Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview #87
RICHARDS, HUGH T.
RICHARDS, Hugh T. (1918- )
Professor of Physics
At UW: 1946-1988
Interviewed: 1977
Series: TA Strike, 1970
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 4 hours
Transcriptionist: Premium Business Services (8/9/09)
[See Index for Key Words.]
Interview Session (1977)
Tape 1
00:00:06 Start of Interview
LS:
I am Laura Smail of the Oral History Project of the University of Wisconsin. I’m going
to be interviewing Hugh Richards of the Physics Department in his office in Sterling
Hall. This is Thursday, January 6th, 1977. To begin with, Professor Richards, would you
tell me where you were born and when and brought up and where you went to school?
HR:
I was born in the Dust Bowl area in Colorado, actually, the southeastern section. My
father had homesteaded a ranch in this area. I was born November 7th, 1918. And
although we lived there for several years, after the war the price of cattle had dropped
where my father couldn’t support a family on the, in the Dust Bowl country. And he had
originally been an electrical engineer teaching at Pride Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
And so he got back into teaching, finally getting a job at what was the Wisconsin State
School of Mines at Platteville, Wisconsin. And that’s when I came to Wisconsin, which
was about 1923, I believe.
LS:
When you were five then.
HR:
Uh, I was, yeah, four or five. My birthday is such that I think I was actually four at the
time. And so I grew up in Platteville, Wisconsin, where my father taught at the State
School of Mines, taught physics and calculus. Uh, after high school, I went to college at
Park College a small liberal arts school near Kansas City, Missouri, Parkville, Missouri,
where my parents had gone, and majored in Physics there. And for graduate work, I very
nearly came to Wisconsin, had an offer from Wisconsin and Minnesota, but I went to
Rice University at Houston, Texas, primarily because my father had been in ill health and
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
had to retire, and had moved down to Louisiana. Uh, that looked like the best place to be
close to my mother and father at that time.
00:02:39
So my graduate work was at Rice University. At, one reason I went to Rice was because
in my high school, I mean, my college course in physical chemistry was a book by
University of Wisconsin, [Frederick Hutton] Getman and Daniels, Farrington Daniels,
and they had in it a description of electrostatic accelerator built by Professor Herb, which
fascinated me and I knew that Rice University had just completed a copy of Ray Herb’s
electrostatic and it looked like a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor on that
development. And also, I had heard very good reports about Professor H. S. Wilson, who
ran the Rice department. And I was very fortunate. That was a good choice.
00:03:41
I got immediately interested in nuclear physics research there with this accelerator,
working with Professor Bonner and my first experiments were on measurement of
neutron spectra using, recalling hydrogen nuclei and photographic emulsions, such recall
from the neutron bombardment. And I developed this to considerable precision as a
means of measuring neutron spectra in my first publications, my master’s thesis, and
Ph.D. thesis all involved this neutron spectra stuff.
LS:
What year is this now? Is it --
HR:
I went to Rice in the fall of 1939, and, uh, I completed my Ph.D. in 1942, but actually the
last half year, I had been involved already in war activities, and my major Professor
Bonner had gone to MIT to work on radar.
LS:
And his first name is --
HR:
Uh, Tom Bonner, and he wished me to come there to work on radar work when I
finished, but, uh, about a half semester before I finished, we were contacted by Breit, who
was at the University of Wisconsin then, to do work on studying the neutron spectrum of
neutrons from uranium fission as part of the OSRD Project at that time, but later to
become Manhattan District Project.
00:05:35
LS:
Now when you say we, you mean the whole Physics Department or just your --
HR:
Well, it was, um, one major professor that, major professor who was still left and myself,
just two people were involved on it.
LS:
Yeah [word unclear] uh-huh.
HR:
And so the last semester of my graduate career, I spent the daytime working on the
OSRD neutron spectrum measurement project. They were also interested in the neutron
spectrum of, uh, from deuterons bombarding carbon because that was a source of
neutrons that they wished to use to study fission properties. And so all day, I worked on
that, and at night I finished up my thesis work. And when we finished and got my degree
in June, I went full time on the OSRD Project at Rice, and we completed the
measurements that we could do there about October of 1942. [Blank spot.] concerns how
much we knew, uh, about the bomb project. At the start, we only knew that presumably
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
the Germans were working on it, and that there was a possibility of it being something of
importance in this war. And we felt a great sense of urgency that we explore it to the
limit of our capability, and it was very high priority on that. The information sharing in
general was quite adequate in most of the contacts I had, the project.
00:07:42
Well, in October then, when we finished the task at Rice, they asked us to go up to the
University of Minnesota to help John Williams, Professor Williams up there complete
some experiments on scattering of neutrons, and so I went from Houston to Minneapolis,
but we stopped by the University of Chicago on the way up for briefings there with
Professor Teller and John Manley particularly about the project. And this was shortly
before the chain reacting pile had been, gone critical successfully in Chicago, but we
knew about it, yeah.
LS:
Were they already in that, that big building that they had?
HR:
The pile was made in Stagg Field, but the offices and the metallurgical project as it was
called was at the University of Chicago buildings proper. And so at that time, we went
on up to Minnesota, and I continued some more spectrum, neutron spectrum studies,
fission neutrons, and helped with the total neutron cross-section measurements on various
scattering materials, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and also uranium. And during that, uh,
winter, we heard, we knew that there was to be a central laboratory set up, um, to
coordinate the work and push for the final bomb development, and we had great
speculations about where it was to be.
00:09:43
In fact we had a betting pool on it, but we’d been mislaid, misled concerning where
Oppenheimer’s, uh, interests lay on it, and none of us came very close to it. But in April
of that year, we moved down to Los Alamos to continue the work. And, in fact, at that
time, well, the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys was just moving out. We were
essentially some first people there. And, uh, in fact, there wasn’t housing for us at first.
Then the first couple of weeks, we had to live in dude ranches down in the Santa Fe area
and commute up to Los Alamos. And that time, I first met Professor Mack, University of
Wisconsin, who had come down via Princeton. He was in charge of part of the optical
work, and, uh, pretty soon, we were able to live up in one of the boys’ dormitories at Los
Alamos Ranch School. And we were concerned mainly at the start in, of course, getting
laboratories constructed and the two accelerators from the University of Wisconsin were
being moved down to the laboratory, and we were involved in getting those set up and
running.
LS:
Would you want to say something about that? What, did it actually happen in the middle
of the night that they were taken from here?
HR:
Well, I wasn’t involved in the removal here.
LS:
Oh, you didn’t know the details?
HR:
I doubt whether it was the middle of the night, but --
LS:
I’d heard that from somebody.
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HR:
It may have been Professor Herb.
LS:
No, not from him.
HR:
Oh. At any rate, our first task was to get these accelerators set up and going. And I got
acquainted with the Wisconsin group. Professor Herb was not with it because he was tied
up with MIT, and Joe McIver was the one who was heading the group. And the rest were
graduate students or recent Ph.D.s. And I was quite impressed with the caliber of the
Wisconsin group and their ability to do things and devise and make equipment and have
it operate.
LS:
I’d like to ask you two questions. Do you think Herb regretted not being there?
HR:
Oh, I’m sure he did, yes, yes.
LS:
And --
HR:
Uh, but John Williams, from Minnesota, who worked with accelerators also took over the
direction of the accelerator [words unclear] accelerator.
LS:
And the other one is, what hours you were working.
HR:
Well, we worked all free hours that we could. We didn’t punch clocks, and there wasn’t
much else to --
LS:
I just wondered if it seems as if it must’ve been a tremendously exciting time.
00:13:00
HR:
Oh, it certainly was. There was a great deal of enthusiasm that was an especially young
group. There were, and vigorous then, lots of energy, and, no, we worked many long
hours regularly. And we got the accelerators back together and in operation and started
on the various measurements and programs that were our task. I remember, for example,
one time the world’s total supply of plutonium, which was 140 micrograms had been
made by cyclotron bombardment, we had for two weeks time in order to measure the
number of neutrons per fission from plutonium. And we worked essentially nearly as
round the clock as we could for two weeks, all of us on that project. And we succeeded
in our measurements. We did get a little vacation after that, that we went over to the
Pecos River and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and took several days vacation to
recuperate. But it was very fascinating work, and the people with whom you associated
were the world’s greatest physicists of the time.
00:14:45
Enrico Fermi was there, and Niels Bohr came later, and the caliber of the physicists there
was just outstanding, Hans Bethe and Keith [Eiscoff?], and Dick Feynman, a later Nobel
Prize winner. So it was, indeed a very stimulating period. Well, I besides the regular
measurements with the machines which we were involved, neutron cross-sections, I also
continued neutron spectrum studies, particularly uranium fission, which they were
interested in. And when the time for production of quantities of material large enough for
testing developed, uh, the laboratory was short of staff to do the testing and
measurements involved.
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And so our basics physics research was postponed, and we were reassigned jobs on the
testing involved. I was in charge of the measurements of neutrons from the first test, and
Professor Barschall, who was at Los Alamos too and now on the University of Wisconsin
staff was in charge of a good many of the blast measurements. And we had a preview of
the first bomb test in May of 19-- whatever year it was. I -LS:
’45?
HR:
’45 I think it was, yeah. And that time, we set off 100 tons of TNT, and to test blast
gauges and so forth to simulate and scale things for the bigger tests. And the big test was
scheduled in July, and we also found that a great many of the field conditions for
electrical signals and so forth were more difficult than had been first anticipated. But in
fact, Joe McKibbon from Wisconsin was the one in charge of all the timing and signals
on both tests and did a tremendous job on it, deserves a great deal of credit. On the final
test, the group that I had on neutron measurements included measurements from some
balloons, helium-filled balloons, where we had recording instruments, and also some
ground station recording instruments, which measured neutrons as a function of time and
also radioactivity measurements and various distances. The object of our measurements
was primarily to, um, serve diagnostic tools in case the detonation did not go as
anticipated, and one had to find out why the implosion wasn’t successful and the
detonation.
00:18:55
And so actually, most of our records were destroyed because the test was quite
successful, and so the close-up instruments and most of the balloon things didn’t give, uh,
much useful information. But we were allowed to go in. We took five roentgen radiation
doses to go in and pick up equipment and records afterwards. And we did have good
enough records so that we could plot the neutron intensity of [word unclear] stations as a
function of time and made measurements of the, um, the efficiency, fraction of the energy
which was available converted. Um, the bomb -- we before the bomb explosion test
itself, we were about, it was about ten miles away at the McDonnell Ranch House, and it
was very spectacular event that occurred, of course there. That’s been described many
times so -LS:
Yes, I’m sure it has, although it’s –
00:20:31
HR:
It was also a very sobering thing, and a great many of us were active for many years
afterwards in setting up first a group of scientists at Los Alamos, Association of Los
Alamos Scientists, called ALAS, and then the Federation of American Scientists to try to
alert the public and the world to the problems, which this new control over nature posed
for mankind and the hope that it might mean the end of warfare as we traditionally knew
it, if mankind would recognize the, that a new dimension has been added and that war as
an instrument of national policy in a sense was becoming obsolete. And we pushed for
international control of atomic energy, and unsuccessfully, but this was the start of a good
deal of this science organizations.
00:21:54
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And, uh, after Los Alamos, I had offers to go to both Princeton and to Illinois for physics
programs, but the Wisconsin program looked like the best bet far as I was concerned. I’d
worked with the accelerators from Wisconsin. I was impressed with the caliber of the
students and staff that, involved at Wisconsin. And so I accepted research associate-ship
appointment and came back and brought the, one of the accelerators back to Wisconsin.
The other one was purchased by Los Alamos and kept there. And the next year then,
next winter, I was involved in the installation of returning the long tank here, and I came
permanently in May of that year of 1946. And I’ve been here every since.
00:23:16
Our first job was to get the accelerators running and producing again, and Professor Herb
was back at that time, and Professor Barschall had joined the staff from Los Alamos, and
we three were the ones who started the program after the war. Plus a great many of
students who had been a Los Alamos from Wisconsin, who came back, finished their
Ph.D.s at that time.
LS:
How many are you speaking of about?
HR:
Oh, there were, um, students, half a dozen perhaps.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
I don’t know offhand.
LS:
Was this a particularly large contingent from a university, or were, how many other
universities were sending –
00:24:13
HR:
Well, at Los Alamos, there was the Wisconsin group with the accelerators, there was the
group from Minnesota, which involved two or three students, came down with Professor
Williams and myself. There was a group from Princeton, which Bob Wilson, who heads
Fermi Lab now ran. The cyclotron had been brought from Harvard, and he ran that, that
group. And there were in physics, some from California. In chemistry, there were
people from various places, Columbia and particularly California in chemistry. But, um,
well, there -- some of the larger groups were, in physics were the Wisconsin and the, uh - actually, the group at Princeton came from other places too. They’d been assembled
there first, and were people from Ohio State and Cornell and various other places. But
the actual contribution of the Wisconsin group at Los Alamos was very large. The, most
of the really precision data, which was needed came from the electrostatic accelerators
rather than the cyclotrons and I think educated a lot of people to the importance of the
electrostatic accelerators.
LS:
Did Herb get proper credit for that? Because he, uh --
HR:
Developed them?
LS:
Didn’t he?
HR:
Herb, uh, is, was both nationally and internationally recognized, I think, for it, and
deservedly so.
LS:
Uh-huh.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
00:26:27
HR:
He, uh, most unusual person, maybe this is a good time to reminisce a little about Ray?
LS:
I’m just curious about one thing. You say you came back with one of the electrostatic
accelerators.
HR:
Yeah.
LS:
How big was it?
HR:
It was a tank about, uh, 6 ½ feet in diameter if I remember. At least it’s the width of the
windows in Sterling Hall because it had the old part of --
LS:
That’s right. He mentions that. It couldn’t be --
HR:
It had -- that determined the size of it, and it was about 20-some feet long.
LS:
You must’ve had it in a truck then.
HR:
Oh, it was, uh, rigorous. Movers brought it, so we just had to reinstall it.
LS:
Yeah.
HR:
No, it was quite a job, actually, getting it up the hill at Los Alamos, the rigors had hairpin
turns to go around and so forth. It was interesting rigging the -- but, um, I came back
because I’m particularly impressed by Herb’s program. First, that story in the physical
chemistry book about his accelerator at Wisconsin, and then the Rice one, which was a
copy of it, and Professor Bonner’s high opinion of Herb and Wisconsin and Gregory
Breit particularly. And I was not disappointed. I was very pleased with the Wisconsin
group.
00:28:00
And my admiration for Professor Herb increased even more. I might tell some stories
about Ray, which he may not have given on his interview. Uh, he came of a farm family
up near Appleton, Wisconsin, Navarino, I believe it was. And he told me once that he
almost didn’t go on to high school because it wasn’t the common thing for the farm boys
to go to high school at that time. But he decided he wanted to play football, and so he
decided to go to high school to play football. Well, he was too small to really be a
successful football player, but in high school, he did discover himself and came on to the
University-LS:
That’s wonderful.
HR:
--where I guess he said he earned his own way through, both undergraduate and then, of
course, he had support for graduate work.
00:29:05
But there was another story about Ray, which I think, um, is interesting to relate. I asked
him once about why he came back to Wisconsin from MIT because he certainly had
many offers elsewhere both radar work and otherwise. And I wondered why he came
back to Wisconsin. And he said, uh, told me a story. He said, when he first went to MIT,
he was extremely impressed by the quality of the lab technicians that MIT had. This was
electronic, wiring up circuits or debugging them, just really remarkable technicians. And
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
he said the other thing that impressed him about MIT and the radiation lab, this was the
war work on radar, was that the overwhelming predominance of Midwesterners in the
physics, science, and engineering positions. And he said, it took him awhile to, he said it
took him awhile to put two and two together and realized that these two phenomena were
connected.
00:30:27
That if these lab technicians had not been born in around Massachusetts, Boston area, but
had been born in the Midwest, they would’ve been scientists and physicists and
engineers, but in the eastern, without the good cheap public higher education, they had no
chance to go on. They couldn’t afford to go to Harvard or MIT, and it was the good,
cheap, available public higher education in the Midwest that made the difference for the
conversion of talented people into scientists and engineers. And he said he felt a
responsibility to pay back this investment, which the state had made in him.
LS:
Very interesting.
HR:
And in the same connection, in his development of accelerators, he found that many of
his innovations and developments were exploited commercially by, um, eastern concerns,
for example, high voltage engineering company. And as a consequence, he felt it was
sort of bad for the Midwest because the commercial exploitation of these were on the
coasts rather than where they’d been developed. And I think that is back of the reason
why he finally started his own company so that he could keep some of these
developments in the Middle West and so that the people graduating didn’t have to go to
the East Coast to, or the West Coast to find jobs.
00:32:31
There are other reasons too, but I’m sure this was not a, uh, unimportant factor in his
starting of his company. I thought he was completely crazy when he started the company
because it was a time when federal support of research was declining, and the certainly
the number of accelerators which the government would support seemed to be going to
zero, and, in fact, did almost go to zero. And I didn’t see how he could possibly compete
against the established concerns, which were having trouble already. But his leadership
both scientific and business-wise was such that he did compete successfully, and has
become the dominant accelerator concern in this area.
00:33:34
Now, let’s see, do you want to shut it off a minute? My initial appointment at Wisconsin
was as a research associate, and I spent full time trying to get the experimental program
going and involved equipping the labs and getting students started on thesis programs.
Our research program in nuclear physics here has always been primarily one of student
theses work. There’s been very little research done which hasn’t directly, uh, related to
student theses, and I think this is different than some places, where the research may be
not directly related to education program. But here in physics in general, nuclear physics
in particularly, there is really no distinction and has been no distinction between graduate
education and instruction and research. They’re integral, one and the same thing.
Question?
LS:
I’m trying to, would this be true in the other science departments here, or is it -8
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
I think it is true in a great many of the science departments but in varying degrees, I
suspect. I think it may be less true in, I don’t, I shouldn’t outside. I don’t really know,
but in physics, it is certainly true that most of the research, well, it’s less so in highenergy physics, but in nuclear physics and most of the other physics, it’s been primarily
student education.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
I think Wisconsin perhaps has had a larger faction of the physics research directly related
to student theses and graduate education than many other places, where more of the work
was, um, either professor’s individual research or post-docs or research personnel hired
for the purpose. But I think this is a feature, which is often neglected when the charges
are made at the university that the university is in research rather than instruction or
teaching. In my experience with the work in the physics department, most of the research
is inseparable from the graduate teaching function.
LS:
That, I see the importance then.
HR:
Yes.
LS:
That –
00:36:26
HR:
Well, on my own history then, after initial appointment as research associate, I was asked
to help out on the teaching, the staff was very small at that time, and the teach load was
increasing enormously with the veterans coming back to school. And so I became an
assistant professor and taught courses. The teaching loads initially in that period were
very high compared to now. Although, I did get somewhat lightened load often because
of trying to get the experimental program going here, and Professor Herb and Barschall
also did too. But I do know that Professor Barschall, in particular, taught quite a heavy
load a number of times.
LS:
Would you, would you say what were you teaching? How many hours?
HR:
I don’t remember the exact number of hours, but I was teaching one of the major
introductory physics courses with the lab and quiz sections too. But --
LS:
With how many students?
HR:
Varied from year to year how many.
LS:
Oh, on [words unclear].
HR:
You have TA, TA assistants to help on the, um, handling the lab and quiz sections, but
my load was lighter, I think than some of the others.
LS:
Would you have an average of 50 or 100 or 200?
HR:
Students?
LS:
In a beginning --
HR:
It varied from classes, the engineering classes had several hundred. The physics or the
vast physics, the high-level physics, introductory physics course was a smaller group, but
I think it had, well, it ranged from 50 to 100, I suspect.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
Oh. But you didn’t have anything to do with the engineering course.
00:38:44
HR:
We teach a course for introductory physics for engineering --
LS:
Oh, you do? I see.
HR:
I did teach that sometimes, and also there was an electricity and magnetism course for
electrical engineers that I taught one time, I know. But that’s ordinary teaching on that
respect. But I did have a number of graduate students, who finished and did well and are,
made names for themselves since. But we were always extremely short of staff in the
physics department to handle both our undergraduate teaching responsibilities and our
graduate teaching responsibilities, which were the student theses. And the University
administration was extremely conservative on allowing expansion of physics staff,
particularly, they were worried about the softness of the research support money.
00:39:54
At that time, it was, we were some of the first, one of the first places to get, in fact our
AEC contract was the first general research contract that the AEC gave, and it’s still the
longest in operation of any of the, it’s now ERDA, but the AEC contracts. But the fact
that we could get this outside support didn’t carry much weight with either Dean
Ingraham or the University administration on adding staff positions. And so it was each
semester a terrific bind to find enough staff to cover the undergraduate teaching
assignments and still find enough staff to supervise the graduate student theses, which
were -- the graduate enrollment was way up too.
LS:
Now when you said the first to receive, do you mean the first department in the
University to receive --
HR:
First in the country. We have the oldest AEC unrestricted, unclassified general research
contract.
LS:
But that’s for physics departments.
HR:
Yes.
00:41:08
LS:
But in relation to other departments in the University, that say, Dean Ingraham would’ve
been dealing with, is it a, is it that he was not yet ready to --
HR:
Well, I think they considered this a temporary sort of thing, and Dean Ingraham
particularly didn’t want --
LS:
So it was new, interesting.
HR:
-- to favor one department over another, and he was reluctant to -- well, there are two
problems. One is a reluctance to, to have competitive salaries and recruiting, I guess. I
think that was perhaps the biggest handicap. I think he would’ve let us add perhaps more
staff, but at the salary levels at that time, which he would permit, which physics were the
same as the rest of the universities. We couldn’t get the people we wanted often. But
both factors were involved. Both the salary level and the difficulty in getting new
10
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
positions. Now part of this was a wise policy because some places over-expanded on soft
money, but I think we went too far the other way.
00:42:24
LS:
And, of course, that’s happened since here, that some departments have over-expanded.
But the University was just beginning to cope with soft money. Is that right?
HR:
Yes.
LS:
It would be about the first experience.
HR:
Yes, in fact, this first contract that we had with the AEC, the AEC had asked about the
overhead part on it, and the University’s initial position was they didn’t want to charge
any overhead because the AEC would be helping University do what they would be
doing anyway. We’d been supported some by WARF on our initial step in getting going.
And the initial attitude was there no point of overhead. We’d just use it all for the
contract.
LS:
Yes, that’s right.
HR:
But it gradually, I think they gradually, I believe originally they accepted about 8%
overhead on it. Of course, it’s risen now to where overhead and fringe benefits amount to
about over 70% of the salary support.
LS:
Yeah.
HR:
So that, uh, is a change with time. And the University for many years did have an
exceptionally low overhead charges compared to many other places. But the only way
we could manage in the early days was to use the, um, [word unclear] support to actually
pay our salaries for semester leaves in order to handle the graduate students, the, and
keep the program going. But finally, the, there was some expansion of staff slowly. But
there was still strong feeling that the University was not in a competitive salary bracket
with other institutions, which were competing for talent. And we were at one time faced
with a possible wholesale exit of four or five of our top, at that time, it was theory and
high-energy people.
00:44:56
And, um, Ingraham, who was dean at that time, was apparently reluctant to make really
competitive matching offers to keep them. There was a great deal of unhappiness in the
department about this, and actually, I believe -- I’m not certain whether, is it this time or
not, but I was on the Physical Science Divisional Committee, and the Physical Science
Divisional Committee was, took steps to point out publicly the danger to the University
of not being competitive in salary-wise, at least in the sciences, that we were in real
danger of losing a large fraction of our top scientists.
LS:
Now you could’ve had the money from the, from other sources than the University, so --
HR:
But you can only pay the salaries that the University authorizes, and the University, of
course, has a long-time commitment on the salaries, and they, object was to keep the
salaries in physics the same as in English and history and so forth. And the way these
things work, of course, is if in salaries in physics were allowed to rise, then the salaries in
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
English and history go up too. But I think people were short sighted in that regard. And
there was reluctance to meet the outside competition for a long time.
00:46:41
And, in fact, we lost I know in one case where Rollefson was chairman, where he was
trying to hire John Bardeen from Bell Telephone Labs. Bardeen had been an
undergraduate here, and Bardeen Medical Lab’s named after his father, who was dean of
the medical school. And Bardeen had, in effect, was one of the co-discoverers of the
transistor, and we were sure he was going to go ahead, get a Nobel Prize. But [Blank
spot.] and the way these things work, of course, is if in salaries in physics were allowed
to rise, then the salaries in English and history go up too. But I think people were short
sighted in that regard. And there was reluctance to meet the outside competition for a
long time. And, in fact, we lost I know in one case where Rollefson was chairman, where
he was trying to hire John Bardeen from Bell Telephone Labs. Bardeen had been an
undergraduate here, and Bardeen Medical Lab’s named after his father, who was dean of
the medical school.
00:48:00
And Bardeen had, in effect, was one of the co-discoverers of the transistor, and we were
sure he was going to go ahead, get a Nobel Prize. But, and he would’ve come here from
Bell Telephone labs I’m pretty sure, except the maximum salary in the University, which
the administration would allow to be offered was less than his sister was earning as an
anesthetist, and he went to the University of Illinois. And this is the sort of thing that we
felt just greatly frustrated one, could’ve added top-rate people if we could’ve only been
competitive at all salary-wise.
LS:
Now this was in the ‘50s then.
HR:
I suspect so. I’d have to check the times, but, yeah, it certainly was in the ‘50s I think.
LS:
Because the lid did come off then, didn’t it, or not?
00:48:56
HR:
Oh, I’ll get to the summary of that. Professor Rollefson was chairman during a good
share of this, and he had, I think, extremely good judgment on hiring people and choosing
people. He was not perhaps as aggressive in pushing the Physics Department as at least
good many people in the Physics Department thought that he should be and there, as a
result, I think, became an organized opposition to him. I hadn’t realized all this at this
time because I wasn’t really involved in departmental politics. But Rollefson, I think
took leave to go to one of these government jobs. Maybe it was chief scientist in the
Army or something like this. And the department asked me to become chairman. And I
hadn’t realized at the time how much of it was sort of in opposition to Rollefson not
perhaps being aggressive enough with the dean and the administration in pushing
salaries. I had been pushing this in the Divisional Committee earlier, and this may have
been the reason. I don’t know what the reason why the department chose me.
00:50:35
LS:
Would you want to say more about that period on the divisional committee? That is,
were the other departments willing to -12
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
That was a common problem a good many of the departments, and I know there was a
great support in the Divisional Committee for the University taking a more realistic view
on what they would have to do to retain and recruit to keep the department strong. And
Elvehjem was president at that time, and I think he realized some of it. And the L & S
College, I think Dean Ingraham was the conservative one, who was very careful that he
had to keep the salaries in English and physics and history all the same, something like
this and which made it difficult.
00:51:38
LS:
When you say you made it public, do you mean you put something in the newspapers?
HR:
Yes, we had resolutions on it, and statements on it. But I’d have to check records on
some of this to be more specific. This is --
LS:
Well, Fred was here, was president until 1958, E. B. Fred.
HR:
Well, that was late ’58 because I think Elvehjem --
LS:
Elvehjem was ’58 to ’62.
HR:
I think maybe it was shortly after Elvehjem, I don’t know. I’d have to check. Maybe
Fred was still on -- Fred was involved on the Bardeen thing, I know. He was president at
that time. Elvehjem was involved on some of the divisional activities. I’ve forgotten
dates, so I don’t know the order of these. I have to check records to see.
LS:
Yeah, did you ever actually go and talk to Fred, or as a Divisional Committee --
HR:
I didn’t at that time. I think when I was Divisional Committee, I think that was when
Elvehjem was, I’m pretty sure Elvehjem was the one who appointed me, I think.
Although I could be wrong on this, but my dealings, as I recall, were all with Elvehjem.
LS:
Did you go to him? Did the committee go to him?
HR:
I don’t remember the details on this. It’s been a long time, and I haven’t reviewed this.
So I wouldn’t want to say on, I could look up in records probably. I think I have some
correspondence with Elvehjem on some of it.
00:53:17
At any rate, as department chairman, well, the two biggest need of the department were
both staff and the other thing was space. The Physics Department was exceptionally
crowded here. We only had initially the basement and first couple of floors of Sterling.
And we finally got additional space in some temporary buildings for some of the labs.
But conditions were really atrocious. Until this east wing of this building was built in
1958, I had only an inside office, without windows, which had been a cubbyhole
storeroom, and conditions on crowding were just intolerable. And this was another, I
think, friction in the department that department had not been given space expansion
commensurate with needs, and I think Ingraham probably is at fault in part of this.
00:54:27
The University was having a building program, and L & S was the largest single college
on the University. But most of the new buildings didn’t go to L & S. They went to Law
13
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
School and Engineering and Ag and various other places. And the only building I know
of that Ingraham really pushed for was the library.
00:54:52
And the department felt particularly frustrated on space because, uh, they want,
presumably chemistry had to get space first, and we, our expansion was to be where
chemistry had been. And this, well, just looked like it would never occur. And I know
one of my big objectives as chairman was to push the space problem to get more space
for the department as well as the salary bit. On the space problem, one thing where we
could’ve gotten money at one time, but were essentially frustrated by the administration
was that we had proposed to NSF for a building covering Lathrop Drive going on to
chemistry. Because, you see, until chemistry moved, we couldn’t get that space, and this
would be a way to get space before that, having a building covering that, than a high-rise
one. And we had drawn up plans for this on our own, and got a site visit from NSF.
00:56:25
But Kurt Wendt and the administration essentially torpedoed us on it. We heard later
from some of the NSF site people that they were all for approving it, but the
administration said it couldn’t be built there, and they wouldn’t permit it or something.
And so this was another frustration that we could’ve gotten NSF money for the building
at that time, but instead, I think the Engineering Research Building was built or
something like this. Now Elvehjem was also sympathetic to our space problems, and he,
in fact, urged me to ask for the site across Charter and Lyndon where Van Heise now is,
and that that would be close enough so physics could expand there and not have to wait
for chemistry to get a building. But, uh, I indeed sold the department on that approach,
that that would be close enough space, and we went to the Campus Planning Committee
to get authorization for that site. And the Campus Planning Committee turned it down,
largely because of Harrington, who wanted that space for Humanities. And -LS:
He was dean then, is that right?
HR:
I think he was, I don’t know what his, he wasn’t dean, but he had some --
LS:
No, he was never dean.
HR:
He was never dean. I think he was --
LS:
Vice president, he was vice president.
HR:
Vice president, I guess. Now, um, yeah, it was, I was told by the Campus Planning
Committee that it was Harrington who opposed that. I don’t know whether Elvehjem
hadn’t pushed it hard enough or what, but that essentially torpedoed any chance of
expansion that way.
00:58:38
Now Rollefson, when he was chairman, had gotten money from WARF for expansion
this wing here, and we had great hopes that we could expand in this direction. The
money from WARF initially was just enough for the basement and first floor here, and
this would enable us to get room for a new accelerator here, which we were interested in
nuclear physics. But when that was authorized, then the Math Department got in the act,
14
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
and the Math Research Center was being talked about. And they insisted on adding three
stories for it. And then somebody wanted the old observatory for an office building, and
so they got astronomy out, and put them on fifth and sixth floors. And the result was this
completely blocked physics expansion this way. Physics didn’t want math here.
Astronomy wanted that for physics expansion, so we were completely tied up this way.
00:59:46
We were quite unhappy with the Math Center being here. In particular, it later hurt us
too in that math had originally had a site south of University Avenue for their building,
but then because the Math Center was here, they decided that they had to be close to it,
and the abandoned that an insisted on building Van Vleck close by because of the Math
Center and because the Math/Physics Library was an integral unit too. And so this still
frustrated physics on expansion space. And it wasn’t indeed until chemistry finally got
space, and it was largely through push from physics, I guess, that they got space and
finally high enough on the priority list to get a building that physics got support for
additional space.
01:00:46
It isn’t quite as bad as I made it in some respect because, of course, as other buildings
were built, some of the other occupants of Sterling left, and we did get small increments
of space in Sterling. First Commerce Department moved out of fourth floor of Sterling
and built their business school, and so that gave some more space in Sterling. And then
finally, when social studies, econ and [Blank spot.]. The difficulty on, uh, building for L
& S was not due to the legislature. I think it was lack of aggressive enough L & S dean.
In fact, when Young became dean, conditions were turned around in that respect.
01:01:46
I think part of it also reflects the disadvantage of having one large college, which is larger
than most universities with just one dean because on most administrative committees and
campus planning and so forth, there tends to be representative by deans of colleges and
dean of the law school, which had a faculty no bigger than the Physics Department itself
would tend to be represented, and the small colleges have an intrinsic advantage in this
respect. Now actually Professor Barschall and myself worried about this considerable
length, and we tried to sell the administration on the need and advantage of splitting the
Letters & Science College into smaller colleges, not only for that reason but because, in
fact, it is humanly impossible for any dean in the Letters & Science College to be on top
of the individual problems in departments. He has somewhere close to 40 departments
and schools, various things, institutes-LS:
Plus all the programs, and it’s –
01:03:09
HR:
--he worries about, and he can’t even know the staff really. If he can remember the
names of all the chairmen, he’s doing well. And such a circumstance it’s our opinion that
the dean cannot in fact exercise effective leadership, and that the college is simply too
large to be functional on that respect. It was our objection on this, which I guess figured
Young, when he became dean to having associate deans for humanities and science and
so forth that, I think, was his reaction to this, which helped somewhat. And Ed Young
15
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
was exceptional in getting around and knowing departments and their problems. He’s
one of the few deans who ever came to a building and went through it and looked at
space problems. And interviewing staff, he would come down here and interview them
rather than take them up there. And I think he was in closer touch with what the
problems were than most deans have been.
01:04:29
But I think it’s still intrinsically a problem and that the Letters & Science College is too
big to be functional. Now Ed Young managed successfully as dean largely because at
that time, it was a time of rapid expansion, and there was money available, and he could
give chairmen essentially what they wanted. The crux, the crisis comes when, uh, hard
decisions have to be made on allocation of resources, and I think under the present
circumstance there, it’s humanly impossible for a dean of L & S to really exercise very
much intelligent judgment on how [word unclear] should be made and so forth. He can
either treat everyone the same 10% cut or certain fractional thing, but it’s just not
possible to have the firsthand judgment about things, which would be possible in a
smaller college. And I think there’s still need for such as split up of the college into
smaller units.
01:05:46
End of Tape 1
Tape 2
00:00:15
HR:
Ed Young was the sort of receptive to the possibility of splitting at least some of the
functions of the L & S College into smaller units. He told me once that if he could get
Jim Watrous to head the College of Music and Fine Arts or something like this, he would
be in favor of that. But nothing ever came of it. And ideally, I think, the college should
be split at least into a separate College of Science, and a College of Fine Arts, and a
College of Letters probably. To get the units and disciplines homogenous enough that a
dean could in fact be enough on top of the problems of the college so that he could make
good judgments on allocation of resources between different departments in his own
college, and then be an effective, informed spokesman for the problems of his college and
the larger, um, administrative councils. Harrington was never receptive to this idea. Part
of it, I guess, was cosmetic purposes that he didn’t want to be in, charged any more than
he already was, charged with multiplying the administration, administrative function of
the University because this would require several deans instead of one.
00:02:01
But I think it was probably more related to the, he liked the larger amount of power,
which was inherent, I think, in administrator and principal if he wanted to maneuver and
having this big unit. And he also claimed specifically far as the physics problems were
concerned, he could treat us better with physics as part of a big college than if it was part
of a small one.
LS:
Did you actually talk to him about this?
HR:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yeah.
LS:
As a friend or as a committee chairman or a department chair?
16
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
I think one time Barschall and I went up and talked to him individually, I think, about it
to sound him out on the possibility. I don’t think we ever wrote anything, but I had also
talked to Young about it. I think I talked to Elvehjem about it too at the time. And, uh,
actually, well, the time we talked to Harrington about it was at the time that Elvehjem
had, Ingraham had resigned, and we thought this was an appropriate time to do it before a
new dean was chosen. But he told us at that time, he was sure that the dean he had in
mind, Ed Young, would be able to be on top of the problems and would take care of
physics. And indeed, we don’t have any complaints about that period as far as dealing
with Ed Young was concerned, but I think the basic problem we posed did not go away,
namely that it was even impossible for Ed Young, I think, in a period of declining
budgets to make the sort of detailed judgments, which would be required, where you
allocate your resources.
00:04:09
LS:
You’re speaking of Ed Young as chancellor.
HR:
Well, as dean.
LS:
Oh, as dean.
HR:
The time he was dean.
LS:
And was that period of declining budgets? I thought it was still expanding.
HR:
No, no, no, that’s why Ed Young was successful as dean. It was a period of increasing
enrollments and increasing university supports and, uh, he was able to handle it because
of that. But when conditions reverse, I say the problem is still there. It didn’t go away,
and the present deans, even if they had the ability and insight of Ed Young, I think have a
much more difficult problem than Ed Young faced because they have to make really
substantive decisions on allocation of resources that I think Ed Young didn’t have to
make. And I think the unit is just a monstrosity now, and the, uh, there’s no dean that can
really be on top of it. All this Rosen discussion explaining how I, uh, had, became
chairman, I guess --
LS:
Was the problem of salary solved too when money became easier?
HR:
Essentially, yes. The Physics Department was treated very well I think salary-wise
during the subsequent period of Dean Young. In fact, and we did get higher on the
priority list on buildings and finally got space on building. Those were the, some of the
problems which I worried about because I was associate dean later with Ed Young, was
the space problem and salary problems.
LS:
Uh-huh. But you’ll be coming to that later.
HR:
Perhaps, um, let’s see. On the --
LS:
I think you just want to say turn it off.
00:06:22
HR:
Um, about the departmental problems, I think a more aggressive chairman and a more
sympathetic dean than existed at the time of Rollefson and Ingraham could’ve made the,
both the department, certainly stronger, I believe, and avoided some of the problems, but
17
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
I do want to say that I think Rollefson’s judgment on staff was excellent, and in general,
his dealings with people were superb. I think his shortcomings as chairman that irritated
some people was his inability to cope with lots of small day-to-day administrative
matters, which shouldn’t, the chairman really shouldn’t have to worry about.
00:07:30
And one of the changes which I made in department structure, which I think helped this,
was the appointment of an assistant chairman. In fact, that was one of my conditions for
taking the chairmanship, that there be an assistant chairman to help out on particularly
problems where continuity is important because I thought for the departments long-term
health, it was probably not wise to have one chairman serve indefinitely. He loses energy
and steam, and they’re it’s difficult to, for the department to change policy if it’s
traditional that you have the same chairman over a long period of time. So I wanted to
get started a tradition of shorter-terms as department chairman, more rotating sort of
department chairmanship. But this would only work if there is someone to carry the
continuity needed on scheduling and classes and many of the day-to-day operations. And
so this was one of the things I insisted upon if I was to become chairman, that there
would be an assistant chairman too. And, um, I was very fortunate in getting as assistant
chairman a former student, who, Connie Blanchard, who is -LS:
Still assistant chairman.
HR:
-- still assistant chairman and associate chairman, who had a great deal of energy and, uh,
very good rapport with graduate students. And I think he has served exceptionally well
in this position. And it’s only because of this that I believe our changed policy of rotating
chairmanship has worked. I think it has worked fairly well. It has not worked quite as
well as I had hoped in one respect, namely, I had envisaged that a reasonable term for one
chairman would be sort of the first year to learn the ropes, and then a couple of years to
capitalize and exploit the experience before his energy and momentum had drained away.
And with at three-year sort of period, it would give, uh, still enough change on
department policy and flexibility that –
00:10:26
LS:
That’s the way most departments do it.
HR:
Yes. But for most of the chairmen, very few of them have been willing to serve more
than two years because of the fact that, um, it is such a burden that particularly the people
that you want as chairmen, who are active in both teaching and research, the research
program tends to suffer so much that they just figure they can’t take more than two years
of it at a time. So that, I’ve been disappointed that we’ve rarely been able to get anyone
to serve more than two years, which means more of a turnover than is perhaps desirable.
LS:
I suppose in the sciences, it’s more crucial to miss an extra year of research than it would
be in [word unclear].
HR:
Yeah, the research program has a certain amount of momentum, but unless you can stay
there, it can go downhill very rapidly. So this has been a problem.
LS:
And you, yourself, did you, how long did you serve your first term?
18
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
I think it was three years on the first one, and then I served as associate dean for three
years. But then, I got out of that. I came back, I served another two-year term as the
chairman, I believe, uh, but I didn’t serve three then, I think. My only other tour of duty
came at the time of the bombing of Sterling Hall, when the regular chairman was away at
Aspen in the summer, and [word unclear] appointed me acting chairman at the time to
coordinate and tackle some of the problems involved there. And then I served as
associate chairman during that period of reconstruction to get the east wing back in
operation.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
And then I felt I had to go back to research because, oh, the department had wanted me to
serve as chairman several years there, but with, at the time of the bombing, our [words
unclear] program was so badly hit that I thought I had to get back to the research area to
keep that program going.
LS:
Oh, yeah.
00:13:17
HR:
The Physics Department and its mode of operation is perhaps, um, one of the most
democratic departments that exist. In fact, I remember a colleague from Michigan, who
was here for a colloquium, who had been chairman there, was completely dismayed and
couldn’t believe the way our department operated and the extreme democracy with
which, for example, salaries and promotions and recruitment were handled compared to
other departments. It is very true that the department chairman is nothing but a chairman.
00:14:10
He is not a head in physics, and has relatively little power in the sense of being able to
make decisions unilaterally. The recruitment, for example, is primarily by the groups that
are involved, if it’s the high-energy physics staff addition, they’re out scouring the
country to find a person, and they do the compilation of the documents and get the letters
of recommendations and present it to the department executive committee. On budget
and salary matters, the department has always had an extremely democratic procedure
for, uh, determining salary raises and promotions. The, either the, when the department
was smaller, the chairman interviewed every member of the department and each
member prepared a list of how he would distribute the amount of money that was
available for salary raises, and it was essentially on sort of an average of these, which was
submitted.
LS:
What an interesting device.
00:15:49
HR:
But as the department got bigger, it was no longer physically possible for the chairman to
individually take time to interview and discuss the research and teaching problems with
each individual member, and there’s a Salary and Promotions Committee, which divides
this up now on the interviewing. But it’s still an extremely democratic process. One
change in recent years on department governments, too, was the organization of a
Departmental Council, which meets once a week. They are elected members, the
19
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
council, from various disciplines, well, actually not formally that, but there’s a slate
which is supposed to cover the various areas.
LS:
How many are there, areas?
HR:
Well, I don’t know about areas, but they didn’t representation by areas, but the council
has five members now, plus the past chairman, the most recent past chairman to give
continuity on it. And this council meets once a week, and it sort of serves as a cabinet for
the chairman to give him advice on policy matters and, well, actually, in some respects,
it’s diluted the power of the chairman. There were some decisions which the chairman
did make unilaterally before, which now seem to go to the council teaching assignments
and things like this. They’re discussed with the council. I think the council is only
advisory, but it does seem to make it easier to get people to serve as chairman to have the
council to go to for advice and to take some of the heat off the chairmen if some of the
decisions are not universally popular. If the council has approved them, it helps the
chairman in that respect.
00:18:14
LS:
So it was, it was developed as a help to the chairman rather than as a control on the
chairman.
HR:
I think it was a little bit of both probably. There’s always some people in the department
are unhappy with the way the chairman does it and does things, and I think the
motivation of the council was, involved both aspects.
LS:
Do remember when it started?
HR:
That was fairly recently. I think it was less than ten years ago, but --
LS:
I wondered if it had to do with either with the unrest in the late ‘60s or the TAA.
HR:
No, I don’t think it was associated with either of those. It does have the advantage that it
does make sort of a training ground for future chairmen too because they can serve on the
council for several years and get a feel for what the problems of the chairman in a
department are, which they wouldn’t normally have. So I think in that respect, it’s good.
It tends to be more time consuming on department’s chairman’s part than the previous
arrangement. But --
LS:
Oh, I guess to go to all those meetings, you need an addition to --
HR:
Yes, and he has to consult them on all sorts of matters, which previously he did have, uh,
things to decide himself.
Although, a good chairman will usually on important things, informally go around and
talk to people who would be most concerned anyway to get their advice and opinion
ahead of time. It wasn’t required formally, but it was certainly the thing to do. Whereas,
now the chairman must consult with the council on major expenditures and things like
this. So --
00:20:17
LS:
I asked you how many divisions there were in the physics department. Is it --
20
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
We don’t have divisions as such. Chemistry does have sharp divisions like this, but, no,
we don’t, don’t, not organized that way.
LS:
You just think of the high-energy physicists and the nuclear --
HR:
Well, there are, of course, but it, the spills over, and it’s not an organizational division.
There are different subject matter areas. And there tends usually to be more cohesion
between an area than the cross-areas, but that isn’t always the case.
LS:
Uh-huh. Has there been anything like an age split or any kind of other kind of split in the
department?
HR:
Well, no, the department, of course, experienced its rapid growth, and it, so that, and the
young people were at it at that time, so that the age group, the whole department tends to
be fairly young. And that’s, of course, one of the problems, that you don’t have the
normal number of older people retiring. It hasn’t come to an equilibrium situation yet
because of the rapid growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
00:21:36
LS:
That’s off the subject, are there department meetings? How often?
HR:
Oh, yes, there are regular department meetings every other week, Friday, noon, we have a
luncheon meeting at the club.
LS:
What club?
HR:
University Club.
LS:
You do?
HR:
Yeah, in the downstairs, in back.
LS:
You still do that?
HR:
Yeah, yeah.
LS:
Well, that’s interesting.
HR:
Yes.
LS:
People gave that up.
HR:
No, this is every other week, and committee reports and count selections, and policy
matters are discussed there.
LS:
What percentage of the faculty go?
HR:
Oh, most of them, it’s a, it’s, I said democratically run department where people very
jealous of their, uh, participation. No, it’s usually a good turnout.
LS:
You wouldn’t say that physicists didn’t like to go to meetings then, I think somebody in
the math department was saying that mathematicians --
HR:
I don’t think they like to go to meetings, and they complain about the meetings being too
long, but the agenda is always published ahead of time for the meeting, and with the
council taking care of the more trivial things, the things on the agenda are usually things
that people do want input in on, and, no, they are very well attended, and it is a cohesive
21
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
[word unclear] department. And every other week in between, it’s a little bit [words
unclear] regular habit, department has a social meeting. Sometimes we meet with
departments or with post docs or civil service or students or just to, so that there is a
regular Friday meeting luncheon.
LS:
Is that strange, also at the University Club?
HR:
Yes.
LS:
And do you pick a particular group each time, or just visit or perhaps --
HR:
Yeah, no, the chairman, uh, decides who to ask, the Math Department to come over or
something.
LS:
How long has that been going on?
HR:
Oh, it certainly dates back to the time when I was chairman, now, because I know I
pushed it. I don’t know whether, well, we’ve had department meetings, as far back --
LS:
Yes, but I mean this --
HR:
But the social things, I don’t know whether I started that or not. I know I, I think maybe I
did try to, well, Physics Department oftentimes, there were ill feelings towards the
physics departments and other departments. Uh, probably because of jealousy, I guess,
on research and financial support. And I, we, some of the social meetings were attempts
for the department to become better acquainted with other departments, other
departments become better acquainted with us. And I think physicists in general are
interested in a broad variety of topics and like to get acquainted with people in other
departments.
LS:
Now, did you include humanities departments?
HR:
Oh, yes.
LS:
And social sciences?
HR:
Yes, but --
LS:
Engineering?
HR:
Yes. The turnout varies a great deal [word unclear] department, how many of the other
departments will come. Some departments, we have to give up on.
LS:
It might be rather hard getting them, having them become aware that they were invited to
a physics --
HR:
Well, their chairman should notify them. We go through the chairman of the department.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
But some departments, we get good turnouts, and some we don’t. But that has, if it’s
done too often, of course, it one group isn’t likely to have a good turnout. But if it’s a
long enough time cycle, it works out all right.
LS:
Excuse me, did you say somebody, do you ever give a paper or does somebody, is
anything discussed?
22
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
No, we don’t try to have a program. We try to make it completely informal. I think
that’s better than trying to have an organized program, something like that. So that --
00:25:49
LS:
Does the department have any gathering for the intellectual purposes giving papers as it’s
supposed to --
HR:
Oh, the department has a weekly colloquium at 4:00 on Friday, where both outside
speakers and local staff report on their work. And this is a cohesive element in the
department. We insist that the graduate students come to this colloquium, and while we
can’t insist the staff do, we certainly hope and expect staff to come. And if the quality of
the talks is good, the turnout is usually good. We tend to fill 1,300, which with, I expect
the average in attendance must be in excess of 200, something like that.
LS:
Oh, goodness.
HR:
Staff plus students, and then [word unclear] well, here are our announcements of
meetings through the week, uh, I’ll, the Friday colloquium you see here, this was T. D.
Lee, from Columbia University. There’s coffee and cookies ahead of time. So it is a
social gathering and a general department one. This was the last day of, and there wasn’t
a colloquium. That, it was no classes that day, but that was just a slideshow about his trip
to China.
LS:
And was that well attended?
HR:
Yeah, but that wasn’t, that would include wives and civil service and everything. That
wasn’t physics. That’s not a colloquium really. That’s --
LS:
It just --
HR:
That happened to be on that Friday.
LS:
That day, yeah.
HR:
That, the more typical colloquia, you know, this, from Stanford University, and
Brookhaven National Laboratory, things like this. Each week the department puts out a
colloquium and seminar notice so that you can go to whatever --
LS:
Who is organizing these? Is this the associate chairman’s job, or --
HR:
No, no, it, the colloquium itself is part of a teaching assignment for a staff member. He
has to organize the colloquium and get the speakers and see that they’re entertained and
so forth. But the other seminars are the individual groups, plasma seminar, nuclear
physics seminar, theory seminar, solid-state seminar, material science seminar,
astronomy and space physics, so forth. They’re different groups, and they organize
themselves. They simply send, put their notices to, give the notices to the secretary and
department office, and each week, we put out a notice of the events of the week so that --
LS:
Oh.
HR:
The students and staff can go to the ones that they’re interested in.
LS:
Yeah. Do you feel that you’re unusually active as a department in the University and
gathering this frequently?
23
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
I guess probably that is true. I think that probably is true, although, I don’t have --
LS:
I know the philosophy department, but that’s a very small department, that’s --
HR:
Do they gather?
LS:
Regular meetings, but it has, they have colloquia.
HR:
Okay. Some of the bigger departments, now I think chemistry no longer has a joint
colloquium overall, but separate ones in their different fields. We’ve tried to keep the
joint colloquium because it is a cohesive influence for the department, gives a chance to
see and hear about work in other fields and outside the department, in other universities.
And it is, I think, a very valuable function.
LS:
I should think so.
HR:
It keeps us in contact with the outside world too.
LS:
And with each other.
HR:
And with each other, yeah.
LS:
In other words, you will go and hear what a plasma physicist had to say.
HR:
Right, right. Right.
LS:
I had only, unless you’re still on this, I had one other subject on this department, how it
functions.
HR:
Okay.
00:30:26
LS:
How much comp -- well, what is the attitude towards being chairman? Are there
struggles to be chairman or struggles not to be?
HR:
The struggle is always not to be. I don’t know of anyone who has ever wanted to be
chairman, who would’ve ever been considered.
LS:
Well, are there elections, and are they disputed, that is, will two people be, will there be
two candidates, and --
HR:
Um, I don’t ever remember of two candidates, no. What, the way it has been handled has
been that, the way it’s presently handled is that there is this nominating committee of the
department, who goes around and interviews people and sees what their wishes are and,
uh, tries to get a consensus on individual interviews. Well, the nominating committee
first will try to find someone that they think is suitable. And if they’re, they will have
checked with other people ahead of time as to whether that he would be acceptable.
00:31:51
And if they can persuade him to serve, then he will be nominated. And if those, well, I
think the votes are usually -- I don’t think they are hardly ever unanimous, but they’re
usually like 35 to 1 or something like this. There’ll always be one or two that, uh, who
don’t approve of any particular person serving as chairman. But, no, I think we have
managed to achieve near unanimity on chairmen selections in the past. And it’s also very
important if the chairman is to function effectively that he have the support of the whole
24
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
department. And a person wouldn’t want to be chairman I think under any other
circumstances. No, as I say, the problem has been to get people who are willing to do it
and who will do it long enough to really be effective. And if it isn’t something which has
[Blank spot.] lots of rewards either financially or scholastically associated with it, so
there isn’t something a person likes to do. And for a person who is power hungry, the
way that department is set up, he would feel completely frustrated because it is not a
powerful job. Although if a person has sufficient leadership, he can indeed change the
direction of the department, persuade them, but it -- there are a lot of strong-minded
individuals in the department, and you, it wouldn’t function as a headship at all or
chairman at all.
00:34:04
LS:
There must be some, a portion of the department who never come to meetings and who
are, remain aloof from all the department business. How a group is that?
HR:
There’s a few. Oh, there’s two or three I think of off hand.
LS:
Just that, just that many.
HR:
Some come to more or less, but, no, most of them come regularly. Well, one thing, the
chairman assigns committees with the advice of the council and the committees include
the whole staff.
LS:
You mean everybody’s on some, on some committee?
HR:
On usually two or three committees, and they have responsibilities, which they have to
discharge, such as preparing the master’s examinations, qualifying exams, the prelim
exams, student-staff committees, library committees, various facilities, museums, lecture
demonstration, introductory courses, there’s, so it is not a centralized sort of operation at
all. It is decentralized. And, department meetings, of course, there will be committee
reports and recommendations from various of the committee programs, so that
everybody’s involved on that.
LS:
I don’t see your name here at all. Are you released from this sort of thing? Oh, here you
are.
HR:
Oh, no, I’m on the --
LS:
Campus interactions.
HR:
Introductory courses, introductory courses, introductory labs, and awards, and some
awards committees that here, you know. There’s some scholarships and various things
like that.
00:36:06
LS:
This doesn’t, I’m just curious. It occurs to me to wonder whether the chairman of a small
department gets the same addition to his, gets the same rewards as the chairman of a large
department.
HR:
Same rewards?
LS:
Same, they get more, they get released from classes and get some more money, I think,
the chairman does, doesn’t he?
25
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
The chairman gets no more money, no, absolutely none. I mean, is, no, no finance --
LS:
He gets the summer off. Is that it, the following summer or in the following semester?
HR:
Oh, uh, well, if he, no, if he serves as summer chairman, he’s paid for his serving as
summer chairman.
LS:
No, I mean, the regular chairman, doesn’t he, the year after he finishes being chairman,
doesn’t he get a summer?
HR:
I don’t think it’s automatic.
LS:
Maybe this isn’t a standard policy. I thought it was a campus policy.
HR:
I don’t think so.
LS:
What, how do you reward your chairmen?
HR:
We don’t.
LS:
Not at all?
HR:
No, uh, well, he doesn’t teach is full load usually.
LS:
No, but --
HR:
But most of them continue to teach some.
LS:
He doesn’t get leave the following year?
HR:
Not automatically. Some in special cases, he may, but it would be handled as any other
staff member on that. Most of the staff have summer support on research anyway, so, uh,
and if the chairman has been chairman, the wants to get back to his research, so he
usually is on research money in the summers. No, I don’t think there is very much of this
involved. It, it isn’t something that people are fighting to do. It’s regarded as a civic
duty that you have to do occasionally. If you’re going to complain about the way thing
are, you’ve got to be willing to take your turn to, uh, to see what the problems are. And I
think also, having had this rotation amongst quite a few chairmen, you have a large group
of people then who are familiar with the problems and the limitations of the job and the
frustrations, who -- that makes life easier for a new chairman because there are fewer
irrational criticisms of his performance because other people have been through it and
know what the limitations are on it.
00:38:51
LS:
One more question, is there, would there be competition among the different areas of
physics, say for an additional staff member that would lead to any, any bitterness?
HR:
Sure, there is competition, but --
LS:
It’s not serious, I gather.
HR:
Well, it hasn’t been so far. Of course, it’s only been recently that things were that tight.
And we have not been expanding rapidly in this situation. The department did have
committees some time ago, which sort of outlined the priority of different areas for
expansion, and we have tried, we try in general to follow those criteria. But more
26
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
important to the department, I think on the average point of view, is not the field, but the
quality of the person.
00:40:01
If a particular group can come up with a really outstanding person, he will get more
support elsewhere than if it’s just a particular field. And I think this is still very healthy,
although, at times, we have to emphasize the area more than the person. But ideally, it
would be the person. There was one problem, there still is a problem in the department,
which arose because of the fact that we were so short of space for many years, that this
precluded us almost from adding experimental physicists because we could not provide
experimental space for them. And you can’t hire an experimental physicist unless he can
have research space. As a consequence, in this period, we added a great many theoretical
physicists, who work with paper and pencil, and in my opinion, at least, we are
unbalanced in an ideal distribution because of this. We had hoped that we would get
space sooner and then add experimental physicists to restore the balance. But by the time
we finally got space, there was no longer the possibility of adding much staff, and as a
result, I do think we are rather heavily weighted on the side of theorists rather than
experimentalists. And this is something which I think we’re suffering some from.
LS:
This would be like having all, no, I was going to say all art historians and no artists, and
we have to -- it wouldn’t be the same.
HR:
It’s not quite the same. It, it cuts across different areas, but it means that the emphasis is
on the more formal mathematical part of physics rather than on the laboratory
experiments.
LS:
Whereas in chemistry or botany, there would be no problem with space for an
experimental science in those fields.
HR:
No, there would be problem there too.
LS:
Oh, there would?
HR:
But in biology, I don’t think they have the theoretical biologists so much where they
don’t need any space. I think they’re essentially all experimental. In chemistry, they do
have theoretical chemists, who just push paper and pencil around. And that, but those
usually are again by particular areas. Like here in physics, the theoretical high-energy
physics, there’s theoretical nuclear physics, there’s theoretical solid-state physics, and so
they’re in all different groups on area-wise, but we, I think, then to have an excess of the
theoretical type rather than the experimental.
00:43:06
LS:
How do they find out whether the theory is going to work or not?
HR:
Well --
LS:
If they can’t --
HR:
Experiments can be done elsewhere, but, or you can take experimental data from all over
the world. But I think, um, my own opinion is that we have an unbalance on this. And
it’s shared by some other members of the department. It also tends to make a little of a
teaching problem in the department in that the theorists are good on formal courses and
27
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
mathematical courses. But most of them haven’t worked out so well in the, well,
especially for laboratory courses and the introductory general physics courses where
there are large element of lecture demonstrations. Now there are exceptions to this. We
have a couple of the theorists who are doing a good job on this. But it had pinched us, I
think, in these areas to cover those courses. But we will have to face that.
LS:
[Words unclear] well, Herb would have been an experimental physicist.
HR:
He is an experimentalist, yes. Breit was a theorist. And Sachs, who’s director of the
Argonne labs not was a theorist when he was here over part of this period.
00:44:35
LS:
This, is this a time to ask about any or attitudes in the department as between physics for
industrial use and physics for, well, not industrial use?
HR:
Yes, the, uh, after the war, there was a great demand for industrial physicists, but also a
great demand for academic-type jobs and government jobs. And the better of the
students tended to want to go, if they had their choice, and they did usually of a dozen job
offers, to choose the academic or government-type jobs over the industrial jobs. This
resulted in the fact then that the industrial people tended to be the poorer ones, and I think
it has been unfortunate in this respect that, well, I think industry was soured somewhat on
type of people they were getting because they weren’t as good as they should’ve been.
And I think that has dried up part of the market.
00:45:59
At that time, one couldn’t even get good graduate students to interview most of the
industrial people who were around. Now that the academic market has essentially dried
up, of course, the only opportunities are primarily government labs and industrial jobs.
And better people are certainly going in that area. I think Wisconsin has had a type of
graduate program, which I believe gave a good background for industrial applications
better than many other places where their training was often very highly specialized and,
I think, perhaps not suitable for industrial application. One of the things that impressed
me about the Wisconsin students when I first met them at Los Alamos was their ability to
design equipment and build it and debug it and operate it. And this, I think, was certainly
if not started, certainly nourished by Professor Herb’s example and training, where he
was exceptionally gifted on this.
LS:
Uh-huh, he [word unclear].
HR:
He built the, uh, equipment here.
LS:
Okay. Write it down.
HR:
So I think our graduate student training [Blank spot.] perhaps not suitable for industrial
applications. One of the things that impressed me about the Wisconsin students when I
first met them at Los Alamos was their ability to design equipment and build it and debug
it and operate it. And this, I think, was certainly, if not started, certainly nourished by
Professor Herb’s example and training, where he was exceptionally gifted on this.
LS:
Uh-huh, he [word unclear].
HR:
He built the, uh, equipment here.
28
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
Okay. Write it down.
HR:
So I think our graduate student training has been, uh, well suited in general for breadth,
which makes people suitable for industry and other activities. But it’s only been in recent
years that a large fraction have been going into industrial jobs.
00:49:03
LS:
Well, that interest, that, what I had meant was something that Herb brought up, which,
when he spoke of having wanted to divide the department and have a department of
applied physics.
HR:
Yes, uh, yes, I think part of Herb’s reaction was to this problem that I mentioned earlier,
namely that we have a predominance of theoretical physicists, and we need a better
balance on it. And I think he felt that the theorists were perhaps pushing the department
too much towards the formal side and not enough towards the experimental emphasis and
that departments should be more vigorous in that area of applied physics. And I think
there is some sentiment in the department for this, but I think, well, it varies from
discipline to discipline. I think in our own field of nuclear physics and Professor Herb’s
area, this was essentially applied physics. And there is other areas which are similar in
this respect. And if we have enough staff in this area to handle these sorts of students, I
think it’s probably better to keep it as one whole department rather than split into two
separate departments on it. But if conditions got too bad, I suppose it could be a split.
There are schools with separate departments of applied [word unclear].
LS:
He said Harvard had it.
HR:
Harvard had that, but they don’t have an engineering school, and the applied physics
corresponds to engineering.
LS:
Yes, he did, did imply that that was -- so this was not a, any sort of conflict in the
department as to whether this should happen or not. It was merely an idea, that he and
others had. Or did it ever come, was it debated in department meetings?
HR:
Uh, I think it’s been mentioned a few times, but I don’t think it’s ever really been a
serious proposal.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
There was some talk at one time, when we had difficulties with the L & S dean that we
would be better off in the College of Engineering because it’s a smaller college, and they
would be cognizant of the problems. In fact, in many departments, universities, that is
the case. Illinois, it’s in the department of, in the College of Engineering. And in some
schools, it’s in both Letters & Science and Engineering College. And I must say, well, at
the time this was sort of proposed, we were less than enthusiastic about the dean of
engineering, so that sort of killed it. The present dean of engineering is quite a differentcaliber person, and there is some talk now that, uh, we might be better off in the College
of Engineering.
LS:
Would they be glad to have you?
HR:
I would think so. We have certainly prestige and reputation and research money. I
would think they would welcome us with open arms. Professor Barschall, who shifted
29
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
from nuclear physics to 90% nuclear engineering is very well pleased with the
Engineering College and contrasts the accessibility of the dean over there with the
inaccessibility of the dean in Letters & Science, and the fact that the dean is aware of
what’s going on, what the problems are there as the dean is not in L & S.
LS:
Would this be a major wrench if something like this happened going into another
college? For instance, would it affect graduate students, and it’s not just changing the
title on the door.
HR:
I don’t -- no, I don’t think it would be a major wrench. I think, uh, it’s administrative
one, budget one, namely the department determines its own policies independent of
which college it’s in, and the graduate school requirements are for the whole university,
not for college. So, no, I think there wouldn’t be any dramatic wrench on the students at
all.
00:54:32
LS:
Is the physics department one of the more expensive departments because of equipment it
needs, or, in L & S?
HR:
Uh, I guess it depends somewhat how you do your bookkeeping on any sort of thing like
this. At the time I was in the dean’s office, the cost per credit hour was highest, I think,
in music, and physics was down lower. Now they do their bookkeeping somewhat
differently up there, and I think at present, physics may be higher per credit hour. But it,
it depends, um, how you count thing. And then a basic difference, of course, is whether
you count research as graduate education or not. The money that the physics department
has on research from outside sources, I think is of the order of, I think it’s still of the
order of $3 million or $4 million a year from outside sources. And the University
collects, uh, overhead about 58% of salaries in the money spent there, so it’s a fair
fraction of that goes into overhead and, um, some in fringe benefits and the other is in
equipment.
00:56:08
So the outside support of Physics Department is large compared to any other college in L
& S, much larger than chemistry, and last time I saw, it’s large compared to engineering
too, all of the Engineering College. The, it’s not large, I guess, compared to medical, but
it -- then a question of how you allocate costs and receipts, it’s a very difficult question to
say just what the cost is. The lighter teaching load in physics is compensated partially by
the large lecture sections and the use of TAs in the labs, so that I think our cost per
student credit hour in introductory courses is relatively low. I haven’t been in the dean’s
office since early ‘60s, so I don’t know what the situation is now. But I do know that
there have been changes in bookkeeping on how they charge certain things, whether they
charge, uh, at one time the physics lighter teaching load was charged against research,
and another time it was, and it’s since been charged against teaching. And so you’ll get
quite different figures depending upon how you do those. So I don’t know the answer on
that. I haven’t seen -00:58:03
LS:
Well, is there any chance that the money would stop coming in, it is, I understand that
plasma physics is the, is coming up as the [word unclear] -30
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
It has all the money, I guess more money than they can, uh, well, they have more students
than they can handle with present staff, and they’re most in need of staff additions. And
they have gotten, uh, there have been certainly no reduction in their budgets or shortage
in their budgets. We have tried to add staff positions. We made an offer to someone last
year, but he turned us down. We’re again, very choosy about who we add, and this was a
high-level position. But he didn’t come, so they’re still looking for people. They’re short
of staff there. The high-energy physics, actually nuclear physics, the [words unclear]
budget I don’t think is very much larger than ours for the physics part. They also have
worked in nuclear engineering and electrical engineering. They cross lines.
00:59:25
High-energy physics budget is probably the largest single group. They have most staff,
and that’s related to experiments that National Accelerator Lab at Batavia and at Stanford
and at CERN and at Brookhaven and they have a lot of travel, and they’re away a lot.
And this, this sort of research has been the biggest problem for the department in that it
becomes very difficult to mesh such requirements with teaching a regular course if they
have to be away from, experiment and back, and it’s a terrible life for the people involved
too all the travels.
LS:
Are they away for a semester at a time or less than that?
HR:
No, less, the experiment may be scheduled for a week or something, and, uh, then, or the
machine may break down. You can’t schedule things always the way you’d like. And so
it’s, that is our most difficult teaching problem, I guess, is the high-energy physics
problem.
01:00:37
LS:
I didn’t, I guess I didn’t make my question clear. I was wondering if money might stop
coming in with --
HR:
Oh, the question of the hardness and softness of the money.
LS:
Yeah.
HR:
Well, this is always a problem on any outside research support. I can say in the nuclear
physics area that we have had this contract since, I think, 1947 or 1948, and, uh, we, if
you have a good program, it tends to be supported. Although with time, areas of interest
to the government change, and this certainly could turn off principal at any time --
LS:
That’s what I was wondering, whether it was changing.
HR:
Well, the fraction of the national effort in low-energy nuclear physics, which is
essentially ours has certainly decreased, and our program suffered tremendously by the
bombing part, both on staff and students. But we did survive that. Other areas actually
have suffered more, and dollar-wise, the fluctuations in support have been worse in solidstate physics, I think. But as long as you have lots of different sources of support, you
tend to sort of average out. If one dries up, another one comes on. And the main thing is
to keep a quality program going. And we have the additional advantage that we have
principal backup from WARF, a good deal of support, which they provide seed money to
get new things going. And this has been one of the big advantages Wisconsin has had.
31
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
001:02:44
LS:
And, all right. I made this mistake. We do have more time another 100 minutes or so.
HR:
Yes, I had expected with the general decrease in federal research funds that our
departmental research activities would be squeezed more than they have been. But the
total dollars, I think, have remained about the same, plus inflation means a net reduction
in activity. The main effect has been that we’ve reduced the number of graduate students
from our peak of around 250 I think down to around 140 or 150, so that we’re supporting
fewer graduate students, and the graduate enrollment is down then. And a larger fraction
of them, then, will be on teaching appointments rather than research appointments.
LS:
Uh-huh. When you say you’ve, have reduced them, they were reduced, or you, do you, I
mean --
HR:
Well, you, we’ve reduced them mainly by not adding as many new ones each year. You
see, it’s semiautomatic, if a person loses research support, and he has some students to
support, then we put them back on teaching. And it means there are fewer teaching
vacancies for next year, so we admit fewer, we hire fewer outside teaching assistants.
And so it is sort of self-correcting that way. And over the period of years from, I don’t
know when the drop started, ’68 or ’69, federal funding, but we’ve gone down from a
high of around I think, around 250 I say, around in there [words unclear]. And the
teaching assistants, I think, constitute about, I would guess, around 25 or 30 students. So
most of them are still research students, maybe more than 30, but I don’t, and there are
some not on appointment, on their own. But most of them have some support.
LS:
Well, I think the next time, you’ll talk about the teaching assistants as one subject I’d like
to cover.
HR:
Okay.
01:05:23
LS:
But is there something more you want to add general to department affairs?
HR:
I might just remark about, um building committees. One of the, this is a university and a
statewide and national problem, I guess, is the proliferation of paperwork and committees
and barriers and red tape. I was in charge of the building of this east wing of Sterling in
1957-58, whatever it was. And we handled it very well by a meeting once a week with
the architect, who came over from Milwaukee, and we went over things. And we made
our suggestions and changes, and he went back, and we got a very functional building out
of it. But I was also chairman of the building committee on the new building here, the
Chamberlain Hall addition, which occurred in, I’ll just forget the dates on it, but at least
the whole operation was just a tremendous contrast. It was illegal for us to meet with the
architect alone, building committee. We had to have representatives of the state
architect’s office, engineering and physical plant university architect. You have a group
of 20 people or something like this. And you can either rubberstamp what the architect
does, or if you try to make changes, it delays things forever.
LS:
This is the end.
01:07:14
End of Tape 2
32
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
Tape 3
00:00:06
LS:
We’re starting off on Tape 2, and do you, Professor Richards, want to say some more?
I’d like you to, about the building committee, your work on the building committees.
HR:
For the building of the east wing of Sterling in the late 1950s, I was the chief faculty
representative on the building committee, and I coordinated the work between the math
faculty, Professor Langer, and Astronomy, Professor, I believe it was [Arthur D.] Code at
that time, who were concerned with different floors of the building. And the architect
was [Reilinger and Rose?] from Milwaukee, and the procedures were very informal and
simple and satisfactory. The architect came over and met with us Wednesday afternoon
each week, and we would go over his plans and have give and take. And we ended up
with minimal, minimal time with a satisfactory, functional building. I was particularly
appalled by the contrast that later occurred when I was on the building committee for
Chamberlain Hall in the late 1960s or, I believe was the time.
00:01:36
LS:
What is Chamberlain Hall?
HR:
The physics/astronomy/pharmacy building over here at --
LS:
Oh, I see, right next to --
HR:
The new physics, the new physics building, yes. Where in the period of about a decade,
the bureaucracy and red tape had multiplied to an unbelievable amount. In fact the work
on that building committee was one of the most, the Chamberlain building committee
was one of the most frustrating administrative jobs I have ever had because first of all, to,
it was illegal for us to meet secretly, privately, with the architect, the faculty building
committee, who at that time initially was composed of Professor Herb, myself, and
Professor Camarini. And later Professor Herb was not associated with it, and it was
primarily myself and Camarini who were the building committee for the hall.
00:02:43
But for, to meet with the architect, we had to have present members from the state
architect’s office, University architect’s office, Bureau of Engineering, campus physical
plant, and various other people, so that it was such a large group that there was not any
effective way to have communication between the architect and the building committee.
You either had to simply rubber stamp what the architect prepared if you wanted to make
progress, or if you wanted to try to put an input, you delayed things interminably because
you could only have a meeting, not oftener than about once a month where you could
hope to get these people together.
LS:
Why was this, was there such a requirement?
HR:
Why, I don’t know, the state and University rules of procedure and bureaucracy had just
grown. I don’t know the reason why, but it is remarkable difference. And after many
long delays and we were, Camarini and I were so unhappy with the original architect’s
suggestions, that we wouldn’t go along with the plans. And finally, the only way we
could make any progress was for Camarini and I to go to Milwaukee on Saturday
33
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
mornings, we’d drive over, and meet secretly with the architect. He will swear we didn’t
-LS:
Yeah, that’s just, interested.
HR:
-- if he is quizzed on it. But finally, we were able to get workable plans. Although, I
must say, we were extremely disappointed with the architectural competence, both in
terms of imagination and technical competence of the architects on that building in
contrast to the ones who I dealt with on the east wing of Sterling Hall. You would like an
architect to have either imagination or competence or preferably both, but it seemed both
of these were in short supply on the architects. As a result, Camarini and I had to do a
great deal of the, uh, almost detailed building planning ourselves, and in fact, the final
arrangement of the building, was an arrangement which Camarini came up with, and not
the architect essentially.
LS:
Who is Camarini?
HR:
He’s a professor of physics here, high-energy physics. And the final building left much
to be desired, largely because one couldn’t, in fact, do everything ourselves. We weren’t
architects. But as I say, this was over the number of years involved, the most frustrating
experience I’ve ever had to try to get something accomplished. The money was
authorized, and it was trying to get something workable out of it. And some parts of the
building are good. Some still are not very good. And the, it’s a compromise. But, I’m a
little bit surprised that any building ever gets built on the campus now with so much
bureaucracy and red tape on it.
LS:
Have these architects been used again?
HR:
I don’t believe so. In fact, I think there was enough unhappiness with the final result
there, I think there were more changes after the thing went up and did on this than most
any other, and there are still some problems. But the same architect had done Helen
White Undergraduate Library, and people had been pleased with that. Although, I talked
to a librarian recently who was formerly director of the Steenbock Library and has now
left the campus, and he thought it was a very poorly done library. But that’s his own
opinion on it. I have no input on that. That, I think, concludes remarks on the building
committee part of stuff.
LS:
Yeah. Is it --
00:07:28
HR:
Okay. I might make some remarks about the early days of our, uh, research contract and
how it was set up somewhat differently than the ordinary research contract at the
University. We had had difficulty in dealing with the associate dean of the L & S on
petty details on administering things. Dean Doremus was the one involved. And Joe
Hirschfelder, who had a contract with a naval research funds had found that by having the
contract administered through the graduate school, he avoided most of the headaches that
we had faced going through the L & S dean. And so when we got our AC contract, we
arranged to have it administered also through the graduate school rather than the L & S
College. Elvehjem was dean of the graduate school at that time, and he had a most
remarkable administrative assistant, Juta Riley, who sort of ran things in the graduate
school. And she was the one who actually monitored the requisitions and worried about
34
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
details on it. And one of the procedures in handling a contract always involved getting
approval by the dean’s office before it went to the business office. And after we’d gone
through Juta Riley a number of times, she said, it’s silly, she said, for me to approve
these. I don’t know what’s involved, and you’re, it’s your money, and you’re competent
people. It just takes extra time and slows you up. Why don’t you just go directly to the
business office? They’ll check whether you have the money and whether it’s within the
contract arrangement.
00:09:38
Well, this pleased us a great deal because oftentimes, trying to get research going when
you’re short some equipment, getting it in short order is very important. And so this was
a big help. And so we were, I guess, at that time, probably the only group in the
University which didn’t have to go through a dean’s office that could get our requisitions
handled by the business office directly. This bothered, um, Letters & Science deans quite
a little bit, I guess, but it worked beautifully, and, in fact, we still have that arrangement
in the University in our contract, as far as I know, the only one that it’s ever been done
for. But when Ed Young was dean, the graduate school did want to get rid of handling
contracts like that, and turned it over to the L & S College to administer, but we kept our
privilege of not going through the dean’s office to get it signed.
00:10:56
And this has still been a burr under the saddle, I guess, of some in the dean’s office.
Dave Dean, Dean Dave Dean, I guess up there, is the one who administers these things
now. And there’s been several attempts to get us to go through the extra red tape of
having the dean’s office first approve the requisition before we can take it to the business
office. But so far, we have resisted this example of Parkinson’s Law, and -LS:
Yeah, I was going to say, how did you manage to resist it?
HR:
Well, it took opposition. In fact, it took a letter to Chancellor Young one time to prevent
them from doing it. But he had agreed when we went from the graduate school to the L
& S College that we could keep this provision, and he was willing to provide by it, so --
LS:
And willing to enforce this on subsequent deans too.
HR:
Well, I don’t know to what extent his commitment really extended, but as chancellor, at
least, it was, he was able to get it dropped. And I think, in fact, it is an example of
bureaucracy making things more difficult without really contributing anything to the
monitoring of the situation. If your research money has funds, the business office checks
whether you have the funds, and the dean’s man is not in a position to make an intelligent
judgment whether that requisition should or shouldn’t be passed on. And it is a [word
unclear] of the bureaucratic red tape. And I think in principle, there’s no reason why it
couldn’t be applied generally throughout the University.
LS:
I was wondering how the, if other departments knew you had this special arrangement
and --
HR:
Some have known of it, but I guess I don’t know of any that had been successful on it.
But we have been, I think, certainly never in the period I’ve been here any question of
35
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
what we had spent our money reasonably on that the dean couldn’t have prevented us
from making a mistake if he had been signing -LS:
Yeah.
00:13:30
HR:
There’s no indication that it would’ve done any good. Now one thing, when I was
physical science division chairman, one of the projects which we pushed at that time,
which I think was a useful University contribution, was the, to get the University
officially to recognize that it was helpful and useful for the University to collaborate with
industrial establishments to promote research in industrial development. The physical
science division had seen the very successful work, which the Ag School had done in
bringing the University to results of research in the University to the agricultural industry
in the state, the farmers and canners and so forth. But there was nothing at all
comparable in the way of bringing a university’s research talents to the industrial sector
of the state. And it was the feeling of the Physical Science Division that in many ways,
the industrial section of the state was very backward in respect to modern technology and
research, quite in contrast to the newer industries on the West Coast and some
rejuvenation of industries, say, around the Boston-Cambridge area around Route 128.
00:15:14
And so the Physical Science Division took steps to try to change this atmosphere, this
barrier between the University and industrial research establishments in the state. And
we had the support of both Young and Harrington on this at the time, and we were able to
get the faculty to adopt university-industrial research program. This was set up and
funded, and has, I think, changed the atmosphere at least of antagonism often between the
University and industrial research establishments, which I had sensed earlier. I don’t
know that it has produced the miracles in renovating the industrial establishment in the
state that one might’ve hoped for, but I think it was a step in the right direction. But it’s
not an easy thing to accomplish overnight. And there are indeed around the Madison, the
fringes of the Madison campus, a number of modern high-tech knowledge, research
oriented industries, which have been set up, and some are direct outgrowths of university
research, or have been located here because of the facilities of the University or the
ability to recruit trained scientists and engineers because of the university being here.
00:17:11
LS:
Is it written up somewhere what, how exactly this operated, or does it have a physical, is
there an office?
HR:
Oh, yes, there’s a dean of the graduate school now who’s involved in it, Jack Duffie, I
think he’s on leave this semester, but earlier there was a separate organization down in
the First National Bank Building. Roger Hildebrand was the public relations person on it.
But --
LS:
But it was the University.
HR:
Oh, yes, the University program, and it still is the University program. And I think in
specific cases, they have given help to small businesses in solving problems and --
LS:
The way, as you say, the ag campus didn’t, I guess -36
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
It hasn’t had the size or the impact or the funding that the Ag Extension Program has had.
And in fact --
LS:
But it’s the same function. It was meant to do, the same intention.
00:18:09
HR:
Same, same, yeah, philosophy is that the University should try to make available its
expertise and help out industrial sector of the state as well as the agricultural sector of the
state.
LS:
Does anybody in the Physical Sciences Division disagree with this idea?
HR:
I don’t think there was any disagreement. I don’t recall any at the time.
LS:
I wonder sometimes about this kind of program in that it seems to benefit companies
which make profits from the University, whereas, one would think the University should
be serving the public. And I realize it isn’t that easy a thing, but --
HR:
No, of course the farmers make profits from the University helping them in ag too. And
the state makes a profit on it then too. Is it worse for individuals to make a profit or a
company to make a profit? We want the industry in the state to be profitable. It means
more jobs and more tax revenues, and healthy economy. So I think the same arguments
that make it wise to bring the results of, results of research to the agricultural sector also
apply equally well to the industrial sector. Some people may disagree. Okay.
00:19:51
We might talk about the period preceding the bombing of Sterling Hall and then the
Sterling Hall bombing, period. This was, of course, the period of a great deal of student
unrest because of, particularly because of the unfortunate Vietnam War. And the student
atmosphere, of course, had gotten more and more militant as time went by and activists
had taken over, and there were periodic trashings, where the windows down State Street
would be broken and actually also the center of the agitation on the campus was the
Army Math Center, which was located above us in Sterling Hall. This was, as I’ve
indicated earlier, not an organization that we wanted in our building, and we had been
unhappy from the start because Langer as director had kept the doors of it locked, and we
couldn’t actually walk through it to exit the, that part of the building. We had to exit in
another part. So we never had exceptionally good relations with the Math Research
Center, although -LS:
That’s very interesting, even though it was supposed to all be above-board research.
HR:
Well, uh, he just didn’t want students tracking through there and interrupting them
because his --
LS:
Oh, I see, well [word unclear].
HR:
And, in fact, when Langer left the directorship of it, and Barkley Rosser came there, he
opened the doors and allowed traffic to go through it. It was just an idiosyncrasy of the
original director, Langer, who didn’t want students traipsing through.
00:21:46
LS:
And you just didn’t want it there because you wanted the space.
37
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
It blocked our expansion, and then it irritated us more to have the doors locked so we
couldn’t even walk through and, in fact, I had needled Ingraham about it once. But
Ingraham was afraid to tackle Langer, who was then in the Math Department and kind of
a prima donna from the start. But Ingraham also thought the doors shouldn’t be locked.
But they remained locked. Langer was a difficult person to deal with. Well, at any rate,
the student unrest increased, and my office neighbor, Professor Barschall, got more and
more worried about it. And to understand his worry, you have to know a bit about his
background. He grew up in Germany, and he saw the Nazis develop in Germany, and
their use of force and terrorism to get their way and their mob psychology, which they
engendered. And he felt very uneasy that the student activists on the campus seemed to
him were exactly in the same pattern of the Nazis, which he’d, had contact with in
Germany, and he was quite worried and agitated about it.
00:23:13
As a matter of fact, because of the trashing and so forth, and is window being exposed
here, and the center of attention being the Army Math Center, he arranged for us to have
metal Venetian blinds installed in our windows on this side. You can see them in my
office here now. And this was, he was worried about flying glass from the trashing,
damaging an office. And if there was very bad activism on the campus, he tended to go
home. He was, he was really physically worried about what the activists were doing on
the campus.
LS:
Was the rest of the department, just went along with him, or was there --
HR:
Well, most of the rest of the department couldn’t really believe it was going to be
anything serious because we never had any experience on this, and we thought it was just
youth that was sort of undisciplined that were, uh, carrying on. And he and, Barschall
and all of us were against the Vietnamese War, and that part, we supported their
objectives to end the war. But we were appalled that the methods they were willing to
take to achieve their ends. And this, I think, is the danger that a great many young people
fall into is that that good ends they think justify bad means, and, of course, in reality, you
can’t separate ends and means. They become very thoroughly mixed, and as I say,
Barschall was the one person who I think was really terrified what was going on and what
might be happening in the country because he’d seen the Nazis take over in Germany, not
by popular vote but by terrorizing people. And he was afraid the same thing was
occurring here.
LS:
Was there anything in the department, did graduates or students in the department, were
there any confrontations with faculty at that time?
HR:
Not physics students. Physics faculty was, I think, almost unanimously, well, not quite, I
think there were one of two who supported the Vietnamese War, but overwhelmingly, the
department had been active and vocal against it from the start. And the students, um, I
don’t, we never had a conflict with our own students on it.
LS:
In the History Department and I guess the English Department, some others, these, all of
these things got mixed up, the opposition to the war, the TA, the issues that led up to the
TA strike, and that’s, I was wondering if that had happened here. For instance, TAs
would say we would ask, want to talk to the department faculty, and then would also
38
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
bring up the issue of the war and would want the department to take a stand on the war.
So the two issues would get mixed up.
HR:
No, I don’t think we ever had that problem. I think both students and faculty were united
against the war, and I don’t think many of the physics students were involved in the
terroristic trashing sort of things.
LS:
Oh, I see.
HR:
But I don’t know. There may, I don’t know how many were, but I don’t -- Physics
students in general are awfully busy, and I don’t think they would have a lot of time for
it, first of all. We keep them, we keep their nose to the grindstone pretty much. But there
may have been some. I don’t know.
00:27:22
Well, the, uh, time of the bombing, I live about a mile from the campus, and I was
awakened by my wife. She said there had been an explosion, and I wasn’t convinced, I
hadn’t heard it, so I wasn’t convinced of it. But shortly thereafter, I got a phone call from
Professor Haeberli, and one of his students had called him. Sterling Hall had been
bombed, and so I, he called me and called Professor Barschall.
LS:
This was still at dawn, wasn’t it?
HR:
Well, this was before dawn, yeah.
LS:
Yeah.
HR:
And we all came in immediately, and at the time, I guess, the fire trucks were there. And
Chancellor Young had come too. And, uh, Professor Barschall’s students were running
on the machine, the accelerator that night, and so he was, of course, particularly worried
concerning the safety of his students. And he had to be almost forcefully restrained from
going in the building to try to see what had happened to them. But the, in fact,
Chancellor Young asked me particularly to keep my eye on Barschall because he was
quite worried about Barschall’s -- might do something really dangerous to himself in
going in.
LS:
There was, it was still burning, and the fire trucks were still fighting the fire.
HR:
Oh, sure. Oh, yes, we were quite early, and they were, the firemen went in and brought
out Schuster, the student of Barschall’s who was injured in the blast. And, uh, Professor
Quinn, who was working in, on the first floor office, in fact, he’d gone to the department,
to the nuclear department office to get a reprint, and the door was open. And apparently,
that saved his life or serious injury because the blast simply knocked him down, and he
was able to get out the window on the north side without any serious injuries. Whereas,
the doors to all the other offices on the hall, since they were closed, were blown clear
across the room and the walls blown down. And my office was on the north side of the
building, and it was complete rubble with the walls and the books and desks and
doorframes all mixed up in the office. And --
LS:
When did you finally get in to discover this?
HR:
Oh, well, not until a day or so later on this.
39
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
Oh, really?
HR:
The, um, the main thing, of course, first was the saving people in the building. There was
a night watchman, who was injured, and then Professor Dillinger’s student, post
doctorate, Fassnacht, Robert Fassnacht, was killed, and this was a great blow to Joe
Dillinger, Professor Dillinger, and he was in a state of shock for, um, well [word unclear]
for some time as a result of this, and it’s not certain that he ever recovered. He died of a
heart attack last year, and his [word unclear] he was getting his program back in
operation again. But I was here then from shortly after the blast to -- for some time as a
result of this, and it’s not certain that he ever recovered. He died of a heart attack last
year, and his [word unclear] he was getting his program back in operation again. But I
was here then from shortly after the blast to, uh, oh, 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, when I
went home then and back to bed.
00:32:13
And the, um, chairman of the department at that time was Loyal Durand, and he was
away at Aspen Institute in Colorado. And Dean Kleene asked me to serve as acting
chairman during the time because the chairman wasn’t here and supplied me an associate
chairman to supervise the reconstruction of the program in the east wing of Sterling. And
we certainly had excellent cooperation on this from the whole university community and
the whole city [word unclear] and the physics community in general on, we had letters
and telegrams of offers of aid from all over the world.
LS:
Financial aid?
00:33:18
HR:
Equipment and asking whether there was anything they could do, and we did get
replacement of some of the equipment later from some of the other laboratories on some
equipment that was lost. The accelerator itself, [Tamind?] Accelerator, was in an
underground portion between east wing of Sterling and the Berge Hall and was relatively
little damaged, although, the entrance to this area was close to the explosion, and it blew
in the doors and wiped out the ion-source end of the accelerator and broke the vacuum
and sand and gravel debris went throughout the whole accelerator and vacuum system.
And we had, in order to get the accelerator back in operation, we had to take out the,
replace the accelerating tubes with new ones and rebuild, clean and rebuild the vacuum
systems and rebuild the ion sources. And we also, at the same time, had to clean up
rubble from the laboratories and salvage whatever equipment we could that was still
usable from that. And --
LS:
When you say we, this is you, the Physics Department, or could you actually do these
things? I don’t suppose, I don’t mean the rubble, but the machine.
HR:
Yes, we --
LS:
You were equipped, you were able to --
HR:
We, uh, we did this.
LS:
-- to make those repairs.
40
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
For a while the FBI excluded us from the area, but then they let us come in and, uh, and
when I could come into the area and go through my office, well, what I did, well, the
Math Center, which wasn’t badly damaged at all, the damage was just almost entirely -the damage was sustained almost entirely by physics on the first and basement floor, and
then actually, in fact, the damage was more up in astronomy and the top part of the
building than in the Math Center because the whole motion of the building had its
maximum amplitude at the upper stories. And so the Math Center was the least damaged
part. And so I could, within a relatively short time, move up one floor to a former math
research, Math Center office. Math had moved out to another building.
00:36:08
LS:
Right away.
HR:
Right away, they took their pencils and paper and were back in business right away. And
so I moved up to a math department office one floor up. And, uh, supervised the
reconstruction of Sterling from this location. The, that was a very difficult winter
because the, the south side of the building being blown out, there wasn’t heat on the south
side, and there was only heat on the north side. And that was a very cold winter in the
office to try to keep warm. In the rubble in my office, as I cleaned it up and moved my
books and manuscripts, journals, to the upper floor, to the Math Center office, amongst
the rubble, I found the sides of the drinking fountain in the hall, which had been blown in.
I found also the spare wheel of the van, which had carried the high explosives, and the
spare wheel was badly deformed in its collision course to my office. My laboratory --
LS:
And you still have it.
HR:
I still have it here in my office to remind me of the situation. My laboratory, which was
across the hall, was totally demolished. I had an ion-source test set up there and student
offices, and the students lost all their books and equipment and any journals they’d
borrowed from me too usually. In fact, my off-- my laboratory dropped down a floor to
the basement on Professor Barschall’s laboratory, which was also totally destroyed in the
basement. And our machine shop in the basement, a [word unclear] shop and the other
labs there were destroyed and some of the adjacent rooms also.
00:38:19
The students pitched in and helped clear debris out, and occasionally, some of the things
in the rubble were worth saving, and some weren’t. And we had to then prepare
insurance form reports on the losses, and the University, the state covers the insurance
themselves, and we got a fairly reasonable insurance settlement from the state for the
equipment. But the problem is that most of the equipment, a great deal of the equipment
is homemade and not something you can buy commercially. And so it isn’t easy to
replace even if you have the dollars. And, in fact, only now, some seven years, six, seven
years later, are we replacing some of the equipment that was damaged. For example,
polarized ion source, which Professor Haeberli is involved with, is only now being
reconstructed, somewhat different and better design, we hope. But it isn’t something that
you can simply go out and buy on the market.
LS:
You went somewhere else and worked with someone else’s equipment?
HR:
No, no.
41
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
Were you just waiting, or --
HR:
No, on this ion source, we just didn’t develop this new source until this time. But on the
accelerator itself, we did get that back and operating in, operation, in a very short time,
remarkably short.
LS:
A month or --
HR:
From August 23rd or 24th, whatever the day of the bombing was, until the end of
November, we had the essential parts of the accelerator back in operation, and we
resumed regular running early in December. And, in fact, the [Heineke?] physicists gave
us a little plaque we have on the wall down there in honor of our heroic job in getting it
back in operation so soon. It was a big undertaking and required dedicated, long hours of
work by the students and technical staff and everyone involved. But we also had help
from some other laboratories, throughout the country, offered, for example, a machine
shop we got a replacement lathe from one laboratory, and we got [word unclear] scopes
and other things from other laboratories. And the AEC did give us a special grant of
$50,000 to purchase, replace equipment, which had been damaged.
00:41:16
So these things helped out. But the cost in time and effort and equipment is really
incalculable. In fact, the biggest cost of the program in the long run was the fact that
Professor Barschall and Professor Borchers, I think, both essentially, after a very short
interval, terminated their activities with the nuclear physics program. Professor Barschall
had been so shaken up by the experience, that he wanted to get away from the campus.
LS:
How old was he at the time?
HR:
Oh, he was probably around 54-55 would be my guess. And he went out to, he had offers
from several places, but he went out to California at the Livermore Laboratories, where
they took him as associate director out there. And he spent two years out there as
associate director of the Laurence Livermore Laboratory. And during that time, he got
interested in development of intense neutron sources, and he is pushing some of those for
cancer therapy now. In fact, I just had a reprint from him of an article in American
Scientist on test neutron sources for cancer therapy, which is a very nice summary of
work in this field. But when he did elect to come back to the University after a couple of
years, and I worked hard to try to get him back because I thought he was a big asset to the
University. In fact, with Ed Young’s help, we got Bascom Professorship for him. He
was an outstanding teacher and research person, so the Bascom Professorship was very
appropriate.
00:43:33
But he, uh, didn’t want to start over again in nuclear physics. He had his lab destroyed,
and he decided he would start over again in a smaller department, nuclear engineering.
And so he is 95% of his time in nuclear engineering, but he is still 10% in physics. And
he seems much happier with this arrangement. There was also, I think, one of the
problems that he didn’t want to come back in physics, at the time of the bombing, he felt
very strongly that Durand should’ve come back immediately to take over as chairman on
the bombing, after the bombing. And he thought the department should’ve insisted upon
42
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
it. And he, in fact, made it almost as a condition that he stay, and I think that may have
been one reason he didn’t.
LS:
Why didn’t Durand come back?
HR:
He didn’t think, well, I don’t know why he didn’t come back. He, uh, thought that, I
guess, I could take care of things. I don’t know.
LS:
He was back for the semester beginning, was he?
HR:
Yeah, when the semester came, but not at the time.
00:45:12
Incidentally, at the same time of the bombing, there was an international conference on
polarized neutrons, which was scheduled for next week here in Madison.
LS:
Oh.
HR:
And Professor Barschall and Professor Haeberli were the local co-sponsors of it. And on
top of all the bombing, there was all these international visitors coming.
LS:
They still came, did they?
HR:
They still came, they still had the conference. Barschall thought at first, they should call
it off. But they had the conference. And, of course, people from all over the world were
alerted to the situation here on it.
LS:
Yes, it was a good way of spreading the word.
00:46:07
HR:
But, um, the local media, both radio and television and press, were very poor in their
coverage of the events in the sense that they were inaccurate in describing the main event,
which -- the main damage was sustained by physics, not by the Math Research Center,
and this was a very hard thing to sell to the media. And Chancellor Young tried hard to
help us sell it, but the impression was that, in fact, that the person killed was involved
with the Math Center, which wasn’t true at all. He was just a research associate in
physics and very much opposed to the Vietnam War. So this close distortion of the
situation by the media bothered Professor Barschall a lot. It bothered some of the other
of us too. And it still has not been successfully countered in many people’s minds. They
still think of it as the bombing of the Math Research Center.
LS:
You said The New York Times had interviewed you.
HR:
The New York Times did send out a reporter, who interviewed Barschall and myself and
others in depth and wrote a very good and accurate appraisal of the situation. The New
York Times in that period followed 1970, and, in fact, we found that our colleagues
abroad, who had read The New York Times account had a more accurate picture of what
went on than people living here in Madison, who relied upon the local media for their
understanding of the event.
LS:
Uh-huh.
00:48:25
43
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
On the rebuilding of the building, Yamamoto, the state architect was very helpful, and I
worked with him on planning the -- Yamamoto and I worked on drawing up the plans for
the rebuilding, and those went forward very successfully, and in about a year’s time, we
were able to get back in the building and back to more or less normal activities. The
Math Center, we were against, in the physics, at least, having the Math Center move back
in. The Math Center did want to move back in, but through Irv Shain, Irv Shain was a
great deal of help to us in this regard. He was vice president in charge of academic
affairs at the time. And, um, Irv Shain was able to persuade the Math Center to remain
out in the WARF Building.
00:49:40
And we arranged a switch on -- the Physics Department office at that time was in the east
wing of Old Chemistry, and we arranged a switch, whereby physics would take the space
in the, that the Math Center occupied in the east wing of Sterling. We moved the Physics
Department office to that region. And the pharmacy then expanded into the space that
physics had been occupying in the east wing of Old Chemistry. This was before the new
building had been built, Chamberlain Hall.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
And after the building was built, then, of course, things weren’t so tight on space, but
physics was extremely tight on space at that time.
LS:
They, they did say in The Cardinal that classroom space hadn’t suffered terribly much.
Is that right?
HR:
That is correct. There were no classrooms at all in the east wing of Sterling. East wing
of Sterling was built entirely by WARF money without any state money being involved,
and there were no classrooms in it. And the damage to classrooms elsewhere on campus
was mainly broken glass then, which was fairly quickly repaired. So, no, there were no
classroom damage.
00:51:19
LS:
You haven’t said how your work was affected or how much research you lost [word
unclear].
HR:
Well, uh, I lost all, lost essentially all the equipment in the laboratory, which we used for
preparing experiments for the accelerator and student theses and equipment, which
underway were set back varying amounts. Probably on the average at least a year’s time
in each student’s career, I suspect, they probably lost because of it. And some perhaps
lost more. They had to rebuild equipment before they could do experiments. One of my
students, well he had is data on magnetic tape. The notebook that, with all the pertinent
information about the parameters for the data was destroyed in the bombing and the fire,
so the data itself was not any use, and he had to retake most of it. So it was -- the brunt
of the loss was borne by the students, graduate students on their thesis problems.
LS:
Uh-huh. So you, yourself, didn’t except for --
HR:
Well, almost all of my research is graduate student theses. That’s what the public is,
finds it hard to understand I guess on University --
44
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
Yes, you did say that earlier I guess.
HR:
-- research, at least most of it, in the Physics Department traditionally and especially in
nuclear physics almost 100% of the research is graduate student theses problems. And in
that respect, the research is inseparable from graduate education. Now there are --
LS:
You suggest a topic to a student, and help, and help him --
HR:
Right supervise the work on the thesis.
LS:
Such as the one who was just in here awhile ago.
HR:
Right.
LS:
You were telling him to dampen something, yeah.
00:53:28
HR:
Yeah. Yes, that’s right. So my research isn’t something that I do apart from student
instruction, graduate student education.
LS:
Yes, that is difficult to understand.
HR:
And, in fact, when I was associate dean under, when Dean Epstein first became dean, I
was most amazing to find his view about what a research assistant consisted of. He
thought a research assistant was someone who helped a professor with his research,
looked up references and prepared bibliography, and things like this. And the research
assistant in physics is nothing like that at all. He, for his research assistantship, he does
the same work on research as if he was, didn’t have a research assistantship. He learns to
operate the accelerator and prepares the experiments and takes the data and analyzes the
data, and draws conclusions and writes up his work for a thesis. And this was a concept
which Epstein was just totally unfamiliar with in his background in the social sciences,
social studies. The research assistant was not literally and assistant to help the professor
on his own research.
LS:
In a way, the other way around.
HR:
Yeah, that’s what I --
LS:
That reminds me that David Burris, whom I interviewed, do you remember him? He was
a TA --
HR:
Oh, yes.
LS:
-- and militant, and, I guess, never got his degree from the department. He spoke of a
resentment of a student in the Physics Department against a faculty member who wasn’t
giving him credit or it was something like that. Does that, I should think that might be --
HR:
That, the question of credit varies a lot from professor to professor just whether he puts
his name on the papers or not. I tend not to put my name on the students papers unless I
have really done an unusually large amount of the actual work. But some professors, of
course, it runs the full gamut. Some professors, uh, put their name on all their students’
work regardless of the amount of competition.
LS:
But do they first?
HR:
Not necessarily.
45
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
But they might.
HR:
They might. I think in the European tradition, it’s much more common for the professor
to take more credit for the students’ work. But amongst my colleagues in nuclear
physics, I have not seen it abused. I can’t speak for what it is in some of the other areas
of physics because I’m not that close to it. So I can’t make judgment, but I would be
surprised if there weren’t occasional cases where the professor probably perhaps took
more credit than he should. Of course, it’s a judgmental matter as to what the fraction of
credit should be on a student and professor on things like this.
LS:
Uh-huh. Do you have more to say about the bombing, or --
HR:
Um, I think that probably covers most of the things on the --
LS:
Has it happened –
00:57:25
HR:
Oh, I might just say a little bit about our computer, which is online with the accelerator
was badly damaged by the bombing too. The walls were blown in on it. And it was
repaired by our technician, and gotten back into operation. Most of it, at least, was put
back into operation. We had to replace some things. And Professor Borchers, who is
now vice president in charge of academic affairs of the University, was the one who
designed and built this, assembled this computer and was responsible for it being such a
good computer was also involved in the reconstruction of it and getting it back in
operation. And as I said, our biggest losses were loss of senior staff like Professor
Barschall and the other person I meant to mention was Professor Borchers, who while he
suffered, he and his students suffered severe damage from the bombing too, and it sort of
deflected him, I think, at this stage from continuing in research to more administrative
jobs. And he left gradually left the research area and went to directorship of the Physical
Science Laboratory at Stoughton, and associate deanship in the graduate school, and his
connections with our project continued to diminish, and he finally severed them and
became full-time essentially administrative.
00:59:16
And so these two very talented, very capable senior staff members left either directly or
indirectly, I think, as a result of the bombing. And these were the biggest casualties our
program suffered. We also found that, uh, the quality of the students we could recruit
into the area dropped off as a result of the situation for a number of years. And it’s only
been within the last few years, I think, that the quality has picked up again to -LS:
It seems extraordinary.
HR:
Well, the facilities were damaged.
LS:
They couldn’t have expected anybody, well, for one year. But within a year, you were
back to --
HR:
Well, I --
LS:
No, or not?
01:00:17
46
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
Well, you’re never back to normal quite, and I don’t know, this is a subjective thing, but
we have also, of course, been decreasing the total graduate school enrollment in physics
because of the job market, so that the two may be coupled. I don’t know how much it’s
fair to assign to the bombing of a particular project. But my impression was that the last
year or so, the quality of students who were applying had picked up some. But I don’t
know. That’s a subjective judgment. One other thing about the nuclear physics program
I might mention is the collaboration, which the program has had for many years with the
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This was started shortly after World War II, when the
Rockefeller Foundation sent Oscar Sala up from the university there. And he worked
with Professor Herb here in nuclear physics and did a nice experiment. And with
Professor Herb’s help and design, uh, went back to Brazil and built a electrostatic
accelerator similar to the sort that he’d worked with here, and got the first program in
nuclear physics going at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
01:01:58
Later, we had, well, we exchanged students back and forth to try to keep the collaboration
going. In fact, the first one, I believe, was John Cameron who got his Ph.D. here in
nuclear physics, and then went down to Brazil, and who is now professor of radiology in
the hospital here, shifted from nuclear physics to radiology, but has done exceptional
work in building up the medical physics part of the hospital program. Another one, one
of my students went down there as a post doctorate and stayed there and is on the staff
down there now. He’s visiting us now for a couple of months, but he’s there
permanently. And we did get some support from the National Science Foundation in the
early 1960s to support this collaborative exchange arrangement that was the first of any
of sorts of programs which they had attempted, and it was, I think, the most successful of
any, largely because, I think, of Professor Herb’s lead –
01:03:20
End of Tape 3
Tape 4
00:00:05
HR:
-- who helped a great deal in the clearing the rubble and rebuilding afterwards. And, uh,
the Sao Paulo, Brazil collaboration did develop, helped a great deal, I think, in the
development of a first-rate physics department at Sao Paulo. And, in fact, they without
question, I think, are certainly the outstanding department in South America, and aside
from Australia in the Southern Hemisphere, I suspect. So I think this has been a very
successful --
LS:
It’s not a, it’s not a financial aid program. It’s just a [words unclear].
HR:
Well, the NSF helped on the financial part.
LS:
But I meant with the university --
HR:
They helped out on the travel and the arrangement -- the university has not contributed
money on it. We contribute our own time and effort and have had the students as guests,
although, they usually got their degree down there. And in fact, one of Professor Herb’s
students got his, went down there for his research thesis program, got his Ph.D. down
47
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
there, and also a Ph.D. up here too. And he’s now in the Radiology Department at the
hospital also doing -LS:
Here?
HR:
Yes, uh, very imaginative work using the accelerator to produce short-lived radioisotopes
and sending them through a capillary, a 400-meter capillary through the University
heating tunnels over to the medical center and using those for research and diagnostic
purposes. You can cut down the body burden of radiation to a patient a lot by using the
very short-lived isotopes that we can generate online for this purpose. And so, uh, we --
LS:
Fascinating.
HR:
Another example of [Blank spot on tape]. One, uh, development early after the war
involved a proposed revision of the University curriculum and college structure, which
was pushed amongst others by Clodius, and involved an extension of the integrated
liberal study sort of approach to a much wider area envisaging setting up many survey
courses and in the opinion of many of us, a move towards making the courses and
curriculum more superficial in the sense of many survey sort of courses rather than
understanding and studying things in more depth.
00:03:56
And this was a time when we, in the sciences particularly, were worried about the gulf
between the two cultures, that C. P. Snow had talked about. And we though that a liberal
education that was needed for college students should involve more in the way of
understanding and some depth of the contributions which science makes to mankind life
and culture. And other members of the University faculty who felt that same way were
people like Murray Fowler in classics and R. K. Meyer in zoology, Terry [Mueller?] in
oncology, and Skoog in botany, and Mulvehill in the Spanish Department. And I took
leadership of this group to oppose the extension of this program because we were worried
about the dilution of the quality of education. And we were successful in opposing this in
the University faculty meetings, and it was not adopted.
LS:
In what capacity was Clodius presenting this, was he the head of a committee?
HR:
Probably, but I don’t remember now. I don’t have notes and detail on that as to what was
involved. I remember he was one, but I don’t know the --
LS:
It would’ve been a series of requirements for undergraduates. Is that it, that they
would’ve had to take this number of survey courses?
HR:
It’s such a long time ago, that I have to be careful what it says. I didn’t find notes on that.
I’ve thrown those all out, so --
LS:
You’re talking about 1961, is that right?
00:06:14
HR:
No, well, I expect that it was, yeah, it must’ve been about that time, yes, about 1961 I
suspect. Then there is another committee that I served on as an official committee this
time in 1963 and ’64, which was called the West Campus Committee. It included Kleene
and Rodman and Bruce Davidson, Ed Foster, Louis Kaplan, Clara Penniman, and Harvey
Sorum. And this was a committee, which had been appointed, well, we reported to Vice
48
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
President Clodius. At the time, the University was faced with the surging enrollments
and the projections for the future indicated that the enrollments would indeed get
completely out of hand for the Madison campus. And this committee has been appointed
to investigate the possibility and desirability of trying to handle the anticipated
enrollment by means of a satellite campus in the Madison area. The area that was talked
about was the western part of the campus as a sort of a first choice, essentially out near
where the Medical Center is now being built, and also the possibility University-owned
land on some farms west of town too would be another possibility.
00:08:24
The pushers behind this, I think, was, were Harrington and Clodius, who, as everyone, I
think, as it were, were very effective operators and interested in the power that they could
control. And they wished for the Madison campus to try to handle this projected increase
in students. I was in the dean’s office at that time with Ed Young, and he was the one
who arranged for me to be chairman of the committee. I suspect, although I had no
intimation from Ed Young that he was not too enthusiastic about this west campus
proposal, and he may have made me chairman or arranged for me to be chairman because
he thought I might raise questions about it. Although I went into it with, I think, a
relatively open mind about it. I had not given any thought to it, and I had no a priori
opinions as to just what the situation should be on it.
00:10:02
Well, at any rate, the committee worked hard for quite a long time studying the technical
feasibility of such a satellite campus where the main research and activity would be on
main campus with the graduate students doing their research on the main campus, but
perhaps teaching on the satellite campus or the staff also going to the satellite campus for
teaching. And while our report said, yes, it could technically be done, we were certainly
less than enthusiastic about the results, and we recommended against it. In fact, we said
it would be much healthier to have the, both in college student enrollment to occur
elsewhere in the state. One should put the emphasis on building campuses at other
locations or expanding existing campuses to try to divert the flood of students from
Madison to the other areas of the state. We thought it would be healthier for the state.
And we did indeed prepare such a report, and that is on file with the West Campus
Committee Report recommending against such an expansion. And it did not occur. And
in fact, the expansion of the University was in other campuses throughout the state,
Milwaukee, Green Bay, Parkside, and the old State Colleges.
00:11:55
And I think, in retrospect, our judgment was very good in that it would’ve been, I think, a
tragedy to try to take care of this boom on the Madison campus. The Madison campus
even with all this diversion to the outlying portions of the state has grown to 38,00039,000, and our feeling at that time was that heroic steps should be taken to keep it under
40,000 in any circumstance. And without these diversions, I think there’s no doubt that it
today would be probably 50,000, something of that -LS:
How did Harrington take your, just, your recommendation?
49
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
Well, Clodius never thanked the committee for their report, so I don’t know. That’s the
only committee I’ve ever served on that we were never thanked for our report.
LS:
Oh, really? It was just put away glumly somewhere.
HR:
He accepted it, but he never thanked us for --
LS:
And that was the last that was, that was heard about it.
HR:
That was the last that was heard of it, yes.
LS:
Was it taken to the faculty meeting and voted on?
HR:
I sus -- it certainly was available to the faculty. I don’t recall now whether it was
formally presented. Probably it was filed at the faculty -- I’m pretty sure it was filed at
the faculty.
LS:
Was there much publicity about it at the time?
HR:
There was some. Well, certainly we had contacted all the major departments to get their
impressions about the feasibility of it and specifics about how it would affect their
operation and how they would envisage that it could be handled on the technical end of it.
And we looked into the transportation problems back and forth, the bus systems that
would be involved and what it would do.
LS:
This was before the Humanities Building was built, I suppose.
HR:
Yeah, this was in 1963-64, yes, long before that was built.
LS:
So that, the solution was, one solution was the other campuses, and another was building
--
HR:
This was before the, uh, there was the University merger of all the common systems.
LS:
Uh-huh. I was going to say, were you in a way responsible for the merger, but decided
that wasn’t in fact -- there’s no connection.
HR:
No, no, no, no, but we were pushing to have the expansion occur at other centers and
two-year centers and four-year centers and state colleges rather than here in Madison.
And we were pushing the building up of the Milwaukee campus, yes, which did occur.
LS:
I’d be interested to know on the other committee, or not committee, the group you got
together to oppose the change in the curriculum, how you chose the people you did. You
say you took the initiative. What --
HR:
Uh, I didn’t choose them. They simply volunteered that they were, I think I had spoken
out to raise some questions about it at faculty meeting.
LS:
Oh, I see.
HR:
And they came around and supported me, and so we got together and, well, they just
volunteered their support.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
I didn’t pick them, no.
LS:
It’s, it’s, because it was an informal group.
50
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
It was completely informal, yeah. It wasn’t --
LS:
And yet, it had some effect, obviously. It did quite an important job.
HR:
Well, I think it, they were people who had respect in their own departments, and I think
they carried weight in their own departments, people on this, yeah.
LS:
And if you hadn’t spoken up, then perhaps the --
HR:
I don’t know.
LS:
There wouldn’t have been any --
HR:
I don’t know. There were certainly people, a number of people, who were not
enthusiastic about it, and these were some of the people who weren’t enthusiastic about
it.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
I can’t predict what would’ve happened, no.
00:16:17
Another committee that I served on, well, two committees, the Mermin Committee and
the committee on Equity in Graduate Appointments and Support, I think main remarks I
would like to make about both committees is that, main remarks are that both of these
committees had, as is customary on all present committees, large student representation.
I think the Mermin Committee was one of the first to have appreciable student
representation. The Graduate Equity Committee certainly had a lot. And I might just
give my impressions concerning the effect of student representation on these committees.
I don’t think in fact they have influenced the outcome of decisions appreciably on any of
the committees I’ve been on, but the main effect has been that they slow down the
committee work a great deal primarily, oh, because of several factors.
00:17:38
First of all, the students don’t generally have the background or perspective that a faculty
member has, and as a consequence, it takes a lot more explaining and background
information and education amongst the committee members before one can arrive at a
consensus of what to do. And the other thing is the question of, um, scheduling meetings
and attendance, although this isn’t as serious. Sometimes it’s been a problem arranging
times when, as the -- well, as the committee gets bigger with more representation on, all
the problems exacerbate on finding a common time and educating each other and getting
a consensus finally for a committee report. Individual students on these committees
oftentimes were quite useful and helpful, but I don’t think the end result of the committee
deliberations were particularly different than what would’ve been without the student
representation. But it does mean many more hours of committee time have to be devoted
to a problem.
LS:
What about the function it performs at assuaging the student body to have representatives
on the faculty committees?
HR:
Well, I think at the time, uh, when the students were actively interested in it, it was
certainly helpful. But that seems to have peaked, and there seems to be relatively less
51
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
interest of the students in serving on committees now, and as a result, on some
committees, it’s very hard to get the better class of students to serve on them because
they take a great deal of time, and with very little reward or dividends apparently on it.
And so there is the tendency for perhaps a few activist students to, they will volunteer
themselves, but they may not be the most mature or the most representative of the student
body’s interest on it. And so I think there are, there are problems associated with the
student representation. I suspect we will continue with it, and overall, it’s probably a
good thing.
LS:
Are they, is it required to have students on all committees now?
HR:
Uh, I don’t know what the University rules are, but whether it’s required or not, it’s
certainly -- well, on an ad hoc committee you set up, I don’t suppose there’s any
requirements. But in practice, it would be desirable ordinarily, I think, to include student
representatives. On the legal committees, the ongoing committees, yes, indeed, most of
those do require things. But, whereas, the additional problem, now like this Committee
on Equity in Graduate Student and Support, this committee was an ad hoc committee, but
it took several years of work to, uh, finally get the committee around to where it could
agree on a report and terminate its activity. And during that time, the student
representatives changed several times. And, of course, then you’re faced with the
problem again of educating the new students to the background of all the committee had
been through in the past.
00:21:36
And, of course, well, the old adage is that people at 20 are arsonists and at 40 are
firefighters, and the young people oftentimes think that there are simple solutions to all
sorts of things if you just restructure things a little bit differently. And it takes experience
and education for them to learn that things are horribly complex, and one can make
changes, but they don’t necessarily accomplish what you set out to do. And it’s, there
aren’t simple, easy answers on most questions. And, of course, it’s wise sometimes to
have this yeast or leaven of plotting one toward different approaches and new solutions
because it is easy to say, well, you can’t change things, and let things ride. And we do
need to change. But one should also realize that change in itself is not automatically for
the better. It can also make things worse. In fact, in dealing with student suggestions and
complaints in department, I have seen the changes go full cycle, where students first want
to change one way, and then those students pass on. Then the other ones want to change
back the other way.
LS:
I can imagine.
HR:
So that’s one of the difficulties with students. They aren’t here long enough to live with
their results of changes to see what the effects are. But again, if they are not -- if the
students are selected carefully, and if one can attract the better grade of students to
committees, they can perform a very useful function on a committee.
00:23:52
LS:
How did you feel about serving on the Mermin Committee? Were you pleased?
HR:
No, I don’t like committee work myself.
52
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
You don’t?
HR:
I’m very allergic to committee work.
LS:
That seems too bad.
HR:
I find it takes time away from other things I’d rather be doing, and I find many of the
discussions longwinded and interminable, and it’s, I only accept committee assignments
when I feel that someone has to do it, and I have to take my turn on it.
LS:
In other words, you turn down a number of committee assignments that you might’ve
had.
HR:
I turn down anyone unless I feel that it is something urgent at the time that the faculty has
to participate in, or there’ll be dire, sad results if we don’t. No, I think there are perhaps
altogether too many committees and committee functions that it takes an inordinate
amount of faculty time and effort for minimal results.
LS:
You would dispense with some of them?
HR:
I think a lot of the committees, well, in fact, I think almost all committees should have,
should be an ad hoc committee for a particular purpose rather than a standing committee.
If the need occurs, you can make a new ad hoc committee, but I think standing
committees, a lot of them tend to become not very useful. And they outlive their
usefulness. They originally had a use, but it would be better if they died a natural death, I
think.
00:25:38
LS:
You’re not talking about the Divisional Committees, presumably [words unclear] --
HR:
Oh, no, some of those have to be, those are -- although, they can overdo their function
too. In fact, well, when I first went in the Divisional Committee, it wasn’t much of a
structure at all, and I’m afraid perhaps I’m responsible for adding some more structure
and meat to the committee activities. But in some sense, I sort of feel that perhaps the
Divisional Committees have gotten too structured and too formal and too formal or rigid
requirements now, and it depends upon how they’re administered. But it varies. I
shouldn’t draw these generalizations actually.
LS:
They’re just concerned with promotions, aren’t they, and appointments and --
HR:
Uh, well, their charge is somewhat broader, I think. They can, they only recommend.
They don’t have any power.
LS:
No, but --
HR:
And at least when we were on the Physical Science Divisional Committee, we took it
upon our, took it upon our job to recommend anything where we thought it was important
to the physical sciences. Like if we felt salaries were out of line or if any curricular or
various things like this, we didn’t limit our considerations solely to promotions. In fact,
we started this university industrial research sort of think too, so --
LS:
Uh-huh. When were you last on the Divisional Committee? Have you been in the ‘70s?
HR:
No, it was, I think, early ‘60s or late ‘50s.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
So in that sense the big, because I think it’s changed a lot since the, the budget cuts and --
HR:
Yes, yes, yes. No, I, uh, I haven’t been on it for many, many years.
LS:
And have you been on the University Committee?
HR:
No, I’ve never been on that.
LS:
How is that since you seem to have been --
HR:
Well, that’s an elected one, and I’ve never been nominated or run for it, and I’d be very
happy not to be on it.
LS:
You would?
HR:
No, I think, uh, there’s other people who are doing a good job there. Barney Webb in our
department does a fine job.
LS:
Is, oh, he’s on it now, is he?
00:28:21
HR:
Yeah, I think so, at least, he was, yeah, yeah. So those are -- I might, the other remarks I
might make are when I was chairman, some of the people who were added during my
term as chairman of the department were, as I’ve already mentioned, Connie Blanchard.
Lee Pondrom was also one, and there was an interesting story about when we were
adding Lee. He had a wife, Cyrena Pondrom at that time. And they both coming from
Columbia University, and one of the things which was going to influence Lee whether he
came was for whether his wife, Cyrena, could get a job. So I tried hard to help her in
finding a job. She had a Ph.D. in English, and she wanted to contact the English
Department. And the chairman of the English Department at that time was Helen White,
after whom the library is named. And I tried to get Helen White to interview Cyrena
while she was here, Pondrom was here, Lee was here visiting. And Helen White would
have nothing to do with this. She did her own recruiting and wasn’t going to have us tell
her who to hire or anything like this.
LS:
Herself.
HR:
And so she wouldn’t even interview Cyrena, which I thought was rather odd. But we did
get her in contact with the Department of Comparative Literature, and they interviewed
her and hired her actually, in fact. So she started out in comparative literature, but then
her reputation as a teacher was good, and the English Department hired her later. And, of
course, now Cyrena is in charge of affirmative action sort of thing in personnel, but her
original problem was a woman chairman of the English Department, who wouldn’t have
anything to do with her on that.
LS:
Yes, that’s a nice, nice touch to the [word unclear].
00:30:45
HR:
Another one that I added when I was chairman and I’m very proud of is Professor Kerst,
Don Kerst, who heads our plasma program, member of the National Academy of Science.
And he had been an undergraduate and graduate here, and invented the betatron when he
was at University of Illinois, and had headed up the MURA Program. And when that
hadn’t been funded, he’d gone to head the plasma program, thermonuclear program at
54
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
General Dynamics. And I was happy that he came to head our plasma program at that
time, done very well. Bob Borchers, who’s now vice president in charge of academic
affairs also added during my time as chairman, although, of course, the real push for this
was his major professor, Barschall in nuclear physics, and -LS:
Is he related to Gladys Borchers?
HR:
No, no, they’re not, no relation.
LS:
Just a, I wondered.
HR:
I asked him that, no. No, Bob Borchers came from undergraduate work at Notre Dame,
and he came here on recommendation of a person we knew at Notre Dame and did very
well in graduate work. And his father had been an executive at Armor, I think, a
meatpacking or something. And Bob always did have a yen for administrative work.
And I think he liked it better than research. And he got out of research and teaching,
although, we did get a teaching award for him one time. He did a very nice job setting up
intermediate laboratory, and he got one of the teaching awards. Oh, there’s many others
that added in my time, but those were some that were interesting to remark about.
LS:
Yeah, well, mention any others that you think --
HR:
Well, I think it’s mostly -- most of them, the appointments, as I said earlier, originate
from the particular group in the department, and it’s their pushing and presentation of it
in recruiting, which is the crucial thing. And on Lee Pondrom’s case, of course, it was
the high-energy physicists who did most of the recruiting. But I worked at it some too,
and took the initiative and, on some parts of it.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
I think that’s most of the things.
LS:
Well, I was going to ask you some more questions about, well, about the department,
about students.
HR:
Okay.
00:33:41
LS:
Well, two little questions about the department, one is whether you have suffered from
lack of secretarial help.
HR:
No, no, I don’t think we’ve suffered from lack of secretarial help. You always suffer
from lack of good secretarial help, but secretarial help is not, we’ve not suffered by it, I
don’t think. Of course, the way it is right now, we, nuclear physics have our own
secretary here, who is paid primarily on our contact funds, but, in fact, I think that’s one
of the things I pushed one time. Instead of having all the secretaries concentrated in the
department office, to have the distributed around in the various areas, and so some of the
university support on secretaries was prorated to different groups. They would pay part
of the secretary’s salary, and the department would pick up the rest. And this way, the
secretary was available for instructional duties, plus research contract duties. Now our
secretary here in nuclear physics, I think is 80% on contract funds and 20% on
departmental funds. And she takes care of all our instructional work plus research work.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
LS:
But, so it’s not a problem.
HR:
No, I don’t think that’s been a problem, and, in fact, in the department office, I don’t
think it’s been a problem. It’s better to have one good secretary than two or three
mediocre ones.
LS:
Hmm, I guess no doubt about that.
HR:
Yeah.
00:35:30
LS:
You don’t have a, or do you have a place where, well, a lounge or where you can
assemble? Do you have to go down to the University Club when you want to eat, is that
right?
HR:
Well, no, in the new building, we did provide for a lounge in the second floor of the new
building on University Avenue side, but at that time, we also planned for a auditorium
and lecture room in the new building, but there was shortage of money at the, and we had
to cut out one story of the building, and that was one thing that was cut out. The
architects had done a very poor job on planning the auditorium, and it wasn’t going to be
as good as the one we have at present. And so we cut it out.
LS:
But the lounge stayed.
HR:
The lounge stays, but it hasn’t been very effective. We still, we have coffee and cookies
before colloquium over there, but I’m afraid it hasn’t served a very useful function.
LS:
What was the --
HR:
The department tends to fragment into groups and, for example, in nuclear physics, we
have a conference room down at the end of the hall here, which we use as a lounge in this
area. And the department is too big for a lounge to serve, well, too spread out perhaps.
The lounge hasn’t served the function that one would’ve liked it to serve.
LS:
Too spread out, do you mean it’s too far away from some of the offices?
HR:
Yes, yes, we’re in two buildings, and one is just too busy. It isn’t something you can go
over there. It takes too much time.
00:37:14
LS:
Is it open to graduate students as well as faculty?
HR:
I honestly don’t know. The graduate students, um, I don’t know. I never go over there,
so I really don’t know. It’s not used very much. It’s poor use of space, I’m afraid at
present.
LS:
Oh, that’s too bad. Where do you eat lunch?
HR:
Cafeteria at the Union usually.
LS:
Oh, you do?
HR:
Yeah. A few go to the club, but not many.
LS:
Do you go with colleagues, or students or --
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
Sometimes, sometimes with students, it’s --
LS:
When you say, do you mean the down, not Tripp, but --
HR:
No, the downstairs one, I like the collection of food.
LS:
You didn’t stop doing that as so many faculty member did in the early, in the late 60s.
HR:
No, I’ve gone to cafeteria ever since I’ve been here, I think. I had done the University
Club one or two years, and I never found, um, well, I spent too much time over there
reading papers afterwards, magazines and it cut into my work. And then there’s the same
old people around there, usually in the University Club. And I would prefer to be with
the young people.
LS:
You, it had been a pattern for many people to go to Tripp, and then they all stopped doing
that.
HR:
I never went to Tripp. I never liked Tripp. It was noisy up there, and I always went to
the cafeteria.
LS:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
HR:
But we have gone over with students from the beginning too a lot, although, not as much
as in recent years. The students now tend to bring lunches more. In earlier days, they
tended to go over to the cafeteria and get --
LS:
That’s what a lot of faculty are doing now, is bring lunches.
HR:
Some do. I don’t like that. I think it’s a healthy thing to get away from the building for a
bit and outside, some fresh air and come back.
00:39:21
LS:
Well, you said you didn’t really want to talk about the TA strike and the affairs
surrounding that. But just, there are a few things that you had observed. One was on
student evaluations, which is one of the demands that the TA contract had, and --
HR:
Well, uh, individual professors in the Physics Department have had student evaluations
off and on as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t anything that’s required. I know I
had given them out in the ‘50s when I first, maybe even earlier. It’s a means of getting
feedback and suggestions about what are good and bad features of a course. And to a
first approximation, you often get conflicting suggestions so that they tend to be selfcanceling in some respects. Some want it one way. Some will say it’s too hard, and
some will say it’s too easy. And you just have to -- there have been useful comments,
and you get a feel for whether you’re getting a good match to your particular class or not.
Of course, you get, again, from your quiz sections and laboratories you meet and the
exams you give as to how they do on it. But it’s still been useful. No, I think the student
evaluations are a good thing.
00:40:52
LS:
Well, it strikes me that it must’ve been singularly peaceful in the Physics Department if
you don’t remember anything from the TA strike because if there were no student-faculty
meetings and --
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
Well, the students in the first strike, at least, they said, no, they didn’t have any problems
in physics, that they were striking to help their colleagues in English and history and
Spanish and so forth.
LS:
That was the --
HR:
That was the line they gave us. Although, there were individuals who gave trouble one
time. I must’ve been chairman on one of these times because there was one, Barbara
Kennedy, who I don’t -- I don’t know whether it was the strike or not. It may have been
before the strike, but on the TA --
LS:
There’s a Barbara Wilson and Jim Jenkins are names who were stewards, but that doesn’t
necessarily.
HR:
Uh, no, Barbara Wilson I know, yeah. Barbara Kennedy was, I think, before her time,
but she was just an unreasonable person. She finally dropped out, and was going to
organize labor in Detroit or something, and I don’t know what happened, uh, to her. But
she wasn’t doing well in physics [word unclear]. But she was unreasonable.
LS:
Did you know David Burress?
HR:
Not close, I just knew of him. He was in high-energy physics, I think. No, I really don’t
know very much about him. I never had him in class, and I just don’t know him. I think
he was high-energy, but there again, I’m not even certain.
00:42:57
LS:
Was, wasn’t there something else we were going to say about students?
HR:
Um --
LS:
Undergraduate teaching or --
HR:
Oh, about the quality of the high school --
LS:
Oh, yes.
HR:
-- training, you were asking about, I think that the students I’m getting now in my
undergraduate physics course, 207 and 208 have generally good background. We don’t
require high school physics for it. What is crucial is a good preparation in high school
mathematics or college math. And many of the students postponed taking the physics
until they’re sophomore or junior or even senior years, and so it’s hard to separate how
much the training is, preparation is university training or high school training. But I have
the feeling that the quality of the mathematical preparation has improved except for
things like simple algebra, which in some respects, the students can do calculus, but they
can’t do simple algebra. And I don’t know, or I shouldn’t generalize too much, but I
have a feeling that there was a period, at least, in the high school training when many of
the simpler courses, algebra and trig, weren’t well taught. But I, again, it’s hard to
separate out because some of the students now take those in college. But the algebra
probably is, many, in high school.
LS:
But it’s improved in the last year or two.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
HR:
Well, the algebra, I think, may still be a problem. The attitude of the students has
improved. They are willing to work hard. They’re as hard working as the veterans who
came back after World War II.
LS:
Oh, really?
HR:
There was a period there on the student unrest, ’69-’70 and so forth, where it was very
difficult teaching because the students weren’t interested and weren’t working, and it was
just not pleasant to be teaching. But that has changed.
00:45:26
The students seem interested much more so and work harder and actually, the cheap
pocket calculators has helped teaching of physics a great deal too because you can give
lots more homework problems, and it doesn’t take as much time, and they can focus on
the physics of the problem and aren’t lost on the coursework and the arithmetical
calculations. So that has been a big boon for both the homework assignments and the
physics laboratories.
LS:
Did you, did you feel at all ambiguous about those when they first came out?
HR:
No, no.
LS:
Did you feel it would weaken the students?
HR:
No, I think we -- in fact, we pushed for them for the elementary labs quite early because
it, we saw it would let them focus on the physics part of it and take, not spend a long time
on just calculations, which is arithmetic, and so we had them in the elementary
laboratories as early as we could get them even when they were quite expensive. And on
examinations, it doesn’t really help them. You mark, some people worried about it, it
gives an advantage to the student who has money to buy a calculator. But on the physics
exams, what we require is that they set up the problem and substitute in the numbers, and
we don’t require that they work out the answers, so it doesn’t make any difference on the
examinations.
LS:
Had you always done that, or do you do that now because of the present --
HR:
Well, we tended to always do that because it’s very hard to see if they just have the
answer whether they’ve copied it or whether they’ve made mistakes or whether they
understand what they’re doing. Whereas, if you have them set it up and see whether they
substitute it in correctly, you can see whether they understand what they’re doing. And
when you’re going to grade them and give partial credit if their answer is wrong, do you
give them no credit, or do you find out where they went wrong? You don’t want to give
them a zero if they’ve done everything right and made a numerical [Blank spot on tape].
LS:
Do you do that now because of the, the present --
HR:
Well, we tended to always do that because it’s very hard to see if they just have the
answer whether they’ve copied it or whether they’ve made mistakes or whether they
understand what they’re doing. Whereas, if you have them set it up and see whether they
substitute it in correctly, you can see whether they understand what they’re doing. And
when you’re going to grade them and give partial credit if their answer is wrong, do you
59
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
give them no credit, or do you find out where they went wrong? You don’t want to give
them a zero if they’ve done everything right and made a numerical mistake.
LS:
Yeah.
HR:
So you have to go back and figure out what they’ve done anyway. So the crucial thing is
have they set it up correctly? And so I think, no, we welcomed calculators, and on the
last exam, where I counted, I think, about 80% of the students did seem to have them.
We’ve never required them or forbidden them, or but I think they’ve been a help.
00:48:46
LS:
Have you been affected by changes in the English requirements or language?
HR:
Well, that’s hard to say. I think I’m, tend to feel that the students don’t write as well on
theses as they used to, but it may just be that I’m being more particular now. I do know
that there were difficulties with writing as far back as I can remember on theses. But it’s
hard to say. There are fluctuations in students too. But writing is a very important skill
that they need to learn. We do have a junior seminar, which was set up to help people,
both in oral expression, scientific expression, and in written expression. And they’re
supposed to write term papers there, where we criticize them, and if that is handled
properly, it helps them on thesis writing, but depending on who teaches that course, it
may or may not be useful.
LS:
Do most of them take it?
HR:
It’s required for a master’s degree. If we don’t, most of the students don’t do a master’s
thesis, but they have to take this junior seminar in lieu of a thesis unless they do do a
thesis. And so we do get a chance to, um, criticize their writing and their, they have to
give a seminar too in that, and so we have both their written expression and their oral
expression.
00:50:32
LS:
How long does it take to get a Ph.D. in physics?
HR:
Well, the minimum time is three years, but I only know of two or three people who’ve
ever done it in that length. I think Professor Kerst was one, and I think one of Barschall’s
students, Martin Walt was one. But the median time keeps increasing, and it was up to
five years a number of years ago. And I think it’s near six now, something like this. And
some take quite a little big longer. My last student, uh, he must’ve spent eight years, I’m
afraid. He was hurt somewhat by the bombing. He probably lost a year there. But I
think also with the job market being not as good as it once was, students tend to, they
don’t have the urge to get out as fast. They don’t --
LS:
[Words unclear].
HR:
I don’t think, they don’t work quite as hard as they used to either. It used to be I would
always expect the students to be around here Saturdays, but very few of them come
around Saturdays now. And I think they don’t work as hard. And there’s more to cover
to get up to the front tiers, so I think it does [word unclear].
LS:
I suppose that’s a big factor.
60
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
00:52:09
HR:
You’ve asked my impressions of the job Ed Young has done as chancellor. I think,
overall, he’s done a very good job as chancellor. I think he is an operator somewhat, but
in the best sense of an operator. And he does plan ahead, and he is open to discussion
and persuasion and tries to inform himself thoroughly about the items on which he has to
make judgment. I think he’s, be hard to beat as chancellor or as president of the
University. He’s accessible and --
LS:
It seems a likelihood.
HR:
-- he’s not arrogant, and he has a background as a faculty man and knows the problems
firsthand. Yes, I have a high regard for him.
LS:
Yes, it’s come through in what you said.
HR:
Yeah.
00:53:18
LS:
Do you want to talk about how the University has changed, or do you have any general
sorts of things to say? I’m interested in the extent to which you participated in University
activities as chairman, doing committee work and whether, you say you don’t really like
to do it, and how you feel you compare to others in this respect.
HR:
Well, I think, um, most active, successful people in the sciences, their interest is first in
their professional field, and anything which detracts, takes time away from this, they look
upon as a nuisance and something to be avoided, at least minimized. And most of the
departmental activities, committee work and University committee work, tends to fall in
this category, so I think my feeling is shared by a great many in the sciences. They
realize the necessity for committee work and someone serving as chairman, and they’re
willing to take their tour of duty, but it’s something that they have to be, have their arms
twisted a little bit to do. There are some who simply avoid it by not doing a good job on
committee work, simply neglecting it, but I think most of them take a responsible view
on it. And there’s always a few who like committee work, but as a rule, it, they aren’t the
most successful scientists.
LS:
That seems to be general.
HR:
Yeah.
00:55:24
LS:
Have you, have you done much writing?
HR:
No, not a lot. I’ve had an unusually large number of graduate students all along, and in
fact, when I left Los Alamos, I figured the biggest need for the new field, nuclear physics,
was to train students, and I have made that my main effort. And, in fact, now the field is
pretty well saturated, and I should be cutting down, and I have decided to do that, I think.
I’ve had over 40 Ph.D. theses, and this is a reproduction rate which is too high for the
field to continue. And I do plan now to, in fact, I doubt whether I’ll take on more
students now. I’ll try to finish up the ones that I have, but I’ve -- in fact, that was also
one reason, I think, that Barschall got out of nuclear physics. He felt that there were
plenty of nuclear physicists trained, and that he would make his, try to make his
61
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
contribution subsequently. And we have cut down our number of students in nuclear
physics here. We used to run around 36 students on our experimental program. And
we’re down to about 15 now, I think, or 16, so over a factor of 2 down.
LS:
That’s a lot less.
HR:
And there is some minimum level that it shouldn’t go below, and the cut has been
perhaps even steeper at many other places. A great many schools have lost their research
support, and in that case, their number trained goes practically to zero. And so, of course,
the whole field becomes dead if you don’t train new people. So one does need students
going through. They keep us alert and alive, and it keeps the field alive. But I don’t,
there isn’t the need for training a lot of them as there was when I first started on it. In
fact, many of the opportunities now with nuclear physicists are in medicine and things
like that. Nuclear medicine is absorbing quite a few of graduates.
LS:
Does your, does your domain include nuclear energy for, and nuclear fission for energy
and the disposal of nuclear waste?
HR:
Only in an indirect sense. We’re interested in the basic physics, nuclear structure and
nuclear reactions. And the applications of this --
LS:
That would be the applied physics then.
HR:
-- properly belong in nuclear engineering or applied physics. And the two can never be
separated entirely, but our focus and interest has not been on the applications per se, no.
But, well, as I say, Professor Barschall has changed his emphasis on his more on the
application.
00:58:57
LS:
Is there anything -- there’s still some space. Do you have some things you’d like to say?
HR:
Okay. Um, well, I’m glad I came to the University of Wisconsin. I’ve had, I think, a
very successful, enjoyable career here. And I think the University is truly a great
institution. And it’s unique in many respects, I think. As I indicated, people from other
departments just can’t believe the, how democratic we are, and how this is something
which you don’t appreciate, I suppose, until you don’t have it. And the other thing I
think we’ve been very fortunate in general in the past is that we have had good
administrators, and this is something you don’t appreciate until you don’t have them too.
And I think the fact that the administrators have come from the faculty has been a very
wise thing. In fact, I remember on a train ride once with A. W. Peterson on a, to a MIRA
meeting, Elvehjem was along too. He was talking, he overlapped the ‘30 period and
earlier, and Glenn Frank and Dykstra had been president then. Peterson’s opinion was
that the University did much better to take as a president someone from the faculty than
they had, their luck on going to outside presidents had not been particularly successful.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
So A. W. Peterson had been through quite a variety of different presidents and different
crises in the University, period. And he had a high regard, I think, I don’t know whether
Fred was president at that time. I think Fred was president at that time. I think Elvehjem
was dean of the graduate school at that time before Elvehjem became president. But
certainly both Fred and Elvehjem had the respect of the faculty and of the state. They
62
Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
hadn’t been as effective as Harrington was in getting money for the University. I think
Harrington exploited the good will that Fred and Harrington, uh, Fred and Elvehjem had
built up amongst the state as a whole and was able -- it was a period of growth anyway,
able to get funds and buildings for the University in a manner, which Fred and Elvehjem
hadn’t been able to. But I think at the same time, Harrington, by being more of an
operator, had, he overdrew his account of good will from the Legislature. In fact,
perhaps he abused the confidence, and there was a reaction, I think, against the
University because of Harrington.
01:02:45
LS:
Yes, I guess he treated them rather high handedly, the Legislature.
HR:
He was essentially a very arrogant person, and he talked, he was very articulate, and he
talked easily, and he wasn’t an easy one to listen. He didn’t listen himself. In fact, that’s
one of the characteristics of Ed Young which is good. He will listen. And that’s one of
the functions that a dean should have is to listen as -- when a dean does all the talking,
he’s not getting any input or information, and the problems get worse.
LS:
Uh-huh.
HR:
So I think that’s an important characteristic, and I think Harrington perhaps didn’t listen
enough either. I think he took the initiative too much and talked too much. But it’s, of
course, very easy in hindsight to judge people. It’s very difficult to know whether, what
things would be like if someone else had been there or done things differently. Robin
Fleming, of course, was chancellor over part of the time, and I think he was a very gifted
person on dealing with people. In fact, Ed Young, I think, was the one responsible for
bringing him here. Ed had a high opinion of him. But Fleming did alienate a lot of the
conservative people in the state by his bailing out the students and things like that, which
those who were against the students were against, but I think Robin Fleming played
things fairly good in that respect.
LS:
Who would you name if you had to name the people during your time who’ve had the
best effects on the University and the people who have had the worst? Well, you’ve, the
worst, you’ve already named, we discussed some of the presidents. Are there some of the
under people whose names don’t show up so often, but have been important one way or
another?
HR:
Well, I don’t have, uh, any villains particularly. I’ve made judgments about some people,
but I don’t consider them villains, and I’m not certain their contribution wasn’t altogether
on average positive.
01:05:29
LS:
Well, also, some of the best, I’m thinking of -- for instance, the vice presidents or there
are people who are influential --
HR:
A. W., A. W. Peterson, I think, in the business office was a very unusual person. He tried
to avoid red tape and was genuinely interested in the University’s well-being, and did
whatever he could to promote it. He did mention at one time that the University had a
big enough surplus so that they could’ve put everyone in L & S College on an annual
appointment.
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Hugh T. Richards #87 (1977)
And Peterson wanted them to do it, but, uh, Ingraham was very much against it, and
persuaded not to go in that direction. And as a result, the Legislature simply reduced the
appropriation next year by the amount of the surplus. And they could’ve, Peterson said,
put everyone on an annual salary at that time and gotten it started if Ingraham hadn’t
opposed it. But whether that would’ve been a good thing or not, I don’t know. But I did
have a high regard for A. W. Peterson and Elvehjem and Fred.
LS:
Not so much for Ingraham.
HR:
Ingraham was a very, a person of very high integrity and high moral principles. He was
just very conservative. And he, his word could be absolutely trusted. I dealt with him
some as chairman. He as still dean then, and if he said something, it was it. And he’d
stick to it. No, I think that respect, he was good. I just think he made, he was too
conservative on some things.
LS:
I guess the Math Department feels that he hurt the Math Department quite a bit by his
conservative policy.
HR:
Well, perhaps.
LS:
You don’t agree, or --
HR:
Well, I don’t know about the Math Department. The Math Department certainly did
well. I don’t know who was responsible, but it’s grown into a first-rate department, so I
don’t know who gets the credit or who gets the blame, but it certainly has done well. Is
that the end?
LS:
Oh, no.
01:08:00
HR:
Oh, the other person I have a high regard for is Irv Shain, and I think it would be very
fine if the University could bring him back to being president.
LS:
The, between Shain and Young is, I suppose you saw Young’s, the article about him last
month.
HR:
Well, Young is 61 years old, and administrators have to retire at 65. So it will only be a
four-year period for Young, I would think, anyway, so I would think they would only go
to Young in case they really couldn’t get someone that they were enthusiastic about, and
would want a caretaker person for a period of years to try to round up someone else. Irv
Shain is younger, and I was quite impressed with how he handled the real crisis problems
during the activist years, the bombing period. I had a lot of dealings with him then. I’d
had dealings with him before. He was chairman of the Chemistry Department. He was
reasonable and articulate, and I also have friends out at the University of Washington,
Seattle, and he went out there, you know, as provost, and they’re very enthusiastic about
him. I think he’s very good. So I, he would have my first choice vote.
LS:
Do you think it’s an important for the University?
HR:
I don’t know –
01:09:30
End of Tape 4. End of interview.
END
64