Shaun Illingworth: This begins the third interview session with Dr. Martin Kling and his wife, Roslyn, on December 4, 2012, in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with Shaun Illingworth. Thank you both for having me here. We're going to begin with Mrs. Kling's version of how the two of you got together and started your life together.
Roslyn Kling: For some time now, my father had been telling me about a nice young couple that he would like me to meet. They lived four floors above us--but, somehow, the meeting had never materialized. This is the Summer of 1957.
One day that summer, we were invited to a party on their floor. There was a Chinese consul to the United States, from what was Nationalist China [Taiwan] at that time. This is 1957. He had a very sweet and charming wife. They were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary. We were among the invited guests. My father was working. So, I attended the party by myself.
As I stepped off the elevator, the aroma of superb Chinese cooking captured my attention. I hardly noticed a young woman approaching. She said to me, "You must be Dave's daughter." Apparently, this was the wife and mother of a young couple whom my father had met--because he worked different hours and he would meet quite a number of the neighbors in this building that was brand-new.
We had moved in. My dad and I had moved into it right after I graduated from college. So, I just never did get to meet that couple until there was a party, the Chinese consul and his wife were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary.
Coincidentally--or not so coincidentally, because Marty's younger brother and sister-in-law lived on that floor, so, they were neighbors--she was also attending the party, the sister-in-law. At that point, we met for the first time. A couple of weeks later, we met again.
I went down to the laundry to do some washing and she happened to be there. She was the only other person in the laundry room. We were talking a while. Then, she said to me, "I wonder if you could do me a favor. My brother-in-law is coming in from California in a couple of weeks. My husband and I will be celebrating our fifth anniversary. We are going with another couple, but my brother-in-law needs a girl to accompany him. Would you mind?"
I was very busy at the time. I was working for NBC at Rockefeller Center and there was a lot of overtime, as there often is in broadcasting. I hesitated. She saw me hesitate. I'm thinking, "Well, I'm expecting another young man to come in and introduce me to his New York family, and I'm going to be so busy between that and the overtime at work. I just don't have time to do anything else."
So, I almost said no, but, then, I thought--well, she kind of put the pressure on me, too. She said, "Look, I have to know right away, because he'll be here in two weeks and we have to make plans." So, I thought, "Well, you're not engaged. Look at somebody else." I said, "Okay, I'll go." That's how I met Marty.
We felt very comfortable with each other the moment we met. When he came in from the West Coast, she had already told me a good bit about him. Actually, before I said I would go, I considered that it would be interesting to meet a professor, because I had a je ne sais quoi about dating gentlemen in different vocations, in different professions. I thought it would be interesting to see what it would be like to date a professor. [laughter]
So, she said, "Fine, I'll go upstairs and tell my husband." It was all set. Marty came in a couple of weeks later. He called from four flights up and said, "I would like to come down and talk to you about arrangements for the dinner/dancing event."
My dad was home and we enjoyed speaking with him for the few minutes. He just came in to break the ice and make arrangements for the time of our meeting, and so forth. When he left, my dad and I just looked at each other as though to say, "Not bad so far." [laughter]
Actually, it was a pleasure from the beginning. He was very congenial, and it didn't hurt that he was a handsome gentleman. [laughter] So, it started. A couple of weeks later, we went to the event and we had a very immediate attraction to each other.
We felt very comfortable with each other. We dated frequently. He was on vacation, of course. I would see him after I came home from work. He was always around. So, I would see him, see quite a bit of him.
I think that destiny played a big part in this, because of the various ways that I met, by chance, his brother and sister-in-law, after my dad had been wanting me to meet them for months. I never had a chance, because I was on a schedule that I came home, I had dinner, I went to sleep, I got up the next morning, I commuted over an hour to work--and that was my merry-go-round. So, I never really met my neighbors. My dad, on a different schedule, on the other hand, was able to meet more people more quickly than I had been.
So, after only six weeks of very frequent dating and being in the same building, seeing each other even when we weren't dating, Marty proposed.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
RK: For a while, yes, please.
SI: Sure, go ahead.
RK: One day, I announced to my dad, "I think there will soon be a proposal." That was late August of 1957 and not too much time passed when Marty did propose. We became formally engaged on September 11, 1957. By this time, the immediate families had met many times and an engagement dinner was given upstairs that included a few additional members of my family, such as my father's brother and his wife, who lived in Brooklyn.
I had failed to mention that we were living up in a part of the Bronx called Riverdale, which was way up at the northeastern part of the Bronx. This was a very bucolic area. The building where we lived was brand-new. It was a co-op that was built just at the time when I completed college. My dad was able to move in a little ahead of my graduation. We subsequently moved in and had very happy experiences. Neighbors were close and friendly.
This is how I came to meet my husband of--next month will be fifty-five years. It was a happy experience all around.
Interestingly enough, and this is a very amusing thing that I like to tell over and over, because it's not only coincidental, but it's amusing, I had a very dear aunt and uncle in the Connecticut countryside. I started to spend a great deal of time there from the age of seven weeks until I was about twenty-five, summers, school vacations, religious holidays. They were very [close]. She (the aunt) was my mother's sister.
My mother was killed when I was sixteen in a very freakish accident, let's call it.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
SI: Sure, go ahead.
RK: Where was I?
SI: You were saying your mother had been killed in an accident with a driverless car.
RK: Yes, that rolled down a hill, up on to the sidewalk, and she never knew what hit her. So, I was now living with my dad in...
[RECORDING PAUSED]
SI: We're talking about your aunt. You were talking to her just before you met Dr. Kling.
RK: That's right, that's right. I think perhaps only a few months before or a couple of months, I visited her in the Connecticut countryside. I said, "I'll never get married." I said, "I just can't find the right guy." She said to me, "There's somebody out there for you and, if he knew where you are, he would come running. We just don't know where he is right now. Maybe he's in California." [laughter]
SI: She really had foresight.
RK: Yes, I think so. That's right, clairvoyant aunt, okay.
SI: Thank you very much. Shifting gears a little bit, Dr. Kling, you had some thoughts after our last few sessions, that you've prepared something.
MK: Yes. I feel as if this is sort of a "last lecture" and how I would sum up what I've learned over the past seventy years, from high school on up. I came across my yearbook and that sort of set the stage for what's happened to me, in somewhat a similar style.
When I graduated in 1945, I was one of the co-editors of our yearbook. It was called The Oriole and it was in the Bronx. It was the Evander Childs High School. We used to try to summarize each person's personality--who they were and what they were doing and what they had accomplished in high school. For me, it said, "Service Pin, Bronze Scholarship Pin, Junior Arista, President of the Foreign Affairs Club." Then, the punchline, it said, "Let no man (K)ling to the past." [laughter]
At that time, 1945, FDR had died. So, it was dedicated to his time, and tying that in was the "gremlins." Gremlins did things as if by magic, and they were referred to as "them gremlins," things that happened during the war that they couldn't explain it readily, and so forth. This was through gremlins' eyes viewing the past, present and future of the graduating Class of 1945.
So, it was an optimistic view of who [we were] and where we were going. It was a happy group of people graduating at that time. So, they set up this theme and they had a song about it, "Evander High, we're leaving you forever. We're off to build a world of our own. We will all remember you and we will never stain your name. We'll keep it well-known. We love you well for all the things you fought for us, high ideals that in life will apply. We'll miss you, but we must go, farewell and goodbye," and so forth.
"A little history of the gremlins, crept into the folklore of aviation beginning in World War II when odd things began to happen to planes. It was also the year when '45 crept into the high school and odd things began to happen in Evander, such as minute accidents as punctured gas tanks, ripped wing fabrics or other nuisances that gummed up the works and gave rise to the gremlin idea."
We set up a scenario, a group of scenarios, as to what happened to who along the line, the past, present and the future. So, I was given that kind of a theme here along the way. I'm trying to find the space here where I was mentioned. It sort of foreran some of the things that happened to me, as a forerunner in a sense. It says, "Gremlinicus Futuramus," and so forth. So, now, this thing here, I can't seem to locate it at this moment, though.
SI: That's all right.
MK: In any event, they mentioned me as being located somewhere in the middle of New York City, "And there's Martin Kling and he is muttering out loud, 'Evander Childs people, where are your dues? You haven't paid them up," but that was influenced by a teacher that I had in public speaking. That's where I became kind of [imbued with] the seeds of professorial-ism.
Instead of the usual English course, it was a public speaking course, which I opted for, in which you prepared a talk, a five-minute talk, to convince whoever you were talking to in class. You went to different classes, all over the school, made a presentation.
Then, they wrote notes and commented on your presentation. Then, you brought it back and you analyzed it in the class. That, in a sense, set the stage for my own professorial stance or demeanor.
What I'm going to do now, in terms of my last lecture, is an inverted pyramid. It's going to look like this, from the "macro" macro to the "micro" micro at the end, the bottom of the pyramid.
So, the first part of the inverted pyramid is the "macro" macro, which I refer to as a zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It's hard to fight the spirit of the times. We're all engulfed by it all the time and reminded of where we are and who we are and what we're not, what we might be, what we could be, and so forth.
So, now, the human being, in terms of development, is like a tabula rasa, culturally speaking and humanizing-wise, from the get-go. It's a blank slate, even though there's heredity and environment, but environment is the biggie in terms of pulling out what's hereditary, in terms of who you are and who you became or didn't become and how you made peace with that type of thing.
So, the zeitgeist I was brought up in was one in which the parent is the biggest role player in transmitting that zeitgeist, culturally, value-wise, skills, lack of skills, opportunity, lack of opportunity, and so forth, which you don't have control of. You're sort of cast in that particular caste.
So, my father was a journalist, first and foremost, for the Jewish papers, in Yiddish, The Jewish Daily Forward. He wrote for all the papers. He was one who was an active journalist, who went behind the scenes, so-to-speak. For example, he slept with hobos, homeless people, for a week. Then, he wrote about it, firsthand, what it was like. He's a featured type of journalist, for years and years. On his grave, he lists himself as a journalist.
Secondly, he was a union organizer, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, where there's a sweatshop and unrightful torture in terms of the kind of days and ways in which they were utilized or mis-utilized, in terms of inhuman behavior, sweatshops, literally and figuratively.
Thirdly, he was a Yiddish teacher. He had a degree in that field and was offered several positions, which he did not accept at that moment, because the other things were occupying his time. He went to night school to do that and got degrees in that field.
So, that's the environment I grew up in and value as my values. As you can see from what was going on in that period, we were in the middle of a Depression, which started in the '30s. I was born in 1928. So, we had to make-do with whatever we could. He also worked in a factory for a while, to make ends meet. He used to work in a company that made beautiful handbags for the people who were not in the recession, [laughter] and bring some of those things home, in fact.
The first language I spoke was not English; it was Yiddish. They spoke Yiddish and Russian. When they didn't want me to understand anything, they spoke in Russian, which then became Poland and Russia. In fact, I almost visited there when I was invited to a Polish meeting in Poland. [Their] equivalent to the Library of Congress, they invited me to present [on] reading habits of adults in this country.
So, I got some of my values in that sense. I went to Yiddish school and was thinking of becoming a Yiddish teacher also, but I was discouraged by the teachers I [was] taught by, because they said, "You're not going to go anywhere with that. You'd better go on, on your way."
So, that's the zeitgeist, the macro and the micro, coming together in the '30s, but the other kind of macro in terms of the zeitgeist is, we've undergone, this society's undergone, three major revolutions, starting with the 1800s, the late 1800s, the Agricultural Revolution, and then, the 1920s, the Industrial Revolution, with the auto industry, Ford and so forth, then, what's now called the Technological Revolution, which is spinning off into other areas.
The big one is (one spinoff is) the social networking, the Facebook; a billion people, that's one out of every seven people. There's seven billion people on this Earth, that just passed. That's a biggie. That's behind a lot of the revolutions going on now. Then, we have the various Silicon Valleys and higher education, more and more higher education.
Now, at the turn of the century, the average reading level (and the expectation and all that was needed) was the fourth grade. Guess what it is now? It's at least the tenth or eleventh grade; it should be, but forty-four million Americans are reading at the fourth-grade level at this moment. These are adults. They are what we call functionally illiterate, functionally illiterate.
Part of it is the makeup of the population. An example is New York City, which is the largest school system in the country. It's equivalent to having--the number of eighty thousand teachers and forty-four percent are Hispanic and black and disadvantaged, poverty levels--it's equivalent to eight states, in terms of population and impact on the nation as a whole.
So, the other spinoff in terms of the macro is STEM to meet this challenge. STEM is an acronym for "S," science, "T" for technology, "E" for engineering and "M" for mathematics. Well, that's a mouthful, but it's also disturbing to me because it assumes that everybody can fit into that mold and that's what the whole world is about. It's not, and this is a real problem.
There are school districts now, for example, Monroe, not far from here, twenty, thirty minutes away, just invested over forty million dollars in revamping their high school to fit STEM--but not everybody is like that. Where are the humanities? Where is social, being a social person, being a real person with values? Where are the people who are good in music and good in other things, in English, and so forth? We're making robots out of them.
That's another thing that's going on--robotics. If MIT were a nation, it would be the eleventh wealthiest country in the world in terms of the jobs they've created. The big thing that they're working on and have perfected quite well are robots. The robots are so good that they can be nurses, pharmacists. They already are in the automobile industry to a great degree.
We're getting more and more micro. In fact, there is work in pharmacy where they will create drugs that the body will not know that it's a foreign thing that's being taken by the body. It'll fit the actual needs and fit right into the flow of the blood network in the body. The pharmacies are working like crazy. It's [within] one to five years that they're trying to accomplish this.
So, here, you have a meeting of the macro and micro going on, and it's disturbing, because what we need more are people who are interdependent, polite, respectful, human, to get along. A good deal of the world is not getting along. We can see that with the religious wars that are going on, the fights that are going on, the mindless killings of innocent people, children, women, and so forth.
Also, we don't seem to be able to communicate with each other, partly because our languages and our cultures are so different. It is estimated by linguists that there are six thousand dialects and languages spoken on this Earth at this time, and still counting. Some people in China cannot understand the other people in China because of the dialects. Maybe we need this universal language called Esperanto, which somebody promulgated a number of years ago, that we all should have one language, so [that] we can all talk to each other, and so forth.
Part of the problem is individual and intraindividual differences. I think I spoke about that earlier, in terms of the bell-shaped curve. 90 to 110 is normal IQ, at sixty-eight percent of the population is that bell shape, and the other twenty-some-odd percent are below 90. So, you have eighty-eight percent that are normal and below. Over 130 or 40 are getting into the gifted and the college people area.
So, not everybody is suitable for college level work--in other words, can they do due diligence and sort out fact from fiction and be taken for (what put us into this recession) and other things going on, which brings me to the invasion of the role of higher education.
Because of technology being so strong a macro factor, they're trying to make higher education fit into that and make it less expensive. In the latest movement, so that it made the front page of The Times a few weeks ago and a discussion in Time Magazine, a whole issue devoted to higher education, is the Internet, giving courses on the Internet. There's one guy at Princeton who's been leading some of the charge--another guy at Stanford and some people at Berkeley are working on it, too--is to lecture on the Internet, take your courses to the Internet.
I would say that is a disaster in the making. The most critical time of a person's life at the college level is becoming a fuller person, meeting up with a mentor, a human person who becomes, eventually, (or should become) either a second father or a second mother. In fact, when I was chair and we hired new assistant professors, I got them a mentor.
Only one didn't make tenure in my tenure there, for other reasons. We tried, but she just didn't size up. Only half--I think I spoke about that--had made assistant to associate with tenure. Only half made [it] from assistant to associate. That's a national trend, very Darwinian.
So, we've lost a lot of the human contact and growth and development--meeting other peers, working with study groups and developing a sense of community, and growing up and becoming an adult. If you took that away and put it on a mindless, mechanical, non-human screen, where are you?
Another example of how Berkeley, at least, handled it, at that time when I was a student there, we had large lecture classes, especially introductory courses, like "Psych 1-A," "Econ 1-A," which I took, for example, as part of my curriculum. We met in an auditorium and there were eight hundred to a thousand people in there, but that wasn't the end of it. We went on to meeting with teaching assistants afterwards, as a follow-up, where the classes only had twenty or thirty or forty people at the most.
That's how the future professors became professors, also--so, you killed two things with one stone, two for one. You made future professors do their work and become professorial. You had students becoming more human and relating to people who knew what they were doing--and even did better than the full professor lecturing in a lecture hall, because they really did their homework, which I did when I was a teaching assistant.
Also, I did some of my studies, my master's and doctoral studies, on students who acted as part of the study. They would take it away for an hour or two to do my [tests], whatever it was or whoever, and became subjects of dissertations or master's theses.
So, I'm not dismissing technology outright. It might be used as a supplementary reinforcement or as a non-credit course, but not as a replacement for the human aspects. So, the role of higher education is key here.
Now, a lot of it goes back to the parents and the basic unit. Now, oh, what's happening is, and what needs to happen more and more in higher education (and lower education as well), is interdisciplinary activity. The reason I emphasize that is, these divisions--and we see that in medicine, unfortunately, there's so many specialties--but the human being is one whole thing and relies on [that], doesn't say, "I want this and that and that." It all works in synchronization.
They all have to work together. If one part breaks, you have to not just go to that person, but maybe some other related [specialist], and you need a team to work together. We're losing that. We're getting all the specialists, "Oh, go to this guy, this guy," when, in fact, you have to talk to a whole team to really get to the bottom of it.
In teaching over five thousand adults, I found, especially, doctors were poor detectives for that reason. They were too narrow. They had a lot of work to do and they did a lot of work by rote, rather than thinking through the problem, in terms of what the real problem was (or problems).
So, we have a lot of pigeonholing in that sense, but it all starts, essentially, with us being a brain. Even though there's genetic, hereditary things and environmental things, but the environment is the thing that makes us a human being, in terms of bringing out whatever's inherited genetically.
Of course, we're getting into the genetics and the genes more and more now. That's the biggest silent revolution that's going on. It starts with the spoken word and the listening. Even though the kid, the kid is saying incomprehensible things, "Wah-wah, blah, blah, blah," and the adult does not understand what the kid is saying, but, when some cultural anthropologists did sine wave analysis of their oral thing, they were at ninety-five percent overlap between the "Wah-wah-wah" and the adult language, already at zero age.
So, there's the speaker, the listener, the reading readiness, learning to read--and that's the fourth grade, learning to read--and then, reading to learn, which starts taking place in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Then, writing is the last thing, and the most difficult thing to master.
It starts with the parent. The basic unit of our society and our culture is the parent and the unit of marriage and caring for each other. In this country, only half the people remain married, have divorces. Part of it is, they don't seem to know how to communicate and relate to each other, because they have not been properly taught that way on a macro and micro level, in terms of values, and so forth.
The big thing that overarches everything at the macro and micro level is critical thinking. We don't know how to teach and haven't (although we can) [taught] critical thinking. There are twenty-one steps, which I've outlined. Did I give you a copy of that?
SI: Is this "Levels of Questioning?"
MK: Yes, yes, "Levels of Questioning," which end up with "Who?" "What?" "Where?" "Why?" at the first level, and ends up with "What if?" A lot of the problems that we have undergone is not transmitting that kind of model.
When I first was looking around for a university to go to--I don't know if I reported this before--we were lower middle class at the time and could afford only one place. My safe college was Brooklyn College and I took the eight-hour test there, and then, the other one was Berkeley, California.
Now, you say, "Whoa, they're too far apart," [laughter] but how did I get there? At that time, in 1945, when stamps were a penny a stamp (postal card), I sent postal cards to over a hundred schools. How did I get them? I went to the World Almanac. [laughter] As far as I know, they're still coming in, the catalogs are still coming in.
I chose Berkeley because it was a college town and they emphasized college students. I could work my way through there, 150 dollars for out of state students, twenty-seven for medical expenses. I worked my way through.
Interestingly enough, when I was hiring people as a chair and looking around, I found many of my future colleagues did their undergraduate work at Brooklyn College. It's an amazing story, come complete circle.
So, this would be my "last lecture." I think professors ought to have this kind of a series called "The Last Lecture: What Have We Learned?" and what I have learned is to keep learning. Every day, I learned something new every day. I read something in the paper.
I've been subscribing to The New York Times for seventy-five years. I sold The New York Times in the schools when I was going to school. My first check was a dollar. [laughter] I don't know if they still have that program. So, your sources of information have to be a valid place, not just appealing to you-know-what, call it non-news or that kind of stuff.
I've been thinking of presenting that to Todd Hunt at Rutgers, but I've been consumed with other things going on, in terms of medical things going on, where I just turned eighty-four, she'll be eighty in February--and so it goes.
So, it's the brain and, on the micro and macro level, we're learning more and more about the brain. Of course, the next big, big thing is Alzheimer's. They now have identified whether you have Alzheimer's or not. They have sort of an X-ray type of thing, which can clearly indicate that, but they don't know how to deal with it. They're working like crazy to find a way to deal with it, but that's the first step.
All these wars, and so forth, they're a lack of communication, lack of education. E-D-U means "Come out, full out." For example, I had developed fourteen ways of learning vocabulary, prefixes, suffixes. There are very common prefixes and suffixes in Latin, and roots, for openers, besides the spelling, and then, using it, and so forth.
So, my training at the Grad School was, as Director of the Reading Center, I taught reading specialists. We got the State to certify reading specialists. We developed [that], and one of the reasons I chose Rutgers was, it was developing a master's and doctoral program. A professor is known by his students. That's how I wanted to [advance in my career].
I'd taught at the state college while going for my higher degrees. I taught English, but I couldn't take the crazy schedule and nothing to show for it. There's five classes a week, a continual grind, and nothing to show for it at the end of the day, except being tired and unproductive and not fulfilling my own intellectual and personal needs.
So, I used to commute from Walnut Creek into San Francisco State College for a couple of years. Boy, it was a grind, but it was a way of getting my degree. That's why it takes so long, because we were raising a family, and so forth, and so on.
My three kids, my oldest son is vice-president of a publishing company. He's an editor and co-editor. He got his degree, of all things, in political science, but he always showed an interest in writing and very, very sharp. My daughter is a musician, professional musician. She did her work at Indiana and Yale, got a master's in musicianship and plays for the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony and all, and movies, background music for movies. My other son is into fundraising and mental health and helping people. So, they're on the West Coast.
So, it's been a full life, but, now, the issues are living assistance, is an algorithm, when you reach this age, and it's not a happy algorithm, obviously, but we're fighting out there. We're going to PT [physical therapy], we go to our regular checkups. She was at the doctor, the ophthalmologist, the other day, and so forth, and so on.
I was a consultant for several years. I think I told you where they sued...
SI: Yes. You were an expert witness.
MK: Yes, an expert witness.
SI: That was after you retired from Rutgers.
MK: Yes.
SI: I wanted to ask about what you did in your retirement, if you continued consulting, which you did.
MK: Yes, I had a private practice. Students would be referred from Rutgers. I mean, faculty would refer parents who came to Rutgers and say, "Where can I go from here?" They said, "Well, Marty Kling's down in East Brunswick," and they were continually knocking on my door.
That was very helpful, in terms of supplementing income and flexibility of [time]. They were down here, right here, one-on-one. Then, I would send the report to their schools. We would follow them up. I was thinking of publishing a lot of these things, but you get caught up. I've been retired since, it says so here...
SI: 1992.
MK: Well, '91, actually, it took place, but he got to '92. I was quoted in The Times a couple of times, been thinking of writing a piece for The New York Times summarizing some of these things.
We are now--getting back to the macro--we can become a banana republic the way we're headed right now. Until recently, the United States produced--back to the macro level--the United States produced seventy percent of all the PhDs in this world. If we go the way we are now, in terms of not supporting doctoral students in graduate work, we'll be thirtieth instead of seventieth in terms of producing.
Now, what's happening is, foreign students are coming here, and then, going back. There are 212 universities that offer the PhD--sixty-three provide over sixty percent of all the PhDs in this country. Rutgers is one of them. They belong to the (I get those figures from) the AAU, the American Association of Universities.edu. In order to become part of that group--I think, did I go into that?
SI: Yes. You talked about the preparations the Graduate School of Education made.
MK: A hundred thousand dollars to prepare for that three-day investigation.
So, that is one part of the picture. The other is the cost of education. That's why there's need to make it cheaper by going online, but there's a price for that. The consequences are real dire. We have to support that from a federal and national point of view as a priority.
Some work has been done with this commissioner in Obama's cabinet for junior colleges, but that's not what's going to keep us going. That's just everyday stuff, because there are five major criteria for doctoral studies. The first one--and foremost for promotion anywhere in academia--is basic research.
Basic research revolves around five things at the macro/micro level. First, you have to have a theory. Then, you have to have a construct developed from that theory. Thirdly, you start testing the theory. There are different ways of testing it. You do a factor analysis, which is a statistical way of sorting out the big picture and the smaller pictures. Fourthly, you test it empirically.
The worst of it is face validity--what the hoi poloi thinks it is. The hoi poloi is always wrong, most of the time. It's like, "Correlation is not causation." The conspiracy theory, all that non-thinking that goes on in this world because of the bell-shaped curve, "I can see the Moon from my bedroom. Does that make me an astronaut?" "No, it makes you an astro-nut."
That's what this world is coming to, these billions of people. They can't separate out the validity of what's going on around them. They don't have the education or the intellectual resources to sort these things out. Now, I took courses in those things, [read] books on those things, did my own work on those things. There's no magic bullet. It's "multiple-multiple."
In medical science (and most of the sciences, so-called, now, one-variable things), [they] are looking for the magic bullet. The poor science is medical science right now. I've had discussions and I've interacted with people in medicine who've called upon me and discussed it with their superiors, but they've gotten nowhere, "He says it's too expensive," or this, that and the other. "How are we going to do it?"
The companies that aren't doing anything in any area are those that are doing basic research. They have a theory and test it out that way. What they do now in medicine is, "Oh, we did a lot of studies," but the studies are GIGO, "garbage in, garbage out." They do a meta-analysis of the lousy studies to begin with and they come out with the wrong answers or no answers at all.
Basically, getting back to my original theme, from a human point of view, we are like a tabula rasa. We need interdisciplinary work across the board, so that we can get to some of the basic things. The human mind or the brain is an open system. That's why they're at six thousand languages, and so forth. If it were a closed system, there'd be only one language spoken, and it's by accident. If you're in "Eskimoland," you speak Eskimo; you don't know anything else.
Just like [on] 60 Minutes the other day, there's this guy who was in "Camp 15," they call it, in North Korea. He thought the whole world was like that--they were tortured, they were killed or whatever, arbitrarily, that electric wire fences surrounded the camp. He thought the whole world was like that.
He escaped and somebody adopted him here in America and became his mother or father, mother and sister. I think somebody was killed there for doing something stupid. In fact, he squealed on them and they killed them, killed the mother and the daughter, whatever, his sister. So, we have people like that and countries like that, still.
So, with all this technology available, we can humanize it and make a better world to live in, but we need people who are dedicated at all levels to have the tools. Higher education is the main way out, in terms of spreading the good things we know about and can utilize almost immediately.
I'm reminded, even in my time, when I first did my master's and doctorate, the computer was just coming into its existence in the '60s. We had a room that was almost as big as a stadium, and, now, that room is a little tablet. I had to punch these cards that had eighty fields in the cards. I even wrote notes to Ros on those cards, saying, "I love you," punched it out. [laughter]
So, this is how [far] we've come and, eventually, we'll be able to replace pieces of us in the brain and attach things in there and make us whole again. The opportunities are endless in terms of what we can do, considering where we were in the Middle Ages and three, four, five thousand years ago.
The other thing is, overall, not withstanding all these things, baddies (there's still some goodies), at the turn of the century, the average person lived about forty years old now, men and women. Now, men live to their middle or late seventies and women live to the middle and late eighties.
Some of our benefits, so-called, now, were just developed when people didn't live that long. So, it seems like [retirement is] in the far distance, yet, ten thousand people are retiring every day, every day. They will become one of the largest constituents in the coming decades.
My basic mantra, in terms of living life the way I have, is threefold--live (you have to live), laugh--the evidence, such as it is now, is you add two or three more years if you laugh--and love, that thing that attracts men and women and keeps the fires burning and doing things together. The basic unit is the family. In a sense, we're all related in one way or another, if you know the "six degrees" notion, probably had to start somewhere. So, that's our mantra.
We still belong to a lot of associations, still about a dozen, are still coming in, been invited here, there and everywhere. We read a lot, read together. We do things together. So, we do have to make quick judgements, though, sometimes.
Interestingly enough, in The Home News--we get The Home News also, for local news, every day--they have a little section on "Today in History." The other day, just December 3rd, yesterday, they said, "In 1964," when I was at Berkeley, in January that year--just a few weeks later, I was filing my dissertation at the administration building. The day before I was doing that, and I was wondering whether I would be all right, "1964, police arrest some eight hundred students at the University of California, Berkeley, because students had stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in," Vietnam War.
So, we've been through [wars]. Wars don't solve problems; they create problems and they're not rational. So, we have to think of ourselves as part of the whole planet. Whatever happens one place affects everybody else, one way or another, either micro or macro level.
I was reminded about that in Korea, in my separation papers, which I dug up. I was at the largest hospital in the world at that time (still is, I guess, if they're here), the 14th Field Hospital, had ten thousand prisoners of war. They were under our aegis, behind barbed wire.
So, when they had an uprising, now and then, and created a problem (and they put it down), obviously, we went in to see why and who did it. These were all Communists, sworn to that kind of approach. In the bathrooms, we could see things written in broken English, "Kill the Americans. If you don't, you should be killed." These were the leaders of that instigation.
It happened every now and then. When it happened, they would blow the sirens and tanks would come around the barbed wire, and so forth, and so on. Of course, we were outside the barbed wire, but they threw darts. They took the cots and they shaved off the end of the wood and threw it out to try to hit somebody on the outside who was guarding them, in a desperate effort to show who they were and how dedicated they were to the Communist, quote, "cause."
Of course, that was what that was all about. We were trying to [contain Communism]. "We" thought, [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower thought, that Communism would spread all over Asia and this was the way to deal with it. Well, does it? War doesn't settle anything. It just kills people prematurely. This thing that they have coming out of the war, the veterans and the...
SI: Post-traumatic stress disorder.
MK: Post-traumatic, it affects the brain. It's not just a therapy thing. It affects the brain, physiologically and psychologically affects the brain. There's more to it than just taking a pill or a one-shot thing. It's more complicated, and so forth, and so on.
In typical Army style, at the end, when they said, "Service training courses," it says, "Army extension course." [laughter] I got the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, and so forth, and so on. I never went AWOL. A lot of guys couldn't take it. They went AWOL, "action [absent] without leave," tried to steal away.
Anyway, so, that's my macro/micro analysis of life. What else have I been doing? been reading a lot, learning a lot, playing the market, doing all right, can live another ten, fifteen years the way we are, not running for the doors. Don't fear fear--that's the biggest single downer in this universe of people, because of the bell-shaped curve. They can't see cause and effect or causes and effect. They can't see beyond their noses.
It's a mob psychology (or lack thereof). They need more people and more in a curriculum to educate that brain and to think about these things, rather than follow the crowd. As you can see, I've never followed the crowd, never, when I have thought my thoughts.
When I taught these guys who were Regular Army--and they were reading below the fourth grade level and we're getting "square pegs in round holes," I told you about--the Colonel said, "You do it." Okay, I did it. I was a PFC and they were all sergeants and master sergeants, "Shape up or ship out--take control. Take control of yourself, control of others, but, in a thoughtful way, not just an arbitrary, stupid way."
So, everything I've done has been thoughtful, I hope. My dad and mother were respectful of that, because I was a little different and went my way.
SI: I had one follow-up question about your time at Rutgers.
MK: Yes.
SI: Going back to when you helped found the AAUP chapter.
MK: Oh, yes, sure.
SI: I asked you this in the last interview, what the relationship was like with the administration after that happened. You said it was good, but I wanted to ask, was there any cooperation between the AAUP and the administration, in terms of trying to get things out of the state or working together for mutual purposes?
MK: Things were pretty good at the time. Proportionally, we got good funding at the time. We had good Governors and good Representatives. Things started getting worse later on, as you know, and one of the reasons...
[RECORDING PAUSED]
MK: There was a big thing just before I retired, and I was pretty active in that, where they didn't want to extend retirement benefits to the faculty, because it would, quote, "bankrupt the budget" or whatever. Florio was Governor at the time. The administration wanted to tie us to a particular plan, which was far worse than other plans that were available, namely TIAA-CREF and groups like that. They had other, lesser things.
[Editor's Note: James J. Florio (1937-2022), a Democrat, served as Governor of New Jersey from 1990 to 1994.]
So, I fought like hell and organized a group to write letters, to the Governor, to everybody, saying that this would do us in, in terms of getting [faculty members]. Well, the other thing was that it was local retirement. Faculty from other universities could not come here because they would lose that retirement system, which was TIAA, which was across the board, across the country.
Then, I found out that the people at the state level were working for those groups [laughter] and had relatives or daughters or sons working in that. They want to maintain that. It was nip-and-tuck. The day or two before Florio left, he signed off on our proposal. That was the biggest confrontation. That was my last fight, so-to-speak, in terms of the AAUP, because we all got together on that to make our case.
Now, at the time, let's see--no, it wasn't Bloustein was here. Was it McCormick?
SI: Lawrence, Fran Lawrence?
MK: No, Lawrence came later.
SI: It could have been when Alec Pond was the Acting President.
[Editor's Note: Dr. T. Alexander Pond served as Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer under Rutgers President Dr. Edward Bloustein from 1982 until Dr. Bloustein's death in 1989, when he took over as Acting President.]
MK: I think it was Pond, was the acting then, yes. He wasn't all there. [laughter] McCormick, so, he was a historian, yes, a Jersey historian.
SI: You mean the father?
MK: Yes, the father, yes. He was in the History Department, yes.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
MK: So, that was my end piece, in terms of fighting. Bloustein was very friendly to the faculty. He came from a nowhere school, I mean a small school in Vermont.
SI: Bennington College.
MK: Bennington College, yes, small school, nowhere near Rutgers. There were questions about that, but he listened. He listened. We were very friendly. As chair, I was there all the time; he invited us over and wanted to know feedback, and the wives, and so forth. Personally, we got along very, very well. The wives were together on things. It was very nice and thoughtful. He asked for suggestions on stuff.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
MK: So, those are some of my thoughts about the administration. The reason I retired at that time is the package was good. It was an excellent package. Rutgers is paying well, from what I understand now, and keeping up with the salary scales. I'd be doing very, very well if I was still there. Some of my colleagues, they want to go on and on and on, endless.
I could easily continue anywhere along those lines, but there's enough keeping us busy now at this age. We're very independent and private people, and always been like that. We came here in '65 and the package was good. Everything we wanted, we realized in short order, but that was a good choice all the way around, looking back and forth.
One of the attractions, by the way, was, Rutgers was between Philadelphia and New York. We shuttled between those two states quite a bit. We were in Philadelphia. There was a flower show, all kinds of stuff, that attracted us to Philadelphia. New York, of course, we were there quite often.
We gave up our car a couple months ago, I think I told you. So, we're dependent on taxis and stuff like that. Being older, you're last in line. You're not treated like you were. So, there's a whole lot of things that need to be done in terms of recognizing this phenomena or onslaught of people our age, literally and figuratively.
We've always been later people, in other words, that we get up late, we go to sleep late, that kind of stuff. So, for example, if you went to one of these places, assisted living, you'd have to go with the crowd [at] eight o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock, or else you don't have any food, twelve o'clock, one o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock. That's it. We're not very conformity-liking people.
At Rutgers, we called ourselves "The Ten O'clock Scholars." We came in about ten or eleven and didn't leave until about eight or nine o'clock in the evening, that kind of stuff, because, at the GSE, a lot of people were taking school after work. That meant four o'clock classes, seven o'clock class, seven to nine, four to six, six to eight, that kind of stuff, and then, Saturdays with the Reading Clinic.
I always learned a lot from the students, always. Our seminars were that [way], too--and I always honored their thoughts and incorporated their thoughts, all throughout. We had ratings of our faculty, in terms of promotions, and I was always numbered way up there. I had some plaques there for me, too, sitting there.
SI: I've seen, yes. I know you have somebody coming here now.
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Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 1/22/2025