Interviewees

Sandra Stewart Holyoak:  This begins our third session with Professor Peter Klein on June 6, 2011, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with Professor Paul Clemens and Sandra Stewart Holyoak.  Again, gentlemen, thank you.  Last time, we talked about your time in graduate school.

Peter D. Klein:  Right.  Well, we talked a little bit about grad school, because I told you about Rulon [S.] Wells, [III], and I told you about my dissertation committee, but I didn't tell you very much about the dissertation.  Whether that matters or not, who knows?  We talked a little bit about Kingman Brewster and the wonderful time we had in trying to get [Richard J.]  Bernstein tenure, losing, which helped me to acquire a healthy skepticism about academic administrations, let's put it that way, and how faculty members can have such high principles, but exercise such low practice.  [laughter] I'm not saying all faculty members, or most, but a bunch that I came in contact with at that place.  Now, of course, it turned out that they were right.  He shouldn't have gotten tenure.  [laughter] As a teacher, he deserved it, no question about that, but the problem, of course--a problem, not the--a problem with giving tenure to a person who is primarily a teacher is that that person may not keep up in the field.  Therefore, the teaching, the students may appreciate the teaching a lot and it may be extremely good, but it's not going to prepare them well and I guess I didn't see that during the Bernstein thing.  I've often wondered whether it was a mistake to do what we did.  I don't think it was, because Yale, at least for a while, I don't know how long it lasted, changed their policy on gathering data with regard to being a teacher and how good you were as a teacher.  Up to that time, they had relied on hearsay, innuendo, ad hoc stories, etc., and then, they began a formal process of visiting classes, soliciting student response.  I don't remember if they had a formal [professor evaluation], but I think there was an informal way that students could describe their experience in the classes and turn it over to chairs if they wanted.  Given the times, that was an important step.  So, maybe it was the right thing to do, even if he didn't deserve tenure. 

Yale taught me--well, Rulon Wells taught me how to do philosophy.  That was my dissertation advisor.  Another guy, who didn't think I was a very good student and therefore made me work very hard, because I wanted to show that he was wrong, was a guy named [Jerome B.] Jerry Schneewind, German, Schneewind.  I got mostly honors.  It was honors, I forget what the other thing was, honors, something and pass and, if you ever got a pass, that meant, "Get out," essentially, and he gave me a pass, Jerry did.  What he did was, I wasn't a very good writer in philosophy at all until Schneewind spent quite a bit of time showing me what was wrong with the way I would write, and I owe him that and I owed Rulon teaching me how to do research in philosophy.  At Earlham [College], we had a library.  [Editor's Note: Founded by Quakers in Richmond, Indiana, Earlham College is a liberal arts college with a student body of approximately 1,200 students.]  It was a little bit bigger than the observatory that's on Old Queens [Campus].  [Editor's Note: Old Queens Campus is located on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  Old Queens consists of the Old Queens College Building, Winants Hall, Geology Hall, Kirkpatrick Chapel and Schenck Observatory.]

SH:  [laughter] My word, that is small.

PK:  But, not much.  [laughter] When I was at Earlham, I had a bunch of jobs.  After I got married, between my junior and senior year, I worked at the ABC, the American Baking Company, making Metrecal wafers.  Those were diet ...

Paul Clemens:  Yes.

PK:  Things, like dog biscuits.  It was the night shift and I think it was from ten to six o'clock in the morning, five days a week, oh, great, and I also worked climbing trees, trimming.  That's when Dutch elm disease was coming around and the treatment then was surgery.  [Editor's Note: Dutch elm disease is a fungal disease that killed over half of the elm tree population in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.]  So, you would hack off all the limbs that were bad, and then, you'd pound these stakes in the ground that were supposedly feeding them.  None of that made any difference.  Well, of course, it made a difference to get rid of the limbs, because they wouldn't fall on somebody, but the stakes in the ground made no difference.  The elms trees, by and large, survived, because there were some that were more resistant, but it was fun and I learned to climb trees.  One of my other jobs was to pick up visitors to the faculty and to the students, university, and job candidates at the airport in--was it Columbus or Dayton?--Dayton, Ohio.  One of them was a guy named Evan [I.] Farber, who became a librarian at Earlham and changed it.  They then became leaders in starting--I wouldn't say it was digital, that's a little too early--but starting to figure out ways, financially, to build a really excellent library at a tiny, little college with a thousand people, and he just recently retired.  One of my best times at Earlham was driving him back and forth to the airport.  It was just great.  He was a wonderful man.  He and I became relatively close friends, because he came within two months or something of that trip and I admired him a lot.  He was one of the people who--one of the very few people in the administration and faculty--who were willing to stand up and defend the [Civil Rights] protests in Richmond that I was part of; anyway, graduate school again.

PC:  You were saying, if I have your train of thought correct, that you had not learned to do philosophy research when you were at Earlham.

PK:  Right, right, and the reason was there wasn't any library.  Well, I mean, there was a library, but there were no journals, it was a philosophy and religion department, except there were a bunch of religious journals.  Earlham didn't yet have their advanced degree in theology.  They gave some sort of master's degree or something and set up a seminary at one point.  That was later.  There were no recent journals, none, in philosophy.  The books, in the library, for philosophy were--I don't think there was anything past 1930.  The history collection was halfway decent.  I don't know if they had all three of [Immanuel] Kant's Critiques.  They at least had the Critique of Pure Reason, [laughter] but I don't know if they had the other two.  It was that kind of place.  Nevertheless, Earlham taught me how to be a student and to love being a student.  I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I just enjoyed studying.  Wayne Booth was tremendous.  Evan Farber was great.  Grimsley Hobbs, that was that giant with the Hobbs Flour, was wonderful.  D. Elton Trueblood was a pompous ass, but he was a student-oriented pompous ass.  [laughter] There was a thing, which really was about the size of the observatory, that was the D. Elton Trueblood Library and the D. Elton Trueblood Library was a tiny, little house, about the size of these two rooms together.  Funny, I mean, Quakers are not supposed to be called D. Elton Trueblood, but he was.  D. Elton Trueblood had an office, and then, a room about this size with books all the way around and it was a better library in the history of philosophy than what was the Earlham Library.  [laughter] So, I spent a lot of time in that thing, reading the books.  He didn't allow you to take the books out, which was reasonable.  So, I spent a lot of time in that little building, studying, because it was quiet.  I was the only person who would go there, because nobody liked Trueblood and they were afraid of him, because he was a little gruff, but he was a kind man, actually.  The gruff, he didn't know how to deal with people and the gruffness was a way of putting up a fence, and so, I spent a lot of time there and got to know him.  He's the one who wrote that I was a good Christian gentleman.

SH:  [laughter] I was just going to ask.

PK:  That's the guy, and even he taught me some things.  I had never taken religion very seriously.  I had gone to a Reformed [temple].  Hebrew Union College, the main location is in New York, but there was a branch in Cincinnati and I went to Sunday school--as a Jewish thing, I went to Sunday school--at Hebrew Union College.  The young rabbinical students were our teachers and I thought it was all absolutely silly and why anybody was taking the Bible and what it said seriously, I thought it was just nonsense.  On the other hand, Trueblood actually got me to think about religious questions a little bit, a little bit.  There was a time in my life I was flirting with the idea that maybe there's a God and maybe there's even a personal God and all that nonsense.  It's not nonsense.  People take it seriously, but I think it's nonsense.  I took the arguments for God's existence, the a priori arguments, not the empirical ones about revelation and all that, but the a priori ones, and it still is somehow a mystery, right, I mean, that there's a universe, that you can just keep on traveling and there's no end to it.  You're going, "How's that possible?" right, but it's too deep a question and I don't ask it, [laughter] because I know I'd just tie myself in knots and not know how to get out of it. 

All right, so, I got into Yale, to graduate school, studied with Rulon Wells, came to like some of the faculty members, personally, but you can put a bunch of fairly nice people together in a room and they can do pretty horrible things, and that's what they did in the Bernstein case.  They may have been right the second time, that he didn't deserve tenure, but they didn't do it on a good basis and that was disturbing to me.  These were people who were supposed to be good reasoners and they would come up with terrible reasons, absolutely terrible, for their judgment.  That's what was disillusioning about it, I guess; hadn't ever thought of it quite that way.  It's in my mind because, when we get to Livingston [College] and Albert [E. Blumberg], there was a memorial service for him and I gave a talk.  [Editor's Note: Dr. Albert E. Blumberg, a Professor of Philosophy, taught at Rutgers from 1965 until his retirement in 1977 and played an important role in organizing Livingston College in the late 1960s.]  I'll show you the list of people who were at that service and, when you hear of Albert's background, it's amazing that that's what happened at the end. 

Anyway, so, Colgate [University]; when I went to graduate school, there wasn't the kind of job market that there is now.  Well, it was in the sense that it was terrible.  [laughter] There were two-and-a-half to three people for every job.  At least at schools that were "prestigious," quote-unquote, the candidate themselves didn't apply for the jobs.  The school would send you out, essentially.  They'd say, "Well, here are the three places we think you should go to."  It was a complete mystery to me why I was told that the three places [were for me]--Notre Dame was one, Colgate was another and someplace in Texas, I forget, was the third. 

I went to Notre Dame first on the job interview and Notre Dame has a huge philosophy department.  Catholic schools, by and large, require you to study a lot of philosophy, so, they have to have a big department.  I think it's probably still one of the biggest departments in the country, if not the biggest department.  I had read, as a graduate student, the writing of one guy there, who didn't write very much, named Ken Sayre and Ken had written a book review of Austin's, John [Langshaw] Austin's, book, and Austin was aware of the pun, called Sense and Sensibilia [(1962)].  Sensibilia are possible sense experiences, and so, he was aware of that, obviously, and it's a very, very well-written, amusing but deep book.  Austin has a great writing style.  In fact, it's so great, it obscures the fact that most of what he was saying was wrong.  [laughter] So, Kenneth Sayre had written a book review of Austin's book and it was one of the best book reviews I've ever read.  It just tore that book apart.  [laughter] There was nothing left, but it was done in a charming kind of way.  Anyway, so, I knew Ken's writing.  One of the graduate students that I studied with when I was at Yale, a priest, was on the faculty, was a senior member of the faculty.  He was some sort of post-doc or something when he was at Yale, David Burrell.  I still know him.  There were one or two other people, a guy named McMullin, Ernan McMullin.  I think he's dead, but I'm not sure.  If he isn't, he's on the verge.  [Editor's Note: Rev. Ernan McMullin died on February 8, 2011.]  Ernan worked in [the] philosophy of science and I knew his work and he was chair.  Every group I met with, including David Burrell, my friend, the priest, every group I met with, whether it was ten people or three people or the same people again, they emphasized to me that I would be the first Jewish member of the department.  [laughter] I wouldn't have been the first non-Christian member.  There was a Muslim-trained person, but I would have been the first Jewish member of this huge department.  There were probably thirty people there.  Anyway, it was impressive, those big oak doors, and, in some ways, it was reminiscent of some of the buildings at Yale, the big stone things with these huge oak doors and tiled floors, etc.  It was impressive.  I couldn't imagine myself living in South Bend, [Indiana], because I had gone to Earlham and I knew what South Bend was.  [laughter] On the other hand, it wasn't that far from Chicago.  "Well, okay."  [laughter] At this time, they would invite out the person whose CV [curriculum vitae] they liked the most or they thought, of the people that they were going to invite, this was the best one.  They'd invite that person out.  If the interview turned out all right, and I was there three days--there was no prior interview.  I hadn't met a person from that place, well, except my friend, but they didn't do this pre-interview stuff.  They just looked at the CV, talked to people at Yale, no doubt.  I don't know.  It was somewhat mysterious to me how I got there.  They offered me the job, which was nice, and I told McMullin that, no, I didn't want to do it, and I thought a little about how to say it.  I said what I thought he would think was a joke, or at least mildly funny, and I said, "No, being the first Jewish member of the department was too heavy a cross for me to carry."  [laughter] I thought he would get that, first of all, I was offended by that coming up over and over again. 

SH:  I would think so.

PK:  I thought he would get that, but, also, that it wouldn't be confrontational.  Well, his response was, "Yes, I understand that."  [laughter] Oh, well; anyway, so, I didn't take that job, and the second place I went to visit was Colgate [in Hamilton, New York].  Although it's in a rural setting, to say the least, [laughter] there was something about the place and their concern for students, and they were just starting what they called the RISK Program; darn if I remember what it [meant].  It was an acronym, but the RISK Program was a program that was going to bring--they were going to do that [in] the fall in 1966--this was going to bring inner-city kids, almost all of them black, to Colgate.  My guess is, there were three or four black students there before, maybe in the history of that place.  [laughter] They somehow knew a little bit about my own background.  I don't know how they knew this.  Some professor must have told them at Yale, but darned if I know, and they thought I might be interested in working with the black students.  There was just something [about Colgate].  I visited it on a spring day.  [laughter] I didn't have any idea what those [winters were like in Upstate New York].  I loved the winters in Montana, because the sun is out.  It's a beautiful day.  The winters in Colgate, you're in a bowl.  You never see the sun for three or four months.  I had never skied before and they had a little ski tow right by the college, a little rope ski tow.  [I thought], "Oh, this is really going to be fun," [laughter] and I liked the people.  I wasn't especially enthusiastic about some of the things I was going to have to teach.  They had a core program and the core program was a core program of interdisciplinary courses.  Our teaching load was three-two and, of the five, at least two had to be in the core program.  The two that I taught, I taught a course called "Philosophy, Religion and Drama," and I taught a course in the history and philosophy of science.  Anyway, I went to Colgate.

PC:  In either of these decisions, Notre Dame or Colgate, what did your wife think?

PK:  My wife really liked Colgate, because she taught--there was a special term for it--educationally low-ranking students.  She taught developmental reading, that's it, sorry. 

PC:  There we go.

PK:  She was interviewed--they knew that this was important to me--she was interviewed by the principal and some of the people who taught developmental ed. and they offered her a job.  Well, that did it, and that they had gone out of their way to realize that you're in this small, little community.  They went out of their way to be friendly and to recognize the drawbacks of that community, but to try and compensate for it.  Anyway, I went there. 

SH:  Was there faculty housing?

PK:  No, but the housing there was [inexpensive].  I think I was earning six thousand dollars a year, or some crazy thing like that, but the housing was three hundred dollars a month or whatever.  There was a fairly nice apartment that was available.  A guy named Swinchat, who taught in the chemistry department, who was going to be gone for the year, he was on sabbatical and we could have his apartment.  It was furnished and it was this luxurious furniture.  I mean, at Yale, my wife and I lived in a cramped, tiny, little place with furniture that we would pick up on the streets, etc.  I mean, even though I had a fellowship to go to Yale, it was [tight], and Dana taught developmental ed. in New Haven.  She was teaching fourth or fifth graders, I don't remember, but some of the fifth graders were fourteen years old. 

PC:  Yes.

PK:  Not the nicest of kids, tough kids.  She would have some successes, but mostly failures, whereas it looked like at Colgate, "Boy, this is going to be a piece of cake," turned out not to be a piece of cake, turned out to be that the elementary school principal was a schmuck, and so were a lot of the other teachers, but she persisted.  Anyway, so, I went to Colgate.  I made a couple little notes here.  There were four things at Colgate that ended up being important.  We, Dana and I, lost two children that were born prematurely while we were at Colgate.  That was tough.  Truth is, I never wanted any children, but she did and this, I think, losing, for her, well, for me, too, but mostly for her, losing the second child--the first child was born very prematurely.  The second one, there was a real shot that she was going to live.  She didn't.  I think that even though we got through it and we were married for twenty-one years, we grew apart during that period.  Maybe we just grew up differently, because we each reacted to that in a very different way.  After the second one, I said, "Okay, that's it.  We're not going to go through this again," but she was more convinced than ever that she wanted a child.  Both attitudes are perfectly understandable.  Anyway, so, that was one thing that happened at Colgate that was important in my life. 

Then, I learned how to teach.  At Yale, I had been a TA [teaching assistant] for Bernstein, among others, and so, I knew a little bit.  We would meet, the people who taught "Philosophy, Religion and Drama."  It was people from the philosophy department--of course, we were a philosophy and religion department, but it was sort of the enemy in the department, in a way--and the people from the drama department and that was extremely interesting to me, the subject matter was, because most students, when they first start philosophy, including me, thought, "Well, we're going to figure out what the meaning of life is," or something like that, and that's what that course was about, the meaning of life.  We met every week.  The faculty met every week.  We went over what we were going to do in the course that week.  We planned the syllabus.  We planned the exams.  We graded each other's exams.  We talked about what was good and what was bad and how to construct an exam so that you got the best that a student could do, not try to trip them up, but try to give an exam that gave students the best opportunity to show what they knew, not what they didn't know.  It really taught me a kind of craft of teaching that I hadn't [known before].  I thought, "Well, look, the material is just intrinsically interesting.  They're going to get what's neat about this."  Well, no, it doesn't work that way.  [laughter]

The history and philosophy of science course was a tremendous thing for me to teach.  I was a math major in college, as well as philosophy, so, I knew some of the math and I had studied physics, because you had to if you were a math major.  You had to have two courses.  I enjoyed physics, but I had no clue about how a theory in science develops, and the course focused on the two revolutions.  This was just at the time that the Copernican Revolution was being studied by [Thomas] Kuhn and others, and so, we studied the Copernican Revolution and the Darwinian Revolution.  So, we studied those two.  We read, when I say in the original, they were translations, of course, but we read Ptolemy in the original.  We read Galileo's the "Dialogues" [Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems], The [Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to] Two New Sciences.  We read [Sir Isaac] Newton's Principia, not the whole damn thing, but we read the first and third books and some of the second book.  The way it was presented, Galileo was a disciple of--if you can think of somebody being long-dead and being a disciple of that person--of Plato, and so, he wrote "Dialogues" in a Platonic tradition.  Newton was aware of the, of course, real resistance [laughter] to his views and to how mysterious it seems that there could be a force between two bodies that you couldn't screen off.  You know, magnetism, you can put something in-between, but here's a force you cannot screen off no matter what you put in-between.  Here's a body and here's a body.  There's no magnetism going on here.  Why are they attracting each other?  Here it is and here it is and you wonder and this one is affecting the motion of this one.  Now, how is that possible?  When Galileo did his thought experiment, because he didn't have a vacuum, that was later, when Galileo said, "Look, if you drop a billiard ball and a feather in a vacuum tube"--so, he had the concept of a vacuum, but he couldn't make one--so, his idea was, if you had a vacuum tube here, let's say a six-foot vacuum tube, and you dropped a heavy billiard ball into one and a feather in the other, they're going to hit the ground at the same time.  Well, that's so counterintuitive.  How could that be? 

My dissertation at Yale was defending a view called the sense-datum theory in philosophy, which is still sort of around, that knowledge has a foundation based upon sense experience, your knowledge of the world.  You could distinguish between a priori judgments.  So, sometimes, a priori judgments are interesting and formative.  I had a dream four nights ago and I woke up--I sometimes have funny dreams--and, in this one, I don't remember the context of the dream, but, in the dream, I said, "It's really a nice thing that you won't die in your lifetime."  [laughter] That's what's known as a tautology.  You also think tautologies can't convey anything interesting.  I mean, either it's raining or it's not raining.  Well, it doesn't tell you anything about the world, but that you won't die in your lifetime, it's an interesting tautology, because you'll never experience it.  So, that's fine. 

What the sense-data theorists thought was, there are two kinds of sentences, probably, indicative sentences, propositions that could have truth values, those that are things like, "Two plus two equals four."  There's no way to empirically test that.  It's not subject to empirical counter-example.  It's not about apples and oranges.  It's about this abstract thing, numbers, or, "Either it's raining or it's not raining," or, "If something lasts an hour, it lasts exactly sixty minutes," things like that, that they thought just explicated the meanings of words.  So, it was just a question of, if you understood how "or" worked and you understood how negation worked, you'd know that either it's raining or it's not raining.  Then, the other kind of sentences were empirical sentences and they were based upon sense experience and sense experience is about personal--this is the sense-data view--is about your own subjective experience.  Sense experience is not about tables or chairs or the objects of sense experience, it's your own perceptions and you develop a theory about the world.  It's roughly [George] Berkeley's view and [David] Hume's view.  That was my view and my view was that science progressed by getting better and better generalizations about our sense experience, so that you get more knowledge, so that the object of science was to encompass more and more things under generalizations and the job of a theory was essentially to gather more and more things under it.  So, if you could explain magnetism, the propagation of light and gravitational force under one theory, wow, you've made it.  To some extent, that's right, but what this course taught me was, "Yes, that's only just a little bit of it." 

One of the things that's important is how you go about discovering the theories, how you go about arguing for the theories.  Again, it's just like teaching--it's not enough that it happens that what you're saying is true.  You have to be able to fit what you're saying into an overall theory that makes sense and that the sense-datum theory was only a very partial explication of what made something acceptable.  There were other criteria for accepting a theory, simplicity, falsifiability, generality, etc.  It wasn't just the evidence that was going to determine what theory was acceptable, but it was qualities of the theory itself, and, if I could get that across to my kids, to the students, that would be great.

PC:  If I understand what you are saying, in teaching this course, you moved beyond what you defended in your dissertation.

PK:  Absolutely.

PC:  You were learning to think about a philosophical problem in a new way

PK:  Absolutely.

PC:  As you were teaching the students the same material.

PK:  Absolutely, absolutely, and it was a terrific experience.  What did it was sitting around the room with mathematicians, some philosophers, some people in physics, the biologists and, when the biologists and physicists were talking, it was amazing to see the difference in the way that they approached science.  We think of science as one huge enterprise with a bunch of shared assumptions.  It was very clear that the kinds of things that the physicist found interesting were different than the kinds of things that the biologist [found interesting].  The biologist was interested in, "Why is this particular plant growing in that particular way?" or, "What particular gene causes that?" and so, they were very focused on localized things, whereas the physicists were interested in something that would explain a vast number of things.  That was their goal.

PC:  When you said you would sit around and talk, did these people come into the classroom and teach the same students you were teaching?

PK:  No.

PC:  No.

PK:  No.

PC:  You just met as a group and talked, but, then, you all went off and taught your own courses.

PK:  Yes, yes.

PC:  In this core curriculum.

PK:  Core curriculum, but we had a common exam.

PC:  Wow.

PK:  So, we were responsible for--believe me, it was a lot of work.

PC:  Yes.

PK:  And it was stuff I had never read, to go through Galileo's "Dialogues" and The Two New Sciences and Newton's Principia and to see that the geocentric theory was, for a long time, clearly the most plausible view, the way to explain things, not just how things appeared in the heavens, because they do appear to be going around the Earth.  That's the natural way we think of it, that they're going around, well, to see why the Aristotelian view lasted for almost two thousand years--well, 1609, yes, it was two thousand years.  Here's a simple example from what Galileo wrote and he's deliberately parroting Ptolemy, "The problem," Galileo said, "one of the problems is, if you accept the view that I, Galileo, am supposing is correct," and this was a dialogue, so, one of the characters was talking, who was defending the geocentric theory, this the Earth's at the center and everything's going around us, the defender of that, whose name is Simplicius [Simplicio]; [laughter] Galileo picked that name, but there was a defender of the Ptolemaic theory named Simplicius [of Cilicia].  Anyway, Simplicius says, not at the time--I think he was fourth century [fifth and sixth centuries], but I'm not sure.  That could be off.  So, here you are, the ancient Egyptians knew the circumference of the Earth.  It's an interesting thing, "How the hell'd they do that?" but they were close.  The Earth is roughly twenty-four thousand miles, the circumference around the Equator, and they had it at about twenty-two thousand miles, but they weren't quite on the Equator.  So, if they had thought a little bit more, they would have hit it almost exactly, but they thought it was twenty-two thousand miles, roughly.  So, it's twenty-four thousand miles.  Now, the Earth goes around.  If you thought the Earth was causing the diurnal motion, the motion of the Sun going around once a day, if you thought that, then, any point on the Earth would have to be moving at roughly a thousand miles an hour, if you were near the Equator.  Well, a thousand miles an hour, why doesn't everything just fly off? and Ptolemy writes, and Simplicius writes in his defense, "And imagine the poor bird, sitting there in a tree.  It lets go of the tree, flies up and, zoom, there goes the tree, a thousand miles an hour.  [laughter] You know, the thing'll never get back home, because we know birds can't fly a thousand miles an hour.  So, it'll never get there;" lots of other things.  [laughter] They say, "Put some water on a top and spin it and figure out how fast that top is moving.  It's nowhere near a thousand miles an hour.  The water on the Earth, zoom, ought to dissipate." 

Anyway, to get students to see that, until Galileo looked in his telescope and saw what he took to be the moons of Jupiter, here are these things moving around the Earth, here's Jupiter, it moves around the Earth, not quite steadily, right, because it's got the epicyclical motion, but, then, to see little points of light following Jupiter around.  Of course, he had to surmise--he called them the Medicean Stars, [named for the Medici family of Tuscany, Italy, his patrons]--I think, he had to surmise that those were moons going around Jupiter.  Of course, his telescope was a sixty-power scope, I think.  All he could see was that they were points of light.  A planet, when you look at it, magnifies differently in the telescope than a star.  The planet actually looks like a disc and, again, he saw that.  So, he said, "Look, there's a real difference between how those things are magnifying and something else.  So, these things, the only way to explain that is, they're much closer to us than those other things," and that was quite upsetting, but, to see these things going around Jupiter--he didn't see them going [around].  That's the point.  If you talked about your sense experience and limited your knowledge to generalizations about the sense experience, you would never come to the conclusion that those were moons.  What you would do is say, "Well, these little points of light go back and forth in front of or behind this disc."  That's all.  You wouldn't think that there was something circulating around it.  So, the minimal description of your sense experience isn't what science is about.  So, anyway, he saw these things.  One of the objections to the heliocentric view was, "In that view, the Earth is going around the sun and here's the Moon going around the Earth.  Why would that happen?  Why would the Moon follow the Earth around?"  Well, his answer was, "I don't know that yet," because he didn't have a theory of gravitation, but he said, "Whatever is responsible for the Moon going around the Earth is the same thing responsible for the moons going around Jupiter.  Now, do you deny that that's happening?"  It put them on the defensive and one of the first reactions was, "We know that lenses distort stuff," you know, because they had lenses that would make people look taller or thicker.  They knew about astigmatism.  They knew about lenses, and so, they said, "Well, it's the machine that's doing that.  Those things really aren't [there].  There's something funny about this lens."  So, they rejected the empirical evidence. 

What that taught me was that you can always find a way to reject counterevidence.  The interesting question for me always is, "When is that rejection of counterevidence legitimate and when isn't it?  When do you have to consider an alternative hypothesis and when don't you?"  So, this is an example from Fred Dretske.  If you go to the zoo and you see what you take to be zebras, because they're in a pen marked, "Zebras," and they look like zebras and everybody else is saying, "Oh, look at the zebras," and then, somebody says to you, "How do you know they're not cleverly-disguised mules?" now, the question is, do you have to take that hypothesis seriously?  Do you have to have some reason for eliminating that? and a lot of philosophers think, "Yes, you do."  One of my interests in philosophy is skepticism and what skepticism says is, "How do you know the world is anything like what you think it is?  Couldn't there be an evil demon?" Descartes, which is what turned me on to begin with, "couldn't there be an evil demon that's implanting those impressions in your mind?  That's all that's in the world, you and this evil demon.  That's it.  There's none of this other stuff."  Do you have to take that hypothesis seriously?  So, here's another hypothesis, take this hypothesis, "The zebras are members of the lost tribe of Israel, who've been hiding out from the Assyrians for two thousand years and they've gotten very good at zebra disguises."  Now, do you have to take that one seriously? or, "Is Queen Elizabeth reincarnated as a zebra?"  Do you have to take that seriously?  The answer should be, "No."  Well, why do you have to take the cleverly-disguised mule one seriously?  What counter-hypotheses are the ones within the range that you have to take seriously? and it was at Colgate where I first [understood].  I didn't have all that sort of put together in a nice, coherent narrative, but, when I first saw, "Wait a minute, you don't have to eliminate all these hypotheses.  You only have to eliminate some of them in order to know that this one's right."  You know if you're in Indiana, you're not in New York.  Now, if you know you're in Indiana, do you have to know you're not in a matrix?  The answer to the first one seems, "Yes, if you know you're in Indiana, you have to know you're not in New York, but, if you know you're in Indiana, do you know you're not in a matrix?"  If the answer to that is yes and if it's also true, "Well, you can't know that you're not in a matrix," then, you don't know you're in Indiana.  That's the skeptical argument.  If you know you have a hand, then, you know you're not in a matrix only thinking you have a hand.  The skeptic will then say, "But. you don't have any evidence for that."  Take this back to the zebra case--if they were cleverly-disguised mules, they'd look like zebras, so, you can't say, "Well, my evidence that they're not cleverly-disguised mules is that they look like zebras, because that's what cleverly-disguised mules would look like."  So, the skeptic runs this argument and that's one of my interests in philosophy, is skepticism. 

Anyway, back to Colgate; so, one of the things I learned at Colgate was how difficult it is to lose two babies, and that's a toughy, and I learned how to teach.  There were two other things.  I learned how to work with the ABC.  This isn't the American Baking Company.  [laughter] This is the Association of Black Collegians.  That was the twenty students who came under the RISK Program.  When Colgate gave it the name RISK and when they talked about it, they meant that Colgate was taking a chance in bringing these black students to Colgate, because this was a change in their tradition and their history and their culture.  They didn't know if Colgate was going to be able to survive this.  It was a radical change.  They didn't mean, as I first thought they meant, that these students were taking a hell of a risk.  I mean, these students are from inner cities, of Detroit and Chicago and New York City and Cleveland, and they're coming up to this lily-white, redneck thing in the middle of the Chenango Valley, where they had no friends.  There was no culture that they could be part of.  The Colgate people, just, "Oh;" I mean, it just never occurred to them.  Anyway, so, the ABC was crucial and I'll tell you a little bit more about that. 

The fourth thing that I learned was, I didn't want to be at a place like Colgate, [laughter] and that was the fourth thing.  I wanted to be at a place that valued teaching and valued undergraduate education.  I did not want to be in a place where it was going to be an uphill battle, political uphill battle, every day.  It was just going to be too frustrating, even though I like winning.  I win a lot, but I don't like fighting all the time and always having to watch out for saying something, doing something, that could get in the way of your political goals and that was always the case at Colgate.  In some ways, the friendliness that they had, that was so attractive to me, became insidious and invasive.  I was, in addition to the advisor to the Association of Black Collegians--me, that was because I was, look at me, I was the blackest thing they had at Colgate, aside from the students, I mean, [laughter] the blackest faculty member--and every student organization had to have a faculty advisor, reasonable, I was also the advisor to Teke, T-K-E [Tau Kappa Epsilon].  It's a fraternity and we decided to become a co-op [cooperative] while I was the advisor, which was a very good thing.  One night, I was at the TKE house until probably two o'clock at night, because they had a party and I was the faculty advisor and I had to be there.  I got home probably at two-thirty or something.  That was either a Friday or Saturday night, maybe a Sunday night, but, on Monday or Tuesday of the following week, three or four different faculty members came up to me and said, "You know, you really shouldn't be out that late."  I thought to myself, "Well, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but how the hell do they know where I was and how is this spreading?"  [laughter] Well, this is a community where everybody [knows everything about everyone else].  It's a good thing.  People care for the welfare of other people, but that also means they know a lot about other people and they're intrusive and it's a tiny, little town.  I mean, they'd know, "Oh, well, Sally Baxter is here.  That's her car," and, "Jerry Balmuth is here.  That's his car."  So, everybody knows everybody's car and everybody knows when you're going to the grocery store.  The grocery store person would say, "Well, we're out of that bread today, but we'll have it tomorrow," and I didn't even ask about the bread.  [laughter] So, it was nice, but it was not what I wanted to do.  The faculty there came smart; they were smart when they came.  I was afraid, if I stayed, I'd get dumb, because--in my field--I wouldn't keep up.  It was so easy to be a teacher and be a good teacher, because there were immediate rewards.  In philosophy, you know, we're still fighting with Aristotle, [laughter] and you never know if you're right and I'm not even sure I know what being right means when you deal with philosophical issues.  It's getting rid of some ignorance, getting rid of mistakes, but are you ever right?  I think the answer's no, because there's always an objection that a person can make relevant that you have to eliminate in order to show that you're right.  Well, the skeptics are right about that one, in philosophical matters. 

So, the ABC, let me say a little bit about that.  So, these twenty students came to Colgate and they had used a psychological test.  I don't remember the name, but it was something like a test of persistence, and what they wanted were students who were [persistent].  They used this on the black students that they were bringing [in].  They wanted students who scored high.  So, they didn't care very much about the SATs.  What they cared about was, "How persistent were these kids?" and the person who insisted they do that at Colgate was a guy named, I don't remember his first name, but his last name was Summers and everybody referred to him as "Doc" Summers.  [Editor's Note: Linden "Doc" Summers, Jr., taught in the Colgate education department from 1961 to 1981.  From 1981 to 1997, he served as director of Colgate's counseling and psychological services.]  Summers was a good guy [laughter] and knew how much of a risk these students were taking and he said, "You can't bring these students unless they're willing to persist, because this is going to be very, very hard for them."

SH:  How were the students chosen to even take this test?

PK:  Well, students applied.  They made it known in inner-city schools that Colgate was now accepting students, that they would provide a scholarship.  Students had to have reasonably decent grades.  They didn't care about the SATs.  Summers convinced them that didn't matter a hang.  If a student, and I'm not kidding about this, if a student had been a gang leader, they'd prefer that student to the student who had just been a member of the gang, because they thought, "Gang leader, he made it in his," Colgate was all-male at the time, "made it in his peer group, so, that's who we want."  So, we had gang leaders from New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, etc.  These students came up there and they looked around and it was lilywhite and it was all-male.  So, they had to go to Syracuse or Utica if they were going to meet any black kids, and so, they had to have cars, and the university didn't understand that.  First-year students were not allowed to have cars.  So, the first thing with the administration and me was, "You have to get them cars."  "Well, we're not going to get them cars."  "Well, they have to have cars."  "Well, we're not going to do it."  I said, "Okay, what if we rent a bus?  Is that okay?"  "Well, is it an official thing by the university?"  "No, it's just me and some friends."  "Well, sure, go rent a bus."  So, we rented buses and we went to Syracuse and Utica.  Since I was paying for the bus, [laughter] I wanted to make sure the bus got back, so, I went to the parties and the things in Syracuse and Utica, which the faculty at Colgate could not understand.  They just couldn't get it, and I met with the ABC.  There was a fraternity called Phi Delta Theta and they had blackballed--interesting word--had blackballed Jewish students.  I mean, black students didn't bother applying.  They had blackballed a Jewish student who they didn't know was Jewish until the night of the voting.  His name was Johnson--not many Jews named Johnson.  Somebody told that he was Jewish and they blackballed him and I went to the ABC and I said, "We've got a real issue here, because we'll get the Jewish students on our side and we'll get some Christian students on our side.  So, we are going to sit-in," and we took over the administration building, which was a beautiful, big hall with a balcony and offices.  If you took--what's the name of the place?  It's here, the Spanish architectural building that's on the College Avenue Campus.

PC:  Bishop House?

PK:  Bishop House. 

PC:  Bishop, yes.

PK:  If you took Bishop House and made it out of brick and five times bigger, that's what [it looked like], but a big hallway, huge hallway, entranceway, big doors, gorgeous place.  So, we took over that building.  Colgate, of course, had never heard of anything like this, but, if you remember, this is 1966 and Spring of '67.  That's when the black groups on various campuses in the country [were protesting].  A lot of campuses were doing the same thing Colgate was doing, admitting black students that had not been admitted before, and these students had communicated with each other and some of the advisors had communicated.  There were one or two people that I knew from CORE and all that stuff.  [Editor's Note: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century and pioneered nonviolent direct action as a way to achieve desegregation and voting rights.  While in high school and college, Dr. Klein volunteered with CORE.]  We communicated with each other, and so, we had some black students coming from Cornell, who sat in with us, and there were other students who were going to come, or at least threatened to come.  [Folk singer, songwriter and activist] Joan Baez came and she was going to sing to the student body.  I'd met Baez when she was unknown, when I was at Earlham College and she was at Oberlin [College].  She visited Oberlin.  I went up to Oberlin, because I was one of those folk-song people, and asked her to come back to Earlham and do a benefit for some black students and she said sure.  She did and she remembered me.  I wrote to her and said, "You can't come to Colgate under these circumstances," and she said, "I'm obligated."  She and I talked for a little bit and I said, "Are you obligated to sing in a particular place?" and she said, "No," and I said, "Well, don't sing in the place where you were [going to sing].  Come to the building that we're occupying.  Sing for us," and she did.  [laughter] Anyway, so, we took over this building.  A lot of Jewish students joined us and the board appointed, and Paul, I'm sure, will know who this is, and you'll probably know, William Rogers, [who] became Nixon's Secretary ...  [Editor's Note: From 1969 to 1973, William P. Rogers served as President Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, preceding Henry Kissinger in that post.  A graduate of Colgate University (1934), Rogers became Deputy Attorney General in 1953 and Attorney General in 1957 in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration.] 

PC:  Nixon's Secretary of State, yes.

PK:  Yes. 

SH:  [laughter] Yes. 

PK:  He was a Colgate undergraduate, was on their Board of Governors or Board of Trustees or whatever they called it.  He worked for some company.  I think he had his own law firm [Rogers & Wells] or whatever, but his specialty, at the time, was labor negotiations.  [laughter] Anyway, so, they ask him to come negotiate with us.  So, we took over this building and we had a meeting set up.  The object was to get rid of Phi Delta Theta, because they had blackballed the Jewish kid and that was against the university rules--wasn't against Phi Delta Theta's rules, but it was against the university rules.  So, we wanted it off campus.  We won and I'll tell you how we won in a minute, but, so, they assigned William Rogers to come meet with us.  The head of the ABC was a kid named William Robinson.  Now, do you know who Bill Robinson was?

SH:  No.

PK:  Yes, Smokey [Robinson, American rhythm and blues singer and songwriter].  So, of course, our kid's nickname was Smokey and he had had some experience in leadership, [laughter] but it was the kind of gang leadership.  I had had some experience doing some organizing stuff and I said, "Look, again, the job here is, we have to get this guy off course," what I learned at the Highlander Folk School.  [I said], "You can't let him dominate this thing, because he's a labor negotiator.  That's his field and he will just run circles around us."  So, what we did was, here's this big, open hall.  We had all the students sitting as tightly together on the floor as they could, just occupying the floor, so that when Rogers opened the door, he would have to step over them to get to the meeting room [laughter] and we thought that would unnerve him.  The meeting, I don't remember the time, but let's say it was ten o'clock or eleven o'clock, let's say ten o'clock, Rogers was fifteen minutes late.  He opened the door, stepped in and stepped over a few people and Bill Robinson was up on the balcony, looking down, and Rogers said, "Bill," to Smokey, he said, "Bill, I'm here for the meeting."  Smokey did this--it was just perfect--he said, "Well, the meeting is cancelled.  When you can get here on time, we'll meet.  We'll schedule it for tomorrow at ten o'clock," and Rogers was just startled, [laughter] because he referred to Smokey as Bill and Bill referred to [him as, "you]," instead of, you know, Mr. Rogers or whatever. 

Anyway, so, he got there the next day and it was this big, long table.  Let's say you're Rogers and Smokey is sitting right in front of him.  I'm to the right.  To the left is the Swarthmore-ish-looking president of the student council, a white kid, of course, dressed with a tie and all the rest of this stuff.  Robinson was dressed like a street kid and I wasn't dressed all that well.  Rogers is sitting there, behind Smokey, and we planned this.  There was a guy named William Boney, Bill Boney, who was short and squat and black as hell and a huge, big neck and a tough guy from Chicago, real tough kid from Chicago.  Rogers and Smokey would be talking and right behind Smokey was this guy talking, excuse the language, and he would say, you know, "Fucking son of a bitch.  I'm going to rip your balls off if you don't give us this."  [laughter] He'd be talking and talking and talking.  After one of the meetings, Smokey turned around and said, "You know, you weren't quite loud enough, because he was listening to me a couple of times."  [laughter] The next day, the president of the student council was a guy named Bob Seaberg, Rogers, we were doing our thing and Rogers turned to him and said, "Bob, when you grow up, you'll realize this is not the way to do things."  To my surprise, Seaberg jumps up on the table, grabs Rogers by the tie and says, "Listen, you son of a bitch, we're not kidding," and he sat down.  [laughter] I went, "Whoa."  I [thought], "Maybe they listened too hard to me."  [laughter] Anyway, they agreed that Phi Delta Theta would be suspended for three years.  They'd have to move out of the house and they would have to rewrite their, not constitution, but whatever it was, of the silly house.  The chant was, "ATO [Alpha Tau Omega] is the next to go."  ATO's another fraternity and it was the next to go.  Almost all the students lived in fraternities after their sophomore year and the fraternities were a place of--well, of course, they were racist.  Most of them did not allow Jews.  They were sexist.  The treatment of women was just horrible on the weekends.  In a place called Cazenovia, there was a girls' college and they would be invited over on the weekends.  It was horrible.  Teke, TKE, was the thing that I was advising.  It was a fraternity and we decided, "Nope, we're not going to do this anymore.  There's no pledging.  There's no blackballing.  There's none of that.  You apply and, if there are more people applying than there are spaces, we do a lottery and we flip coins, and whoever gets in, gets in."  It was really successful and, of course, it ended up being black, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant.  That's what happened.  So, that was the first year at Colgate.  My friends in the faculty, except for Doc Summers and one person in the philosophy department, said, you know, "You're a new faculty member here and this is not the way we do things," just essentially what they [Rogers] told Seaberg, "When you grow up," you know, and I didn't say, "Listen, you son of a bitch, I'm not kidding," but it was something like that.  [laughter]

Then, the next year, the black students had come to see that what they wanted was a cultural center, a home away from home.  They didn't have a fraternity.  They were forced to live on campus, not because somebody said, "You can't live off campus," but most of the housing in Hamilton, New York, just didn't want black students and they didn't want to be spread throughout this community.  They wanted a place where they could meet, where they could invite speakers, where they could invite artists, where they could invite girls, and they needed a cultural center.  So, we met and I said, "Well, what building would you like?"  [laughter] "Well, we'd like something like the," what was called the alumni center, but it was a place where faculty ate, [called Merrill House], was a faculty place to eat and it was the faculty club.  It was something like our club here, the Rutgers Club.  It was much nicer than the Rutgers Club, actually, a nicer building, but it was an old private house.  They said, "We'd like that."  I said, "Okay, let's take that one over and not leave," and they said, "Oh."  [laughter] By then, there were forty of us and what I didn't know at the time was, they were going to take over the building armed, because there were now enough of them.  I should've known.  [laughter] I said earlier, the difference between SNCC and SCLC was whether nonviolence was a tactic or a basic principle.  [Editor's Note: CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the student-run Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) spearheaded the Civil Rights Movement prior to the rise of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s.]  Well, for them, it was clearly a tactic, and so, they took over the building armed, rifles, some pistols, loaded. 

SH:  Did they come to Colgate armed originally?

PK:  I don't know how they got them.

SH:  Okay.

PK:  Anyway, the faculty had much more difficulty understanding this one.  [laughter] They had difficulty for a variety of reasons.  One thing, they couldn't understand why, if segregation was a bad thing, the black students would want to segregate themselves in a cultural center.  I think they called it a black cultural center, but I don't remember, and I was looking this morning to see if I could find [out].  During this whole thing, they put out a little mimeographed pamphlet called Speak, Brother, in which they had written poems, short stories, little essays on why having a cultural house was important.  There was some beautiful stuff in there, absolutely terrific.  Anyway, I tried.  There was a big faculty meeting and the faculty was going to vote on what to recommend to the administration.  I spoke to them and said that, "I know you think that segregation is bad, but you have to distinguish between segregation to preserve illegitimately-gained power and segregation in order to gain power that you legitimately should have."  The liberal faculty, with the exception of Doc Summers, the liberal faculty couldn't even get that.  They couldn't get the distinction between a group segregating itself in order to survive and a group segregating itself in order to dominate another group.  They just couldn't get it and having the arms made it a lot worse.  Well, Colgate was concerned about this, so was the governor.  William Rogers was still; Spring of '67 was the first one, this is Spring of '68.  I don't think Rogers started as the Secretary of State until '69, or maybe even later than that, because he still was not the Secretary of State.  Nixon was first elected in '72? 

PC:  [No].  [Editor's Note: Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey in the Presidential Election of 1968 and won reelection in 1972.  Nixon served as President until 1974, when he resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal.]

PK:  I think he was doing something for Eisenhower as Assistant Attorney General or something or other at the time that he came back. 

PC:  He was there fairly soon, because one of the documents we use in my teaching is a set of letters between him and his son, who was one of the early Vietnam War soldiers.  He had to be there pretty early. 

PK:  Yes.

PC:  The story throws me off key, because it means those letters must be from the early 1970s and I thought they were from the late 1960s.

PK:  Well, he might have been Deputy Attorney General at the time or something like that, but he wasn't yet the Secretary of State.  He came to negotiate again.  [laughter] They didn't learn their lesson.  I knew a stringer from The New York Times from the CORE days and I called him and said, "Do you want a story?  Here's a story."  [laughter] There were articles in The New York Times about it, pictures of the house and the students.  I said to the students, "Please, they know you have guns, you know you have guns--don't walk out there on the porch with those guns.  Just don't do that, because that's going to give these rednecks a real, real opportunity to call in the National Guard, or something like that, and then, you're going to get killed and I'm going to get killed and I don't want to get killed over this."  [laughter] They called Rogers and Rogers [came] and, now, a guy named--Robinson was still there--but a new guy was the president of it.  We've been in contact, sporadically, ever since.  Anyway, we put together a plan for Rogers and we said to Rogers, "Okay, we realize we can't really have this house and there is no house here on campus that would be suitable, but there's this old warehouse on campus that you just store farm implements and lawn mowing stuff."  It's a beautiful stone building, beautiful on the outside, but it was a storage shed, essentially, but just gorgeous on the outside.  We said, "Okay, we don't want this house.  We see that.  How about that house?"  "Well, it's going to cost X-number of dollars," I forget, three hundred thousand dollars to renovate or whatever, and we said, "Well, that's not our problem.  Your problem is to get us a black cultural center," and we had specifications.  It had to sleep seven or eight kids and the kids could rotate through and it had to have a place for artists and it had to have a dining hall big enough to feed thirty people, etc.  That building would do it.  So, we made a deal with Rogers, that if we raised, and I think the number was twenty-five, it might have been thirty-five thousand dollars, "As soon as we raise thirty-five thousand dollars, you guys have to start renovating that building."  Rogers said to me, "How are you going to do that?" and I said, "Well, we'll have track meets and we'll figure out various ways and it'll take us a while," and Rogers must have thought, "Yes, by then, by the time they raise that thirty-five thousand dollars, there won't be a need or people will have forgotten.  It's just a long thing.  They'll never carry it out." 

Rogers, interestingly enough, he played a role in some desegregation case in Alabama, I think, while he was Attorney General, but I'm not quite sure.  [Editor's Note: In the Fall of 1957, the Little Rock Central High School was forced to desegregate by federal order.  Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed, Terrence Roberts, Minnijean Brown and Melba Pattillo, later known as the Little Rock Nine, were scheduled to enter, but Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus went against the order and called on the Arkansas National Guard to bar their entrance.   President Dwight D. Eisenhower then federalized the National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division to guard the Little Rock Nine as they entered the high school on September 25, 1957.  Then Deputy Attorney General Rogers played a significant role in the federal government's actions in this event.]  He and Nixon differed deeply on racial politics.  Everybody knows Nixon was a schmuck and Rogers was a fairly liberal person, frankly, in terms of his political view about the position of blacks in the Army and in education, etc. 

Anyway, so, we got this deal cut and I don't remember whether it was twenty-five, thirty-five thousand dollars, but I told the stringer, who came up, wrote the first story, and we were in that building for about five days, I think, I told him, "Come back up."  He was from Syracuse.  Actually, [I must have said], "Come down, come down from Syracuse, because there's going to be an interesting thing tomorrow," because what we had worked out with Rogers was, and we spent a lot of time--I sold encyclopedias for a couple of weeks, so, I knew the bait-and-switch thing.  You get them thinking, "This thing's going to be in your home for nothing."  Did I tell you about the encyclopedia stuff?  [laughter] I'll tell you in a minute.  So, we had him convinced that we were going to raise this thirty-five thousand dollars and, whenever we did that, Colgate would call a press conference and there'd be a ceremony, etc., and he said, "Sure."  [laughter]

What he didn't know was that I had a check for thirty-five thousand dollars in my pocket from the Shiffman Foundation in Chicago, which was a liberal Jewish foundation.  The reason was that Jim Levy was the grandson of the Shiffmans and Jim was a student at Colgate and a student of mine.  [laughter] So, Jim Levy got the Shiffman Foundation to give us this money.  So, we had a check for the amount of money, whatever it was, in our hands.  The New York Times person was there and we had this signing ceremony, [laughter] and there was a picture in The Times of Rogers.  We had gotten an old--well, it wasn't that old--but we had gotten a shovel and we had some gold spray paint [laughter] and we spray painted it gold and we showed up with the shovel at the meeting.  Anyway, so, they got the cultural center, but it was clear to me, at that point, that it was unlikely I was going to get tenure at that place.  [laughter]

When you sell encyclopedias, I did this for three weeks one summer, the ad said that you would get a commission and the use of a car and you would be selling from door to door.  Well, this was the time that, [for] encyclopedia sales, people would go from door to door.  [laughter] I was already at Earlham and they wanted college kids to do this and they would train you for a week and you learned a forty-five-minute presentation that would start with what they called the "door opener."  Now, the car that you had the use of, four of you would be dropped in a neighborhood.  [laughter] They'd drive you out.  So, they did the same bait-and-switch to us that we were doing to the [customers] and they said you could work either by the hour or on commission, but, if you said, "I'd like to work by the hour," "Well, you don't have confidence in the material you're selling?"  Well, what are you going to say?  "Well, do you have confidence in yourself?"  "Yes."  "Well, then, you ought to go on commission."  If you stuck to the hourly thing, they'd fire you, [laughter] because there was no hourly plan.  There was only a commission plan. 

Anyway, they'd drop you off and the first thing you learned to do, you'll see that this is somewhat relevant to what we did to Rogers, because he was focusing on the long run and he was focusing on, "This is going to take a lot of time," they drop you off at around five-thirty.  Remember, this was the "medieval period," when the women were at home and the men were at work.  So, the women were used to door-to-door salesmen and they would, of course, say, "No, you're not allowed in the house," because people were still selling Fuller brushes and still selling home cleansing things and all that kind of stuff.  So, you'd go to the door.  [Editor's Note: Dr. Klein makes a knocking noise.]  You'd know the people's name and you'd have a little card.  You'd go to the door.  By that time, the husband was home.  Of course, the husband would never come to the door.  The wife would come to the door.  You'd have a little card.  You'd say, "My name is Peter Klein.  I'm here to see Mr. Jones," and then, you'd turn your back.  When they first said that, I thought, "Turn your back?  I'm going to get hit over the head, I mean, or the door's just going to get slammed."  They said, "No, people do not talk to you when your back is turned.  They won't know what to do and they'll go get their husband."  Well, by God, they did. 

Then, when the husband would come, you would say, "We're doing some promotional advertising.  Would you be at all interested?  One of the things we can offer you, if you're willing to cooperate with us, is a free home family reference library," you never referred to it as an encyclopedia, "a free home reference family library that we would put in your house free, for no charge whatsoever."  The person would say, 'Well, what do I have to do?"  "All you have to do is to give us permission to use your statements about how much you appreciate the value of our family home reference library in our advertising.  We won't identify you by name, but we will identify you by a rough district in which you live.  Would you be at all interested?"  Invariably, the guy's going to say, "Sure."  Sorry, I skipped one part.  "I'm representing Collier's.  You probably have heard of Collier's, yes?" and they would say, "Yes, it's a shoe company."  We'd say, "No.  We produce educational material, especially for the home, and the family home reference library," and it was called Collier's Encyclopedia.  Anyway, you go in and, invariably, the television set is on, invariably.  One of the things you learned in this week course was where the on/off button was on the various televisions, because they'd have mock-ups, little cardboard placards, mockups of the standard television.  So, you knew, because, you know, you'd look at the damn thing, "Where is the on/off button?"  You don't know.  So, they'd have a little thing and you'd go to the television, and I'm not kidding, you'd go to the television, you'd put your hand on the button and you'd say, whatever they were watching, "Do you watch this program regularly?"  If they said yes, then, you'd say, "Well, then, you wouldn't mind missing it this one time, would you?" [laughter] and then, you'd turn the damn thing off, or, if they said no, then, you would say, "Well, you wouldn't mind missing it this one time, would you?" [laughter] and you'd turn it off.  Again, I thought, "They're going to jump out of the chair.  Somebody comes into my house and I'm relaxing after a hard day's work, or whatever myth I tell, they're going to jump at me."  No, you could turn the television set off.  You'd have a nice, little cover thing where you'd open it up and you'd show the color pictures and all the rest.  Then, you'd say, "Do you have any children?"  "Yes."  "Well, do you think they would [appreciate this]?" and you're taking notes all the time.  "Why are you taking those notes?"  "Well, because I'm here to determine whether you're qualified to have the reference library in your home."  "What do you mean qualified?"  "Well, we don't put this everywhere.  I should have said that what we're looking for are people who are going to appreciate the vast amount of educational material contained in the family home reference library.  What do you think?" and so, "Would you tell her or would you tell him what you find interesting and I'll take some notes?" and, every once in a while, I would say, they would train you to say, things like, "Do you think you could put that a little more strongly?  Is there a way you could put that?"  [laughter] By the time it was over, they didn't ever add stuff up, "One of the family home reference library advantages is that there are supplements, yearly supplements, because, as we know, knowledge advances."  I never said it quite like this, but there was a way [it was] said, yes, "The people who were writing the advertisements for us would appreciate having the most up-to-date knowledge.  You want the most up-to-date knowledge, don't you?"  [laughter] "Yes."  "Well, we can afford to put the home reference library in your house for nothing, but we can't afford to keep it up for ten years for nothing."  "How much does it cost?"  "Twenty-eight dollars a year to keep it up," and they don't figure, "Wait a minute, I'm paying 280 [dollars]." 

Now, remember when this was, this is probably the Summer of '59, probably--that's a lot of money.  You never talk about a contract.  It's an order form and they would sign the damn thing.  There was a ten-year plan and a two-year plan.  "So, you could pay off the twenty-eight dollars a year.  You could keep the family home reference library up-to-date for twenty-eight dollars a year, or, because that causes us to keep the paperwork and books and we have to employ people to do that, you can pay off the full amount in two years.  You'd pay for the order in two years and, if you're willing to do that, it'll save us some money.  We want you to write a good letter for us.  We'll give you either your choice of a ten-volume science set or the Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary, plus this beautiful bookcase," that you would have pictures of, "in which you can put the family home reference library and the ten-volume science set or the dictionary and the ten updated volumes."  The idea was, they were supposed to go for the two-year plan, because there wasn't a ten-year plan.  [laughter]

There was no such thing.  If they insisted on the ten-year plan, you'd say, "Well, I just forgot to put that in my briefcase, because nobody has ever done that in the past.  I'll be back tomorrow night," because you tried to convert them from the ten-year plan to the two-year plan.  If you couldn't, there were people who were conversion specialists and you'd have to split the commission with that person--that person would come back the next night--if they succeeded.  I don't know what training they had, but they were specialists.  [laughter] The first night I went out, it was in a very, very upper-middle-class, professional-class neighborhood.  The first person, the first door I went to, the husband was a lawyer.  The wife was a schoolteacher, high school teacher, and I thought, "I'm screwed."  [laughter] Actually, the Collier's Encyclopedia was a pretty good encyclopedia. 

PC:  I bought it.  Well, my parents bought it.  [laughter]

PK:  Yes, there you have it, and because they wanted their little child to have the most up-to-date knowledge, etc.  I thought, "They're going to see right through this."  They didn't.  They bought it and that was okay.  The next night, they dropped me off in a neighborhood that was Southern mountain whites, hillbillies.  I don't know if they could read or not.  They didn't have a book, a magazine, no nothing in their house, but they had four or five kids and they wanted the best for their kids.  When it was all over and they were about ready to sign, I couldn't say to them, I couldn't bring [myself to say], I should've, I couldn't bring myself to say, "Listen, this is all a scam.  You have to learn to deal with people like me."  [laughter] What I did say was, "I want you to add this up, because you're going to have to give 140 dollars this year and 140 dollars next year.  Can you afford that?"  They said no and I said, "Then, I don't think you should do this.  You could use the public library," because it was two blocks away, three blocks away, and I said, "It's probably better for your children to go to the public library, because there's so much in there.  This, it's a great encyclopedia, but there's only this much in there."  I should've said, "This is a scam," [laughter] but I didn't.  I didn't have the guts to do that and I quit after that, because I was going to have to do that again in those neighborhoods.  The people who had been doing this for years were able to do what they called write, W-R, write-at-will.  Whenever they felt mad or they were upset, they'd go sell somebody one of these encyclopedias.  [laughter] It was their way to get even with the world.  My view of humanity was just going downhill as people didn't add this thing up.  They didn't think about it, but the bait-and-switch thing was clear, and that's what we used with Rogers.  We had him completely focused on the long run, just like you had these people completely focused on writing the letter for us, because you'd show them a form in which, you know, "Did you appreciate this, this and this?" and they had to sign a form that said, "We give you permission to use this advertising."  What the instructors told us was, "As soon as you leave that house, you tear that thing up and throw it away," the signing [form], "because we don't want any record of this."  Anyway, so, I learned the gift of deceiving people. 

[TAPE PAUSED]

PK:  At Colgate. 

SH:  Yes.

PK:  Okay.  So, Rogers was, at first, very upset that we had deceived him, because he knew, obviously, that we had this money once we produced it the next day.  I said that I understood, that we tried to build up some trust here, because part of the discussion was, "This is going to be a long haul.  It's going to take a long time to do this.  We're going to trust that you're not going to do anything else with that building until we raise the money and you have to trust us that we're not going to do this again, because we could.  We're dedicated to raising this thirty-five thousand dollars."  Part of it was to get him.  It was conscious on our part; it was a conscious deception.

SH:  Were the students included in this?  I mean, did they know what the plans were and how you were negotiating?

PK:  The executive committee of the student group did.  So, there was one person and then there was Bill Boney and Bill Robinson and Greg Threat, T-H-R-E-A-T, I think, Greg Threat.  One of the people in the leadership had something like 280 [out of a possible score of eight hundred] on his verbal SATs.  You know, you get two hundred for signing your name, essentially.  You can't get lower than two hundred, at the time.  I think the score was two hundred to eight hundred and you couldn't get lower than two hundred.  I don't know why it didn't go from zero to eight hundred, but it didn't, which meant he could hardly read, and it's true.  He could hardly read.  [laughter] I tried to find the Speak Out, Brother.  They tried to convey in that, to whites, why it was so important to have a cultural home and his poem was amazing and here's a kid with a 280 verbal score on the SAT and the poem was terrific.  He became the dean of admissions for some college, a small college in Albany, I think.  He and I haven't been in touch for quite a while.  He was ill the last time we talked, so, maybe he didn't make it.  I don't know.  A lot of these guys finally adopted Colgate as a place that they felt comfortable with.  It was an amazing thing.  I was there four years and, by the fourth year, the ABC had sort of fallen apart.  There were probably eighty to a hundred black students there then.  Most of them were academically successful.

SH:  Really?

PK:  Yes.  This persistence test, I wish I remembered the name, I don't think it was called the Harvard persistence test, but it was a standard test.  It wasn't a real task.  It was all, "What would you do if?" and blah, blah, blah, and I think that thing worked.  I think Summers was right, that if you had kids who had a goal and they were persistent, they'd overcome whatever obstacles there were, especially if we provided some [accommodations and], first of all, made them comfortable.  They became very loyal followers of Colgate.  [laughter] It was amazing to me.

SH:  The ABC falls apart, but does the cultural center go forward?

PK:  No, the cultural center, it's interesting.  [Editor's Note: As a result of the ABC's seventy-hour sit-in in 1969, Colgate University opened the cultural center in 1970 in a former maintenance building.  In 1996, the cultural center was renamed the ALANA (Africana, Latin American, Asian American and Native American) Cultural Center.]  My wife, current wife, was a faculty member at Colgate; not then.  She's much younger.  She's six years younger than I am and she didn't get to Colgate until 1974, I think, '75, and I didn't know her at all until fourteen years ago.  She told me, when we first met, that was, whatever, 1996 or something, that the black cultural house had become a multicultural house and it was for--they were called something like ALANA students.  It's an acronym for something, Asian, Latin America, I don't know what the hell the "N" was, and black students, and it was now an interracial cultural center, which was a good way to see that thing develop.  At the time, it was a black-white issue.  It wasn't a black-Latino or black-Asian [issue].  It was black-white, and then, it was a kind of common cause, just almost the same thing that happened at Livingston, although, at Livingston, there was a significant Puerto Rican group from the beginning. 

SH:  Was the ABC falling apart because their needs were being met?

PK:  Yes, I think so.  The group banded together for self-defense, because they were in this [hostile environment].  The native population around Colgate, I know it's Upstate New York, but the population is a very similar population to Appalachia and the kind of scratch-dirt farming.  Colgate is in a very hilly area and the farmland isn't all that good.  There are some flat places.  There are some places with good soil.  So, the people were dirt poor and they were rednecks.  So, these students really needed a place.  They didn't feel at home in the town.  The town and the university are right [in close proximity].  It's called Colgate University, but it was just 2,500 students.  They had some MA programs; they didn't have any Ph.D. programs.  It was really an under[graduate institution].  Probably, I'm guessing, out of the 2,500, 2,400 of them were undergraduate male students. 

SH:  How did all of this affect your teaching and your professional advancement?

PK:  [Do] you mean the presence of the black students?

SH:  Also, being involved in the protests.  You said you thought you would never get tenure.

PK:  Yes, I didn't think I would.  The faculty in the philosophy department said, "Yes, you will."  They thought I would get tenure.  They thought it would be a battle, [laughter] but they thought I would.  In a way, it was completely independent of my teaching.  The teaching, I didn't teach courses that had anything to do with politics.

SH:  Okay.

PK:  I taught logic.  I taught this "Philosophy, Religion and Drama," the history and philosophy of science course, and then, I taught courses in epistemology and I also taught the "Introduction to Philosophy," which was a really good learning experience for me.  Like most people, when I was finished with graduate school, my interests were pretty narrow in philosophy.  Now, the sense-datum theory was an important theory.  It's Aristotle's view, as opposed to Plato's view, so, it has a long history.  It was a fight, between the sense-data people on the one hand, [John] Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and the rationalists, [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz and Descartes and [Baruch] Spinoza, on the other hand.  In the seventeenth century, when we think of, quote, "modern philosophy," modern philosophy means the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  That's what modern philosophy meant.  [laughter] There's a myth going around, I don't know if it's true, that the reason it was called modern philosophy was that back at Oxford, in probably 1720, 1730, if this really happened, they had a course called "Modern Philosophy," and it was studying Locke, Berkeley and Hume and Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.  [laughter] Well, they kept calling it that.  Now, I have no idea whether that's true, no idea whatsoever, but how come we still refer to it as modern?  When we talk about modern philosophy, we're talking about that. 

I didn't think I would get tenure at Colgate and, besides, I didn't want to get tenure at Colgate.  I wanted to teach graduate students.  I thought that would be exciting.  I did not want to be in an all-men's college.  Colgate now is coed.  At Colgate, I was the flaming radical and I wasn't used to being sort of watched all the time.  I had a strategy--every once in a while, in a faculty meeting, if I knew it was close and it was something I wanted, I'd talk against it and the damn thing would pass.  [laughter] I would give all kinds of arguments against it, I'd leave a little gap in there, and that's a good thing to learn to do when you give talks anyway.  I mean, I usually [do that].  When I give a talk, philosophy talk--not when I write a paper, but, when I give a philosophy talk--you leave some gaps and you leave some place where you know, "Boy, they're going to catch [this].  There's a gap here," but you better know how to fill it.  So, you trap them.  At least the first two questions, you know you're going to be able to answer and you're going to feel confident. 

Now, I didn't feel at home there and we wanted another child, or that was the family decision and I didn't want to do it there, because, by the time the second one died, they figured out what the problem was and it was going to be difficult to solve.  So, we wanted to be near a big city, where the medical treatment was good.  I liked many of my faculty colleagues.  I had some great students.  They were terrific and I did like the spring at Colgate.  [laughter] I didn't like the winter, because it was just dark and cloudy.  They got rid of the rope tow and I never did [that], because the lawyers said, even though you had to sign a little slip of paper saying, you know, "I will never hold Colgate responsible for whatever happens to me if I ski down this;" it was just a little hill.  It was just a straight, little hill, nothing to it and it was a real rope tow.  It was a thing with a rope with little short pieces of rope that would come off and you'd grab a knot on that thing and it'd take you up and there were a couple of little dips and stuff.  I was getting reasonably good at it, but, then, the lawyers said, "No, no, it doesn't matter whether they sign it.  The university could still be sued."  So, they cancelled it.  So, the only thing to do in the winter was now gone.  I thought, "I learned a lot--time to leave."  That coincided with Livingston's opening.  Livingston opened in '69.  I didn't get there until '70, but a person who got there in '69 was this Bob Martin, Robert Martin, this high school friend who beat me to everything, [laughter] and Bob had come up to Colgate.  [Editor's Note: Dr. Robert Martin served as Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cellist in Residence at Livingston College, Rutgers University, from 1969 to 1974, before leaving to play and tour with the Sequoia String Quartet from 1975 to 1985.  Since 1994, he has been a faculty member at Bard College and now serves as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy and Music there.] 

Bob's a cellist.  He was the cellist of the Sequoia String Quartet, which was an up-and-coming young quartet, and then it fell apart.  Bob had gotten to [Livingston College] in 1969, the first year.  We grew up in high school, we went apart for college, and then, graduate school, we got back together, and Bob knew what my political interests were and what my teaching interests were.  In 1970, Livingston expanded a lot, because it doubled in size, more than doubled in size, because they had a first-year and a second-year class.  [laughter] They were building more dorms.  So, they needed a lot of new faculty.  [Editor's Note: Under the leadership of Founding Dean Ernest A. Lynton, Livingston College in Piscataway opened in 1969 as Rutgers-New Brunswick's first coeducational undergraduate college.  Livingston existed until 2007, when the Rutgers-New Brunswick undergraduate liberal arts colleges merged into the School of Arts and Sciences.]

SH:  Bob Martin was teaching.

PK:  Bob was teaching at Livingston and Albert Blumberg was chair of the Philosophy Department and, also, we called him "Speaker of the Faculty Chamber," so, chair of the faculty senate, essentially, and I had known about Albert a little bit.  Albert had been a member of the Vienna Circle.  That was the logical positivists.  In fact, he was, Albert was, the person who coined the expression logical positivist.  He was the first person to use that expression.  [Editor's Note: The Vienna Circle consisted of philosophers attached to the University of Vienna beginning in the early 1920s, under the chairmanship of Moritz Schlick, whose views of philosophy were shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  Dr. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl created the term logical positivism to describe the group's beliefs in their 1931 article "Logical Positivism: A New Movement in European Philosophy," published in The Journal of Philosophy.]  Albert was born, I think, in Baltimore, I think, studied at Johns Hopkins, the Sorbonne and in Vienna.  That's when he met all the logical positivists, especially [Moritz] Schlick, and Albert was also a member of the American Communist Party.  I knew about him through a mutual friend.  Albert had spent a year-and-a-half, he and his wife, in Mexico during the McCarthy period.  [Editor's Note: Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations of Communist infiltration in the US government led to a nationwide witch-hunt in the 1950s to unearth alleged Communists.  Blumberg was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and was convicted under the Smith Act's anti-Communist provisions, although the unconstitutionality of the law precluded Blumberg from serving his prison sentence.  Blumberg struggled to find university work due to his Communist affiliations until coming to Rutgers in 1965.]  

I had heard of Albert, but I never met him and I didn't know much about him.  I knew he had written one article that I don't think was published yet, but was--you know, articles get circulated around, even in those days, before email--and he had written an article on the history of analytic philosophy.  Maybe it was called the "History of Logical Positivism," maybe it was some combined title, I don't remember, and I had learned a lot from that article.  It was really insightful.  He was chair of our department here, at Livingston, and Bob said, "Why don't you come down and see what it's like?" and I came down and I knew, "That's where I want to be."  Also, 1970 was the first year that philosophy had a graduate program here.  They didn't have a graduate program prior to 1970.

SH:  At any of the colleges?

PK:  At any of the colleges.

SH:  Okay.

PK:  You sort of wonder, "How the hell could that be?" but we didn't.  I could come to a place and help build an undergraduate college and help build a graduate program, and Livingston billed itself as, "coed, multi-racial and explicitly non-sexist."  I don't know why the explicitly was there, but it didn't say explicitly multi-racial, but it said explicitly non-sexist.  [laughter] Oh, there were four things, sorry, "academically innovative, coed, multicultural and explicitly non-sexist."  This was a time when a lot of new colleges were springing up, right, New College in particular, and a bunch of others, experimental colleges.  We didn't like when the University called us an experimental college.  We did not like that expression, because we thought we were doing what a college ought to do all along.  We weren't any kind of experiment.  They were the ones who were screwed up, not us.  Anyway, so, it just seemed perfect and I came down and, although I don't like the Stalinist architecture, [laughter] I just fell in love with the people.  The students were [diverse].  It was great to walk on a campus where black students were a significant population.  It was quite clear they did not need to have an ABC.  They might need to have five different ones, because there were all these different kinds of students with different objectives and all the rest.

SH:  They were in the majority.

PK:  No.

SH:  No.

PK:  No.  I'd say that the number of black students, the percentage, was probably eighteen, sixteen, nineteen percent, twenty percent.  Puerto Ricans were probably ten to twelve percent.  Whites were the other [percentage], at the beginning.  This is the time of a lot of racial tension.  Livingston was originally going to be set up as an honors college. 

SH:  Was it still like that when you came?

PK:  Well, it was in its formative stages.  Yes, that was part of it.  Livingston opened in '69.  I think the planning probably began in '65, but could have been '66, could have been '64, but it had been in the works for a long time and it was going to be the honors college, because some of the people at Rutgers thought, "Well, we're letting the hoi polloi in here."  Then, the Newark, whatever-one-wants-to-call-them, riots, everybody refers to them as the Newark riots, the Newark riots took place.  [Editor's Note: In the years preceding the opening of Livingston College, the shaping of the institution's identity evolved to reflect crosscurrents in society.  In 1965, the Curriculum Planning Committee, under the guidance of Dean Ernest Lynton, undertook the task of designing Livingston College as an innovative institution dedicated to the teaching of the social sciences.  In the Summer of 1967, riots erupted in over one hundred American cities, including Newark and Plainfield, in response to the political disenfranchisement, poverty and racism suffered by minorities.  By 1969, in the wake of demonstrations at Rutgers protesting racial inequalities, Livingston planners expanded the college's mission to emphasize diversity and began to recruit and enroll minority students.]  People looked around and thought, "Wait a minute, this is a public university and two percent, one percent, of the students are minority students.  Rutgers College was all-male.  Douglass was all-female.  It had a conservative bent, both politically and academically."  Livingston was the first place to teach "Philosophy and the Black Experience," in America.  It's the first place, as far as we know.  We taught that kind of a course before the historically black colleges taught that course.  We taught ...

SH:  Did you develop that course?

PK:  Pardon?

SH:  Did you develop this course?

PK:  Howard McGary did, Howard and Albert, and we developed another course called "Race and Class."  Albert, of course, given his background, thought things were based on class.  He understood, and always supported, blacks and Puerto Ricans, but that was a tactic on his part.  He didn't see things in terms of [race], he saw things in terms of economic class.  He saw it in terms of class, not race, but we started the first "Race and Class" and another course called "Justice and Equality," or something.  Douglass College was all-women, the students.  The philosophy faculty had one woman, Amelie Rorty, and, when Livingston was set up, she joined the Livingston faculty.  Albert had been at Rutgers College.  I know he was part of the planning for Livingston.  I think Amelie was, too.  They brought [in] a dean named Ernest Lynton.  I don't know much about Ernie's background.  He was a physicist, but he was an idealist.  [Editor's Note: After a career that began at Rutgers in 1952 as a physics professor and expanded to administration as the Founding Dean of Livingston College, Ernest A. Lynton became Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at University of Massachusetts-Amherst from 1973 to 1980 and later a Commonwealth Professor at UMass-Boston.]  So was Albert, but Albert was a realist and Ernie thought you could just put blacks, whites and Puerto Ricans together and everything would be just fine. 

It was initially designed and Ernie was selected as the dean to develop an honors college, and we had some of those students.  Part of what was meant by academic innovation was students would develop their own majors and a faculty committee would approve it.  There would be what were called student-initiated courses, where, if a group of students wanted a course, they'd put together a course outline, it'd be approved by a faculty committee and we'd find somebody to teach it and, if we couldn't, we'd hire somebody from the outside.  [laughter] What I remember, there was a guy, I don't remember his name, who wrote a book called Stalking the Wild Asparagus [(1962) by Euell Gibbons] and he was teaching you how to eat wild food.  The students wanted him to come and teach a course and we hired him, and so, they were out in the Livingston woods foraging for things to eat.  [laughter] We were not going to have grades.  Albert's way of putting it was that a transcript is like--this is almost a quote from Albert--"A transcript is like a bank account.  It shows what knowledge you've gained, not what knowledge you don't have.  So, we don't record 'Fs,'" and I still think he's right.  That's what a transcript ought to be.  It ought to be a record of your accomplishment, what you know.  We didn't have grades at the beginning, but we had to write an evaluation of each student in the course. 

I came as a faculty resident advisor.  At Livingston, at the time, there were the three quads, Quad 1, 2 and 3.  The Towers [now called Ernest Lynton North and South Towers] had not been built yet.  Quad 1, which was the quad that [Professor of Urban Studies] Ed Ortiz was the faculty [advisor for], everything there--take a step back--everything there was one-third white, one-third black, one-third Puerto Rican.  What I mean by that is, the student government had decided, with some faculty guidance, that the fact that the overwhelming majority of students were white should not determine what bands they brought, what kind of government they had, etc.  So, the whites would vote for the white students, the blacks would vote for the black students, the Puerto Ricans would vote for the Puerto Ricans students, and each one would have one-third of the student chamber and we had a bicameral system.  Nothing could happen unless both--academically even, majors, courses to be admitted and stuff--unless both the students and faculty agreed to it, which meant very little happened.  [laughter] There were three quads, as luck would have it.  [laughter] Quad 1, Eddie's quad, was known as the "Woodstock Nation," so that the drugs of choice were the hallucinatory drugs.

PC:  LSD.

PK:  [Yes].

PC:  Yes.

PK:  Quad 3 was known as "The Ghetto."  The music you would hear in Quad 1 was the Folk Song Army music, blasting out of the windows.  In Quad 3, you'd hear black and some Latino, but there weren't that many Puerto Ricans there yet, and my quad, Quad 2, was known as "Suburbia."  [laughter] Mine was middle-class, white, black.  We had, I think, the first gay house, which wasn't a whole house.  Each one of the houses in the quads has fifty students.  There are ten houses in each quad, so, there were fifteen hundred students living in the quads.  Any group of students could petition to have whatever size [unit for a special living area].  The smallest was a floor and each floor had, there were five floors, so, each floor had ten students.  That's not quite right.  There were fifty in a house, but the first floor had fewer students, because there was a big lounge in it.  So, I don't quite remember how they got fifty students in there, but there were fifty and I lived under the Malcolm X House.  The first night I got there ...

PC:  In your "Suburbia."

PK:  Yes.

PC:  There was a Malcolm X House.

PK:  You bet.

PC:  Okay.  [laughter]

PK:  Yes.

SH:  Why were they not in Quad 3?

PK:  Because there was a lot of drug activity in Quad 3, the drugs that are in a ghetto, and Malcolm X and many black leaders were violently opposed to the drugs.  So, my quad was relatively drug-free, because the black students in my quad would go after anybody, including the white students or Puerto Rican students, who was using drugs.  Now, pot didn't count as a drug.  [laughter] It wasn't a drug, and so, that was okay, but cocaine, heroin, in any form, was not okay in my quad.  First night I was there, we, my wife and I, arrived after dark and my key wouldn't open the door to the apartment, the outside door, but one of the students said, "Why don't you try going through the main entrance?  You know, there's a way."  At the time, you could get into any place in the quad by going through this central thing in the middle, was kind of like a subway station.  You go down that thing, and then, you could walk around the basement of the whole quad.  So, any thief or whomever who got into one of the buildings could get into all of them and could escape by running around in the basement--Ernie Lynton's wonderful idea.  Anyway, I came around the corner [laughter] and right in front of the Malcolm X House, in the middle of the quad, is this black panther, a cement black panther, with yellow eyes, in front of the Malcolm X House.  Now, I had just come from Montana, and so, I saw that thing and I [said], "Don't move."  [laughter] The kids, they thought that was very, very funny.  Anyway, so, there were three resident faculty advisors.  Eddie was in Quad 1, I was in Quad 2 and a guy in Quad 3 was named Ibrahim Shariff, who was from Somalia, a painter, taught comparative literature, a poet, genuine Renaissance intellectual.  Well, he was completely out of his [element].  Larry Pervin thought, "Well, he's black, so, put him in the 'Ghetto.'"  [Editor's Note: Dr. Lawrence Pervin, Professor of Psychology, served as Dean of Student Affairs at this time.]  Well, this was also at a time when American blacks and native African blacks weren't getting along all that well.  There was a language problem.  There was a cultural problem.  So, that wasn't the wisest of choices, but, anyway, so, I went to Livingston. 

I helped shape the curriculum at Livingston.  I was one of--we were a large department.  By the time the departments merged in 1981, we had nine people at Livingston and Livingston was only; it was probably around 2,500 students, 2,700 students.  We had nine.  Rutgers College had ten faculty members and Rutgers College was probably eight thousand students, I'm guessing, something like that.  The Rutgers College department was in the basement of Van Dyck [Hall].  The Douglass faculty was in a place called Ruth Adams [Building], I think is the name of the building, and tell you about the Douglass faculty.  This will give you a hint.  By the time I got to Livingston, departments did conduct interviews and the APA, the American Philosophical Association, has its main interviewing time at the Eastern Division meetings after Christmas, between Christmas and New Year's, and Douglass was advertising for a position.  Even though we were separate departments, the graduate program was the combined effort of the separate departments, and it was an accident, what you had in the graduate program, in Aristotle's sense, unplanned.  Whatever you had in the graduate program was an accident, because the staffing of the graduate program was whatever you could pull together from the undergraduate programs.  Nobody in a department like mine, especially one that just started, was concerned, when they were hiring faculty, with the graduate element, except philosophy started to do that.  Now, there were some singleton departments, like physics.  That was always by [itself].  I think it was only always at Rutgers College and I think the math department was at Rutgers College, but it serviced the Douglass department, too.  So, there were some departments that were New Brunswick-wide and computer science was New Brunswick-wide, because it was only at Livingston.  

They asked a person from Livingston and a person from Rutgers College to sit in, because they realized that the people were going to get tenure only if what was then called the section, which was combined with us and Newark and Camden, and the graduate director agreed to the promotion.  The graduate director had a lot of power when it came time for promotion, tenure in particular.  So, they invited me to come and one other.  They had their meetings.  At first, I didn't believe it was possible.  They met, they interviewed the candidates in their hotel room, and the APA still does a lot of this.  The APA still is eighty percent male.  So, they have their interviews in a bedroom in the hotel.  Okay, so, there are four guys sort of sitting on a bed, from Douglass, and me and a person from Rutgers College.  Anyway, the way they would conduct the interview is this--they'd invite two people to be interviewed at the same time.  The first question always is, "Tell us about your dissertation."  That person would say [their piece] and they'd turn to you and say, "What do you think about that dissertation?"  [laughter]

PC:  Wow.

PK:  When I saw that, I thought, "What?"  You haven't heard the worst of it.  So, we had several interviews and, of course, most of the people being interviewed were male, because most of the people in philosophy are still male, probably more than eighty percent.  It was probably ninety percent, at the time, male.  One woman was being interviewed, for a position at Douglass, and we had been interviewing maybe six people.  We were tired.  One of the faculty members at Douglass said, they had some coffee brought in, "Would you mind serving?"  [laughter]

PC:  I hate to laugh.

PK:  And I thought, "What?  Are you kidding?"  Now, somehow, the APA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, which was, I don't think it was called that at the time, but it was something close to that.  Now, it's called SWIP.  Now, it's called the Society for Women in Philosophy.  I think it was then called the Status of Women in the Profession.  Anyway, they found out about that somehow; don't quite remember how.  [laughter]

SH:  Did the woman serve?

PK:  Yes, she did, she did.  I know.  I told them.  I told the committee.  [laughter]

PC:  That is what we suspected, Peter. 

SH:  Let us get it out in the open.

PK:  And there was a move to censure the Douglass department, which I supported; [laughter] didn't endear me to the Douglass faculty.  In a sense, again, I should have said something right at the spot, but I was so [flabbergasted], "What?  [laughter] This is Alice in Wonderland.  What are you doing?"  [laughter] We taught the course "Philosophical Issues in Feminism" before Douglass did.  In fact, they borrowed our faculty member to teach at their place.  Back to Albert now.

PC:  I assume this woman who was asked to serve the coffee did not get the job.

PK:  She did get the job.

PC:  She did.  You then had two women.

PK:  Well, Amelie was on the Livingston ...

PC:  Livingston.

PK:  At Livingston.

SH:  She had been at Douglass.

PK:  She had been at Douglass.

PC:  This was the second woman in philosophy overall.

PK:  No, there was a woman, Gail Belaief, who taught at University College and, by the time this happened, we might have hired Mary Gibson. 

PC:  Okay.

PK:  It's possible.  I'm not sure.  We, at one time, out of our nine--no, there were only seven of us at the time--we had three women, Mary Gibson, Martha [Brandt] Bolton and Amelie Rorty.  Feminist philosophy and philosophy and the black experience, or black philosophy, became specialties in the APA and Albert was responsible for this, because the APA had a rule, that if--and I didn't know about this, Albert knew about it--if a specialization is listed three years in a row in the jobs for philosophers, it became an official specialization of the APA, which entitled them to certain kinds [of perks].  They could have meeting rooms that the APA would support and stuff.  The APA has its main sessions, and then, it has the Kant session and the [Charles Sanders] Peirce session and the [John] Dewey committee, you know, all the rest of it.  Sometimes, we didn't have jobs, but we advertised, so that it would become [a specialty] and we would tell the candidates what we were doing.  It became a specialty because we listed those things three years in a row and we weren't really looking for somebody in feminist philosophy or looking for somebody in black philosophy.  We were looking for somebody, but we'd listed [those] among the areas that we wanted.  As a matter-of-fact, that's how we ended up with Howard McGary, because we weren't looking for somebody in black philosophy at the time, and we had a choice between Howard McGary and, shows senility, black guy, Princeton, not Tony Apiah ...

PC:  I do not know.

PK:  No, you'll know the name, teaches in religion as well as philosophy, on talk show after talk show.

PC:  Cornel West. 

PK:  That's it.  We had a choice between Cornel and Howard, and we made the right choice by far.  [laughter] Anyway, so, Albert said, "We'll do this three years in a row," and that's how they got to be specialties.  Albert was a member of the CP [Communist Party], hid out in Mexico for a year-and-a-half, was the department chair from 1969 until 1975, when I became the chair.  He was forced to retire, because when you hit a certain age, I think it was, I don't remember if it was sixty or sixty-five at the time, but he hit that age and, at the time, you could forcibly retire somebody on the basis of their age.  Albert was playing tennis one hour a day, was a very, very healthy person.  He would've retired anyway, because he believed that people should make way for the younger people.  I can just imagine what he would say now.  This is his book.  He died in 1997, and let me read, "Albert was the Democratic district leader," after he retired from Rutgers, "the Democratic district leader, chaired the policy committee of the New York County Democratic Party, was president of the Audubon Reform Democratic Club," member of the Communist Party, "and was an advisor to local elected officials, including Mayor David Dinkins."  [Editor's Note: David Dinkins served as Mayor of New York from 1990 to 1993.]  These are the people who spoke at his memorial.  I'm on that list, but look at the list of people who spoke at his memorial.  You name a Democratic important politician in New York City at the time--I think even Herman Badillo is on there and Charlie Rangel.  This is 1997.  [Editor's Note: Herman Badillo represented New York City congressional districts in the US House of Representatives from 1971 to 1977.  Charles B. Rangel has represented New York City congressional districts in the US House of Representatives since 1971.]

SH:  I do not see Badillo on there.

PK:  Maybe he isn't.

SH:  If you want, I can make a copy of that.

PK:  Here's one or two stories about Albert.  Albert used to like to tell this story, and it's really a story that should have been told about [him].  I brought my little talk that I gave at the [memorial].  I was looking in the book and I didn't know where I had this thing.  You can see this is a well-worn book.  Here's my talk at his memorial.  Albert told this story, but I told this story to say it's really about Albert.  "No matter what the obstacles were, Albert never, ever gave up, ever.  So, here's a story Albert used to tell.  So, there was a guy sitting in a barn full of horse manure and another man came in and started shoveling it and was shoveling this horse manure for hours and hours and hours.  The guy sitting on the bench got more and more and more curious and finally said, 'What the hell are you doing?' and the fellow replied, 'There's got to be a pony in here somewhere,' [laughter] and that's Albert.  Albert was a man who never, ever allowed an obstacle to deter him.  He just figured a way around it." 

Livingston, when it was initially founded, was supposed to be this honors college, but the Newark riots occurred.  Everybody said, "Oh, Rutgers, it's a public university.  What are we doing here with two percent minority students?" or whatever it was, "Doesn't reflect the public at all and why do we have a male college and a female college?" because Rutgers was all-male, Douglass was all-female.  "What kind of place is this?  It's a public university."  Well, the riots took place and Livingston attracted people who could fit and, in some ways, I could fit at both ends of the spectrum.  Some of them were community organizers who had not had much academic experience, maybe they didn't even have a Ph.D., but they had been community leaders, important community leaders, and education had been an important part of their lives.  Eddie Ortiz is a really clear example of that.  Then, there were other people who were interested in teaching at an honors college, at a really highfalutin, only-take-the-really-brightest-kids [type of institution], etc., etc., let them design their own curriculum, their own major.  Well, when these two groups got together, it made PTA meetings look organized.  [laughter] Imagine trying to decide, "Are we going to have any requirements for graduation?" and, there, a third of the faculty says, "Well, no, these students are really well prepared," blah, blah, blah.  Another group would say, "Excuse me, you're forgetting the other two-thirds of the students here."  At the beginning, that was about right.  Two-thirds of the students were extremely underprepared.  Those were mostly the blacks and mostly the Puerto Ricans, but working-class whites, rural kids.  A third of the students--maybe that's a little high, maybe it was seventy-five [percent were] underprepared and twenty-five percent [were] really well-prepared, the honors kids, again, mostly white, a couple black students in there, one Puerto Rican student I remember.  There were probably more than what I'm [remembering].  I had one student who was terrific.  Anyway, so, at faculty meetings, trying to figure out how you develop an educational program that would be suitable for both groups of students was very difficult.  The students themselves were having all kinds of problems.  They tried this one-third, one-third, one-third stuff, and the Jewish students said, "Well, excuse me, where the hell are we?" and the black students said, "Well, you're white," and they said, "No, we're Jewish.  We may have white skin, but we identify not as white, but as Jew."  The black students said, "No, not when you're talking to us, you don't."  [laughter] There was a really telling incident for me. 

The Philosophy Department was on the sixth or seventh [floor], whatever the top floor in Tillett Hall is.  I think it was the sixth floor, and so, we could look out on the people as they were walking below.  There were no sidewalks at Livingston.  It was all mud.  To get from one place to another, you had to walk on wooden pallets.  So, if a group of white students would be walking on the pallet and a group of about twice the number of black students would be walking on the pallet, the white students would step off into the mud and the black students would go on.  If it was the other way around, the black students would step off into the mud and the white students would go like this.  It had to be a really substantial majority or they'd form single files, and so, you could watch this from above.  One parent of one of my white students came one time and she was there to complain that her son was not having a good time at Livingston because of the race relations and she looked out the window and she said, "You see?  See that gang of blacks just about ready to walk down the path?"  I said, "See what happens.  Just watch," and she said, "You mean watch the group of white students?" gang-group.  She just didn't hear herself when she said that.  Anyway, we could watch this thing and it was fascinating to watch this.  [laughter] So, the white students said, "Where are we?" and then, the Asian students said, "Well, where are we?" and then, the students of mixed racial background said, "Where are we?"  So, the first thing we did was black, white, Puerto Rican, other, and the Jews and the Mexicans and the Cubans were in the other.  [laughter] Then, they looked at each other and said, "We don't have much in common."  Larry Pervin, it was Larry Pervin, my first stint as a faculty advisor was in Quad 1 [2].  There were five hundred students and me and the student--there was a student advisor for each one of the houses, for each one of the fifty houses in the quads.  We did not consider ourselves, the faculty, as administrators.  We weren't there to enforce university policy.  The faculty had voted that we didn't want what was then called the Campus Patrol, the University Police, on the campus.  We didn't want any police on the campus--remember when this was.  We saw ourselves more as community organizers, to get health services for the students, to get heaters that worked and all sorts of [things], books in the library.  We thought that'd be a good thing.  [laughter] I was in the quads for a year, because Bob, my friend, had been in that apartment the first year, but he was on leave, because he wanted to still play with the Sequoia Quartet and they were doing a lot of touring that year.  So, I took his apartment for the year.  Then, I moved to the Towers. 

To show you how smart some of the administration was, the Towers, I think, have seven floors, I think, I don't know, six or seven floors, and there's a North Tower and a South Tower, 350 students in each one--fifty students on a floor, so, there are seven floors.  An administrator decided, he put the Puerto Rican students on the seventh floor in the South Towers.  That was okay, but he put the Cuban students on the sixth floor.  I went to him and said, "What are you doing?" and he said, "What do you mean what am I doing?"  I said, "Well, you put the Puerto Ricans on the [seventh floor] and the Cubans there," and he said, "Yes?"  "Why'd you do that?"  I was incredulous and he said, "Well, they all speak Spanish."  [laughter] I said, "Are you kidding?  The Cuban students are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle-class and professional class that left when Castro came and they can't stand the Puerto Rican kids and the Puerto Rican kids can't stand them.  We're going to have knife fights."  "Nah."  Well, the Towers, you can see the steps.  There are big glass things and you can see the steps going up.  The first night there, when the Towers opened up, I saw what looked like mayhem between the two floors.  One of the Cuban kids had been dating a Puerto Rican girl and the Puerto Ricans found out, [Dr. Klein groans] and so, I don't speak any Spanish.  So, here I am, and I walk up the steps and I say, "What's going on here?"  [laughter] They hear this Anglo voice and everybody stops for a minute, then, turns towards me and I think, "Oh, shit," [laughter] but it was fine.  They were okay.  So, other things that happened at Livingston, and then, I'll get back to ...

PC:  Peter, I want to make sure I have got the facts right.  You said your first stint was in Quad 1, but ...

PK:  Yes, it's Quad 2.

PC:  Quad 2, okay.

PK:  Quad 2. 

PC:  The only reason I am asking is, that means you were initially in that "Suburbia."

PK:  That's right.

PC:  Mentality.

PK:  And, if you go to Livingston, you'll see that the trees in Quad 2 are older than the trees in any other place, because we planted the damn things.  [laughter]

PC:  In the mud.

PK:  In the mud.  

SH:  No water.

PK:  And we brought in dirt by the truckload and built little hills; [laughter] oh, well, anyway.

PC:  I will add that when I came in 1974, the thing I heard most about Livingston was not about any of the racial problems, any of the drug problems--it was just covered with mud.

PK:  Mud, yes, just mud.

PC:  Because they had no way to walk other than through the mud.

PK:  Right, right, and that's true.  We didn't.

SH:  For how many years?

PK:  Six or seven.

PC:  Quite a while.

PK:  Long time. 

SH:  How did your family adapt to living in such close proximity with the students, because your apartments were right there?

PK:  Yes.  They were built on the cheap, so, there's hardly any insulation in the walls, so [that] the noise carried.  We learned how to sleep to music that was not our normal music, let's just say that.  I actually enjoyed it a lot.  Dana is a lovely person and very kind and calm, not like me, and the students liked her a lot.  We liked it.  After our son was born, we didn't think, I mean, given the medical problems he had anyway and given you get no peace and quiet anyway, we thought, "No."  So, we did it for three years. 

PC:  All right.  [laughter]

PK:  To show Ernie Lynton's wonderful idealism and naivety at the same time, so, there's the Great Hall at Livingston, in Tillett, and he had bought some prints and had them around, nailed on the wall.  He had bought some beautiful furniture with rugs, throw rugs, and stuff in the Great Hall.  I told him, "This is a mistake.  It's not going to be here tomorrow.  There won't be anything left tomorrow," and he said, "No, no, students wouldn't steal this."  Nothing, not a thing, was left the next day and I told him, "You know, it is true that there are people from outside the University who are doing some of the theft."  There was an awful lot of theft in some of the Livingston dorms, because a lot of the suburban kids didn't lock their doors and they would leave a door ajar with a rock, so that their friends could get in, because their friend's key wouldn't open that door if they were in another quad.  People from the outside would get in and, once they got in, in the basement, they could find another door going up to one of the houses that was open.  Ernie said, "No, no, it's all from the outside," and I said, "Okay.  Will you give me a hundred dollars if I can produce a master key to all the quads tomorrow?" and he said, "Yes, you're not going to be able to do that."  I said, "Okay, not tomorrow, day after tomorrow," and he said, "Sure."  Well, I had three, and he had to give me three hundred dollars.  [laughter] Three different keys made by different locksmiths, because, dumb thing, they put their thing on it and you can tell, of course, a Rutgers key, because it's a six or seven-pointed key.  It's not a five-pointed key, and I tried them and they worked.  He had to give me three hundred dollars, because I gave [it to] the kids.  I told the kids, "You slide it under the door, no question asked.  You come at ten o'clock.  I'm going to slide it under the door.  I won't see who you are.  You come at ten and you come at eleven and you come at twelve."  The hundred dollars disappeared right on the dot.  So, they had others.  They had the blank they were making it from, so, they had nothing to lose, [laughter] and then, Ernie learned a lesson. 

So, one little story about Albert, and then, if we have time, maybe I can read part of--well, no, it's sort of in the story.  Two stories about Albert; so, we'd have this meeting going on of the Faculty Chamber, in which Eddie was the secretary, and Eddie was a very creative secretary, let's say.  I'll explain what I mean in a minute.  So, we'd be fighting about something or other and God knows what was happening.  Albert had a little block of wood.  He always spoke from a podium.  He always had a suit and tie on and he always had a slip of paper with three recent articles from The New York Times to make some sort of point.  He'd start a faculty meeting, "I have three things I'd like you to read."  We knew, because he was a Hegelian, right.  Albert, there'd be this pandemonium and Albert would go [bang the block of wood] and nobody would shut up, [bangs the block of wood], nobody, and then, Eddie would stand up and say, "Albert is trying to get your attention."  [Editor's Note: Dr. Klein makes knocking sounds to illustrate how Albert Blumberg banged the block of wood]  Then, Albert would say, "I think I hear a consensus," [laughter] and we'd all be sitting there, "Hmm?"  [laughter] Albert would say, "And Eddie will put it together for the next meeting," [laughter] and Eddie would write up something, and Eddie would write it up because Albert and I and Eddie and three or four other faculty members would meet and agree, of the different factions, agree on what we would all agree to.  Then, at the next meeting, Eddie would announce, "Here was the consensus," and we'd all say, "Yes, that's right."  [laughter]

One other story about Albert, and this one, it's okay.  So, we had a dean at one point named Emmanuel Mesthene, M-E-S-T-H-E-N-E, who, when he introduced himself, would say, "My name is Mesthene and you'll remember because it rhymes with destiny."  [Editor's Note: Ernest Lynton served as Livingston's Dean from 1965 until 1973.  Emmanuel Mesthene served as Dean of Livingston College from 1974 to 1977.]  Okay, now, Manny was trained as a philosopher by John Randall at Columbia, so, a pretty good philosopher.  Randall was an excellent philosopher, I meant Manny, but Manny came from, let's say, an extremely conservative tradition.  [laughter] When Manny took over, part of the plan, we thought, at the time, was to close Livingston, or at least change it radically, because we were bringing, from what Rutgers' point-of-view was, bad press to the University.  Manny was a very good philosopher, a good philosopher.  When he died, he left some money to our Philosophy Department to endow a lecture series and we have the Emmanuel Mesthene Lecture Series and his wife, Ruth, comes to some of them.  That was very helpful to us.  Now, we've not gotten to the development of our department.

PC:  I was going to suggest we pause.

[TAPE PAUSED]

SH:  We had turned it off.

PK:  Okay.

SH:  This concludes our session for today.  We will meet again in the next couple of weeks.

---------------------------------------------END OF INTERVIEW-------------------------------------------

Reviewed by Kathryn Tracy Rizzi 11/26/12
Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 9/12/13
Reviewed by Jessica Friedman 11/10/14
Reviewed by Peter Klein 11/8/2019
Reviewed by Kate Rizzi 1/27/2020