John Ryan Oral History Interview

Today is June 9th 1997 and I am interviewing Dr. John Ryan, former president of Indiana University. This interview is part of an oral history of Indiana University-Purdue University, at Indianapolis funded by the campus administration. The project director is Dr. Philip V. Scarpino, chair of the Department of History and Associate Director of Public History David Zubke, a graduate student in history at lUPUI is the research assistant conducting the interview. Among other uses, interviews conducted for this project will provide source material for "A History of IUPUI" which is presently being researched and written by Dr. Ralph Gray of the Department of History. For additional oral histories of IUPUI, please see interviews conducted in 1989-90 by Philip Scarpino and Sheila Goodenough for a project titled "IUPUI: The Evolution of an Urban University."

Tapes and transcripts of "IUPUI: The Evolution of an Urban University" are on deposit in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives.

Today's interview is being conducted in room 316 of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, SPEA, on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr.

Ryan was born in 1929 in Chicago. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Utah and his M.A. and Ph.D. both from Indiana University. Prior to his arrival at Indiana University as Vice President and Chancellor for Regional Campuses, Dr. Ryan held various teaching and administrative positions in Kentucky, Thailand, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Boston, and Arizona State University at Tempe. Dr. Ryan served as Indiana University's fourteenth president from 1971 until 1987. Currently, he is President [correction: Chancellor] of the State University of New York. He and his wife have three children.

RYAN:

All right David, let's get started.

ZUBKE: Good morning Dr. Ryan

RYAN:

Good morning.

ZUBKE:

On behalf of Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis welcome to our series of interviews in dealing with the history of IUPUI. For the record, Dr. Ryan, I need to have your permission to conduct the taped interview, to transcribe the interview, and then to submit both tape and transcript to the IUPUI Library. Do I have your permission?

RYAN:

Yes, you sure do.

ZUBKE:

Thank you very much. We appreciate your time and effort that is needed to do the interview.

want to begin, I notice in a biographical listing in one of the newspapers some years ago that you started out as a research analyst in Kentucky with the Department of Revenue of all places. How did that happen?

RYAN:

Well, maybe it it would be better if I started out a little earlier.

ZUBKE:

By all means.

RYAN:

I'll make it very quick. I had decided early on in my life wanted to go tO college. Nobody in my family had ever gone to college. In fact, my father never finished high school. And so I I didn't really know much about college, and we had a a reasonably large family and no assets, so the question of how to go to college was an important question also.

To make a a long story short, I took an examination given by the United States Navy and did well enough to be offered a a scholarship, a grant to go to a a college; they sent me to the University of Utah and that was the beginning of my higher education career. While at Utah, a professor of Political Science came, named Francis D. Wormuth. He had been eleven, or twelve, or thirteen years on the faculty at Indiana University, and he came to the University of Utah. And he was a marvelous professor, maybe the most influential teacher in my life.

And when I finished my two years, two and a a half years in association with him, he made arrangements for me to come to Indiana University to graduate school and I did, still without any money, still without knowing very much more about colleges and certainly nothing about graduate study.

But in the meantime, had become...had found my wife at Utah, we were married. We had two children when I arrived here as a graduate student and so I became a member of the Department of Government, now the Department of Political Science, as a a gradate student assigned to Professor Edwin B. McPheron, a wonderful man, now deceased, good teacher, a specialist in state and local government. And worked with Professor John Stoner, who…another wonderful man and life long friend of mine.

But, with our expenses and the lack of any outside financial support, I was able to be here only three semesters, and…before I had to earn some money. So, one of the professors here, a a man named Professor Bill Siffin, who is now deceased, but was very helpful to me, had been in the Legislative Reference Service or council in Kentucky, and he knew of my situation here and he knew that, or thought there might be a place for me in Kentucky. So, he arranged for me to talk to people in the Department of Revenue in Frankfort, Kentucky and went there to earn some money and put it away so I could come back to school. So, that's how I became a research analyst at the Department of Revenue in Frankfort, Kentucky.

It so happens at that time, the governor, a man named Weathersby, Wetherby, determined that the state property tax administration should be brought into compliance with the Kentucky constitution, which required full assessment and equal assessment county-bycounty of real property, and of course, were wildly different from what the constitutional requirement was. Unfortunately, for Governor Wetherby, most of the people in Kentucky were happier with the way it was, I think, than the way he wanted to make it. But my job was to go around the state to the various county tax commissioner's offices and measure up the actual sale price of property with the assessed value of property and taking all of the sales for a given period of time to determine what the ratio was. If you use a sale as a determinant of the market value of property, and you use the assessed value as the assessed value of property, what's the ratio of assessment to real value, market value. And that became the basis for reassessing property and that's a sure road to perdition if you're a a politician, at least in Kentucky.

But that was my job as research analyst. And I was there for a year and a half or so, and got a telephone call from a young professor here in the Department of Government named Joe Sutton, who was an assistant professor at the time, because the new chairman of the department, a man named Walter Laves, had great international connections and experience, in fact had been Deputy Director General of UNESCO before he came to the chairmanship at Indiana. Through Walter Laves's interest and contacts, the university had agreed to send a team of people to Thailand to establish there a faculty of public administration and an in-service training program and things like that. And Joe Sutton, knowing of my experience in state administration in Kentucky asked me if I wanted to be a member of that team. And I remember had been out mowing the lawn in Kentucky in July, in Frankfort, Kentucky, and I was in the bathtub trying to recover, when the phone rang and said…he said would come up and talk to him and to Walter Laves about it. And so I did, and the rest is history. Pat and I took our three kids, by this time, to Bangkok, Thailand, for two years.

ZUBKE: A remarkable experience, I'm sure.

RYAN: Well, it was. I mean, like so many things in my life, it was unanticipated unexpected, it turned out to be a wonderful experience, academically and personally.

ZUBKE:

Had you finished graduate school then at the time?

RYAN:

No, no. I was still,

had not finished even the course work for the Ph.D.

not begun my dissertation. In fact, I had received approval

wanted to do a comparative study, which was all the rage in those days; I know people hardly do it anymore. I'm still interested in it and when I teach a course again, which I intend to do, I'll probably have a comparative course in government.

was planning to do it in Latin America, I I was thinking about an economic development theory comparison and using Argentina and the United States, but then when I decided to go to Thailand, I thought I'll scrap that Argentina idea and I studied, before left, I studied the Thai language, at a very elemental level, and during my two years in Thailand, I did...I also did my research for a comparative study of local government, my thesis being the government of Bangkok municipality, a comparative study. And then published shortly after I left, a comparative study of Thai urban local...rural local government.

ZUBKE:

Does Indiana University still have a Thailand connection?

RYAN:

A very, very substantial connection in the persons of our alumni who came here and finished Ph.D.'s, went back to Thailand to become governors of provinces, professors in the National Institute for Development Administration, which has university status, and then other aspects of the business and education. But I think there is no formal program connection, that is we do not have a a team of people or a set of advisors in any of the institutions in Thailand, to my knowledge.

ZUBKE:

What brought you back then to Bloomington in 1957?

RYAN:

Well, I returned, since I had not finished my Ph.D. course work or my dissertation, I came back in '57, I used the year '57-'58 to write my dissertation and to complete the course work. I think I needed...I think I probably took two seminars in that year. So I had most of my course work completed and I completed my dissertation, turned it in. In those days, there was a tremendous pressure in universities to deal with galloping increases in enrollment, and so I wanted to spend the year '58-'59 kind of continuing to polish the dissertation, but the department here wanted me to take on an appointment as assistant professor, that is, a regular appointment, and they didn't use the instructor rank anymore, so would have been an assistant professor. And I was overjoyed because I loved the department, the people in it, the university.

But something told me, a certain kind of Gaelic conservatism, I think, that it it would not be professionally wise to accept an appointment in the department in which I finished my degree. And I had a long talk with some of the professors about it. I talked to Walter Lavess, the chairman, who wanted me take the appointment, and he thought that was no problem at all. And I talked to York Willbern, who had come into the department after I had gone to Thailand, so

had only come to know him. He was extremely helpful and is still a very highly regarded friend. He agreed with me. He said, we here know that you would be a very fine member of our department, but you will never know that if you don't go someplace else first. And so, I had offers from the University of Nebraska and, think Kansas, and the University of Wisconsin. And I finally decided to go to the University of Wisconsin, so I did. And so '57-'58, I finished my dissertation. I didn't actually submit it until the course of the year '58-'59 and I finished...I received my degree in the Commencement of 1959.

ZUBKE:

So you spent several years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison?

RYAN:

Yes, four years.

ZUBKE:

And then you went on to Massachusetts, how did that happen?

RYAN:

That's right. Well, at Wisconsin, 1 was…two of us started at the same time, Leo Redfern from Harvard University and I from Indiana University. Leo then left after two years to become a a staff member in the president's office at the University of Massachusetts, the president of which, at that time, being John Lederle, a Michigan man. John Lederle had been brought there to try to bring the University of Massachusetts sort of into the modern world. Not academically, it was a very strong place academically, but it was so tied into, really so regimented into state processes, and purchasing, and personnel appointments and, really the university could hardly breathe out in Amherst without somebody providing the And so they developed a campaign to achieve what they called autonomy for the university. And it was a hard goal. Leo Redfern went to Massachusetts to work with a couple of other young guys, with John Lederle to get the legislature to agree to this. And that position, as secretary of the university and secretary to the board, and assistant to the president became open and I think Leo persuaded John Lederle to invite me to come and do that, sO that I could help with the autonomy campaign and so that would be able to organize the centennial ceremonials for the centennial year of 1962. And I had a couple of offers to leave Wisconsin to start…one to start a program, a Masters Degree in Public Administration in a university here in the Midwest and a couple of others. And I thought that if I were ever going to do something administrative, I should leave Wisconsin to do it, because I had my hands full with administrative stuff at Wisconsin.

When John Kennedy was elected president in 1960 he took, I think, half of the political science and history departments to Washington D.C. to run various government programs, including the Peace Corps. And that left lots of work to be done and the President, [Fred] Harrington, asked me to take on preparing proposals to the Ford Foundation and setting up some institutes for land tenure reform in Latin America and, oh, a number of things. And it was all, it turned out, in addition to a full teaching load, it was all extremely helpful to me, educational to me, a great experience for me, but it caused me to conclude, you know, I'd gone to Wisconsin in the first place because I wanted what I thought would be a professional career in scholarship. And that was the farthest thing from being available to me in those days, because again, we had droves of students coming in every year. We all had to do the best we could and I I didn't begrudge that at all.

But I talked to my wife about it and I said, you know, I I can spend the next fifteen years doing what I'm doing here and then I probably would have foregone any opportunity to try to sample some other aspects of academic life, such as administration, or can go to Massachusetts and take on administration and T I can return to the academic side. So we decided to do that. In the course of that, John Lederle said, why don't you have some people who know you, write a recommendation? So I wrote the president of Arizona State University, who had been one of my professors at Utah and asked if he would write to John Lederle and tell him about me, and I got a letter back from him saying two things. One, I have written John Lederle telling him he ought to appoint you. Secondly, your letter came to me a day or two before I was going to send you a letter asking you to come to Arizona State and be my academic vice-president. But he said, I won't do that to John Lederle, my old friend, but one year from today,

will write you, and I am notifying John Lederle by copy of this letter that I'm gonna do that.

Well, I went to Massachusetts and sure enough, in a year, Elmer Durham sent me such a letter and I went to Arizona State, and the reason is that being assistant to the president is staff position. I learned a great deal and I'm glad I had the position, but being academic vice-president is a line position and anybody in public administration knows the difference between being in a staff position and being in a line position, and so I chose to do that. But during my year and a half or so in Massachusetts, one of the things the president had me do was represent him on a a commission studying, it turns out, health insurance, but that had nothing to do with the real lesson, which was that the higher education world in Massachusetts, at least in the public side, was changing. And that the University of Massachusetts in Amherst was a strong institution, getting stronger; we had succeeded in getting the autonomy legislation passed, we had succeeded in getting better procreation levels of state funds, but most of the people of the state lived 120 or more miles away from Amherst. And I said I I think that that geographic and demographic fact will result in one or more new institutions being established so that people don't have to send their youngsters 120 miles west just to go to college.

Then I went off to Arizona. And I had been there two years and I got a call saying that the senate and the house, the state legislature, had just approved legislation which called for the establishment of a campus of the University of Massachusetts in Boston and we want you to come and be the person to do that since that was your idea. Well, it was kind of a stretch to say that it was my idea, it was my caution and my warning maybe. But didn't, I thought to myself, how can anybody turn down the opportunity that comes to few people to start a brand new university. So I went to Boston. And I was in Boston for three...a little over three years from 1965 to 1968, establishing the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

arrived there in June, and in September we had refurbished an office building in Boston and enrolled twelve thousand...1,244, I'll never forget the figure, freshmen students, and as somebody reminded me just the other day, I convened all the students on the first day of classes and said a a few announcements about the program and the thrill of being in it and sO on. And I said, now I have a bonus for you, which is that the laboratories aren't ready yet and so you can all go home; you don't have to come back for another two weeks and that was the most popular thing I ever did anywhere in my administrative career.

ZUBKE:

So you started with 1,244 freshmen. There was no sophomore class?

RYAN:

Well, we started only with the freshman class and then the second year we enrolled about 900 and some freshmen, added to the survivors of the 1,244. We had around 2,000 students in the second year. Then the third year we enrolled another 900 or so freshmen. And so it was around 3,400 students or so when I left to come to Indiana and then I went back and attended the first commencement in 1968, 1969, I'm sorry.

ZUBKE:

So the, I just can't imagine starting a school from scratch, but that's basically what you and others did?

RYAN:

Yes. It, well, it was exciting.

think that only a young man or woman would do that. I think anybody of any age and experience would decide not to take on the headaches. But it was thrilling. I mean...

ZUBKE:

Did you have a full time nucleus of a faculty or were these adjunct faculty members, or were they [phrase inaudible]?

RYAN:

Before I arrived in June, that is for not quite a year, we had been recruiting persons to fill the positions that had been allocated to us. And so, when the students arrived, we had full time professors in the fields we intended to offer, biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, some languages, french, german and spanish, history, political science, sociology, psychology, I've probably left out a couple. But we had a fixed, more or less, fixed curriculum for the first two years and then we had electives in the last two years.

And so we doubled the faculty, really, in the second year, hired as many in the second year as we had in the first. But we did start out with

full cadre of faculty. The first year, a man named Paul Gagnon, who was

history professor and was provost, did a major, major part of the job of pulling together the faculty. We had a librarian...a library a librarian, with staff, assembling library materials for a year before the students came on board and things

ZUBKE:

So the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Boston, what was the relationship between the two? Were these..were they both independent schools? RYAN:

No. No, the University of Mass. at Boston was established to be a campus.

The president of the university then became the president of two campuses. And now, that beginning has matured into a university of five campuses, because, oh, about ten years after the Boston campus was established, a medical school was established and located in Worcester, Massachusetts. And then, actually after I left office here, I was on a commission in 1988 maybe, in Massachusetts, David Saxon from MIT was the chairman and this commission of a dozen people or so looked at the organization of the university and recommended that there be a university system, headed by a president, which there is, and it has, and added to it two other existing...pre-existing campuses, Southeast Massachusetts and Lowell, which is a…Lowell, it emphasizes technology.

ZUBKE:

After your last association with the University of Massachusetts, you then arrived back at Indiana University. How did you come back to IU?

RYAN:

Well, that was 1968. Actually, in...but Elvis Stahr became president of the University, of Indiana University in 1962, and by 1965 I think, he had determined that, just as

said, higher education changed dramatically in Massachusetts, it also was changing, had changed in Indiana, public higher education certainly. And that…..he began thinking about and doing a systematic examination of how Indiana University ought to respond to this now enrollments and institutions and so forth. It became...that systematic study, in which he was assisted by people like John Mee and others in his own staff, the Faculty Council, Joe Sutton, who by this time was dean and then Dean of Faculties, it caused them to determine that the .Indiana University, Bloomington should plan for enormous growth. I'm guessing about the enrollment in 1965-66 was probably around 25,000, maybe less than that, oh, I'm sure less than that, 21, 22,000. And the projections they used, even though they were generous and optimistic and we may never have reached that, I think startled everybody, not to say scared them to death, that this campus would be a campus of 50,000 students, maybe 60,000 students, and that they thought, and agree, agreed then and I agree now, would have fundamentally changed the character of the institution, and in ways they didn't want. What's the alternative? Well, and not what that not...and that was not only a projection for the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, but the same kind of thing would happen Purdue University at West Lafayette. Maybe not 60,000 but maybe 40, or 45,000, and that would change the character of that place and it would not be in accord with the traditions either of Purdue or Indiana University. At the same time, other public institutions, like Ball State and Indiana State would be growing.

By 1967, they had decided that the way to both meet the obligations for providing education to the people of the state and preserve the basic character that they wanted to preserve in the main campuses, the way to do that was to develop regional campuses, which were in existence for the most part, to develop them as credible, available educational choices for people in those regions. Now, what do I I mean by that? At that time, they were essentially extension centers where persons could begin a baccalaureate education that had to be completed elsewhere, let's say Bloomington, or West Lafayette or someplace, or a person who had begun somewhere could make some additional progress toward a degree but there were... they were not degree-granting institutions, were not set up to be that.

When they reached the decision that the way to plan the growth of Indiana University was to plan it as a system, they needed then to create the system. And I was brought here as the Vice-President for Regional Campuses, there had not been such a position before, to do that. The. Elvis Stahr began talking to me in 1967 about it. I was really very much torn, because there's nothing I would have preferred to do than to come back to Indiana but I felt I could not leave Massachusetts until the fledgling campus in Boston had been established. And I told him that, so in 1967, I didn't do anything and they didn't do anything here, they didn't pick somebody else. My...a member of my Ph.D. committee was Joe Sutton, and by this time, that was the young assistant professor that asked me to go to Thailand, he...I also took classes with him, he was maybe the best teacher I ever had, just a phenomenal classroom teacher, very powerful person in many ways, and a great influence on my life. By 1967, he was Vice-President and Dean of Faculties, which was the number two position at the university. And so think he probably was one of the influences on President Stahr to bring me here to do this position, cause until I came and talked to him, Stahr did not know who I I was, although it didn't hurt me in Stahr's estimation for me to have had Kentucky experience, because that was where Elvis Stahr came from. I said I could not do it until I had things further along in Massachusetts, by which I had in mind 1970 or so. And knew that they had to move faster than that, so I discounted it.

But I went back to Massachusetts and really had some good luck for the University, met with the governor, Governor John Volpe, a marvelous man, personally, and told him that our study of what we require for a campus for this university will cost

hundred million dollars, which in 1967 was an awful lot of money. It's a lot of money today, but in 1967, I don't know that any university outside of California had ever had a hundred million dollars in one fell swoop, but I asked for it and the governor, who was in private life a very successful contractor and builder, said, that's what he said to me, "John, that's an awful lot of money," and

said, "yes, governor, it is but that's the only way we should go." And he thought a few minutes and then he said, "you're right, and I'll go with it." But, he said, you have to get the legislature to go along, * cause Volpe was a Republican and the legislature was Democratic. So I went to the President of the Senate, Senator Maurice Donahue, an absolutely marvelous, powerful, honest political leader and a a former teacher, and I said, "senator, this is what we need and the governor said he will support it if I can get the legislature to go along." And Donahue, being a very wise fellow, said, "why, John, you know you'll have no trouble with me." It was key to get him because he represented a western Massachusetts district, we're talking about building a campus, a a hundred million dollars worth, in Boston. But he said, I don't know about that Boston College Classics graduate, Bob Quinn, who was Speaker of the House. Well, I went to the Speaker of the House, I knew about him because I had already talked to him, my...tremendous supporter, to this day, a great supporter of public higher education, though he was a classics major at Boston College and a law graduate from Harvard Law School, brilliant guy and powerful guy. Make a long story short. I received approval for a hundred million dollars and we had appointed the fourth group of faculty members and enrolled the fourth group of students, or at least the process was under way. And so I left in June of 1968 and became Vice-President of Indiana University for Regional Campuses. And my role was to develop the regional campuses into credible degree opportunities, especially at baccalaureate level in South Bend, Fort Wayne, Northwest which is in Gary, Southeast which at that time was in Jeffersonville but we built a new campus in New Albany, and Kokomo. We had, and Purdue had, centers in Indianapolis. They were not associated with each other and, in fact, the key visible Indiana University presence in Indianapolis was the Medical School and the Health Center.

And our…..most of our programs weren't associated with, hell, they were completely separate.

One was an extension center set of places, again there were three or four of those locations, and then the hospital one, the Medical School, Dental School, Nursing School. So that was an unresolved question, what are we going to do in Indianapolis? When I arrived it was unresolved. By 1969, when the General Assembly was about to meet, actually in December of '68, when President Hovde and by now, President Sutton, were meeting with the Indianapolis Legislative delegation, as they always did in a a December prior to the legislative session. In those days, the legislature met every other year, they didn't meet every year, and so it was really quite important to have these orientation sessions, sO to speak, newly elected representatives and senators and continuing representatives and senators. There had been a growing level of clamor, of insistence, even argumentation in Indianapolis about the level, the state of higher education availability, public higher education availability in the capital city of the state. And the statement was made, statements were made and they weren't wrong,

think, that Indianapolis, as a capital city wouldn't be taken seriously as a capital city if it didn't have a major university. Certainly in the van of such tremendous forward-looking actions as the development of Unigov and so forth, people were asking now well education is next, education...higher education has to be next and we have to get the proper response from the state to this need, indeed Indianapolis is the only major metropolis in the country that doesn't have a...that kind of thing. And it wasn't wrong!

And I know that there was a lot of thinking going on, at least a lot of talking, I don't know how much thinking, going on about what should Indiana University do with its physical education programs, education programs, Law School, etc., etc., etc.

And in the wake of all of this, and a lot of other problems, including financial problems, believe it or not, today's aren't the only times that had financial problems for universities, in this state and elsewhere, the… this meeting, customarily held before the session of the legislature began, occurred. I was not at that meeting, but Vice-President Joe Hartley was, who was the Vice-President and Dean of Faculties and Joe Sutton was, and President Hovde of Purdue was, and Vice-President Lawshe and I think Vice-President Hicks of Purdue were there. And somebody, I don't who, in the Indianapolis delegation raised this issue, I mean there are many other issues that were discussed, but raised this issue about in effect, what are you going to do about the need here in Indianapolis for higher education and will you support some initiative to address this need? And for reasons I don't know, I never dared ask him about it and now he's gone, sO

can't, but President Hovde took some umbrage and I think he was probably irritated at whoever asked the question, not the question itself, but in effect he said that he didn't intend to do anything about it and he turned it to President Sutton, who'd only been in office a year, and said, Joe, if you want all of this, take care of all of this and deal with all of this, it's yours. And I think he walked out of the chamber; whether he did or not, I don't know, 'cause I wasn't there, but anyway, he was out of patience with the issue, and Joe Sutton didn't know what to do, and the meeting concluded and Joe came back to Bloomington and told me about this, and Fred obviously went back to West Lafayette and told Chuck Lawshe about it, Chuck, also being VicePresident for Regional Campuses, for the Purdue campuses. And so we very quickly came to the conclusion that we should not take President Hove literally, that it would not be good for Indianapolis, whatever we could do in Indianapolis would not [be] good enough if we...if we foreclosed the possibility of Purdue programs being part of it.

And so there were two ways to go. One was for us to agree to the establishment of a separate university, separate board of trustees, separate identity, separate everything in Indianapolis, that would have a combination of Indiana University and Purdue University programs. The second was to develop a workable blend of Indiana and Purdue programs in Indianapolis at the level that everybody would accept was what a metropolis ike Indianapolis deserved to have. I argued for the latter because, first of all, I knew that Indiana University's Law School, Medical School, Social Work School, just to name three, were already in Indianapolis and nothing would be gained if we separated those from Indiana University and had to recreate them, say in Bloomington or didn't recreate them in Bloomington; it would just be...it wouldn't work, I didn't think. Secondly, the Medical School was only two years, I think, into its state-wide medical education program that teaches medicine at seven different locations in Indiana, and had just started that at the time, and to have allocated those programs to an Indianapolis-only entity, I thought had more political problems attached to it than political solutions. We should not do that. And third, that Purdue and Indiana Universities had reputations that were international and that certainly it would be possible to develop programs in Indianapolis that were under an Indianapolis aegis only that would achieve that level of reputation, but it could take a hundred years to do so, or fifty years to do So and a a person...one of the things Indianapolis wanted and needed was the cache of Purdue or Indiana reputation that goes along with the diploma in one's field, in business, or education, or in biological science, or medicine, or whatever, so, and it's so much easier in the telling than in the doing, but we decided first we needed to come to a meeting of the minds with Purdue about how this blending would occur. And we did.

And in effect, we developed, and it still exists, an inventory of programs that would carry Purdue degrees, programs that would carry Indiana University degrees, in a setting, the administration of which was in the hands of Indiana University from the trustees through the president to the campus, and that the faculty would be Indiana University faculty, on the Indiana University payroll and promoted and appointed and tenured by Indiana University.

But in the case of Purdue programs, would be recruited and would be judged and assessed by the same people and against the same standards applied at Purdue University. And believe it or not, that's worked. I won't say that we never had any glitches, we of course, have had some. I've been out of it for ten years but from the very beginning, we had good will, we had good will from people both at Indiana and Purdue, and maybe more particularly good will of people in Indianapolis. Everybody wanted it to work, and it has worked, and I think

ZUBKE:

So President Hovde probably did not want to, perhaps take a leadership role in this development when he made his comments, supposedly as a [word inaudible]?

RYAN:

Well, it's very risky to attribute to anybody, and President Hovde certainly, just what he had in mind. But I don't think it's unfair to say that Fred Hovde believed that the main chance was…. the main environment for his attention was West Lafayette. And if he were..and if he could succeed, all he asked for was to succeed in making Purdue University, West Lafayette the best at what it did in the world, and I think he largely did that. And that was essentially the view here in Indiana I mean Indiana University did not covet Indianapolis, well, I think they coveted the Medical School, which has been here and moved to Indianapolis, but they didn't covet Indianapolis. t was not an easy sell for me to say we have to make it as a very first place on our agenda to make an Indianapolis educational experience the equivalent of an educational experience anywhere in Indiana University, including Bloomington. If we don't do that, then we really aren't satisfying what... what Indianapolis needs. Maybe people in Indianapolis don't understand that--too bad. We do and it's our obligation to produce that. Well, just as a separate Indianapolis institution couldn't have a world reputation overnight, and I think fifty, sixty years or more, it would take, just so, you can't establish that level of equity of experience overnight, and we didn't establish it overnight. But it's been established and it's far short of forty or fifty years.

And of course the institution has grown. One of the first things we had do was build the campus, make a campus, and we had to bring the Social Work School, and the Law School, and the Art School, and we haven't quite done that but that's coming, physical education, all of those had been... engineering had to be accommodated on the campus. We had to have

major library, it's there now. I thought we had to have something that even looked like a campus to people to whom that's important. And so one of the first things we did was build berms and plant trees and design our buildings so that students can move from building to building without crossing streets if they don't want to, but more particularly can move on a campus without being... they don't have to go around buildings or through them, they go underneath them. And think if you take

look…people who look at the campus today cannot realize, and it's good that they can't, cannot realize the campusness, the bucolic sense of that campus, compared to what was there just really only twenty years ago.

ZUBKE:

Just to back up for one moment. The meeting with President Hovde and President Sutton with the members of the legislature, what year did that occur?

RYAN: That would have been ’69.

ZUBKE: ‘69

RYAN: I’m sorry, it was…

ZUBKE: Or ’68?

...prior to the '69 session which started in January but it was probably ZUBKE:

December of '68. And as far as you know, did the legislature then support the idea of the joint venture with IU and Purdue, was that what they were looking for? Or did the legislature have another alternative of what to do with Indianapolis?

RYAN:

Well, there were many voices in the legislature. Some wanted simply to establish a University of Indianapolis, state university.

suppose some didn't want to hear any more about it. And, but many, it didn't have a fixed notion, and many of them, including a good many of the leaders, in effect, were saying to us, come up with an idea, you tell us how to do it. And my advice to the president was, we'd better tell them something or they'll tell us and we might not like the idea nearly as much. And so, it was that that drove us to reach, I think, a very fair and sound agreement with the Purdue Trustees about moving ahead. Chuck Lawshe was invaluable, and he was the Purdue Vice-president for Regional Campuses, extremely helpful in working out this...we had worked together. I suppose it isn't out of line to...we had something called the Regional Campuses Coordinating Commission, or something like that, which existed because Ball State University, Indiana University and Purdue University, jointly provided a program, it was essentially, it wasn't a degree-granting program, in Richmond, Indiana, using facilities at

Earlham College. And so we had experience at kind of putting this sort of mosaic together and, but we had very high-type people, high-minded people working together from Purdue and Indiana and that's why think we got off to a good start.

ZUBKE:

Is there one person that can be credited with the idea for IUPUI? Or is, as you say, it's more of an evolution of like-minded individuals coming to that conclusion?

RYAN:

don't think there's one person. I think there was a catalyst person. I think that, at Purdue and at Indiana, for a number of years, the same question had been rocketing around the halls, what do we do in Indianapolis, something has to be done, what do we do? It was Fred Hovde's sort of ...and that may have…be why Fred was ready to make the statement he made. I think it was Fred Hovde's statement that was the catalyst that said, well, O.K. you know, now the fat's in the fire, we've got to do something. The legislature was meeting, there was a strong move on the part of a resurgent young Turk political grouping in Indianapolis that had brought up Unigov and so forth. Dick Lugar and Larry Borst and Keith Bulen and others who were demanding that something be done and what they thought of, because I think they …..nobody suggested anything else to think of...

ZUBKE:

Sorry. [tape ended] Continuing with the discussion of that late '68, 1968 meeting and so on, did the legislature, despite whatever alternatives they were interested in for Indianapolis, did they ever indicate a monetary cap or was funding something to worry about once everybody agreed on what they wanted?

RYAN:

think there was never any precise set of figures used about what it would cost in the first year, in the first five years, or the first ten years. Probably a a lot of assumptions were made…well, not probably, I know a lot of assumptions were made. I don't know where the legislature's thinking was. I know that the members, especially the chairs of the Higher Education…of the Education Committees in the house and the senate were concerned that... they had a lot of other fish to fry, the legislature did. Remember Governor Bowen wasn't in office yet, wasn't elected yet, property tax relief was a a big issue in Indiana, there were..they had a lot of fish to fry, a a lot of things to be argumentative about, a lot of interests at stake, and so what these.. what the Education Committees wanted anyway was for us to come up with a solution and get everybody's mind off of that as an issue, and let them deal with other things. So we did and now that's the legislature, now that's not to say that similar questions weren't very high in the minds of interest groups within the universities themselves, faculty, students, administrators, and so on. And there was a a great deal of apprehension, perhaps still is, certainly there was about Indianapolis, in particular, but about regional campuses in general, a great deal of apprehension about the risk of creating a demand for higher education funds that would drain funds away from the major campuses. That was never my view, in fact my view was the only way to keep funds from being drained away from the major campuses, the only way that would happen is if we ignored the needs in the rest of the state, and that... and it's a moot question, I mean how do where we are today, would Bloomington have more money than it has, if there you prove

were no Indianapolis? I really don't believe it, in some ways the money is infungible, what we can get support for, the support we can get for Indianapolis, or South Bend, or Fort Wayne, or where ever, is money we couldn't get for Bloomington, anyway. We can get it for South Bend, and to some extent I'm sure that's true, can't put a dollar figure on it.

No, I thought we had to...when you can't answer dollar questions with that kind of precision, I think even if you can answer dollar questions like that with precision, the only questions aren't dollar questions, but since you can't even answer them with precision, then the route you must take is that of sound public policy, and Indiana had reached the point, in my view, where public policy required building a credible, quality, higher education institution that's public, in Indianapolis. And that's what we did, and we did it with physical facilities, it's not the job isn't over. And certainly didn't do it alone. If I had any special or unique role to play, it was a a matter of timing, that it was my intention to say things, at the time I said them, that others might not have said, and therefore what was done might not have been done. Had it it not been done then, we may not have had the opportunity today

ZUBKE:

You mentioned before about the faculty and students at the time. Was there a consensus idea on the part of faculty or from different schools of what could or should be done in Indianapolis?

RYAN:

No, I don't really think so.

think that there was just a kind of inchoate reaction that, you know, a a kind of a common wisdom, which of course usually isn't wisdom, common wisdom that if Indianapolis, if we develop things in Indianapolis that cost more 4

money, that money will come from what would otherwise come to us, without anybody thinking, well, that's library money, or chemistry laboratory money, or anything. There was a good deal more misgiving, I think, or at least more uproar, three years... well, this was launched in 1969. I became president in 1971, and in 1974, I introduced a reorganization of the university that fundamentally changed the relationship of many parts of the university.

One of the objectives, and clearly stated, was to knit together Bloomington and Indianapolis professional programs, with one School of Public and Environmental Affairs. There was no articulated policy of that kind prior to 1974. I don't know what people assumed, and most people I think didn't even think about it.

ZUBKE:

So that just prior to '74, it...so like a transition period, perhaps?

RYAN:

Exactly. Well, there was so much to do with just working out and understanding what…it took us two years, or at least, because the legislature only met every two years, it took us two years to work out the administrative arrangements and structures and to, you know, in everybody, in many peoples minds, Indianapolis was the Medical School. It's shameful to say it it but there wasn't much else of Indiana University or Purdue University in Indianapolis, than the Medical School. I say the Medical School but the Health Science Schools, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, and so on. And we could have kept it that way, we could have had a university that had its own Business School, and its own Journalism School, and its own Education School, and in fact, in the initial years of '71, '72, €72-'73, and so forth, these were separate and they had deans.

But was firmly of the opinion that the students would be best served and indeed, Indianapolis would be best served, if we had a single faculty establishing a single set of expectations for quality, both incoming students, courses offered, degree requirements, graduation requirements. And the 1974 reorganization went as far as I could go, it didn't go as far as I wanted to go, but as far as

could go to bring that about. We kept the undergraduate arts and sciences core, campus separate, campus distinct, and that's gonna work out all right, but I would have gone the whole distance with everything, So that…and why? Because harking back to the very reason for building these campuses, namely keeping some degree of human scale in the size thereof, bespeaks a maximum flexibility, fluidity of movement from one campus to the other. And unless you're very careful, it is as hard to move from one campus to another campus in some university systems, as it is to move from one state to another state, for sound academic reasons. So anyway, in 1974, we established this university school concept for the professional schools, we kept the Arts and Sciences Colleges campus-specific. And we did generate, as nearly as we could, a common calendar.

It was never perfect because a calendar, believe it or not, at a university has to reflect to some degree the calendar of the elementary and secondary school system of the location.

Why? Because faculty members have kids in those schools and if the kid's on vacation and the faculty member isn't or vice versa, that's a real problem that you can't ignore. We kept calendars reasonably similar, degree requirements, degree denominology, as much commonality as we could in everything, and of course, admissions requirements the same.

We have one Board of Trustees and we sought to have very comparable requirements for appointment, promotion, tenure. We were not able, and I don't think the university is yet able, to present, to define common salary policies, for example. Because the funding, back to your question about funding, the legislature never mentioned any….nobody ever mentioned any dollar amount, just that it would cost some money to do what we wanted to do, and sort of coincidentally, three or four years after the introduction of the IUPUI, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education was created. And that…there the comparable, or what should I say, the examination of the allocation of the total resources to higher education was an evaluation made by that commission, individual universities, Purdue, Ball State, Indiana State, Indiana, would create their budget requests and submit them to the governor and the legislature but the Higher Education Commission would review them and make its recommendations that, to some degree I think, expressed their view anyway, of the proper balance, proper allocation formulas and SO on.

ZUBKE:

Was the primary purpose of your reorganization of IU in '74 to address the situation of Bloomington and Indianapolis..

RYAN:

Yes, yeah.

ZUBKE:

...or also to address all of the other regional campuses, to once and for all set up a system for all of them?

RYAN:

Well, we had a system. It was to change the system. And there was a changed role for the other campuses. [knock on door]

ZUBKE:

Part of your reorganization plan included a concept of core campus. Could you define that for us, please?

RYAN:

Well, it really has two definitions that are...complement each other. The first definition of the core campus is that Indiana University, Bloomington and Indiana University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, both because of geographic propinquity and because of the level of research and advanced activity already in place in Indianapolis, or anticipated and planned to be there, that these two entities had a different relationship to each other and played, and would continue to play a a different role in Indiana University than the other campuses. At the time, and still, there were six other campuses, a brand new one in Richmond which was two-year campus, now a baccalaureate-level campus; the Kokomo campus, a baccalaureate campus, now a masters-level campus; and the other campuses. So that's one definition, if you will, of the core, that Indianapolis and Bloomington had more in common with each other than any of the other campuses had in common with either Indianapolis or Bloomington. Second idea of a core campus was this, and it was only mine, don't know if anybody else agreed with me then or would agree with me now, but in formulating the concept I had for Indiana University and translating that concept into the organization of 1974, I believe that Indianapolis and Bloomington needed to grow into the future together, that Indiana, the State, would be better served by an institution with the strengths of Bloomington and Indianapolis in association, in integration with each other, than any other alternative arrangement for those two campuses. I felt that the campus...that the….and that it was a two-way flow of strength and advantage, Bloomington to Indianapolis, Indianapolis to Bloomington. I felt about the other campuses that Indiana University as an entity would not adversely be affected by separation of any one of those campuses from the university into a separate existence, much as Evansville was separated from Terre Haute.

That I didn't propose it, I didn't think it would be good for them, but it would not be harmful to the prospect of Indiana University serving the state of Indiana to the utmost of its ability.

And so that was the second concept of core, that Indiana University as an entity had...could not be separated from the core, which was made up of Indianapolis and Bloomington. It could be separated from what you might think of as the peripheral institutions. And to repeat, I thought that those institutions derived a great benefit from being part of Indiana University, but when and if they believed that benefit no longer existed or the benefit was not worth whatever limitations were placed on them, then Indiana University should not object to their being separated. As I say, I don't know anybody else who thought that then or who thinks it now, but that's what I thought.

ZUBKE:

So at that time, or still now, then the core campuses would remain as you just now stated, the other regional campuses, if they wanted some autonomy, that they perhaps could become autonomous in the future, if they SO decided?

RYAN:

It was always my view. The trustees didn't agree with me, a a lot of other people didn't agree with me, but my view...I don't say all the trustees, but the..it was always my view that if the regional campus faculty and student body wanted to be separated from Indiana University, that we should not oppose that.

ZUBKE:

What if the Indianapolis faculty and student body wanted to become autonomous?

RYAN:

Well, I think you'd have a different...first of all, I wouldn't support that. But whether I would or I wouldn't isn't so important. You'd have quite

different issue. You know, in the one case you're talking about placing different children in a foster home. In the case of Indianapolis and Bloomington, you're talking about splitting Siamese twins, and that's a a very different, riskier, higher, problematical situation.

ZUBKE:

What role did the professional schools play in your decision regarding reorganization?

RYAN:

I'm not sure

understand the thrust of the question. I didn't discuss it with the professional schools, so it wasn't the product of either their desire or in opposition to their desires. Every one of the professional school faculties was a little leery of the idea, wondering you know, would we get more work and less money, I think. But the reorganization probably would have failed if it had not been for the wholehearted support, once asked for it, from the professional schools, both in Indianapolis and in Bloomington.

For example, the organization assumed that the School of Education would be a single school, single faculty, single set of quality judgments. But we already had a school of merit in Indianapolis and that dean and that faculty could have taken the position that this was humiliating or insulting to them, or that they would be in charge and that somebody here in Bloomington could answer to them. And that would just not have worked. That didn't happen. There…they, and I will probably never know all of the difficulties there were. For example, in subsuming all the nursing programs, on all of the campuses into the responsibility of the Dean of Nursing, and the faculty of nursing, a single faculty of nursing, caused a lot of problems because of quality requirements and credential requirements and so forth. But I'll probably never know how much anguish went into...that they went through in bringing this forward but they did. It's not something a president can order. I knew that and I didn't order it. What I ordered was, give it a try and, but the person at the top of the list, who really made the effort and produced the evidence that it was something that was a rising tide that lifted all boats, was Schuyler Otteson, Dean of the School of Business. There's no question in the mind of anybody in Indianapolis, student, civic leader, faculty member, or general campus officer, nobody in Indianapolis that didn't think that this was an improvement for Indianapolis. And I suppose there are plenty of people in Bloomington that didn't like the chores that resulted from it, but there was no deep-seated, foot-dragging, and dug-in opposition and SO on, and if there had been, Dean Otteson would have taken care of that. But Howard Schaller, and Dean Otteson, and Joe Waldman, and well, George Pinnell, of course, was not... was a professor in the School of Business, Ed Williams, they…Eddie Edwards, Les Waters, they all...I don't know what kind of reservations they had about this insane Irishman who was trying to do this but they helped. And that's why it still exists.

This is the organization of Indiana University and it's twenty-five years later. And..or twenty-three years later...and there have been adjustments, as there always are in any kind of organization, but I'm not sure, since the days of David Starr Jordan that there has been any period of twenty-three years where the university organization has stayed as stable as this

ZUBKE:

Good point. Also at this time, with Indianapolis, under the reorganization becoming a core campus, do you see that if you had not had the reorganization plan in '74, and just let the status quo remain, so to speak, I realize this is speculation somewhat, what do think would have occurred on this Indianapolis campus, if you hadn't reorganized? you

RYAN:

[sighing]

don't know, of course, it is speculation but rather than be specific about this or that or the next event that might have happened or might not have happened, I am quite convinced that it got all the cooks but one out of the kitchen. That by moving to this form of organization, the Trustees and the President of Indiana University remained the decisive figures in the development of the university, which meant the development of Indianapolis, because that was our highest priority. And that's the...and then we...and that's what we did for ten years, fifteen years.

Well, on the capital side and on the program development side and So on, had we not had the reorganization, had we not developed the core campus concept, there would have been a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Trustees, and the President of Indiana University, the elements among political and civic leadership desiring something for Indianapolis, they weren't exactly sure what it was but it sure as hell was something different from what they had, the newspapers, the., Maybe other institutions, public and private in Indiana, having an idea either to advancing or retarding higher education, institution development in Indianapolis, I mean if there were any cooks out there, they'd have all been in the kitchen, but this move, it seems to me, put the trustees and the President of Indiana University in a decisive position, and because the president was there, leadership and faculty in Indianapolis was there. Leadership in Indianapolis would not have had a voice except through the President of Indiana University, I'm talking about campus leadership.

ZUBKE:

You mentioned newspapers. A short time later, I believe in 1975, the Indianapolis News had an article, in which I quote, "Indianapolis will be a professionoriented school and the Indiana University campus in Bloomington will be more Humanities oriented," end of quote. Is that a fair assessment as they saw it in '75?

RYAN:

I don't know who said that. And it's one of those kinds of statements that you don't want to dispute too much but of course, it's important more for what it it doesn't say than what it does. The Indiana University, Bloomington campus is a humanities center for Indiana University, it's a humanities center for the country, and yet that statement leaves out the biological sciences, physical sciences, the social sciences in which the university is not simply a center, the Bloomington campus is not simply a center for Indiana University but for the country, and for the world, so it... what it is, is an unfortunate parallelism. It is off mark to describe, or it is overly simplistic to describe even the anticipation, much less the reality for the Indianapolis campus as the professional center. Although it is the center of professional schools for Indiana University, it is that. But to say it that way implies that it isn't going to be humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, and that's just not so. Now, you...if you take a photograph at a given point in time, you have reflected different pinnacles of achievement of the plan and starting out, of course, the professional schools were at a much higher level in Indianapolis than other schools in Indianapolis. Just as professional schools in Bloomington, as important as they are, and my goodness, who would suggest that education, and business, and SPEA, and so forth aren't central to the quality of Indiana University, but the Arts and Sciences College and the graduate programs of the departments of the arts and sciences are, were then and still are, very much more a part of the skyscrapers on our skyline here in Bloomington than they are in Indianapolis.

ZUBKE:

A few years later, I found another comment, this time in the Daily Student newspaper here on campus, 1986, again perhaps an editorial, there was a concern that Indianapolis might someday surpass Bloomington. The article didn't specify, but there appeared to be an indication that there was some difficulty that maybe Indianapolis had been created on a par with Bloomington and now might exceed, perhaps in enrollment or research funding. Any comment about that concern?

RYAN:

Again, I don't know who said that. Or I mean I don't really know the roots of that statement, it would help to know, you know, what was going on at the time. But it was never my thought to worry about one campus surpassing another campus. In 1969, when we began the amalgamation of Indiana and Purdue programs...

ZUBKE:

I have to stop you for a moment. Sorry. [tape ended] O.K.

RYAN:

In the beginning of the decision to develop Indianapolis programs as a joint, or as a blended, as a merged set of Indiana and Purdue programs, the only fair description was that Lafayette and Bloomington were light years ahead of Indianapolis in some respects, but certainly not with respect to the health sciences, both in terms of their stature as professional programs, and in their research. Now, shift ahead to 1986, to quite a few years.

By that time, events totally secular to the politics of the higher education of Indiana, where was, where were the major sources of research funding in the United States? National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, so on and SO on and SO on.

ZUBKE:

Ah, O.K.

RYAN:

And who should be surprised, in fact...and certainly who should be disappointed to find that the Indianapolis faculty was attracting as much, nearly as much at least, maybe even more, research funding as the research scientists in the Bloomington campus, who were also attracting a great deal more than they had at the time of the merger.

So it certainly was never planned that for some policy reason, one campus would surpass another campus, but we caught... we caught both at a a different time in the history of each and what's happened over the last twenty-five years is the result of reactions of each campus to the secular happenings in research funding, in enrollment, in the choice of professional or other majors by students. I mean, once we launched IUPUI, it became a craft floating on the same rapids as West Lafayette and Bloomington. The crafts were bigger or smaller or put together differently, destinations are the same. The highest possible quality, the best kind of work serving the needs of the State of Indiana, and now twenty-five years down the road, I think everybody would agree that IUPUI is a major player. That's what we wanted and don't know that I could make an assessment that one surpasses another, *cause IUPUI will never be a clone of Bloomington. Bloomington certainly will never be a clone of IUPUI, neither will ever be clones of West Lafayette, and that's really, perhaps, the best way in which our overall system serves the State of Indiana.

ZUBKE:

So each has their individual personalities yet part of the system. I like the analogy or the description of launching IUPUI. That does appear to fit. In our preinterview, I had talked about, although it's a semantic type of thing, but would you call JUPUI a merger, a co-location, a clone, we've just said it wasn't a clone, what would you call IUPUI then?

RYAN:

A word escapes me, but maybe a few words will describe what I see it. And what I see today is what hoped these twenty-five years ago, that we would see. It's not a of Indiana and Purdue, because Indiana and Purdue aren't merged. It's not a colony merger

of Indiana and Purdue. It's more like the joining that occurs when two powerful families join through marriage. What's created at IUPUI is distinct and separate from either Lafayette or Bloomington, but because of the nature of the structure and the organization, and now twenty-five years of history, there is a linkage, not only between IUPUI and Indiana, and JUPUI and Purdue, and between Indiana and Purdue, that is extremely valuable, that did not pre-exist this arrangement that started in 1969, that is unique in the country, as far as I know it's unique in the world, that will last as long as it is beneficial to the people in all of these settings, in Lafayette and in Indianapolis and in Bloomington. When it it stops being beneficial, somebody will come along and say we've got to change it, and they will

ZUBKE:

You used my next question, somewhat,

wanted you to take a look at, if you…how you would define IUPUI as being unique. You mentioned unique in the country and perhaps the world, based on how it was created. Do you see IUPUI unique in other ways?

RYAN:

I think that what hasn't happened yet, at least it's not very visible, it's going to happen, all of the forces are in play underneath the surface. IUPUI is going to be a channel to the major research campuses in West Lafayette and in Bloomington and to some extent, other campuses in the country. It's going to be a channel of energy and initiative because of its geographic location, and the economic, financial, political, and geographic center of our state. Each year that goes by, as IUPUI becomes a bigger player in the metropolitan area of Indianapolis, it enables Lafayette and Bloomington to become bigger players in the metropolitan area of Indianapolis. That's good for Lafayette and Bloomington; it's good for Indianapolis.

ZUBKE:

So that channel then is defined as part of the metropolitan growth of Indianapolis as it attracts world business and world...

RYAN:

Well, in so many ways. I mean, Indianapolis is the location, it's where our decisions are made. It's…for over two hundred years, it's where our..or almost two hundred, well, over two hundred years, it's where our... where representatives have come from all over the state to decide among themselves what are the important problems of the state and do something about it. For twenty-five years, Indianapolis has been a location, where if you want to call it that, representatives have come from the universities of our state.

Well, it's been easier, it was possible before, but it's been easier and more logical for graduate students to go to Indianapolis from other campuses in order to do their dissertation research, to work out their internships, to do their fieldwork, or upon graduation to get their jobs and so forth. And the more Indianapolis grows.. the campus grows and develops, the more this advantage flows from the center, financial, commercial, economic, political, media center, it's the center of everything. The more the strength of that flows to these other there was campuses to their benefit. But one of the things I noticed so many years ago, was a kind of a…there was more than there is now of an in-turning in Indianapolis because absent something like IUPUI, people in Indianapolis had only the old-school-tie kind of relationship with their schools, whether they be Yale and Princeton or Stanford, or Purdue and Michigan and Iowa, and Indiana. With IUPUI there, there is again the connection is made between Bloomington and Lafayette for the leadership of these important segments of society, the connection's made between them and whatever it is they want and need from a university, new programs of training, research programs, marketing programs, statistical analysis, whatever. Now, I don't say that expect an avalanche tomorrow, I just have the..I look around and I see higher education, and public higher education in Indiana is more on the mind, and more constructively on the mind, of leadership I know in Indianapolis today than was true twenty-five years. And I think that the way we've gone about producing a university in Indianapolis, which is a better way than any alternatives that were proposed, is partly responsible.

ZUBKE:

Do you see IUPUI as about as big as it can get, current enrollment around 25, 26,000, from a physical point of view. We're bounded by water and major streets. Do you see any other visionary aspects of the growth of IUPUI?

RYAN:

No. I..it's certainly not as big as it can get. It's not as big as it's going to get. It may not be...it may well be that the future, I'm talking twenty-five years down the road, holds out the prospect of satellites, in other words, Indianapolis isn't as big as it's gonna get. And there's no reason to think that its university is as big as it's gonna get. But Indianapolis isn't going to get bigger, solely at least, by building bigger buildings in the center of the city. It's getting bigger because of Noblesville, and Zionsville, and Carmel, and Southport, and whatnot, and I I certainly would not rule out the possibility of modern, I mean really ultra-modern, we don't even have it yet, kinds of IUPUI locations beyond where the current campus is. And what I mean by modern is, developed in the knowledge and the science of distance learning and so on. In other words, not necessarily classrooms and professors' offices and so on. I don't think that...I think what we will find is that the current technology we know about, and the kind of technology we expect to come along, will not eliminate the desirability and the need for student to associate with other student, student to associate with professor, but that needn't happen in a traditional classroom, in a traditional way. And I think Indianapolis will actually, it's already...already has people thinking about how to do this in unique ways that will electrify the rest of the country.

ZUBKE:

You mentioned IUPUI being unique and so on, and I had next on the list, since you were President of IU, that you had served as interim President of Florida Atlantic University, University of Maryland, and the State University of New York, and now the President... Chancellor of the State University of New York. How would you compare IUPUI and or IU with the other schools that you have served as interim president?

RYAN:

Gee, that's... in some ways that's hard to do, because both the background and the structure of each of those institutions is so different. There's some fundamental similarities between the State University of New York and the way Indiana has chosen, the state of Indiana, has chosen to develop its system. And by that, a fundamental similarity Iwould say is some degree of institutional specialization. It's too much a generalization to say that Purdue is a technology, agriculture, science institution and Indiana is humanities or whatever somebody said. But there's no question about it, that there are emphases in one campus that are not duplicated to that degree in another campus. And the State University of New York was, from the beginning, built that way. And I think that's a strength in Indiana and I think it's a strength in New York. In Florida, there are now ten universities and there is no such differentiation. They don't all have law schools, and So on, but there's a good…and they don't have all...all have medical schools, but there's a good deal of expression, evidence, manifestation there that a university is everything. And you can bet there'll be more medical schools, and more law schools among the universities in Florida.

And I..and that's fine, I suppose, if you're Florida, with, you know, a huge population, hugely wealthy state. It's probably fine for California, which is where the way they do it in Texas which is the way they do it in Florida which is the way they do it. One could say well, therefore, why not New York? Because New York is smarter than that. And I do think that the Indiana way, the New York way, is the better way to maximize the efficiency of use of public resources, to produce all of the aspects of higher education at the highest possible quality.

ZUBKE:

And yet, having attended IUPUI, sometimes I feel frustrated that I can't get some of the same things that I might be able to get at a residential campus like Bloomington.

For example a Ph.D. in history because the master level is the ceiling at IUPUI. So your statement that, compared to other states, it depends first of all, it's the situation about what each state wants to do with its funding, and maybe based on its size of its population as it meets the needs and has to provide a lot of duplication in different parts of the state. Earlier you had mentioned with Massachusetts, with Amherst and Boston, there seemed to be some similarities between Amherst which is smaller, as compared to the larger city of Boston. Is there any other similarities between Amherst and Boston that, that pattern or parallel the growth between Bloomington and Indianapolis?

RYAN:

Oh, I suppose there are some, but there's so many differences that they cause the similarities to pale. And the overarching differences that in Massachusetts, as in much of New England, public institutions are not recognized as either the indispensable or the highest quality element of higher education. Private institutions are. And now that difference has modified a small bit in the last twenty-five years, but not much, not enough. Here in the state of Indiana, there just is no question of the respect that the citizens hold for their public institutions. And rightfully so. But Hoosiers can have a great deal of respect for something and not be wanting to put a lot of their money into it, and that's why I think that before, you know, you want to be sure that you have covered the waterfront with Ph.D. programs generally before you duplicate any one of them in more than one place. And that means that the last cousin to come to the dinner table may be the last one to get the second Ph.D.

program in history or chemistry or something. I think this is more likely to be true in the social sciences, anyway, because I would not hesitate to make a case for replication of Ph.D.

programs in Indianapolis in any of the areas where there is a demonstrated local, applied need, and of course, in the social sciences, we have such replication, in social work, in economics, and so on and SO on, where there is a current and insistent clamor.

That's not to say that as

society we don't need political science or history or anthropology Ph.D.s, just as much, or intellectual welfare. We've got to cross the practical bridge first and then we'll cross the intellectual bridge second, and in the meantime, as long as we have a first-rate, internationally respected Ph.D. program somewhere, we are serving the state of Indiana. But if you live in Seymour, Indiana, and you want a Ph.D. program, you can't drive from Seymour to Columbus to get it, you have to drive to Bloomington or someplace else, and if you need to, live there to do it and it is an inconvenience to the individual but it's a huge benefit to the state. It enables the state to do so much more for everybody and so the individual is..the way I kind of look at it, and naturally not everybody is sympathetic to it, the way I kind of look at it is that it is a great deal of inconvenience to the families of this state to pay taxes to pay for whatever we do in the university, so we're not unethical or immoral to accept inconvenience to the students and faculty in the university in order to serve those people. [interview ended]

This is the second interview with Dr. John Ryan, former President of the Indiana University.

Today's date is June 10, 1997. This interview is again being conducted on the campus of Bloomington, Indiana, in the SPEA Building, Room 316. My name is David Zubke. I am the graduate research assistant conducting the interview. The oral history of IUPUI is funded by Campus Administration and will become one of the many sources used by Dr.

Ralph Gray to write the history of IUPUI, to be published in the near future.

ZUBKE:

Good morning, Dr. Ryan.

RYAN:

Good morning.

ZUBKE:

Yesterday we had discussed the growing enrollment of Indiana University as well as other universities in the '50s and the '60s time period. What were some of the causes of this sudden interest in higher education or the high enrollments at the time?

RYAN:

Well, I think there were a number of factors that affected Indiana University's enrollment. One was as we developed the system, and the several campuses, particularly the Indianapolis campus, but South Bend, Fort Wayne, and so on, the availability, let's say the accessibility of higher education,

think stimulated families to take advantage of it, to think about college and take advantage of it. But also it it became more available, or available for the first time, for persons in employment to elect to attend college as... because they could work it into their schedule, whereas if they worked someplace in the state and were confronted with the need to come to Lafayette or to Bloomington or some such place, they couldn't do it. So those factors were what you might call secular factors. Main factor was an increase in the population and the cohort, if you will, coming through the K through 12 education, and the change in the direction of relatively higher numbers of the cohort actually graduating from high school and the awareness that there was a substantial difference over the course of one's lifetime in one's income earning capacity and so forth, if one had a college degree. All those things stimulated, the main thing I think was an increase in numbers of students coming out of the K through 12 system.

ZUBKE:

Could you compare Indiana University's approach to handling that enrollment compared to other states at the time, in their systems?

RYAN:

Well, we all had the same statistics and the same statistical projections, and as think I indicated yesterday, at Indiana we...each system anywhere in the country, had to decide would they try to meet the demand or not? In most cases, they decided yes they would. Would they try to meet the demand by expanding the existing faculty, the existing campus structure, or creating new ones? And in our case, we decided to create new ones.

That's how the regional campuses system developed, both with Indiana and Purdue. And in a sense I think that explains the growth and development of Ball State and Indiana State Universities, and certainly the creation of Southeast Indiana or whatever it is down there in Evansville. And then another factor that is not huge but it is a contributing factor, was the contemporary... contemporaneous development of the Ivy Tech system. Because while Ivy Tech was, and still is, a technology-training, skills-development institution, intended to reflect and meet the needs of industry for trained people for economic development progress in the state, it it was intended to be that. It is that, but not very far into the history of the institution, it developed a fairly sizable segment of what we might call basic, lower division academic preparation in English, math, so on. So that we were, in various places, getting transfers of these persons who had completed that part of the Ivy Tech program, perhaps decided against heating and air conditioning technology or some other kind of technology, that came over into a more traditional, baccalaureate type program. And so that the existence of the technology program increased the college... the post-secondary enrollment and then the...that made for a a pool of persons from which some came into the more tradition baccalaureate... traditional baccalaureate programs.

The...of course, I haven't... it's been quite a long time, and what I'm telling you is what I remember of how the situation looked to us at that time. We did try, and I have no idea what the current arrangement is, but in my years, we tried very hard to articulate with, to coordinate with Ivy Tech programs, and of course, we always supported, I did personally and Indiana University's policy was to support the Freedom of Choice program of the State of Indiana, which allocated funds to assist students who wanted to go to a private school, which costs more than a public school, to be able to finance that. Now the same…there was a…at the same time, for persons meeting income tests and SO on, funds from that same program supporting students who choose to come to public schools. Now those, if they were eligible for the Freedom of Choice program, they could be funded whether they went to private or public schools. The amount of money for a student choosing a private school was more than the public school, because the amount of tuition and books and so forth was higher for an independent college than for Indiana. But we always felt, and said, and testified to the legislature that that program should be fully funded because we felt the university was better off having the students who wanted to be there because they wanted to be there, not because they couldn't afford to be someplace else.

ZUBKE:

You also mentioned yesterday that if there was

lack of controlled growth on the part of, let's say, IU and Purdue's campus, that that could result in a change of the basic character of IU and Purdue. Would you define or explain what you mean by basic character?

RYAN:

Well, I suppose similar words could be tradition or history, or the kind of the sociology of the campus. I can't speak of Purdue, I was never a student at Purdue. But I was a student at Indiana University and from that day to the...to my last day in the president's office, I felt that many, many, many students at Indiana were there because they found association with other students from Indiana, [word inaudible] other students from all around the world of course, other students from Indiana and they knew, either because they explicitly knew it or they just felt it, that the rest of their lives, in whatever they were going to do, teach, or work in business or be medical doctors or nurses, or whatever, engineers, whatever they were going to do, they would benefit from, and they would appreciate the association they made on the campus and they expected that. I think to achieve that requires a certain human scale. Now you might say, when you get to 35,000 students, or 32,000 students, you've already lost the battle. And indeed that may be so, but it... there has to be a difference of scale, talking about 30,000 students versus 50, or 60,000 students. And there were Big Ten schools, Wisconsin, Ohio State, others, that really didn't concern themselves with just how many they had. I mean the problem of size was to be met by having enough classrooms and laboratories and faculty members. And we added into that set of discrete requirements, preserving to the extent we could, the essence of what Indiana University was like twenty, and thirty, and fifty years before then and when I I came here in 1952, there were about 11,000 students. When I became president, there were about twice that many. That great increase in numbers didn't change what I observed to be the character of the campus.

don't know how big you can get before you lose that particular element, but I don't.. but we didn't want to lose it and we didn't get, when I left office I think we were about 31, or 32,000 students and I felt that we were still O.K.

ZUBKE:

Also yesterday, you had mentioned, when I asked the question about who [knock on door] When I reviewed the tape from yesterday, I had asked a question about who mentioned a authored, or whose idea it was to marry Purdue and IU at Indianapolis, and you catalyst person, and it wasn't clear to me, you were referring to President Hovde as the

RYAN:

Yeah, President Hovde was the catalyst person, not because he went into the meeting intending to be so, but because of his sort of. being... the moment and the stimulus and the persons coming together, I think he gave voice, really, to something that had probably been rolling around in his head, that of others at Purdue, and people at Indiana for a long time, but had not been given voice, had not been articulated. So while I don't think you can say that President Hovde decided that there should be a merger, a marriage of Indiana and Purdue in Indianapolis, he decided a basic change needed to be made, and Indiana University people were very sympathetic to the idea, a basic change needed to be made.

When he said what he said, and did what he did, then people got to work figuring out what basic change, and that's where the marriage came from.

ZUBKE:

You also mentioned yesterday, a couple of times, the Commission on Higher Education, which was created believe in the early...

RYAN:

'68 or '9, no, no 72.

ZUBKE:

Early '70s?

RYAN:

Yeah, '72 or '3.

ZUBKE:

What did the Commission on Higher Education replace, or was there no [word inaudible] before then?

RYAN:

There was nothing that it replaced. It was an added layer on the system, that

ZUBKE:

And its purpose was?

RYAN:

Well I think coordination, its purpose was to offer a..an arms-length sort of, no special interest coordination of higher education development in Indiana. You say what did it replace and I said nothing. Well, it replaced an informal scheme whereby the four universities at that time, Indiana, Purdue, Ball State, and Indiana State, which had informally dealt with issues as they came up and arrived at consensus positions to present to the governor and the legislature. That didn't stop, in fact I'm sure it still exists, that the presidents and their chief officers talk to each other about things, but the Higher Education Commission became the place where official coordination, messages were developed and given to the legislature and the governor relative to budget and appropriations for higher education, relative to development, expansion of education programs, the creation of new education sites and institutions. And also, or in order to enable the Higher Education Commission to do this, it became...it developed a staff of persons gathering data about issues of significance in the higher education in Indiana, analyzing the data, making reports to the institutions or to the legislature and the governor, or to the general public and so on.

ZUBKE:

I want to spend some time discussing just a few excerpts from the book Being Lucky by Herman B. Wells, believe published in 1980 or 1981. Dr. Wells commented that fundamental difference between his earlier administration and future administrations, such as yours, was that, and I quote, "The great proliferation of federal and state legislation affecting universities, along with the growth of both state and federal regulations circumscribing nearly every activity of the university." End of quote. Is that a fair assessment, as time has developed, in the role of universities and government?

RYAN:

Well, there's no question about it. In his day, there was almost no federal involvement at all. But as student loan programs, as the higher education. the National Higher Education Defense Act, or something like that, under which funds were appropriated for capital construction on campuses.

mean one thing after another came along, and also in the Civil Rights legislation and gender equity legislation, or court decisions which generated Washington agency involvement with campuses and report of data had to be kept, reports submitted, regulations were created and compliance had to be verified, and all of this came subsequent to Dr. Wells, who left office in 1962. The...much of it came after I left office, or certainly halfway into my office, and so, yes it was really quite different.

Secondly, and I don't know how relevant this is, certainly I think it's not widely known, Indiana, as a a state, was very wise in allowing a great deal of discretion and autonomy to its universities to develop and to manage themselves. Many states then, and even today, have very restrictive limitations on university discretion and autonomy, in purchasing areas and appointing personnel, in developing the campus...the long-range plans, and building buildings, I mean just very, very restrictive regulations, and processes, procedures, which : think add to the costs, diminish the potential for leadership. I think one of the reasons Indiana has seen Purdue and Indiana University develop as the premier institutions they are is that Indiana let people who knew what they were doing, do it, and many other states have not done that. So what Herman Wells is saying there, is that even Indiana began to place...to set into place limitations and restrictions that weren't there before but even SO, even though that's happened, today we're still infinitely better off than some other states.

ZUBKE:

Coupled with that, I want to focus for a moment on state legislation, primarily the general assembly and funding. How would you describe the general assembly and its funding of IU during your tenure as president?

RYAN:

Well, it was up and down. I felt there was always a residual, small minority unsympathetic to what they would describe as generous funding of higher education. And they had their reasons, but from time to time...but always, session after session after session, on both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican, and the Higher Education Commission...the Committees, and the Budget Committees, the Ways and Means Committees, there was always a preponderance of support for the universities. That does not mean a preponderance, or even any, support of a knee-jerk sort, every session it was necessary for the universities to be meticulous in presenting the case, presenting the needs, and defending and justifying their needs. And from time to time, it became necessary to illustrate again, the connection between what a university, let's say Indiana University, did and what the state needed, economically, intellectually, and artistically and so forth. So we always had to be alert to presenting the university in the best light. But we were presenting such a case to a group, most of whom were prepared to be supportive, prepared to be affirmative, prepared to be positive.

ZUBKE:

Another excerpt from Being Lucky regarding the development of extension centers, with later drives toward autonomy of these extension centers, we discussed a little bit yesterday even, Dr. Wells felt that there was a a balance, and I quote, "Between the aspirations of all its campuses and the realities of state funding." end of quote. Now of course, he's referring, more than likely, to his time period. Would that be a fair assessment of later administrations, including your own, that there was a balance between the two?

RYAN:

I don't know about a balance. Our regional campuses, some of them go back to 1914 and 1916. They were established for a purpose, in those days, and in fact, if you go back, I think, to the Constitution of 1856, or something like that, maybe in the 1880s in Indiana, but I think it was 1856, there is a requirement that the Indiana, the faculty of Indiana University visit every county once

year, for purposes of education, by which they meant give a lecture or something in a a church or in a hall. So from very early on, after all the university was founded in 1820, so it wasn't very old when this evidence, that the state expected to see the university visibly involved all over the state, was put into place. And Indiana University has tried to comply with that ever since, certainly Purdue University has, with the Cooperative Extensions system and so forth. I mean the universities are everywhere in the state doing things that, hopefully, are relevant to everybody in the state.

But as eras come and go, every so often, ten years, twenty years, fifteen years, times change, the environment changes, the economy changes, the social picture changes, technology changes, the world changes, and these entities established for one purpose are still there. Regional campuses still there, an institute is still there, and so you should expect, and indeed it happens, that the institutions change what they do as situations and environment and needs change.

So I would think, through most of Dr. Wells's time, after all he became president in 1937, very shortly thereafter, all the students went, well, all the males went off to war, and there certainly was not much urgency about doing anything about those campuses that had been out there since 1916 and 1918 and which had..or the ones we picked up during the Great Depression years like the East Chicago campus, which was a municipally funded thing that the municipality couldn't fund any more and asked us to take over. True also some entities in Indianapolis that just wouldn't... weren't about to make it through the 1930 to 1950 period, such as the Law School, such as the Medical School, such as the Turnverein and the National Association of Gymnastic Union or something like that, which is what I call a Turnverein, which became the kernel, the core of the Physical Education School here in Indianapolis.

Times changed and so in Indianapolis the matrix, the mosaic of what is there now came about for different reasons. By the time the males came back from their wartime duty, there were an awful lot of them. We had in place capacity to deal with students and needed it, because we couldn't possibly accommodate in Bloomington, the GI's, all of them. So that new perspective, maybe even a new life to these campuses. When everybody had a gave

chance to catch his breath, say, in the 50s, as we...the GI wave sort of diminished and we didn't have the baby boom wave yet, the campuses that had had to develop themselves to meet the post-war demand, were made up of people of professional, scholarly capacity, ambition for themselves, were located in communities that saw the great economic and social and artistic benefit to the community of having them and so forth. So that's what Herman is saying, that there is a natural and laudable desire on the part of people, and especially strong in Indiana communities, to have what a university offers. The desire and the need, shouldn't surprise anybody, outstrip the availability of resources and the willingness to allocate resources sufficient to, say duplicate a Bloomington or West Lafayette in ten or twelve places in the state of Indiana. So what about in my day? The die was cast when the policy decision was made to develop credible, educational alternatives outside of Bloomington.

That meant assiduously developing the resources it took to...

ZUBKE:

Can I stop you here? Sorry. [tape ended]

RYAN:

...assiduously developing the resources required to provide on a campus the essential, substantive amenities, courses, support facilities and staff for a university. So while we did not, and do not, have a policy that we are going to replicate Bloomington any where else in the state of Indiana, we do have a policy of building elsewhere, on other campuses in the state of Indiana, what is essential to make of those places, quality academic institutions. But back to Herman's quotation, I'm sure it will always be true, as long as I live and even longer, that campuses including Bloomington will have justifiable expectations that will not be, we won't be able to fulfill completely because resources aren't going to be there to do it. We'll do what is necessary to have quality, credible, respectable institutions but we won't be able to do everything everybody wants us to do.

ZUBKE:

Dr. Wells praised specifically your deep involvement, and I quote "in overseas technical assistance and other international programs." end of quote. Why did you have that kind of emphasis?

RYAN:

Well, again, a mixture of reasons. First of all, my varied Ph.D. research and interest was in comparative matters that involved comparing American experience with experience elsewhere. Secondly, in my junior faculty years and through my presidency, the national welfare and the national security of my country was served by having universities deeply involved in the economic development and consequent security of nations, especially friendly nations, abroad. Third,

felt that universities, and I've said this in several places during the coldest of the communist period, I felt universities were one element common to the communist and non-communist world where association, collaboration, involvement was possible in spite of the political problems between the governments of the countries. Indeed there was a time in our relationships with Poland where the Polish government would not accept the designated ambassador from the United States, and a good deal of informal communication occurred simply through the Polish Studies Center here in Indiana University and the American Studies at the University of Warsaw. I don't mean high-level national policy but a communication was kept alive, and I felt that was in the service not simply of our country but of our world, that every step we could take of that kind of communication was a a step in the direction of maintaining the peace and eventually leading to a relaxation or even an elimination of the stress.

I'd like to say that therefore I predicted the end of the communist empire and the coming down of the Berlin Wall; I didn't predict anything of the kind and I was shocked and stunned and, of course, very pleased when it happened. Although I do think that the kind of work we did here at Indiana University, along with many other universities, was supportive of and energizing of the kind of thing that ultimately caused the Soviets to rethink their own national policy, and their own international outlook and international policy.

But the. there was another very important set of reasons. Indiana University is a, on all of its campuses taken together or any one of them individually, is a Hoosier institution. It belongs to the people of Indiana, most of its students are from Indiana, and should be and I think always will be, and on our campuses, along with the campuses of the other public and private schools in this state, we're developing tomorrow's leadership in Indiana.

And I I think we have a twin obligation. One is to develop and carry forward the values that are deep in the roots of the people of Indiana, the kind of thing the student brings to the campus with him or her. The other is to bring to the consciousness of those young Hoosiers a greater sense of the world, the big world out there made up of people who have really very contrary values, or no values at all, whose experiences are different, but who make up the part… the world in which Hoosiers are gonna live, they're gonna have to be successfully competitive in commercial terms, or in value terms, in political terms, in social terms. And one can't expect automatically, O.K. expect that to happen automatically, and one can't expect that to happen just by reading books, or even listening to lectures from people who know about it. And so we put great emphasis and support into study abroad programs, into international exchange programs, into economic development programs, and into programs that brought foreign students here and enabled our students to study abroad.

Does that mean everybody, every student at Indiana studies abroad somewhere? No. It does mean that, if not everyone, certainly most everyone who wants to, can find an opportunity to do it. It's not an easy thing for the student to do because the main...one main plank in our program for study abroad, is that the study be done in the language of the area to which the student goes. So students have to learn a language here to a a level that enables them to study in that language, in Spain, or in Germany, or in France, or wherever but and I suppose there's a great deal more I could say about the international side, I think it was a very practical policy decision on my part that Indiana University itself needed, its students needed to know about the rest of the world and they needed to know about it in ways not discoverable through reading books and going to classes alone.

ZUBKE:

Would this explain then some of your trips during your tenure? You went to Moscow, I believe in '75, as part of the International Association of Universities Conference, and also a tour of Chinese universities several years later. Was that part of your stress on international affairs, so to speak?

RYAN:

Well each... Certainly, I mean it was.I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't felt the way I did about the importance of the international dimension. But each of these trips or programs had its own special set of interests. The meeting in China was, first of all, to become familiar with the presidents of Chinese universities. The Chinese government had developed a policy of identifying twenty-five key universities and I felt Indiana University ought to be in communication with, if not all twenty-five, at least some of those. Out of the thousand universities in China, the ones we ought to be dealing with...at least some of those we dealt with, should be among that group, so a handful of us from the U.S., president of Johns Hopkins, the president of Vanderbilt, the president of Cornell, the president of UCLA, and so on, and I, met with a like number of Chinese counterparts but so that we both learned more about each other. On the American side we could learn is it possible to do business with these institutions, are they interested in us, do they have anything of interest to us, and out of that came, I think, an extremely valuable program of association where graduate students from Chinese institutions would come to one of our places where we had an to receive this Chinese graduate student into internationally noted scholar who was willing

his laboratory or his classroom or whatever, under his tutelage, so that that Chinese student could do his research and finish his dissertation, receive a degree from, let's say, Indiana University, Ph.D. and return to China to this key university, in a very key role. When he, since the first half of his doctoral education would have been completed in China, he would receive a Chinese degree also. Why was that important? It was important because the Chinese were very anxious not to have it appear that the best Chinese students wouldn't take Chinese degrees, so it was important to me to, in effect, save face that way for them. It was important to us if we were going to deal with Chinese research scholars, that we deal with the best they had. And this seemed to satisfy both of those requirements. So that's why we went to China. The I.A. U., the International Association of Universities, meets once every five years. In those days, the only way you could predictably meet with presidents of universities behind the Iron Curtain, was at the I.A.U.. And so if you wanted to get an idea of what was going on in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia itself, Latvia, Estonia, and so on, the only way to do that was at a meeting like the I.A.U. meeting, and the first one I attended was in Moscow in nineteen seventy something or other, '75 I think, and in 1980 we had a similar meeting, I think, in Manilla, I think it was in Manilla. I may have gone to three but I recall only going to two, I missed the one in Canada, so. But the reason there was to, first of all, to enable the United States to have, with a little luck, the Olympics, enable the United States to have a delegation that represented the United States well in this international scene. And also in support of the British Commonwealth Universities group and the European Rectors group, who sent delegations and So forth, it was important to be sure the United States was involved in these sort of leadership circles in higher education. So, but yes, those and there were many other things that I did, usually at the invitation either of the foreign government or some foundation here to keep stretching our thinking, our imagination about what kind of international role a United States public university should play, in general, and in particular what should Indiana University do.

ZUBKE:

So you see this international development then, on various levels, internationally, nationally, academically, and so on, for you to represent IU. Did this also stimulate any of your budget or your economy here at the institution with business, with the ties that you are now creating, or was it it purely the...more of the academic levels?

RYAN:

Well it was primarily academic. Because Indiana University, then and now, is a major U.S. center for what we call area study programs, and these are...these deal with the history, and the arts, and the economics, and SO forth, the sociology of areas of Europe, and Middle East, and Far East, and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and so forth. It was always primarily centered on these academic studies, as I think it should be, and is today.

But all along the way, we recognized that we should, and we wanted, to find points of relevance with Indiana business activity, for example, and virtually every one of our centers and institutes and so on have their own unique contacts with export and import business interests in the state of Indiana, and in the country as a whole. So we...we've always tried to, and not simply, well, not only that, but also with respect to the secondary school system, with grants to teachers of social studies and teachers of languages and so forth, that are international activities, involving our own faculty, found a a way, in some way or other, to the edification, the development of teachers in the school systems of the state of Indiana. And we also developed, oh, into my presidency, the roots of our American Studies program, the idea that we should be prepared to draw on our experience of what we think we need to know about other areas, and use that as a pattern for carrying such information, such education about America to other places in the world that want it, and believe me, they all want it.

It's amazing, and I had a very special reason for wanting to do this, and from the very beginning it involved Indianapolis and Bloomington faculty members in the mix. The very special reason I had for doing it was that

felt that our international activities would thrive only if everybody on the faculty felt included in, or at least eligible to be included in. And the persons upon whom you would draw for an American Studies program are people who would likely not be involved in a a Spanish studies programs, or a Middle East studies program, and so forth. They would be persons expert in American literature, the American economy, the American business community, journalism, American history, and so on. And by having American Studies programs abroad, we could make opportunities available for a semester, a year, two years, to faculty persons who, in some other university, wouldn't even think of themselves as doing what they do, abroad.

thought it was extremely helpful to Indiana University to have an opportunity to have such overseas experience for our faculty, because that enriched our own campuses back here at home, and increased the level of support among faculty members for the idea of international activity.

ZUBKE:

So this wasn't just an IU, Bloomington scope, it also would then affect your...the regional campuses as well?

RYAN:

Absolutely, and in fact, we had a a global studies kind of program, the headquarters of which is located on the Fort Wayne campus. We, because of the universitywide school concept that we talked about, in terms of the 1974 reorganization of the university, a program that required specialists, let's say, in business administration, where we provide people, say, to Ljubljana, in Slovenia, or to Singapore, wherever, Shanghai, those persons might come from Fort Wayne, they might come from Gary, they might come from Indianapolis, they might come from Bloomington, in fact they would come from all of those places. So it was…I thought it was...I think it was a d necessary sinew of a system that was integrated but it was also a necessity because after all, our first chore is to do the work here at home. And you can't take six or eight professors out of the School of Business or the School of Education or something here in Bloomington and think that it's not going to be a real problem, so you have access to a broader group. In the larger sense, that's what MUCIA offered, the Midwest University Consortium on International Affairs. Initially it was made up of four Big Ten Schools, the fifth was soon added, now all Big Ten schools belong.

ZUBKE:

You followed right into my next major group of... of line of questioning. You have a long list of committee membership in various agencies that I wanted to address, first of all, what they are and then their reaction or their interaction with IU, Bloomington but also IUPUI. You mentioned the Midwest Consortium for International Activities, what about the United States Agency for International Development? What was the purpose of this particular organization?

RYAN:

Well, it's a..the State Department of the United States, which has the responsibility for the external affairs and defense and security of the United States has essentially three parts. It has the diplomatic part, it has the propaganda part which is the what do they call it...the United States Information Agency, and it has the economic development, delivery of goods and services part, which is the A.I.D. [U.S. Agency for International Development]. So it's a government agency. It's a a government agency, however, that does most of what it does through other people, so it's kind of a nucleus and they work out contracts with private contractors, with universities, with...

ZUBKE:

So a broad spectrum, not just universities themselves, but a cross-section RYAN:

That's right. Oh, yes, in fact there's a huge industry in Washington, D.C.

that…comprised of consultant firms that do the work that A.I.D. needs to have done,  and A.I.D. manages them.

ZUBKE:

Are you still on this, or associated with this group, or was this...?

RYAN:

Well, I was never associated…I was in communication with A.I.D. for many kinds of projects. We'd send... they would contract with us to send a person or a team various places. However when I left the presidency, I spent, oh, a year and

half or so, on a part-time basis, at A.I.D. helping the administrator, who had been a president of the University of Nebraska, with a special project developing democratic processes in newly liberated central and eastern European countries. At...so I... that's..in fact, that only...not only is the only formal association involvement, internal involvement I had with A.I.D., it's the only internal involvement ] ever had with any government agency, state or federal.

ZUBKE:

What was the role of the National Advisory Board on International Educational Programs?

RYAN:

That is a committee of the National Association of State Universities Land Grant Colleges that was an attempt to bring into focus, international….the interests of member universities in international involvement and the expressed needs of other countries for university services, and primarily to develop an arsenal, that's not a very good term maybe, but a…an inventory, a warehouse, an index of capacities possessed by universities, because of the international involvement over the years, the international experience of their faculties. So that if the University of Delaware wanted, or had accepted, an obligation to carry out a program in Thailand, that the experience of, really, scores of Indiana University people in Thailand over the years, could be made known to the University of Delaware, and such people might be drawn upon by the University of Delaware, and so on.

ZUBKE:

Switching gears for a moment, I want to turn to sports. You were on the President's Commission of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

RYAN: Correct.

ZUBKE:

With that organization, but also a larger question, how do you see sports fitting in with the academic endeavors of a university?

RYAN:

Well, as with everything, it's

little more complex than that. I mean, the first answer to your question is, I think athletic activity, sport if if you will, is inseparable from a full-rounded education, really starting from very early in the elementary grades through at least undergraduate education. Because I think it's...it teaches...it is a way to teach, not the only way, to teach some important lessons to people as they develop, one is that they do develop, and you can start out being a total clod in soccer and you work away at it, and you become better and better and better. Or you quit, one or the other. But for health reasons, for diversion reasons, for recreation reasons, athletic activity, physical activity, I think, is a very important adjunct to a person's daily routine, especially in his maturing years.

ZUBKE:

Can I stop you here for a moment? Thank you. [tape ended]

RYAN:

But that's athletic activity and if we, in general, if we narrow it down a little bit to the college years, and the college students, and hold on to the principle I advanced that it's very important to make...to have this available to students, we're talking about all students and therefore, we're talking about recreational sports activity, and Indiana University has always been devoted to that. That really, that there is...there are physical facilities and other supports available for students who want to swim, or play tennis, or jog, or play basketball, or whatever they want to do. Again, it helps them discipline themselves, use their time well, develop a better comprehension of what teamwork is and how important teamwork can be to human activity and so forth. And it reinforces the same kind of teamwork development in classroom and so on.

But we get to the NCAA, which deals only with intercollegiate athletics. And intercollegiate athletics involves

tiny fraction of the student body in a campus this size.

But it's extremely important again, not so much, unfortunately, because of what the campus decides as its importance, as the outside world, television, newspapers, the general public, alumni are great consumers of intercollegiate athletic activity. The students involved in it love it. Some students involved in it come to school just so they can be in intercollegiate athletic activity. Some students come to school, are able to come to school only because of the intercollegiate activity and the athletic grants that go along with that. But because there is such an external, such a pressure, set of pressures, complex of pressures, external to the university, in this particular area of university activity, it's extremely important and difficult for the university to maintain university standards of behavior, and university standards of accountability, of control, in the area. And that's where the NCAA comes in. The NCAA, whatever the sport is, the rules, and that is the rules of course, manages the sport as a sport,

of play, and the eligibility of athletes and so forth.

But the NCAA also reached a a point, was very really created to assist universities to control intercollegiate athletics. And things weren't going very well in this regard for quite a long period of time and the presidents of the institutions recognized a a need to be more central to the management of the National Collegiate Athletic Association itself, and its rules making, and its rules enforcing, its compliance efforts. And that's really where the outcome of probably ten years worth of pulling and hauling about how to do this, was the creation of the Presidents Commission, of which : was the first chair, and we began a series of moves that we felt would strengthen the hand of the presidents in the organization and that strengthening of the hands of the presidents would strengthen the ability of the universities to take charge of and control their ...the operation of intercollegiate athletics. And think it it has worked. And now the Presidents Commission is being dissolved because the structure of the NCAA has been changed so that presidents make up the management of the NCAA, and up until this time, it has essentially not been presidents, there have been some presidents involved in their personal capacity, but it's been essentially athletic directors, faculty representatives and so forth. They are still very much involved, but the policy level is now presidential. And now, you know, presidents are human beings, like anybody else and I think eternal vigilance is going to be required for the association to do what it t must do, even in the hands of the presidents, but things have come a long way.

ZUBKE:

One of the reasons I asked the question was, IUPUI is looking at attaining Division One status in the NCAA as a way of establishing itself further as a university. Your opinion, do you think that's a wise move, to try to elevate itself?

RYAN:

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know simply because have not been involved enough to know all of the ingredients in such a a strategic decision, but it may very well be essential with certain elements of the population who rank universities in terms of their athletic publicity and their athletic achievements. Then it comes down to a judgment call; is that particular segment of public thinking central enough to advancing the reputation or the consideration, or the support of the university to warrant the cost and the difficulty of Division One status. But Indianapolis campus is big enough now and I think established enough and central enough to the life of central Indiana that, I...if I were there and not knowing any more about it than I do, I'd seriously consider Division One status. But there is Division Two and it's a very fine division, and Division Three. Institutions can actually maintain programs in all three levels, mean, you don't have to be only Division One.

ZUBKE:

Right, right.

RYAN:

But I would think Indianapolis would want to be Division One in basketball, in fact, I think maybe they are. The... where the decision usually gets the hardest is what do do about football, are you gonna have football, or not have football? And the reason is you

football is a very...it requires a huge investment. So.

ZUBKE:

But in this day and age of television receipts and exposure, I believe Indianapolis is looking at that exposure element. One way to do that is, right now, through their basketball program, and some other programs as compared to the football program.

Also in conjunction with sports and the image, do you feel that, although you've already mentioned somewhat, that maybe the cost is too much, who then should pay for the development of the athletic program?

RYAN:

Well, at Indiana University, it's always been the sport pays for itself. That is, ticket buyers, advertisers in programs, television revenue, conference revenue of one kind or another, in other words, there's never been any taxpayers' money used. And there's not been academic funds that the university used, or at least not in my day. Since... when I...one of the things

did was to require that the campus receive a payment for the tuition costs of an athlete. If the athlete had a grant, the grant had to be paid for by somebody, not the campus, not the campus academic program. And that's been done. And we've had enormously beneficial support from the athletic support groups and the alumni and, of course, it's up and down but here at Indiana, students buy their own tickets. You know, in an awful places have an athletic fee, and with that goes admission to sports contests. And maybe that used..that was the case here at one time, but not in my time, and not in my time as a student and not in my time as president.

ZUBKE:

Speaking of advertising for a a moment, sports does advertise a school because of the exposure. How else can a a school advertise what it does to enhance its prestige?

RYAN:

Well, of course there are many, many, many, many ways. I mean, it's a..it's almost an infinite variety of instances of how to do it. But essentially they are all versions of making the world in general and specific professions and businesses aware of the quality of your student body. Calling attention of the world at large to your programs and making contacts with the cognate groups, that is the School of Public and Environmental Affairs has a board of visitors made up of persons from every aspect of private industry and government that can make use of Environmental Science professors and students and Public Administration professors and students. So you...you... you... you follow all kinds of campaigns to call yourself to the attention of people who ought to know, and they want to know, and they may not know if you don't tell them. The...we haven't reached the point yet, at least not with everything, I think, where you take out an ad in the New York Times or something, and say here we are, Indiana University, although they do have an education section and many universities do that. So you make use of,

guess, of what I'd conclude with is, you do the best job you can of identifying the media that are out there and you make use of them, within the most constructive way.

ZUBKE:

You had mentioned at one time in the Indianapolis Star, in October of 1981, and I quote "The economic health of Indiana University is tied to the economic health of the state" end of quote. In what ways are they related?

RYAN:

Well, for the most basic way, like for example, if the economy is healthy, there's... the people pay taxes and the state has the money it it needs to provide us with our budget. And I'm sure, I don't really remember that quote, but putting the time….what it says together with the time it was said, the three basic ingredients of the Indiana economy were ailing. The automobile industry was in drastic shape and a a huge part of our economy is made up of little companies that supply the automobile industry. The agriculture was not robust and the other elements of Indiana's industry were suffering from a general malaise, nationally. And the...it was imperative,

thought, for the general public and for business, private industry, to not see Indiana University as a...an attractive ornament, but dispensable because it's not essential to the economic health of the state, but to see Indiana University as essential to improving all of these elements that were under stress. And in fact, the governor of the state, and the lieutenant governor of the state, formulated some initiatives, that were very wise that brought universities, Indiana, Purdue, Notre Dame, Indiana State, Ball State, into structures that would inform potential investors of ideas developed in laboratories on campuses, and would inform campuses and their research faculty of the willingness of people to invest in ideas. The outcome of which, hopefully, would develop additional economic activity, provide jobs, good jobs, bring about more prosperity in the state of Indiana, that's really what that....

ZUBKE:

Perhaps, this is also then coupled with the...a couple of articles that appeared in 1982 in the Indianapolis News, one of which was by Bill Pittman who was commenting that fewer comparable numbers of Hoosiers were in college related to the numbers of college-age students in other states with less populations. Was that because of that transition time between those other economies of the state, that usually had given jobs to young people without a a college education?

RYAN:

I don't know, I really don't know. I don't know where Bill got his figures from, for one thing. I would hazard a different guess, which is that Indiana has not developed an extensive junior college system and that college going in some other states, Illinois for example, if you look at the number of college students relative to the graduating high school class, you will always see more, because so many are in the first year, or even second year of the junior college that don't continue on anyway. And I I think if you were to look at some kind of measurement of four or five years after a high school class graduates, the proportion of our...of our population completing four or five years of education would compare favorably with other places.

ZUBKE:

So in looking at the stats, it isn't just the raw data of number of eligible versus number of individuals going to school, you're looking at the finished product, so to speak?

RYAN:

Well, I mean, you can. That is, I I think Bill was right in what he's... what he has written about the comparison, but and probably, not probably, certainly Indiana would be better off if a higher proportion of its high school graduates entered college. But that didn't mean in 1982, and it doesn't mean now, that you would have more college graduates as a result of that.

ZUBKE:

You mentioned Ivy Tech before. Do you see Ivy Tech, which now has somewhat expanded its, I guess, its original charter to more of a community college system, do you see that helping the cause for higher education in the state of Indiana or competing with schools like IU and IUPUI?

RYAN:

I don't see it as a problem, or I mean, as a disadvantage, from that point or view, and really it's presumptuous of me to give advice about Ivy Tech but the thing that I would watch is that it... that Ivy Tech doesn't get drawn away from its primary mission, which is skills development, technology development, current to Indiana industrial needs, and whatever else they do of an educational sort, you know, how can that be bad? It's obviously that's good. And frankly, I think that Ivy Tech sees it the same way. As I understand Ivy Tech leadership, they want to continue their role as a first-rate place bringing current technology and skill to the work force in Indiana that needs it, and the...whatever else they do is ancillary to doing that, that is not bad idea for a technician to have some collegelevel familiarity with literature and math and history and so forth. I think it's a good idea.

ZUBKE:

We have discussed a lot of general and some specific topics relative to IUPUI, do you have any somewhat concluding remarks regarding IU, Bloomington or IUPUI that we haven't really discussed, that you would like to make sure gets on tape?

RYAN:

I think I may be overly sanguine, but...or

may be seeing what I want to see, but what I do see, is a very healthy development of complementarity between the two don't see, in any broad way, unnecessary duplication in Indianapolis of campuses.

Bloomington programs. I think the stronger Bloomington becomes in its strength areas, the better that is for Indianapolis; I think Indianapolis thinks that too. Even more important, I think that the stronger Indianapolis becomes in its strength areas, including new ones that have just begun to develop, the better that is for the Bloomington campus and frankly, the better it is for West Lafayette. And I think that that's...my... you'll detect my bias when I that's because we started out doing it the right way, and we've stuck to that. I think that say,

already it has happened and it will happen more so that the Indianapolis campus and its leadership will be

as one of the triumvirate of the major higher education, public seen

institutions in Indiana, in other words, it has not always been so. I mean, there's been Indiana and Purdue, and IUPUI kind of a hard-to-describe linkage between the two, and I think every day that goes by, it's becoming more and more a partnership of three, because l think Indianapolis represents opportunities to have things, to do things that weren't done before, not simply not in Indianapolis, but not at all. And so because we did it the way we did it, and we did it as a partnership between Indiana and Purdue, Indianapolis has not had to make its way fighting and clawing over the other two already great institutions, but rather, I think, applause comes from West Lafayette and Bloomington when good things happen in Indianapolis. And believe me, that's a much better way to develop the long-range thinking, a long-range vision for higher education in Indiana.

ZUBKE:

Well, on behalf of the Oral History Project of IUPUI,

want to thank you for your time and your comments on tape, and we wish you the best of luck in your leadership role at the State University of New York.

RYAN:

Well, I'm still a a Hoosier and I'm going to come back and be a Hoosier but thank you, because I'm gonna be pretty actively involved for a while in New York.

ZUBKE: Best of luck to you, sir.

RYAN: Thanks.