Oral History Interview with H. R. Haldeman
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255 conflict of interest and should have resigned. TRELEVEN: [William A.] Bill Wilson [ambassador to the Vatican]? HALDEMAN: Not necessarily. TRELEVEN: Oh, come on. Papacy? [Laughter] HALDEMAN: Bill Wilson had no position of policy that would affect anything that related to the university budget. So I'll be happy to add Bill Wilson if you want to. I wouldn't object one way or the other. I don't care. Put him in or leave him out, I don't think it makes any difference. He was not in the kind of position that Dutton, Roth•••. Actually, Roth really wasn't either, so if I take Wilson off I guess I have to take Roth off too, and just leave it as Bill Smith on the Republican side and Fred Dutton on the Democratic side. TRELEVEN: I've got to turn this over. HALDEMAN: Okay. [End Tape 4, Side A] [Begin Tape 4, Side B] TRELEVEN: Well, you were mentioning several options, and one option was contributing overhead funds. How did you personally feel about the regents 256 beginning to or I should say conceding to do that? HALDEMAN: I felt that it should not be done and that it should be. ••• We should not take that route. We should fight being subjected to that route. But I also felt realistically that we might very well not have a winning case. TRELEVEN: Tuition. HALDEMAN: Tuition I was less adamant on, because there I felt, first of all, that you had a situation that was ultimately not going to be sustainable. Someday we were going to lose the non-tuition battle and that we ought to hold it off as long as we could realistically, but that at some point we were going to lose and we were going to have to bow to reality. TRELEVEN: Forbes of course was •••• You've probably heard him twelve times if you've heard him once about his opinion on tuition. Well, maybe you haven't. HALDEMAN: As stated how? I'm sure I did. TRELEVEN: If the implementation of tuition prevents one potential Ralph Bunche from attending the university. • Does that ring a bell? HALDEMAN: Yeah. 257 TRELEVEN: Yeah. He really felt strongly about it. HALDEMAN: I feel strongly about the concept also, but I don't even begin to concede to him that that's a necessary consequence, because with the imposition of tuition you also bring on an additional source of funding for those who can't pay the tuition. I was•••• We haven't gone into it at all, California Institute of the Arts, but the concept that I was arguing for at Cal Arts--which was an intentionally very radical concept in the funding of higher education, I guess, but I thought we were the kind of institution that could get away with it and should and take the lead in having it happen--is that every student should pay as tuition, be charged as tuition the actual as best we could determine cost of his education total, which meant a music student would be charged a lot more than a creative writing student, because education of a music student requires lots of facilities. And it would also mean that the physicist at the university, which we didn't deal with at Cal Arts, would be charged a lot more than the liberal arts major, because he has to 258 have a lot of facilities and backup. And the med student would be charged the most of all. I remember a lot of the stuff we'd get on cost of medical education, which was mind-boggling. And I happen to feel that it's not right for us to pay all of that to produce a person who is going to make the incredible amounts of money that some of the people in the medical profession can make, and that there's got to be a balance there somewhere. The argument that I had with Cal Arts is that there is no such thing as free tuition or anything else. It costs x dollars to educate a student through a four-year course in whatever he's taking the four-year course in. That student should know what that cost is, first of all, because he should understand that someone is paying it: the taxpayer, or the giver of a scholarship, or his parents, if he's actually being charged the cost of his education, which nobody is. There is no student in any university in higher education today I don't think that's paying the cost of his tuition, the cost of his education. I think they all in all of them should be, but I couldn't do anything about all 259 of them, and I knew I couldn't do anything about it at the University of California. I wasn't about to raise the issue there, but I did at Cal Arts. And if I had not pulled off of that [Cal Arts] board when I became chairman, I might have gotten that through. I wish I had, because my concept then was, take all of what you're going to use for funding students' educations and pretending therefore it didn't cost anything and use that to provide to the students who can't pay the tuition the means for getting the tuition. Don't eliminate any student for financial reasons. Then we were going the other way, which was to provide the aid in a lot of creative forms. We had a lot of•••• There were some good ideas that came out of this, and we were generating them, but my objective was to say to anybody, "There is no free lunch. Somebody's paying for your lunch. It may not be you, because you may not have the money for it, and I'm not saying you shouldn't..•• If you don't have the money you can't have lunch. What I'm saying is if you don't have the money, we've got to find another way to pay for your lunch, and 260 you've got to know that we had to find another way to pay for your lunch. I'm not going to tell you that there really is a free lunch." And I think it's a mistake to go tuition-free philosophically. However, realistically within the university, I was definitely opposed to the imposition of tuition. I was consistently opposed to it, but I also felt as I said that someday we were going to end up with it. TRELEVEN: Yeah, one of the problems is once you open the door, the door swings wider and wider. HALDEMAN: Absolutely. There's no question. TRELEVEN: And we look at the statistics today and I think those are definitely borne out. Even though we still don't have tuition. You know, it's called a registration fee. HALDEMAN: See, that to me is ridiculous. Call it tuition. But it isn't•••• In a way it's ridiculous to call it tuition, because it doesn't even begin to approach the cost of the education. What we're charging now doesn't even begin to, but what Stanford's charging doesn't either. I mean, there's all those people that gave the money, the $100 million, or $500 million 261 campaign that are underwriting the cost of little Charlie's education, and little Charlie ought to know that. TRELEVEN: But it benefits California society. HALDEMAN: Of course it does, and I'm not arguing it ••• TRELEVEN: Cost-benefit. HALDEMAN: I'm not even beginning to argue that we shouldn't pay for that education. What I'm saying is that Charlie ought to pay for it and that we ought to reimburse Charlie so that Charlie knows that this didn't just happen. Then I feel that you'd have a greater student appreciation and student use of their education. And I don't. • I'm not disparaging the student of today. I would disparage some of the students of the sixties and I would have thrown a lot of them off a lot faster than they ever did. TRELEVEN: Well, they • HALDEMAN: I mean, when you decide to tear down the institution that's giving you your education, you've lost the right to it. TRELEVEN: And since you raised that, was tuition a form of punishment? HALDEMAN: No. 262 TRELEVEN: No? HALDEMAN: Well, it may have been in some people's minds. But it would not. That's not in my mind. Those are two totally separate issues. I believed at that time that we were better off with a tuition-free university and I would have liked to have kept it that way. Not only tuition-free but registration-fee free. I mean, no tuition per se or de jure or de facto. I would also like to take any student who starts to implement the destruction of the institution, who throws bombs into faculty members' laboratories and things like that, is not only subject to dismissal but is dismissed and dismissed forever. I would say he's lost his chance for an education, higher education at the expense of the people of California. I'd throw him out, fast, and without a jury trial. So that's my, you know, overstatement of the case on that sort of thing. TRELEVEN: Okay. Where was • .? I should say in all of this, did you get to know Alex [C.] Sherriffs? HALDEMAN: Yes.