Cecil Mackey May 23, 2001 Jeff Charnley, interviewer Charnley: Today is Wednesday, May 23rd, the year 2001. We're in East Lansing, Michigan. I am Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. Cecil Mackey for the MSU Oral History Project. The sesquicentennial of the university will be coming up in the year 2005. Dr. Mackey served as President of Michigan State University from 1979 until 1985. As you can see, Dr. Mackey, we're tape-recording. Do you give us permission to record this interview? Mackey: Indeed, I do. Charnley: I'd like to start, first, this morning with some questions about your educational and professional background before you came to Michigan State. Where were you born and raised, and where did you go to college? Mackey: I was born and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. I graduated from Sidney Lanier [phonetic] High School in Montgomery. Started college at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1945, just before the war ended. I went there for three semesters and then transferred to the University of Alabama, graduated from there, it was March of 1949. Subsequently got a master's. That degree was in economics. My master's was in economics. Went to the University of Illinois for doctoral study, Ph.D. in 1955. I began the study of law on a part-time basis. After I got my Ph.D., I went to the University of Alabama Law School in the summer of '55. Taught for a year at Illinois, went to law school while I was there. Did some Air 1 Force duty, on the faculty of the Air Force Academy in Denver, and then while I was there, went to law school at the University of Denver. When I got out of the Air Force, I'd accumulated just enough leave time to have some money, and it matched the length of time I needed to finish law school, so I went back to Alabama. I got a law degree there, and then went to Harvard for a year of graduate study in law. Taught law at Alabama and from there went to Washington. I served in Washington during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, first as Assistant Secretary to the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee. From there, I moved to the Federal Administration Agency as Director of the Office of Policy Development. From there to the Department of Commerce as Director of the Office of Transportation Policy and was a part of the project that led to the creation of the Department of Transportation. My boss became the first Secretary of the new Department of Transportation, and President Johnson appointed me as Assistant Secretary of the Policy Development. I served in that job till the change of administration when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. There was a significant turnover. The Republicans fired all the Democratic presidential appointees in very short order. I went from Washington then to Florida State as executive vice president, actually a brief stint as administrative vice president, then executive vice president. In 1971, I went to the University of South Florida as president, stayed there for a little less than six years. Then moved to Texas Tech as president, was there for three years, and from there to Michigan State in August of 1979, and I've been at Michigan State since. Charnley: What attracted you to the study of economics originally? Mackey: Main attraction was one of the faculty members I had who was a teacher, a man named Paul Paustian. He was one of the two most interesting professors I had at the University of Alabama. The other one was a man named Frierson [phonetic] who taught Victorian poetry. I 2 thought of majoring in English right up until near the end of my senior year and then decided I wasn't sure what English majors would do, so I switched and majored in economics and continued with it. Paustian was interested in things that I thought were interesting, and the way he taught his classes, the kind of questions he'd posed, kinds of things he had done, all struck me as being interesting. He encouraged me, and so I went into economics. Charnley: How about law? How did you first get interested in that? Mackey: I had originally thought, when I had transferred from Georgia Tech to Alabama, that I might want to go to law school. Turned out I went on to graduate school in economics instead, but I never really got rid of the idea of law school. The areas of economics that interested me most seemed to be related to law. A man named Horace Gray, at the University of Illinois, was a faculty member who was interested in institutional economics. He and Walter Adams were good friends and collaborators. When I'd finished my degree at the University of Illinois and he asked me to stay for a year and teach, I told him I thought I might be interested in law school. There was hardly anybody who encouraged that kind of study. It was just something that wasn't done at that time, but Professor Gray said, "I think you should go ahead and study law." He says, "Very few economists know law and no lawyers know economists, so you might be able to try it." And with that, a man named John Cribbet, who was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, was also encouraging. He later became Chancellor of the Champaign-Urbana campus. He and I served on the Council of Ten of the presidents of Big Ten institutions together. But he was very supportive and encouraging and helped foster my career in law. Charnley: Had you met Walter Adams before you came to Michigan State? 3 Mackey: Yes, I'd met him when I worked in Washington. He came and testified and consulted with some of the people that I worked with, mainly people in the Small Business Committee of the Senate. I'd known him not well, but knew him by reputation and knew his philosophy. Charnley: Government service. You said you served in the Air Force for a time. Mackey: Yes. Charnley: Was that in a regular commission? Mackey: I had an ROTC commission. My active duty was delayed so I could finish graduate school, and, by an odd stroke of good fortune for me, I got an assignment to the Air Force Academy when it was in its very earliest stages of development. So I spent my tour of duty as an Air Force officer at the Academy, helping to develop the curriculum for the new Academy, still in its temporary quarters in Denver. It hadn't moved to Colorado Springs. Charnley: What courses did you teach? Mackey: We didn't really get to teaching. I got out before. I had responsibility for developing most of the courses. I was the only Ph.D. There were four officers there, one major and two captains. One of them had a master's in economics and had taught at a small private school in the Midwest. The other two had MBAs. They'd been sent to school by the military. I was the youngest, the newest, and all, but I was the only one who had any background in economic theory to amount to anything. There were three courses in curriculum. One was the basic introductory economics course, one was comparative economic systems, and then one was to be the economics of national 4 security. Charnley: You were a lieutenant at the time? Mackey: I was a first lieutenant and the youngest one there. The man who was the dean of the faculty, a man named Robert McDermott, had been the chair of the economics department and then had become dean of the faculty, and he did something that was sort of unusual for the military, he gave me the academic rank of associate professor, and I had a major who was assigned to help me. There weren't many first lieutenants who had--I couldn't call him an assistant, but he was there working with me, and I enjoyed that part of my military career. Charnley: You were a "Dr. Lieutenant." Mackey: Yes. We got one other Ph.D., a young lieutenant who was a flight officer later, but when I first got there, I was the only one. Charnley: Your time in Washington, how would you describe your experiences? Mackey: Interesting, exciting, demanding. It convinced me that if you wanted to be in public policy in any way, that was the place to be. Charnley: Was there anything in your training or background that prepared you for your government service well? Mackey: Nothing directly, but in a sense it seemed the ideal place for the combination of economics and law, because they tend to come together in both the governmental and the legislative 5 processes. I enjoyed having a chance to work in fields that were related to what I had studied and taught, but there weren't many courses that prepared you for being an investigative lawyer on the Antitrust Subcommittee. Charnley: Do you feel that your service helped prepare you for university administration? Mackey: Oh, very much so. One of the reasons I left teaching to go to Washington was that as a young faculty member I was curious about the situation that I found myself in with limited experience in the real world that I was teaching about. I taught antitrust law, I taught corporation law and some other things, and I had never been working either in a law firm or in a corporation. So when the chance came to go to Washington and be involved in the activities of government in areas I was interested in, that was very appealing. It gave me some of the background and some of the experience that really allowed me to feel a lot more confident about what I wanted to do as an academician when I got back in the classroom, when I got back to a university campus. Charnley: How is it that you first heard about the Michigan State opening after Dr. [Clifton R.] Wharton [Jr.] left? Mackey: I was at home one night, and I got a call from a man I'd never heard of. He said he was calling on behalf of the Board of Regents, Board of Trustees of Michigan State and wanted to know if I'd be interested in talking with him. Charnley: Who was that, that called you? Was it one of the board members? Mackey: It was a former board member, Warren Huff. We became good friends and saw a lot of one another in the years that followed. 6 Charnley: When you first arrived, how would you say the general mood on campus was, or what do you remember about your first experiences at Michigan State? Mackey: It's hard to put a point in time as being my arrival time, because once the board had met and approved my appointment, I stayed in Texas for a while, but I came here quite frequently and stayed for several days at a time over a period of the summer. I actually came here, I think it was August the 4th, of '79, but I had been coming here meeting with people, with the deans, the nonacademic administrators, people like that. So I had gotten to know a lot about the university before I had actually moved here and my appointment was effective. It was in the summer, so you've got a very different impression of the university in the summer than you might in the fall. Any place that has been without permanent leadership for twenty-two months, which I think was the length of time they had been without a permanent president here, there is a lot that's unsettled and uncertain. There had not been particularly strong or favorable financial support for the institution. There were a number of issues that the board was concerned about or that they had mentioned in the recruiting process, and so I just found a situation where there was a lot to learn, a lot to set about doing. But there was no great unrest, there wasn't significant student unrest, there were not major faculty issues that I recall, but just a lot of work that needed to be done. Charnley: What attracted you to the job originally? Mackey: Michigan State is, obviously, a university with a compelling reputation. I think most people in higher education know all the good universities, they know where they are, and if you're going to be an administrator, you probably have some desire to work in an AAU-type institution or one of the major research universities of the country. 7 It was a place where the board wanted a president to work with them to deal with the issues that confronted the institution. It was an institution where it seemed to me it would make a difference who the president was. I had some concurrent conversations with members of the board of another institution, which was also a very fine institution, but one of my reactions to it was that it was going to make a lot less difference who was president there. The president would have less opportunity and less ability to have a personal impact. If you're going to do that kind of a job, it seems that you might as well do it where it makes a difference that it's you instead of somebody else who's there. Charnley: The economic issues that you mentioned affected the university, the general downturn in the economy. Mackey: It came fairly soon after I got here, but it was not obvious that the financial crisis that materialized was in the offing at the time that I was talking with the board and when I got here, but it was quite soon after that the full impact of it became apparent. Charnley: That relationship between the university and the legislature or the governor, obviously you were pulled into that. Would you talk a little bit about the relationship with the legislature? Mackey: I enjoyed what I thought was a good personal relationship with most of the legislators. There were a few exceptions to that, but, by and large, I got along well with them personally. I worked at it. I spent time with legislators individually, with the chairs of the various committees. Legislators find it a little difficult to feel totally at ease with administrators who are involved in fairly intense controversy, so if you've got some major issues on your campus, and it's very easy for the people who have grievances or feel that they have issues they'd like resolved by outside forces to get to the legislature, the legislature tends to hear those and respond, and that certainly complicates 8 the job. We had enough problems on this campus with budget and other things that there were people who were talking to the legislature about a lot of matters, and some of them were more sympathetic than others when they deal with the president after you've had those questions about historical discrimination on the basis of one thing or another, the allocation of funds. People wanted funds reallocated, so they'd take their grievances to the legislature. Decisions that the administration and the board had to make affected some people rather severely, and they were looking for ways to get those problems solved through their individual contacts with legislators. But even with all that, there were a number of people I had quite good relationships with, one or two that I'd usually send somebody else to talk to because it was more productive. My staff and I had a pretty good understanding of that. If we figured out that one of us had a better relationship with somebody than another one, that was the person who had most of the contact. Charnley: How about [Dominic J.] Nicholas Jacobetti? What was his attitude toward Michigan State? Was he a tough sell? Mackey: Jake was a person who had own agenda. He was accustomed to acting as he wished. His main interests were in Northern Michigan, and he didn't ever go out of his way to make life easy for anybody that was not one of his favorite people. MSU was not a special event interest of his. He did have a good relationship with Jack Breslin. He liked Jack. They'd worked together, and that relationship was helpful to Michigan State some of the time. Charnley: He was in charge of legislative contacts? Mackey: Generally, yes, he was our principal contact with the legislature. 9 Charnley: Some of the other issues that came up during your administration, some of the women's issues, diversity issues, would you talk a little bit about that? Mackey: I had been concerned with women's issues from the earliest days of my experience in university administration. University of South Florida had done some things that I don't think had been done anywhere else in trying to get equality for women in terms of salary, promotion, tenure, and other things like that. I'd continued those interests at Texas Tech and here. When I first got here, I had to hire two vice presidents. One was Connie Stewart, the first female vice president we had had, and the other was Moses Turner, the first African-American vice president that Michigan State had had. I did a number of other things, some of my own initiative, some in response to proposals from others to try to advance the causes of hiring and recognition of the accomplishments of people in minority groups, particularly interests of women as well. We had some issues with HEW [Department of Health, Education and Welfare]. A couple of times, I found myself siding with the women on campus against HEW. Some interesting issues. I guess from a distance you kind of get a laugh out of them. The women wanted to be able to keep a separate closed opportunity for swimming, and HEW wanted us to break down the barriers so men could swim at the same time, same hours, same location that the women did. We went round and round with them. I preserved the right for the women. The HEW folks came in, and we had a big hassle over it. They finally ended up saying, "Okay, we'll let you do that." Not the largest issue to ever deal with, but one you do remember. We had some male faculty members who, I think more as a matter of spite or as a joke, were trying to go after the places where women had preserved some niche for themselves. The Faculty Wives Club had changed its name to the Faculty Folk because we had one or two male members who said they wanted to join, and it was more a farce than anything. But that happened in a number of places on campus. 10 Charnley: There was a women's lounge in the union, too? Mackey: Yes, yes. Charnley: Was the board supportive of you in these efforts? Mackey: Yes, on things like that, we had some very, very active and very concerned female members of the board. Virtually all the male members of the board were very supportive of doing things for female faculty members, staff members, students, and all. The same with minority. We had two minority members, two African-American board members, when I came. All the other members were generally supportive. The board tended to slant or tilt toward--I guess one would now say, toward the liberal side considerably, and that generally seemed to favor most of these issues and cause them to be supportive. Charnley: Was Joel Ferguson on the Board at that time? Mackey: No. Charnley: Blanche Martin was? Mackey: Blanche Martin. Charnley: Some of the academics and athletics issues that came up. Why don't we talk about athletics, football, some of the issues. How does big-time Big Ten sports intrude on the academic process? 11 Mackey: That's an issue that I was outspoken on most of my time as a university administrator. My own personal opinions never gained wide popular support among major university presidents. The Big Ten, there were maybe one and a half other commitments to some of what I was advocating. In the Ivy League, I think there was one, there may have been two, presidents, who were generally inclined to my views on athletics. It seemed to me that the NCAA was an invention of the universities that had come to have an undue and unfortunate influence on the universities. If we created a monster, it's of our own making, and now we're its victims in many ways. Through its efforts to control the athletes, keep a monopoly over the labor force, they do things which aren't in the student interest. In trying to do that, they create a lot of other issues that seem to be virtually insoluble if you grant them all of the assumptions or hypotheses from which they want to operate. I was in favor of some compensation to athletes, in favor of much more realistic recognition of what universities do when they recruit the elite athletes who are poorly prepared for the academy work of the universities. It's more coincidence than plan that you have the association of big-time athletics with universities in this country. It doesn't exist in most other countries, maybe any other of the developed countries in the world. If you decide you're going to keep athletics here and you want the elite athletes, then you ought to admit what you're doing, instead of doing things to jerry-rig admission processes and advisory processes and all that. The great majority of people who have responsibilities don't want to do it, don't want to face the realities of it, and they'd like it to function with less bad publicity but not have to do anything to fix the underlying problems. Charnley: The athletic director. I know Dr. Wharton had some difficulties with the athletic director and the oversight or perhaps lack of it. Your athletic directors, those under your tenure, could you talk a little bit about them? Mackey: One who was here when I came left fairly soon after. I gather, from what I've heard 12 indirectly, he made some statements or offered some interpretations about my desire to have him leave, which was absolutely untrue. But Joe Kearney [phonetic] left here, as Daryl Rogers, football coach, left, and they both left on the basis of their own decisions, their own careers, no pressure from me. Actually, when Daryl Rodgers left, he went to another university and violated all the rules and customs, as best we could tell, of recruiting, and I ended up having to call the president of his university, telling him that we couldn't put up with that and would appreciate it if he got it fixed. Otherwise, we'd probably have to take some legal action against him. Then that seemed to end it, but he left to go to a situation which was much more attractive to him financially, but I was very happy with him as our football coach. Didn't think much of that practice when he was trying to recruit the people he had been recruiting here. But other than that, both Daryl and Joe were fine, as far as I was concerned. Doug Weaver was the athletic director, and Doug and I had what I think we both would say was a very good working and personal relationship the whole time he was here. He hired "Muddy" Waters. It was on his recommendation. He got into some trouble with some of the alumni who had their own agenda for that, but I thought it was his role. He decided, with a little help and advice, when it was time to fire Muddy, and he did that as well. Then he recruited [George] Perles, and I was supportive of that appointment. So I had what I always thought was a fair amount of involvement. I was interested in the issues of athletics, and not all presidents are, I guess. Charnley: Was there anything that you did in terms of curriculum or academics that happened under your tenure, either that foreshadowed what came later or [unclear]? Mackey: The greatest single involvement with that was when we had to take a look at what to do with the university's programs as a result of the budget cuts. Lee Winder, our provost, was the 13 principal administrative officer in charge of that re-examination, but we had to look at what we were going to support, what we were going to cut, what we were going to eliminate, and the philosophical question of how we were going to allocate resources. I had a blue-ribbon-type committee of senior distinguished faculty for advisors who looked at everything in the university and reviewed all the programs and all and made some recommendations. There was strong sentiment within some of the faculty elements for across-the- board allocation of resources, and I was absolutely convinced that that would be just a ticket to mediocrity. So the issue which went to the board as a philosophical and an operational question-- [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Charnley: When the tape ended, you were talking about the cuts in academics because of the economic downturn. Mackey: Yes, the question facing the university was whether to look at things across the board or whether to be selective and do things programmatically. Some of the faculty, particularly those who were interested in trying to unionize the faculty, wanted resources spread across the board without programmatic variation, emphasizing quality or whatever the basis might have been. The board struggled with that. We had some board members who were very closely associated with some of the faculty who wanted the across-the-board approach. The provost and I were both strongly supportive to the board of programmatic approaches, and that was a major issue. The board ultimately resolved it in favor of programmatic approach. I think that was a major factor in preserving and strengthening quality in the academic programs of the university. Charnley: Who would you say orchestrated the programmatic cuts? 14 Mackey: Lee Winder and I worked very closely together on most things. He was my chief academic officer, and a very effective one, so it was his direct operating responsibility. But the question of what policy the board would have before it as a recommendation was something that he and I worked on, and we worked on it with several members of the board, including John [B.] Bruff, who was chairperson of the board most of the early years that I was president here. Charnley: At that time the board elected their own chair rather than had a rotating system. Mackey: Yes. Charnley: If we can go back to athletics a little bit, is there anything else about football that occurred during your administration? Those were not generally winning years in terms of football. Mackey: No, Muddy Waters didn't have a very good winning record, and he didn't have a lot of support in the community, but I was satisfied with the way Doug Weaver approached it. He caught some flak for it, and I guess when your athletic director and your football coach are catching flak for something, the president is going to get his or her share of it, so in that sense I was involved. As with almost any institution, there are certain elements of the alumni and the fan support base who think that they ought to have a lot of say or maybe the say in most or all of the major athletic decisions. That simply didn't seem to me to be an appropriate role for them. So those differences of opinions sometimes led to clashes. You know, early on I got the message from some of our alums and supporters that they really expected to have a major say in picking the football coach. It turned out when Doug chose Muddy Waters, they didn't have a say, and they weren't happy about it. It turned out the next time that Doug was favorable recommending a candidate that they were happy with, so whether they thought they had made the choice or they thought they had 15 influenced Doug, or whether Doug thought he had made it without their involvement, you know, I couldn't really say. But there wasn't an issue because there was a more common agreement. Charnley: How about in basketball? Those were some of the good years? Mackey: I got here in August after "Magic" Johnson had left at the end of his sophomore year, but Judd Heathcote was well established, well entrenched, fine coach, good friend. He and I, I think I would say, are still good friends. We had a good relationship the whole time we were here, went through a few issues together when there were things from outside, but we were always of a common mind, I think, on all those issues. Some things that involved behavior of some players and the public wanted something to happen, and Judd wasn't so sure that it should, and I told him that those were his decisions, not to be influenced by the outside reactions to what was going on. Hockey was the same. Ron Mason was an outstanding coach, I guess maybe the outstanding college coach of all times. But I got along with all of them well. I saw them around the athletic facilities. As I was there as a runner using the facilities, I was around. One of the perquisites I had of office was a key to the weight room and the football building when it was there, and I used to see some of the players and some of the coaches at odd hours. Just little things like that make a working relationship a little easier, I guess. Charnley: Interesting. You talked about the alumni. Obviously the issue of the Alumni Association came up as an important issue during your administration. How did that come about? Mackey: Well, the board had made some decisions in the months just before I came here in response to recommendations that came to them, and the board, I think, later concluded that it hadn't really understood the full implications of what it had done. The Alumni Association was seeking independence with subsidization and also the right to act in the university's name in ways that the 16 board concluded later, and I had concluded almost immediately, were not in the best interest of the university. The Alumni Association wanted to take over fundraising and raise money into a private Alumni Association so that they would be able to allocate funds from it. They wanted to establish a lobbying network so that they would, in effect, be able to manage the legislative effort on behalf of the university. They were interested, through some various approaches to athletic fundraising, in extending their influence in academic decision-making. Much of that arose from some conclusions that people who were very interested in the university but were outside it, came to in the years just several years before I got here. They disagreed with the board. They viewed the board as much too liberal, not having the stature that they thought it should have, and they were looking for ways to counteract what they thought were bad decisions that the board made. One of the ways was to create this independent entity and set of different approaches to decision-making, in effect, to counter the influence they saw the board having. They were very upset about things like the policy on South Africa and investments in South Africa, about the boycott of grapes, about any number of things like that. So there was a good bit of anti-board hostility, and the folks who felt that way thought that if they could establish alternative avenues for decision-making, they could minimize what they viewed as an unfortunate impact of the board on the university. They didn't want to run for membership. They just wanted to be able to stop the board from doing some of the things, making some of the kinds of decisions it was making, and/or make some positive decisions, do some things on their own that the board might not do or might not approve of. Once the board really looked into what was going on and saw what that meant to the board's constitutional responsibilities for the university, they said, "This doesn't make any sense at all," and the board reversed itself. The people who were involved through the Alumni Association, directly and indirectly through that, fought rather bitterly to try to get the independence they had wanted, 17 and they lost. They did a lot of damage to the university, but the strength and the success of the alumni program we have now is a pretty good testimony, I think, to the fact that the course that was set--I was at the center of that. The board was very supportive once they took the time to look at all the implications. I think everybody would conclude now that that was what was needed. If you look around the country, you see occasionally that another university is confronted with this kind of an issue, and virtually all of them have to resolve it as we did, not all the details exactly, but in that direction, to preserve the interests of the institutions. Charnley: Sounds like a tough decision, one that had to be made. Mackey: It was bitter, And what was happening with the alumni publications, and not just the alumni official publications, but other things they were doing were bitter attacks on me, on the chairman of the board, on other people who were trying to act in what they thought of was the interest of the university. I mean really vicious and all over the country, going to the alumni. Charnley: [John D.] Jack Shingleton was involved in that in terms of being brought in. What was your relationship with him? I know he was a placement. Mackey: I asked Jack to come in and take charge of the Alumni Affairs Office. We had to go through a process, which was a legal separation of the Alumni Association, and tell them that they had no right to use the name of the university, and that was because they fought so bitterly to try to be independent. So we had to create a University Alumni Association. I asked Jack to come in and head that. He had done other things. He had been acting athletic director at one time. He did tremendous service to the university, helped make peace. He was well known to many of the alumni, and he was able to help calm some of them down, not all of 18 them, by any means, but he was very effective at it and really helped launch the current, modern Alumni Association at MSU. Charnley: Do you remember who the director was, the new one that was brought in? Mackey: Chuck Webb. Charnley: What was your position as an economist? Obviously you had knowledge in the area of the divesture of investments in South Africa. How did that first come about? Mackey: The board had gotten into that before I got here. I was supportive of the policy. As a matter of philosophy, I was in favor of that, generally. Charnley: Michigan State was the first large university to take that position. Mackey: That's my understanding, yes. Charnley: So you were supportive of it? Mackey: Yes. Charnley: Some of the other things that were going on on campus, the buildings that occurred. Some were initiated and some were completed. Mackey: The two that stand out most in my mind are the Wharton Center [for Performing Arts] and the Breslin [Student Events] Center. 19 The Wharton Center was really the first project I was involved in. When I got here, I had to make some decisions and some recommendations to the board, because private fundraising effort had failed. It wasn't going to happen. Roger Wilkinson and Steve Terry put together a plan where we could undertake the financing of it internally, so, in effect, what we did was we had bids coming in. We didn't have the financial ability to accept the bids on the basis of the private fundraising campaign. So we talked about it and said, "If we don't find a way to do this now, the costs are going to escalate and we'll probably never be able to have a facility like this." But we had only, I think, maybe ten-and-a-half million committed, and some of that was shaky, for a 21-million-dollar project. So they looked at a way to come up with a proposal to bond against student fees. We explained that to the board, I guess you'd say, privately, and then said, "We can do this. It's very different from what we've done. In effect, we'll just declare the project a success and accept the bids." That was at the first board meeting after I'd become president, I believe. A couple of the board members really understood what was happening. Some of the others were not quite as sure of the details, and a couple of them had very little understanding, but everybody wanted it to go, so it was sort of an understanding that if this was a proposal that the administration could advance and support, the board would approve it and not ask very many questions, and everybody would be about as happy as they could be with it. So we got the Wharton Center built, and that was a good thing. Ultimately had to give a million dollars back to one of the donors over an issue that was unfortunate, but we got it built. The Breslin Center, there had been proposals and projects around for years, whether we could have a coliseum or not. After I told the board I was going to be leaving the office, I had some time, I thought about it and said, "I really don't want somebody to look around some years from now and say, 'We don't have a coliseum. Why not? Who failed?'" So I asked Ken Thompson and Roger Wilkinson and Steve Terry to take a look at the project and see how we could finance something and put together something that we could take to the board and say, "If you want it, here's a way you can do it." So they worked up a proposal. We 20 met with the board, laid it out on just those terms. We said, "Here are the issues, here's a way it can be financed. We can have it." That was a time when the board was pretty leery to committing to things like that. But we talked about the implications, the fact that if it didn't happen then, it would be much more expensive, much harder to get through, and I think they came around pretty much unanimously to deciding that they wanted to do it, and so they approved that at just about the last board meeting where I was president. So those were sort of the bookends from a physical facility standpoint. It was interesting, they're on opposite sides of the campus, one primarily cultural events, the other primarily athletic and student events, but the two of them together, always seemed to me, just changed the nature of the university, what it made possible in terms of the activities that were here, what it brought to the campus, what it offered our faculty and students. Great universities have the capacity to do big, important things like that in those areas. So I was pleased with that. We got the Cyclotron Building. We got the Plant and Soil Science Building, and there were other things that were important. Thirty million, I think it was, for the Cyclotron. We were very lucky. When I'd been in Florida, I'd known the man who was chair of the committee in Congress that dealt with priorities for the allocation of funds like that, and he was very helpful to us in getting it, so an old association helped. Charnley: So a Washington connection helped there. Mackey: Yes. Charnley: How about during your tenure as president, your knowledge of the government affairs, grants, and that sort of thing, did you put any emphasis on that? Did you feel that helped you? Obviously government had changed. 21 Mackey: Yes. John Cantlon ran the operation for research and grants and things like that. I helped out occasionally, but that wasn't an area where there was a lot of need for my direct involvement. We were very successful. We had a long history of doing things well there, and so it just didn't seem to require a lot of my personal involvement. Sometimes I would go to Washington occasionally to deal with particular individuals or particular issues or things like that, but that wasn't an area of great need for the president's involvement. Charnley: Any major curricular changes that occurred during your administration? Mackey: I was a strong advocate of the semester system as opposed to the quarter system. It didn't come about until a relatively short time after I left office, but I'd started, maybe I should say, I started agitating for it, urging the faculty, through the Faculty Senate, to consider it, and having an analysis done for it. David Scott, I think, was the one who pushed it through and got it done. It seemed to me it was just a much better arrangement for producing academic quality, for giving a little more time to work through assignments for the students to get to know the subject matter. We debated that a lot and looked at it. Curriculum by delegation at Michigan State is basically a faculty matter, so the president and, you might even say, to a fair extent, the provost have limited influence in those areas, not without impact sometimes, but that's basically a faculty matter. I guess the main influence on the curriculum was in the programmatic changes through budgetary decisions and things of that sort. Charnley: Was there any year, in terms of the budget crisis, that was particularly bad or difficult? Mackey: Oh, yes, '81 and '82 were the really tough years, one of the years where we actually had three reductions in the budget. Normally, you think of it as a serious cut when you don't get the 22 same percentage increase you had last year, but we were having actual reductions below the prior- year dollar level. We were having those percentage increases taken out of our budget well into the year so that a 3 percent cut on your total budget, which comes half-way through the year, is, in effect, a 6 percent increase. So, yes, '81, '82 when the unemployment was high, the graduates were having trouble getting jobs, cutbacks, the reductions in the budget, those were really devastating years. Charnley: How would you say your relationship was with the governors that you dealt with? That was Milliken and Blanchard. Mackey: That was one of the real delights of my time here. I was good, personal friends with both Bill Milliken and Jim Blanchard. Both of them were strong, outspoken supporters of me and what I was doing. In controversial times when there were issues, both of them were willing to speak out. They didn't get involved in the issues; they spoke out, approving of the way we were going about things, and being supportive of me. So both the Republican Governor Milliken and the Democratic Governor Blanchard were good friends. Blanchard was the first MSU graduate to become governor, and we had a lot of fun with that. I introduced him at the first event at which he spoke as governor. Somebody in the Public Information Office found an old picture of him when he had been a student here and he ran for student government. He was up in a tree. We got that framed. Here was this picture of the governor in the tree. But that was sort of typical of a very enjoyable, very productive relationship. Charnley: Would you say that both men, while they were in office, had a good assessment of what this university was about? Mackey: Yes, they both understood it, both of them very bright, both of them interested in higher 23 education. Neither of them had an approach which you'd say caused them to be highly favorable to one institution over another. The fact that Blanchard was an MSU graduate didn't mean that you got the sort of pork-barrel activity that you sort of see in the federal Congress or something, but he was very supportive of Michigan State in general and very helpful in many ways. Charnley: Were there any issues that came up where you--I'm not saying "used" that relationship, but where that became an issue or a help? Mackey: Just the fact that we had good relations in both instances was a help. But neither of them was the kind that would make that an issue, use that as leverage, and I never did either. I never had to. They were always supportive. Charnley: How about the endowment and the general lack of endowment that this university had? Did that surprise you when you first came here? Mackey: "Surprise" is probably a mild word. I was shocked. I had been involved in raising the money for the first endowed chair at each of the other two institutions where I had been president, neither of them had a single endowed chair. Because of its age and reputation and all, I never thought to ask about that at Michigan State. Charnley: Before you got here. Mackey: Before I got here. I made the mistake of going on assumptions, and they were wrong. Apparently, fundraising had never been a problem, a priority here, and, consequently, we were far, far behind where this institution should have been. For example, in fundraising for the President's Club, we had had an arrangement that 24 allowed people to join the President's Club with a commitment of insurance. The way it worked, it was a great benefit for the insurance salesmen, but of limited benefit for the university because you could get to be a member of the President's Club by taking a policy with a certain value. If you looked at the life expectancy and the assumed rate of inflation, by the time that policy paid off, it would probably have cost more to maintain those people as members of the club than would be the value of the ultimate return to the university. So we took a look at that and said, "Let's cut that out." The insurance people all got mad, because they had been selling a lot of insurance on that as a mechanism to get people into the President's Club. But there were no endowed chairs. There had never been a real campaign, a capital campaign. It started more slowly than I would have liked, but it was at least the initiation in virtually all areas of fundraising of some efforts. They've gradually expanded into what John [A.] DiBiaggio and now [M.] Peter McPherson have been able to do. But we didn't really have a Development Office, so we had people, as they would say, were "friend raisers," who never got around to asking anybody for money. That's not a very good way to try to raise funds. Charnley: The coming together of the problems of the Alumni Association and the general economic downturn must have made it-- Mackey: Oh, yes, we had the problem with the alumni, the economic downturn, and the absence of any structure for fundraising. So we had to create the new Alumni Association. I hired Joe Dickinson as our first real development officer as vice president for development. Then, eventually, the economy turned around. Charnley: I was a little surprised to know how relatively low proportion of our graduates were 25 actually giving to endowment, but I know that's turning around. Mackey: Well, there was stories that they used to tell comparing Michigan and Michigan State, how the president at the University of Michigan would meet with the freshmen and begin by telling them what their obligations were going to be to the institution, as the first time they ever saw the president. Michigan State, it was just the opposite. It was telling him what the university was going to do for them and never asking them for anything in return. And they responded by not giving, for the most part. Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your staff, the people that you worked with? Provost Winder you'd mentioned a little bit. John Cantlon. Mackey: Both of those men had been in the positions they were in in my administration when I got here. I talked with each of them about their preferences. I knew of their reputation and work. I asked them both if they would stay. They both said they would and would like to. I had what I thought were terrific relationships with both of them all the way through. Roger Wilkinson was the chief financial officer, the administrative vice president. I wanted to bring a person in, Ken Thompson, to be my chief administrative and financial officer. Ken and I talked about that, and he was prepared to offer Roger the opportunity to stay as the associate, where he had been the vice president. Roger debated that and then told us that he would do that, he would like to do that and stay. Both Ken and I had good relationships with Roger. He was effective. He was a loyal and a productive officer. Later, when I was gone and Ken left, Roger then became the vice president, which I think is a real tribute to him as an individual. He also served as secretary to the board. I brought in a man named Fred Carlisle, who had been chair of the English Department and was a senior faculty member of some distinction, as my executive assistant. He was a very good 26 person to work, in terms of coordinating matters of interest to the president's office-- Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Charnley: This is tape two of the Cecil Mackey interview. When the last tape ended, you were talking about some of your staff, and you mentioned Ken Thompson. Mackey: I mentioned Ken Thompson, and I mentioned Fred Carlisle, who was my executive assistant. Actually, a man named Al Ballard had stayed in that position for a while and then moved to CUNY to be with Cliff Wharton, and Fred Carlisle came in when Al left. Lou Anna [K.] Simon, who is currently our provost, was my special assistant for minority affairs for a time, did a terrific job. Lee Winder and I talked about her career and asked her if she would like to move over into the provost office, and she did that, became an assistant in the provost office, an assistant provost, associate provost. Let's see. Who else? Moses Turner. I replaced the student affairs vice president, who was a man who had been here a long time. Moses came in, difficult circumstance. There was a good bit of resentment about his appointment. Some of it was racially based, but he survived that. I think he served sixteen years in the office and did a fine job. He handled a number of controversial matters that came up with students over the years that he was there, sometimes a disruption over some of the issues, but he did a good job on that. Jack Breslin. I think Jack had the title executive vice president. I changed that, but kept Jack as a vice president for the whole time I was president of the university. I mentioned earlier that I had hired Connie Stewart and Moses Turner. Connie had a lot of Washington and journalistic experience and, I thought, did a good job. I was very happy with the staff I had. 27 Ken Thompson had worked with me at Florida State, South Florida, and Texas Tech, so he and I both knew what we were getting into when we decided to work together here. I thought I had very good people for staff support. I thought they worked together well, so I was pleased with that. Charnley: How about your relationship with the board? Did that change over time? Mackey: Well, it was never totally smooth. The vote was eight to nothing, I think, when they took it finally, but that didn't reflect the actual vote. They decided when there was a majority that they would come out a unanimous vote, and that's a good thing to do. It masks a little, but maybe it masks a lot. I had very strong support from the chair and several of the members the whole time I was here. There were a couple who had their own agendas. There were sometimes ones who didn't particularly approve of or agree with the positions on certain matters that were very important to the university. Those, sometimes, if they couldn't resolve them within the board, if they didn't have a majority on the board, it sometimes reflected in their relationship with me. There were some who, one or two, who would have liked to have had a president who was more responsive to them and would have been willing to change almost anytime to get someone who would be more tractable or more responsive to their preferences. There were some unlikely strong supporters. Peter Fletcher, who was a surprise appointment of Milliken's, and a Republican, turned out to support most of what I did very strongly on the basis of his commitment to academic quality and the nature of the institution. We became good friends. But I guess there was an undercurrent, and I didn't consider that particularly unusual. Charnley: I know Dr. Wharton had a 5:3 ratio that was so tough that was maintained almost throughout on the board. You didn't have that exact thing? It varied? 28 Mackey: No, not in the same way that I understand it to have existed in Cliff's years here. Well, there was some changes in the board, too, so that the pattern of my relationships with them didn't stay the same. When they would change, sometimes it was helpful, sometimes it wasn't. Charnley: Were you teaching when you were president? Did you teach at all? Mackey: I taught. Generally, I taught at least one course a year, was the pattern, and I had done that at the other institutions. Charnley: What did you like about teaching, do you like about teaching? Mackey: I guess for a good while I had always assumed that that would be my career. I enjoy the interaction with the students. I enjoy the work with the discipline that I care about. It always seemed to me that if you didn't care something about teaching, there wasn't much point in being an administrator of a university. You might as well be the president of a firm that made beer bottles or something like that. So I really enjoyed being a part of the academic enterprise in the most fundamental way, and that's being in the classroom with the students. So I encouraged the deans and others to teach. I didn't have a whole lot of luck with them. Some did, but not nearly as much. I wouldn't say I hounded them, but I spoke frequently at the Deans Council meetings and with them individually, said, you know, "It would be nice if you could teach a course a year," or something like that. I don't think I ever got quite as many as half of them to doing it. Charnley: While you were president, the contact with students that you had, were there any special programs that you did? 29 Mackey: Yes, there were a number, a number of things. When I first got here, I'd go into the dorms and have dinner with a group of students, and sometimes just go to a student's room, get the people in student affairs to find a student, and then I'd go to a student's room and people could come by and just sit and talk. Not as much here, but at the other two universities, I had, sometimes, call-in radio shows and television program. I had a series of events that would bring students into Cowles House here. We had a periodic meeting, a dinner with the heads of student organizations, a variety of things like that, to try to make the contacts as broad and as informal as possible. I'd usually have my class over to Cowles House for sort of a picnic supper one night. Didn't do it, not every term, it didn't always work out, but frequently we'd do that. Charnley: How did staying at Cowles House affect your family? It was kind of like a parsonage, almost. Mackey: Oh, yes. It clearly has both its good and its bad. I don't know that I'd really recommend it for someone with children, young children. We were fortunate, I think, in that we were able to keep it relatively private. We came here with the board chair, whose wife didn't choose to be involved in many university events just because she was the wife of the chair of the board. He had great understanding of Claire's role. If my wife wanted to be involved, that was fine. If she chose not to, she didn't feel, and I didn't either, that the board had hired two of us. They had hired me as the president. She enjoyed doing a great many things and did them very well, but we didn't turn it into as much of a public facility as some of the presidents choose to do. That was, I guess, because we had young children in the house. We wanted to keep it as much a home for them as possible. 30 But it's hard not to be affected. You have meetings with the department, with the public safety people, the police, and they talk to you about what to do in hostage situations and when they take over control if there were hostages taken in the house, if something happens outside the house. You have to go through emergency procedures like that with the children. When they come home, they know that if they see certain things going on here, they go to the [Student] Union or somewhere else and call home or call the police to find out whether to go home or not. We had demonstrations that raised those issues with them. The effect on them of the intense publicity, sometimes, when there are serious issues flaring up on campus, that had been more an issue in Florida than it had been here, but there was still some of that. Just the reaction that other junior high children have to your children when they live in a place like that, the things that other kids say to your kids about their life, most of it not desirable, but some opportunities. They get a chance to meet the people who come through, to shake hands with the Chinese ambassador or whatever it is like that, to meet the people who stay there at commencement, the speakers and all. But it's certainly a mixed bag. We were right on the path. Our bedroom was right over the path from Dooley's back to the dorms. On Saturday night, early Sunday morning, it wasn't uncommon to have people come and stand under the window and yell to me, and that's not necessarily what you look forward to. When the Tigers were doing well, when they were in the World Series and they won, at one point in that sequence, there was a big gathering of students. The police called and said, "We want to warn you. They're coming toward Cowles House." Now, what on earth we had to do with the Tigers' success in baseball, but there were people climbing up on the roof of Cowles House. They told us to pull all the shades down. My younger daughter sort of went and peeked through one of the shades, and there was a group of people out on the roof. Probably the event that my wife and I laugh about the most, we had a trampoline in the backyard. It was sort of up in a corner near the edge of the yard. At Cowles House, they had a series of lights for the backyard, and they had a switch. You could turn the switch, and one after 31 another, a series of lights would come on. One Saturday night, we heard some noise out in the backyard. So I went downstairs and my wife came with me. We were curious as to what was happening, and so we were just standing there. I turned the switch and threw all the lights on at one time. Here were a couple that decided that our trampoline was the ideal place for their lovers' tryst. Boy, you never saw two people get themselves together to get off into the bushes any faster. I've often wondered how they described that event to their friends or whomever they tell about it. Charnley: That's funny. Life in the fishbowl out there. Mackey: Yes. They stole our canoe out of the backyard and a few other things like that. And the band. You asked about Cowles House. The band practiced on the field immediately adjacent to Cowles House, and when they would do a particular turn, everything would be facing, and they would rattle the windows of the bedroom or the dining room or whatever. They usually began early Saturday morning, like six o'clock on football weekends. So we got to be good friends with the band. We would invite the band over one evening each year, and they would all come for a reception, and we enjoyed them. My wife's a musician. She got along well with the music folks. But those are just some of the little incidental aspects of living there. Charnley: What did you like best about being president of this university? Mackey: I guess the best way to answer that, the most accurate way, is in the context of how I talked about the job with graduate students or young aspiring administrators who would sometimes say they were getting a Ph.D. in higher ed administration because they wanted to be a university president or something like that. The way I expressed my own view of it was that I never wanted to be a university president. I wanted to do some of the things that only the president got to do. I thought that was the reason for 32 being in the office. If you wanted to have the opportunity to make some of the decisions that the president made to influence the course of the institution and to reflect some values that you thought were important in decisions for the university, then to have the influence you wanted, you needed to be the chief executive officer of the institution. The people who wanted to be the president probably didn't belong there, because they were probably more interested in the trappings of office than in the functions of office. But just as in government I had enjoyed being a party to helping formulate issues, to consider options, and then to make decisions about public policy, the same was true in higher education. I enjoyed that part of the work. If you want to be in a position to make those decisions, if you want to have that opportunity, you have to do a lot of other things that no president would be able to ask a self-respecting faculty member or department chair or even a dean to do. So you spend a large percent of your time doing things that nobody else really wants to do, in order to have that small percent of time to make the decisions that are most vital to the institution. That percentage gets smaller and smaller. A faculty member can choose to do what she or he wants to do most of the time. A chair can do a lot of it. A dean still has at least 50-50. Provost, not so much. And a president, very little. You're doing what somebody else decides much of the time. So it has to be pretty important, highly important, to you to be able to decide that 10, 15 percent, whatever it is, of the time on the important issues that are going to make a difference. I found that interesting. I found it challenging. I found it work that I enjoyed. So I didn't think so much of being the president as I did of doing those things which the person holding that office, (A), got to do, and, (B), had to do. Sometimes when I go through that sort of a discussion with the graduate students, they didn't like to look at it in that way. They wanted to be the president. I said, "You know, well, that's probably the wrong reason for getting there, and I hope you come to a better understanding of what it means before you do, if you're ever going to make it." 33 Charnley: Your decision to leave the presidency, what contributed to that? Mackey: This was the third place I'd been a university president. It had been a good many years. The controversy took some toll, and there had been controversy in other places. Not much at Texas Tech, some, but a lot in Florida, and a good bit here. The learning curve was flatter. There were fewer new issues that my staff and I hadn't considered, fewer problems that we hadn't dealt with one way or another, fewer things that we didn't have some experience with. I had the feeling that having been through all of the things that the early eighties meant here, that it just might be a good time for both me and for the university to make it possible for the board to get another president. Times were going to be better. I didn't want to stay to retirement in the job. So it just seemed to me that it was probably a good time to make that decision. I didn't have any particular idea of what I wanted to do beyond that. I didn't really think I was interested in looking for another presidency anywhere. Charnley: So you returned to teaching then? Mackey: I did, ultimately, yes. I was headed for the University of Hawaii, and that didn't work out, but it was so close that I had a contract with the board, and then there was an interpretation that the board didn't have the authority to carry out the terms of the contract that they had agreed to. That related to their statutory authority. The compensation that we had agreed to was some private, some public funds. The Ethics Board in Hawaii concluded that the board didn't have statutory authority to use private funds to compensate the president. They could use private funds to compensate anybody else in the university, but not the president. I told them that without a contract I couldn't go. They said, "Well, we'll fix it in the legislature next session." I said, "No, I can't do that." They weren't able to get organized to try to change the law, the legislature adjourned and all, so I decided I just wouldn't go and at that point chose to stay here. 34 Charnley: What have you been involved in here at the university since you left the presidency, besides teaching? Mackey: I guess my principal involvement, in terms of time and energy, has been work with the United Arab Emirates. I helped that country with its higher educational system in a variety of ways, and it's taken up a lot of time and a lot of effort, and I continue to be involved. We've created a new university. I helped them design the Ministry of Higher Education, create that. I continue to help advise on the operation of a new university which we've created over there, which is unlike anything else in the Middle East, university for women, taught and administered in English with a major emphasis on technology. So that's been very gratifying, but it's also been very helpful in terms of my teaching interests. I teach comparative economic systems, and it allowed me to learn a lot about the Middle East and Islam and introduce that into my students' work in ways that I'd never have been able to do. Charnley: How about the law school? Were you involved in that? Mackey: President McPherson asked me to serve as the facilitator to bring the law school from Detroit to our campus. I was involved working with Don Bowersox and working on some of the final terms of the agreement. But it took a year, year and a half, of work on my part, maybe more than that, working with the architects, getting the building done, relationships with the faculty, the logistics, relationships with MSU and the law school. That was a major involvement for an extended period of time. Either four or five springs, I forget which now, I went to the Netherlands with MSU students. I think I went there four years, and then five winters I went as a distinguished visiting professor to the United Arab Emirates, spent part of one winter as a consultant to a university in 35 Thailand, which was engaged in a major reorganization. National Science Council, I think it was, asked me to go and help them. So I spent a number of weeks there. So, international involvement has been pretty high on my activity list. Charnley: We didn't talk about that when you were president, but the international programs, how were you involved when you were president? Mackey: Extensively, in lots of ways. Ralph Smuckler and I worked on a number of things. He asked me to be involved, and I was interested. Otherwise, I guess the biggest single project would have been China. I went to China with MSU representatives, and we visited a number of universities and laid the groundwork for what became a series of institutional relationships with other universities in China. I was in Japan a couple of times with alumni people there, trying to strengthen relationships with the Japanese who had been MSU graduates. So I was in Thailand, was active in Musea [phonetic], among other things. Went to Nepal. We were the principal contractor through Musea with the principal lead university on a contract in Nepal. So I went out there to help Bill Flynn [phonetic], who was the head of Musea, with that. There were other things. Before I got here, I'd gone with a delegation, the first group of American educators to go to Cuba. So I've had an extensive involvement in international activities through most of my career in higher education. Charnley: Did you have any contact with Peter McPherson while he was head of AID? Mackey: I'm not sure whether I saw him once there or not, but that's the extent of it. The answer's effectively no. 36 Charnley: How about President [John A.] Hannah, your relationship with him? Mackey: Cordial on the face of it. He had some involvement with the alumni group, but I was never fully aware of the extent of it. He came to see me immediately. I invited him to campus and went to see him. We had a little test of protocol. I wanted to go see him, he said, no, he wanted to come to my office. So we worked it out where we did one of each very quickly. But Hannah had been a big supporter of Jack Breslin, and I think he would probably have been happy to have seen Breslin become president, for a variety of reasons. My understanding, though I have limited firsthand knowledge, is that Hannah was not on campus much, if at all, during the Wharton years. I was not aware of that when I first came here, but my own personal approach, actually, before I came here, I think, after the board approved my appointment, I was in touch with Hannah to talk with him and ask for his thoughts, his background. I remember that the first time he came to my office, I think it was our second meeting, we had talked for a long, long time. He was leaving. He always indicated he was loath to give advice. He said, "I have just one thing to suggest, and one thing for you to remember." He said, "Always remember, life is finite." And that was it. Charnley: Interesting. In your community activities, were you involved at all in town-gown issues or any of those, support for the arts? Mackey: I was involved in the arts. I guess if you looked at anything that my wife and I were both active in, it would have been the arts, personal interests, hers stronger than mine, but both strong. Both through Wharton Center and through other community activities, she, being a musician, had easy entry and a lot of contact. I don't remember anything in the way of town-gown issues. I was always involved. I was 37 active in Boy Scouts, I was president of the council here, and a variety of other things, and had been in other communities. We were active in the church, so we were always with people. I was on the board of a local bank. I think my involvement was considerably less than it might have been had I had different relationships in terms of the athletic programs early. Some of the things that had been suggested as being inevitable or certain to occur didn't materialize after the first disagreements, where the community, some of the business folks, wanted a say on the athletic decisions and they didn't get them, there was some distance as a result of that. That carried over for a good long time. Charnley: I understand. In looking back to when you first came to Michigan State, did you anticipate you'd been here more than twenty years later? Mackey: No, no, never. Never occurred to me one way or another. My wife and I generally had talked about things and said, "You really ought not to go places you wouldn't be happy to stay, if it turns out there's reason to." But we never tried to plan our whole lifetime or our whole career, and as it turns out, I think, we enjoyed every place we were. We liked the people everywhere we went. There were a few places we'd go back to sooner than some of the others, but there are no really unpleasant circumstances, and I consider that we were both very fortunate in that regard. Our children are the same. They had all-- [Begin Tape 2, Side 2] Charnley: In looking back at your experience here, obviously you're still teaching, but your period as president, if someone were to describe the Mackey legacy--saved the tough ones for last. Mackey: Well, you might want to look at that framed collection of headlines and pictures that they 38 gave me when I left office. Somebody put that together. The centerpiece of it says, "The Mackey Years: Excellence in Hard Times." I'd be very happy for that to be a description that other people felt was appropriate, and that's sort of the theme that some of the commentators took when I left. There was controversy over a number of things. There was progress in some important areas. I think the difficult decisions that the board was prepared to make on the recommendations of the president and the staff were good for the university, good long-term decisions. That, I think, would be a description I'd be happy to have of the time here. Charnley: I'd like to thank you on behalf of the project, and I appreciate your insight. Mackey: Pleasure to chat with you. Charnley: Thank you. [End of interview] 39 Index Adams, Walter, 3, 4 Ballard, Al, 28 Bauersocks, Don, 36 Big Ten, 12 Blanchard, Jim, 24 Breslin, Jack, 9, 28, 38 Bruff, John B., 15 Cantlon, John, 22, 27 Carlisle, Fred, 27, 28 Cribbot, John, 3 Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 10 DiBiaggio, John A., 26 Dickinson, Joe, 26 Faculty Folk, 11 Faculty Wives Club, 11 Fletcher, Peter, 29 Flynn, Bill, 37 Frierson, _____, 3 Gray, Horace, 3 Hannah, John A., 38 Heathcote, Judd, 16 Huff, Warren, 7 Jacobetti, Dominic J., 9 Kearney, Joe, 13 Mackey, Claire, 31, 39 Mackey, M. Cecil advocate of semester system, 23 and allocation of MSU resources, 14, 15 and Alumni Association, 17 and athletic directors, 13 and Big Ten sports, 12 and MSU Law School, 36 and United Arab Emirates, 36 40 education of, 1, 3 hiring of women and minorities, 10 interaction with students, 31 interest in the arts, 38 international involvement, 37 leaving the MSU presidency, 35 military service of, 2, 4, 5 positions held, 2 relationship with Michigan legislature, 8 Martin, Blanche, 12 Mason, Ron, 17 McDermott, Robert, 5 McPherson, M. Peter, 26, 36, 38 Michigan State University, 14, 18, 20 Alumni Association, 17, 18, 19, 26 Athletics, 16, 17 Board of Trustees, 8, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 29, 30 Breslin Student Events Center, 20, 21 Cowles House, 31, 32, 33 Cyclotron Building, 22 Faculty Senate, 23 financial situation in 1979, 8 financial situation in '81-'82, 23 grape boycott, 18 influence of Big Ten, 12 investments in South Africa, 18, 20 minority hiring, 10 Plant and Soil Science Building, 22 President's Club, 25 semester system vs. quarter system, 23 state of affairs in 1979, 7 University Alumni Association, 19 Wharton Center for Performing Arts, 20, 21 women's issues, 10 Milliken, Bill 24, 29 NCAA, 12 Paustien, Paul, 3 Perles, George, 14 Rogers, Del, 13 Scott, David, 23 Shingleton, John D., 19 2 Simon, Lou Anna K., 28 Smuckler, Ralph, 37 Stewart, Connie, 10, 28 Terry, Steve, 20, 21 Texas Tech University, 10 Thompson, Ken, 21, 27, 29 Turner, Moses, 10, 28 U.S. Air Force Academy, 4 University of Michigan, 27 University of South Florida, 10 Waters, "Muddy", 13, 16 Weaver, Doug, 13, 16 Webb, Chuck, 19 Wharton, Clifton R. Jr., 6, 13, 28, 30, 38 Wilkinson, Roger, 20, 21, 27 Winder, Lee, 14, 15, 27, 28 3