University of Minnesota Sesquicentennial Diversity Project Interview with Lyndon Carlson Interviewed by Ann M. Pflaum Interviewed on September 16,1999 Lyndon Carlson - LC Ann Pflaum - AP AP: This is the 16th of September. This is Ann Pflaum. My guest is Representative Lyndon Carlson, who has been a long-term representative in the Minnesota Legislature and he has been mentioned by many people as one of the most helpful and insightful observers about the university, and one of the greatest friends of the university. It's a pleasure to do an interview with you. Lyn, we generally begin these interviews asking a little bit about their own background, where they went to school, and then how they came to interact with the university. LC: By way of my personal background, I'm a native Minnesota. I grew up in Minneapolis; graduated from a suburban high school in 1958; attended a state university-Mankato State, now known I guess as Minnesota State; graduated from there in 1964; have a social studies major, business minor; went into teaching; taught one year in greater Minnesota, St. Charles School District, and thirty-three years in the Minneapolis Public Schools, mainly at Henry High School and Edison High School. I just recently retired from the school district, so being a legislator I point out that I haven't retired, I've just gone from two jobs to one. I always had an interest in government and politics. In fact, that was my core of my social studies major. I made the decision in 1972 to run for the legisiature. I was successful in that first campaign and have been serving in the Minnesota House ever since. So this is my fourteenth term, just completed my twenty-seventh legislative session. AP: So if we look at that year, the president of the university was Malcolm Moos. LC: That's correct. AP: One of the great events of that year was the most major of the demonstrations that occurred in May, of the anti-war demonstrations. Do you remember be affected by that, or perhaps you were elected to the legislature at a different time of the year. You may have been elected in November of '72. LC: I was elected in November. I remember those events as an observer. I remember a number of years later that, when we were having a hearing, probably late seventies or early eighties, it was pointed out to me by some of the university people that some of the leaders of that period of time when there were a lot of demonstrations on the university, were still active. We were having a hearing on tuition, if I recall correctly, and many of these same student a~tivists ~ve!"e present :!t the hearing. AP: You got to see them. LC: I hadn't been directly involved during the period of the demonstrations, as a legislator or as a citizen. AP: If I remember correctly, that was a change in the balance in the House about that time. More Democrats came in, and the Republican hegemony was reduced. Does that sound right? LC: The political history there of the legislature ... Actually the DFL, or the Democrats, took control of both the senate and the House in the election of 1972. So we had a period of time there for the first time almost since statehood, the Minnesota House during the 1950s had been controlled by the Democrats but the senate going back to the very early periods, the state had been under the control of the Republican/conservatives. We actually still ran in 1972 with a non-partisan ballot, although most but not all candidates were endorsed by one political party or the other. The neat thing about the election in 1972 was that for the first time the Democrats controlled the governor's office with Wendy Anderson, who had been elected in 1970, and then the taking control of both the House and the senate in 1972 made it for the first time a Democratic majority in both branches. AP: How did you get to know the university? Were you always on university-related committees? How did that transpire in your career? LC: It really transpired a little bit later in my career. My first term I was a fortunate member of the legislature in the eyes of many in that I was appointed to the tax committee. In those days very few people in their first term were ever appointed to the tax committee. My second term, because of my long-standing interest in education, I asked the Speaker for a change of assignment. The Speaker at the time was Martin Sabo. I wanted to serve on the education committee. In both days we had both a higher ed policy committee and an education committee that dealt primarily with K-12. We also had the appropriations committee, which dealt with the funding of the higher education institutions as well as the Department of Education. It wasn't until the 1980 session that I was appointed to chair the higher ed policy committee, and then followed that in 1981 with a change from the education committee to th~ l1ppropriations committee and became chair of the education division of appropriations. So I would have to say that I always had an interest in the university and followed issues, but became heavily involved during that period of the late seventies or early eighties, and have continued to be since, both with the university and with the other higher education institutions. Lyndon Carlson interview 2 AP: One of the things that I'd like to ask you about because it's interesting is that the phenomenon of growth began to tail off at about the eighties, I would say, late seventies or early e!ghties. YOll had this very long post-World War II kind of dealing.wjth what was expected to be the almost unending baby boom growth. The Baby Boomers became eighteen in 1964, and it wasn't really until the seventies, I'd say, or even the eighties, that there was an awareness that we were perhaps not always going to have this level of growth as it affected higher education. I've picked this up from some reading. Is that a perception that you've encountered? I don't believe everything I read all the time, so I wanted to check this out. But I had picked up some sort of sense of a change in the ecology of education, in the numbers of education for the post-secondary sector. LC: Of course, when I was mentioning earlier that I had served on the education committee during much of the 1970s on the K-12 policy committee, we became very aware at that point in time of the declining enrollment in the K-12 system. The conventional wisdom was then that that decline would be hitting a little later, of course, higher education as well. There were projections by the Higher Education Coordinating Board [HECB] at the time that we would have major declines in the number of students involved in higher education. That series of reports and presentations by HECB was hotly debated in the higher education community because we would hear from the systems each year that those HECB forecasts were wrong. There was another trend that was beginning to take place, even though there were fewer high school graduates to draw upon. We had more and more non-traditional students starting to enroll in our higher education institutions. So what was often happening was that HECB would testify to the potential decline, and in fact was actually talking about closing campuses and a number of things. The chancellors of the different systems and the president of the university would say that that wasn't what their experience was in that given year, that previous biennium. We did have tremendous growth for quite a period of time among the non­ traditional students. There were some dynamics with that, and I'm talking now higher education generally. Very often those non-traditional students \:</crc more part time. They also brought some other issues to the table. For example, their need for and the pressures, if you will, and I don't mean that negatiVely, that they would put on support personnel-­ advisers, counselors, registration personnel, and so on-were as great as a full-time student and yet they were often carrying a lighter credit load. The other trend that somewhat related there is that we would get testimony about the length of time that students were in school in terms of completing a four-year degree. I can remember when I first became chair in the early eighties, I think it was fairly typical that the leadership at the university and the other four-year institutions would say it takes the average student about five years to complete a degree, and a few years later they were talking about it taking not simply five but five to six ye~rs. So there were a number of dynamics there that were taking place as well as the decline in K-12, for the change in the face, if you will, of the students with older students coming in. Lyndon Carlson interview 3 AP: Then I believe there was another problem that affected the higher education system, which was that the economy of the state wasn't as robust as it once had been. LC: Very true. What I sometimes call the Quie Yf':::Irs is wh{'n th(lt rf':~l1y hit for the first time in a major way, where it wasn't simply a question of perhaps having a smaller increase than what the systems would have liked, but we were actually engaged in a situation where we were cutting the appropriations to higher education.