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. There was a guy there that I didn’t know about, quite remarkably, who that’s exactly what he does. A guy named Barry Bosernan, who now runs a program in science policy at Georgia Tech and I had one of these remarkable phone calls. I called Barry and he was head of the Ph.D. Program at the time and we just started chatting, interesting guy. Southerner. He was a Floridian or Georgian, I guess. We chatted a bit and he said, “Well, tell me what you’re interested in?” and I described this and there was this big, long pregnant pause, and he said, “You’ve just described my research agenda.” So needless to say, he and I hit it off and I started doing some work in that direction. BS: Why were you particularly interested in that? ME: You know, I’m not sure. I’ve asked myself that a lot of times. I think that I read a lot of popularized science, became fascinated by scientific progress and I think also from its historical and social point of view. It struck me that this was such a huge driving force, sort of the Paul Kennedy thesis, only I didn’t have the brains to write the book. [chuckles] And that got me to—that plus I was struggling to understand universities, I think. You know this works. It’s probably as much [unclear] rationalization as anything. EMMERT 7

The other fascinating piece that came out of the same popularization of science and reading a lot of popular literature was I was fascinated by human behavior and was frustrated by social sciences, especially economics, and their steadfast refusal to incorporate any of the life sciences, particularly neurobiology and psychobiology and a variety of other things, and started reading a lot of, at that time, Wilson’s work on sociobiology and what has since become, of course, a massive field. Started reading a little bit of a new association of the American Political Science Association called Politics in the Life Sciences, which still flourishes. And so started doing some work there. So I was interested in individual level behavior and on this side, organized science on this side, and in thinking about organizations broadly and then started thinking about how do people inside organizations operate because that’s really what the science piece was over here, and wound up bringing them back together again. So wrote a dissertation that I’m enormously proud of actually because it was—I finished it in early ‘80s and it was maybe ten years ahead of where a lot of people were at the time and now a lot of other folks have sort of caught up with it, on the integrated—the best sociological and management theories around organization commitment. How do people become attached to and involved in organizations? With, at the time, the best understanding of that process, also from a sociobiological point of view. In other words, what we did was we stopped—a couple of colleagues—stopped pretending like humans were anything other than primates and said, “Okay, if these are primates, how do they get attached to, why do they EMMERT $

get attached to organizations?” Things like universities or banks or military organizations and why do military organizations manipulate symbols and go through these very deep processes to indoctrinate people. You know, the bootcamp model. And also at the same time I was reading a lot of management literature. That’s when the Japanese model of management, people were just getting excited about it back there in the late ‘70s, early ‘$Os. BM: Was Boseman your advisor? ME: He was through much of it. He was not my chair. A guy named Jack Honey was, who was most keenly interested in the behavioral science side. Barry wasn’t. He was much more interested lab and I’ve done subsequent work, mostly with a guy who’s since become a good friend, I’ll mention in a minute. So anyway, I did this interesting exploration about how we developed social mechanisms for organizing human activity, without thinking about it, that recognizes our biological, as well as our sociological roots and that I think was pretty good stuff. And I’ve continued to read a lot about it and I’m convinced I got it right, which is fun. BM: Did you publish much out of it? ME: Yeah, I published a number of pieces out of it and continued to do some work in it, and then slowly drifted back over to the Boseman stream, mostly because I found it a little more interesting at the time. My dissertation was fascinating intellectually for me because I satisfied myself about those issues. About, “Okay, there’s a whole lot of work that needs to get done here, but it really needs to occur with EMMERT 9

the neurobiologists and some of the people that are—” In fact, I became good friends with a graduate student at Connecticut in the Psych Department because there’s a number of people here that were doing some very interesting work around that whole arena. And so I thought, “Look, these guys are really the ones that have to advance their discipline before anybody’s going to do anything really terribly interesting, other than the kind of secondary work that I’ve done. So I’ll wait 20 years, 30 years and come back and revisit it,” which is what I want to do still. And they’re making some progress over there. It was also my first lesson in the real politic of the academy because this was very controversial work in 1979 and 1980, too. Very controversial. I had friends who hated me over this work. I had a gay friend who thought I was a Nazi until sociobiology caught up with the gay movement and now they love it. [laughs] I remember when I interviewed, I had ajob offer from Texas A&M because they were excited about me, but there were about a third of the faculty that just loathed what I was doing, and I just thought, “I have no interest in going into an environment where that obtains.” So I wound up at—my first job—at Northern Illinois University, which is also the home of the—at that time was the home of the office of the Politics and Life Sciences Group of APSA, which ran out of the—I was offered a joint appointment in the Center for Governmental Studies and the Political Science Department, and the Center for Governmental Study had the sub-unit for Politics and the Life Sciences in it, and so published and things in their journals and did some work out there. Never really wanted to go to NIU, but it seemed like a good first place. EMMERT 10

3M: Decalba’s flat. ME: Decalba’s flat and unattractive. Its sole virtue is its proximity to Chicago, which we fled to every Friday. Met some wonderful people. Had a good political science department at the time, some good historians. You know Paul— 3M: Paul Kleppner. ME: Kleppner, of course, who ran the Social Science Research Institute, or whatever it was called. And we were there just two and a half years, I guess. And Elaine taught in both Syracuse and in Illinois and then we decided we’d move to some place that we’d enjoy living, so we moved to Colorado. I joined the Graduate School of Public Affairs as a untenured associate professor. They were willing to promote me to associate. BM: Is this the University of Colorado? ME: Yeah, CU. The Graduate School of Public Affairs is a multi-campus school based on Denver, so my home was the Denver campus. While I was interviewing with a very interesting man who is still there—he’s not dean anymore—a guy named Marshall Kaplan who was a refugee from the Carter administration. He’d been deputy assistant secretary for HUD. He was an urban planner out in Boston. Fascinating guy, incredibly politically active. A real deal maker and what he really loved—he doesn’t really love the academic life. What he really loves is having the academic life as a forum for playing politics and we all know those kind of guys. Denver was going through a tot of change and development and frustration at the time and so it was ripe for a guy like Marshall and he did a lot of great things for the city and for the region. He was terrific. Did a lot of good things for the EMMERT I I

university, but he was very difficult to work with and the other deans didn’t like working with him. He needed somebody to buffer him from the politics of the academy and deal with essentially the work of being a dean. So in the middle of the conversation he said, “Say, I’m looking for an Assistant Dean, too. You want to do that job?” and I thought, “Well, what the hell. That sounds kind of fun,” not realizing I’m untenured. I’ve got two and a half three years under my belt as an academic. I’m just a kid. I don’t know anything about this stuff and I didn’t know that he ground up two assistant deans and that everybody in the university loathed him as an administrator. [laughs] And said, “Yeah, sure, what the heck.,” because I knew I could get a summer salary, right, and this is strictly a financial deal from my point of view with a young family. Oh, left Illinois with a one year old daughter. That’s where my daughter was born. So I had a six year old and a one year old and being an assistant dean adding a summer salary sounded like a good deal. So that’s how I got into administration. I’d love to tell you it was finely thought out. It wasn’t. If it had been thought out, I never would have done it. Fortunately, the school was a very small academic unit and he pretty much let me run it because he didn’t want to. He hated that stuff, and it was really—when you scrape away all the nonsense—it was really a department head’s job. You know, I did all the department head work except tenure and promotion of course because I was untenured and brand new. Did that for a number of years. I spent almost seven years in Colorado, so I did that for three years. Yeah, because I got tenure. EMMERT 12

Met the president, who had come to Colorado the same time I did, a guy named Gordon Ghee, who is now president of Brown. Gordon Ghee is one of those—you know, you always go back and pick out the people who had a huge impact on you. In my collegiate days, Jack Honey had a enormous impact. Gordon Ghee had an even bigger and still does have a bigger impact. Gordon was president of West Virginia when he was 36, president of Colorado when he was 40 and president of Ohio State when he was 46 and now he’s president of Brown. He’s just had this unbelievable career as an academic president. Gordon and I just liked each other a lot. He was still new in his tenure there, extraordinarily energetic, a little bit off the walls. Asked me to do some things for him and then said, “Gee, you ought to be one of these AC Fellows,” and I said, “I have no idea what that is.” He told me about it. He had had a fellow at the time who I met and I liked, a guy from William and Mary, a biologist from William and Mary. So I did that for a year and rather than leaving—often you’ll leave the whole university and go away—I moved into his office. BM: This is the American Council on Education? ME: Yeah, the American Council on Education, and spent my ACE sabbatical or leave with him and also at Iowa State University. Another guy that I didn’t mention—back to the Maxwell days— became very dear friends with a guy named Michael Crowe, mostly because of our shared interest in organized science. He and I published a lot of work together, still my best friend in the world. He’s the number three guy at Columbia now. EMMERT 13

Michael was at Iowa State at the time learning a bunch of things over there for the president and so I went and worked with Gordon Eaton, who was president of Iowa State, for a bit and Michael. Just for weeks at a time, not for extended periods. That worked real well because it got me to see—that was my first land grant university. I got to see what a land grant university is all about. Got to see what a university in transition was all about because Gordon was intent on really changing Iowa State and did, and it cost him his job. He didn’t get fired, but he was on the ropes by the time he left because he forced so much change down the throat of this institution and they were sort of ready for him to go. I think they now think of him very fondly, but at the time they didn’t. So we spent—oh, so then I finished up my AC fellowship year. Gordon fired the chancellor of the Denver campus and then put in his place a guy named John Buechner. John was the—what was John? John was the real academic. He was a political scientist, also. Came up through the ranks at Boulder, then got into politics. Ran against Tim Worth, in fact, for Congress and lost. He had been mayor of Boulder, Republican mayor of Boulder—hard for me to imagine that—then got back into—never left the academy, but moved into kind of an Ed Allenby like job. Odd transition. Then Gordon made him chancellor of the Boulder Campus, the Denver campus, which was a very bright thing to do, except he’d been out of real academic life for a while and so John came to me and said, “Would you go to Denver with me and be the chief academic officer?” EMMERT 14

So I went down to do that for a couple of years to finish up my career at Colorado, and that was very good. That was very useful for me. I liked it a lot, learned a lot of things. At this stage DeLayne was teaching in Cherry Hill schools and why did we go to Montana? We went to Montana as much because of lifestyle issues as anything. We had always loved the place. A friend called me up and said, “Gee, the provostship is opening up up here and it’s—” BS: This is Montana State? ME: Montana State, outside of Bosman. We loved Bosman and we loved that area a lot and it seemed like a terrific place. Denver was doing well. I still liked Denver a lot, but we thought that might be a great place to go and stay for a long time. BS: What year was this? ME: ‘90. Maybe started looking at it in ‘29 somewhere. Yeah, ‘89. And we went up and looked at it and it was a cut in pay. A huge cut in DeLayne’s pay. It was going to get cut in half as a teacher and I guess I was going to break even on my pay, but at that time housing was cheap and we thought, “Oh, this is just such a beautiful place, how could we not do this?” And so we moved up there and spent a little over three years there and will probably always have a profound love for the place. It’s just a remarkable spot with wonderful people. Physically, couldn’t be more beautiful. Didn’t even mind the winters, though they are long, but it is so professionally constraining. You know, you can’t—you really couldn’t get done what you wanted to get done and after a years we came to that realization that, “While we deeply love it—” I’m sure that we’ll probably retire there. EMMERT 15

BS: What were the constraints? ME: Geographic remoteness is not as big an issue as it once was, of course, but it’s still non-trivial. To do things like come to Washington DC is a long deal. To get to a real city is a big deal. You’re a long ways from anything. Air transportation now is quite good. Then it was not quite as good. Financial resources at the university are just pitiful and I think I naively thought I could change that or have some impact on it. BS: Your position there again was? ME: Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Same job I took here essentially only smaller. In some ways a bigger portfolio because I had student affairs under me. I had the athletic director under me, which was interesting. BS: How big a school was this? ME: MSU’s 11,000, 11,500, something like that. The biggest school in the state at the time. I think it still is. BS: Why was it so difficult to have the athletic director under you there? ME: Oh, just because I had never done that. I had no exposure at all to the world of athletics and it was unusual for that to report to the chief academic officer, and what it really did is it reported to the student affairs guy, who reported to me. So they, as athletic directors want to do immediately, you know, went around one guy and tried to seduce the guy, the next person up the ladder. It was a very good experience, but the ability recruit faculty was utterly dependent upon locating people who wanted to live in that part of the world. The guy who right now is vice president for research there is a guy I helped recruit from Amherst, but you had to find people who wanted to be fly EMMERT 16

fishermen, or just wanted to really live the outdoorsy life. I recruited a fantastic student affairs dean, the dean of students from UCLA, but only by finding somebody who was desperate to be a westerner. [laughs] And after a while you can only sell the mountain so much and so the quality of the faculty is very mixed. You have some truly wonderful and brilliant people there, mostly in the humanities. A few—the physics department is extraordinarily good, for bizarre reasons. Professional schools are weak. It’s tough. Engineering program—undergraduate engineering’s actually very strong. Boeing Airlines, airplanes hires more engineers from Montana State than any other source because they just hire good Montana kids who how how to work. That’s what they’re really looking for is people that work hard. But then we realized, gee, for me in particular this isn’t going to work over the long haul. Let’s think about this as a retirement home, not as a permanent place and I’d been approached about a few presidencies. Clemson wanted me to come down and that wasn’t going to work there. They were going through some enormous dislocations at the time. Someone called me about Connecticut and someone called me about Virginia Tech. Both provostships had opened up and I interviewed. BS: Who called you from here? ME: Nobody fi-om here called me. A friend, actually Gordon Eaton called me from Colorado because I had chatted with him about wanting to change, and I don’t know who talked to him. And to be honest with you, I didn’t know a lot about UConn. I knew Everett Ladd and his work. I knew the psychology department. EMMERT 17

I knew a little bit about basketball, but I didn’t know it was strong basketball. I knew that we used to beat them up from Syracuse. And I knew a bit more about Virginia Tech. The outgoing provost there actually called me. Looked at both positions and it was clear that it was a better fit at UConn, more comprehensive school. Virginia Tech’s, as its name applies, engineering and technical school predominantly. The attraction there was it has a strong program in my field. There’s a number of good people led by a guy named Gary Walmsley down there in public policy and public affairs that was strong, and I thought, “Okay, good. I’ll have an academic home there.” Also at Montana State I had no real academic home in any sense and at that point I still thought that was more important than it really was. Came here in, the first time in—what was it?—the fall of ‘94 I guess. Corresponded with folks, talked with some folks. Research was being accelerated a bit. I gather Harry was in a hurry to get it wrapped up. 3$: Who were the people that you talked to and corresponded with here? ME: Peter Mcfadden I think was as I recall was staffing the search. Peter was the first person I met and I think all the initial correspondence was with him. Virginia Tech had started much earlier in the year, so I’d already met with them once and liked them. A good search committee chair. The search committee was the dean of liberal arts. BS: So in the process, after Gordon Eaton told you about this, you got in touch with UConn, I assume. EMMERT 18

ME: Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, he asked if I wanted to be nominated and I said, “Yes,” and he sent a letter. Then they contacted me. You know, in that interesting pas de deux that you do in this business. BS: Right.

ME: Did a lot of homework, read a lot about the place. Got sent a lot of material, some of which was encouraging, some of which was discouraging about the direction. The materials about the institution itself were very encouraging. The materials about the lack of material, about the direction of the place, about what was going on, that was a little frustrating except for the strategic planning materials that came in that were just finally coming about. But I gathered from my conversations with Peter and who else did I chat with? Tony Rornano, I guess, Richard Bachoo, that there was some anxiety about this board driven strategic plan that was just being pushed through that summer and fall. But I thought the materials looked kind of interesting. BS: This was 1994? ME: ‘4, yeah. So we talked about it. My wife was not keen to come to Connecticut, having bad memories of Syracuse and I assured her that it wasn’t a Syracuse. BS: Bad memories, the weather right? ME: Yeah, that’s right and having a general disinclination to move back to the northeast, which was true of both of us frankly. You know, if you move to Bosman, Montana for lifestyle, then you don’t immediately start thinking of Connecticut as the next obvious step in your life, or Blacksburg, Virginia, for that matter. But she was willing to take a look and I was willing to take a look, and I came for the first EMMERT 19

interview, which was out at the hotel with the search committee. Met a lot of good folks who I immediately liked. BS: Which hotel?

ME: The Sheraden out in the airport, of course. Flew in late one night and got into the hotel and there came this knocking at my door about ten

p.m. or something and it was Peter Mcfadden. So I finally met Peter, who of course can be utterly charming, as he was. Next day I went down and met with them in one of the conference rooms down in the Sheraton downstairs and on the committee was Peter staffing it and Tony Rornano and Bachool was I think staffing it also, and Ron Taylor and Louise Barry, Tom Giolas, a wonderful student who was in the first class of Nutmeg Scholars, John—oh, gosh, I forget his last name—and who went to Choate. A great kid who asked very impressive questions. Don’t remember the committee thoroughly. Judith Bridges I think was on that. I was very taken with them. I liked them a lot and still had some anxiety about it, but like what I thought was their seriousness, got the sense that there were some concerns about senior administration at the time. A lot of concern, obviously, about the economics of what had been happening in the early ‘90s. Anxiety about at that stage the governor? Yeah, I guess Rowland had been elected, so this must have been mid-November. Maybe not. Yeah, yeah, because Rowland had been elected. And then I changed my reservation and [laughs] got in the car and drove out here. I was a little anxious that they were concerned that I—they didn’t seem to want me out here. I just picked that up and I thought, “Well, that’s funny.” So I changed my flight to a later EMMERT 20

flight and rented a car and drove out and looked it over and found a campus that was in need of a whole bunch of work. There were some wonderful buildings and an extraordinary piece of land, but some deferred maintenance that showed badly and showed that the place really was having some financial issues. You know how it is, you don’t need to spend a lot of time on a campus to figure out who has been putting money into their physical plant and who’s been trying to make ends meet. BS: Was the library wrapped up at that time? ME: Oh, God, yeah, the library looked like it looked like, as you know. Library was all wrapped in plastic. There were dumpsters every place. The grass was a foot high. The place was filthy. I mean it really was. That was my immediate reaction: “God, this place just looks run down.” And it was surprising to me because while I’d been in Connecticut, I hadn’t spent much time. I was always driving through or stopping at the quaint little places. You know, I’d been to the Opera House down at the theater on the river—what’ s the name of it? BS: I know what you’re talking about. ME: I’ve been there a dozen times. B$: It’s in Ivoryton? ME: No, no, no, in Hampton [sic-Haddam]. BS: Goodspeed. ME: The Goodspeed. I’d been to the Goodspeed Opera House on vacation. So I’d seen all the quaint part of Connecticut and that’s sort of the image that one has in your mind and you think, “Well, the University EMMERT 21

of Connecticut must be one of those well-kept New England sort of places,” and the reality didn’t fit with that. So I went back. We talked about it some more and agreed it was at least another look and so I came out and did a campus visit. [end of side 1, tape 1] ME: And during the campus visit met a lot more folks, including [unclear]. BS: Who were some of the folks that you met aside from— ME: Well, obviously the administrative team. You know, the first thing you have to look for in ajob like this one is who do you have to work with. So I was anxious to see the deans and get a feel for them. I was anxious to see the rest of the vice presidential crew. Remember, it was provost-vp at that time, so it the full cabinet model was in place and the position hadn’t been changed from the portfolio Tom Tighe had. I knew Torn only slightly, but knew that he had difficulty here. Didn’t know what that was about. I was curious to figure that out. Knew that the board was in the midst of some transformation, but didn’t know what that was about. Knew that you had had the heck beat out of you during the first half of the ‘90s economically. So on the board I met Lew Rome, who I spent a couple of hours with during a basketball game, halftime and part of the game. Met all the vp’s, of course, Ed Allenby, Carol Wiggins, Wilbur Jones. Met most of the folks who were deans and met the people who then were my provost central folks. At that time at kind of the provost staff meetings were Fred Maryanski, Judy Meyer, Pam Roelf, Dick Danis, Dana Wilder. Oh, Leon Bailey and Tom Giolas. EMMERT 22

And then met with the committee again, of course. I was very interested in learning more about the AAUP and how the AAUP operated and interacted with the administration. B$: Had you worked with collective bargaining? ME: Never worked with a collective bargaining faculty, an organized faculty before. Had worked with classified unions and such, but not with faculty and I was not concerned about that, but anxious to niake sure that I would fit in and they’d feel comfortable with me and that I understand what that was all about because the model, as you well know, varied dramatically from campus to campus. And went out to dinner with Ed Marth and Bruce Stave and came away from that feeling much better and much more confident about that relationship, and my instincts were right. That’s proven to be a very practical and useful relationship for the university and the faculty and for the state, I think. And then right at the end of my visit I met the president of the university and my surprise there was his very limited involvement in this process. At the end of the visit I left wondering who was hiring whom here. [laughs] I’m trying to remember. I came back a third time with DeLayne and my kids—no, without kids—and spent more time then with the senior administrative staff, whom I hadn’t met. Oh, Lew Perkins I met in the first go around. He was actually on the search committee. I was impressed with Lew. So I came back again and kept hearing over and over again from a variety sources, a variety of central administration people and board members, that they were looking for somebody to come in and provide some serious leadership. That they probably would like to EMMERT 23

reshape the job at some time in the near future. That they wanted to change the role of the president in the near future. BS: Which board members were you talking to? ME: Lew, Bill Berkely. I think that’s it. Yeah. BS: Why did they want to do this? What were their issues? ME: Well, it was a little hard to untangle at first It was apparent that they were very unhappy with the senior administration in general. At that stage I’d learned more about Tom’s leaving and found out that by all accounts it was the board who fired him and that they did in fact ask him to leave and not Harry, who had done it, but the board. The board had—at that stage those three members also at that stage said, “You know, the fact is, if we could do it in one swoop, we’d turn over everybody, with taking out Harry and everybody down, but you can’t do that, so you got to do this a piece at a time,” you know, Bill Berkley and Lew. It was obvious that there was going to be a lot more movement and that was going to be some kind of a significant transformation. At that time also there was conversation about UConn 2000 being introduced as a concept. I met Brohinsky and Allenby, who were leading the charge on the public relations side of that, became convinced that, “Wow, I didn’t know if UConn 2000 was going to happen, but something was going to happen,” and that the public relations strategy that was in place and the marketing plan that was in place was a sound one and that some good things would happen. And then you sit down with the president who said, “This is an inherently bad idea and I don’t support it.” So then you realize, “Gee, this is curious.” I got two board members and two vp’s saying, or a EMMERT 24

VP and a pr guy saying, “This is utterly critical and we’re going to get it done,” and I’ve got a president and a couple of other people, key people, saying, “This is inherently stupid and I don’t support it,” and you sat there shaking your head thinking, “What in the hell is this about?” So I left that set of interviews, that last set knowing that there was a significant chance of both—well, knowing that there was going to be some fairly dramatic change that would occur, but not knowing in which direction it was going to go. Do you want me to sit closer? BS: No. ME: And we went back to Montana, we talked a while. The people in Montana tried to convince us to stay and were very nice about it. Things were going quite well there. We weren’t making the dramatic change we made here, but the progress was steady and given the resource base, it was something to be proud of. And I liked the president and he’s become a very good friend and somebody you can work with. Tony Rornano and Richard Bachoo came out to visit us then. You know, the mandatory site visit to make sure I wasn’t an axe murderer and that my wife didn’t have felony charges hanging around, and that was interesting to see Richard in Bosman, Montana. [laughs] They were both quite surprised by what a wonderful place Bosman was. I think they thought they were going to Deadwood, South Dakota, or something. I took them out to dinner at a restaurant in town. Bosman has many more nice restaurants than anything that EMMERT 25

Mansfield has to offer, and we had a delightful dinner and they worked hard to convince DeLayne that this was a nice place to live. I remember taking Tony into my office in Montana, which had three huge windows looking right into the Bridger Mountains. It was spectacular. It’s a picture postcard. And he walked in and he said, “Oh, you’re not going to leave this.” [laughs] To make a long story short, then we decided to come. Negotiated a little bit with Harry, which was an agreeable interaction and decided to come out. Then I started interacting seriously with the university then. This was just before Christmas, I guess. BS: Of, ‘90? ME: ‘94. So January ‘95, as the legislature comes into session, opening round of its session, I started interacting with the legislature around UConn 2000. Came out for the initial proposal of UConn 2000 to the legislature, a joint, very unusual meeting. It was joint House and Senate. Met Claire Leonardi. First time I met Claire was on the floor of the House, and my curiouser and curiouser phenomenon continued. They had it set up as a panel: Tommy Ritter, Speaker of the House, gets up and gives an impassioned speech about UConn 2000 and I don’t remember if you were there or not. BS: Probably not. ME: Ed probably was. And Lew Rome gives an impassioned speech on UConn 2000, Claire does as well, very ably. BS: This was where now? ME: The floor of the House. Oh, well, just before this all begins, I had pressed some board members because sitting as a brand new freshman legislator was Dernetrius Genarios from West Hartford and Demetrius EMMERT 26

is an old friend of mine. So Demetrius rises to introduce a sense of the House Resolution to welcome Mark Emmert to Connecticut, his dear and old friend, Mark Emmert, and Lew Rome turns around, “What in the hell is this?” So it was great. I just happened to blindly have, you know, by dumb luck happen to have a friend in the House who was brand new. It was like his third day in the legislature. BS: Before you go on, Ijust—[tape turned off/on]. So you were saying about you were at the legislature. ME: At the legislature and Genarios reads in this nice welcome and then Tommy Ritter gives an impassioned speech and Lew does and Claire does and then the president reads, reads a very terse kind of a statement saying, “Well, this is a good idea, we ought to do it,” essentially. Then they open themselves for Q&A and Harry doesn’t say a damn word. He didn’t answer at all and Lew and Claire handled all the questions and I thought, “This is very odd,” and couldn’t quite figure out the dynamics. Then came back a number of times to meet with legislative leaders on the whole business, and realized that we were lobbying for a very, very expensive project without the support of the governor and without the support of the president of the university. [laughs] Every time I’d go back to Montana, I’d say, “Well, I might have a very short tenure there at Connecticut.” [laughs] Well, obviously it passed and at the end of the day, you know, the president and the governor were there, once it started to gain momentum and we wound up craffing the legislation right at the end of the session. So I relocated here in April of ‘95. My family waited until August. They finished up the school year and spent the summer EMMERT 27

in Montana with their friends, which worked fine. I lived in a bed and breakfast for six months or however long that was, five months. 3$: Which one? ME: Oh, mostly in—oh, what’s it called? Joys, Special Joys. 3$: Special Joys in Coventry. ME: In Coventry. Yeah, wonderful people. Oh, what’s their names? 3$: I forget. He was in the athletic department. ME: Yeah, he was the track coach. Yeah, a very nice man. I’ll say it in a minute. They couldn’t have been more accommodating there and of course I just worked constantly, so it worked fine. I worked 16-18 hour days and drove back to Special Joys and fell in bed and got up and did it again the next day, trying to get on top of things here. Yet, upon arriving you— 3$: Well, up to this point who were the individuals that you had closest relationships to? ME: Here? 3$: Yeah, up to this point. ME: Well, Ed Allenby clearly and Wilbur Jones. My immediate staff, of course, and Fred. Judy Meyer to a lesser extent. 3$: When you say your immediate staff, you weren’t thinking of the associate provost then, you are thinking of secretaries? ME: Right. Right. Oh, Tom Giolas. Virtually no interaction with the president. In the time that I overlapped with Hairy, which was two years I guess, we had three meetings. Yeah, three meetings, cabinet meetings. B$: Now, were you hired by him or the trustees? EMMERT 28

ME: Well, in a titular sense, him. In reality, both, at the very least. I mean clearly he would not have moved forward if Lew and Claire and others had said, “No, isn’t they guy.” Fortunately, there wasn’t that kind of disagreement and Harry genuinely liked me and was pleased and the committee supported me and I think the board did, too. So you didn’t have—I guess the easy way to answer that is they all did, but the board seemed—again, when I say “the board,” I mean the board leadership. Oh, also in the legislature that first day I met. Whitey Heiss and Dennis Nadan. Whitey was, God rest his soul, a kind of laconic fellow who only said a few words and his words were, “Well, you know, I live in Stamford and I only really care about one thing, making sure you take care of Stamford. You understand that?” [laughs] And that’s only a slight paraphrase, and I said, “Well, Mr. Heiss, I don’t know enough about it right now to comment, but everybody tells me you got an important project in here.” “Well, that’s right. I do.” And Dennis Nadan said pretty much the same thing. Dennis wasn’t on the Foundation board at the time. He was just the president of GE Capital. So, you know, those board members led mostly by Lew and Bill really wanted me to begin trying to figure out how to implement the strategic plan and move the place along. Harry had only a passing interest in me.

This is probably a good time to kind of pause and talk about it broadly because what’s obvious today, looking back, is that it’s easy to sit and be critical of Harry and God knows a lot of people have. What was clearly going on in my mind was that the university was EMMERT 29

going through a very significant transition in moving from this sort of state agency mentality to becoming a university. Like you would recognize it in the way it behaved. It had had for a long time some wonderful programs and very good faculty and all of that going on, but it didn’t think about—the leadership of the university didn’t think of it and act as if it was a university with its own sense of purpose. Harry clearly thought of it in the old model. I mean, he described himself as an agency head. The first time I heard him say that, I’m sure my tongue fell out of my mouth, but he would describe himself first and foremost as an agency head and so from his point of view, the notion of going in and asking for a billion dollars and maybe bumping into the governor and pushing too hard in any one direction, you know, that’s just not the kind of behavior you engage in if you’re an agency head. You maximize peace and tranquility and you minimize disruption. That’s what good bureaucrats do, and so his behavior was quite rational in that context, but it clearly wasn’t where the board wanted to go and it wasn’t going to move the university and that was the biggest problem he had. So now when they were saying, “Gee, we need a new model,” now it’s quite clear what they were talking about. They wanted to change the nature of the presidency so that person would become a policy leader and an external agent and then let others run the place who would essentially execute the will of that, of the board and the president. So in this first six months really, it was quite apparent that the major task I had to take on was to repair some damage that was done among the relationships early on. Gulley Hall was not a pleasant EMMERT

place and I wasn’t here to see Tighe and Wiggins and Jones go at each other, but apparently they did and you could tell without anybody interceding to straighten it out. So you had little feudal baronies set up and every time I would move, there would be a counter reaction somewhere else and I kept thinking, “What in the heck is this about? Aren’t we in this together?” and then you realized, “Well, no, not necessarily.” [laughs) But after a short while they quickly came to realize that I wasn’t my predecessor and that I was predominantly interested in trying to move the institution along and that I was willing to compromise with them if they were willing to compromise with me and in short order we figured out how to work together pretty well. And at that stage Ed Allenby’s influence was enormous because the board was listening closely to Ed. His job, I assume you know, was created over the president’s objections. He was hired over the president’s objections. You’d asked who hired me and it’s a little vague. It wasn’t vague in Ed’s case. Lew Rome hired him, negotiated the contract, set his pay, cut the deal and hired him and did it over the president’s objections. So you had Ed in that mix, too, with Harry reacting in funny ways to him. So the first year it was odd. Could you turn these off for just a second? [tape turned off] Okay. Yeah, I probably would like this section closed. The interesting dynamic that occurred then was, as I said, the president’s cabinet at that point was either nonfunctional or dysfunctional, depending upon the issue and we met in those first two years three times, literally. So we created a closet cabinet and met at EMMERT 31

the Hartford Club. Me and Les and Lew and Ed, Wilbur, and that’s how we did business, outside of the office. For over a year, once a month we’d meet. We had a room that every day I kept waiting for a reporter to show up and ask what the hell all of you are doing sitting here having breakfast, but we’d have early morning meetings. When Lori came onboard, we included her. Oh, Scott Brohinsky a lot of times. So it was essentially the cabinet, we just met separately. The other thing that we created formally and publicly was we created the Council of Vice Presidents, which I chair, and that didn’t include Lew or Les, but it included most of the other people. So I just took my what’s now chancellor’s staff and expanded it to include the vice presidents. So it was Carol and Wilbur and Ed, and we met almost weekly for a good while during a lot of the transition. BS: Couple of questions. Who initiated the first group, the breakfast group? ME: It emerged from some conversations we were having. We would meet, you know, in groups of one or two or three and realized that we weren’t communicating and we weren’t making the decisions that had to be made. I don’t remember any one person saying, “Look, we got to get together and talk routinely.” I think Lew said, “Gee, you know, why don’t we have breakfast tomorrow at the Hartford Club and talk about this,” and it was so successful that we said, “Let’s just institute—let’s routinize this, so we can do business.” Now, I don’t know that—I don’t know what the reaction of the president would have been at that stage, but it probably would have been— EMMERT 32

BS: Did he ever know, do you think? ME: No. I’m pretty sure not. So we did business in funny ways. We created organizational connections where none existed formally, and interestingly, since then when I look back on it now, since then after we changed the organizational structure and created the chancellor model and hired Phil and now we’ve got a sensible structure that works well, we communicate less effectively today in some ways than we did then because we rely on the formal structure too much. I rarely sit down with Ed Allenby now, almost never and talk about issues. I have very little communication with Scott Brohinsky and the public relations arm. So those units, now that we’ve got a fully functioning presidency, they circle around. That becomes their orbit, the planet around which they circle and so the two chancellors are in fact doing what the board wanted, which is running their parts of the university, but there’s less flow back and forth between those pieces of the organization than there had been. I think that that’s probably okay, but there needs to be some [unclear]. Okay, now I’ll go back on [unclear]. BS: All right. So you were talking about essentially UConn 2000. ME: Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about UConn 2000 was that because there were a lot of people with a lot of different ideas about it, its success or its failure and their willingness to stick out their necks on it, by the time it passed everybody was surprised including those of us that were sitting there trying to finalize the legislation. So the last week of the legislature—it was about this time of year I guess—I’ll never forget sitting in the third floor Senate meeting room in the back of the Capitol. Was it the fourth floor? The very top floor clear in the EMMERT

back, a little tiny, dinky—yeah, it’s the fourth floor. Hot room, no air conditioning, late at night. It must have been 11:00, 12:00. It was like from 11:00 to 1:00, or something like that. Me, Wilbur, Scott. I think Allenby was there. I’m not sure. Tommy Ritter’s staff members. Tommy wasn’t there. Bill Nickerson from the Senate. A couple other legislators coming in and out. Claire Leonardi. Larry Schilling. I think that might have been it. Oh, Mary Ann Handley from the governor’s office. And as these things often happened in legislative crunches, just sitting down and whacking out the details of the bill, in two hours’ time we finalized the details of a billion dollar capital plan. There were still a couple odds and ends that had to occur and we got those ironed out, but throughout all, you can’t say enough about the political adroitness and moxie of Tom Ritter. I mean Tom Ritter put his political career on the line on this thing. I mean just time and time again he was willing to go in and play hardball with the governor. The beauty of the campaign that Scott Brohinsky and John Pelto crafted had really done its work, and so everybody knew that something had to be done. There was no doubt that some kind of UConn 2000 legislation was going to pass. It was just a matter of what it was going to be because all of the political work had been done up front, from the grassroots level. As an example of grassroots lobbying to get a major bit of legislation passed, it was brilliant and very few if any universities have done anything like it. So there are lots of people to thank: Brohinsky and Pelto, most obviously, but the guy who really stuck EMMERI

body parts on the table, that was Tommy Ritter because if this had crashed, it would have crashed on him. Anyhow, that was Harry’s resistance to it. He thought, “Well, this is a long shot. I’m not sticking any body parts out there for a long shot,” and even when it was done to 70-30 in favor, he wasn’t putting any body parts on the table. At that stage Rowland jumped on and when Rowland finally jumped on, then Harry finally thought, “Maybe this is a good idea.” So we all come together at the end and have a big signing down here in front of our plastic-wrapped library and it was a great day. Then we realized we had this thing. [laughs] BS: Now what? ME: We didn’t have a facilities master plan. The building proposal—the legislation had been crafted, as you know, around avoiding some things as much as created some things. It was crafted, the language was crafted to avoid spending any of this on a football stadium. It was crafted to avoid letting us move a lot of money into Hartford easily. There was deep suspicion that the chairman, Lew Rome, wanted to singularly rip $45 million dollars out of it and stick it in downtown Hartford, which interestingly is what they’re doing now, of course, out of a different pot. So the bill had as many restrictions on it as anything else. So there’s lots of language in there that says things like, “You can’t use this to create a whole new project. You have to come back to us to do that. You can’t drop a project from the list without coming back to us. You can’t do a lot of things.” EMMERT 35

On the other hand, it was incredibly enabling. The biggest piece, of course, allowing us to go outside of DPW to do the construction work, which was a surprisingly easy sell only because John Rowland was a new governor. Had John Rowland been in office twelve months, we never would have gotten that through. Any governor been in office twelve months, we never would have gotten it through. BS: Why so? ME: Because John had never been an executive before. He didn’t realize what he’d given up. What he gave up was the capacity to control construction projects and he has lots and lots of—like every governor before him—lots and lots of donors who are architects and construction managers and construction firms. While I have no reason to believe that he or any other governor has ever done anything illegal, they do in fact promote and encourage at least the perception that they wind up with projects going to certain people. Well, he doesn’t have that and as soon as that happened, he gave up a billion dollars worth of bonding and no capacity. The other thing he didn’t know, I don’t think—his people weren’t—they were just brand new in office. They just hadn’t figured it out and they knew that DPW was a problem and they’d just put in place Ted Anson, who was a new guy and they wanted him to clean it up, but they were in disarray so they couldn’t lobby hard against this thing. DPW primarily funds itself by charging five to eight percent off all the projects. Well, if they don’t have any projects, they don’t have a budget. So by not getting UConn 2000, they lost millions and millions of dollars of revenue to run that agency. EMMERT 36

You’d never get that thing passed today. Never, ever, ever, ever. Interestingly, I was back for the public testimony on UConn 2000 and it was just group after group testifying about the wonders of this thing: the contractors, the construction unions, the trade folks. Everybody loved it because they just wanted a huge injection into the construction industry because the construction industry was on its back in ‘95, as you remember. So they didn’t care whether it was DPW or not, they just wanted damn jobs. Only one person stood up and testified against it and did so very adroitly and very aggressively, very thoughtful arguments and that was the first time I met Lori Aronson. [laughs] Lori was there as the OPM hit man, right? Hit woman. I thought it was pretty compelling testimony, but knew the politics weren’t on her side. So the first time I met her—or saw her. I didn’t meet her, and I kept thinking, “Who’s this woman? Why does she dislike us so much?” and she talked about our inability to manage big projects and yadda, yadda, yadda, and six months later she was on my staff So we got this thing and then we had to sit down and say, “Okay, now what the hell do we do?” It passes in June, the bill begins a month and a half later on July 1—three weeks later. We’re supposed to have money flowing and we has some projects on the table that we were going to move forward with, like the Stamford project that was already under way and some other things. We had done plans for South Campus, but didn’t know how we were going to finish it up. So we just started running forward with the things that were on the books. Had to hire some management staff because we had nobody who could do that kind of stuff in Schilling’s operation. We brought EMMERT 37

in four—well, the other thing they did, prudently, in the legislation was they said, “You can only put—you can’t put people on this money,” and we said, “Gee, we got to add some,” and I forget what we’re allowed. I think it’s just six people. Maybe four even. No, it’s six. So we hired six professional construction managers to work with the consulting firms and the contractors and that’s worked okay so far. But we then realized we had to not let this opportunity slip away. Now this thing’s really here. We knew we had enough wiggle room with the funding that we could get something quite special if we really put our minds to it. So we said, “Look, got to do a master plan as fast as we humanly can with as much input as we can, but we’ve got to do it fast.” So we started that process, which for me personally and I think for the university more broadly is a once in a lifetime event. Not to do the master plan. Everybody does those, but to do it and know you can fulfill it. That’s the bizarre thing, is that you can lay it out and you can say, “Look, here is the ten year plan and here’s what’s going to happen in each of those stages.” That’s quite amazing. That piece has come together I think remarkably well. Yeah, we got the rancor over the Pfizer project and the rancor over parking, which that will get sorted out, but I don’t think there’s anybody that can doubt that it’s changed the nature of this campus in pretty fundamental ways. I think that the university has matured in the way it thinks about those things, the way it manages them. That hopefully—it is my own personal hope, since I’m leaving, is that that has changed as part of institutional memory. You never know. Well, we’ll know, but not for EMMERT

a while yet. That we won’t slide back into doing things in a [unclear] fashion, but thinking about the university as a comprehensive whole. I think it’s changed and by the time UConn 2000’s over, it certainly better have changed. The trick is now exercising some discipline about that process. BS: Now, what would you say your role in UConn 2000 has been? ME: Oh, from the beginning it was, you know, the legislative piece it was mostly to I think add some academic credibility to inherently political process. I don’t have any pretense that I had much to do with its passage, other than being able to reassure legislators at the right time that, “Yeah, this makes good sense. If you want to build a great university, this is what you’ve got to do. As an academic, I’m telling you this makes sense,” and that was reassuring to them when they occasionally thought, “Was this an academic deal or a land deal?” [laughs] From the beginning of it, what I think I was able to do, Bruce, was when I was still just a peer among the VPs, bring that group together in a way that they hadn’t been brought together, and hold them together as a working group, rather than letting them spread out. When I got here, and I don’t know how long this had been going on— you know it much better than me—the vice presidential pieces were such silos. I mean they didn’t talk, they didn’t work together, they didn’t coordinate and to go into UConn 2000 that way would have been a disastrous waste of money and opportunity. So before we moved to the chancellor model, I’d like to believe I was influential in getting those people to sit down and say, “Look guys, I don’t know EMMERT 39

what happened in the past, but we got to do this together,” and they did. They did. It was quite impressive, actually. Then when we moved into the chancellor’s model, which was another interesting chapter, and those pieces moved under me, that’s when we were starting the Master Plan in process and whether it was me or anybody else, that was a critical step in shaping the Master Plan process. I was insistent that we have a big, broad representative Master Planning Committee, that it be a group that the faculty and staff and board could look at and have some confidence in and say, “Oh, ya, okay, these are good folk and they represent us broadly.” I was insistent that we bring in as good a team as we could possibly bring in, even if they cost another $50,000, and we got I think the best team in the country. And then I played the role of, oh, sort of final arbiter on some of the key decisions. BM: Such as? ME: Oh, you know, there’s a lot of projects that—it’s just silly things. There was a huge debate—not about the mall. The mall’s been on the books since 1926. There was a huge fight over whether the mall should have curved linear lines to it or vertical lines to it and I finally looked at it five different ways and said, “Curved linear,” and, “Okay, fine.” So that’s what we have. There’s a bit of it that’s, oh, I suppose, heady. Like a lot of us, I’m a frustrated architect underneath and love all of these kinds of issues, but most of the key concepts came from the planners and the planning team. I just wound up— EMMERT 40

BS: The team for the record was? ME: The professional team. The Johnson, Johnson, Roy team, which included the Johnson, Johnson, Roy out at Ann Arbor, Michigan and then Barry Seagals and Associates out of New Haven, a Yalee, who was a delight. God, he’s just been wonderful to work with. They brought a lot of creative juice to it and a lot of professionalism to it and a lot of experience at other universities. [end of side 2, tape 11 BS: Interview with Mark Emmert by Bruce M. Stave for the Center for Oral History, University of Connecticut, June 7th 1999, tape 2. ME: Well, so the professional planners that came in added obviously their professional talents. They added discipline to the process and order to the process of making the Master Planning decisions. They I think also lent a very important element of legitimacy to that, to that effort in the eyes of the board and external constituencies and the campus community. We wound up with a marveLews plan that we’re still implementing and still modifying. We’ll be modifying constantly, but it has set down the general set of themes that will follow as UConn 2000 is implemented. The hardest thing—not the hardest, but among the hardest things for me to leave in going to LSU is not getting to finish the implementation of it. You know, the first four years of Phase I of UConn 2000 was by far the hardest and now it will be easier and more fun, but I can leave knowing that there’s a plan in place, knowing that there’s a commitment to the implementation of that plan, knowing that there’s a sense of discipline about that process, and leave with confidence that it’s going to get done and get done right. EMMERT 41

BS: Okay. In terms of the physical change, where do you think the greatest physical change has come? ME: Well, you know, surprisingly—at least it surprises a lot of people—I don’t point to the library or mall or the chemistry building. I point to the dumpsters because you know full well that, as I like to joke, that we used to think dumpsters were decorative applique and the dumpsters that were every 100 yards on campus were—maybe I’m getting a little carried away with this, but I think it’s not too strong to describe them as sociological markers of the way people looked at, thought about and behaved toward the campus and the broader institution. And that between dumpsters everywhere and cars driving everywhere, you really had people not feeling very good about the place, and if you don’t feel very good about the place, you generally don’t feel very good about the things that happen at that place. So the fact that today there’s no dumpsters or virtually no dumpsters, and that the amount of cars on the lawns, while not zero is dramatically diminished, and that the place is remarkably cleaner and neater and that the vandalism in the dormitories and residence halls has fallen off precipitously, and that the graffiti writing is off precipitously, that’s the significant change because that’s a community and cultural change. Now, why did that happen? It happened in part because we exercised some discipline and I called in facilities people and said, “I don’t know what you have to do, but get rid of the God damned dumpsters. I don’t know what you have to do, but get some garbage cans spread around this place that don’t look terrible. I don’t know what you have to do, but get your people off these lawns.” And to my EMMERT 42

surprise, I had to say that 50 times before anything happened, but it’s finally taking hold and I hope there’s not any back sliding there. Coincident with that, of course, was the construction and new building. So if you get people cleaning—I mean, it is a silly old story that an empty building, empty warehouse with one broken window, you lose all of them; no broken windows and they all stay. It’s true and so now we’ve got buildings that we’re proud of. You walk into the library and it’s beautiful instead of an embarrassment. You walk down that mall and you don’t get run over by a car. You feel good about crossing that thing. You go into that chemistry building and it’s impressive. And then of course the residential complexes that are coming along. As each of those new changes occurs, people will feel better about the place and so the general quality of life will improve. That’s the bottom line, is that people have to walk onto the campus and know they’re at some place special, know they’re at some place where serious academic inquiry goes on, know that they’re at some place where they’re expected to take care of the place and each other. I think that the University of Connecticut is, if not 180 degrees, 120 degrees from where it was five years ago. I’m very proud of that. It’s not just personal pride, I’m proud of the community because that’s a big change, big change. BS: You mentioned earlier the shift to the chancellor model. Could you talk about that? ME: Yes. As you know, there had been an interest in moving to a strong provost model before I was hired. The Strategic Planning Committee that Bill Berkley was chairing had proposed moving—I think they’d foolishly proposed eliminating the vice presidency for student affairs EMMERT

at a board meeting, which led to mass demonstrations and all kinds of revulsion at the idea. The instinct was sound. Their knowledge of the academy wasn’t. The notion that they needed to strengthen the role of the chief academic officer into being chief academic and chief operating officer was the right approach. They just didn’t know how to implement it without creating a war. So after I’d been here a while, the board led by Lew Rome and Bill, again started talking about the need to strengthen the provost role. I think immodestly they saw that I was competent and someone they had confidence in. They wanted to recraft the presidency around an external affairs agenda, also a good instinct, but they didn’t know quite how to do it. Now, here’s another section I’d like closed, please. BS: Okay. ME: The lore of the campus is that—or at least at Gulley Hall is that Lew Rome came up with the notion and implemented it. The reality is he came to me and said, “Look, we’ve got to strengthen your hand in all of this because you’re getting stuff done. You’re the guy that can run the campus. We need to recreate a new presidential role. This isn’t the president to do it—we all know that—but we need to create that model and then go find a president that will fill that new role. Draw up a model that will do that. Make it happen.” So I sat up one night and drew up a couple of models and sat down with him the next day and said, “Here’s the one that makes sense to me,” and he said, “fine, let’s do it.” He said, “I guess I ought to be the one to carry this forward to the board,” and I said, “I think it would be better than me doing it,” and he said, “Fine.” The only EMMERT 44

interesting disagreement he and I had was he said, “Oh, and don’t you think that the dean of the Law School should be a chancellor, too?” and I said, “No, sir, I do not and I would be very unhappy with that.” [laughs] And he said, “Fine, then we won’t do that.” He carried it into the board and said, “Here’s a new”—he

carried into Harry actually and said, “Harry, this is the model that I want to run with. It changes your job,” and Lew is very good at selling these things and let Harry take it as his model and then Harry actually carried it to the board and said, “Here’s my new model.” But Harry was the third guy to come up with the idea. [laughs] And created this new model that is I think a pretty good one. I don’t know how long it will continue, frankly, but it worked real well for me and for Phil. I think Phil wants to continue it largely intact, though the current board had some different ideas about that. I think we’re likely to go back to a central chief financial officer sometime soon because the chairman wants that very much, and depending upon how that’s shaped, that could make very good sense to me. We’ll see where it

goes. Okay, now I’ll— BS: You’ll come back. ME: I’ll come back now. BS: Okay. All right. The Strategic Plan is something that you came into. ME: Yes. BS: Could you talk a little about that and how you dealt with it and what evolved out of it and the process and the people involve? ME: Well, the Strategic Plan had been developed by a Strategic Planning Committee led by Bill Berkley. You were here, I wasn’t so I didn’t EMMERT 45

get to see that in action, but I know it was contentious in the way it came together. It didn’t have widespread support among the faculty, as far as I could tell, or the staff, or the administration for that matter. President Hartley certainly didn’t support it. He didn’t have that sense of ownership of it. And the board handed it to me and said, “Here. Do it!” Now, the interesting thing was that when you came at the plan without the history of the process, you read the plan pretty objectively, it was a pretty good plan. It said all the right things and didn’t have a lot of detail in there about how you were going to get anything done, but that’s okay. You don’t need all of that. It laid out a pretty good road map and reflected some pretty serous thought. What we came to realize was that the real issue was the process more than the outcome. There were some glaring gaps in it, largely absent conversation about the role of scholarship and research. You could tell that it was a non-academic audience that put it together because they didn’t understand how important research and scholarship was to the standing and prestige of the institution and that that was a core part of our work and our mission. There were some nods in that direction, but nothing serious. So we had to work on that piece a lot. What I did was I then carved it up into manageable pieces and formed some working groups of faculty and staff and students to spend time trying to flesh out some of the bones of this skeletal outline. My secondary intent, or maybe even my primary intent was to then get people to think about and buy into the notion that this is their future, this isn’t just some abstract concept. I think that was EMMERT 46

successful in large measure. I wouldn’t describe it as wholly successful, but it in some cases it worked quite well and in others it didn’t. It worked well with the undergraduate education piece. It worked well with the strategic communications and public relations pieces. It worked well with obviously the facilities piece that came out through the facilities master planning components. It worked well through the organizational and restructuring components, for the most part. It didn’t work as well around the research and graduate components. It didn’t work as well around the bureaucratic restructure and elimination of bureaucracy, as I would have liked— those pieces. BS: Why do you think that these were difficult areas? ME: I think because they’re the most entrenched, because change is most difficult in those two areas. When you deal with the bureaucracy of this university, again you got to remember a university just emerging from the state agency mentality, too many managers, you know, line managers middle level and down, too many staff members who still even today see themselves first and foremost like the fellow you were just talking about at your agency, that their function is to avoid error not to serve your purposes. It is to avoid an audit, not to advance the institution. So that’s still work that if I were going to stay here, I would push hard on. The other area that we didn’t make as much progress on that I would push hard on if I were staying is in thinking more about how we advance the university as a scholarly enterprise that produces new knowledge and scientific understanding and creativity. The group that EMMERT 47

was brought together for the strategic planning purposes were I think not interested in. In all candor, interested in thinking about change, but only how do we do more of the same, and that works fine if you’ve got ever-growing abundance, and financial and physical abundance, but we don’t and we’re not likely to. So when they came to me and said, “Okay, here’s a plan. If you increase the base support for research by eight million dollars, we’ll do a heck of a lot more.” That doesn’t help, because I don’t have eight million dollars to deal with it, and as you know, at that time we were—the other piece that we were struggling with was a fifteen million dollar annual deficit that had to be eliminated. So I was cutting eleven million dollars out of the operating budget and adding four million in new revenue, not trying to find six to eight million to put into things. So while I couldn’t argue with anything they put on the table—it was all good stuff—I couldn’t implement it. So it was utterly implementable. I think today that there’s the capacity to add over “n” period of time, a four year period, maybe, significant resources into that kind of an enterprise, but there needs to be concomitant changes in the way we do that business and that is very, very hard, just like with the bureaucracy because it strikes at the heart of what we do as faculty and it’s tough to change that. BS: Okay, now with the process itself, how much do you think has to still be implemented coming out of the Strategic Plan? ME: Well, I think the first critical, most critical element is to never think of the Strategic Plan as done. The university isn’t at one level of performance and behavior here and then there’s a transitional phase EMMERT 4$

when the plan’s implemented and then it gets up here and stops. It’s, from here on out it’s going to be constantly changing and hopefully always upward, or at least even when it’s a plateau up here, it’s going to be changing. So whoever the leadership is, it’s critical that they recognize that the Strategic Plan needs to innervate constant modification and growth and development and progress. Having said that, if you ask yourself the basic question, if the University of Connecticut aspires to be one of the great public universities in the country, what are still missing pieces? Those two latter pieces, we’ve still made grossly insufficient progress. We do need to find ways to increase the scholarly output of this university. That doesn’t necessarily mean any one faculty member. It means as a body. We need to have more scholarship that’s seen in more fields— more scholarship in more fields that’s seen as cutting edge across the board. We need to have many more faculty who are at the absolute top of their game. Those pieces have yet to be put in place. We’ve made progress, no question of that, but it hasn’t been as great as it should be. And one of the keys to doing just that and one of the keys to enhancing the undergraduate educational experience, where we have made dramatic progress, is fixing the bureaucracy. We trip over ourselves too much. We waste too much time and money on the bureaucratic side and we need to take those resources and move them over here, where they deliver the goods of the enterprise, which is teaching and scholarship. We haven’t made that kind of progress yet. BS: Okay, with the budgetary reduction, this was something that was obviously on deck when you came, I guess. EMMERT 49

ME: [chuckles] Yeah, a surprise, actually. I was not aware that—I knew that the university had had significant budgetary problems in the late ‘$Os, early ‘90s. I didn’t expect to find pools of money laying around. I knew that there had been temporary shortfalls. I had been—I think this is a careftdly chosen word—led to believe that steps had been made, taken to deal with those shortfalls. BS: Who led you to believe that? ME: Mostly the president’s office. And so I was almost dismayed--I think that’s the right word—to learn that indeed the year that I arrived there was a twelve million dollar shortfall that was going to be covered through the working capital reserves that had been built up and that the next year that was likely to balloon to fifteen million dollars, unless something happened. And that we had about forty—at that stage around a rough number is forty-five million dollars worth of what are referred to as reserves. What they really are are cash balances, a lot of which is already earmarked for other purposes. It’s like the working capital that we keep in your account. It all adds to at that time something like forty-five million dollars, and you don’t have to be a wizard in math to figure out you got three years and you’re broke and you’re not making payroll anymore. You know, while we like to believe that those things can’t happen, I remember early nineties, late eighties when University of California went two months paying its faculty with script. [laughs] It can indeed happen and I didn’t want that to happen on my watch. So I sat down with the deans, sat down with then the Council of Vice Presidents and said, “Well, we got to fix this. This just isn’t going to work, kids.” Spoke very frankly, as you might remember, EMMERT 50

about it in the Senate and I thought—I’ve always thought and will always believe with great confidence that when it comes to financial issues and public universities, you are always better off by just letting everybody see where everything is because no one will believe that you’ve really got a financial problem. No one will really believe that you’ve got financial opportunities unless they see it in front of them. So I started talking a lot about this very significant deficit, showing as many people as I could where it came from, how it got there. It was frankly, and you know this is the politically difficult piece, was I had to walk a tight rope because the reason we were in that position, one can say, was the actions of the state, which is true, but the university had also failed to do anything up to that point to fix it. Either to go in and lobby like hell for changes and change its revenue structures, or increase tuition alone. That was the only thing that they’d done, but we were also bleeding students like mad. So we were down at that stage in ‘96 we’d lost enough enrollment that at those current revenue levels, we had lost seventeen million dollars in tuition revenue annually and we hadn’t fixed that. The university hadn’t done much at all to fix its financial problems. So then you only had—well, the board had by then adopted a policy saying you couldn’t increase tuition above the rate of inflation, so that card was off the table. So you had to look for solutions wherever you could find them. We reduced payroll by eleven million bucks through attrition through a nicely crafted early retirement package with AAUP. AAUP was a wonderful partner in putting together a model that worked. The state came along and then provided a “golden handshake.” That allowed some reductions and EMMERT 51

also some flexibility that was greatly needed. We increased revenue through a handful of mechanisms--four million bucks roughly, and I assumed it would take, well, I’d said I assumed it would take four years, I pretty much assumed we could do it in three if we tried hard. And we did, we got it balanced in three years. And now this last year we actually added back to reserves very slightly. And this current year we’ll finish the year even. Next year I’m sorry to say, I think we’ll have problems again, because the legislature under-funded us— the governor brought in a budget that—while he’s not saying it, is under-funded by a couple three million bucks. Under-funded the budget approved by the board by six million bucks [unclear] So right now we’re struggling to figure out, at the upcoming board meeting on budgets, which will be in July now, after I’ve gone I guess—they moved it back. It will cut back, not on the core operations of the University, but it’ll cut back on some of the strategic initiatives we’ve introduced. That’s unfortunate. BS: Okay, now in the past when this kind of thing was done at the university, it raised all sorts of cries, particularly program review, and it became a very political thing. What was the politics of your doing this budgetary reduction? ME: Yeah, it was interesting. Because the budget problems of the early ninety’s had led to, under my predecessor, the creation of—I guess it, was it Tom that formed the committees? DE: Um-hmm. ME: The program review committee, that had the task of identifying programs to be eliminated to balance the budget. I’d had similar experiences at Montana State University, where we had to eliminate, EMMERT 52

oh gosh, three and a half, four million dollars in a year I guess. You know, there’s this interesting assumption that the only way you can deal with that in a university, is to go in and eliminate a college or eliminate a department or eliminate this or that. What in fact the political dynamics of universities, particularly public universities, but even private universities, are that that’s almost an impossible thing to do. When I was at Montana State, we were struggling with some of those issues, and we did eliminate a couple of departments and [unclean some things and close out a couple of programs. I spent a lot of time at Oregon and Oregon State, working with some colleagues there, because they had to do it much more seriously out there, to see what worked and didn’t work. And these big, bold public confrontations, never work. I mean, that’s the problem with them, cause you never—and we didn’t. The reason that I inherited that fifteen million dollar deficit was that back when the program review committee came into play, everybody said “Okay, well, we’re not going to eliminate those programs, therefore we’re not going to do anything.” So nothing was done. And so the deficit just kept chipping away at the reserves, until we were going broke. So what we did do, was we looked at the strategic plan—we being my cabinet and the dean’s council—and looked at the strategic plan and said “Okay. How can we make disproportionate cuts? If we have to do reductions, how do we make reductions in ways that are minimally disruptive of the kinds of things we want to do to advance the University?” So we came up with prioritizations of categories, where you protect the academic core as much as possible. But then EMMERT 53

we said, “But the facilities are a mess, so were not going to go in and whack away at facilities anymore.” They got slaughtered in the early nineties, went from five hundred to two hundred employees and facilities, which is one of the reasons that the place looked terrible. And so, we said “We’re not going to touch those. Well, what can we go after? We can go after some administrative costs. We can go after administrative and auxiliary costs, we can go after support structure costs.” And so those are the things that we did, and we took disproportionately larger whacks out of all of those things—at least to stabilize things for the first year. And then, what we were able to do, because of both of the early retirements, was then set some academic priorities around programmatic opportunities; and strategic decisions that allowed us to take the cuts wherever they came, cause you have to do that, right? The retirements are going to occur, wherever they occur. Then the decision is, where are you going to put them back and at what levels do you put them back. And that was really the controversial part of the process. BS: The re-allocation. ME: The re-allocation piece. Because, had we not gone through the early nineties program review committee, I probably would have created a program review committee. But there was no way I could do that without invoking all of those horrible memories. So, instead, I asked all the deans to work with their department heads, and bring me proposals. And went to the senate, went to the dean’s council, went to the graduate council, and said, “Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to ask deans to give me academic proposals on where to re allocate. I’m going to review those consistent with, (and I laid out a EMMERT 54

handful of criteria) these kind of criteria. And then I’m going to make those decisions.” And I laid it out as a model, waiting to see if the world would explode, not on the decisions, but on the process. And most everybody, not everybody, the vast majority of those said, “Yeah, that’s fine. That’s the best way to do this, because we’ve tried it through the faculty committee structure, and that crashed and burned, and we don’t want to go there again for at least now.” So that’s what I did. I had everybody submit plans and proposals. Ranked them against some criteria that I’d set up, and then chose among our children, made Sophie’s choices. To my pleasant surprise, the negative reactions were less profound than they could have been. Even people who didn’t win said, “Look, I don’t like the decision, but the process was okay.” And that’s all I really wanted, at the end, was for people to have confidence in me. I also pushed very hard on, what I keep referring to as the “unitive analysis problem”: that everybody has to understand from the department to the chancellor that the re-allocation process has to occur at each of those levels, constantly. Constantly. If nobody makes any decisions until it gets up to where you’ve got a big problem and now you’ve got to eliminate the college of Engineering to balance the budget, well then you’re dead, ‘cause you can’t--nobody’ll ever make that decision. So the department head has to constantly be saying, “How can we take the resources we have and make them more effective?” A dean needs to say it constantly. A chief academic officer needs to say it constantly; so it’s an iterative on-going cycle. We’re not there yet. We’re closer. That’s why I changed the EMMERT 55

budgetary process though: to shove the budgetary authority out to the deans, saying “Don’t come to me and ask for money. You’ve got all the money.” And they’re--two-thirds of them are there now. Another third are still in the baby mode—they still wait until they have a disaster, then they come over and say, “Oh, I’m broke. We’ve got to cancel these courses. What are we going to do?” And I’ve gotten in the habit of saying, “I don’t know. What are you going to do?” And they don’t like that, but they’re starting to grasp it. I’ve now, I think, Bruce, hired—recruited and hired, or rehired or re-appointed, all of the deans, in my short- BS: Four years. ME: I think that’s right. I can’t think of one that I haven’t hired or re

appointed. [long pause.] Huh. .. so, each and every one of them, I’ve brought in or rehired, trying to get them to understand that they have to take much greater responsibility for the management of their school. And that’s again moving away from that “agency” mentality. When I got here, everybody was angry—the academics were all angry that all of the budgetary decisions were being made by the financial side of the house. And the truth is worse than that. There were no decisions being made anywhere—anyplace. Every budget was put together by the budget staff. Hello Dan Court [unclear] could have done it. They just saw—they waited to see what the revenue was going to do. “Is the revenue going to go up?” “Nope. It’s going down two percent.” “Okay, subtract two percent from everybody.” “Okay fine.” [vocal effect like a chalk line drawn across a board, or a cleaver dropping onto a butcher block.] That was it. And then the budgets went out. And my—the guy I replaced, held everything centrally, and EMMERT 56

the deans had no authority over anything. Anything. And you know, cause you were a department head. Department heads—being a department head here has got to be a really unsatisfying task, at least at that stage. Because you have no travel budget and no authority or discretion—only thing you did that was terribly important was hire people and make tenure decisions. But in terms of moving resources around and trying to build a department or a program—how could you do that? No capacity. So, I think we’ve changed. I know that with this group of deans we will never go back to a central-run budget. That won’t happen. Whether they successfully filter it down to the departments, we’ll have to wait and see. Some have, some haven’t. BS: Now, you had singled down, on the re-allocation process, three professional schools, I think. ME: Yeah. BS: How did you come about doing that? ME: Yeah. By looking at a number of criteria. One, places where marginal investments, (cause investments were, while they got a lot of attention and were the subject of a lot of debate, the investments were really quite modest, [chuckle] in, you know, the grand scheme of things), places where a marginal investment could have a significant impact—schools that were well positioned to move forward and could make some progress with [unclear]impact of a few faculty members. Places that where we could leverage the most out of UCONN 2000- where we were already making a large capital investment, so we could take it and get some kind of multiplier effect out of that. Places that were-academic places that were important to the state and were there EMMERT 57

for—if they improve then [unclear] quality we’re likely to gamer greater support for the University, broadly. And places where there was the possibility of return on the investment—enrollment or tuition, over time. And then lastly, in one case—pharmacy—a situation where you either had to make an investment or had to get out of the business. Pharmacy was in the interesting position of having to move to a Doctorate of Pharmacy to remain competitive. And we had committed to—or at least at that stage—were about to commit to a new building for them, in phase one. So if you’re building them a building, and they’ve got to move to a Doctorate of Pharmacy to be competitive, they can’t even be ranked right now on the national- they can today—but then they couldn’t even be ranked nationally, cause you only rank doctorate pharmacy programs. What do you do to get that program to go? And then in their case also, how can you put in place a tuition bottle that would allow, within a three-year period, almost all that investment to be regrouped? So it was around those kind of criteria. And then in the non-professional schools, working with predominantly Ross, and Bob Grey, identifying units inside those schools, departments and programs where you could again re-allocate inside those units to have significant impact. So, History lost a lot of people, but they wound up with more bodies—the opportunity for more bodies than they lost. And they, as you well know, made some wonderful hires. It may be a few years before they all pay off, but you brought in some very good people. Psychology added some people. I guess they replaced everybody in Linguistics. Added some people over in Biological Sciences. EMMERT 5$

BS: Okay, and just for the record, the other two schools besides Pharmacy, are Business and Law. ME: Law, Business and Pharmacy. B$: Yeah. ME: The Law school, because the Law school is again, a beneficiary of UCONN 2000—or actually just pre-UCONN 2000—with its new library, and with, I think they’re ear-marked for about six million buck worth of renovations, we’ll have a splendid physical plant out there, in a lovely location. They are well-positioned to move forward, they’re already in the upper-quartile, one of the few schools we have in the upper-quartile, and can move up a bit more. Business because, building a brand-new business school, we’re seen as the predominant supplier of business education in the state, by a long shot. The demands, the enrollment demands are huge, and because they can probably move up the ranks reasonably well, in a reasonably short period of time. I’m rapidly becoming a fan of historians and social scientists, though, because you can actually afford to make progress in those disciplines. BS: [chuckle] [cough] ME: Hey, look at Physics, there, it’s a tough one! We ought to have some of the engineering programs. You look at physics, and you got a great department head in Bill Stwalley, you’ve got a number of very fine faculty. But the price, the sheer price of saying “We want to move them from,”—in our C-rankings they were in the lowest quartile, but in reality today, they’re probably in the second quartile. But to move them from the second quartile, even to the third quartile—let alone the EMMERT 59

top quartile—would take such a massive infusion of money to get them there, you just think, “Golly, gee!” But, History department, now, that’ s—you historians are cheap! [chuckle] BS: We, we definitely are. ME: And political scientists, they’re cheap. So you do wind up making some interesting trade-offs, by saying, “Okay, which of these, at this stage of the University’s development, can you afford to make great strides in. You have to move Physics and Chemistry up, but can you realistically move them into the top quartile in a ten-year period? No, there’s not enough money on planet. Can you move them up there in twenty years? I don’t know, but you’d have to make a serious, long- term, twenty-year commitment to just pile a lot of money in to the physical sciences to get there. BS: The issue of athletics. ME: Yeah? BS: Your relationship as academic officer to athletics. [unclear] How does it-- ME: Well, in a formal sense it’s very minor, in that the—uh [sigh]— academic counseling program for athletics reports to Fred Maryansky and hints to me. But even more importantly is the strong informal relationship. I work extremely well with the athletic director, and associate ADs—Lew Perkins [unclear] the AD, and Jeff Hathaway the associate—and have been able to do a lot of things, mostly financially, but some of them programmatically, through mutual adjustment and mutual respect, I think. Let me give you an example that’s unknown to the world. [BS chuckles] And probably ought to be held for a little while anyway. EMMERT 60

The athletic department was just given a—was just given a million dollars by Harry Gample, again, as an endowment to Athletics. Well, had the Athletic department and the academic side of the house been at war, or even not had good relationships, that’s probably exactly what would have happened, Harry would have given a million dollars to Athletics. But what’s happening in reality behind the scenes, is that six hundred thousand of that money is going to the business school. We’re putting it all in an endowment because, we wanted to—Harry really wanted to do something big and splashy in Athletics, and Athletics can put it in an endowment—it won’t get paid out for a number of years. It’ll get paid out over three years, and then the balance upon Harry’s death—which, you know, who knows when that’s going to occur—but their need for short term cash flow is. limited. They happen to be doing pretty well right now. Business school has got to raise four million buck to finish building their building, so I really need money for that, so Tom’s been out working hard. So we made an internal adjustment in our budgets. Lew took all of the gift, I took six hundred thousand out of his budget—the scholarship budget—and put it over into the building. Perfectly legal, perfectly appropriate thing to do, but it happens behind the scenes, rather than up front, because if we had to do it up front it would have been kind of big and messy. So we’ve been able to through collaboration and mutual respect, to get some things done that we couldn’t have gotten done otherwise. When I balanced the budget, the board made a two million— you may remember this—made a two million dollar commitment for gender equity—Title Nine gender equity—perfectly sensible thing to EMMERT 61

do that I supported. They never once asked where the money was coming from. That money came right out of the academic side of the operation. That was a two million dollar budget cut to the academic programs, because there’s no place else to get the money. But the board didn’t stop to ask that question, and the president at the time— former president didn’t stop to a—he knew bloody good and well where it was coming from. But he didn’t—he didn’t say to the board, “By the way— [End of tape 2, side 1] ME: Title Nine athletic gender equity was part of the fifteen million dollar deficit the University had. That’s how we went from thirteen to fifteen. Nobody paid much attention to that, because the board wasn’t going to debate it. And so then when I had to come up with a budget balancing plan, I went over to Lew and said, “Lew, we”— So we laid out a plan, that the Athletic department had laid out to the board, and said, “Okay, here’s how we’re going to ramp up all of our women’s sports, over a three-to-five-year period.” And I sat down with Lew after it was all done and said, “Lew, there’s no way I can do this. Now, you can do it over five years, you can do it over seven years, but I can’t do it over three-to-five years.” And so, we literally, behind-the scenes, decided to stretch out the implementation—knowing full-well that we were not only in compliance with Title nine, but we were, we were going to be probably the national leader in Title nine. But had Lew wanted to be a real horse’s patooty about it, he could have said, “No, the board said this. We’re going to deliver that.” So, we were able to work some things out that we couldn’t have otherwise. EMMERT 62

BS: Okay. What about the—with the good working relationship there— the impact of athletics on the institution? ME: Well, you simply can’t deny—regardless of your philosophical pre dispositions—the dominance of Sport, competitive sports, on the American psyche. It’s a phenomenon I don’t pretend to understand— probably don’t want to understand, [chuckle]. And so, as a tool for building community—for garnering attention and affection and emotional commitment, for sheer entertainment—our premier sports—men’s and women’s basketball, to a lesser extent, football, though that may change—just can’t be beat. I mean, they’ve been extraordinary for us. And the fact that we have two basketball coaches who care about student athletes, and care about running clean programs, we’ve been able to smile proudly about our—. Students’ graduation rates from men’s basketball’s got to improve though. This year’s four seniors all graduated and everybody feels great about that. It has clearly brought attention to us, nationally and internationally—. I was sitting in, over the weekend, in a conference in Florida, and near me was a group from Kentucky that were there, they were doctors from a different convention, in this hotel, and they were talking about playing UCONN, and they were all excited about playing UCONN. Well, it finally dawned on me, they were playing us in football, they were talking football. And they assumed that we have a great football team, [BS chuckles roundly] because we’re national champions in basketball. It didn’t—you know, they had no idea we play 1 -AA football and they’re going to beat us by eighty points. But, the truth is, people in Kentucky wouldn’t be talking about Connecticut, EMMERT 63

University of Connecticut, if it wasn’t for basketball. So you can’t deny that impact. It’s been quite special. I am very concerned—I am deeply concerned—about the impact of the new stadium. I am, as you know, one of those rare academicians that supported our move to 1-A football—still do. But I said all along I had two prerequisites: one that it not impact negatively the academic budget, and two that it occur in Storrs Not only is football not going to occur in Storrs, the only way you can make the finances of that stadium work is to play all our basketball in Hartford, too. So we’re going to relocate football to Hartford. We’re going to relocate basketball—the little bit of basketball that was being played here—to Hartford. And we’re going to move from the Civic Center, which is an okay place to watch basketball, to a domed football stadium to play basketball in, like Syracuse does which is a dreadful venue for basketball. I’ve watched too much basketball in those [unclear]. Horrible. And I don’t think it’s going to be good for basketball, I don’t think it’s going to be good for the University. But it’s gonna move us to 1-A football and that’s good, but I don’t—I don’t even know what the hell you do for homecoming when, homecoming, cause the game’s in Hartford. Ijust don’t see this as useful. But I see it as inevitable! [both chuckle] Not useful. Our sports have gotten tied up in economic development, and that’s unfortunate. BS: Okay. Issues of diversity on campus during the years that you have been Chancellor? ME: Yeah. I think we’ve made good progress in clarifying and reinforcing our commitment to the importance of diversity as a key part of the EMMERT 64

strategic plan. I hope so. I hope that that doesn’t—I’ve emphasized it hard, so has Phil Austin. I hope whoever replaces me is as serious about it because it’s just an integral part of being a great University today. You can’t not pay attention—You don’t do it because it’s politically correct—you don’t do it because it’s, cause you’re trying to avoid lawsuits. You do it because it is utterly essential if you’re going to be a great University. And I like to say it’s not about politics—it’s about arithmetic. The United States is rapidly becoming a highly diverse society. And if a public university’s going to be an important part of that society it has to embrace that diversity and work with in that context effectively. We have done a very, very fine job here—I don’t mean me, I mean “we” as a University—at building and creating multicultural institutes and centers. We’ve done a poor job of telling that story. If the world knew more effectively—the academic world knew more effectively what we have in those centers and institutes, we would be recognized nationally as a leader in that whole arena. That’s something that’s got to happen and happen fast. It’s one of the reasons I want to try and close up the Vice-Provost for Multicultural [unclear] search before I get done—the job that Leon Bailey used to have. We’ve done and excellent job at adding faculty to the institutes and those arenas, and I’m very proud of that, because we did that while we were dealing with the budget issues. I managed to quietly— not clandestinely, but almost—quietly create the Rainbow Center as a frill-fledged center at the university, without debate, and was told when I came here by board members, that could never happen. BS: Which board members? EMMERT 65

ME: [laughs] Urn, actually supporters of the whole concept. Richard Treiback, for example, said “Gee, I don’t think you could ever do that.” Even though he thought it was a good idea. And [we] have hired some wonderful directors, the director’s of the Women’s center, and the Women’s studies institute, right now, and the Rainbow Center are just, they’re fantastic—just terrific people—and the director’s that were here when I got here are doing excellent jobs. So we’ve done well there. We’ve done very, very well—the past two years especially, in recruitment of minority students at the undergraduate level. Those numbers are just heading off the charts, and equality is up and I couldn’t be more happy with that. Did that through targeted recruitment, targeted scholarship programs. Did a lot of very good work there—very labor intensive, but got it done. And it had a very positive impact, in the same way with faculty recruitment, of new faculty. Past two years are most diverse incoming faculty groups that we’ve ever hired, and again equality is just, I think, fine. We’ve not done anywhere near as well in senior administrative positions. We have an all Anglo set of deans right now, three women deans, but just offered, made an offer to a woman dean of Extended Continuing Ed last week, but don’t have any minority deans. Only have one minority member in senior administration, though when I finally made this week, the hire of the Vice-provost, I hired the second minority member in a senior administrative position. BS: Your hire will be multicultural? ME: Yes. So there’s still work to be done there. But all in all, I think it’s a record we should be please with. It’s a record that’s moving us in the EMMERT 66

right directions. But one that you can’t relax on. And probably, Connecticut’s not going to escape the anti-affirmative action stuff that’s out there—sooner or later that’s going to come around to New England, I’m afraid. So we’ll wind up dealing with that. That’s an interesting faction. BS: Two issues that are current now, and you mentioned them early on in our conversation—the Pfizer building and parking. Can you talk a little bit about these two questions? And your role? ME: Sure. Well the parking issue’s the easiest one, because it’s the most common, and it’s virtually a boring issue. It’s got interest in practical implications and solutions, but it’s an engineering as much as a political [unclear]. When we put in place the master plan, it became clear that we were going to have—we were going to move cars to the periphery of campus. And that we wanted to create some parking opportunities on that periphery that were close and convenient. That necessitated the building of some parking garages. And of the shuttle bus system. Both of which take money. Alright, if you’re going to do those things, you can do them one of two ways. You can—one of three ways. You can get General Obligations funds for them, which is almost unheard of, but we happened to get it for one parking garage. I know of no other university that’s built a parking garage with state G.O. bonds, and probably never—no one again. You can pay for them out of your other budgets, you know just put it on the debt service of the institution and eat it out of all your operating budgets. Or you can create parking fees. And we’re doing a little bit of the latter two. The parking fee structure doesn’t pay for all those services but it comes closer, and we have, of course, as you know, never had EMMERI 67

parking fees. So, I made the decision in the end, to bite the bullet and create parking fees, which I’m sure will enshrine me in ignominy for—ignominious character for the remainder of my—the living memory of those that are here. And you know, we’ll have to work our way through that. It’s always controversial. As I joke with Phil Austin, “As long as everybody’s unhappy about parking, everything’s right in the world.” But the truth of the matter is that we now have a parking advisory committee that’s working well, I think—well, people always grouse about it, but they have more confidence in it than they did. I’ve got somebody chairing it, who people have confidence in as a faculty member and as somebody who is thoughtful. Carla Fox, who I brought in from the faculty to help with those kind of projects. She’s somebody who has long-standing status in the community. One of the problems—not problems—one of the dynamics of the current administration is that it’s very new for the most part. And so there’s utility in having people that bring history in with them, and that’s one of the reason’s I asked Carla to come in for a couple of years. The Pfizer issue’s actually a much more interesting one, because I really think it’s a watershed project for the University. We started doing some things with Pfizer around biotechnology three years ago, I guess. We have a small—a lot of people don’t know this—we have a small facility right now, on some of the ag lands, where we do some work with them around small farm animals and doing some joint vaccine research projects around bio-technology, and they’re quite nice collaborations. We’re doing some good science. Out of that Pfizer came to us and said, “Gee, we would,”— came to some [unclear]—the scientists that were doing the work EMMERT 6$

decided together to go to their superiors and say, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if there was a research facility at UCONN where we could do joint research on animal vaccine programs.” And the scientists talked among themselves for a good while, and then it worked it’s way up to deans and middle managers, and then finally came to me. And the notion was, you know, Pfizer would build the facility at their expense; we would operate it at their expense—they’d pay us to be managers so we could control quality and manage it since it was on our land. We would give them the land, for a dollar a year lease, for some fixed term, yet to be defined, and then at the end of that term, they would give us the building or we’d renegotiate something. Wonderful, wonderful opportunity for the University—dealing with a firm that is the recognized leader in R[esearch] and D[evelopment]; that’s bringing six hundred new scientists to the state at their Groton facility. One of the most important, if not—no I’d say one of the most important, employers in the state. This last year, 1998, Forbes’ Magazine Corporation of the Year—this is a huge industry leader. We’ve never had a corporate partner like this, of this quality and this stature, working with us on research. They made quite clear in our private conversations that they’re coming to us because of geography—they’re not coming to us because we have the best scientists in the world. They’re accustomed to dealing with the Ivies—with Michigan, with Berkeley, with San Diego. That if they weren’t in our backyard—and we in their backyard—they probably wouldn’t be working with us. So they wanted to know, “Are you serious about doing serious science? If you are, we want to work with you. If you’re not, then we EMMERT 69

don’t want to talk about it.” We’ve had to convince them that we were serious about doing serious science. They now believe it. They want to work with us. They’re willing to do a project. We then started deciding the rough parameters of the deal, and of the intellectual property issues, the management issues, their space needs, our space needs—how we can make this work. Crafted a deal in principle that would work well, and then started saying, “Okay, where do we want to site this thing? And we looked at a number of different opportunities through the building and grounds management team, and the scientists that were involved and concluded that the only site that made sense was a site on the ag side of—the east side of 1-95 [195], on the north end of—the north side of the Horse-barn hill road- loop. Which of course became enormously controversial, led to a great debate about the project; led to a lot of misleading communication coming from a variety of sources that want to kill the project. The University did not handle the communication very well—In retrospect we could have communicated much more effectively. We then turned the issue over to the facilities master plan advisory committee, who has made a recommendation, who heard testimony, and brought in a consultant and reviewed a bunch of sights, and concluded that the Mansfield town planning and zoning commission recommendation to move the site—keep it on the north side of Horsebarn Hill and the east side of 195, but move it back north about three hundred feet—literally back into the woods—so that it wouldn’t interfere with sight lines, was the preferred option. That committee has now made a recommendation to Phil and as of today, Phil has not made a final decision. If I had to guess, I would guess EMMERT 70

that he would adopt their position, and not hold with the original proposal. We’ll have to go back and then do another revised environmental assessment, because we did not assess that particular site, specifically. We can do that relatively quickly, and there’s every reason to believe that the group of town folks that are opposed to it will file a suit and try to stop it. I think that should the university fail in this project, it will be a long, long time before any corporate partners darken any door at the University of Connecticut. With the failure of the tech park, with our inability to get the town green, or town development of any kind going, with the failure of the football stadium, with the failure of the road through the /yoo-kep-pee/ land, and should this fail on top of all of that, I can’t fantasize why a corporate partner would come out here. BS: Why do you think this is happening? Why do you think this opposition arises to all of those things? ME: Well, I think that there’s—they’re all—they all are slightly idiosyncratic of course. There is a well-organized, thoughtful, deeply committed group of activists in town who come after every one of these projects with great vigor. That’s not new to me—I saw it in Boulder, Colorado; I saw it in Bozeman, Montana. What is new to me is the relative passivity with which that is met. It’s not surprising that if you look at a bell-curve, that out here on the right and the left tails, you’ve got, what you or I might describe as extremists—that’s pretty common. What is unusual to me is that the town doesn’t seem to care. And the University in almost all of those cases did a poor job also in communicating and working with the largest body of the town, I think. And then the University community and the town, were, oh I EMMERT 71

think, too eager to believe misinformation. There are still—if you took a poli today of the Mansfield citizens and asked them where the proposed Pfizer site is, I’m sure that they’d put it in their mind on the top of Horsebarn Hill. I’m sure that they—I’ve had people stop me in the grocery store and say, “Please don’t do that, cause I really like sledding on that hill.” And then when you explain to them, that it’s no where near that: “Oh, oh that’s different then.” So, we’ve had to work very hard to overcome some intentional misinformation, as well. I think we’ve been—on the Pfizer building—I think we were naïve in seeing this as such an obviously good thing. We had confidence that the site was the sensible site, and that it wasn’t going to damage the hill, and that the site was—we literally stopped—you know, the great irony of ironies—we stopped the construction of the heifer barn—that big ugly white heifer bam?—right on that site. It would be there today, on that site, if we hadn’t said, “No, no, no! Let’s put an attractive facility there. It’s too prominent to let this ugly piece of plastic go there. So. 3$: Whose decision was that? ME: To stop it and move it? BS: Yeah. ME: Phil’s mostly. Phil and I were in agreement. We’d originally thought, “Well, this would be a good spot, general location for the Pfizer building, and then we could do the heifer barn there.” And we said, “Oh God, No! Those two side by side, would be terrible! Cause one’s attractive and one’s ugly. Let’s find an alternative heifer site.” Much to the chagrin of the Aggies, we said, “Well, we’re going to move this one more time.” And so we moved it downstream, down hill. And no EMMERT 72

one said a peep! We put that thing up in three months, and not a letter to the editor, not a phone call. Nothing. When we saw that go up we thought, “Well, you know, this is obviously okay.” So we were naïve enough to think that people would see this as a positive. It is the single biggest obstacle in my mind to the progress of the university: is the resistance of the town, and the relationship between the University and the Town, to stop or make virtually impossible the development of a town—of a town of any consequence. You know how hard it is to bring faculty here, and it would be enormously easier to recruit faculty and students if there was a town here. I loved to show people Bozernan, Montana. You show them Storrs, and you say, “Well, you know, it’s not very far back to Hartford. We’ll get there soon.” [chuckle] B$: Okay. [unclear] You mentioned Phil. The fact of—let’s see—the search for the presidency, and in terms of yourself—in terms of the role you were playing vis-a-vis Harry, and the shift in the chancellor ship. How does that work? ME: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of—I know there’s a lot of interesting mythology around that as well. When we created the new chancellorial model early in my tenure—I guess I’d been here about nine months or something like that—and the board adopted it, and Harry adopted it and they brought it to a meeting and put it in place and away we went—it was implicit in that that the board—and they made this clear to the president—that they would [unclear] like to go get another president some day. And that was okay with Harry, he was quite comfortable with that. He’d been here five years, and has been at the institution forever, so it was a reasonable thing to expect at EMMERT 73

that stage. He announces his resignation—quite suddenly, by the way, I did not anticipate him doing that, I didn’t know it was coming till the day before—after a testy senate meeting as I recall. Yeah, on a Monday, two days later he resigned. The board then announced that they wanted to go out and get a sitting president to fill this new role. That made perfectly good sense to me. A lot of people, as is always the case—you know, a lot of people said, “Oh golly. You surely want to be a candidate for this.” I had genuinely mixed emotions about it, knowing that it was a good job, important job; knowing though that the board was really looking for somebody with already sitting presidential experience. Knowing that we’d just created a new model, and to put a new person in my role would have been difficult at least. And so, the chairman and I talked a number of times about it and made quite clear that the most useful thing—we agreed—that the most useful thing that I could do would be to be helpful in the search process, cause I happen to know a lot of people out there. And stay as far away from the process itself as I could; make clear to everybody under the sun that I wasn’t a candidate, and let the process run its course, while they did a quick search. I did a—one of the fun things that wound up in the end being a very interesting political issue, was that I gave Lew Rome a list of sitting president that I thought would be people they ought to contact. What I did was I went through my [unclearJNASUaLGiC[?] National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges directory, and looked at all the NA$ULGIC institutions, cause I know almost all the presidents, at least in passing. And I just said, “Now, here’s some real interesting men and women out there that you might want to EMMERT 74

encourage to look at the job,” and gave them the list. Well, at the top of the list was Phil Austin, cause I’d organized the list by state, cause that’s how the directory was listed [both laugh], and he was in Alabama. And so that was—I thought—just an interesting joke when I saw that Phil was one of the finalists. And, well I’ll skip ahead a little bit. When the search process got going, there was a—hardly a secret: Lew Rome and the governor were not on perfect terms at the time—and when the search committee and Lew and Bill Berkeley and the rest, were interested in Phil, they said, “Well Phil’s on that—” Some people had said, “Gee, one of the things we wanted [was] somebody who could work with Emmert,” which was flattering and nice, but--Rome then said, “Well, this guy’s on the top of Emmert’s list.” [BS laughs] And indeed, he was on the top of my list. It was funny. Well, it wound up getting—and this part I’d like held, too—it wound up getting the Governor’s office absolutely furious with me. Because they thought—they were mad a Lew Rome—they thought Lew Rome was man handling the search process, that he was just ramming this guy down their throat. And they sort of liked—one of the members of the governor’s cabinet—really liked one of the other candidates, predominately because she wanted to make a statement about women, with a woman president—and said so. And they thought I was in cahoots with Lew Rome, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was trying to stay as far away from this as I possibly could. At the board meeting where they were supposed to announce Phil, down at Avery Point in July—what year was that? Ninety-seven? EMMERT 75

BS: Ithinkso. ME: Six. Nope, seven. BS: Yeah I think it was seven. ME: Yeah, just two years ago? BS: Yeah, I think that’s right. ME: Ninety-seven, the search committee, screening committee—whatever the senior committee was—was in a room, they were all meeting away, and—No, it was ninety-six. BS: Six? Then it would be what? Three years then? ME: Yeah, it was ninety-six. July ninety-six—Yeah, cause I’m in the first months of my fifth year. And the governor’s chief-of-staff comes out of the meeting to get me—I was hanging around cause it’s a board meeting. And, oh he was—I’ve never seen a man so angry—he was just furious at me—because Rome had indicated to these guys that Austin was my choice. And they really, actually the irony was that they really wanted Phil—they were really supportive of Phil—but they didn’t want Lew to pick him. They wanted to pick him. And so they drug me in, and had me go through the candidates in front of them all, and was quite impressed. And then a couple days later, they called me into the Governor’s office, and for two hours, just beat the tar out of me, for being unfaithful. [BS chuckles] It was quite amazing. And they spun out these amazing conspiracy theories—the governor’s off—[unclear] none of those people are in his office any longer. Is that true? B$: Yeah. EMMERT 76

ME: But they, you know, it was a Democrat conspiracy, and then its in cahoots with all—I just said, “Geez, you guys, you gotta stop reading bad novels! This is just insane!” [Both chuckle] So the truth be told, I had virtually nothing to do with the process. I happened to know Phil from when he was president at Colorado State—cause that’s when I was in the president’s office at University of Colorado—didn’t know him well—we knew each other kind of socially and liked him, liked him a lot. And [I] knew everybody at CSU thought the world of him; and knew from Alabama, people thought the world of him. Did some background checks with people, and that was it! Knew he was a guy I could work with. Knew he was the right guy—clearly the best person in the pool—and said so when called upon by the search committee. But beyond that, I stayed away from it—prudently. And I think they made a very fine choice. BS: Now how about the relationship when he came on and you were working with him, and in a sense there was a vacuum because of the previous president. How did this have and impact with it all? ME: Yeah, it worked remarkably smoothly. It could have been very difficult, because the vacuum that existed previously really led to—as I mentioned earlier—a variety of informal and ad hoc arrangements, and lefi me in a lot of cases as defacto interim president. A number of folks could have been deeply concerned about that. Phil said at the time—he and I have always had a very frank relationship—and he said at the time, “I’m not sure I like this structure. It’s a little odd, I can’t quite figure it out.” And I said, “Well, nobody can figure it out!” And I said, “Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I need to look at it a EMMERT 77

bit.” [pause] And obviously I didn’t. And whether I did or didn’t, didn’t matter, because he was the boss. So he got in, he looked at it, came to know the players, and I think gained in confidence about it. And made it a remarkably easy transition for each other. We right from the beginning had a very trusting and open relationship—we’re very, actually, very similar people and we’re very frank and honest. So that’s been—couldn’t have been a smoother introduction. And as I said earlier, I think he will likely make some changes in the structure, but I don’t think they’ll be dramatic. BS: Okay. In terms of—What do you think is your greatest accomplishment at UCONN? ME: Well you can’t talk about the late nineties and UCONN without talking about UCONN 2000 and that master plan and bringing that into reality. And while it’s not finally done, and won’t be for six, seven years, the course is set and I’m enormously proud of that- being involved in the setting of that course—and modestly think I had something significant to do with it. I think—more importantly though, agaIn is those cultural shifts. I could be wrong. I guess I’m about to hear from you whether you agree or not, but I really think, B, that over five years—and that five year period started before I got here—the University thinks differently about itself. You know, the place justfeels different. And it’s not content with what it was, and it’s not content with just kind of hanging around. It really wants to be something bigger and better and to the extent that I had anything to do with that, I feel very pleased with that. And I hope that continues, because that’s what will get the university EMMERT 78

further forward. It needs to keep saying, “Why aren’t we as good as North Carolina? And how, what do we have to do to get there?” That’s just what you want. I don’t think it was doing that in nineteen- ninety-four. B S: What do you think is your greatest disappointment? ME: You know, I said the other day at a reception, “If you told me in ninety-four that we’d have as much done today as we do, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d have said, “No, you can’t—you can’t get that much stuff done.” So I’m not disappointed at the amount of—the direction and the amount of things we’ve gotten done. I think it’s just—the only disappointment I have is a personal one and that is that I’m leaving. And I know that sounds odd and ironic, but— BS: Why are you leaving? [chuckle] ME: Because I need to personally and professionally. I know I’ve only been here four years, but this is—this spring as I sat and did promotion and tenure—this is the ninth spring that I’ve done promotion and tenure as a chief academic officer. And I’ve done to many of those—it starts to cease to be fun after awhile. And I don’t ever want it to be that I’m going through the motions of it. I’ve learned and grown a lot, personally and professionally, but I can sense that flattening out a lot. My daughter starts high school next fall, so it’s either go now or wait four more years. And I was having trouble envisioning myself doing the same thing for four more—I was having trouble envisioning doing the promotion and tenure reviews in my fourteenth year. [both chuckle] And I didn’t ever—I never ever ever want to get tired and bitter, and I’ve watched too many academic administrators get grouchy. EMMERT 79

And so the hardest thing—again, as I said the other day—the hardest thing wasn’t saying “Yes” to get to lead L$U. The hardest thing was saying that I’m going to leave here. ‘Cause I’ve grown very, very fond of the place—fonder than I would have imagined in that short a period of time. 8$: Okay, well on that note, unless there’s something you’d like to add--? ME: Nope. No that’s it. That’s Emmert’s life. B$: Emmert’s Life. The life at UCONN. ME: Life atUCONN. 8$: Right. End of Interview