Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER 1: Paul Gruchow and I are in our Saint Paul studio with State Representative Phyllis Kahn who released a statement rather critical of the lobbying efforts of the University of Minnesota during the last session of the legislature. I might mention that representative Kahn serves District 57A, which is primarily Southeast Minneapolis where many students, faculty, and staff of the University of Minnesota live.

She is also a member of the University of Minnesota faculty in the field of genetics and cell biology and a resident of Southeast Minneapolis. So I think we'll probably be posing questions to her today as a member of the legislature, as a faculty member, and as a citizen of the University community.

Representative Kahn, rather than trying to summarize the statements that you made about how the University presented its case to the legislature during the 73 session, I think I would like to begin by asking you to state essentially, what displeased you about the appearances of the University lobbyists at the legislature?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I think the major thing that displeased me was one, the absence of faculty and student participation in the presentation and the direction of their interest, which was very strongly directed to buildings. In other words, at a point when the academic-- you might say the academic field is in a real crisis in terms of dealing with problems of declining enrollment with the problems of cutting out of federal grants and training grants are being cut. And people don't know whether the research program, which they've been embarked on in the last 10 years, which may be connected with the theses of many graduate students, is going to be cut off leaving everyone just hanging.

There was the University not interested in any kind of plans which would bring some flexibility into this uncertainties of federal funding and revenue sharing and so forth. But still just, again, attempting to cover more of the University area in concrete, making final plans that were based on either enrollment or what they thought important programs were. Again, that showed no element of flexibility and no element of change.

SPEAKER 1: What you say sounds like there is a strict demarcation at the University between the administration, which speaks for the University, and then the faculty and the student body. Is that really the way it is or is that accidentally the way it came across?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I think that this is really the way it is, and I think that this is what the real crisis in the University leadership is all about. I think that one of the things that we've got to do is start to reassert the traditional values of a University and the traditional thought of a University perhaps as some kind of a center of learning in the community.

I haven't heard of this real crisis of administrative leadership and mass resignations and great displeasure at other universities. I guess the ones that I keep greater contact with such as, for example, my last Alma mater is Yale University where Kingman Brewster is, in a sense, the head of the administration and has very, very strong support from the faculty, from the students, and even sometimes from the trustees and the alumni and so forth.

SPEAKER 1: Is it specifically Malcolm Moos's problem as a leader?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, it's just hard to say. I think it's the problem of the whole administration, and it's a problem of somewhat the anonymity of the large state university. And I think the way it's surfaced this year-- and I really think it isn't just rumblings that have come up to the top, but it's really come up this year because there is a crisis. And there is a-- and the crisis is probably rooted in money.

SPEAKER 1: At a conference in San Francisco recently of University trustees, State University trustees, the chairman of the Board of Regents, former Governor Elmer Anderson, made what I thought was quite an impressive speech about the importance of bringing students into the governing of the University. I'd like to ask you whether you're satisfied with the performance of the Board of Regents and their leadership role at Minnesota? And then also, who ought to speak for the University in terms of final authority? Should it be the Board of Regents, should it be the president, or should it be maybe the faculty?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, according to the constitutional setup of the University and so forth, it is the Board of Regents. So I think that that's the reality that we deal with. The question then comes is, how do the Board of Regents going to arrive-- how are they going to arrive at their decision and what kind of input goes into that? And this is the point where I think we want much greater faculty and student input

Now, again, as I said, there are also, again, going back to European universities, their chief administration is done by, say, a rector and dean, and their responsibility is very clearly, was in former times to the faculty and now even though we tend to think of Europeans as being less innovative and less of a frontier mentality than Americans are, they've gone very far to having the rector and Dean who are faculty members rotate with two year terms as administrators elected by faculty and students now. Very quick to bring students into participation to head off the kind of confrontation.

SPEAKER 1: Did the Governor, Anderson, or any other members of the Board of Regents appear before any of the committees that you serve on at the legislature speaking for the University this last session?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes, they did appear before them, but most of the hard core presentation was done by the University lobbyists.

SPEAKER 1: You mentioned in your press statement yesterday that faculty and student leaders did appear at the legislature unofficially. They were not part of the administration case being made. Did you complain about that at the time and to the University and what kind of response did you get?

PHYLLIS KAHN: There was a small presentation. I guess I did complain certainly unofficially at every level that I could from faculty, through deans, to the lobbyists. That I thought that the emphasis was wrong, and that I could not-- and then I could not see that the faculty case was being presented properly.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well, faculty and students did appear at the legislature. Did the story they gave to legislative committees significantly differ from that the administration was giving in your view? Was it helpful?

PHYLLIS KAHN: To a certain extent in that the-- the hearings that I did sit-in on, there was very great concern about this decrease in federal funding and very great concern about the lack of interest in programs. But the major hit point again and again was the need for the need for new buildings.

And I think, for example, my-- now, I was someone who probably received much more contact from University people and also from the faculty in the area just because of the district I represent. And I don't think I was ever approached by one of the official University lobbyists or an administration member or any of the regents about anything else than concern about what they're going to get their new buildings-- the home economics building the law school--

PAUL GRUCHOW: The health buildings--

PHYLLIS KAHN: --yes, the health buildings--

PAUL GRUCHOW: --part of that.

SPEAKER 1: The University is suffering-- I don't know whether to call it an image problem or not, but it certainly is seen less favorably by the people who live around it and who watch it than it used to be as an institution. It has a less favorable image. I heard complaints, for example, this past week about-- and I don't even know if this is true, but a whole complex of parking ramps that are being built along Oak Street where a lot of houses have been cleared out just recently near the University's Minneapolis campus.

And I think you have spoken publicly about the alumni hotel issue over there. Again, I have to come back to whether or not this reflects distorted values on the part of President Moos and his vice presidents or the Board of Regents. Who's responsible for what appears to be a less sensitive University?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, it's not really clear. I think that the legislature has to take some of this responsibility in their budgeting allocations. The University has certainly now developed a very bad reputation among its neighbors. It's considered to be essentially participating in what we would call a rape of the community and in a complete oblivion-- they regard with total oblivion the interests of the community.

And I think that the legislature shares some of the responsibility for this in that I see among the legislatures a feeling that the University is a state institution. And in fact, I think this is encouraged very much by the University administration. And this is rightly so. I've read a letter from Brinkerhoff which says that the University is a great local state, national, and international asset. And this is-- there's no quarrel with that statement, except one has to remember that it does exist in the middle of a community, which are real, flesh and blood local people who have homes, and schools, and traffic problems, and housing problems.

And I guess some of the concern has been is that this riding roughshod over the local community is considered acceptable in a way that no other state legislator would tolerate for their district. And I think this alumni hotel is a really good example where liquor bills are considered, local liquor bills, and this change in the law in the last session. I'm not sure how deeply you want to go into this, but--

SPEAKER 1: As deeply as you think it should be gone into.

PHYLLIS KAHN: That might be an interesting case to bring out. As many people may know, there's a general old probably from the last century law which says that liquor will not be sold within a mile of Morrill Hall on the east bank of the Mississippi, which is from a time of values when it was considered that liquor and education should not mix.

Now, I don't want to get into the aspects of whether this is good and whether liquor or education can or should or do mix, but let's-- what happened in the last session of the legislature-- not this one, but the 71 session, was that a special bill was pushed through, which added a sentence to this section of the law-- except for the case of a club or hotel or organization which is leased or controlled by members of an association of former students of the University which had been organized prior to 1940.

[LAUGHTER]

In the vernacular, this is known as special legislation. Now, this was not at all brought through the local legislator at the point, the only member of the Southeast community who was violently opposed to this kind of intrusion in the community. And in fact, we find that the community is very much opposed to this. They don't feel that the alumni association represents the community. They don't feel that this will serve an educational function. They don't feel that this is the kind of complex which is needed with the kind of traffic problems it will bring in, with the kind of traffic problems it may create if it's successful as a good party place.

And so what myself and Senator Speer, who regard ourselves as the local legislators in this area, have done is submit a bill, which was submitted too late for any action this session, but which will repeal this line that was added in the last session. And of course, the legislature will deal with this again in January.

SPEAKER 1: That revision of that old law that quasi grandfather clause or something that was added to that old law is law now.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes.

SPEAKER 1: That was passed. So the legislation that you'll be dealing with, the 1974 on this matter is to reverse that.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes. And we did it in the way a local liquor bill is introduced. We did not go around gathering a support of influential legislators without the state. We introduced it just with-- as a single authored bill, and I can say that this is exactly analogous to a local legislator who wants or does not want a liquor license.

SPEAKER 1: Do you remember who sponsored that revision in the law?

PHYLLIS KAHN: No, I'm sorry. I don't have that with me. It was passed by a strong majority. I just know that the local legislator was opposed to it. It was passed over his wishes. It was not put through the Hennepin County delegation. It went around the Hennepin County delegation, which is also somewhat unusual procedure.

And finally, the elder statesmen, who sit around me on the House floor and were very amused at the thought of my introducing an anti-liquor bill at the same time that everyone was introducing pro-liquor bills for their district, recalled that after that bill passed, that Moos and the University lobbyists at the time took them all out to dinner to celebrate the passage of it.

SPEAKER 1: Paul.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I wonder if this specific incident in Southeast Minneapolis isn't reflective of a somewhat larger image problem that the University has. I until fairly recently lived in rural Minnesota, and I think there was an image problem with the University there too and it went somewhat along these lines. The University is eager to spend as much of our money as taxpayers as it possibly can.

And makes a vigorous and well coordinated fight for that money and each session of the legislature, but it's not interested in turn in providing in the way of community service anything of-- anything in return a benefit to us. I think there's a feeling that it's not sufficient to say that this is a place where you can send your kids, if you have enough money to send them there to get educated. That there is a greater obligation on the part of the University to the whole community of the state. Did you sense that in the legislature?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, one of the problems is that I think that the universities promises in this direction sound much better than the delivery of its promises. For example, one would think that the only purpose of this enormous amount of money going into Health Sciences and this huge numbers of buildings and the parking ramp-- the Health Sciences parking ramp, which, as you've mentioned, is kind of a sore spot in the community, is to provide better delivery of family medical care to rural Minnesota. Well, anywhere that family doctors are needed.

Now this sounds very good, except to some of us like myself who've spent not much of my time, I admit, in rural Minnesota, but a fair amount of time around prestigious medical schools throughout the country and in other countries too. And the problem is that it's very difficult to educate the family doctor in a setting where all the glory and all the esteem goes to the people who are doing heart transplants and kidney transplants and are fighting on the forefront of medical research and are finding a cure for cancer if not this week then the next month. And when you educate people in this area and yet say the real glory and the real purpose of life is to family practice--

SPEAKER 1: It's not realistic. They're going to--

PHYLLIS KAHN: It's this do as I say, not as I do kind of implication. I think that this is true of a lot of the University actions and a lot of their presentation at the legislature.

SPEAKER 1: Legislature did pass a bill in this session that just ended, I believe, which did provide some incentive for young people to go into training to be general practitioners, giving them loans, I believe, with the assumption that they would then serve, what, two years or something out in a rural area of the state to go essentially wherever they were told to go, I believe, wasn't it, for a couple of years?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I guess I have to support that kind of legislation, but I'm fairly dubious as to what its effect will be. The bill was originally presented at least in the House as two years of practice in a rural area, and it will-- I think in conference, it went up to three years, which is a little bit better. The scholarships available are up to $6,000 per year.

So what might happen is that the state will be paying $24,000 for what might be only three years of medical practice in that area, which is kind of-- and they might get the same effect instead of having a scholarship program by just setting up a bonus of a gift of $8,000 a year to anyone who wants to practice in rural Minnesota. And you'd have-- you'd be able to choose your people after they had graduated, which would eliminate some of the risks.

Now, we won't know about the success of this program until it's worked. The thought is that the student will-- that the medical student will go out to rural Minnesota, will find a pretty young girl or she will find a handsome young man just down the road with deep roots in the community and will practice and will then-- the town will then just-- will have a lasting doctor of their own.

SPEAKER 1: That's the part you're a little dubious about.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yeah. I guess one of the legislators broke up the Appropriations Committee by saying, actually, this was what happened. That the young doctor did come to town and did practice for a while and did meet a pretty young girl. And the only problem was that the young doctor was married and the pretty young girl was married to other people.

[LAUGHTER]

They got together and ran off, leaving the town without a doctor. I think this might be a more realistic view of what might happen.

SPEAKER 1: I'm thinking or I was thinking before that story--

[LAUGHTER]

--of another piece of legislation in this last session to provide general scholarships to students to try to compensate for the loss of federal funds, I believe, scholarship funds that were cut back. Could you elaborate a bit on that. And was that legislation promoted by the University for the students or not?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I don't want to box myself into a corner on this. I thought that there was much more lobbying effort and much more effort was put on this by the people from HECC, the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, than the University. Again, that bill was certainly a good idea. I don't think it goes really far enough in making the kind of loans that we need available.

In fact, I'm going to be working on a proposal over the summer and during the interim, which several other universities have adopted-- I'm not sure any state system has adopted it, which is an income contingent loan situation where the loan is not repaid until some time like 10 years after graduation. And it is then repaid fully as a percentage of the student's income.

SPEAKER 1: Yes. I've heard of that proposal in other states, but I hadn't heard--

PHYLLIS KAHN: There is a slight income contingency element, I think, possibly 7% of the total loan. The difficulty in this program, as the preliminary discussions that I had with the people in HECC about it, is that you can't get federal guarantee on these loans because nobody knows what the repayment problem is. You don't know what the skip out rate is going to be. There's no data about it. And so you've got to put more funding into it.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Some kinds of plans along that line have suggested that the repayment ought to be a lifetime repayment at some percentage. Would that be part of your proposal?

PHYLLIS KAHN: This would be a very long term repayment. It might be 30, 20 years and so forth, in a very low percentage. And you have-- you'd have to figure it out as to what you expect the repayment to be because you may have your psychiatrist or surgeon and so forth may end up paying far more than the loan originally cost, and your street minister and so forth may pay far less.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I was thinking too that any kind of improvement in the loan situation at the University is somewhat for students a bittersweet experience anyway because as you increase the loans, you're also at the same time increasing the tuition costs and you're in a kind of treadmill in that respect. Can something be done about that tuition situation?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, it's hard to say unless we get more federal support into education and unless we start cutting expenses. And I'm not-- I think that there are places to cut expenses. I don't know if-- I suppose I should have had the exact figures, but there are a lot of administrators at the University that are making $40,000 a year in basic salary plus have the cost of a whole administrative support service.

Now, an instructor who may be making $9,000 or $10,000 has far less expenses in terms of janitorial service, secretarial service, messenger service, free cars, and so forth than the rest of the University administration. And I would like to have figures on what is exactly the cost of a vice presidency at the University and what is the bare bones number of vice presidents we could get along with?

PAUL GRUCHOW: The size of the central administrative bureaucracy at the University in recent years has increased enormously--

SPEAKER 1: When the jobs are filled.

PAUL GRUCHOW: When the jobs are filled, yes. I believe there were-- about six years ago, there were three vice presidents at the University and there are now how many? Six, and almost a countless number of assistant and associate vice presidents. Is there any evidence that growth in the bureaucracy has netted anything in terms of efficiency at the University? Has it been a useful exercise.

PHYLLIS KAHN: It's certainly been a net growth and antagonism, of course.

[LAUGHTER]

PAUL GRUCHOW: That's part of the problem?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I think so. And I think one of the things that I proposed yesterday and I think that is very reasonable is, let's have a complete freeze on administration. The administration proposed a freeze on the hiring of teaching assistants for the next year. Well, the University has gotten along without a couple of vice presidents now. Let's freeze those positions and see what happens.

SPEAKER 1: Representative Khan, doesn't that come back again though to Dr. Moos? Isn't he the one who conceived this plan for administering the University in a more efficient way, a more responsive way, I think he said, to the needs of the students and the faculty by adding vice presidents and assistant and associate vice presidents?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, again, as I understand it, from-- this is from conversations with Dr. Moos too who very strongly protests his lack of ability to do anything on his own, this really does come down to the regents. The administration may propose things, but the regents are the final disposes, the final-- and when it comes to funding the legislature, I guess, has the last to say.

SPEAKER 1: The regents used to be a rather passive group of people, and the University administration went to them with proposals and they rubber stamped them. Governor Anderson, under his term as chairman of the Board of Regents, has openly stated that he thinks the regents ought to take a more aggressive role more of a leadership role at the University. Are you a agreeing or disagreeing with that notion in what you're saying?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I have mixed feelings about this. I do think that there has to be someone to measure responsiveness of the University. I guess I would like to see the regents be a somewhat more representative group. I'd like to see their average age a little lower. I'd like to see some people on it who have what I consider a real dedication to the humanistic part of education that used to be so important-- liberal arts and so forth.

I'm terribly afraid that there's this big trend in the regents to agribusiness, towards the medicine, the representative for the medical community, the representative for labor. And there's no representative to the humanist, to the philosopher, to the person who believes in the values of higher education as such.

PAUL GRUCHOW: It seems to me there's a bit of disingenuous in Moos's defending his inability to act on grounds of the regents because-- I wonder whether you agree or disagree with the statement, active or passive, no matter what the Board of Regents does, its decisions are primarily-- well, exclusively based on whatever information is channeled to it by the central administrative officers of the University. And it has no independent staff. It doesn't even have a Secretary to serve it who is independent of the administration. So even in its most aggressive form, it would hardly do anything that wouldn't support the central administration, would it?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I think that this is true, unless the regents has some other way to channel information in. For example, the faculty and the students. The faculty and the students could be much-- perhaps with a little organization, could be much more aggressive and having their viewpoint presented to the regents and thence to the legislature or to the administration and so forth.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Is improvement a matter of changing the membership on the Board of Regents or can gains be achieved too by establishing the means of independence for the Board of Regents to some extent? For example, giving it some kind of staff or setting up consultative committees directly to the Board of Regents composed of faculty and students? Or does membership on the board go hand in hand with making them more responsive to the University community?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, as an educator, I would hope that all one would have to do would be to present the idea to the regents, that this should be-- that they should be more responsive to it. And that they should listen to the faculty, and also in a sense, you've got to have an organized channel to get this information to them. One might say that in fact, the whole actions of the administration at this legislative session have been a drive to unionization of the faculty. And I think this is one of the things that we've seen happening, that the faculty is now much more interested in unionization collective bargaining and so forth.

SPEAKER 1: Now, that, to some people, testifies to the breakdown of a community at the University. And in the 10 years or so that I have been around that institution and people who teach there and have gone to school there, I have heard repeatedly the statement made through the '60s that the University community was dying or falling apart or becoming factionalized by various things.

Unionization is often brought up as evidence of that. That you form a union in an academic environment when the relationship of trust breaks down and then you have the corporate management and the people who work for that management and then the people who work for them need a union. Would you endorse that interpretation of unionization at all?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, not necessarily. I mean, unionization I think can be looked at as a very-- just a way to get proper channels opened up, as a coming together of people, of looking of perhaps getting away from some of the more elitist tradition that academics are above this kind of agreement. And that you don't have to rely on the support of the lower people in the academic community.

There's been a great tendency in the past, which I hope is diminishing, to regard the academic as an elite-- as a totally elite group and to completely neglect the civil service and the students and so forth. And I think that this is-- that unionization hopefully pulls away from this. There's no way for us to tell at this point.

SPEAKER 1: Since the time I was on the University campus, which would have been in the mid 1960s, the civil service people have become much more active in their own behalf there in terms of organizing and putting pressure on the administration for benefits and for salary considerations. You in your statement released yesterday said that the suggestion had been made to you by some faculty people at the University that perhaps the faculty ought to have their own lobbyist, I believe, at the legislature. You were not friendly to that idea, I think, in your press release. Would you talk about that and maybe whether the civil servants ought to have perhaps their own lobbyists over there?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I don't think that's completely correct. I think what I said was that the-- this was talking about the fact that the faculty increase as it was first presented to the legislature, the increase in salary, looked just about the same as the civil service increase. They were both supposed to be about 5%.

But the civil service increase that turns out goes-- does appear as a 5% increase on-- approximately 5% increase on paychecks. Whereas the faculty increase is subjected to all kinds of manipulation and skimming off phenomena along the way, and there's now some discussion as to whether it will be closer to 3% or 4%. But it's definitely not what either the faculty or the legislature thought.

Now, the civil service increase is not handled at all in the University process. I guess, a law was passed a little while ago or a state-- a rider written into the budget that said that universities civil service salaries will be comparable to those in the state civil service. So they're handled completely by the bargaining union for state employees. It's not part of the University presentation at all. And so they came out of the budgeting process in much better shape than the faculty do. And it's not even in the University budget. It's in the state department's appropriation budget.

SPEAKER 1: I didn't understand your response and maybe you didn't give a direct response to the question of a lobbyist for the faculty.

PHYLLIS KAHN: What I had said was that-- one was, the faculty had spoken to me often during the session and now afterwards, is that they want the legislature to take more direct control of the University appropriation. They want to go in the direction of almost more line item budgeting. You might have an individual sociology professor may come up and wants the legislature to write that person's salary in as a line item budget in the appropriations bill and the line item in the budget. Well, the TAs want you to write how many TAs there will be or exactly what their salaries will be--

SPEAKER 1: These are teaching assistants for the--

PHYLLIS KAHN: Sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

There is a tendency to lapse into jargon. And so this is very much getting away from the concept, the basic concept that we've had, of constitutional autonomy of the University of Minnesota. And what I'm not sure about is that I don't think this is a good idea. I really don't think the University wants the legislature to say, who should be the regents professor of history, which is almost what they're asking for.

But what I think is very bad about this is that it's symptomatic of the deep distrust that the faculty has of the administration. Is that they feel they're being controlled by the administration. They're looking towards state control, and I mean real rigorous state control, as a more pleasant alternative to what they see as is not feeling administration control.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I know because I've talked to them a number of times about the subject that President Moos would say exactly the opposite thing. He'd say, the whole problem with being president of a great University like the University of Minnesota is that the traditions under which it's been established make the place unmanageable.

And he said on more than one occasion, if I could have the power to appoint-- myself without any advice from anybody else, if I could have the power to appoint five professors to the University each year, I could turn this place around. We have a situation in which the president claims he can't run anything and the faculty claims it can't run anything. Is in fact a University unmanageable?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I don't think so. I just think it's become a tradition to protest the ability-- one's own lack of ability to manage by just saying that someone else prevents you from doing it. And this is why I think we need to return to a more traditional process where the faculty have-- and the students. And the students now, I think, are a very legitimate part of the academic concern, reassert real influence. Like, for example, I think that there is no reason, even if it has to be ratified by the regents, why the faculty and students can't elect a president.

SPEAKER 1: Faculty and students elect a university president.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes. This is done somewhere. This is done, for example, in many European University communities.

SPEAKER 1: I can just hear people saying that would be an abdication of responsibility on the part of the regents and really as far as the legislature to and the people of the state who it's their University, they often-- people outside the University often see the students, for example, as rather transient people at the University with no long range investment there or involvement there.

They're just being processed somehow through this institution, and that perhaps they do have a vital interest in what goes on for four years or six years or eight years, but not in any institutionalized long term way. How would you respond to that criticism of their participation or their right to participate in that kind of basic decision making like the selection of a president or putting together a budget?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I just--

SPEAKER 1: Do they really have any part in that business?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes, I certainly think so, because it is very strongly affecting their lives, and I think that we would get to the point where we had a more responsive administration. I mean, I don't want this to be taken as criticism of President Moos because perhaps maybe it would be that someone with his kind of abilities is the very proper kind of president for the University. And again, I'm not saying that the regents would abdicate their responsibility. Constitutionally, they would still have to reaffirm the choice. I'm saying that this might be a better way of arriving at the decision process as to what the administration is going to be, who the administration is going to be.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Would that suggest that the elections would-- that the governance of the University would come from within the organization? Would an election process make it likely that some member of the faculty, for example, would accede to the presidency.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, again, I think that this would be very much healthier situation. This is a situation in many universities. I think I would also-- I think the idea of entrenched administrators is very bad. I think we really ought to get to the position where we consider rotating people through the administration. I think the homogeneity and the administrative class is just appalling. I mean, you go into one of those rooms at Morrill Hall, and everybody looks alike. And they're all white, somewhat overweight, over 40, and male.

SPEAKER 1: A lot of students and others would say that same problem exists in the faculty. That the faculty has a lot of entrenched mediocrity in it that is there because of traditions and, well, tenure that keep them there.

PHYLLIS KAHN: I don't know. I guess you'd also get to the same point where a lot of people in another level would say that the same thing exists in the student body also. But I just think as you go down--

[LAUGHTER]

--as you go down each level--

SPEAKER 1: Would you extend that though to the faculty? I thought of that when Paul was making his comment about the president of the central administration saying that they really can't do what they want to do. And if the president had a chance to hire five professors a year, he could turn this place around. Well, isn't that really a comment on tenure, faculty tenure?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well--

SPEAKER 1: How do you feel about faculty? That's what I'm asking.

PHYLLIS KAHN: As someone who doesn't have it, I can speak of-- and yet, I guess our chief family income does come from someone who does have it, so I can speak with total-- I can speak on both sides of the subject. And I guess at the point-- at this point, I would be unhappy to see tenure completely disappear because I think it has been something that's really given US academic freedom and has given people the ability to speak with to speak freely and to be free of other pressures.

But I really think that in this kind of age that we're living in and in the job market that we're living in, that we need to modify the concept of tenure. And I think people-- the University community is probably the only place where a total incompetent can have a job for life at age 35 with no other review from then on at age 30 even, from then on if any of their productivity or any of their effectiveness and so forth.

And I think that if we got to a system of more peer evaluation-- and there was something-- if the faculty had trust in the fact that the evaluation was going to be justified and that they wouldn't be released for political pressure, I think that the demand for unmitigated tenure as we have it now might decrease a little bit.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I'm thinking that the University and as a community in many respects is uncommonly gentle because of tenure, and that's helped to swell the administrative ranks in part. A person becomes completely incompetent in his job in the community-- in the University community and he's promoted upstairs to-- without naming any names, for example, there was for a long time after the dean of students office ceased to exist an associate dean of students with no other structure around him, and it was simply a way of keeping him on the faculty and eventually.

He went around and made a study of enrollment of registration procedures at other universities in the country. And it was enormously costly to the community. You could have hired three faculty people, I'm sure, for the same price. Is there some way to make the tenure procedure work without protecting that kind of featherbedding in the University community?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, one of the modifications I think that the tenure system should look into is the concept of early retirement, which the state put in for the first time for its penal officials. Now, I'm not sure if we want to say [? facts ?] should be the University. But I think throughout all of society, we have this completely ridiculous idea that someone must work eight hours a day or more, if you believe the workloads that the faculty say that they have, until age 65. And then at age 65 precisely or perhaps maybe we'll drop it now to age 62, you don't work at all, zero days.

And I think that this is the kind of thing that we should be looking at. That maybe at a point someone who has taught full load really should start teaching a 3/4 load, and then a 1/2 load, and this maybe in a sense slide into retirement. And that this should be-- and that there may be people who really would like to do this. And I've had a lot of talk at the legislature and around the University community about consultantships and are they proper and are they being abused?

SPEAKER 1: That came up during this last legislative session, didn't it?

PHYLLIS KAHN: And I think that possibly, we should think-- the University should be the place where creative solutions to the problems of society are being tested and either discarded or implemented. And one of these would be part time positions, would be changing-- making it easy to change careers in midstream, and partial retirement, early retirement, late retirement. And I don't see any of these things being promulgated by the administration certainly.

SPEAKER 1: Paul Gruchow and I are talking with State Representative Phyllis Kahn, a Democrat from Southeast Minneapolis who represents a large part of the Minneapolis campus community of the University of Minnesota in the legislature and that many people who teach and who go to school at the University and who are on the staff there live in her district. And we'll continue in just a moment.

Representative Khan, in 1972 in the primary race for the seat that you hold, one of your opponents, I believe, campaigned on a tuition free platform for the University. And this keeps coming up by candidates for the Minnesota Student Association and others. Creeping tuition increases have concern people for a long time, and it would appear that there's apparently no way to avoid them. You took exception with the free tuition idea. Would you comment on tuition and how it can be kept to a minimum?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, this is certainly a real problem. And as tuition goes up, it just makes it harder and harder for the marginal income student. And particularly for the middle class student because one finds that the wealthy can afford tuition, and the very poor are often eligible for programs for tuition, but the middle class is really getting squeezed out of the whole deal.

And so we come back to the basic fact that the value of a higher-- the financial value of a higher education accrues mainly to the person who has that education for all the statements about the benefits of society and so forth. And I guess I said this during the campaign, and it's still a good analogy, is that the surgeon has a much better standard of living and a much greater income than the orderly. And the only difference between those two people can be a certain amount of higher education.

And when you think of this coming out of the burden of the taxpayers of the state, among whom is the orderly of course, it then becomes a little hard to take. And I'm just not sure how to go about it. I think we need more student loan programs. We need good repayment schemes. We need a realization, I think, from the federal government that the University-- a university like the University of Minnesota is a federal resource.

And that we can't have a state of this kind of population and this kind of wealth paying for the whole-- for essentially federal programs of education like medicine here and like veterinary medicine, of which I think there are only 11 veterinary medical schools in the country. It's a problem, but the people crying out for free tuition are not coming up with solutions to the problem because I think that's really just the kind of pie in the sky political promises, which mean absolutely nothing.

SPEAKER 1: But the spirit of the land grant institution was and continues to be that education at such institutions ought to be available to anyone who can complete it really, can go through it.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yeah, that's true and it's certainly an all one can answer, is that the cost of education at private institutions is rising even much more outrageously.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Well one can probably also argue, can't one, historically, that at the time when the land grant universities were established, the resources of the communities were such and the demands of the states and regions were such that it really was an important role for the federal government to take at that point in our history.

But the situation has changed substantially since the land grant institutions were established. They're now functioning well. They don't have the start up costs. There are viable communities to support them. They're generating their own income. They have state legislatures which are well established to provide them with money and maybe some different basis for tuition is now appropriate.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Another thing that it might be appropriate to say here now is that I'm-- although I don't have the hard facts to back this up, I'm quite sure that education in the time of the establishment of the land grant institutions even at the land grant institutions was a much more elitist affair than it is now. I think we're educating a much greater variety of people, so we really still are succeeding in the initial idea of these.

SPEAKER 1: Vice President Stanley Weinberg complained during the last legislative session about the changes in federal funding that President Nixon has initiated. That in dropping a number of the categorical grant programs to the University and giving a general lump sum of money to local governments, that what the president was, in fact, doing was forcing the University to go hat in hand to city fathers or to local units of government and compete with other community agencies and organization for this limited amount of money. And Mr. Weinberg said that the University really shouldn't have to do that. What is your view of that?

Well, some of this goes along with what I said about the-- that the University really is a federal resource in many aspects and should be regarded so by the federal government. Now, the problem that really came up this session particularly is that we don't know the federal government has not made its decisions yet, and we won't know until August, September, or even later what federal programs are being maintained, what are being cut back, and what the difference is?

And this is, I guess, why I criticize the University administration for their emphasis on buildings and instead of pushing for things like a contingency fund. I heard that the legislature Wisconsin put, I believe, a $12 million lump sum contingency fund for the University to draw on to replace programs which are discontinued. And the legislature-- the Minnesota legislature did do this for one aspect. They put a 1 million contingency fund for day care centers and day activity centers that could be drawn on if federal appropriations were cut. And this is the kind of program that the University administration, I think, should have asked for.

PAUL GRUCHOW: That's hardly a $1 million is hardly adequate. I think the figures from Vice President Weinberg's office suggest that if the president's program is sustained in large part at least, the University stands to lose in federal support about $16 million in the coming fiscal year, which is an enormous amount of money to make up.

SPEAKER 1: I wanted your comment on that whole rearrangement of passing money from the federal level to the state and local governments by the administration. I mean, Mr. Nixon says that in dropping the categorical programs or changing them to general grant programs, that this will make local governments more responsible. Being part of the principal unit of local government in this state, do you agree with the president's view of that change?

PHYLLIS KAHN: There's some truth in it. One of the dangers though does come about in the fact that the amounts of money are not the same. In that programs have been cut, so you do have this competitive element. You do have to-- you go to fight for daycare, and you find out that what you're fighting against is not the military industrial establishment, but you're fighting against the people who want better care for the mentally retarded or better care for-- or more money put into legal aid for minorities or something like-- and this kind of thing. And I think the problem is that the federal government does have the big piece of money in the state or and in our society. And unless they're going to allocate a fair share for this, it's just a lie that it can be replaced by local control.

SPEAKER 1: So rather than criticizing the way the president has proposed reorganizing this relationship between the federal government and state and local governments, you would suggest that the federal government ought to simply come across with more money--

PHYLLIS KAHN: Of course--

SPEAKER 1: --giving these.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Of course, that's true for Minnesota, which I think with all due modesty has a fairly progressive local government on many levels, but this is not true in a state like Mississippi or in a sense in a sense perhaps even California where you may have the local people are very opposed to these kinds of programs because they're interfering with their local powers.

PAUL GRUCHOW: It seems appropriate to ask here too, you've been critical of the University administration in its relationships to the state legislature. I wonder whether you have also some judgment about the University's relationship to the federal government where it's also active as a lobbyist. Do you have the feeling that the University administration has represented the University's needs at the federal level better than it did its needs at the legislature?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I really don't have any detailed knowledge of this. I guess I come back to the same statement of, when you see the University at a time when programs are in deep crisis pushing for buildings, and you start to wonder, are they trying to create a campus of empty buildings essentially? There are a lot-- there's lots of empty space in new buildings that have been built, and there's no-- and still, the idea of an administrator is always to get more to administer.

PAUL GRUCHOW: Assume you're not going to build buildings, how specifically would you build a list of priorities to present to the legislature for the funding of the University of Minnesota? What's most needed there?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I don't think that there's any objection to presenting a fairly specific list of requests as long as the absolute control not delegated to the legislature. But I think-- I would have thought that in this session, the biggest crisis is the concept of the decrease of federal funding and programs that are underway and that may be totally truncated. Like, for example, the help center, the Martin Luther King Center, the-- I think student loans tuition is a big point that has to be looked at.

And again, I think the need for comprehensive planning in the community was a strong need, which was not pushed at all by the University. They'll say that they did put the item in their budget and it wasn't funded by the legislature, but putting it, writing it in, and really pressing for it is totally different.

SPEAKER 1: There has been criticism of the University for a long time for the de-emphasis that is taking place on the humanities program and other programs that, I should say, nonscientific or non-technical programs that tend not to attract federal money so easily. That the University has not provided adequate support for these programs to grow and to prosper. And people look back to the days when the humanities program was healthier at the University certainly than it is now. What are your thoughts about that? Is that a failure of the University leadership.

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I think it's a failure of the University leadership, and I it's almost a failure of all of us because we take the-- we get into a political cycle of the University proposing what it thinks the legislature wants and the governor okaying what it thinks the legislature and the people want, and we then get to this element of dishonesty where the people get to think that they will get better health care by building health building complex A, B and parking lot E and so forth.

PAUL GRUCHOW: I wonder if there isn't an analogy too in the federal funding thing within the University its-- within the University community itself when you set priorities. You get into a sport for one department or program meaning in effect a decline in the support for another department or program. And the strictly humanities oriented programs have never come out very well in those internal squabbles even within the faculty at the University. Isn't that true?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I think this, again, points out the need for political organization of that element of the faculty. And I think that we-- the presentation to the people of the state, to the legislature, to the regents, and possibly even to the University administration, that humanities is a deep and basic need for the society for the betterment of all of US has to be properly presented. I don't think it was in this session.

SPEAKER 1: It would appear from the recent student elections at the University, that the student body is plagued by galloping apathy with respect to its own government and perhaps with respect to its having any meaningful role, any power in the institution. How do you interpret the pitifully poor turnout of student voters in those elections and the impotence of the Minnesota Student Association?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I think you've summed it up better than I can. There is an enormous apathy. There isn't any-- and I think that this is something which plagues a lot of commuter colleges.

SPEAKER 1: Would that change though if students were allowed to participate in governing the University as Regent Anderson suggested they should be, and as you have proposed here, that they might even participate in the election of the president? Would you have in mind any way that the student could become more, let's say, politically involved in the University?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Well, I would hope that would happen. I would think that one of the things would be-- is more sense, say, of the regents and of the administration of reporting to the students, of asking for the students for help in drawing up plans instead of presenting a plan to the students, the community, and the faculty afterwards where the only alternative you have is just to tear into it.

SPEAKER 1: Should there be student regents?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I am in favor of that, but I'm not sure if a special student regent should be elected or if it just-- one should just ask either the legislature or the governor, whoever is appointing a regent, to make a point of appointing either a student or a recent student to the Board of Regents.

SPEAKER 1: Do you think that the-- and maybe this isn't a fair question with only two or three minutes left, but do you think that the role of women in the governing of the University has improved? I mean, we've heard several rather dramatic announcements of promotion for women in recent years at the University. This is the first woman to be the Dean of this, and the first woman to be a department chairman here. Does that impress you or is there a long way to go in that?

PHYLLIS KAHN: I think it's a really good case of galloping tokenism. I think the major problem that we've seen is that there's been few appointments of strong feminists in the University community. And I hate to coming in at this kind of time slot in the Schedule. One hates to make an analogy with the Watergate hearings that you're about to go back to, but-- and I certainly don't want to be accused of saying that the University administration is the Haldeman and Ehrlichman of Minnesota community.

But one does notice the absence of women in both of those situations. And people have said before that if they took-- if they replaced the University administration completely with a quarter of the number of women at a quarter of the salary, because they get outrageously high salaries, then it would run just as well. Women are used to working they're used to going by bus instead of airplane and--

SPEAKER 1: Are women organizing? Is there increasing pressure within the University community among faculty women to improve their status there? Do you know about this?

PHYLLIS KAHN: Yes. That's certainly been so in the last few years the Council for University women's programs and so forth. And the problem is that the women are just grossly overworked. Is that they're-- for example now that every committee needs to have a token women on it, we have women serving on two or three faculty committees. And also, they've had to work very hard just to get to that position.

SPEAKER 1: Paul Gruchow and I have been talking for the last a little over an hour-- We've been grilling state representative Phyllis Kahn of Minneapolis who represents many of the people who teach and who go to school and who work at the University of Minnesota in District 57A which takes doesn't it take all of Southeast and a little bit of Northeast Minneapolis--

PHYLLIS KAHN: And most of Southeast. We have a-- a little hunk of it goes to 57B.

SPEAKER 1: I see. Anyway, it's in the general vicinity of the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus, and we've been talking about almost every aspect I can think of the University of Minnesota and its relations with the state legislature.