1
                            PHILIP KORTH
                         November 29, 2000
                           Jeff Charnley,
                             interviewer
Charnley:  Today is November 29, the year 2000.     We're in Green
Valley, Arizona.  I'm Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. Philip Korth,
for the MSU Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial of the
institution, to be commemorated in the year 2005.     As you can see,
we've got our tape recorder today for this oral history, Dr. Korth.
 Do you give us permission to do this interview?
Korth:  I certainly do.
Charnley:  I'd like to start first with your personal and educational
background, before you went to college.     Where were you born and
where did you grow up?
Korth:  I was born in southern Minnesota, in Fairmont, Minnesota.
 We moved to another small town during the Second World War, and
at the end of the war, '45, my dad got a job with 3M Company, and
we moved to St. Paul.   So I really grew up, insofar as I have ever
grown up, in the Twin Cities, in St. Paul.
     I went to the University of Minnesota, started briefly in
engineering, and then left the university after one year, probably
shortly ahead of an invitation to leave, and went in the Army for


                                                                    2
three years, where I was trained and served as a linguist in the
Czech language, was stationed in Germany, and returned to the
university.
     That was in 1958, I got out of the Army, returned to the
university, still kind of wandering around, looking for a major,
but finally decided on philosophy the last year I was there.     Took
all my philosophy courses for a major in one year, and as my wife
says, permanently disordered my mind.
     So that was 1961, I got a bachelor's degree, and I went to work
for the American National Red Cross as an assistant field director.
 We trained at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and then I was assigned down
to Fort Bliss in El Paso, and I worked there for about a year, a
year and a half.
     I came home for Christmas vacation.     A friend of mine was in
graduate school.   I'd never thought of going to graduate school.
But he had a reasonable job, so I explored a job advising, and I
would make almost as much money advising as I was making for the
Red Cross.  So I decided to apply for graduate school at the
University of Minnesota in American studies.
     I decided on that after talking to Mary Turpey [phonetic], who
was certainly the heart and probably the soul of the American studies
program at the University of Minnesota.    I was still interested in
going overseas, and that was partly what moved me in that direction.
 The Red Cross, of course, had military posts all over the world,
but it was fairly clear that I was going to be in El Paso longer


                                                                       3
than I wanted to be, and the American Studies program was an excellent
preparation for the State Department.
     So that was my thinking when I went to the university.       I, of
course, had taken very few American history courses and no American
literature courses, so I had to audit some work to bring myself up
to speed.   So I began there in 1963, in the spring of 1963, and began
advising in the College of Liberal Arts the next fall.
Charnley:   Were you married at that time?
Korth:   No, I wasn't.    No, I wasn't.   I met my wife that spring.
I actually had known her since grade school, but we had gone separate
paths.   I ran into her at The Mixers, a local graduate bar just across
the campus, and we were married in June of 1963.
     I continued to think in terms of the Foreign Service, and made
application.    I took the tests and succeeded, did very well on the
tests, and so there was an interview, which I did well in.        Then
they came around to the campus and did the background checks.        I
had been in the Army Security Agency when I was in the Army, so I
had a top-secret clearance at that time, so it wasn't much of a
background check.
     One of the people they talked to was my advisor, historian,
Hy Berman [phonetic], labor history at Minnesota, and he told them
and subsequently told me that he hoped I wouldn't get the job because
he thought that I should go into teaching.       Well, that was really
a new idea for me.    Here I was, a master's degree in a brand-new


                                                                      4
area that I had not studied as an undergraduate, and here's this
fellow saying I should be a professor.
     So I started thinking about that, and I still wasn't certain
whether I wanted to do that, but it seemed like a nice option.       He
encouraged me to go on for a Ph.D.      The State Department was not
real happy with that, because I was on the verge of taking the physical
for the appointment when I wrote them and said I had a continuing
job as an advisor and I really wanted to complete a Ph.D.
     The problem was, at that time you had to have your appointment
before you were thirty-one, I believe, and I was approaching
thirty-one, and that was really why I wrote the letter.      They wrote
back a real snippy letter, I thought, and said, "Well, if that's
what you're going to do, forget it."     I was really kind of annoyed,
because up until that point, every single bit of correspondence was
flattering and encouraging, and how I was a highly selected, valuable
candidate for this job, and then here I get a letter that says "Buzz
off."  So then that kind of closed the door on the State Department,
I decided.
     So I went ahead and continued in my program, and then, lo and
behold, I was just to turn thirty-one, and I got a phone call one
morning from Washington.    I said, "Yes, this is Phil Korth in
Minneapolis."   Well, it was the USIA, and they had a special program
for highly recruited, selected candidates, and all of this stuff,
and they could give me a reserve appointment in the USIA, if I would
agree to join them after I got a Ph.D.   I told them I was very pleased


                                                                      5
to know that getting a Ph.D. did not disqualify me for the USIA.
So I agreed, contingent upon that.
     They made the appointment, and I accepted the appointment but
I said I would have to make a decision once I got the Ph.D., and
they accepted that.   So the last year in graduate school, I was fairly
comfortable, because I was assured of having a job when I got out.
 So that must have been in 1966 that they called.       May have been
the fall of 1966, yes.
     So I had finished all my coursework that fall and was sorting
around for a dissertation topic.   Hy Berman had really been a powerful
influence on a subject area.    His specialty was labor history, and
I decided first that I would try to do something in labor history.
     The Industrial Workers of the World interested me.      They'd had
an organization in Minneapolis, the Agricultural Workers
Organization, and I was hoping to find some records.       There were
some good general books done on the IWW already, but they had been
raided during the Palmer raids and a lot of their records had
disappeared, so it was kind of a scramble to try and find materials.
     But in the course of looking over their record, what records
I could find in Minnesota, I became more and more convinced this
was not going to go anyplace.     This was still boring.    There just
wasn't enough material to develop a dissertation.       But one of the
organizations I found, with whom they negotiated, was the Nonpartisan
League of North Dakota.
     Well, what was so interesting about that is that as a matter
of philosophy and policy, the Industrial Workers of the World did


                                                                     6
not negotiate with owners.    The owners, in their ideas, were
usurpers, had no legitimacy, and you don't sit down and negotiate
with the devil.    The IWW tactic was to declare what their demands
were, and when the employer met the demands, they'd go back to work.
 So here they were, negotiating with this organization.
     Well, the Nonpartisan League started to become interesting,
and they had a lot of records.    Minnesota Historical had all their
newspapers, a lot of correspondence.     Arthur Lesueur [phonetic],
who was a prominent attorney in Minnesota, had been a major figure
in the Nonpartisan League.    I won't give you the whole history of
my dissertation, but the materials were there.   The Farmers Alliance
materials were in Lincoln, so this was a lock.
     So I had really started doing my research in probably November
of 1966, and I took one trip to Lincoln, coordinated that with my
daughter's birth, took my wife to the hospital in February, got on
a plane and flew down to Lincoln, did about three days in the archives
there, came back, picked up my wife and daughter from the hospital.
 The nurses were very cool to me, partly because my friends had come
to visit her and they didn't know who the father was, and so here
I showed up, you know, "You S.O.B."
     Anyway, I finished my dissertation by early April, defended
it in April, so I had graduated, I got the degree in June, so I wrote
my dissertation in about four months, which kind of set a record
in American studies at that time.
Charnley:   I can imagine.   So what year was it then you graduated?


                                                                      7
Korth:   '67.  That spring, while I was finishing the dissertation,
I, of course, started going around to the markets, and it was a very
good year.   There were several colleges and universities interested
in me--Boston and Oregon State.     It came down to Idaho State and
Michigan State, and Idaho State was a history appointment.    I didn't
know much about Pocatello.    I actually didn't know much about East
Lansing, either, but Hy Berman, again, my mentor, had taught at MSU
in the ATL department for a year or two, and he knew Ben Strandness
[phonetic] quite well.
     So I went down there to East Lansing for an interview.       Ben
Strandness was a crafty bugger.    I stayed at Kellogg Center.   I got
there late in the day, and we had dinner and then he drove me around
the campus at night, and here is this enormous campus, all lit up,
obviously a world-class facility.    He smooth-talked me and they made
an offer before I left, and then I went back and here was an offer
from Idaho State.
     So my wife and I had several conversations about that, and I
really wasn't certain that I wanted to be a professor, even then,
but I knew that the State Department was off.      I wasn't going to
do that.   We had two little kids.    So we decided we'd go to East
Lansing, and we'd give it three years and see if that's what we wanted
to do.   Well, the three years turned into thirty-two.     So that's
how I got to MSU.    Ben Strandness was crucial in all of that.
Charnley:   It sounds like Hy Berman was, too.


                                                                   8
Korth:  Oh, yes.   Oh, yes.   We're still in touch.   He's still
working, although I think he doesn't teach too much at Minnesota,
but he's very active. He had a very strong political, left political
background.   He really made a home in Minneapolis.   He was the guy
who introduced me to the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, which, you
know, I did an oral history and a book on that.    He was an advisor
to Hubert Humphrey and very active in the Iron Range studies, that
[unclear].   That included oral histories.   So he was a very fine
man.
Charnley:   Oral history wasn't part of your dissertation, though?
Korth:  No.
Charnley:   When you first got to Michigan State, what do you recall
about some of your impressions when you first got here?
Korth:  Well, one of the first things was going into a classroom
with a spine that was alternately frozen and made out of jelly.
I mean, it was not a comfortable thing to walk into a classroom.
I had taught classes at Minnesota.    I didn't teach a course, but
I'd visited some American studies classes and made presentations.
 Of course, in graduate studies I'd made presentations on papers
I'd written in literature courses and history courses and things
of that sort.   But walking in, knowing you had ten weeks, and it


                                                                     9
met four times a week then, so you had forty sessions that you had
to fill up with something that you hoped was halfway intelligent
and interesting.
     The course at that time was designed by a faculty committee
in the department, so the texts were chosen, the array, the syllabus
was written, so you just kind of had to follow the program that was
already laid out.   There wasn't the anxiety of "What am I going to
do next?" so much, in the sense of what document I'm going to choose,
but it was, "What am I going to do with all these people?"
     I had pretty good training in Minnesota, I thought, but it wasn't
as broad as was demanded in ATL.     There were probably a third of
the names in that syllabus that I had never heard about, so I had
to scramble around to find out who in God's name these people were
and what did that do that was significant, and how was I going to
handle this in the classroom.    So it was not comfortable.
     Then, of course, when I got this first set of papers, I looked
at them, "What the hell am I going to do with these?"     So there was
some sort of in-service training.   Bob Wright, I think, was in charge
of that, and it was useful.    It helped ease some of the anxiety.
     After the first quarter there, I still was not sure this is
what I wanted to make a career out of.   On the other hand, I couldn't
have asked for a more creative and dynamic and supportive faculty
in any institution I would have gone to.      ATL, at that time, had,
I think, about ninety, eighty to ninety faculty, all Ph.D.s, with
an array of backgrounds and interests that was just stunning, from
Al Thurman, whose major was speech, to Perry Ganakas, who was


                                                                     10
interested in millenialism and the late nineteenth century, and Bruce
Curtis, who at that time was working in nineteenth century interests,
too.   Bruce was my age, but Perry was significantly older, and Al
Thurman was older.
     So there was really a spread of people, and one of the most
interesting parts of the day was kind of your coffee break
mid-morning, because you'd go into the lounge and, my god, there
would be conversations about everything.       You could just kind of
pick and choose.    This was a University College thing, so mainly
ATL people were in the lounge there, but there were people from
humanities who'd come up and have their coffee there, too.
     Bessey Hall was in lots of ways what a scholar would just love
to have, a place to test ideas, to talk about the stuff you're teaching
and learn different approaches from people in an informal way, which
I think sticks better than a lot of the formal presentations you
might have.   The people, the faculty there, really began to be a
very important part of what I was interested in.
Charnley:   You mentioned Bruce Curtis.     Were there any others that
were a core, that ultimately became your friends and colleagues?
Not that everybody didn't.
Korth:   Right.   Well, yes.   Originally, there were five of us.      I
wasn't terribly confident about my own writing and scholarship, and
I liked the idea of kind of peer discussion and editing.        That's
what it came to be called later.    At that time you just got together


                                                                   11
in a kind of bull session.    I put together a group--Bruce Curtis,
Jim McClintock, Reid Baird, and Herb--oh, his last name escapes me.
 He was only there briefly and then went back over to Grand Rapids.
     But there were five of us, and anytime anybody had a paper they
were going to deliver, an article they wanted, a chapter, whatever,
anytime we'd written something, we'd meet at somebody's house, and
everybody would get it ahead of time, and then we'd have a critique.
 It was relatively informal, over wine and cheese, usually.      When
some of us were still drinking a lot, it got kind of lively.      But
it was a wonderful way to learn the impact of what you'd written.
 It got pretty detailed at times.    We got to discussing words, not
just structures.   So I think my writing improved significantly just
because of that interaction, and they remain--you know, Jim and Bruce
I count among my best friends today.    Reid, of course, died.   Herb
went back to Galvin College.    So that was kind of a core group.
We were mutually supportive and helpful that way.
Charnley:   How would you describe the mood on campus, the students,
when you first arrived?
Korth:  I got there the year after the Orange Horse.     The Orange
Horse was a sit-in, in Bessey Hall, in support of, I think, of three
or four faculty, ATL faculty, who had been fired.     Bob Fogerty, I
met him, I knew him.   He was a fairly nice guy, went on to Amherst,
I believe.   Then there were two others. I don't remember the names
because I didn't really meet them.


                                                                  12
     The issue had been--well, I want to say style, but it was a
little more than that.    In the view of the department leadership,
they were using inappropriate language, a lot of sexual references,
things that were not so much politically controversial, but remember
this is the sixties, and sexual liberation and all that.     Ben
Strandness and Bern [Bernard] Engel and some of the older guys in
charge were pretty uncomfortable with that.  Of course, it generated
controversy.   Kids would go home and tell their parents that this
guy had used certain four-letter words in class, and it came back
to the university.
     John [A.] Hannah was still president at that time.   If it came
back to John Hannah, you know, it came down to the department.    So
there was some discomfort about them.    They were untenured, so it
was a matter of not renewing their contracts, and they were very
popular teachers.   This happened just after I had had my interview
there, so I really didn't know too much about it.
     The other thing that was in the wind was the Ramparts article
on MSU's involvement in Vietnam, and training of GM's police.     So
there were several sort of controversies on campus that way when
I got there.  Of course, the war was grinding on in Vietnam.   There
was more and more concern about that and opposition to it being
expressed around on campus.
     There was also talk of collective bargaining for faculty, and
of course my ears perked up for that, because labor history has been
a major interest of mine.    But I'm a new, wet-behind-the-ears
assistant professor coming in on campus, and I'm still trying to


                                                                   13
find my way around, you know, and not quite certain the way things
worked.
     Then I was elected--well, first I was chosen to be on the
University College Symposium Committee.    That was a big deal.  We'd
bring in well-known figures to discuss some particular topic, and
this was to be in 1968.   This was in spring of '68, I believe, so
this happened really quickly after I got there.
     I was appointed to this committee.    We decided on a topic, the
city, and we had Saul Alinsky.    I insisted that he be one of them.
 Eric McKittrick [phonetic].    Some of these names escape me.   One,
an editor of the architectural magazine, and a theologian, to come
in and talk about the city.
     It was quite successful, and I was delighted to meet Saul
Alinsky, who was just a wonderful person.    Although when I met him,
he had flown into Detroit, and he was expecting to stay overnight
there.  Well, his secretary had arranged with us that he would come
to an informal session that night over at Justin Morrill [Hall].
So there was some communication mixup on their part.      I didn't go
down to meet him at the airport, but I was going to meet him when
he got to Justin Morrill.   So I came there and I had his itinerary.
[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Charnley:   When the tape ended, we were talking about Saul Alinsky
and his arrival on campus.


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Korth:   Right.   This was in the evening, probably eight o'clock at
night, and here's Alinsky coming in.    He's expecting to have a nice,
quiet evening in a motel, and here he is, meeting a bunch of students.
 I'm standing there with his itinerary in my hand, and I introduce
myself and shook his hand, and he says, "What's that?"
     I said, "Well, that's your itinerary."
     He looks at it and says, "Jesus, when am I going to have time
to take a piss?"    [Laughter]
     So I figured there was trouble in River City, and did my best
to smooth it over and discovered what had happened, and apologized
for not getting the communication right.      But he turned out to be
just a terrific person.     I was at several gatherings with him and
of course I was most interested in hearing him.
     It was a very successful symposium.     Hannah was at one of the
lunches, which just tickled Ed Carlin [phonetic] beyond belief.
Alinsky and Hannah had served on the--I think it was the Civil Rights
Commission.   So that was a wonderful thing.    So I felt engaged right
away, not only in the classroom, with some help and terror, but engaged
in what was going on in the university, and certainly in the college
and in the university.
     Then I was elected right away to the Department Advisory Council,
and I still don't know why.    I was brand new there, and as I recall,
this was a general election.     I don't know if they had by ranks or
not, but at any rate, so then I became more engaged in the department,
with the activities of the department and the management of the
department.   So the first year was really kind of an active year.


                                                                    15
     In the spring of '68, again, there were some meetings about
unions for faculty.   I recall one, a University College group, and
Keith Grody [phonetic] was, at that time, an assistant professor
over in labor and industrial relations, and he was there as kind
of an expert.   After discussions, I made the comment that I didn't
that there was anything to lose in trying to organize, and his comment
was, that was the way he looked at it, too.
     Well, what's interesting about that is that Keith Grody was
then hired by the university to defeat the organizing campaign.
The first attempt, I think--do you want me to go through kind of
the organizing stuff?
Charnley:   Yes.
Korth:  The first attempt really started, I think, in '69, it must
have been '69, and the attempt, at first, to identify the University
College as a bargaining unit, distinct from the rest of the
university, and that didn't go anywhere.      I think Mary Tompkins
[phonetic] and Gladys Beckwith were the major forces in that.       I
didn't have much to do with that.
     But then through '69, there were meetings.     One of the moving
colleges was the College of Education, in that particular movement.
 I remember John Seare [phonetic] was president.     I would go to the
meetings, but I really wasn't in a position, I didn't think, to take
a very active role.


                                                                  16
     Then in 1970, while they were trying to collect cards and all,
I went over to James Madison College.    At that time the writing
program in James Madison was staffed by ATL, and we had, I think,
three people over there, teaching a special social science oriented
curriculum.
     Let me back up a little bit, because the other thing that was
happening in 1969 was a great deal of resistance to the common
syllabus.   They were hiring in a bunch of young hotshot Ph.D.s from
all over.   We were hiring eight to ten people a year, and some of
the people that came in, like Kate [Kathleen K.] Rout, Maise Laselle
[phonetic], who are still here now, came in that year.
     About a year later, Dick Thomas came in, and several more who
finally left ATL, who really wanted, I think, to get into graduate
teaching and went on to Carbondale and out to Evergreen College and
Washington, D.C. College.    So there was a lot of discussion about
the curriculum at that time, and the first part of that movement
was to, if not eliminate the common final examination, at least to
add some writing to it, where the students would have to actually
go in and write an essay.
Charnley:   Was it multiple choice prior to that?
Korth:  Yes.   It was almost entirely a subject matter common final
examination, in the auditorium.    Part of your job was to monitor
that.  Well, hell, it was very difficult to monitor.  Somebody could


                                                                    17
come in and take the test for somebody else, although there were
attempts to monitor.    It wasn't just open.
     But at any rate, people were taking writing more seriously,
I think, and that was a growing movement in the department, a growing
concern in the department.     Then, of course, with that growing
emphasis or interest in evaluating writing at the end of the course,
there was also more interest in what was going on in terms of writing
in the course.   So there were a lot of discussions about that.
     Then of course, as I say, there were a lot of people who had
a divergence of interests in terms of the subject matter, so there
was a movement to develop the track system with different subject
matter focuses.   All of this kind of the turmoil of late '68, '69,
'69 to '70.  Of course, there were dire predictions that the college
would be eliminated, that all coherence would break down, and of
course, these predictions were coming largely from the older faculty.
 Change is often uncomfortable.
     But interestingly, the movement for this change prevailed.
I remember Milt [Milton] Powell being very important in that.       I
guess the motto was to offer choices to the students instead of having
a lockstep curriculum that everybody had to take, offer the students
some choice in subject matter.
     Well, one of the first ones was the "American Radical Thought,"
which I taught in spring of 1970.     It took that length of time to
get the curricular change through that way.     I don't remember what
the other ones were.   I was just interested in that one.  Of course,


                                                                   18
there's the turmoil out in the streets and out in the country during
this time.
     It must have been maybe a month into the course, May of 1970,
I'm teaching "American Radical Thought," and I'm in the classroom
and the fire alarm goes off.   We go out and the streets are filled.
 This was the shooting at Kent State [University], and the students
are protesting and a lot of faculty.    I went out and joined and we
marched down Farm Lane and around Shaw Lane.     There was just all
sorts of--just turmoil.
     I, in a sense, turned the course into a practicum at that point,
and met with the students and we decided how we were going about
handling this.   I thought this would be pretty good subject matter.
 Here was a kind of incipient revolution in process, and they were
supposed to report and write about what was going on and why it was
going on and who was doing what, and all that, which, actually, I
thought was pretty creative.   I didn't just cancel class as several
faculty did.
     There were faculty meetings, good Lord, all over.  Norm [Norman]
Pollack surfaced.   I, of course, had known him, had known his name.
 I had not met him.   I had known his name because he had written
about the populists.   He was among the group.    Bill Durman
[phonetic].   There were others who were quite active in trying to
draft a statement about the war in Vietnam and the responsibility
of citizens and the role of faculty and the students and all of that.


                                                                      19
     So that was the student strike during the spring of 1970.         I
think Walter Adams was president at that point.     I disremember that.
 I'm not quite certain.     I think he was.    It may have been.
Charnley:   He was interim, and then followed by [Clifton R.] Wharton
[Jr.].
Korth:   Yes, he was interim between Hannah and Wharton.      So he must
have been president at that point, and handled it actually fairly
well.   Then that fall, I went over to James Madison College, fall
of 1970.   So that's part of the sort of track movement then.        The
reason I backed up was to explain that Madison had its own social
science focus for the writing program there that had been accepted
because of what was happening in ATL, generally.
     So, 1970.   I'll try not to go hour by hour here, Jeff.
Charnley:   No, it's fine.    I'm glad you remember it in detail.
Korth:   But 1970, then, of course, I had my hair down over my shoulders
and grew a beard.    Since I'd come clean-shaven and in a crewcut,
that was quite a change.     James Madison was a very lively place.
Very young faculty, quite supportive.     A little elitist, I thought,
but it was a good place to teach, and the students, of course, were
terrific.   Anytime you have students making choices of a program
like that, I think you start with engagement, and so they were very
nice to work with.    Did the work, capable.    Some of them picked up
on the radical side.   I think of John Royal [phonetic], who was very


                                                                     20
active in SDS [Students for Democratic Society], and he was
ultimately, I think, arrested and charged for obstructing ROTC.
I can maybe come back to that, because I got involved that.        And
Meg Beagle [phonetic], who was active in SDS, she was one of the
students I hired for the Auto Light research.       There were several
very good.
      One of them who was one of the students I had a lot of contact
with because he was quite torn by what was going on in Vietnam and
what his responsibilities were, and whether he should go to Canada
or whether he should just resist, I became a kind of informal counselor
for some of the students that way.     He surfaced about three or four
years ago, and is on the staff of the National Security Advisory
Council in D.C.    When I say "surfaced" it was because he was
interviewed for the alumni magazine and he remembered me and I
certainly remembered him.
      I held office hours at night.     We'd have students over to the
house.   It was a very nice teaching situation.     In the midst of it,
near the end of it, then the first collective bargaining election
was held.   I was out of the department, yet in the department.      It
was a very strange situation, because I stayed on the advisory
council, was elected to the advisory council, while I was teaching
over in James Madison College.     I was very engaged in the teaching
and everything over there, so I really didn't play much of a role
in that first election in 1972.     That seemed, to me, to have a very
heavy NEA presence.
      Can we take a brief break here?     [Tape recorder turned off.]


                                                                     21
Charnley:   We were talking about the first unionization effort in
1972.
Korth:   Yes.  I don't have many distinct memories of it, because
I was not very actively involved.     I was so busy in Madison.   I was
supportive and signed the cards.    I didn't play much of a leadership
role.
Charnley:   Who was in leadership in that first movement?
Korth:   I think that was when John Seare--I know Gladys and Mary
Tompkins were quite active then.   I think John [H.] Ferres was active,
out of our department.   Who the university-wide figures were at that
time I don't really remember, but the election occurred, and it ran
against organizing.    I don't remember the vote but probably six or
seven hundred votes for collective bargaining, all total.     Then that
just kind of went on a back burner.
     There was still some interest.      The Faculty Associates, which
was affiliated with the Michigan Education Association, continued
to exist.   The AAUP, of course, had been around on campus for a long
time.   They were quite cool to collective bargaining.   I was a member
of AAUP and a member of Faculty Associates at the same time.        The
dues for Faculty Associates were very low.
     The AAUP was really quite centrist about everything on campus.
 The free speech issues, the Garskov [phonetic] case, you know, I


                                                                     22
thought they might have handled a little better.     He was the fellow
in psychology who gave blanket As.  It was that kind of a time, though,
where people did strange things.    With the war in the background,
the so-called liberation, you know, sexual liberation and all this,
it was a time of some turmoil, but the faculty who were interested
in collective bargaining, interesting to me, were quite focused on
the campus and on the way decisions were made on campus.
      There was the faculty governance, and I always thought it was
very interesting.    Words are often interesting, and "governance"
is one of those interesting words.     It's clearly short of
"government."   What it means is not altogether clear.      That is, if
you think in terms of power, and that is, power, who has the power
to make a decision, the power to act, the power to determine the
ways things will go, it was clear to me that the governance system
did not have any of those powers.    It was advisory in many ways.
In most ways, it had the power perhaps to embarrass the
administration.    I was never really interested in running for
university-wide offices, partly because it just didn't seem to be
a very effective use of time.
      To give AAUP credit, there were several members of the AAUP
who were also concerned about this weakness in governance.        This
had come out of the John Hannah, period and John was a very strong
president.   The governance might be something like his kitchen
cabinet, I would imagine, but he certainly felt free to accept or
reject any advice that came his way.


                                                                     23
     There were some movements, though, in governance, at that time,
to try and strengthen the hand of governance, and part of that
movement, of course, was in response to the threat of collective
bargaining, and so they tried to identify things that were absolutely
the prerogative of the faculty and that the administration would
have a great deal of difficulty overturning faculty action.       It
wasn't impossible, but it was difficult, so there were some revisions
made in the tenure system, I think, first, and that was strengthened.
 There were some hearing panels set up, etc.
     The other area of faculty determination was curriculum.   I think
the power of faculty in those areas was strengthened during this
period, and, as I say, partly as a response to collective bargaining.
 Collective bargaining wasn't such a way-out idea on campus, and
certainly not in Michigan, with its long union tradition.       But
Central Michigan had organized by that time.      They were organized
before the campaign at MSU.    I'd say they must have organized in
'67 or '68.
Charnley:   I was there then, as a student.
Korth:   So there was a union in place there that was working, and
there was a movement nationally at that time.      There weren't many
major institutions that had chosen collective bargaining, but there
were elections around--the California system and Rutgers.      I don't
remember all of them at the time.   Of course, on campus it was viewed
as a pretty damn radical idea.


                                                                     24
     I don't remember exactly when, but a year or two after the
election, so it must have been maybe '74 or something like that,
maybe '75, yes, it must have been '75, I was approached.    I was doing
fairly well then.    I'd received a grant from Rockefeller for the
summer of '73 and the summer of '74 to do research, first on the
Auto Light strike in Toledo, second on the Minneapolis Teamsters
strike.   These were oral history-based projects.      I'd hired two
students from James Madison, Claude Zansky [phonetic] and Meg Beagle,
to go down to Auto Light.     We rented a place there and really got
into the community and did several really good interviews with the
important people, and that resulted in a manuscript and then a book.
     Then in the summer of '74, I went to Minneapolis and hired two
more James Madison students, Bill Fishman, whose father was the
political head of the UAW in the state, although that didn't determine
why I chose him.    He was just very good.    And Janet Zepolsky
[phonetic], who was another student, and we went to Minneapolis and
rented a place there and conducted interviews in Minneapolis.
     And I was publishing some things.   I guess my level of confidence
was high enough that I--and by then I guess I had decided that maybe
the academic life was a good life after all, which, in a way, makes
it curious why I would begin to risk it, but I did.      Mary Tompkins
and Gladys Beckwith approached me, to recruit me to be the president
of the Faculty Associates, which I thought over, and then I agreed
to do, with in mind bringing about another and, hopefully, a more
successful election.


                                                                   25
      That must have been about '75 or '76, because shortly after,
we began circulating cards again for another election, and that time,
as president of the Faculty Associates, I was, of course, there on
the cusp, and I would write my Tom Paine letters, you know, points
of view, and try to recruit people to work out in the faculty
community, to see if we couldn't get enough support to bring about
an election and, hopefully, then to win the election.
      It was an interesting process, partly because of the way the
campus divided on this issue.    I think, except for James Madison
College, which was quite small, if you kind of do a line south of
the Red Cedar and north of the Red Cedar, that would kind of divide
the support and the hostility--not just opposition, but hostility--to
collective bargaining.    That is, the sciences, the ag school, all
of those groups were really quite hostile to collective bargaining.
 At this point I have to include the College of Education as well,
although there were still strong supporters there.     But things had
changed, and so the demographics of teaching in the state, this was
when they were beginning to talk about the plethora of education
students and no jobs.
      The MEA had gotten into a kind of quota discussion, and MSU
was--of course, Central Michigan, which produced teachers, was an
affiliate of the MEA, so there were charges that they were receiving
favored treatment.    But enrollment was dropping off in the College
of Education, and, of course, that meant jobs and etc., so there
was a lot of anxiety and a lot of hostility to MEA.    Even those who


                                                                  26
might support collective bargaining were hostile to MEA, because
they felt, I suppose, betrayed by MEA.
[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Charnley:   This is tape two.
     When the last tape ended, we were talking about collective
bargaining at Michigan State.
Korth:  Yes.   So I went over to the College of Education, at their
invitation, to talk about collective bargaining and about Faculty
Associates and MEA.   I walked into the room and it was very cool,
and I said, "Well, I sort of feel like Daniel."     Then this voice
in the back of the room said, "Jonah."    [Laughter]
     What was very interesting about organizing, or trying to
organize faculty, is that largely it was very civil.     There were
no shouting matches, no fisticuffs.   We were all intellectuals, and
faculty tend to intellectualize everything, and so however deep the
feelings were, and there were some deep feelings, it was tense, you
know, when I would go around to the less than friendly areas, but
they were never rude or nasty.
     But to give you a sense of how intense some of those feelings
were, when I retired, I was looking through the booklet, little
blurbs, 250 words on each retiree, and there was a fellow retiring
the same year I did, who listed as his most significant contribution
to Michigan State "the defeat of the faculty union effort."   He was


                                                                     27
out of mathematics.     I thought, wow, what a legacy.     That's your
career?
     I remember meeting over in physics, where Loren Beeber
[phonetic], who was very active and one of the most active in
opposition to the union movement, was a biochemist, was there.      And
again, it was all very civil.   You know, hard questions, hard answers.
 I mention Loren because he became a hunting buddy of mine later
on when I formed a Ducks Unlimited chapter here.      It turns out he's
a duck hunter.   Of course, duck hunting transcends everything.     You
don't have to worry about politics when you're duck hunting.
     We put together a really modest organization.        I don't think
Faculty Associates ever had even a hundred members, but we had some
very active people, some very articulate people, and MEA didn't press
us on any of these campaigns to do one thing or another.       That was
one of the nice things about working with MEA.      They allowed us to
run the campaign as we thought fit.     They would give us some advice
occasionally, but they were bankrolling a lot of this, too.        This
was MEA.
     There were no national people who came in on that election,
and I thought, and argued, that the heavy presence of MEA and NEA
people on campus in the previous election had been a mistake, because
it certainly looked like something external to the campus was
happening.   So we limited their role to advisory, we had meetings
at MEA headquarters, that sort of thing.
     These were always modestly attended meetings.        It was, in a
sense, you know, trying to lead a movement like this that was, quote,


                                                                     28
a "mass movement" and it's a little discouraging when you call a
meeting and you've got about thirty people there.       But I figured,
I kept thinking about John Adams, you know.      A third of the people
supported the revolution and a third opposed it and a third didn't
give a damn, and I figured that's just the way it was going to be.
 So anyway, you work with what you have, and there were some very
good people.
Charnley:   What were some of the issues?
Korth:   Well, one was faculty protection, a grievance procedure.
In response to the initial union effort, governance did develop a
grievance procedure and it was largely still advisory.    Mike Harrison
was the administrator, the faculty grievance official.       I became
engaged in one case there, as counsel, for a fellow over in sociology.
 I won't mention his name because, well, it's not necessary, and
it still is kind of a private thing, I guess.    But [Clarence] Winder
was the dean of the college at that time, and this fellow, I think,
very clearly had been discriminated against, and that discrimination
had been made public when White and Bob Repas had published the faculty
salary list, and that was kind of a--it wasn't a bombshell, but there
was an explosion on campus when people saw what had happened not
only to individuals, but what was happening from department to
department, college to college.     I mean, the inequities in salary
were dramatic.


                                                                      29
      Of course, salary was always behind part of the movement for
collective bargaining.     I remember one guy coming in and saying,
"Damn it, my wife, who teaches eighth grade, is making more money
than I am," and you'd hear this.      And the response was, "Damn it,
your wife's in a union."     So, just allocation of resources in a
general way were always behind us, and faculty salaries were not
keeping up.    That was probably an underlying issue all along.
Charnley:    Were benefits or retirement an issue then?
Korth:   No, retirement was never really an issue.       The TIA-CREF
system, and I can tell you from my personal experience right now,
is a wonderful system.     There was never any question about that.
In the second election, and I'll come to that, there were some other
issues on benefits.     But the grievance procedure was an issue and
there were some fairly high-profile cases.       I don't remember them
all.   You can probably check them.
      We had this grievance in the sociology department and worked
it through.    I think I must have found every contradiction and flaw
in the grievance procedure, because I think the department supported
the chair and I then appealed it to the college and the college
committee asked to be dissolved because they could not resolve the
contradictions.
      Winder then said, "Well, why don't you guys just go to lunch
and figure this out."     So we went to lunch and, as it turned out,
I was not to have been invited to the lunch, but the guy whose grievance


                                                                  30
we had prosecuted insisted that I come, and it probably was a good
thing I did, because they were cool when they saw I was there, but
we were having lunch, and then this friend of mine started making
some proposals that were a little bit off the wall and they were
beginning to get upset, the chair and all, because they interpreted
this as attacks on their integrity.    You know how that stuff goes.
 It can get pretty heated.
Charnley:   Escalates.
Korth:   I managed to calm him down a little bit, but that didn't
go anywhere.   That was an extra grievance procedure.  Then finally,
Winder had him in and talked to him individually, personally, and
they worked out a salary settlement, and so it was a successful
prosecution.   But, boy, it really opened my eyes to the grievance
procedure, and I refused after that, ever, because that took an
enormous amount of time.
     Yes, it worked in his favor, but it worked in his favor not
because it was a grievance procedure.   He could have done that just
at the outset, and that was the way a lot of what happened at MSU
was done.   You'd go in and make an individual appeal to an
administrator, and the administrator might help you out in some
fashion.   It was a very paternalistic kind of system.
     We started going through this process, and then the AAUP began
to see that they'd better get involved, too, and so they were not
going to circulate cards, but they were preparing to enter, if we


                                                                    31
were successful in getting the 30 percent, that they were preparing
to be put on the ballot, too.     All they needed was 10 percent.
      Zolten Francy [phonetic] was the president of AAUP at that time,
and I went over, he invited me over to an AAUP meeting, and it was
a big meeting.   They must have had forty people.   [Laughter]  I made
a pitch for unity, saying, "Look, there's precedent.       Out in
California, the Education Association and the AAUP got together in
a coalition, and put together a bargaining unit," and all this stuff.
      Then Zolten and I went up to John Cantlon, together, to see
if we couldn't get office space, and John was very clear about this.
 He says, "Well, you could probably find a room for the AAUP," but
he'd never find a room for the MEA.    So that kind of was stillborn.
 Zolten had the integrity of saying, "Well, no, we're not going to
accept this kind of privileged relationship."
      But John, he was adamant, and he made statements in the campaign
that I thought were going to help us, that were quite clearly
anti-union and probably could have been grounds for unfair labor
practice if we had been closer in the result.     But Keith Grody then
was very firmly ensconced.    He was handling the labor negotiations
for the university and handled the campaign, and he's a skilled man.
 I don't like his ethics, but he certainly is skilled.
      We got our 30 thirty percent of what we thought was the faculty,
and the cards, submitted them.     He submitted a list of about a
thousand more than we thought were on the list, so we didn't have
30 percent according to his list.     Well, that's the way this game
is played.    Then you have to define the unit, who you're talking


                                                                   32
about, after this sort of shenanigans.    We challenged the list that
he had submitted, etc., and you get into some sort of legal
maneuverings as to who is in and who is out.   We met, and of course,
by then Winder was the provost and we're getting close to 1978, which
is a memorable year.    I met with him, had an MEA rep with me, and
met with Winder.   Who was the attorney?    A long-time attorney for
the university, Republican attorney.
Charnley:   Carr?
Korth:   Yes.  Lee Carr.   Lee Carr, Lee Winder, Lee, Lee.    We met
off campus to talk about the composition of the bargaining unit and
to see if we could come to some agreements on some of these issues
before, rather than go through the whole process.     And we did.  It
was amicable.
     I'm trying to remember the timing on this.     The election was
in '78 and I don't recall now whether the dissolution of University
College preceded that election or not.     I do remember the result
of the election, which was very close to what it had been in 1972.
 There were about eight hundred votes, split between MEA and AAUP,
for collective bargaining.
     We had attempted to cut the medical school out, because that's
happened at several institutions.    They were quite opposed.   There
was no point in having them in.  They all had their own deals anyhow.
 We had hearings on that.   That went to formal hearings with a judge
and we were not successful in excluding them.


                                                                     33
     We were going to appeal that decision and so we did challenge
the ballots from the medical school.    At the polling place is where
we had to do the challenge.   One physician from the medical school,
he was ready to duke it out with us over that.      "What do you mean?
 I'll challenge your rights.     You can't challenge the ballots."
     But there was a referee there and he explained that all that
meant was he would be able to vote, they'd be set aside until the
determination was made on our appeal, about whether that medical
unit would be in or out.   But it was very clear, as I sat over there
in that polling place, it was in Dem [Demonstration] Hall.
     By then I began to recognize quite a few people on campus.
Here would come the whole horticulture department.     I mean, it would
look like the chair had rounded them all up and said, "You will go
and vote."   But they'd come in in clusters, and I'd look at them
and say, "There's fifteen no votes right there."
     I really got an interesting sense about the campus in that
election.   The supportive groups tended to be the teachers, so the
College of Arts and Letters was one of the strongest colleges.
Despite their problems with MEA, College of Education, there were
long traditions of organizing and so there was some strength there.
     Social Science varied.    They tended to be more AAUP, but there
was strong support there.    Comm Arts was kind of mixed.     Natural
Science, you had to press to find somebody who was really
enthusiastic.    There was some support there.    A lot of the support
was probably explained more in terms of personal histories.        When
you get into the medical school, or maybe they came from working-class


                                                                    34
families, who were not threatened by the idea of a union.    They knew
a little bit more about what a union was.    There was a greater sense
of commonality, I think, in the College of Arts and Letters, a common
plight.
     You get off into the sciences and the research faculty, many
of whom are in science, and their identification with MSU was really
not primary.   Their identification was with the funding agency, and
the PIs, they're the principal investigators, the money, yes, it
came to MSU, but it came to MSU contingent on the PI being there.
 So these guys, if they went to another institution, they could take
their grants with them.    That may be a little simplification.     I
characterized them as sort of the last bastion of entrepreneurial
interests on campus, because they really were operating in their
own labs, their own little world, with their own funding, and what
was in it for them for a union?
     Even the system of evaluation in the colleges, in the sciences,
led off campus, as your promotion or raise determinations frequently
required testimonials external to MSU, and a letter of recommendation
from somebody in the field saying he's doing quality research.      So
there's a whole network out there in the science areas that's national
and not parochial to a university.    When they get their grants, they
are evaluated by peers in the field, in the country, or in the world
sometimes.   I understood it was a little better later, when some
of my close friends, who were in the sciences, that I hunt with or
fish with, we'd talk about the granting process and their evaluation
processes.   It became clear to me that they were voting their


                                                                   35
interests just as clearly as the people who were north of the river
were voting theirs.
     The way salary determinations or promotions are determined,
the College of Arts and Letters are fairly uniform through that
college.   If you look where the leadership of the union movements
on campus, and I say movements because AAUP became more active later,
they were from social sciences and humanities, certainly more than
natural sciences.    The most active one from the natural sciences
I can think of AAUP was Jack Bass, who was a physicist and, I think,
a New Yorker, and had a more liberal background than some others
might have.
Charnley:   Was there anyone in ag that worked with you?     Ag econ?
Korth:   Well, AAUP had some in ag econ.   Colette Mosier [phonetic]
was the president of AAUP, I think, or I think she was.      In terms
of active participation, I mean, the centurions, the one hundred
that we might have had beating bushes, we really didn't have anybody
in the sciences and in ag.   There were people, individuals, who were
supportive, and I understand fully they did not really want to be
visible.   There were some consequences to being--
Charnley:   Did you have tenure at the time?
Korth:   Yes, I did have tenure.   I didn't have tenure in the first
one.   I did have tenure in the first one, because I was promoted


                                                                    36
very quickly.   I was promoted in three years, to associate professor.
 But then I think it must have taken between six and eight years
to get to associate professor, during which time I'd gotten these
Rockefeller grants and I'd published stuff.      Bern Engel, in one of
his more roundabout ways, as a matter of fact, let me know that I
should be doing more time, spend my energies more on publishing than
on other activities.
     When they turned it down, I think at one time I decided, well,
they had made me uncomfortable.    They're going to be uncomfortable.
 So I didn't file a grievance, but I went, individually, I went to
Bern and he kind of kicked it up and said, "Well, I didn't really
make this decision."
     So then I went to Ed Carlin, who was the dean.    Well, he didn't
want to be the guy--see, by then, I was so visible.   I'd been writing
stuff.   He didn't really want to be the fall guy, either.   They were
a little afraid that MEA would come in behind me, that this was
preliminary to a lawsuit, which it never was, in my mind.       Then I
went to Lee [Lawrence L.] Boger, who was the provost at that time.
 He followed Cantlon.    He said, "Well, these decisions are made down
below."   [Laughter]
Charnley:   Or somewhere in between.
Korth:   So there was a crack someplace, but then I let it go at that.
 I could see this was not going to be worth pursuing.     If they went
on for ten years and everybody else was getting promoted, then I


                                                                     37
might have a suit.   I never did think of collective bargaining very
personally, anyhow.    I thought of it always as a system.     There
weren't any devils.   We were looking for devils, because that's how
you organize.   If you can find some S.O.B. out there, and we thought
we had.  We thought we had in the third election, because that was
'81-'82, that was that campaign, and that was the crisis on campus,
the financial crisis on campus, you know, when they were going to
eliminate colleges, the nursing program, Lyman Briggs [phonetic].
 Who else was on the line?     Oh, there were half a dozen.
     They appointed a blue ribbon committee of--what did they call
it?  I think it might have been Committee of Assessment or something
like that.  It was UCA.   I, of course, wrote another Tom Paine letter
about the University Committee of Assassins.     [Laughter]   I turned
up the rhetoric a little bit on that one, and it was shameless.
A good friend of mine was on that committee, too, and I told him,
"Jesus, what are you doing?"
     And that's where I saw some really awful things happen, in those
meetings with the trustees.    This could go on forever.   But in that
campaign, I was not the president anymore.    Bill [William L.] Ewens
from sociology was the president.
     I took on a particular task.     The life insurance program at
MSU had gotten into trouble, and they were going to raise rates.
So Bob Repas, who kind of has a nose for good stuff like this, Bob
Repas kind of pulled me aside and said, "We ought to look at this.
 There's something going on here."   And we did.  I learned more about


                                                                     38
life insurance than I ever want to know.     To melt it down, what had
happened was that the university had established--
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Charnley:   We were talking about the 1981-'82 election.
Korth:   Yes, and so I got onto the life insurance program, and it
was an experience-based program.    What that meant was, the university
would just pass the money through.     The university would collect
the money from the faculty who enrolled and pass that on to the
insurance company, which built up a fund to pay off claims based
on the experience.
      Well, faculty are crusty old birds who last forever.    This fund
was getting enormous, because there were no claims, but it was faculty
money paid.   It was not university contribution.      So after the
election in '78, the Faculty Affairs Committee raised the benefits
without changing the premium.     It was announced by Keith Grody, in
his office, as an improvement in benefits sponsored by the university.
 It was a flat lie.
      So we got all the information on this hummer, put together a
package, met with the trustees.     [Elizabeth P.] Howe and [John B.]
Bruff were trustees at that time, and we had a public meeting and
we laid out what had happened and how the faculty had been conned
on this.   Keith said, well, it had been a misnomer.      It was a very
good meeting with the trustees, and they said, "Well, we understand


                                                                     39
what you're saying.    We recognize what happened.     Where do we go
from here?"
     And we said, "Well, you've got to put it out in bits."       Well,
they didn't like that.    Keith didn't like that.    Because they have
their--you know, I understand, they have their relationships with
the existing companies that are familiar with them, comfortable with
them.   Why change?   They really wouldn't have had to change, except
that they'd mucked it up so badly, and they knew it when they did
it, because Gary Stolick [phonetic], from the business school, told
them, said, "If you do this, you're going to bankrupt that fund."
     So at any rate, so we had this enormous meeting.   Well, it wasn't
just faculty that we were in this.    This was a big meeting.   We were
over in Miles.    What's that office building where Grody is?
Charnley:   Manly Miles.
Korth:   Manly Miles.   We were over there.  And the unions were there,
because they were affected by all this, too.      The CT union, all of
the operating engineers, everybody was there.     They brought in this
consultant and he started blowing smoke about all the complexities
of all of this.    I interrupted him, I said, "How do you write up
a bid?"
     So he went on and he explained how to write up a bid.      I said,
"You mean it's easy?" and he said yes.      Then we got a bid on the
life insurance policy, so we had the two dimensions to it.        That


                                                                  40
took an enormous amount of time, learning things I didn't care to
learn.
     Bob Repas was great in this, MEA was helpful in this, trying
to explain some of this to us, and so that became what we thought
was a big issue, and they clearly had manipulated this and had not
acted in the best interests of the faculty.
     Then at the same time we have the dissolution, or threatened
dissolution, of colleges, and I thought, "Boy, this is going to be,
you know, if we can't make it now, with [M.] Cecil Mackey [phonetic]
there," who was kind of a cold fish.    That characterization came
to me from one of the trustees.    That's the way he was seen.
     The AAUP decided also at this point that the time was right,
so they really became active in organizing a campaign, and, in fact,
took the lead and we decided if they can get their 30 percent, fine,
let them get 30 percent, and with our 10 percent we'll get on the
ballot as well.   They collected their cards and they announced how
many cards they'd collected--800, 900, something like that.     And
lo and behold, Keith Grody came up with a list that was big enough
so they didn't have 30 percent.
     I saw Roy Matthews, who was very strong AAUP, right after that,
and when we had been in that position, his comment to me was, "Can't
you guys count?"   So I was able to throw that one back at him, and
he couldn't figure out how that happened.    I said, "Well, you told
them how many people to put on the list."
     I thought that was a good campaign.    Bill Ewens was a great
job, I thought.  But what hurt the--not the union effort.  The union


                                                                     41
effort was about the same, resulted in about the same.        What hurt
MEA--we wound up with the smaller portion this time--what hurt us
was the AAUP assertion that if you wanted a union on campus, you
had to vote for AAUP because the Faculty Associates people, in the
end, felt stronger about a union than about the association, and
in the runoff election, they would vote for AAUP rather than no.
      On the other hand, the AAUP people felt stronger about AAUP
than they did about union, and if Faculty Associates was in the runoff,
AAUP people would not vote for them, and the union effort would fail.
 It wasn't inaccurate.     I thought it was dirty.
      At any rate, it was moot.    If you look back over all three of
those elections, I don't remember the numbers from the '72 election,
but I'm confident they are the same, that there were about in the
neighborhood of eight to nine hundred people who voted for union
in each of these elections, which was, in fact, about 30 percent
of the faculty.   It was better than 30 percent of those who voted,
in each case, but never enough to get to the 50 percent that would
be needed to run off against.     So, really, that last one, the
circumstances were such that if it was going to happen, it was going
to happen then, and that really ended the movement for a union on
campus.
      But the consequences, I think, of the union movement are still
around on campus.   I think the procedures are more open, the grievance
procedure is markedly improved, the salary lists are published now.
 You know what's going on.     The criteria for promotion and tenure
are more clearly articulated.     I think the tenure system has been


                                                                    42
strengthened, faculty control over curriculum.   I would say all those
elements have been improved or strengthened because there was a union
movement.
     Zolten used to say, I suppose what every election winner would
say, he'd look at the programs that were enacted afterwards and say,
"Well, those were our programs.    Who won the election?     They may
be sitting in the office, but who won the election?"       I wouldn't
go that far, but it was a worthwhile effort.
     I don't regret any of the energies that I put into it, and they
were considerable.   Ultimately, it didn't damage me.   I do know that
when I became associate dean, I ran into Bob Banks.     Bob took over
the second campaign.   He really was the academic one who ran the
anti-union campaign, but he was not as aggressive or as--I count
him as a friend today.  But I must say, when I showed up as associate
dean different places, here were all these people who had been sitting
on the other side of the table in various circumstances, wondering
what the hell this meant.
Charnley:   Who sold out?
Korth:   Yes.  Whether they had to watch their Ps and Qs or something
happened.
Charnley:   Interesting.  Could you talk a little bit about your
scholarship in the 1980s or seventies?     You were working on your
oral histories.


                                                                    43
Korth:   Yes.  First major project, of course, was my dissertation,
and I got an article out of that.   What was really interesting about
that was, I think, the left wing sort of movement it purported to
be.  But the Auto Light strike had not really been done in a scholarly
way.   There had been some books written on it, and the timing was
right and the money was there, so I could devote the whole summer
and take two students down to Toledo and conduct interviews.
     I wrote up the process for the Labor History Journal about what
we did there, and got some nice notes about that.      When the book
was published, I got some very nice reviews of that, and several
notes about the oral history, my description of doing oral history,
that were very complimentary.   These were quite welcome because this
is the same time that I was getting poison pen notes from people
who were opposed to the union.
     I should back up to say that, in public, it was very civil.
Man, you'd be amazed, in private, the scurrilous sort of shit that
could come my way, unsigned.    Nasty, nasty notes.    And that was
sustaining, to be able to engage in that sort of scholarship that
really interested me.
     The Auto Light movement was a very difficult book, because that
was a new area, doing oral history.    What do you keep, what do you
cut.   We didn't have money for transcribing, so I had to work out--I
didn't have much money for it, so I had some friends do some of it
here and there, and then transcribed some of it myself and typed
it up.   Man, this was well before computers and any of this stuff.


                                                                      44
Charnley:   A lot of work.
Korth:   Yes.   So you wind up with a thousand pages of manuscript,
and then have to cut it down.     I was getting kind of frustrated with
it and I sent it off to Meg.    She had gone on to the American studies
program in Minnesota, the student who had worked with me.         I sent
it over there and said, "Why don't you take a hand at cutting some
of this stuff," and so she did, and that helped, and I got back on
track and got it down to a reasonable manuscript of three, four hundred
pages.
     I sent it around, I think, to a couple of places without much
success, and then sent it over to Dick Chapin at MSU, and he called
me up and wanted to have lunch, which I took as a good sign.         So
we went over to the University Club and he bought me lunch and he
said that he didn't really approve of oral histories.        I thought,
"Oh, shit, he's bringing me over to tell me that he doesn't approve
of this.   There's something else going on."      Well, he said, "But
you know, I read your manuscript and you made a believer out of me."
     So that's how that one worked out, and then he did a very nice
job in putting it together.    That one ran fairly well.   It was picked
up in a couple of courses, so it went to a second printing, which
meant a full four or five hundred dollars, for the whole thing, in
my pocket.    But they got their expenses and it got published, and
that was really the most important part for me.


                                                                     45
Charnley:   What do you remember about the interview processes that
you went through and the workers that you interviewed?
Korth:   You had to be very careful.     The students were--well, let
me back up.   The first thing that was very clear is that I was a
professor, and these were working-class people that I was
interviewing, whether they were police, whether they were strikers,
whether they were scabs.   So there was a class and a social difference
there, and so I had to think through how I was going to approach
them so that they would be comfortable and trusting, how to establish
rapport.
     I had a different problem from the problem the students had,
because the students had a certain advantage because they weren't
supposed to know and I trained them in this, too.    I said, "You don't
know, and you've just got to continually ask for clarification.
You're not telling them anything.     They're telling you and they're
explaining it to you, and you're this naive listener, and you want
to know."   And they did it very well.
     Both Meg and--Claude was a little more relaxed at this, I think.
 Meg is kind of an intense person and she did know things, and I
kept telling her, "You don't know."     So I had the problem of being
somebody who, they said, "Well, of course, you know," and I kept
saying, "No, I don't know."     So it was always a challenge to sit
down with people and establish this sort of connection, where they
would freely tell you what they recalled.


                                                                     46
      I always tried to do it in a setting that was comfortable to
them--their homes or any place they chose.      I had to play the naive
listener, too, and I had to be even more careful about not offering
things.   What I chose to do was to use key words.      I modeled this,
really, after what a nondirectional psychologist does.
      I would listen until they used a term that warranted some
elaboration or that seemed to be charged, and I'd just repeat the
term back to them, in a questioning way.       If they said "scab" I'd
just say, "Scab?" and then they'd go and tell you what that meant.
 That worked very well.     That worked well.
      I did two other books, one on the union carpenters in Michigan,
and one on the Minneapolis Teamsters strike.       The Teamsters strike
was part of the second phase of the same research project that was
funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and so summer of '73, I went
to Toledo.
      Summer of '74, I went to Minneapolis.   Again, with two students,
undergraduate students with me, to conduct interviews and to help
with all the paperwork and that sort of thing.       Took me a while to
get those things published, because it was a hand operation, getting
the manuscripts together.    Well, getting it transcribed and all that.
 So I was trying to fit that in while I was trying to organize faculty
and teach courses and do other things.
Charnley:    In your spare time.


                                                                    47
Korth:   Then the carpenters book, I was approached.     I was very
supportive of the Michigan Council for the Humanities.       I'd known
Ron for a while.
Charnley:   Is this Ron Means?
Korth:   Means, yes.   I'd made some presentations for them, using
some of these oral history materials, for their annual conferences,
as a way to try and encourage people to do oral histories.    I'd made
some other presentations there.    While I'm thinking about that, I
was on a panel for the National Oral History Association, was here,
and we talked about oral history, and I went down to Wayne State
when the state oral history association began at the Ruther [phonetic]
Library.   I think Geneva [phonetic] was there.
Charnley:   Justin, probably?
Korth:   Yes.   Yes, I think Justin Castlemount [phonetic] was down
there, too, and the guy from Wall Lake.
Charnley:   Glen Ruggles [phonetic].
Korth:   Yes, Glen Ruggles was there, and people from the Ruther
Library that had done some interviewing themselves.      So the
carpenters, for their centennial, were looking for somebody to do


                                                                   48
something, and they had a little bit of money, so I agreed to do
an oral history there, where I would interview retired carpenters.
      The focus in that was--there were two foci.   One was the union
and how that had impacted the way they did their job and the way
they lived, etc., and the other was the impact of changing
technologies on the work.
      That was a fun project.   I went all over the state.   I was up
at Escanaba and Iron River and Alpina and, of course, the Detroit
area, and Sioux St. Marie.    The carpenters union is a very complex
union.   It's not just people who nail boards together.   It includes
pile drivers and machinists that install--or millwrights, who install
heavy machinery and flooring and all of that.
      I learned some things there and had some fun doing it, and
produced a good book.    The carpenters are happy with it.    I think
we sold out on that one.    Union people bought it.    It had a wider
audience than the union people in Michigan, because I had some
correspondence and some comments at conferences I went to, about
it.   People who'd read it thought it was okay.
Charnley:   How was it that you got involved in administration within
the college?
Korth:   It really is the department.    I had been active, serving
on everything in the department.     As I said, I was elected to the
advisory council the first year I was here, so I was on and off one
thing after another, all the way through.     Then, of course, when


                                                                     49
Henry Silverman, in what I recognize as very difficult
circumstances--difficult being, Al Hollingsworth as the dean--tried
to make some changes in the department that many of us thought were
inappropriate, mainly an attack on the American studies curriculum
at the core of a writing program.
     That led, of course, to a revolution when he came up for review,
and I was one of, oh, I don't know, three, four candidates in the
runoff.   Henry, Jocelyn [phonetic], Jenny Banks [phonetic], and I
were all candidates.   I think there may have been another one, too.
 I don't remember who.
     But at any rate, it came down to a ballot with three of us--Henry
and Jocelyn and I were on the ballot for the chair.       Jocelyn and
Henry were one vote apart.    I think Jocelyn had one more than Henry,
and I had probably half of what each of them had.     When I went over
to talk to John--he interviewed all three of us--and I said--
Charnley:   This is John Edie [phonetic]?
Korth:  Yes, John Edie, the dean of the college.       I said, "If you
appointed me, I'd have a lot of trouble, because it would be a minority
candidate, but it's very clear from the split of the vote between
Jocelyn and me that Henry no longer enjoys the [unclear], and if
you're going to interpret the vote for me, a lot of that is personal
loyalties, but they would, I'm sure, transfer to Jocelyn if I were
not there."


                                                                     50
     So she was appointed chair.     I never did tell her that, now
that I think about it.    She was appointed chair, Henry had a snit,
so then she had to put together her administration.      Milt had been
in there.   That's right.
Charnley:   As one of the other candidates?
Korth:   Yes, he had been one of the candidates, too.      Fine guy.
Think the world of Milt.    So she chose Milt as the associate chair,
and that was fine.    I was very comfortable with that.   Then she was
having some trouble getting somebody to do the developmental, and
she called and I said, "You know, this is not my cup of tea."      She
said okay.   Then she called back and she said, "Well, if I help you
brew it, will it be your cup of tea?"
     So I agreed to do that, with some conditions.    It wasn't really
that complicated because what I saw immediately was that we were
going to get graduate students and that that had to be handled very
well and very carefully, or we were going to have a lot of trouble.
 I wanted to make sure that we didn't just hire them and say, "Go
do it," that we wanted to have a system.
     I'd had a conversation in my interview with the dean about that,
too, about the use of graduate students, and so I shared that view
with her and she said, "That's right.     Will you do it?"   So I said
I would.   So then I brought together the people who had been teaching
in developmental, or who were process-oriented, the process approach
to writing.    Sherry Thomas and Maria Blaine [phonetic] and Mike


                                                                     51
Steinberg [phonetic], and, oh, I don't remember who all.        I said,
"We've got to do this right, and you guys have been more involved
in this than I have, so I want you to take the lead on putting together
the pedagogy and the curriculum in this, and I'll support you.      I'm
going to monitor.    I want to know what you're doing, and I'm still
the one that's going to be responsible, so we're going to have to
agree."
     So they went along.     I made the proposal that what we really
needed was to have graduate students from the entire college, not
just one department, that we needed a training program, and that
we needed a retreat, to get this all together.       My God, he funded
it.
     So we went up to Ketnan [phonetic] Center and John Smollens
[phonetic], I remember he was there, too, and we had a terrific time,
and really laid it out, and these were graduate students from history,
music, English, of course, philosophy.      They were from around the
college.   Art.   I think we had one from art.    Yes, we did.  I think
almost every department was represented.       Then we had weekly
seminars.
[Begin Tape 3, Side 1]
Charnley:   This is tape three.
     When the last tape ended, we were talking about the graduate
seminars in American Thought and Language.


                                                                    52
Korth:  We began those--when did that happen?     Do you remember when
Jocelyn became chair?
Charnley:   '88?   '89?
Korth:  No.   It must have been before that.    It must have been '87,
because '88, I've got another program I got into then.
     Just a side note on that transition.      Henry had very hard
feelings about all this, and ultimately he said he would only
communicate with Jocelyn in writing, and I was around, so I was kind
of de facto.   I was the go-between.   Henry would talk to me.   Henry
just left.
Charnley:   Would talk with you and not Jocelyn?
Korth:  Henry just left that summer, and Jocelyn didn't start until
August or something, and I was there.    I don't know why I was there.
 Oh, I know why I was there, because I was setting up the program,
the developmental program for the fall.
Charnley:   That would have been '87?
Korth:  Yes, summer of '87.    And so I was around.   But at any rate,
so it was a very successful seminar and the whole year just went
swimmingly.   I directed that and I taught a developmental course,
which took me all the way back.     I was glad to have the seminar,


                                                                     53
frankly, because they had some very good ideas, and the things that
worked.   Frankly, the developmental had been kind of a stepchild
and it had not been much of a program.     It was really in disarray.
     So it was an opportunity, with the influx of graduate students
and the new system, to kind of bring some coherence and substance
to it, and I think we did.    So I did that and, let's see, that's
'87.  I did that four years, five years, four years.       Five years.
     I was going to take a sabbatical.      Well, I was going to take
a sabbatical.   That's right.   I was going to take a sabbatical until
Jocelyn asked me to do the developmental thing.      I said okay.    So
then I was going to take a sabbatical, and then Jocelyn nominated
me for associate dean.   I said, "Okay, I'd do that."    I'd allow her
to nominate me, but I wasn't sure I was going to do this.
     So I went through the interview process, which was all conducted
by the college council.    Good interviews, it was fine.     Then he
called me up, he called me in and talked to me.    He's an interesting
guy.  He had some interesting questions.      He wanted to know what
I would say if people thought this was kind of a payoff to ATL for
behaving.   I said, well, I hope they saw it that way, because it
was about ATL was a central part of the college.     But ATL might not
have been terribly--you know, it was not admired entirely in the
whole college.
     What could I bring to it?     I said, well, I had a standing in
the department and the college as well.      I was the first one from
the department elected to the Graduate Council, and we had no graduate
program.   That shattered ice there.    Well, you know how it is, you


                                                                     54
know, that if you don't have a graduate program, you can't even get
on the Graduate Council, let alone be on the University Graduate
Council, coming from a department that doesn't have a graduate
program.
     So that was unprecedented, and he recognized that.     So he asked
me to come on for the three years, which I did.    In retrospect, that
was a very good appointment for me.      It was just the right time.
I'd finished all my books, and I was looking for a new research topic,
but I didn't have one.   A new dean, a new chance, maybe, and I really
thought I could do a good service for ATL as well as the college
there.
     It really turned out that way.    John Edie made his appointments
on the basis of individual's qualities, not on their politics.       By
politics, I don't mean left or right, I mean who they're associated
with.   So it wasn't an ATL appointment, like he had to have somebody
from ATL or he had to have somebody from [unclear].    It wasn't that.
     All of his appointments, if you look at them, were people that
he felt had qualities that would help in his administration.        Pat
McConahey [phonetic] was certainly that way, and Dan S______.        It
was Pat Paulson [phonetic], the one who replaced me.       But it was
also true of the chairs.    The only awkward position he got into was
Henry, over in history department.
     But Doug [Douglas] Noverr was certainly an inspired selection.
 I didn't think Doug would take it, and when he said he was going
to ask him, I said, "Boy, more power to you.   He is exactly the right
guy to get."    But that was all John's idea.    This was not mine.


                                                                     55
I mention that because he had a very good sense of who would be good
in that job.
     But going into the dean's office did give me an opportunity
to change some views about ATL.     I think the first meeting I went
to with, who's the admissions guy, Bill Turner, talking about
enrollment projections.    He said, "Well, you know, you just add a
few sections of ATL."    I said, "Wait a minute.    Do you know what
that means?"
     I came to appreciate the difficulty of projecting how many
students you're going to have there, and all that.       But I said,
"That's not the way you look at it."  There was a meeting when Jocelyn
and Milt and I were under excruciating pressure from my good friend
Jim Hamilton, nonetheless, from the provost's office, to increase
class size, and we were sitting there kind of imaginatively writing
out our letters of resignation, and the provost's office backed down
on that one.
     It never was that dramatic again.     I could then be in places
where comments like that would be made or where there was an
opportunity to showcase not just the college but ATL and what they're
doing and the important role they were playing.   It gave me, it wasn't
a bully pulpit, but it was a little lectern that I had, and I enjoyed
that.  The reason that we have an audit is because I pushed for that.
 I brought that up about the first year I was in the dean's office.
 "Oh, it can't be done."
Charnley:   Financial audit?


                                                                  56
Korth:  No, no.   Course audit.  Transcript audit.   When I brought
that up, they said, "This can't be done."  It took four years until
they said, "Oh, yes, well here's how we can do it," and then I'm
not sure they did it right.   But there was nobody.   I was a lone
voice, and you can ask, what's her name, the one that replaced King
Lou?  In the registrar's office, she was acting registrar forever.
 I don't know if she was made full registrar or not.
Charnley:  I don't know.
Korth:  We had many, many meetings about, where I'd sit down and
say, "So the student has a `what-if' capability.   They can look at
their own transcript and the curriculum and the course choices and
all that."  The online, the registration online, that, I didn't have
anything to do with creating, but then putting that together, and
that was part of the problem, putting that together with student
access to their own records.
Charnley:  The degree navigator.
Korth:  The degree navigator.   All of that.   That was one of the
things I was able to push until it happened.
Charnley:  I know students find that tremendously useful now.


                                                                    57
Korth:   I mean, it seems so self-evident to me.   Of course, I hadn't
thought about it, and then I went to one of these associate deans
meetings in the Big Ten.    I don't know where it was.    Penn State,
I think.   Yes, it was Penn State the first year that they were in
the Big Ten.
     Every year there was a meeting of associate deans from the Big
Ten schools, and Ohio State was doing something then on degree audit.
 They had their own program they were trying to build up.     But then
others started talking about it and how they were moving toward doing
something like that.    I brought that back and, jeez, she thought
that I had come from the moon.     You can't do that.
     Then it did become a terrible problem, because of the way the
registration system was set up.     They built their own here instead
of buying a package, and then trying to get that to interface with
the degree audit stuff was--that's where the problem was.       That's
why it couldn't be done.
Charnley:   Because the software was proprietary rather than--
Korth:   Well, and they couldn't get them to interface, either.     So
there were several things that, it gave me an opportunity.       Being
in administration that way gave me an opportunity.      I was on the
task force with John Hutsig [phonetic] to redo our whole
international, our study abroad program, and I nominated him to be
dean.  Actually, I nominated to the dean to nominate him to be dean
of international programs, and he is now, and a good one, I think.


                                                                     58
Charnley:   [unclear] or emphasis.
Korth:   Yes.   Well, it was that task force report that laid out a
goal of 40 percent are going to have an overseas studies experience.
 We'd like it to be 100.    Of course, he had [M. Peter] McPherson
behind it, too, which made a big difference.
Charnley:   Besides your own service overseas in Germany, and then
your interest in foreign service, initially, did you have a Fulbright
or anything, where you studied overseas?
Korth:   Yes, I went overseas, but that was a special arrangement
with Al Hollingsworth, who was dean of the college of arts and letters.
 I think he had been doing some research on the Taipei revolution
or something of that sort, and he was studying Chinese, spoke Chinese.
 Developed a relationship with, was eager in developing relationships
with Chinese universities.     Had developed a relationship with
[Chinese word], Northwest University, one of the key universities.
 This was in Shiyon [phonetic], in China, and had sent over there
a graduate student in 1983-'84, and had brought to this country a
young faculty member, all under college money.
      The following year he sent Jim McClintock over there, and the
third year, he called me and asked me if I wanted to go.        I could
afford to.    My family was here and my salary continued here, and


                                                                      59
then I went there and the Chinese paid me a lot more than the Chinese
got, but not a lot of money, but enough so I could live there.
      I spent one year teaching English majors in Northwest
University, American and English literature.        English literature
was a stretch, because I had never a taken a course in it, but then,
it was really language training.    But it was a most interesting time.
 That's a Chinese curse, did you know that?
Charnley:   No.
Korth:   May you live in interesting times.
Charnley:   Yes, yes, right.
Korth:   Well, it was interesting.     I was never bored in China and
you have not enough tape for me to tell you all the things that happened
there.   But I was lead faculty member there, from a major university.
 There was another guy from Oregon State there with his wife.      There
were two graduate students from MSU there, and there were a couple
of other foreigners there, one from Canada, one retired woman from
the United States, and the Chinese just made me the--first of all,
they made me fifty.    I wasn't fifty yet.    But that's the cutoff for
a senior status, so my age was fifty when I got there.        I was
forty-eight or something.     So I was sort of the contact one, the
one responsible for what all these Americans and foreign nationals
did, which got to be interesting at times.


                                                                    60
Charnley:   So you were the head colonel?
Korth:   Yes, I was.  But we traveled.    And then my wife came over,
Nadine came over during their Chinese New Year, which was in the
spring, and we spent five weeks, the two of us, traveling around
in China.   I met her in Hong Kong, and we went to [Chinese city]
and [Chinese city], Kunming [phonetic], and then down in a beautiful
area of southwestern China, in [Chinese city].     It's just idyllic.
 Then back to Kunming, Shanghai, Shiyon, for some time and then out
to Beijing, so we got around.
Charnley:   How was the reception of the people toward Americans at
that time?
Korth:   It was very pleasant.   At no time did I feel threatened in
China at all.  You had to get used to certain things, because they're
so very curious.   Quite literally now, I mean this, literally, you
could be standing there at a shop or a grocery store or something,
and realize that there's a nose in your ear.    I mean, they get right
up in next to you.   I was taller than most Chinese, so they were
just crowded around.
     When there are billions of people, I suppose they don't have
the same sense of space that Americans do, so you had to become
accustomed to that.   The official reception and official treatment
in the university was wonderful.    There were a lot of difficulties,


                                                                     61
but they tried very much to overcome them and to be helpful.      There
was never any hostilities.     There was a lot of some anxieties.     I
passed a kidney stone there and that was not something you want to
do.   I had to ride to the hospital over a cobblestone street on a
bicycle while I was passing this damn stone.
     But they were very protective, did not want us to have bicycles.
 It took a long time for us to persuade them to allow us to buy
bicycles.   I realized how autonomous we are in this country.       You
just go out and get in your car and you go wherever the hell you
want.   Well, they didn't quite like us doing that.      They weren't
afraid that we would see something we shouldn't see, in the sense
of some secret, but that maybe we'd see something that they didn't
want us to see in terms of the conditions, or that we might be
embarrassed in some way.
     This was true in the classroom.     Students were very reluctant
to ask me questions.    Coming from an American university, that took
a while to get accustomed to.      And I figured out the reason they
were reluctant, was that if they asked me a question and I didn't
know the answer, I would lose face and they would be the cause of
me losing face, so it would be an embarrassment for them.
Charnley:   They were protecting you, in a sense.
Korth:   There was a lot of this indirection in China, but the students
were just great.    I'm sure I caused problems.    There's no question
in my mind that Tiananmen Square is a consequence of opening to the


                                                                     62
West and having all these foreign experts in the country, because
I had students who was a party cadre, you know, in the class.
      We were reading John Stuart Mill's essay, On Liberty, in which
he makes some very unhappy comments about Chinese culture, one, but
he also talked about a liberal education.      In China, a very small
portion of the people get to college, 3 percent or something like
that, and they go to a designed program, a designed curriculum, kind
of like the first year of ATL when I got here.
      They have their classroom, and the teachers come into their
classroom.    They maintain the classroom.    They all have the same
curriculum and they go right through this curriculum.        There are
no electives.    So here we are, talking about choices, and this guy
says, "I want to take a course in tourism, so I can be a guide.
Why can't I do that?"    I said, "I don't know why you can't do that."
      I gave a lecture to the campus community on the credit system
and how that works, because there was a growing interest in it.
Their first reaction to a credit system, which I would argue, implies
choice, because you accumulate, as Thurston Vehman [phonetic] said,
a certain body of staple credits, and that's how you graduate.     What
the composition of that body is in an American university has a great
deal of latitude.
      Well, all they did was just assign credit hours to them.     Same
curriculum, same sequencing, no choice.     Next step was going to be,
now you may take one elective course, or two, or three.       It's hard
for them to change that system, but that idea of, you know, inherently,
you're talking about American literature and American ideas and


                                                                     63
American history and you're talking about democratic reforms and
democratic movements and personal liberties and those always have
been conspiracies.
Charnley:   In looking back on your career at Michigan State, you
mentioned that you and your wife were going to give it three years?
Korth:   Yes.
Charnley:   Did you have other offers, or was there any other point
that you thought about leaving?
Korth:   Yes.  Yes, there were.    Did I have any other offers?     No.
 None of the interviews came to that.     I went to Boston in 1970,
at Christmas, to the AJ, three years after I had graduated from
Minnesota and I was there for the advisory council.      We didn't have
any positions but we might get some positions, so I was there to--well,
I was going down the elevator and I heard these guys talking about
"the pit," you know, AJ [unclear].     I thought it might be a
restaurant.
      So Nadine and I, we went down, and I went into the ballroom
down there and I'd been to the AJ in Chicago, I think it was, I don't
remember where it was, when I was looking for a job.        I went into
a ballroom like that and there were three-by-five cards just all
over the wall, all around the damn room, with the jobs.       I went in
there, and there was nothing.     There was nothing on the walls.


                                                                   64
Charnley:   In a three-year difference.
Korth:   And there were three-ring notebooks with vitaes.     I said,
"Whoa, I'm glad I got out when I did."     The New York Times had an
article about it, what had happened in the historical profession.
 It had just clamped down at that point.    So I didn't really think
much then about applying for another academic job.
     I did think about other jobs, but MSU kept turning out to be
a pretty good place to be.   A certain inertia takes over and we were
there with the kids, the circumstances were fine, Nadine got a job
a few years later.    But once the kids were gone, then--oh, I went
to Northern Iowa to interview for a chair job there and they were
intimidated.   They really were looking for somebody who had been
in a state system.   They were a little worried that I'd come in with
some research agenda and demands for them.    It was not a good fit.
     It was a nice enough place.    I got to meet relatives I hadn't
seen in years.   My dad was born in Waverly and my grandparents are
buried there, which is just a few miles away.   Then after I had been
in the dean's office for three years--it was a three-year gig.   That
was the way he put it, and I said fine.
     Then at the end of the third year, Metropolitan State in St.
Paul was looking for a dean, and the place was right, and all our
kids are there, so I had Jocelyn nominate me, and I was a finalist
there.   But it was not a good fit there, either.    I came in with
a vocabulary that was giving them some trouble.


                                                                    65
      It's not a community college, but it relied very heavily on
local resources for staffing--business people, like a community
college.   But it's a university, and also, they were hiring a lot
of people from, graduate students, from Minnesota there, to teach
some introductory courses.     And they had a lot of long-term
temporaries, and I said, "Here it is, folks.      This is what your
trouble is and what you're in for."
      They'd already had one suit, of somebody trying to get a
permanent job.    They were talking about expanding, getting
tenure-stream jobs and I was saying, "Okay, how are you going to
do this?"   You know what the problem would be.  If you want to create
now a core of permanent faculty, on the basis of a national search,
you have a whole pool of people who have been here who have reasonable
expectations that they can compete well for those jobs, and if you
don't hire, you've got trouble.     If you hire, you may still have
trouble.
Charnley:   That was something you were experienced in?
Korth:   Yes, I had a lot of experience with that.      No matter what
they decided, there was going to be turmoil, and there was going
to be a lot of tension, and so they'd better gear up for it.       It
was a good interview.   After I got home and thought about it, I said,
"No, been there, done that."
      So when they called they wanted me to come back and talk to
the provost and the president and we had--this was the assistant


                                                                     66
provost I was talking to.  We had a conversation.   I said, "It doesn't
feel right.   I don't think you'd be happy with me and I don't think
I'd be happy in that situation."     So that was that.
     But I told the dean that I was going there, so he, without
knowing, he talked to the chairs and told them that he wanted to
reappoint me, and that he knew it was a three-year job, but he wanted
me to stay there.    The chairs all unanimously agreed.     Said fine,
that's okay with us.
     So then I stayed on and that's why I wound up.       Then I knew
he was going to resign and I told him, "No, I want off the first
of the year," because he was going to be off in June, going to leave
in June, and I said, "I want to serve until six months before you're
off.   I do not want to be in a position where I would have to work
in a transition.    That's all."   He was very good about that, and
he agree to let me resign.
[Begin Tape 3, Side 2]
Charnley:   In looking back on your career, is there anything that
stands out that maybe you see as most important?       In your career
at Michigan State.
Korth:   I think, in a way, it's a credit to Michigan State that first
they could tolerate me, and even though some of my early activities
created significant discomfort for some of the administrators, among
whom were John Cantlon and Lee Winder and Cecil Mackey.       There was


                                                                    67
every good reason to try to find some to shunt me aside, and there
were opportunities.
     When Al Hollingsworth asked me to go to China, the provost could
have disapproved that.   When John Edie asked me to be associate dean,
Bob Banks, whom I sat across the table from, in negotiating stuff,
he could have raised objection.     Certainly Lou Anna, who was Lee
Winder's assistant, could have--I'm sure she has some memories that
were not so comfortable.
     There were good reasons to obstruct, but they really ultimately
did not and so I've had what I thought was a useful career.   I always
felt that when you go someplace, you ought to act like you're going
to be there the rest of your life, whether you're going to be there
or not, and when you leave someplace, they ought to know you were
there.   And so people knew I was there.
Charnley:   I want to thank you for your time and the insights that
you've shared.
Korth:   You're quite welcome, quite welcome.
[End of interview]


                                      68
                              Index
AAUP 22, 23, 32, 34-37, 42, 43
Adams, Walter 19
Agricultural Workers Organization   5
Alinsky, Saul 14
American National Red Cross 2
Baird, Reid 11
Banks, Bob 44, 70
Banks, Jenny 51
Bass, Jack 36
Beagle, Meg 21, 25, 46, 47
Beckwith, Gladys 16, 22, 26
Beeber, Loren 28
Berman, Hy 3, 5, 7, 8
Bessey Hall 11, 12
Blaine, Maria 53
Boger, Lawrence L. 38
Bruff, John B. 40
Cantlon, John 32, 69
Carlin, Ed 15, 38
Carr, Lee 33
Castlemount, Justin 49
Central Michigan University  24, 27
Chapin, Dick 46
Civil Rights Commission 15
Curtis, Bruce 10, 11
Demonstration Hall  34
Durman, Bill 19
Edie, John 51, 56, 70
Engel, Bernard 12, 37
Ewens, William L. 39, 42
Ferris, John H. 22
Fishman, Bill 25
Fogerty, Bob 12
Francy, Zolten 32, 43
Ganakas, Perry 10
Garskov, _______ 23
Grody, Keith 15, 16, 33, 40, 42


                                                 69
Hamilton, Jim 57
Hannah, John A. 13, 15, 23
Harrison, Mike 29
Hollingsworth, Al 51, 61, 70
Howe, Elizabeth P. 40
Hutsig, John 60
Industrial Workers of the World  5, 6
James Madison College 16, 20, 26
Jocelyn, ____ 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 67
Kellogg Center 7
Kent State University  19
Labor History Journal  45
Laselle, Maise 17
Lesueur, Arthur 6
Mackey, M. Cecil 42, 69
Manly Miles 41
Matthews, Roy 42
McClintock, Jim 11, 61
McConahey, Pat 57
McKittrick, Eric 14
McPherson, M. Peter 60
MEA 27-29, 32-35, 38, 41, 42
Means, Ron 49
Michigan Education Association 22
Michigan State University
Collective bargaining 13, 21, 24, 26, 27, 34, 35
Common syllabus 17
Curriculum issues 17, 24
Department Advisory Council 15
Faculty Affairs Committee 40
Faculty Associates 22, 26, 28, 42, 43
Life insurance program 39
Orange Horse (sit-in) 12
Salary issues 30, 36, 43
Student protests 19
Student strike (1970) 19
Unionization 22
University College 10, 15, 16, 34
Minneapolis Teamsters 8
Morrill Hall 14
Mosier, Colette 37
NEA 29
Nonpartisan League of North Dakota  6
Noverr, Douglas 57


                                          70
Paulson, Pat 57
Pollack, Norman 19
Powell, Milton 18, 52, 57
Repas, Bob 30, 39, 41
Rockefeller grant 25, 37
Rout, Kathleen K. 17
Royal, John 21
Ruggles, Glen 49
Seare, John 16, 22
Silverman, Henry 51, 52, 54, 57
Smollens, John 53
Steinberg, Mike 53
Stolick, Gary 40
Strandness, Ben 7, 8, 12
Thomas, Dick 17
Thomas, Sherry 53
Thurman, Al 10
TIA-CREF 30
Tompkins, Mary 16, 22, 26
Turner, Bill 57
Turpey, Mary 2
University College 10, 13, 15, 16, 34
University College Symposium Committee 13
University of Minnesota 1-3
USIA 4
White, _______ 30
Winder, Clarence 29, 31, 33, 69
Wright, Bob 10
Zansky, Claude 25, 47
Zepolsky, Janet 25