he knew the guy who was head of the State Engineering section, a classmate from VPI, So we could go talk to him.

So in Richmond we talked to this gentleman and some of his assistants and had some discussion on this. They agreed on our merits in requesting additional funds. So we then brought in Larry Hill who was the state man representing federal money. We put him through an inquisition. It was Larry Hill against about six of us, and every objection he raised was countered by someone else. We really had him on the defensive and finally the gentleman who was the head State Engineering Office said "Mr. Hill why don't you take a chance. Why are you so negative? Why don't you take a chance and o.k. this money? You have so many "ifs" and "becauses", why don't you just go ahead and do it? The money's there." So finally Larry said, "Okay, we'll do it."

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So I came away with another half a million dollars. We set the thing up and the first of the spirals began and in the middle of it, the design period, we got a note from the governor saying, "Shrink everything ten percent, we won't allow you one dollar over." So we had to move in from Hampton Boulevard and our stage got jammed because we had a truck passage behind which we couldn't shorten, and the dental hygiene clinic got squeezed up,some inequities got into the design, but by and large it came out pretty good. So that's how we got the building.

Q: You declared in the same interview, "The lack of extracurricular activities is due directly to the lack of facilities for them. That's the biggest complaint of our students." Had you foreseen that the TI students would be interested in such activities? Did the TI students by the mid-l960's seem to be more a part of the greater college than previously?

Kovner: When Bud Metheny became athletic director, he opened up all sports to the tech students. He's a very good friend of mine. There were no problems then, and we got a fair shake at intramurals. We could put any number of teams into intramurals for the same fee. So that picture changed.

Other than athletics, the theater became open and there was no problem in extracurricular activities. Our students had the same opportunities as those did on campus.

Q: Do you want to add anything about the 1965 development of the Old Dominion Community College?

Kovner: Well, we have already covered that, We had to get rid of the title of course because of the state's going into the community college business. It was renamed the Division of Technology and had the less than baccalaureate curricula. Our tech programs by that time were three years, and the others on campus were two years. We discontinued it as you know.

The programs were given to me to develop so I did play a part in the grouping of the curricula and I think I really went after them and developed them. Later on when we discontinued them, my function was to protect them. To see that we didn't drop them off campus, but that we built them up to the baccalaureate level. In all except one instance we were successful.

Q: Were you involved in securing the dental hygiene and the law enforcement programs?

Kovner: The law enforcement program was already in effect before I became Dean of the Community College Division. It is the one program that never really developed and eventually was discontinued. Dental hygiene is a peculiar story. I was called into a meeting in July 1955 by President Webb, completely unprepared, and I met a bunch of dentists. They were

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representatives of the Dental Association. They more or less jumped on me and wanted to know why we didn't have a two-year dental hygiene program. I said I didn't know what that was. It turned out that these men had been frustrated for some fifteen years trying to set up the program and train dental auxiliaries by one man, Dr. Lyons, who was head of the dental school at the Medical College of Virginia. Dr. Lyons had no use for medical auxiliaries. They were venting their frustrations on Lewis Webb and Lewis Webb decided to pass the buck to me since I was now dean of this new division where a two-year dental hygiene program would fit. So I said I would start one. I didn't know which way was up, though.

We had lots of meetings. I had full support from this group. They would do anything including building a building. They had to have it. We began to organize and one of the first things I had to do was to go to Richmond and argue it out with Dr. Lyons. It was a very ludicrous situation. Here is Mr. Dentistry himself on the one side and myself on the other side, who knew nothing about dentistry except what I read in a real cram course, and we were arguing about whether we should have a program down here. I won't say I lost the argument, but I will say that when I left, Dr. Lyons wasn't speaking to me. Though in later years when I met him, he was just as cordial as could be. But at that time, he wasn't speaking to me.

He used his influence to have a committee report written where a state committee recommended that there by only one school of dental hygiene and it be located at the Medical College of Virginia. He got that run through and he got Senator Willey, who's been very controversial recently on this Ferrard X. Green thing, to assure him that the legislature wouldn't appropriate any money for this.

We got that killed in the legislature by having friends of our local dentist who live in Richmond pressure Willey by threatening to withdraw their patronage from his pharmaceutical firm. We put an economic crush on Willey. It was very reprehensible and very unorthodox to get him to reverse his "muscle" push in the legislature. We felt that once the legislature declared that we could not have the program, we were sunk. But if they didn't say anything, it was a possibility. Now as far as equipment was concerned, we were getting very liberal budgets in the technology program at that time and so I diverted money from the budget, picked up state money on three to one ratio, bought equipment, dental machines, chairs and stored them over on 48th Street, Nobody in Richmond knew it, the State Council didn't know it, the legislature didn't know it, the Medical College of Virginia didn't know. Everyone knew a new building was being designed. We designed all the utilities for it, even some of the equipment we designed and had manufactured, and when we came to the State Council they stalled as long as they could and finally said they would approve the program but couldn't give us a dollar for equipment. We said we didn't care, We had the best part of two hundred thousand dollars of equipment already purchased and ready to install. This was how we got it.

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Q: Then your duties as the head of the Community College Division were to coordinate and see that these programs were developing along the right lines?

Kovner: My duties were to do whatever I wanted to do. There was an area committee in Hampton Roads called the Committee for Area Wide Cooperation. It was headed mostly by a man named Kilgore of Hampton. He was quoted in a newspaper article as saying we ought to have a police academy for all the areas. It would not be law enforcement, it would be an academy to train police recruits. So there would be a more uniform type of operation in the city. So I wrote a letter and said I would be ready to do it for him. Meetings were set up and we got police chiefs from various areas. Not all the departments went in but Norfolk did, Hampton, Suffolk, plus auxiliary police departments from the Bay Bridge Tunnel and park police and that sort of thing. Newport News and Portsmouth would not come into the thing, they wanted to run their own.

The police academy was very successful. This is an example of how you push things together. We felt it was needed in the community and somebody had to knock it together. The thing began to drag and in November there was a meeting, unfortunately covered by news media, and nobody knew how to get the thing started. I just said we were going to start, no ifs, ands, or buts, and in February 1968 we started the first class.

Q: I have read that the Technical Institute's curricula in Civil Engineering Technology and Engineering Design Technology were the first in the South to be certified by the American Institute for Design and Drafting. What was the significance of this certification?

Kovner: None whatsoever. It was just another feather in our cap. We were one of the few schools that could be certified, so we said well, we had collegiate accreditation, why not get this?

Q; In your programs in electronic engineering technology, engineering design technology and mechanical engineering technology were later accredited by the Engineer's Council for Professional Development. Could you comment on the significance of that accreditation and had your upper division offerings been so accredited?

Kovner: We didn't have any upper division offering. We were an associate program. There was no upper division at this time. We have an upper division now and we go for the baccalaureate accreditation this coming Fall in 1975. So we couldn't go for that until we had graduates out in the field.

The ECPD accreditation was first attempted in 1961. Prior to that time we were ineligible for it. See there was a provision that said any program which receives a large part of their support from federal

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vocational funds is ineligible. Then they relaxed that a little bit. They said they would consider these programs, and so we applied and discovered after we'd been examined and turned down, that they didn't mean what they'd said at all. They were only going through the motions. It was after that I went for the collegiate accreditation since I saw us blocked in the professional accreditation. So we went for a more difficult accreditation which we got, the one relative to complete collegiate. So I didn't bother with ECPD accreditation because I didn't need it. The other accreditation opened all the doors we needed. I resented the way we had been treated by ECPD. I think the committee simply came down to get a vacation. They brought their wives and didn't really go into our program.

About the time it looked as though we were going to go into a four- year program, Dean Rotty suggested that when we became four year program, it would be easier to get a four-year accreditation if we had previously had an associate level accreditation. This was during my last year as an administrator. I agreed with that and went for the accreditation just to have and it might give us a better transition than the other. We went for the accrediation in 1969 and we got it, so we do have the ECPD accreditation. That doesn't mean a whole lot, because we are not an associate degree school. So it no longer has a lot of meaning. But when we do come up for accreditation in the Fall, the fact that we are an accredited program for the past four or five years isn't going to hurt us any.

Q: By 1968 the Community College Division had had its name changed to the Division of Technology. I understand that was because of the development of the community college system under Governor Godwin, and the program did not change any and your duties remained the same. When the dental hygiene program was initiated, did you foresee the service to the community which the clinic would provide? How did the members of the dental profession locally react to the establishment of this clinic?

Kovner: In a dental hygiene program, clinical work must be supervised to a very high degree. I would say as I remember it, having been out of the program now for some years, that no more than eight students per dentist would be tolerated. We couldn't hire these people on our faculty so we had to depend on free clinical services from the dental community. They would come in during clinic hours and devote their time free of charge to supervise the work of a student. There never was any problem. We had waiting lines of dentists volunteering to come again and again. Henry McCoy who was a member of the Board of Visitors at Old Dominion was one of our most ardent supporters, Eddie Myers who has been famous in dentistry for many years, and now retired, wouldn't stay away. He was always asking if we had another vacancy so he could spend some more time here. There was no resentment whatsoever. It is true that the clinic does furnish services at a very low rate to people in the community, but there was no loss of income to the dentists because by and large these people who come for these services are people who have never had this service before.

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Their teeth have been neglected except when extraction was required. They are now learning preventive dentistry, how to maintain their own oral hygiene and in fact it may accelerate the business for the dentists, or rather for the dental hygienists they hire. Today almost no dentist can afford to do dental hygiene work because the rate of return for the pay is too low. So our program is very highly supported by the dentists here and I expect will continue to be supported. If somebody threatened to remove it, there would be a revolution.

Q: Why was chemical engineering technology dropped from the technology program in 1969?

Kovner: We had a real gung ho lad named White run the program for us, and he was a real enthusiast, very laboratory-equipment oriented and was well respected by the students. The program was really moving, then John decided to go back to Connecticut and get a doctorate. We got supportive services from a member of the engineering school, who was competent in this area, but the students couldn't respond to him and all of a sudden we lost most of our student body in this field. It seemed a big step to take to discontinue a program that we had just geared up, but I felt we had better do it then, rather than keep throwing good money after bad.

What happened to us had been true all over the country. Many successful programs up in the Connecticut area, New England, and other parts of the country had dropped their programs too. They said there had been a drop in enrollment. Maybe because the chemical industry, more than any other, has become automated. It is really right for automation. If you have plenty of pipes and equipment and very few people, you can automate things.

Q: Why was general education dropped for the associate arts program in 1969?

Kovner: Well, that wasn't really a program. General Education is what it all started with in 1930. The first two years of somebody's liberal arts program. When the college became a baccalaureate degree institution and gave a four-year degree in liberal arts, and when we were dropping our two-year programs, it seemed very logical. Who needed it? Any community college can give a two year degree in liberal arts. We no longer had a purpose for it here.

Q: In 1971 the Division of Technology was abolished and the Department of Engineering Technology was established while the law enforcement and dental hygiene programs were shifted to the Division of Continuing Education. Did you favor this move? Were you included in the planning of it?

Kovner: I was not included in the original decision to go for doctoral work and drop the associate programs. From that point on the handwriting was on the wall, and any program we did not promote to a four year status would die and would go to the community colleges. Law enforcement didn't have any potential for development and that's why it went

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into Continuing Education where it could die quietly. Dental Hygiene did not go into the Continuing Education, it went into the School of Sciences. Dental Assisting, which is a program I haven't mentioned, it's a lower level program and is more vocationally oriented requiring one year of training, and is done as a courtesy to the dental community. There was no other place for it so that was put into the Division of Continuing Education. That was not a college level program, it was more service oriented like the police academy.

Q: According to the 1971 catalogue civil engineering technology was no longer being taught. Why was this dropped?

Kovner: Again as we were phasing out the associate programs, our enrollment dropped from a high of 400 to around 100 and we just couldn't afford the luxury of having a small department. Something had to go and these went. They almost wiped us out. Dr. Bugg didn't have any use for our program when he first came here. It's expensive. He looked at the dollar signs, the student credit hours, and the costs and said, "Wipe it out." Only through long argument by Dean Rotty and especially by Dr. Stanley was Dr. Bugg persuaded to give it a chance. Now we have one of the highest growth rates on campus. But we were just on the verge of being wiped out. We couldn't afford the young programs that had a small enrollment.

Q: Why did you not become the chairman of Engineering Technology?

Kovner: Well, you know by now how I operate. I am a dictator, I don't administer, and with the new decentralized authority here, there was no way. It was decentralized from my point of view. It was completely centralized to the point of view of the new President. He was gathering everything to his bosom, and nothing could be approved without his close inspection. The State Council had its finger on everything. I didn't want to be part of that. The way I look at it an administrator is simply a punching bag and many forces are applied upon him; and he tries to shuffle paper and battle those forces. I don't work that way, so I wouldn't want any part of being an administrator. When Dean Rotty offered me the job, I said I would rather teach.

So he suggested Dr. Stanley, who I've mentioned before. Dr. Stanley's an unusual person. He functions at the highest realms of research, in fact he was at that time in charge of all the graduate electrical engineering on the campus. But he also had a foot in the practical aspects of it. He'd come up as a ham radior operator, and he also had a doctorate, which I didn't. He had some clout with the President to keep his program going, plus he had respectability in any field, Rotty sent him over and it was my job to hoodwink him in any way I could to see him take the job. I'm happy to say I was able to fool him. He took the job, not knowing what he was getting into and he has proved to be a gem. It is mainly through his efforts that we have a four-year program. So my decision not to take the job could have been the best thing that happened at that time.

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Q: Did the new administrative organization bring engineering technology into closer contact with the School of Engineering of which it was now a part? Was this one of the purposes of the reorganization?

Kovner: Under the new dean, Weese, there was a very close merger, in fact, there even was a discussion which was a proposition that we merge the departments completely. So all the mechanical tech became part of the mechanical engineering and so on down the line. We decided not to do it at this time, but there was very close coordination between the two. You have a number of instances of cross-teaching. For instance, several of us had taught the engineering courses, we've had engineering faculty teaching in the tech courses. We were getting a fair shake on budget and carried equal clout and representation and so on. In fact in some areas Dr. Weese had given us more than a fair share to make up for past inequities. For instance last year's salary increments, we got higher in proportion than the engineering faculty because of the fact that we'd been allowed to drift lower on the scale.

This was one of the purposes of the reorganization and the reorganization has since been reorganized and I think it is significant in terms of the amount of cooperation.

Q: It would seem then that you don't really try to maintain a different emphasis in the engineering tech courses from that of the regular engineering courses now.

Kovner: Yes we do. Our engineering basically is geared to the engineering of thirty years ago. Engineering today is a science, that is though there is a wide spectrum that all graduates cover, there is an area at one end called research that few of our tech graduates go into. At the other end of the spectrum there is the maintenance and operation which relatively few engineers go into. But the areas in between, that of design and development and production function equally, whether engineers or engineering technologists. They all work in that area. There is a mathematical differentiation. They approach things more mathematically from a design point of view with more research and less laboratory work. We are more lab oriented and more applications. Our purpose is less to discover things than to apply what somebody else has discovered, So it's a very wide spectrum and no individual today can function in but a small area of it, anymore than a doctor could. You can't train a doctor in everything. He's either a doctor of the left ventricle or the right ventricle or the left ear, etc. He must specialize. Similarly in engineering today the body of knowledge is so vast, an individual can only function in a small spectrum of it.

Q: In 1972 then you began to offer upper division programs leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology. What was the justification for this program? Did you play a part in its development and what was its goal?

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Kovner: I don't know what you can mean by "justification". I don't know if there is justification for anything. As to why did we want the program, well the concept of the four-year engineering technology degree had just begun to sweep the country. Many schools much inferior to ours were achieving this plateau. Many schools were starting programs from scratch with this degree and here we were, one of the three or four schools in the country with three-year programs (ODU, Houston and Temple) and we felt it would be a shame if we were left out of the picture. Our three-year programs were superior to the two-year programs and our graduates were obtaining higher salaries, so we felt we were one of those most qualified for such a program. Plus if we dropped our three-year program, we would have the faculty out on the street along with the students, so it seemed much more logical to go to a four-year degree.

I did not have a part to play in this. This was Dr. Stanley's baby. He was the man who put this through.

Q: Were the entrance requirements and the continuance standards in the engineering technology program comparable to those in the engineering program?

Kovner: Yes, they are the same. Many of the courses in the first year of engineering and the first year of technology are similar. I suppose they are about 50% or 60% similar. So a transfer of a student from engineering to technology or technology to engineering in the first year involves very little loss of credit.

Q: In 1973 civil engineering technology reappeared in the catalogue and mechanical engineering technology was changed to electromechanical engineering technology. Could you explain these changes?

Kovner: The civil engineering reappeared because we were able to pursuade Professor Beck who headed the civil program and was very practical oriented and was supportive of practical registration in the civil engineering field. At this time engineering had abandoned all the traditional civil engineering courses such as survey, etc. and we were able to pursuade Professor Beck that if he came into our program he would have an opportunity to reestablish these courses which were the love of his life. So he agreed to come into our program, plus his reputation in the field immediately attracted a lot of students, so we were able to reestablish a civil engineering program.

We changed the mechanical engineering technology to electromechanical with the idea of attracting students from community colleges that had some of this electromechanical electrical background. It didn't work out too well and we have since dropped that term and we have just a mechanical engineering technology. It was an experiment to see if it would attract certain types of students and it didn't. The name proved to be very confusing so we just dropped it. It was sort of an evolutionary process that went the wrong way.

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Q: What courses have you been teaching for over the past five years?

Kovner: A little bit of everything since I went back to fulltime teaching. I've taught calculus, specialized senior level courses in air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. Next fall for the second time I'll be teaching a course in power and combustion. I've taught status courses, dynamics courses, and I'm now teaching a senior course in automatic electronic controls. It's a wide spectrum with a little bit of everything and very enjoyable because it's forced me to go back and become a little less obselete. Things have changed a lot since I had taught much and I have to read more books and re-learn my trade, as it were. That's always a challenge. Sometime you wonder if your mind can take it, has it lost all its sharpness and then you discover occasionally that you still can function.

Q: What changes in your students have you noticed since you first came to the college? Are there more women taking technical courses today?

Kovner: No there are almost no women. Students today are much more academically oriented than in the old associate degree days. I expect that comparable to any group on campus, and I expect they're sharper. Certainly mathematically they are, except for those in physics or engineering. Our students would be more mathematically oriented than biology for instance. So they may lack a little in their liberal arts and very few of them could become technical writers, although in the past a few of our students have become excellent technical writers. So they are not literature-oriented or oriented towards philosophy or social studies. But they are very high in their field.

Q: You've already mentioned that you are no longer involved with the Norfolk Symphony Orchestra, but I noticed in an article that appeared in a Sunday, March 23rd edition of the Virginian-Pilot that your name is listed as the treasurer of a new opera company which is being formed. Could you tell me something about that?

Kovner: Well, I put nearly thirty years in with the Norfolk Symphony but it precluded doing other things. Since it's grown in scope there are more symphonies and more concerts involved. I retain my position with the Newport News Symphony, called the Peninsula Orchestra, which has only about half the services of the Norfolk Symphony. This takes care of my requirements in that area, and I have now become a singer. I do a lot of solo singing, and I direct musicals and have done a lot of acting since I retired. I have done a lot of acting in the dinner theaters here. I expect I've done some 300-350 performances on stage. Next month I'm directing "Finnigan's Rainbow", the musical end of it for the Portsmouth Little Theater and I expect to be active with the Virginia Beach Little Theater one way or another. I will also be playing violin with the Virginia Beach Symphony Orchestra when I can find time. So I am keeping quite active, and expect to the rest of my life. But staying in one group, like the Norfolk Symphony, and sign a contract, it means you can't do anything else.

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Q: In 1960 you wrote, "If the progress of the next fifteen years even approximates that of the period of development just ended, the Technical Institute of the College of William and Mary may well become one of the outstanding schools engaged in training the Engineering Technician for industry." I would be interested in your comments on that statement fifteen years later. Are the engineering technologists we are producing today what you had in mind then or an improvement over your previous goals?

Kovner: When we trained technicians in the associate program we thought they were very outstanding. I have in my possession for instance a letter from Newport News shipyard which hired many of our graduates in which they say in reference to our drafting and design program, that it was the best in the country. When you consider that they recruit from here to the west coast, we thought it was a nice thing to insert in a survey and we even had a tape where an engineer from Newport News Shipyard, giving a talk to a technical society mentioned that the technicians they got from William and Mary were the best he had. That plus the way they were gobbled up by industry, plus the salaries we commanded (we always commanded high salaries in this area, and this isn't even the North, where the high salaries usually are) were the best and on any national survey we always hit high salaries. It was a very rewarding aspect.

Many of our graduates achieved good transfer into engineering schools. I mentioned the arrangement we had with NC State until that was nullified. But the good schools like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Newark College of Engineering accepted our graduates into their programs, giving them basically two degrees. Many of our graduates went on to get industrial education degrees on a complete transfer basis. So with experiences like this, plus our phenomenal accreditation by the Southern Association, we had a pretty good opinion of ourselves, and felt we had established a successful program.

Our four-year program is difficult to measure, Because we are so new, we have very little to measure it with. If we measure it by acceptance in industry, it is fabulous. The dollar amount paid to the graduates is great, and the positions they are getting are good. So, I think we have a very successful operation and under Dean Weese who is not going to tolerate us but is going to promote us and under Dr. Stanley who is one of the most competent people around, it's got to continue to improve. Last year we were cited for having the outstanding growth rate on campus in terms of percentages. This was at a time when programs on campus were beginning to drop in enrollment and ours is blossoming out. This also shows that ours is a field where there are opportunities and very rewarding.

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ADDITIONAL COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR KOVNER 4/3/75

1. When he was asked to succeed Klinefelter as head of TI, he stipulated that he make the decisions and not be required to call Dr. Webb constantly for his approval as Mr. Klinefelter had been accustomed to do. Webb agreed, and in fact declared that that was the way he wanted it.

2. When he took on the new position, he determined that something would have to be done about Mr. O.B. Dickerson who taught the radio courses. His "freewheeling approach" was not acceptable he didn't turn in grade sheets, course outlines, didn't teach what was supposed to be taught. He decided he would give Dickerson one year to shape up; he worked hard to get Dickerson to change his ways, but was unsuccessful and so he fired him. Dr. Webb had predicted a revolution among faculty and students, but allowed Kovner to go ahead and administer his department as he saw fit. There was discontent over Kovner's actions, but only one student quit.

Kovner himself taught Dickerson's radio courses for one year and did not take any action to destroy this program as Mr. Dickerson had forecast. Dickerson had seen Kovner as the enemy of the radio courses. Then Kovner appointed Mr. William Thornton to teach the courses. After getting over his unhappiness at Dickerson's dismissal, Thornton accepted the responsibility and was highly successful.

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