Interview with Mark Emmert, by Bruce M. Stave, for the University of Connecticut Oral History Series, University of Connecticut, Center for Oral History, June 7, 1999
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Interview with Mark Emmert, by Bruce M. Stave, for the University of Connecticut Oral History Series, University of Connecticut, Center for Oral History, June 7, 1999. STAVE: Okay, could we just talk a little bit about your early life, where and when you were born, about your family, education? EMMERT: Yeah, sure. I was born in 1952 in the Puy Allup Valley in the Puget Sound region of Seattle-Tacoma area. BS: PuyAllup? ME: PuyAllup. BS: How do you spell that? ME: P-U-Y A-L-L-U-P, obviously an Indian name. The Puget Sound region is loaded with wonderful Indian names. And spent the first eighteen years of my life in the house I was born into in Fife, Washington, which is part of that valley, about seven miles outside of Tacoma. My dad was an optician who worked in downtown Tacoma all his adult life. Not a college graduate, but like everybody of his generation, went to the war, came back, was trained as an optics guy in the military and came back and said, “Gee, I know something about glasses. I guess I’ll go into that business.” Went to technical school on the GI Bill and became an optician and worked for one company for his whole career. My mother, neither was she—they went to the same high school, Fife High School and graduated from the school I did. Neither one went to college. My mom wound up as a teacher’s aide. After I grew to be about twelve or thirteen, I guess, she went back to work. EMMERT I have one brother who is the head building inspector in Kent, Washington. He’s a construction industry guy. All of my mother’s family, which included six brothers and sisters, is still in that same area. I’m the one who fell from grace. I’m the only one out of probably twenty-five cousins to leave the Seattle Tacoma area, and I’ve left it too many times, they say. Almost all of them, except for one or two, went into craftsman kind ofjobs. Very artistic family, wonderful carpenters and boat builders. One of my cousins has become very wealthy from setting up a race car company that makes racing car parts because he knew how to do things that other people didn’t know how to do, and now he’s got a huge business out there that makes a lot of money. So most of them have gone into professions like that. I became an academic and they all scratched their heads and said, “What have we done wrong?” [laughs] BS: What led you to becoming an academic? ME: Oh, I think like many of us, Bruce, it was as much accidental as thoughtful. Went to the University of Washington as an undergraduate, fell in love with political science and history. I was a history minor. I don’t say that often, I should. [laughs) In fact, the first bit of original research that ever got me excited about academics was a history project. I took an honors class in Reconstruction—it just dawned on me, it had a lot to do with Lewisiana—with the Reconstruction Era and wound up doing an independent study project on Lincoln’s plan for resettlement of freed slaves. That’s one of his little known initiatives, and I think he would have pursued it, had he not been assassinated because he was quite serious about it and there EMMERI 3 seemed to be sufficient political interest in it as well, especially among folks who didn’t know what in the world to do with all these freed slaves. $o he was going to, in politically correct terms, ship them back to Africa in large numbers. Finished up in my degree of political science, got to my senior year and said, “Gee, now what do I do?” Thought I might want to do city management or something like that. Started chatting with some professors and they all said, “Oh, you probably want to go take a Master’s in public administration.” I didn’t know what that was and they told me and it sounded sort of interesting and said, “Well, where are the good schools?” and they ticked them off and I wound up at Syracuse University. Took a ten day vacation between my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree work, during which time I drove back to Syracuse, New York, and went to school. BS: This is at the Maxwell School? ME: Uh-hmm. Went to the Maxwell School, finished up my MPA and while a graduate student the first time around, realized that I really enjoyed academic work. I had a number of faculty that encouraged me to continue going to school. Had really grown a little tired of being a student, though, after I finished that degree, which was ‘75 1 guess, and took an interesting—but I wanted to stay involved in higher ed in some way or another, so I took an interesting break. I moved to the Wind River Indian Reservation in the middle of Wyoming, which is the reservation that the Shoshone and Arapahoe live on, and ran a bunch of student financial aid and BIA programs and worked with most of the students going into the little community EMMERT 4 college there, Central Wyoming College. I did that for about a year and a half It was a wonderful experience. BS: Why did you go out there? I mean, what drew you? EM: Oh, you know, it was—a little bit of it was sort of the Peace Corps zeal, I suppose, but I didn’t really want to do that. I’ve always loved the Rocky Mountain west. My father’s family are native Coloradans, so I have multi-generational links to Colorado and vacationed there as a kid and Wyoming and the Yellowstone area. So I liked it a lot. Probably had some romantic vision of going out and working on an Indian reservation, which was quickly brought back into balance by the reality of being on an Indian reservation. And really just wanted to do something quite different, but wanted to stay somehow involved in higher education. So did that for a year and a half, picked up a wife along the way. At that stage, DeLayne and I had dated since we were kids, off and on. In fact, I took her out for her sixteenth birthday. She had- we had gone our separate ways. She had been in Europe for a good while and then was back finishing a second degree in Washington and foolishly, we got married and she left Washington before she finished that degree, joined me for about four months in Wind River Reservation and said, “We’re not going to keep doing this for long!” She wanted to finish the second degree in special education and northern Colorado, where Peter Halvorsan had been, actually, at the time had one of the best known special ed programs. So she said, “Gee that’s not that far. Maybe I’ll go down there and finish.” And so we moved to Greeley, Colorado, where she finished her second degree up. EMMERT BS: Now, what were you doing? Were you still on the reservation? ME: No, I moved. I followed her. She went down a couple of months ahead of me and then I followed her down and I started working for a—I said, “Gee, I’ll go down and I’ll find something to do.” Well, I’d learned on the reservation how to do student financial aid stuff, so I ran the student financial aid programs at Ames Community College and University of Northern Colorado while she finished up. Along the way there, we picked up a son. That’s where our son Steven was born. We lived there for— BS: Was it ‘76, ‘77? ME: ‘77 I lived there. Yeah, he was born in the summer of ‘77, and then we realized, “Well, if I’m going to finish a Ph.D. and we now have this son in our life, probably now is a good time to go do it, before he gets ready for school.” So we went back to the Maxwell School and spent three long winters in Syracuse. You don’t count years in Syracuse, you count winters. Where I fell deeply in love with being an academic, somewhat to my surprise, actually. I wound up leaving there with just enormous respect for and admiration for the Maxwell School and the faculty that had collected. When I went there in ‘75, it was the number one ranked PA school and remains so. Had admission offers from the Kennedy School, Harvard and Indiana, which are typically one, two and three with Syracuse in PA, but wanted to finish up at the Maxwell School, so I went there and that was a good choice. It worked well for me. Came away with a— BS: What did you focus on? In other words, what was your specialization there? Did it deal with higher ed? EMMERT 6 ME: No. Well, yes and no. It had two very disparate branches that I tried to bring back together in funny ways. I went back starting to work on scientific productivity. So I guess that’s an academic question, university question. I became fascinated by the notion from just reading and talking and meeting with people about what it is about organized, scholarly effort. Scientific effort really is what I was most interested in, that facilitated or impaired its development progress.