Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California University History Series Lincoln Constance VERSATILE BERKELEY BOTANIST: PLANT TAXONOMY AND UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE With Introductions by William B. Fretter and Mildred Mathias An Interview Conducted by Ann Lage in 1986 Underwritten by The Chancellor's Office and The College of Letters and Science University of California at Berkeley Copyright (c ) 1987 by The Regents of the University of California All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Lincoln Constance dated 15 May 1986. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Lir. In Constance requires that he be notified of the r st and allowed thirty days in which to respond. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Lincoln Constance, "Versitile Berkeley Botanist: Plant Texonomy and University Governance," an oral history conducted in 1986 by Ann Lage, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1987. Copy no . yf LINCOLN CONSTANCE 1976 Photograph by Dennis Galloway TABLE OF CONTENTS ~ Lincoln Constance PREFACE to the University History Series i INTRODUCTION by William Fretter iv INTRODUCTION by Mildred Mathias vi INTERVIEW HISTORY xi I YOUTH AND EDUCATION IN EUGENE. OREGON 1 Family Background 1 A Rural Youth 4 Interest in Natural History 7 Undergraduate at the University of Oregon 9 II GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1930-1934 14 Applying for a Teaching Assistantship 14 Adjusting to the Grind on Fifty Cents a Day 15 Teaching Assistant to Professor Jepson 17 William A. Set ch ell and Willis L. Jepson: A Study in Contrasts 18 Dissertation on Eriophyllum 20 III WASHINGTON STATE COLLEGE. PULLMAN. 1934-1937 24 A "Half-time" Position 24 Summer Work Collecting in the Redwoods 28 Collecting in the Northwest 29 A Network of Correspondents 31 Marriage and Job Offer from Berkeley, 1936-1937 32 Willis Jepson. in Retirement Years 36 IV ADDENDUM ON THE EARLY YEARS 38 Family and Family Life in Oregon 38 The Graduate Program at Berkeley 40 Looking at Photographs from the Pullman Period 42 Conservative Administration at Washington State 47 V BOTANY AT BERKELEY: THE PREWAR YEARS 51 The Department following Setchell's Retirement 51 Setchell and Jepson at Odds 56 Entries from Field Notebook, 1937-1942 58 Cytological Investigations with Marion Cave: Developing Additional Information for Taxonomists 62 Early Work on Umbelliferae with Mildred Mathias 65 Prewar Trips 69 VI WARTIME SERVICE 71 Geobotanist for the OSS Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board 74 VII POSTWAR YEARS AT BERKELEY AND HARVARD 78 A Call from Harvard 78 Observations of Harvard, 1947-1948 81 The Associates in Tropical Biogeography 87 With Carl Sauer in Baja California 88 VIII BAY AREA BOTANISTS AND BOTANICAL THOUGHT 92 Women in Botany: Eastwood. Mexia, Alexander, Carter 92 The Biosystematists 95 Jepson' s Will: Creation of the Jepson Herbarium and Library 97 IX THE UNIVERSITY LOYALTY OATH CRISIS 102 Robert Gordon Sproul and the Faculty 102 An Extraordinarily Difficult Period — Background to the Oath 105 Sproul 's Strengths 109 Principles or Power Struggles? Long-Term Divisive Effects of the Oath 113 X SERVICE ON ACADEMIC SENATE COMMITTEES 116 The Senate Editorial Committee — Advising the University Press 116 The Budget Committee: Jurisdiction over UCSF and UC Davis Budgetary Affairs 119 The Question of Academic Titles for Davis Personnel 120 Budget Committee Chairman During Campus Transition 123 Special Problems of the School of Nursing 124 The Promotion Process 125 Faculty Role in University Governance 127 XI THE EARLY FIFTIES: ADMINISTRATION AND ADDRESSES 133 Relationship with Clark Kerr 133 "The Versatile Taxonomist, " 1950 138 "The Role of Plant Ecology in Biosystematics, " 1952 140 "Plant Taxonomy in an Age of Experiment," 1957 143 XII SABBATICAL YEAR IN SOUTH AMERICA 145 Guggenheim Fellowship to Study Plant Relationships North and South 145 In Transit: Twelve Passengers and a Cargo of Dynamite 146 Life in Chile, Colleagues, and Field Work 152 Peru and the Trip Home 161 The Chilean Way: Disposing of the Car 164 XIII FROM DEPARTMENT CHAIR TO DEAN OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE 167 Chairing the Department of Botany, 1954-1955 167 Plans to Restructure Biological Sciences Departments. 1980s 170 Appointment as Dean of Letters and Science, 1955 172 Kerr's Goals for UC Undergraduate Education: Expansion and Excellence 174 The Special Committee on Objectives, Programs, and Requirements 177 A Close Tie between Faculty and Administration 179 XIV ENFORCING NEW REQUIREMENTS AND HIGHER STANDARDS IN LETTERS AND SCIENCE 182 Breadth Requirements 182 Letters and Science as a Campus Dumping Ground 183 Strict Enforcement of Regulations 185 Judging Cases for Special Admissions 188 Crusader against Misuse of University Extension 191 Maintaining Standards: the Problem of Junior College Transfers 193 XV ADMINISTERING THE COLLEGE OF L & S, 1955-1962 196 Staff Changes 196 A Decentralized Approach: Departmental Authority 197 Reforming Weak Departments 198 A Distinguished Roster of Assistant and Associate Deans 203 Working with Chancellor Kerr 209 Problems of Undergraduate Teaching 212 Kerr's Interest in Interdepartmental Cooperation 213 ROTC Controversy: Kerr's Intervention 216 Letters and Science: A College or a Collection of Departments? 220 Working with Glenn Seaborg as Chancellor 222 A Multiplicity of Committees 223 Seaborg 's Treatment of the Humanities 225 Relations with the Regents and Other Campuses 227 XVI BACKGROUND TO THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT 230 Chancellor Kerr's Use of Advisory Councils . 230 Kerr's Support for Social Sciences 233 Lower Division Teaching and Advising: A Source of Student Alienation? 235 Accepting the Vice-Chancellorship, 1962 237 Year-Round Academic Proeram: A Divisive Issue 240 Sibling Rivalry between Berkeley and Other UC Campuses 245 Faculty- Administration Conflict over Rehiring Eli Katz 249 Chancellor Strong: Liberal, Contemplative, Principled 253 XV IT RECALLING THE TUMULT OF 1964-1965 257 Split in the Chancellor's Office: Strong, Sherriffs, and Malloy Handle the Students 257 Mario Savio and a New Student Clientele 260 Representing the Chancellor's Office to the Faculty 263 The View from University Hall 268 A Siege Mentality in the Campus Administration 271 Incident at the Greek Theatre. December 7 274 Resignation Offer to Protect Chancellor Strong 278 XVIII MENDIJC THE CAMPUS: CHANCELLORS MEYERSON AND HEYNS 281 Changes under Meyerson 281 Selection of Roger Heyns as Permanent Chancellor 284 Advice to Heyns 285 Berkeley in the Dog House 287 Aftermath of FSM. Parallels to Anti- Apartheid Demonstrations 288 XIX IN PURSUIT OF PARSLEY 293 Beginning of Serious Research on Umbellif erae in Association with Mildred Mathias 293 Graduate Student Shan Ren-Hwa and Sanicula 297 The Remarkable Mathiasella 300 Pacific Basin Urabellif erae 301 Rafael Lucas Rodriguez from Costa Rica 302 The Ambitious Hiroe from Japan 305 More Exotic Conquests: Students and Colleagues from New Zealand, Pakistan, France 308 Describing the Shipwrecked Sailor, Naufraga balearica 310 Looking for Perideridia with Student Chuang from Taiwan 312 More Publications, More International Connections 313 Umbelliferae of India: Mukherjee and Vanasushava 315 Ripples from Umbelliferae: South America, Wyoming. Africa, and Russia 319 XX FURTHER UNIVERSITY RESPONSIBILITIES AND PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS, 1963-FRESENT 324 The History and Function of Herbaria 324 Directing the University Herbarium in an Era of Retrenchment 327 The Managing "Assistants" of the Herbarium: Walker, Crum, Carter, and Howard 331 Teaching during the Environmental Decade 334 Organizational Changes in the Research and Teaching of the Biological Sciences 335 The Freshman Cluster Program: Antidote to Anomie 338 President of the California Academy of Sciences: Broadening the Decision-making Process 342 A Lasting Influence 344 TAPE GUIDE 346 APPENDIX — Constance Curriculum Vitae 348 INDEX 351 UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES LIST 356 PREFACE When President Robert Gordon Sproul proposed that the Regents of the University of California establish a Regional Oral History Office, he was eager to have the office document both the University's history and its impact on the state. The Regents established the office in 1954, "to tape record the memoirs of persons who have contributed significantly to the history of California and the West," thus embracing President Sproul 's vision and expanding its scope. Administratively, the new program at Berkeley was placed within the library, but the budget line was direct to the Office of the President. An Academic Senate committee served as executive. In the more than three decades that followed, the program has grown in scope and personnel, and has taken its place as a division of The Bancroft Library, the University's manuscript and rare books Library. The essential purpose of the office, however, remains as it was in the beginning: to document the movers and shakers of California and the West, and to give special attention to those who have strong and often continuing links to the University of California. The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley is the oldest such entity within the University system, and the University History series is the Regional Oral History Office's longest established series of memoirs. That series documents the institutional history of the University. It captures the flavor of incidents, events, personalities, and details that formal records cannot reach. It traces the contributions of graduates and faculty members, officers and staff in the statewide arena, and reveals the ways the University and the community have learned to deal with each other over time. The University History series provides background in two areas. First is the external setting, the ways the University stimulates, serves, and responds to the community through research, publication, and the education of generalists and specialists. The other is the internal history that binds together University participants from a variety of eras and specialties, and reminds them of interests in common. For faculty, staff, and alumni, the University History memoirs serve as reminders of the work of predecessors, and foster a sense of responsibility toward those who will join the University in years to come. For those who are interviewed, the memoirs present a chance to express perceptions about the University and its role, and to offer one's own legacy of memories to the University itself. The University History series over the years has enjoyed financial support from a variety of sources. These include alumni groups and individuals, members of particular industries and those involved in specific subject fields, campus departments, administrative units and special groups, as well as grants and private gifts. Some examples follow. ii Professor Walton Bean, with the aid of Verne A. Stadtman, Centennial Editor, conducted a number of significant oral history memoirs in cooperation with the University's Centennial History Project (1968). More recently, the Women's Faculty Club supported a series on the club and its members in order to preserve insights into the role of women in the faculty, in research areas, and in administrative fields. Guided by Richard Erickson, the Alumni Association has supported a variety of interviews, including those with Ida Sproul, wife of the President; athletic coaches Clint Evans and Brutus Hamilton; and alumnus Jean Carter Witter. The California Wine Industry Series reached to the University campus by featuring Professors Maynard A. Amerine and William V. Cruess, among others. Regent Elinor Heller was interviewed in the series on California Women Political Leaders, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities; her oral history included an extensive discussion of her years with the University through interviews funded by her family's gift to the University. On campus, the Friends of the East Asiatic Library and the UC Berkeley Foundation supported the memoir of Elizabeth Huff, the Library's founder; the Water Resources Center provided for the interviews of Professors Percy H. McGaughey, Sidney T. Harding, and Wilfred Langelier. Their own academic units and friends joined to contribute for such memoirists as Dean Ewald T. Grether, Business Administration; Professor Garff Wilson, Public Ceremonies; Regents' Secretary Marjorie Woolman; and Dean Morrough P. O'Brien, Engineering, As the class gift on their 50th Anniversary, the Class of 1931 endowed an oral history series titled "The University of California, Source of Community Leaders." These interviews will reflect President Sproul's vision by encompassing leadership both state- and nationwide, as well as in special fields, and will include memoirists from the University's alumni, faculty members, and administrators. The first oral histories focused on President Sproul himself. Interviews with 34 key individuals dealt with his career from student years in the early 1900s through his term as the University's llth President, from 1930 to 1958. More recently, University President David Pierpont Gardner has shown his interest in and support for oral histories, as a result of his own views and in harmony with President Sproul's original intent. The University History memoirs continue to document the life of the University and to link its community more closely — Regents, alumni, faculty, staff members, and students. Through these oral history interviews, the University keeps its own history alive, along with the flavor of irreplaceable personal memories, experiences, and perceptions. A full list of completed memoirs and those in process in the series is included in this volume. ill The Regional Oral History Office is under the administrative supervision of Professor James D. Hart, the Director of The Bancroft Library. Willa K. Baum Division Head Regional Oral History Office Harriet Nathan Project Head University History Series 9 November 1987 Regional Oral History Office Room 486 The Bancroft Library University of California Berkeley, California IV INTRODUCTION — by William B. Fretter I've known Lincoln Constance as a fellow professor at the University of California for thirty-four years, but I worked most closely with him in the College of Letters and Science, first as a. member of the Special Committee on Objectives, Programs, and Requirements, then as assistant and associate dean of the college during his deanship. When I eventually succeeded him as dean of Letters and Science, the lessons I learned under his tutelege served me in good stead. In 1955, when Lincoln became dean of the College of Letters and Science, the Special Committee on Objectives, Programs, and Requirements was hard at work reezamining and upgrading the college's entire program, from entrance and graduation requirements to major and breadth requirements, to advising programs. It became the job of Dean Constance to enforce the new rules, dealing with a sometimes recalcitrant student population. He was unrelenting in his firm but fair enforcement of the rules, guided in his task by his insistence — as he puts it so succinctly in his oral history — that he did not become dean of L & S to "preside over the cesspool of the campus." As assistant and associate dean, I sat in on weekly meetings with Lincoln and the staff, in which we conferred on difficult cases as we sought to apply the new rules fairly. It was in these sessions, usually discussing the problems of individual students with a request to the dean for exemption from the rules, that Constance's willingness to listen openly and his sense of fairness were apparent, as were his high standards for himself and others. During the years we worked together in the College. I had many opportunities to observe his skill at interacting with his fellow faculty members. The new requirements meant change in many campus departments. And along with an upgrading of student performance, the dean determined to upgrade the few departments in the college which showed signs of neglect or lethargy. Not all department chairmen were enthusiastic about the major changes taking place. It was in dealing with this situation that Lincoln's skills were most apparent, I think he succeeded where many would have failed in large part because of his respect for his fellow faculty members and for their individual disciplines. He always listened to the objections of his fellows, never engaged in confrontational battles. Instead, he would appeal with his considerable persuasive skills to the best side of his opponent. Working individually, discussing the issues, stressing the importance of undergraduate education and the high standards of the University, he would gently bring the recalcitrant faculty member into line. As a result, Lincoln Constance was highly regarded among his fellow faculty members. His sense of fairness, his respect for individual disciplines, his love and respect for the University of California were readily apparent. Even at the height of the unfortunate "Free Speech Movement," when Lincoln had moved on to the position of vice-chancellor, he was one of the few administrators on campus to escape criticism. Lincoln Constance's career on this campus has been a long and fruitful one — coming as a graduate student in 1930; appointed as a faculty member in 1937; serving as chairman of the botany department, 1954-1955; dean of the College of Letters and Science, 1955-62; and vice-chancellor of the Berkeley campus. 1962-65. Always ready to serve, the consummate good citizen of the Berkeley faculty, he has served on over fifty committees, subcommittees, and task forces on campus ranging from the Committee on Junior and Irregular Teaching Personnel, to the Advisory Committee to the School of Nursing, to the chairmanship of the powerful Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations. Since his formal retirement in 1976, he has continued to be an active member of the Berkeley campus community, still pursuing his botanical research and still available for work on faculty committees, advisor to students and fellow professors. He has received many honors in his long career, none more significant nor important to him, I suspect, than the high regard in which the Berkeley faculty continues to hold him. William B. Fretter Vice President of the University. Emeritus Professor of Physics, Emeritus April 1987 Berkeley, California vi INTRODUCTION — by Mildred Mathias My association with Lincoln Constance dates back precisely fifty years to correspondence in March 1937 concerning the loan of specimens of Cogswellia (now Lorn ati urn) from the herbarium of the State College of Washington at Pullman. Little did I expect that early request to lead to decades of joint "pursuit of parsley." Shortly after that initial contact Lincoln joined the staff of the Department of Botany at the University of California. Berkeley, where I was then struggling with the parsleys for the North American Flora. By that time, I had accumulated a fair amount of manuscript and there was some reason to believe that I might not finish it for publication. Consequently I did a serious bit of arm-twisting and the team of Mathias and Constance was born. It turned out to be a successful delivery since the manuscript for the Umbelliferae for the North American Flora was completed in 1942. The multiplication of my family, the war, and our respective moves to Binghamton, New York, and the Washington, D.C.. area led to a lapse in sciadography for a few years except for the inevitable proof-reading. For the next five years my pursuit was not of parsley but of children while Lincoln returned to Berkeley and renewed his studies of the family Umbelliferae. In 1947 I joined the Department of Botany at UCLA and after several exchanges of letters we agreed that cooperative efforts would be resumed, the main research collections would be deposited at Berkeley, and I would retain at UCLA a small reference collection to aid in routine ide nti f ica ti ons . However, the cooperative efforts lagged since Lincoln left Berkeley for a year on an interim appointment at Harvard, where in spite of many other duties, he managed to collect a significant amount of information on South American umbels as the basis for future studies. He also became better acquainted with the eastern establishment. Carl [Epling] would be delighted to know, I think, that I am talking to the New England Botanical (Hub in a couple of weeks on, "Is a New Taxonomy Necessary." He might think it less funny that I'm also talking to the Biology colloquium this week on "Some Foibles of B iosy stem ati cs." Thus, you see, I try to establish my role as a middle-of-the-roader, or a damned hypocrite. [Constance to Mathias, 24 February 1948] vii The new taxonomy and biosystematics were catch words of the day with the publications during the war years of Julian Huxley's The New Systematics (1940). Clausen. Keck and Hiesey papers on "Experimental Studies on the Nature of Species" and "Experimental Taxonomy" (1940-48), Edgar Anderson's studies (1940-41) leading to his book on Ir.trogres^sive Hybridization (1949). Dobzhansky on Genetics and the' Origin of _Species (1941). Ernst Mayr Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) and papers by Ledyard Stebbins leading to the publication of Variation and Evolution in Plants (1950). Students returning to the colleges and universities after war service brought more experience and maturity to their studies. They were exciting years in the early fifties as taxonomy became "new" by moving from the herbarium into the laboratory and the field with transplant experiments, studies of populations, cytogenetics, etc. What was needed and what Lincoln provided and still provides was a balanced view of the subject. Each new approach adds and hopefully improves our knowledge and understanding of taxa and their relationships. The herbarium still provides the voucher collections where the variability and nomenclature are preserved and documented As he entitled his 1950 presidential address to the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. the "new" taxonomist must be "The Versatile Taxonomist. " To return to umbels: When possible during the next thirty years I managed to ascend to the umbel level in the herbarium at Berkeley to pore over the collections of umbels and manuscript drafts and discuss with Lincoln problems and possible solutions. Having temporarily disposed of the umbels of North America, we concentrated on South America. Everything south of the United States' border was pioneering. Collections were meaaer, often only a single sheet or a fragment for a species, and many taxa still uncollected (as we found out); the literature was sparse and ancient with the only "complete" worldwide treatment of the family being that of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1829 and 1830; and many of the type specimens had been destroyed during the wartime bombing of Berlin, where Hermann Wolff had been intensively studying and describing South American Umbellif erae. J. N. Rose, following a preliminary treatment of the umbels of Mexico and Central America, had left a series of handwritten notes that I had been given after his death. What was available in the way of notes, literature, and specimens was concentrated at Berkeley and Lincoln accurately described the state of knowledge in a letter early in 1948: At any rate, Rose's eight herbarium names aren't much help, and of the three things Wolff described, he saw mature fruit of only onel No wonder things were in a mess. ...When I get done, they'll probably still be in a mess, but a slightly different one. [Constance to Mathias, 24 February 1948.] Vlll The correspondence waxed and waned during the years as both of us became more involved in administrative and other academic duties. The letters from Lincoln were written in what he called "my hour" and kept me informed of progress such as the arrival of an undescribed species from one of our correspondents: We have just had another "blessed event" about which I thought you ought to know. [Constance to Mathias. 10 May 1949.] The enclosed items are.. .to keep you up- to-date on the activities of the Center for Prosecuting (mainly) Latin American parsleys. [Constance to Mathias, 15 August 1961.] There were letters back and forth bemoaning the lack of time for research, the accumulation of loaned specimens that should be annotated and returned but were still needed for study, and the masses of specimens that were needed or came unexpectedly: I suppose we might just as well offer to determine all their Umbellif erae for them, in order to get an opportunity to see what we want. This way, every time we solve one problem, we turn up two or three new ones.. .more fun! I enjoyed Rose's [J. N. Rose] notes: he seems to have been about as confused as we are, possibly even more so. With the stuff I now have on hand • he'd have had ten new genera and fifty-six new species, possibly he would have been right! [Constance to Mathias, 21 July 1950.] It was obvious that* in order to understand the Umbellif erae of the western hemisphere we would have to pick away genus by genus on a worldwide basis. One of the first genera to tackle was Oreomvrrhis with its unusual southern hemisphere distribution extending from southern Mexico to the tip of South America, across to New Zealand and north as far as Taiwan. In 1952 I wrote Lincoln: I am going to dig into Oreomyrrhis now and make some pretense of putting the whole thing together in an orderly manner which you will be privileged to tear apart. [Mathias to Constance, 30 July 1952.] That expresses well the cooperation. Sometimes Lincoln wrote the entire paper and I tore apart the draft; other times it was the reverse; and in some cases we split the effort and one wrote the introductory pieces LX while the other did the descriptions of the taxa. Lincoln was able to have excellent artists to assist and their superb detailed drawings of umbels were exceedingly helpful in calling our attention to characters that we had overlooked. As the years passed he was also able to grow quite a parsley patch in the botanical garden in Strawberry Canyon and some of the old- timers may remember the giant bromeliad-like eryngiums that sprouted there. Umbels are still under cultivation there and for a short time some were also grown in Los Angeles. Examination of these documented specimens has proven exceedingly helpful as Lincoln wrote in 1975: It is in Azorella (as I found with the Ecuadorean stuff) that all the walls seem to be coming down around our ears. Either one has a species for each of several dozen paramos, or else one is forced to come to the conclusion that these cushion- umbels are actually extraordinarily plastic and variable, as their behavior in the greenhouse should have told me. [Constance to Mathias, 16 May 1975.] By 1978 I was more and more involved in extra-umbel activities and the cooperative efforts on the Umbellif erae have essentially ceased but Lincoln has continued in the studies: I came to the realization some time ago that if I planned to continue with Umbellif erae, I should have to pretty much "go it alone." Going it alone is not a very accurate description. I guess. In attempting to handle the "Umbel business" I am continuing to get involved in all sorts of minor projects with various people. [And he follows with a list of eleven individuals from various parts of the United States. Mexico. South America, Europe and Asia with whom he is . cooperating on joint umbel adventures, finishing the list with] Alone...? [Constance to Mathias, 18 September 1978.] The numerous collaborators indicate the influence Lincoln Constance has had on students throughout the world. The list of those who worked with him during their doctorate programs includes many of the distinguished taxonomists of today. Lincoln has been internationally known as a mentor for over fifty years to generations of both undergraduate and graduate students; as a distinguished researcher and student of the Hydrophyllaceae and Umbelliferae; and as an able field collector who has pursued his favorite plants through the herbaria of Europe and South America and in the field, particularly in western North America and South America. The innumerable honors that he has received are recognition of his botanical contributions and his standing among his peers: president of The American Society of Plant Taxonomists, The Botanical Society of America, and The California Botanical Society; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; membership in the Academia Chilena d° O'er.cias Naturales, Sociedad Argentina de Bot^nica, Socie'te de Biogeographie (Paris)v Institute Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales (Quito). Sociedad Botanica de La Libertad (Trujillo. Peru), Linnean Society of London, and Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The citation upon receiving the Asa Gray Medal of The American Society of Plant Taxonomists, its highest award, expressed well his position in botany : Lincoln Constance has been mentor to all of us. In a series of papers that are too insightful and vatical to be considered reviews, Lincoln Constance defined and set the course for the coming age of systematics. As a participant in biosystematics his papers serve as models for the field of cytotaxonomy. His contributions to taxonomic research range across fl eristics, biogeography, cytotaxonomy, and palynology. [Systematic Botany 12:186, 1987.] He has been a continuing proponent of "Systematic botany — an unending synthesis." It has been a fruitful fifty years, an honor and a privilege to call him a colleague and a friend and to have contributed a small piece to his research. Mildred E. Mathias Professor Emeritus University of California, Los Angeles March 1987 Los Angeles, California xi INTERVIEW HISTORY Lincoln Constance joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as assistant professor of Botany in 1937. As he explains in his oral history memoir, the University had the policy of hiring promising young scholars, with the expectation that they would, within the environment of excellence provided by the University, advance to leading positions in their respective fields. The faculty, once gaining tenure, expected to finish out their careers at Berkeley. This sense of permanence and belonging, coupled with a strong tradition of faculty participation in University governance, encouraged the faculty's willingness to serve the Academic Senate and the University as committee members, department chairs, and campus or University-wide administrators. The career of Lincoln Constance validates that University policy. As he progressed through the professorial ranks, he also advanced steadily to a role of national prominence in his field of systematic botany. His oral history gives some insight into the everwidening scope of his investigation into the parsley family, Umbelliferae, and the growing role that he took in helping his field assimilate wisely the swiftly expanding state of botanical knowledge. His prominence in botanical research, however, was not achieved by a neglect of teaching responsibilities. In fact, as demonstrated by the sampling of professor-graduate student relationships documented here, he has influenced his field most profoundly, perhaps, by serving as mentor to nearly half a century of plant taxonomists. While pursuing his parsleys and guiding his graduate students, Constance also engaged in the third aspect of the professorial role — service to the University. He has served on innumerable Academic Senate committees, but his remarks in the oral history focus on his chairmanship of the powerful Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Affairs — what effectively is the University's faculty personnel committee, reviewing all appointments and promotions and issuing recommendations to the Chancellor that are rarely rejected. By 1954, Lincoln Constance had already developed a reputation for "knowing everyone on campus" and understanding how the complex system of University of California governance worked. He was asked by Chancellor Clark Kerr (based on the recommendation of a faculty committee) to serve as dean of the College of Letters and Science during a crucial period in its history. He recalls his work as dean to upgrade the college by strict enforcement of the newly instituted faculty-designed reform measures. Unyielding, but fair and evenhanded, Constance demonstrated his high expecta tions for the performance of academic departments and undergraduate students Xll alike. His remarks make clear his devotion to the University and its standards of excellence and his esteem for its faculty and tradition of mutual respect among all its elements. It is easy to underatand, then, why the explosive force of the Free Speech Movement with its rebellious student (and nonstudent) activism and its disregard for conventional courtesies and traditional academic modes of operation were so dismaying to Lincoln Constance, who served as vice- chancellor during this turbulent period. Although he was seldom involved directly in working with the FSM leaders, he was in a position to closely observe the operation of the Chancellor's Office, and his memoir brings a valuable perspective to the historical record of this well-remembered period of the University's history. Throughout his administrative career, Constance found time to continue his botanical research. Therefore, when he gave up his administrative responsibilities in 1965, he resumed his professorial career and has given more than twenty additional years to the joint pursuit of parsley and service to the University and scientific communities. The final interviews record this prolific period, including the directorship of the University Herbarium, presidency of the California Academy of Sciences, and a host of publications, often based on his cooperative work with botanical researchers from Russia to India to South America. This series of eleven interviews with Lincoln Constance took place at approximately weekly intervals during the winter and spring of 1986 in his office in the Life Sciences Building. There in his office were apparent the interests and habits of mind of a professor in his fiftieth year at the University of California at Berkeley. Still very much a working office, it contained letters from his far-flung correspondents, sheets of obscure Umbelliferae from around the world with requests for his assistance in identification, and cabinets of carefully arranged files, from which he could retrieve in minutes a significant letter from thirty years past to add information to our recorded sessions. Professor Constance's manner is quiet and low key, supremely courteous, always modest. His ironic sense of humor, we hope, comes through in the written transcript of these tape-recorded interviews. The transcripts were lightly edited for continuity and clarity and reviewed by Professor Constance with minimal changes. Tapes of the interview are available in The Bancroft Library. On behalf of future researchers of University and botanical history, we would like to thank the Chancellor's Office and the College of Letters and Science for underwriting this interview. Ann Lage Interviewer-Editor November 1987 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley I YOUTH AND EDUCATION IN EUGENE, OREGON [Interview 1: January 23, 1986] //f/ Family Background Lage : Let's just start with the most simple question of when and where you were born and then tell us something about your family. Constance: Okay. I was born in Eugene, Oregon — actually, it's now a part of Eugene though it was two miles outside the city limits — on February 16, 1909. My parents were Lewis Llewellyn Constance and Ella Clifford Constance. Lage: And had they been residents of Eugene for a while? Constance: My parents moved to Eugene the year before I was born, from Wisconsin, where they were both born and grew up. Three out of four of my grandparents were immigrants. (I take it you want to know about my grandparents.) Lage: Right, I'd like to know back at least tc your grandparents, where they came from and — Constance: Well, a recent distant relative sent ice some genealogical material on my father's family. According to her, the Constance family, presumably, came from somewhere in northern France to England with William the Conqueror and settled at a place called Longhope, in Gloucestershire. I don't know the exact occupations of the different ancestral line, but my impression is that they were craftsmen of some sort. Somewhere along the line I heard that ray great-grandfather made beer barrels, but I can't really prove that. Somebody else said that they made baskets, or some sort of more or less skilled handwork, presumably. ////This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page 346. Constance: At all events, ray grandfather, who was Charles Enoch Constance, born in 1321, came with his father and some other members cf the family, I think, to North America about the middle of the nineteenth century. My grandfather Constance served in the 21st Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War and participated in Sherman's campaign. Lage: Were there any stories about why they came? Constance: Don't know at all. I have no idea. His wife, Margaret Rogers, was born in Cardiff, Wales. I'm supposed to have some genealogical material on my mother's family, but I couldn't lay my hands on it. At all events, mv mother's family — the Cliffords — came to Massachusetts quite early. They missed the Mayflower apparently by not more than twenty years or so, and several were participants in the Revolutionary War (Bunker Hill, etc.). And that's the only part of the family that was in this country for a long time. Her mother presumably was born on a ship coming to the United States, while it was anchored off Prince Edward Island, Canada. So, as I said, three of my four grandparents were immigrants. I never saw any of them. Lage: Was your mother's family English in origin, also? Constance: Yes. There are Cliffords all throughout history. They're mentioned in Shakespeare; I think they're all villains. I think there was an Earl of Clifford; he was a thorough S.O.D. of some kind. Lage: But you don't know whether to trace yourself to that line? Constance: No. It's a relatively frequent name, but it's English, obviously. So much for my grandparents. All of them were dead before I was born, excepting my father's mother. I think I can remember his receiving a telephone call telling of her death when I was four. It made quite an impression on me because I remember his answering the phone and then turning to my mother and saying, "Mother died." For some reason, that seemed to carry a great deal of weight with me, but I never knew any of them. Lage: Did you know why your parents came to Eugene? Constance: Not reallv. My information en the suoject is garbled. My mother and father were both born in Wisconsin. My father attended Lawrence College and then the University of Wisconsin Constance: Law School. He practiced law and was scrae kind of municipal judge. For reasons I don't know — whether physical health, mental health, cr what — he was not happy with it. He was urgec. apparently, by some of his family, of whom there are a lot, to c ora e W e s t. So my parents did come, as I said, in 1908. My brother suggested recently that he thought ray mother's unexpected pregnancy — she was forty — might have had something to do with it. I never thought of myself as being a causative factor. I had always heard that they had come because of his health, because that was the period when, if someone had poor lungs, he immediately moved to Colorado, or Arizona, or wherever, if he could do it. At all events, I mentioned this to my mother sometime before her death — she died at the age of ninety-four in 1963 — and she said no, she wasn't aware that there was anything wrong with his health. If it was anything, it was her health. Lage : So maybe it did have to do with you. Constance: Maybe so. I hadn't thought that I was the occasion for it. At any rate, why they chose Eugene, I have no idea. Perhaps because it was the seat of a university. Lage: They cidr. ' t have relatives there? Constance: I had an uncle living at Independence and an aunt living at Salem, which are not too far away, but I simply do not know. All I know is that they bought a ten-acre -plot of land southwest of Eugene and tried to make a living farming at it. Lage: Your father didn't go back to law? Constance: So far as my brother or I am aware, my father never practiced law in the West. He was once, so to speak, a candidate for public office. A group asked him to run on the Prohibition ticket for something, and he said he would do it if he didn't have to campaign. So he didn't campaign, and he didn't w in. That's about all we know about that. He had been born on a farm, but at that particular time and place trying to make a living on a ten-acre farm — unless you were raising diamonds — would have been a disaster. So the move was an economic disaster for the family. We had, I suppose, what would be called a fairly hard-scrabble youth, although we didn't know it. At least I wasn't aware of it. We had a very strong sense of family stability. Constance: Everything seemed normal, and certainly our parents did everything they thought would be good for us. My mother was always concerned that, living in the country, we would be penalized by absence from cultural things of one sort or another, and she was very anxious to try to counteract any lack in any way she could. Mother was quite a dominant character. In some ways, she was a perfect liew Englander although she'd never been in New England. I've sometimes said I never fully understood her until I spent a year at Harvard, and then a lot of it became very clear. She went to a seminary, which I guess was a sort of equivalent of high school at that particular point. And she worked as, I suppose, a secretary, or perhaps what we'd call an administrative assistant, for, I believe, the publisher of a farm magazine. We used to have copies of them around the house when I was a child. Whether it was a publishing house that published only farm magazines, whether they published only one magazine, I don't know. The name that sticks in my mind is the American Thresherman. Now, whether that is one of several publications, I don't know. I think it was published in Madison, or some other town in Wisconsin. Lage: You say she went to a seminary. Is that where she was educated? Constance: That's correct. It was roughly something beyond the high school level. I don't know quite what. In those days, they had academies and seminaries; it wasn't religious. But, at any rate, she worked before she was married; that is the point. I don't think she worked after she was married. A Rural Youth Constance: I think my parents married in either 1898 or 1899. My brother was born in 1903, and I was born six years later — a year after they had arrived in Oregon. So my mother never worked after they came West, and as far as I know, my father never practiced law — gave it up completely. And, from then on, his health was a problem a good share of the time. So, we grew up "in modest Lage: Were you far from Eugene? Was it quite a rural setting? Constance: Two miles. We were equidistant from a rural school and a school in the western part of Eugene, and ray parents decided we should go to school in town. So we walked two miles every day each way, which was fine when the weather was nice, but not always. Eugene has a fairly mild cr slightly damp climate. Constance: My family gave up the farm — we sold it — and moved to town when I was eleven, which would make it 1920. I went to two elementary schools, a junior high school, and the public Eugene high school. I didn't go to school until I was eight. I started in the third grade. Lage: Was that unusual? Constance: Yes, I think probably. My mother taught me at home, presumably, so I could read and so en, before I went. She thought it was too much of a hike for a youngster of six or seven years old. And so I think tnat I went to the third grade, the fourth grade, the fifth grace, and half of the sixth grade — I skipped half of that and I skipped half of the seventh grade — and the eighth grade and four years of high school. Lage: Was that unusual to skip grades then? Constance: I'm not sure. Obviously, I have no real basis for comparison. All I know is what happened to me. Lage: Did you show an interest in school? Did you excel in school? Constance: More or less. I always thought all my teachers were wonderful. I think they all thought I was a pain in the neck. Well, I remember particularly — I think it was my fourth grade teacher — I haa a great crush on her, and she was teaching us geography. As far as she was concerned, Europe remained exactly as it was after the Congress of Vienna, and this was after World War I. I had been collecting postage stamps. She had never heard of Czechoslovakia and what I thought was "Jugoslavia" and so on and so on. I knew about the new countries, and I suppose I kept raising ray hand and saying, "But teacher, the Austro- Hungarian Empire isn't there anymore," and I'm sure she wished I would get lost. Lage: That's probably why you got skipped ahead. Constance: That was one way to get tie cut of class. But, I think that I enjoyed elementary school, and I don't think there were any great problems that I can remember. I was, you know, a bit naive and something of a country bumpkin. I was not athletic, which was quite a handicap, in those days at least. Also, I had to wear glasses, and any boy who did was fair game for the local bullies. But I don't remember any particular difficulties. I remember it snowed a time or two and made us several hours late for school, things like that. We had to cross a small stream, which was locally known as the Amazon Slough, Constance: presumably because every winter it flooded, and we'd get two feet of water over the bridge that we normally walked over. That made for some irregularities in cur comings and goings. But there were no .particular problems that I can think of. We were somewhat isolated in the country, it's true. Neighbors in that part of the world were usually a mile or so away. There were relatively few who had children my brother's age or ny age. We were sufficiently far apart in age that we normally did not have the same friends. We were not terribly close. Cur interests were different, our friends were different. Lage: So you relied on your own resources a great deal. Constance: A good deal of the time. And that was probably one of the reasons I got interested in natural history, because we were on the edge of essentially wild country. My mother felt that, in the absence of urban cultural vehicles of one sort or another, it only made sense to interest my brother and myself in natural history. With him it became a hobby filling all his life, cherished all his life. And with me, it turned into a profession. Lage: What has he done as a hobby with it? Constance: Well, he likes to wander around national parks, travel here and there. He has a passing knowledge of natural history. It didn't really become part of his education, per se. It might have, I suppose, if things had happened to 'work out that way, but they didn't in his case. Lage: We didn't get his name. Constance: His name is Clifford. Clifford Llewellyn Constance. He and I both attended the University of Oregon. He graduated in physics, went to Chicago, and worked for Western Electric Company for some years. Much of the time he was supporting my parents, in part, because they were getting in bad shape. And then he wasn't very happy with that work; he found it was pretty much prescribed work. He came back to Eugene and took a master's degree in psychology. Then. I suppose, probably, the Depression may have finished off the funding — I'm not quite sure. And he took a job in the registrar's office and spent most of his career as registrar of the University of Oregon, from which he retired — when he retired — and he's still living in Eugene. So that was the sibling situation. Interest in Natural History Lage: Constance ; Lage: Constance Lage: Constance Lage: Let's go back and talk a little more about how you got interested in natural history, and how your mother promoted it, and what form it took. Well, really about all it took was to open the door and let me through it. There were woods around, and I went through all the stages of interest that people involved in natural history get into on their own. I used to think it would be a wonderful thing to stuff animals, for instance. It seems to me I worked on a couple of mice and discovered that my stuffing, my taxidermy, didn't do much for either the mice or me. And so I moved from that to butterflies, and I was very much intrigued by butterflies and moths for a long time. I wanted to get caterpillars and raise them, and have them flying around the house. And then gradually I worked up to an interest in plants, rocks, you name it. Did you read about these things and classify them? To some degree, yes, but it never became systematic. Well, with butterflies and moths, I got to the stage where I was just beginning to get into recognizing scientific names. I knew that swallowtail butterflies were Papilio. If they still are, I don't know. And I had some sense that caterpillars produced adult insects, and what they lived on and things like that. I knew that you could find milkweed larvae and grow monarch butterflies from them. But it wasn't terribly systematic. Then, I got involved in summers in some of the YMCA camps after we moved to Eugene. In those camps we were often encouraged to get involved in natural things; that probably had a good deal to do with stimulating the interest. And some of the YMCA secretaries or other personnel who were involved in these camps gave me a good deal of encouragement about it. Instead of being pointed out as the local crackpot, I was given a certain amount of praise and recognition because I knew more about these things than the others did. Did the other kids value this also, do you remember? I suppose one would say that, at best, it amounted to a certain bemused tolerance. It certainly didn't carry the honor that being a really good athlete would have, but it was not scorn. I interrupted you when you started to tell about your botanical interests. Constance: The interest in plants is the one that survived. I don't know- quite why. I suppose these natural history interests carried along pretty much through high school. To some extent, they dropped off in college. I was interested enough in college that I took a biology major, but I never wanted to go into medicine, and of course biology, to all intents and purposes there, was headed for medicine. That's where all my classmates went. Lage: Did they have a botany department? Constance: Yes, botany and bacteriology. I took some bacteriology, which I didn't particularly care for, but it was part of it. Well, one of the things that happened, perhaps, is that I got acquainted — I suppose, through my parents — with some of the people at the university. And I found it a fascinating place to go; people sent in things that they wanted to know about. The University of Oregon had a small collection of scientific plant materials. I believe they also had some animal materials, and so on, as well. I don't remember so much about that. Oregon has an organization called the Mazamas, which is an alpine club, of sorts. "Mazama" is supposedly the Indian name for the mountain that was Crater Lake. The secretary of the Mazamas was a man named Martin Gorman, who had an office in Portland and was an amateur botanist. He collected plants in some of the mountain areas, primarily, and also in Alaska. At his death, this collection went to the University of Oregon. They really didn't have anybody capable of handling it, I suppose, so they induced Louis F. Henderson to come and care for it. He had been a professor at the University of Idaho, had had his plant collection burn up, and had then gone into apple raising in Hood River. He had more botanical knowledge of the classif icatory kind than anybody else, I suppose, in the state at that point. They got him to come down to Eugene, and I got acquainted with him. Lage: Was this when you were still in high school or college? Constance: This was when I was in high school. I used to spend every Saturday morning when I could, at least, up at the university hobnobbing with him. They had a few graduate students, at least two of whom went on into professional botanical life. I had had quite a bit of experience and very little knowledge, but I was fascinated by anything that came along that I hadn't seen before. And without really knowing what I was doing, I was very lucky at figuring out what some of them were. So they used to save things that came in, if they couldn't identify them readily, to see if this young squirt could, by any chance, identify it. Sometimes I did. Of course, that was very exciting. Lage : Constance : Lage: Now what does it take? Why did you have that facility? because you knew so many different kinds of plants? Was it I suppose so, because I suppose I was a good observer and I was interested in looking at what seemed to me to be relationships or differences. I mean, you must have had an ability to see things that some of the others couldn't. Constance: I suppose you have to. Well, a great deal of classification of anything is, of course, observation, and doing your own computing, shall we say. I read some, and I at least looked at the pictures of the National Geographic and books on butterflies, and this sort of thing. But I didn't get into it with a really scientific basis for some time. I got some help in the university. The chairman of the department was a man named Albert Sweetser, who used to write articles for the newspapers on spring plants, and things of that sort. I remember he had a master's degree from Harvard, which was quite an accolade. I took biology in high school, and one of my teachers there — her name was Ruth Sanborn — had a sister, Ethel Sanborn, who was a botanist in the university at Eugene and later transferred to Corvallis, to Oregon State College. She was interested primarily in structural botany — in other words, how plants are put together — and she came into contact with Ralph Chancy, who was a professor of paleobotany here at Berkeley. They worked together on a fossil deposit of plants, called the Goshen floor. Goshen is a little town a few miles from Eugene. I had her backing, and Sweetser's backing, and Henderson's backing, and I had a pretty good academic record. So when I came to trying to figure out what I was going to do after I finished college, I was in a pretty good position. Undergraduate at the University of Oregon Constance: I don't know what there is really to say about my college experience. It's relatively uneventful. I graduated from high school in 1926. I went directly into the University of Oregon. I flirted with the idea of going to Oregon State and taking forestry, and actually went over there with a friend who had been the president of the student body in high school during the 10 Constance: year I was treasurer. The people there were very much interested in him and were not very much ' '-.terested in me. For economic reasons, it made more sense to live at hone and go to the University of -Oregon in Eugene, which I probably would have dene anyway. Lage: Was this something of a financial burden? Constance: It was a financial burden on ray parents. My parents really worked desperately hard to see that my brother and I got an education. We always expected to go to college, university — Lage: And that was always a goal for them — Constance: Oh, yes. Lage: And for you. Constance: I've always felt that my father got me through college and then almost collapsed. Lage: Did he die soon after that? Constance: No. He lived for nine years beyond that, but in very poor health. I should say that, as I mentioned before, my mother was a stalwart character. Certainly, physically she was the stronger member of the team. My father, by 1920, really couldn't handle farm work. They came to town. They sold the place, which gave them, I suppose, a little security for a while. He took up manual labor as what we call now a custodian or a janitor, first in the public schools, and then at the university. He was verv conscientious. Constance: He was obviously better educated than many of the people he worked with. As a result, he made friends with members of the faculty, students, and so on. I suppose I wouldn't have gotten access to the university in the first place if he hadn't known people there. Lage: Why is that? Constance: Well, it would take considerable initiative, in those days at least, I think, for a high school youngster to go barging into the university. Nowadays, I suppose kids would think nothing of it. They didn't have Lawrence Halls of Science in those days. Lage: Oh, you mean go up there ^s a high school student. I thought you meant enrolled as a college student. 11 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: No, no. I mean as a high school kid. Because, you know, I already knew the biological end of the university before I ever entered it, because I had been hanging arour.d it for two or three years. In 1928, Mr. Henderson unexpectedly got a small sum of money from somebody. And, he was not well because he had over worked himself and developed a hernia, as a matter of fact. He sent one of the faculty members, your.g faculty members, and me (then an undergraduate Junior) over to eastern Oregon, to collect plants for him. That was my first professional experience as a botanist. I collected plants in Klaraath County and Lake County in eastern Oregon. I did it the same way he did. There was a stage which was usually an old seven- passenger automobile, which would ge a couple times a week to some of these relatively widely dispersed towns. You'd take this stage, say ten miles out of town, get out, collect plants, and spend the day, should you be so lucky, getting to the next place. And how did you choose what spot te step in and pick your plants? I suppose simply on the basis of where it looked as if you could make a pretty good haul. In other words, you might stop in a marsh one day, see an interesting mountain over there, and the next day, you would aim for it. As a result, you would cover quite a bit of territory. Of course, you had to cart all your stuff with you. Sometimes it was quite awhile between meals, drinks, and whatever. But, at any rate, it was very interesting because if everything worked right, you could, you know, make a lot of good connections; if it didn't, you might be there for three days waiting for the next stage. I remember meeting one fairly salty character, who I believe raised race horses at one time, and he insisted on taking me home with him. I spent three days there, at a place called Summer Lake, which was quite interesting. I remember that's where I saw my first rattlesnake. We were out walking around at dusk, and the rattlesnake came buzzing down the road at us, I think a little bemused by the heat. So, he put his cane on the rattlesnake's neck, and I put a rock on the rattle snake's head. We obviously cut off the rattlers for a souvenir. At any rate, I spent a couple of months in that area, which was a really good experience. Were you carrying a backpack or a suitcase, or what? 12 Constance : Well, I had a press, which I probably carried in a backpack. I don't remember. I ^ay ever, have a picture of myself doing it. But that would probably have been the way of doing it, because with a frame and an assortment of papers and some sort cf absorbent material, you could collect plants and dry them by sticking these things out to dry. It was hot most of the time, so they'd dry all right. That was the way of carrying stuff around. It was an interesting experience. Lage: You were a student at Eugene then, at college? Constance: That's right. It was during the summer of my junior year. I'm trying to think about particularly noteworthy college experiences. The first two years I took a very heavy course load, what was then eighteen units per period. We had a quarter svstem, and that didn't leave you much time to spend. And then the last two years I took a lighter load and worked in the reference library. That was fur.; I enjoyed that. I don't remember how they had the library divided, but this was where the students came to get books for what were then the big reading courses. Lage: Were there any impressions made that affected your view of education later? Constance: I don't think particularly so. I dor.'t remember having any particular thoughts on the subject. I took a rather erratic program, myself. I suppose my mother may have had something to do with it, I don't know how much. I never liked mathematics. I had taken mathematics from the football coach's wife in high school, and that dried up any interest I ever had in it. She was a very glamorous gal, but she wasn't much of a mathematics teacher, I think. Ar.d my mind is not very mathematically oriented. I found mathematics repelling. I liked language, I liked history. I didn't take as much English as I might have liked to. I didn't take physics, primarily, I suppose, because it had so much mathematics. I'm not quite sure if they gave physics in high school when I was there. I didn't take it in high school. I took biology by choice in high school, and in college, I did take chemistry. But, it isn't the kind of a curriculum that I would later have recommended for somebody going into biology. It was just sort of hit or miss. My problem, if it was a problem, was that I always got interested in anything I got involved in. I took a course in Scandinavian literature because everybody said it was the easiest course on campus, which it wasn't. But I read everything they recommended, so I learned quite a bit about Scandinavian literature. I haven't had much chance to go back 13 Constance: to use it, but I found it fascinating. So I managed to pick up various things, for no particular reason, just because they were intriguing. One year-course I remember was an obvious hodgepodge, which consisted of one quarter of Chinese history, one quarter of Japanese history, and one quarter of Latin-American history, which was taught by Verne Blue, who had been a doctoral student of Herbert Bolton at Berkeley. Bolton, of course, was the man who essentially invented Latin-American history in this country. So that was an early antecedent, I suppose, of an interest in Latin America, which bubbled up later. 14 II GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 1930-1934 Applying for a Teaching Assistantship Constance: I don't remember very much about my undergraduate experience that was notable, but I know it was recommended by several people that, perhaps, I ought to do graduate work. I wasn't necessarily sold on the idea of doing graduate work. I think if I could have gotten a job, I probably would have taken it. Of course, that was about 1929 and things were not all that plush. Lage: Did you have thoughts of what kind of field you would go into if you didn't go on to graduate school? Constance: Well, I suppose I might have gone into most anything that came along. I applied, at the urging, I guess, of Miss Sanborn, probably by way of Chaney, and also by way of one of the zoologists. He was A. R, Moore, a very good research zoologist. He had studied at Naples — an internationally famous marine station there — and how he got to the University of Oregon, I'll never know. Whoever thought he could teach elementary biology should have had his head examined. He was absolutely impossible as an undergraduate teacher. I got to know his teaching assistant, one way or another — I really don't know how. Dr. Moore would give beautifully-rounded lectures to a freshman class on the development of the urino-genital system in verte brates, let's say, or parasitism in marine coelenterates, or something, but with no background, no nothing. I did ask the T.A., "Where in the world can you get information on this sort of thing?" And he gave me help and recommended some of the standard zoological texts. I read them all. I think that we must have had a class of one hundred and fifty, or something like that. In those days, they used to post grades at the midterms. My recollection is that about thirty people got passing grades, and the other one hundred and twenty all got Fs. I was one of those who received a passing grade, so I became quite something in the eyes of this gentleman, anc he 15 Constance: Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : strongly recommended that I should come to Berkeley. He told me there was very interesting work going on there. I think what he was referring to, probably, was cytogenetic investigations in tobacco which were being carried on by Professors Goodspeed and Clausen at that time. I had no particular interest in that, but at any rate, I did apply to Berkeley — I think, maybe, along toward the end of the spring quarter, because I didn't have any visible means of support or anything else at that point — and I got a very nasty letter back saying, "We fill our teaching positions before Christmas. " So that was that, and the summer went along. And along in July I got a wire from Berkeley saying that someone had dropped out, and that if I would care to apply, they would be happy to look at my recommendation. Well, by that time, everybody I knew was off the campus, so I had to go around and talk to my history professor and my German professor, and so on — You didr.'t have your botanical and biology professors? I didn't have more than one or two of them, at any rate. And I was quite pleased when the history professor said, "Are you applying for an assistantship in history?" I said, "No," it was in botany. But, at any rate, they all wrote for me, apparently. The Berkeley Botany Department was probably lucky to get anything that could wiggle at that particular time in the year. Things were pretty rough in 1930, as you could guess. At any rate, I came. Were your parents pleased with that move? I'm sure they must have been. I don't remember, really. Adjusting to the Grind on Fifty Cents a Day Lage: Did the teaching assistantship pay for the education? Constance: Oh sure, yes. Let's see, I'm trying to remember what we were getting. I know we had responsibility for twelve hours of lab a week. And I know that I developed a routine. I didn't eat any breakfast. I think I was eating on fifty cents a day. In those days, you could get either, if I remember correctly, three what we now call Danish rolls or a milkshake for fifteen cents, and 16 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: Constance : that would leave you up to thirty-five cents for dinner. You could get fried beans or chili or something of that sort, and that was sort of standard. Now you get about one candy bar for fifty cents. Oh, I know. I lived around in all the boarding houses and rooming houses south of the campus and north of the campus, and wherever. We students managed to get along on very little. We had to. But at any rate, I did nicely on that. Ar.d the tuition — you must have had an out-of-state charge. No, we didn't. We had an exemption as teaching assistants, sure we didn't pay any. We couldn't possibly have; we didn't make that much. I can't remember how much we got. I should, but I don' It wasn't all that much, but — But it was enough. It was enough. It could be done. When I worked in the library during my junior year at Oregon where the students came to get their books, I met my wife. That was one of the reasons I was perhaps less enthusiastic about graduate work than I might otherwise have been. So mostly I worked hard as a student — I'd say, not particularly inspired for the first couple of years. Then, the third year, I began to get really interested. So the first couple of years here at Cal-w — were pretty much of a grind, pretty much of a grind. I didn't like the professor who was in charge of the elementary course, where most of the teaching assistantship was done, and he didn't 1 ike me. Shall we mention names here? No, I don't think so. He tried to get me discontinued as a teaching assistant, and he might have been successful, but he also took a dislike to the brightest, most senior graduate student in the department at the same time and tried to get rid of both of us, and that was too much. So we survived. The chairman of the department called me in, along toward the end of my second year, and suggested maybe I'd like to go to the University of Hawaii, which I think was a general suggestion it might be nice if I were somewhere else. 17 Lage: What was the dissatisfaction? Constance: I was insubordinate, if I remember correctly. There was a failure of con muni cation, I think. He was very overbearing, and I was not about to be overborne. Teaching Assistant to Professor Jepson Constance Lage: Constance Lage: Constance Lage: At any rate. Professor Jepson, at about that point, called me in and asked me if I would be his teaching assistant for the next year. And so I did that for a couple of years, and that got me clearly started on a problem, and you know, things began to roll along. The first two years I was a graduate student, "30 and '31, I spent the summer working as a ranger naturalist at Crater Lake Park, which was kind of fun. Of course, you had to lead nature walks, tell people about the birds, the bees, the flowers, give lectures, and so on. I was pretty shy, as a matter of fact, and that pretty much knocked it out ef me. You really had to be able to stand up in front of a group and talk. Did you find you rose to that occasion all right? Yes, I usually rise to occasions. When I have to do something, I usually do it. So, that was — Crater Lake — was a wonderful place to be, as well. And it came along just, I think, at the right time. I think that I developed fairly fast as a graduate student during that period. I gained self-confidence and moved on fairly well. Was Jepson helpful in this process of moving along? Not really. By the time I knew him, he was not very active, shall we say. He was quite aloof. He didn't really know what I was doing. And I was scared to death of him, as was everybody else; there was nothing novel about that. He was a very aloof character. I can't say just how, but I think I really got quite a bit from him, as a matter of fact. He was a genius in his own way, I think. He considered the flora of California to be his oyster, and he more or less resented anybody else (other than his students) who dabbled in it. And he had very high stan dards, which, I suppose, we absorbed by osmosis, more than anything else. Not by direct teaching — 18 Constance: No, I don't think so. Well, we had very little contact with him. He had a weekly seminar, which usually had anywhere from three to eight graduate students in it. And they had the same topics every year. Cf course, students get onto that very quickly, so you'd get last year's list, and you added a few references to it and give the same thing over again in your own version. But still you learned something. There was a little discussion, not much. I don't think anybody really felt at ease in the seminar because you never knew quite what was going to happen. Lage: He was a little unpredictable; is that what you're saying? Constance: Quite. One of the students, who was a colleague of mine, was quite emotional. He got terribly excited about something, and he said "damn," wnereupcn he was ousted from the seminar because, (imitating professor's voice) "No one in my (Professor Jepson's) history has ever had the affrontery to use foul language in my presence," and so on. So you see, there was a little of a — Lage: You were on edge. Constance: A little bit of edginess. Or. the other hand, graduate students learn a lot from each other. We did. William A. Setchell and Willis L. Jepson: A Study in Contrasts Lage: I don't see, in your discussion here, any evidence of great inspiration from a teacher in the botany department. Was there anyone in particular who did inspire? Constance: The botany department, at that time, consisted primarily of two stars, who were Setchell and Jepson. William Albert Setcheil took his master's degree from Yale and his doctorate from Harvard, and he came here as assistant professor and chairman ir 1894. He remained chairman until 1934. Lage: He must have put his stamp on the place. Constance: Oh, he did. And the only other person here, really, at that time was Jepscn, who was a native brought up in Vacaville, near Fairfield or Vallejo. He was somewhere in the graduate student- assistant stage. I think he had the title of assistant, or Setchell made him assistant, I'm not sure. They were pretty much the same age and completely different as personalities. Jepson was very shy, diffident, some would say paranoid. 19 Constance: Setchell was cosmopolitan, outgoing, hearty. Setchell was one of the founders of the Faculty Club. He was an enthusiastic participant in the Bohemian Club. He knew people all over the world, and he was very active and very broad intellectually. In fact, I had a visit from Professor Axelrod, now down at the Davis campus — both of us retired, now, but he's a paleobotanist — and he was talking about him this morning. He said that he had found Setchell more stimulating than anyone else he had ever experienced in his academic life. I took a couple of courses from him, and I enjoyed that. I suppose the age disparity, or whatever, was sufficiently great that I didn't really feel too much at ease with either Setchell or Jepson. But I had great admiration for both of them. I don't think I ever took a lecture course from Jepson. I don't know if he ever gave one while I was here. So the only contact I really had, until I was working on my thesis problem was that he used to pop into my office occasionally. Lage : He directed your thesis, more or less? Constance: I did it under his direction, shall we say. Actually, I got a great deal of help from the man who was then his assistant, Herbert Mason, who later became a full faculty member. Lage: He was a young person at that time, wasn't he? Constance: Well, let's see, he's eighty-nine now, so — he was some years older than I — but he was young enough to be on an informal basis with the students at that time, and that helped to bridge gaps. But I would say there was a pretty major gap between the students and faculty at that time. Students like to say whether they were in various professors' homes, or not. I don't think I was ever in more than two. The year I took my degree, I was the only student in the department who had reached that august pinnacle. There were relatively few graduate students. Several of them were married and were more or less in their own little worlds. I was lonesome for the first two years. I was really very unhappy because I didn't seem to be getting anywhere much. I didn't particularly like any of my associates. Oh, no, that's not true entirely. But I lived in boarding houses, and sometimes there was someone there I enjoyed, and frequently there wasn't. I worked pretty hard, and I would rather have been someplace else, I think, but there wasn't any other place to be. But that, too, passed, like everything else. Eventually I got thoroughly wound up in it, and it was fine. 20 Lage: You spent four years? Constance: I spent four years, that's right. Dissertation on Eriophyllum Lage: And what was ycur dissertation on? Constance: I worked on a group of sunflower relatives, a genus called Eriop'nyllu". One of the problems that graduate students have is finding a problem on which to work. This is solved sometimes by having somebody assign them something. In recent years, in many areas — to ~y view, at least — a professor slices a little piece off some problem on which he's been working for a long time and which is really his, and then the graduate student does that piece. With or without credit, that is sort of moved over into the professor's stock of knowledge and what the student does next is not quite clear — if he doesn't elaborate the same piece. You tend to get this kind of specialized "schools" in academic work. I think it may be particularly true of the physical sciences, but it's true also of other areas. You frequently have a particular laboratory, where the professor works on a given group of plants, and he has ten students working on various aspects of this same group. I've never liked this. I've always thought a student should have something that was truly his own. In fact, I've always discouraged students from working in the groups that I've worked on, although some have insisted or. doing so. Some have come here to work with me because they were interested in the particular group I was. But still, I try to be sure that they have something really of their own. Well, at any rate, Jepson made a list of things that I could work on. He didn't tell me I had to work on one of them, but I probably had asked him. Perhaps he volunteered it, I'm not sure. At all events, he came in with a list. I looked down the list and recognized at least one name, and I think that's probably why I chose it — as simple as that. The interesting thing is that the first thing he suggested, I think, was that I work on the carrot family or parsley family or Umbelliferae of Oregon. I turned that down flat because it was a very difficult group, and I didn't think I should ever find my way successfully through that. That, of course, turns out to be the group I have spent most of my life working on! The second topic on his list was the flora of Mt. Tamalpais. He had a propensity to divide up the state and assign a mountain to each of his graduate students. 21 Constance: In these days, you'd have te take the ferry te get to Marin County, to begin with. I tried te figure out the timing, the financing, and so on, and decided I couldn't possibly achieve it within any reasonable time — and besides. I'd be broke if I did. So I wasn't very enthusiastic about that. I did do a master's thesis on Redwood Peak, which is one of the higher members of the Oakland Hills, and that was a good project for me because I learned every plant en it in every stage ef its development. That kind of knowledge is very useful. I finally chose Eriephyllum te work on, and I spent the summer of my third year doing field work. I bought an old Chevrolet, and with the help ef the owner, who lived in one ef the bearding houses I did, ground the valves. I drove it all over that summer. H Constance: The field work involved nest of northern California, with, I think a little digression into Nevada and then into Oregon and Washington. I really needed te de mere in southern California, but somehow, I didn't manage to work that in. So I basically did without it, but it would have been useful. Lage: New, what would be the basic purpose ef — ? Constance: You select a particular group ef plants, and then you go out and study them in the field. Then you study the accumulated preserved material — net only what you have in the institution where you're working, but you usually borrow from all ef the other major institutions that have materials ef it. Lage: And they're willing to send this te you? Constance: That's right. It's an elaborate system ef inter- institutional leans, which we all operate on. And then you try te evaluate the group you're concerned with — try te figure out hew many kinds ef representatives it has. what their differences are, what their similarities are, what their distribution is, anything else you can learn about them. Ideally, you try te grow them. You may de some genetic work en them. You may try crossing them, you may net. You may study them in greater detail, anatomically. Nowadays, you very possibly may make comparisons with not only microscopic, but also electron-microscopic things like pollen, and things ef that sort, simply to learn as much as you can about them. 22 Lage: Do you have te choose something that hasn't been studied in this way? Constance: Well, probably everything has been at least partially studied, but the problem is to get it all together. Not only that, but these things have to be updated from time to time because new information comes in all the time. For instance, someone just brought in two specimens for me to look at: one each in two families that I work with. It's perfectly possible that one of these might be something that, you know, adds to or subtracts from previous knowledge. Now, for example. I was looking at something in the herbarium the other day, and the material was from Ecuador, I think. There were two plants represented in this one collection. And it was perfectly clear that the two plants, which were growing in the same place and which the collector, at least, thought were the same thing, represented what had been regarded as two distinct species. This made me realize that, as a matter of fact, the thing that supposedly was the second species was merely an extreme form of the first one. So down gees one species. That's one way change may go. On the other hand, very often something comes in. and you look at it, and you realize, well, this is net anything that I've seen before in this group. Therefore, it must be something new and different which has te be properly characterized, named, recorded, and so en. And that's the way the thing moves. You're adding all the time, you're reevaluating all the time, and I hope that we'll be doing this as long as there are natural things around. Birds were pretty much classified a long time ago, according to the erni thole gists. Mammals certainly have been reasonably well taken care of, I would guess. I think most entomologists would say that they are only at the beginning, that there are tens of thousands of undescribed species. Many botanists maintain that in the tropical forests of the world, there are a great many things which have never been entered into the annals of science, and the chances are a great many of them will be lost before their discovery. So. that goes on all the time. That is the kind of thing that I am interested in. For instance, that picture en my desk was taken in the mountains of Idaho. A colleague ©f mine from the University of Wyoming, who is studying here at the moment, and I gave it a new name and designation. It had been confused with something 23 Constance: that was known only from Nevada. We got mere material and more information about it, and we knew that indeed it wasn't the same thing. What we're basically involved in is trying to describe and classify and. insofar as possible, explain everything around us. It's part of man's general assault on the the environment. Lage: [Laughs] Gentle assault, though. Constance: General. Not necessarily gentle, just general. Lage: Well, your portion of it is a gentle one. Constance: Yes, relatively speaking, that's correct. Lage: Did you come up with seme new discoveries and explanations in this graduate thesis? Constance: Well, I don't think anything particularly earth-shattering. I think I got a respectable thesis out of it. I learned hew to do this sort of thing, hew to express myself, and so on. The thesis yielded several of my initial publications. I even did a little illustrating, which I've never tried to de since. I don't have any artistic talent that anybody's aware of. Then I never worked again in the area of that particular group (Com- positae), s© it didn't really determine my direction. A thesis is basically an exercise which may or may not contribute a great deal to the world's knowledge en the subject, but it contributes a good deal te your own ability to de comparable things. I suppose. 24 III WASHINGTON STATE COLLEGE, PULLMAN. 1934-1937 A "Half- Time" Position Lage : By this time, were you thinking you'd ge en te university teaching? Constance: I didn't have any doubt about it, really, I suppose. I'm pretty pragmatic. I work at what's in front of my nose and try to do a good job of that. Other things tend te fall into place, I think. I don't remember making any particular decisions, that "Sure, this is it," and so on. I was already into it, mere or less by accident. And it was like putting something in a tube: you have te ge out the other end unless you're going to back up, and nobody wants to back up. Lage: Were there ether options besides university teaching for the Ph.D. in botany? Constance: Very few, very few. There are somewhat mere new, but it's not the sort of field, you knew, that has IBM and Xerox waiting for you te emerge when you earn your degree. Actually, the position I took when I left Berkeley te go to Washington State — I think I may have told you the ether day — I turned it down in January and took it in June. But, that was the only job that anybody had even heard of that year! Lage: New, you turned it down in January of the year '34, was it? Constance: '34, that's right. Lage: Because — Constance: Because I was close to finishing my doctorate, and I didn't think I wanted to take a job at that time. Lage: They wanted you right away. Ranger-Naturalist at Crater Lake National Park, ca. 1932 Ph.D. in hand, 1934. THE THIRTIES Wedding Day, July 12, 1936, Portland, Oregon **»*•". Rocky Mountain Park field trip, 1937. 25 Constance: Yes, they must have wanted to get somebody to come for the spring quarter. I decided that it didn't make sense to spend three and a half years working en a doctorate, and then drop it. I think I probably realized that I wouldn't get a lot of time to work on it. By and large, this doesn't happen so much nowadays, but it used to be that people would take a position during their graduate training and then try desperately to finish the darn thing, while learning how to teach and so en, I don't think that's a very reasonable way of going at it. I like to finish something and then go to something else, if at all possible. Lage: But the job was there for you in June? Constance: They couldn't get anybody else. The depression was still lingering on. This particular position had been a full-time position and had been reduced to a half-time position. All the faculty were given a 10 percent salary cut. It was very democratic — they did it right across the beard. The instructors were cut 10 percent, as well as the full professors, and so on. So. as you might imagine, there wasn't a great deal left. It wasn't a very attractive position, but I really didn't have another choice, and I would rather have taken that than nothing. So I took that. I'm trying to remember — I think it paid $875.00 for the year. You can see why a lot of people didn't want it. But it was a wonderful experience. Lage: Now. you say it was half time. Does that mean you were paid for half time and worked full time? Constance: Yes. I was paid for half time, and I worked about two-and-a- half time. I wasn't married, and I worked twelve hours a day. seven days a week, regularly. Lage: Primarily teaching, or trying to keep up with your research? Constance: I did a little research, but net much. I taught three courses and was in charge of the herbarium. The herbarium had been neglected for eight years, and the teaching was in pretty bad shape, toe. I think I taught a total of five courses during the year. I taught two courses in taxonomy. I taught one in ecology, which I had never taken, and I taught one elementary course. I guess it just was four courses. I have forgotten the details of it new. Lage: It was a let of preparation. Constance: It was quite a bit. I was busy, no doubt about that, but I enj eyed it. Lage: This was Washington State College? 26 Constance: Yes, it was then. Washington State College at Pullman, which was (and to some extent, still is) basically an agricultural college. It is now Washington State University. Lage: Constance: Lage: Were you teaching agricultural students, then, primarily? Primarily students in agriculture and range management. Botany was net in agriculture, but it was on the edges of it. That's where most of the students came from. They used to say that the University of Washington had the School of Forestry, which taught them how to cut down trees and that Washington State, Pullman, taught range management, which was how to grow them. So there was quite an emphasis on ecology, systematics, and taxonomy. Where did you get your guidance on how to teach, how to prepare a course? Or was there any? Constance: Of course, as a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant for four years. When I worked in the Park Service, I lectured. I suppose I learned by imitation, primarily. I always made an outline of what I was going to talk about. I had notes. I don't think I ever fully wrote out a class lecture in my life. I'm sure that my lecturing may not have exactly delighted some of the people who would have liked to see less of plants, and so on, but I still think that if you knew your subject, are interested in it. and are conscientious, you can probably do a pretty fair job of teaching. I'm net much impressed by most of pedagogy, per se, which I suspect you'll find, is characteristic of most university professors. It used to.be a sort of accepted view that people who thought most about the presentation of information were probably net necessarily the most efficient in doing it. I took one course in education as an undergraduate, and I thought it was a disaster, frankly. I remember they gave us a final exam which had a hundred true and false questions. Each section was supposed to do half of them. I did half of them, and nobody else seemed to have moved, so I did the other half. They graded me on all of them for being smart, and I missed one. I think I missed the date of the founding of Harvard by two years or something, which I should have known better. (My apologies to Harvard's 350th anniversaryl) But, you know, there wasn't much substance to it. Undoubtedly, there is much te be learned about presenting materials, but I don't think that that is the crying lack in education. Seme people are good at it, and seme people are net good at it. I don't think I'm the world's greatest, but I don't 27 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: Constance Lage: Constance : think I'm the world's worst, either. At least I've been fairly successful with students. By and large, a let of it depends on the subject matter, and that depends on the individual, I think. Now. you were teaching ecology, and you really hadn't had any background in ecology. How did you go about teaching it? That's true. Well, there wasn't much substance to it, in those days, so I read a couple of books. I kept three jumps ahead of the class. After teaching one book for one year, I couldn't stand it anymore; I thought it was hopeless. So I got another one and used that for a couple of years, although it wasn't terribly appropriate for the area. Most of it was fairly simple-minded. A lot of these things have gotten much more complicated and much mere at least pseudo-scientific. Ecology new runs to graphs much more than it used to. Hew much substance there is in it, I'm net quite sure. Had you taken courses in the School of Forestry here as a student? No. I understand they had an ecologist. Was he Arthur Sampson? That's right, and I knew him rather well; I worked for him one summer; and in fact, I apparently made a great impression on him. Somebody had accumulated tremendous piles of eucalyptus from all ever the state — just a mess — and they wanted somebody to work ever this collection and put it in some sort ef order. I threw out nine- tenths of it and organized the rest of it. He thought I was great. Well, ecology is mostly common sense, and field observation, and so on. I don't think I did a sensa tional job ef teaching it. I don't think many other people did either. It was sort of in its infancy at that time, wasn' t it? Pretty much, pretty much. It was dominated by Frederick E. Clements, who, I'm sorry to say. was a windbag. It was terribly inflated, for one thing. Clements was a graduate ef the University ef Nebraska, who became probably the dominant figure in American ecology. He was particularly noted, among ether things, for his love ef picking up Greek terminology. They used to say he called a spade a geeteme. [Laughter] He had something more than that to go on, but he didn't believe in genetics. So he was not the world's greatest scientist, but was quite an influential figure for a long time in the field. 28 Constance: This department had a very lew and, tc some extent, I think, deserved opinion of ecology at the time. It wasn't for many years that we really could develop ecology in the department because there was so much dubiousness about it. Summer Work Collecting in the Redwoods Lage: Is there anything to add about your experience at Washington State? Constance: As I said, I accepted the position there starting in September of 1934. I took my degree in spring of '34, and that summer I immediately went up to Humboldt County because Jepson had been doing a survey of the recently-purchased Bull Creek Flat redwood grove, which was then bought by Save- the- Redwoods League as a park. He was making a survey of what was growing there, and he was not in good health, so he asked me if I would go. The arrangement was that I was to live in a CCC camp (Civilian Conservation Corps) and make as thorough a collection as I could. I could continue doing it until I felt it was no longer worthwhile going on. So I did that. It was a CCC camp in a place called Dyerville en the Eel River. Later, it was washed away in a flood, which was the end of Dyerville. It was quite an interesting experience because they had a group of young people — if I remember correctly, they were mostly from Akron, Ohio — and my impression was that probably most of them had never seen a tree before, and all of a sudden they were out in a redwood forest. It was run by army officers. When I first got there — I don't remember how I got up there — I presented a letter from Jepson to the commanding officer and asked if there was any place I could stay because we were miles from anything else. He read the letter and said, "Doctor, we don't have anything that would be suitable for you." And I said, "Well, I don't know what's in the letter, but I'm not fussy." So I wound up living in a bunk house with the staff, who were mostly eld lumbermen who managed activities for the youngsters who were out making trails, chopping down trees, or whatever. They — the lumbermen — were a very salty crew and were really quite a bit of fun. Naturally, having a young Ph.D. thrust in on them was a little unsettling, if anything. But I get along fine with them. I think the reason I did was that there was almost nothing by way of recreation. These chaps would come in — of course, they'd worked hard — they'd come in, have dinner, and go to bed. The only thing around, after you'd read the few books — which I did very quickly — were pulp magazines. They would read one of these things for about an hour before dinner, or just after dinner, 29 Constance: and then go to bed. I would read three or four of them an evening, and that really impressed them. [Laughter] That really impressed them. Here was a real egghead. But they were very nice to me. The first few days I was there, the weather was beautiful, and I collected masses of stuff. And when you collect the stuff, you have to dry the papers you put it in, or put in driers that you dry out, put in, and remove, and so on. It then rained for the next sixteen days. And if you didn't do some thing about it, you would have one of the most elegant examples of mold in the country. So I waited until they had gene out in the fields. Then I strung wires around the main room of the bunkhouse, ran the wires through these blotters, and fired up the wood stove to about ninety degrees to warm up the place, and dried the blotters all day. I then tried to get it cooled off by night. There was some mumbling about how hot the place was by the time they all get back, although it had cooled it off considerably by then. But. at any rate, that stove carried me through, and I managed to get this stuff through without it all spoiling. It was kind of fun. It actually reached a point where people would bring stuff in for me — both the kids and the staff would bring in things. They went out, you knew, farther in seme direction than I got. They brought in things I had never seen. I worked at it for about six weeks. I think. Collecting in the Northwest Constance: Then I went up to Oregon and met an old friend of mine who, incidentally, has just retired as a professional geologist for the Geological Survey of America. We went up in the Cascade Mountains and hiked all ever the place. I collected plants there, which I took to Pullman. I believe I had gotten a thou sand or so sheets — which is the unit we use for specimens. To give you an idea of what I mean, this is something brought in a couple of days age for me to leek at. This is a sheet. [shews Ann a folded half newspaper with dried plants in it] Lage: So a thousand of these is quite a collection. Constance: That's right. One of the ways that you develop herbaria is to get things from other institutions. You send them specimens and then they send you specimens. So you collect things in duplicate, and then you send the duplicates, and you get other things back extensively ever the course of time. It's a so- called exchange program. So I went to Pullman with seme 30 Constance: thousand sheets, or something of the sort, I think, to use for exchange se I could start in. As I said, the herbarium there had been completely defunct for all intents and purposes for eight years, so I tried to build up an exchange program. I'd go out and collect material, both to add to the collections there and to send out and get other things in return. And in the course of this, I learned the local flora. Lage: Did you have students helping you with it? Constance: Yes. This was in the National Youth Administration period — the NYA — and I usually had one or two student assistants. I was very fortunate in that one of the people I had as a teaching assistant, starting the first year — who really was my first graduate student — became a very distinguished botanist. This was Reed Rollins, who recently retired from Harvard as Asa Gray Professor of Botany. I wrote a biographical statement about that part of his career, which you can add to your collection of ammunition. It may give some sense to what we we were up to.* Lage: Se Washington State did have a graduate program? Constance: Yes — sort of. Lage: Well, this was sort of fortuitous that your first graduate student was very interested and capable. Constance: That's right. He was one of the best students I ever had. if not the best. He was about my age, or a couple of years younger. You see, I was fairly young at the time, and we had a good deal in common, as we still do today. I get my degree at twenty- five, se at that age your ties are much more to the graduate students, let's say, and students in general, than to the senior faculty. I should mention that Reed Rollins spent two years with me at Pullman. Then [Harry] Clements and I tried to arrange his going elsewhere for his doctoral work, and he went to Harvard. Not only did he do well, but he did so well that his success also helped me. Lage: He helped you, you say? Constance: He helped me because he made such an excellent record, and since he always credited me with being the one who launched him, that was nice. *See "The Years of Preparation, 1911-1948"; TAXON 31(3): 404. 1982. Constance Papers, The Bancroft Library. 401- 31 Constance: During the first two years, we did a let ef work in the field. The Pullman area is net terribly interesting, betanically; it's open "prairie" country. So we worked mere in northern Idaho, which was then quite wild, heavily forested. I don't knew what it is like now, I hate to think, but it probably is considerably less wild and considerably less forested. At that time, it was a very interesting, challenging country to be in. There were a lot ef things that were poorly known, if at all. A Network ef Correspondents Constance : Lage: Constance; Lage: People in other parts of the country interested in particular groups ef plants were very anxious to obtain material from there, so we get into correspondence with botanists around the country and beyond. And it was easy, in a sense, to make a name for yourself in your profession through correspondence. And I was a pretty good correspondent; I did a lot ef letter writing. I still do. I correspond with most everybody in my field in this country and abroad, I suppose. It seems to be a field that has mere ef a network of correspondents and sharing than seme do. I'm sure that's true. I think that's probably quite a good insight that, since we do depend upon exchange of materials and exchange of information — Well, I just get a letter from my first Chinese student, who asked me to send him a xerox of something which was written by a Frenchman, who had connections in Nepal — this sort ef thing gets pretty complicated. II Pullman being somewhat isolated, about the only way you could make contact with people in your profession was by correspondence or by an occasional visit. Of course, if a visitor came through, that was marvelous. When anybody came through. I'd probably take two days off and take them up in the mountains, or something of the sort. You made very good friends that way, and so by the time I had been there two or three years, I had at least made contact by mail with a fair share ef the people in the country in my field. And the fact that I'd come from Berkeley was probably a plus — people knew and admired Setchell and Jepsen. Se, Berkeley did have a reputation. 32 Constance: Berkeley had a good reputation, yes. Jepson was very much respected — his work was very much respected. Not very many people knew him personally. I think. In fact, I introduced him to several whom he had never met, although they lived next door, so to speak, for a number ©f years. Net only that, but Professor Abrams, who was the taxonomist at Stanford, was exceedingly nice to me. He wrote and asked about something or he wanted some specimen, and he sent me reprints. He treated me very generously. So I was the beneficiary of a lot of good will from various people for various reasons. Lage : This must be a continuing theme because you've mentioned that in your later career, people accused you of knowing everybody. Constance: Yes, I suppose that's true. I've always enjoyed people in the profession and out of it. And I always had a lot of correspon dents; I sort of lived by it, I guess. I probably spend a lot mere time on it than I ought te, but it's been satisfying. Marriage and Job 0 ffer from Berkeley. 1936-1937 Lage: Constance; Lage: Constance ; Lage: Constance: Lage: Is there anything else we should say about Washington? Did you get married while you were there? Yes. Sara (Sally) Luten. my college sweetheart, and I were married en July 12, 1936. So you can see that we're almost at our golden wedding anniversary. Was she from Portland? She was from Portland. She had lived alternately between Seattle and Portland. I met her when we were juniors in college at Oregon. One ef the reasons I wasn't too happy in my first couple ef years at Berkeley was that it was a long way from Portland. People in those days didn't think about just going ahead and getting married and making do as best they could. Some did. I thought what you were going to say is that they didn't think of not getting married, but just started living together. I don't think that that was an accepted part of the general way of doing things at that time. It seemed te me the decision te get married was more often based on whether you felt you were economically secure. 33 Constance: It was. Remember, we were children of the Depression, Her father was a banker, and her mother was the only girl in a family of five. Her four brothers and her father, Sally's grandfather, were all in the lumber business in one way or another, at one time or another. One of her uncles became a farmer ahead of his time in the Medford region. He should have been Harry and David — the exporters of beautiful fruit — he loved to grow beautiful fruit. But with the economy at that time, transportation just didn't make it commercially possible. So he grew beautiful fruit, but he didn't make a living doing it- Then when Sally's grandfather and his sens came west, they invested — they had done very well in Michigan — in timber in the Pacific Northwest. There were a series of fires and transport ation problems and so on, and they had a very rough time during the Depression. My family was also having a very rough time, so we had a great deal in common. The first automobile I ever owned I bought before we were married, so we took our wedding trip down the coast to Berkeley. We tried to trace this a few years age and found that lots of the places we remembered particularly were no longer visible — and are now covered with people. But at any rate, that was her first experience of California and after a year in Pullman, part of the spring in the Snake River Canyon, and temperatures of thirty-seven below in the winter, she was mere than willing to come back to Berkeley — and we had the opportunity te come. I mentioned Setchell before, whom I really hadn't known terribly well as a graduate student; I was rather in awe of him. He had retired by the time I went te Pullman. [He retired in 1934]. At all events, he was back East visiting his sisters in Rhode Island, and for seme reason he wrote a note to me, just sort of a well-wishing note: "If you have any problems, let me know." By this time I was up te my ears and net very happy with the situation at Pullman. And so I unloaded. I wrote him a long, garrulous letter about what a dump it was, a "cow college" with all the trimmings. There were a let ef things I didn't like. It was a school which had been progressively depleted. They had a conscious policy of hiring young people, getting as much out of them as they could, and then letting them go. That is, if you get an offer from someplace — fine — se, they get somebody else for less than they had paid you and worked the tail off him. As a result, the staff consisted largely ef people who had never gotten an offer from anyplace else and probably never would. I remember that the vice-president of the college was an officer ef one of the banks. One of my friends and colleagues said he had te borrow money to get there, and he had te borrow money to leave. 34 Constance: The gap between the younger faculty members and the elder ones was profound. There were about two older faculty members whom we had any respect for — maybe three. They didn't include the president of the college, by the way. The dean was henpecked, but we respected him, otherwise; he was a chemist. And then there was an eminent plant pathologist. Professor Heald. The only reason he was there, as far as we could see, was that he had an abominable temper, and nobody could get along with him, So he stayed. His sen became head of Ford Foundation, if I remember correctly. He was quite a distinguished guy, but irascible. And there was a classicist that we were very fond of. Otherwise, they were in entirely different worlds. Oh, there were a few of the younger people that were, you knew, en good terms with the people at the top. But when I was there, the faculty consisted mainly of young people who were trapped. This was the bottom, or as the current term has it, "the pits". Lage: Trapped by economic conditions of the time. Constance: That's right. I think fifty of us left the year I left, which was three years after I got there. This was just the way it was. Lage: It was a pretty large school. If there were fifty leaving, it must have been a large faculty. Constance: I don't know how big it was then. I'd hesitate to guess — maybe ten, twelve thousand students, something of that sort, I suppose. Very isolated; it's, you knew, clear off in the south east corner of the state. A long ways from the flesh pets of Seattle, shall we say. But. at all events. I wrote this long screed to Setchell, who loved it, and encouraged me to do more of it. And so I used to write him. He said, "Whenever you feel like unloading, go ahead and unload on me. I enjoy it." [laughter] So, I did. Lage: He must have understood something of what you were going through. Constance: Oh, yes. So. I told him I was going to get married and come to California. By this time, he was back in California, and he said, "Well, I'm going up to the Bohemian Grove, so you and your wife can have my apartment," which was down en Dwight Way. '^Because I realize you probably won't accept this otherwise, I'm sending you the key." So there was the key enclosed with the letter. Lage: Well, that is very interesting, from the way you described your relationship with him when you were here. 35 Constance: That's right. Well, we had become very chummy by then. At any rate, we came down and when we got here, we discovered he had his apartment all ready for us. He said, "I would rather enjoy being here with you than going to the Bohemian Grove for the time being." So he rented the apartment across the hall. I don't remember the duration of the Bohemian dub thing, but at any rate, he went to the latter part of it. He insisted en taking us all over the City and so on — a marvelous host. Of course, this was a bit sticky because I was a student of Jepson's. I didn't see Jepson during the time we were here, but he couldn't help but hear about it. Later, he wrote and said that if we came again, he would want the opportunity to play host, or whatever. But, at any rate, that went along all right. So we got married; we went back to Pullman. That is the year that Jepson retired. And I had one colleague in the department there that I was very fond of — his name was Harry Clements, a plant physiologist. I regard him as one of the two or three most influential people, really, in my life. He was a wonderful person. Lage: Was this at Washington? Constance: Washington State. He got a position at the University of Hawaii in 1937, and so here I was going to be left alone then. But about three months after he got his invitation, I got one from Berkeley. My wife loves to tell this. I went over and resigned to the dean. The dean regarded me as a sort of young hothead. First, I had seen the chairman. And the chairman said. "Veil, now, maybe we could do something about your salary." My salary, as I said, started off at half-time. It was an eleven-month salary at seventy-five dollars a month. At the end of the first year, I applied to the president asking to be relieved of two months of my summer obligation in order to get a job at the Soil Conservation Service so that I would have enough money to come back and teach in the fall — because I had had to borrow money on my insurance policy (I had a small one) to last out the year, even living in boarding houses and so en. I lived in a student boarding house. For seventy-five dollars a month, you know, you were lucky te be eating. And that worked: they doubled my salary, putting me on at full-time. But, at any rate. I went te the chairman of my department. He was net my favorite character, nor I his, although he disliked me less actively than he did my colleague Clements. We probably shortened his life, I think. But, at all events, he urged me te stay, and my reaction te that was. "Look, if I was worth whatever new, I was worth it six months ago," and what I'm 36 Constance: interested in is. you know. "What would you do for me then?" not what you would do for me new. I went over and carried the same message to the dean, and he was very nice. He said, "Tell me, what would it take to get you to stay?" And I said, "I can't think of anything. I think the institution stinks from the top to the bottom. It's rotten, especially at the top." He listened to this, not entirely unsympathetically, I think. But at any rate, this was a bright new day. A few days later, my wife said, "By the way, did you accept at Berkeley?" And come to think of it, I hadn't. [laughter] I was toe busy resigning at Pullman. Willis Jepsen in Retirement Years Constance: That was the year that everything happened — I was married in 1936 and this job offer came during the spring ef 1937. Then I get a letter from Jepsen saying that he was coming up to see me, which was sort ef incredible. But, at any rate, he drove up. He was a tall, lanky, very serious-looking person. He had bought a maroon-colored roadster — a Buick or something of the sort — en the grounds that — I can't remember. There was seme reason for it, other than mid-life crisis; he was past mid-life. At any rate, he arrived, and he came ostensibly to urge me net to come to Berkeley because Berkeley was a "nest ef vipers" and he thought the atmosphere was poisoned. Lage: He had already retired? Constance: He had just retired. But he hated practically everybody in the place, with bells. For me, it was a very interesting experience because I had always been rather in awe of him. And yet I realized, in a way, that I was master of the situation, so to speak. So I picked him up and drove him out into the country, and we sat under a pine tree. He poured out fifty years worth ef his grievances — real and imagined. I was very patient. And he just went on and en. It was kind ef embarrassing, but as I say. I realized that I was the parent and he was the child, so to speak. And when he got all dene, I said, "Professor Jepsen, I've already accepted the position. I'm sure you'd have wanted me to." I said, "I'm sorry for the disappointments, the frustrations and things that you feel. The people you're talking about, you know, are the ones who are going to be my colleagues. I have enough personality that I'm sure I'll make plenty ef enemies of my own. I don't think you'd want me te start my 37 Constance: career at Berkeley by taking en yours." He accepted it, I took him home for dinner, and he departed the next day. And that was all that was ever said about it. He stayed on the campus here. I had an office near him. I went out of my way so that if people came through whom I thought he might like to see, I attempted to arrange that. I encouraged at least one couple to stay overnight on the chance that Jepsen would see them, and he did. You passed little notes in, which he might or might net respond to. In fact, he might embarrass you by opening the door and appearing in person — you never knew. But, at any rate, he was very nice to us, but it was a kind of hands-off relationship. He was a very difficult person. I never felt really at ease with him. But I feel that, as I said, in some ways I got a good deal from him, although it's hard to say exactly what and how. But the two of them, Setchell and Jepson, really contributed a lot, I think , to my education in ways which are net all that apparent, even to me. Well, at any rate, we came to Berkeley in fall of 1937, and here we still are. Lage: That's a good place to pause and start up next time. Constance: I think so. I probably left out things I should have put in. 38 IV ADDENDUM ON THE EARLY YEARS [Interview 2: January 30, 1986] ## Family and Family Life in Oregon Lage: We're going to review just a little bit from last week. Constance: I wanted to pick up a few points that you asked that perhaps are not of great significance. You asked about my family back ground. I mentioned that three of my four grandparents were immigrants. My mother's family — the Clifford family — apparently went way back in New England history. Three of her ancestors were apparently volunteers at Bunker Hill, and the story is that one of them lost his pants at Bunker Hill. He lest a bundle of clothing, which may or may net have ever have been reclaimed — I don't know. Presumably, one of the Q if fords was a governor of Massachusetts, another one was U. S. attorney general in the cabinet of the president who I think is generally thought te have been the weakest of all presidents, notably Franklin Pierce. So much for genealogy. You also asked about family life, religion, politics. social life and so en. My parents were Presbyterians — not very rabid ones. My recollection is that they had attended the Methodist church in Wisconsin, but when one of the ministers asked them to pray for the poor ungodly Presbyterians down the street, they severed their connections and moved over to the Presbyterian Church. Church was net a particularly great factor in my life, although the family, when I was quite young, used to go te town, which was two miles away, to attend church. And, of course, I went te Sunday school and had the various interests that are cultivated for youngsters in that kind ef a setting. Later, I think my parents probably stopped going very often, maybe as a matter of health — I'm net quite sure. And then, sometimes, I would ge with boys ef my age who lived somewhere near me. So. for a series ef years. I know I attended the 39 Constance: Methodist church. Sometime after that — probably after we moved to town — I attended the Christian church. It was something to do on Sunday and I don't think it did a great deal to influence me. although perhaps seme. There was net a tremendous amount of social life. Seme- times my parents would invite people from the church out to the farm. People would like to come out for picnic. And some of their progeny became good friends. At all events, they furnished peer companionship. Politics would be a little hard to classify, I think. My parents were relatively conservative, but my mother was a bit of a romantic. I remember she voted for Herbert Hoover because she thought he was a great humanitarian. (And, of course, he was after World War I). And I think probably after that, she either voted for Norman Thomas or for one of the Democrats, but I really don't knew. I don't remember my father ever really discussing politics, as such. Lage: It wasn't a highly political family. Constance: It was not a highly political family, that's right. We were always interested in everything, but I don't recall that we were terribly doctrinaire about much of anything. You asked about reading. I don't remember particularly. I think I probably read everything that came into the house. I remember I became fascinated by one of these amazing series of, probably, thirty-nine volumes of the motorcycle beys and what. But, I think I read quite indiscriminately most anything. Lage: There's nothing in particular that you remember that had a big influence? Constance: Net particularly. I de remember when my mother used to read to me when I was a small child. And I remember, I think* that one day, she completely disrupted me by saying, "Well, today you're going to read to me." Just when that was, I don't know. I can remember that she was ironing at the time, but I couldn't date it. Lage: Did you read any kind of nature- oriented books? Constance: Yes. Of course, I had the National Geographic magazine. Then when I get interested in butterflies, I would go to the public library in town and get somebody's book en the moths of the world and somebody else's on the butterflies. Now that was 40 Constance: really related to my developing natural history interest. But I don't remember any really intensive campaign to read in any particular genre. Eugene was a 'town of. I believe, about twelve to fifteen thousand at the time. There was one high school and — actually there were two. One developed as an offshoot of the university and was the university high school. It was quite small; I did not attend it. I don't know of any particular reason why I did or didn't, but I didn't. Lage: They did have a public library? Constance: Oh, yes, they had a Carnegie library. Every town did. Western Oregon was largely settled by people from the East Coast and the upper Midwest. It was the kind of town in which intellectual affairs were maybe net stressed, but pretty well accepted. One point I forget to make was that my parents were members of a grange, and we used to attend meetings there. The thing I remember particularly is the wonderful feed they had, which, ef course, children enjoyed no end. I think I was barely mature before it occurred to me that you could ge te a picnic and not start with the cake, pie, and ice cream, but te eat all of that ether stuff instead. It always seemed te be a terrible waste of capacity. The Graduate Program at Berkeley Constance: I think I probably covered adequately my undergraduate education at Oregon, which was basic biology with seme remarkable holes in it, so that when I came to Berkeley, there was a lot I didn't knew. Fortunately, I realized that te some degree before my professors did. Se I did my best te fill in the notable gaps. I think I said before I was not too happy in the first two years. I didn't have any very clear goal. It's true that I was interested in biology, and more in botany perhaps than other kinds. There was nothing like dissecting a pickled shark on a hot day te convince a biologist that plants are more attractive than animals. And I responded te that. Lage: So when you came here you weren't necessarily set in botany. Constance: I came as a graduate student in botany — as a teaching assistant in botany — so it was expected that I would go on in botany. It would have always been possible, I'm sure, to change if I'd really wanted te, but I'm net sure that I ever wanted to. 41 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : After I had obtained my master's degree and started assisting in the systematics — or taxenomic area — under Jepson's general jurisdiction (although without a great deal of personal contact) I was thoroughly established and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. There was no great problem in going en with that. It was a period of considerable economic stress. I didn't eat very lavishly, and I remember I managed to eat en fifty cents a day. which wouldn't be possible new. Did you find your fellow students were in somewhat the same circumstance? I suspect so. There were not very many of them. Several were married. One or more of them lived in the same kinds of boarding houses that I did — sometimes the same ones. We lived en our teaching assistant ships, without any doubt. Hew many women were in the graduate program, and how many graduate students in the program? It was a small program, no doubt about that. I don't know that I can really tell, but I would say there were about as many women as men. Botany has traditionally been a field that was accessible to women. Many of the early writers felt that it was particularly appropriate for women because of the delicacy of plants versus animals. I'm net sure I could give any real idea of the number of graduate students. I can tell something about those who emerged with their doctoral degrees, but there were quite a number of women who didn't. They took master's degrees and went into teaching, er they get married and didn't go on with it or didn't go en with it for a number of years. I think it's fair te say that there was always a sizable number of women. But on the whole, it was a very small program. I don't suppose there were more than ten to a dozen graduate students at most at any one time. There were several additional people associated with the botanical garden er the herbarium. Of course, there were not very many grants in these days — extramural grants. Professor [T. Harper] Geedspeed was something of a genius and ahead of his time in obtaining grants. He get money from the Rockefellers and various other places, and he always had several assistants working for him, one way or another. The interesting thing is that, at the time, I think the general feeling was that this sort of group approach really wasn't quite ethical, that you should be doing your own work. 42 Lage: For him te have assistants doing the spade work? Constance: That's right. It had not really taken in the field of botany, at least. I think it probably did rather early in medical research. But the whole idea of these mass approaches which are so popular new just was not heard of. You leek at an article in Science now — if there aren't six authors, it's amazing. In these balmy days people used to wonder if it really were quite right to have a co-auther. So it was a very different sort of picture. Looking at Photographs from the Pullman Period Constance: I think we may have covered the whole of Washington State enterprise, I have a — Lage: You're looking at phete albums, very well-organized and labeled. Is this from Washington State? Constance: This is from Washington State. It was a fairly good learning experience. I took a half-time job te teach three courses and run the herbarium at seventy-five dollars a month. I lived in a student boarding house. Lage: You didn't have the status one associates with a professor. Constance: In a way. All professors were automatically called "Dec." That was the way they were designated. And we had very close rela tionships with the undergraduates and relatively few graduate students. Probably as young faculty members, we had much better relationships than some of the older ones did. I still hear from a few. There are three or four people who write te me still who always address me as "Dec," which I find rather amusing. Lage: You gave me the piece on Reed Rollins, which was very interesting. Constance: Yes. Here's the picture of him in 1936. Lage: It sounds as if you made a let of collecting trips with him. Constance: That's right. I was in charge ef the herbarium. It didn't carry a special stipend or title, but somebody had to do it, and I liked it. I had a National Youth Administration grant. Grants were made to the college, and I managed te get one ef those and had several people working for me. 43 Constance: Most of the springs and summers, when I could, I tried to get out into the field. Seme of these pictures shew trips to the Big Bend country, which is the grain-producing country of southern Washington. The Snake River, which forms the boundary between Idaho and Washington — and Oregon in part — flows on into Washington and gees ever toward the Columbia. Among my com panions on trips were people like J. F. Gates dark, who is a distinguished entomologist, new retired from the Smithsonian Institution; Reed Rollins, who has retired as a Gray professor at Harvard; Leonard Machlis. who was chairman of the botany department here before his death, and a number of others. Lage: Was Machlis a student ef yours? Constance: No, he was a plant physiologist. He was a protege ef mine, but net a student. We used to take the students on field trips which usually combined — en their part at least — squirrel shooting with investigating the biota. Lage: Your album has maps ef where you went? [looking at photographs] Constance: Oh. yes. I remember particularly a trip to the Blue Mountains, an isolated range in northeastern Oregon, and perhaps even mere interesting, the Wallewa Mountains, which represent a little sort ef pocket range — a piece of the Reeky Mountains in terms ef the biota. I went into the Wallow as for a week's trip accompanied by one economics professor and one mule. The economics professor was considerably mere tractable than the mule, but it was a very interesting experience. Lage: Was he just going for the fun of it? Constance: He just went for the fun ef it; it was something to do. Seme of this country was extremely remote. There was the town ef Imnaha. Oregon. It's off the Snake River; the Imnaha River flews into the Snake. Lage: Had you done any of that kind of thing as a young bey — or with your family? Any kind ef wilderness trip? Constance: Oh, not quite the same. The scale of the country here was much grander, less civilized and se on. But I was always used to being out in the weeds. Some ef the country in adjacent Idaho and Washington was fairly spectacular — some ef this volcanic country, waterfalls. We used to go particularly into northern Idaho because the country around Pullman was net forested, excepting the canyons around a few rocky hills (Steptoes). This is Rollins again. [indicating en photo]. 44 Lage: Would the premise of someone like Rollins have been apparent to you at the time? Constance: It was to me. Yes. there never was any doubt about it. One of the roXites we were interested in following was that of Lewis and Clark, who traversed the country from Montana westward. They came down the Qearwater River and had camps at specific places, and we tried to find the same places, and indeed, if we could, tried to find the same plants they had collected. Lage: So they did a considerable amount of collecting? Constance: Yes. Lage: And where are these collections? Constance: Their official collections went to Philadelphia Academy, but a good share of them went to the British Museum. So now if you want to see plants collected by Lewis and Clark, Philadephia thinks they have them, but the British Museum usually dees. It was beautiful country — very wild country. We found plants that were extremely interesting. One of them was actually named for me: Cardamine censtancei. named for me by a botanist at Stanford to whom I sent material. You see, it was rugged, beautiful country. I would hate to go back to it now because I'm sure it's so changed that it would no longer be attractive. One of the things we used to do was to take a group of students of botany, forestry or whatever, and spend five or six days going up the Snake River, through the deepest part — so called Hell's Canyon — and camp without shelters except tents. The first year I see that my colleague, Harry Clements, was in charge and I was the co-organizer. The following year the clipping says: "Dr. Constance will direct the Snake River excursion. " There were seme interesting characters. One little motor boat could take the whole group, excepting where the rapids were tee shallow. It was a fast-moving stream. The Snake really runs between the Wallow a range on one side — on the Oregon side — and the Seven Devils range en the Idaho side, so the river is constricted into a very narrow zone. We used to say it took one day to get up the stream and about fifteen minutes to come down. It was breathtaking, there's no doubt. Lage: And you traveled up it by meterboat? Constance: That's right. 45 Lage: They do that new, to a degree. Constance: But. of course, they have flooded it to seme extent. I don't know hew much — I haven't been back in years. Lage: I took a raft trip there. There are seme jet boats, which are considered to be intruding on the wilderness, that try te go up it. Constance: Well, that was the only way of negotiating it at that time. There were several families who had their ranches on the Snake River and also on the Imnaha and some of the ether tributaries. Then there were only two ways of getting there: one was up the river and the ether was te ceme in by pack train over the wall of the mile-deep canyon. And in real emergencies, they sometimes flew in and flew somebody eut — someone stepped on by a horse, or something. [indicating on photograph] This was one of the beats that we were en and these are "bucking" the rapids. And every so often, when it became particularly shallow and the water parti cularly fierce, we all had to get out and walk around. One of the places that we get eut and walked around was a river bar and en that we found a spectacular purplish-red flowered plant which was identifiable as a "four o'clock". Actually, the boat captain had told us about it. Rollins and I investigated it and discovered that* indeed, it was something that had not gotten in the literature. So we described it and named it; we named it after the captain — but that's the story of Mirabilis macfarlanei. Lage: Was he knowledgeable about the plants? Constance: He was knowledgeable about the plants to an extent. Eight years before I got te Washington State, the botanist there was Harold St. John, who has been at the University of Hawaii for many years. St. John had apparently told him what seme of the things were, and he had remembered. We didn't know that St. John had actually collected this thing. When St. John left Washington State for Hawaii, he took everything away that he thought might be of any interest. Occasionally, we'd run across seme scrap of paper, and we saw a note te the effect that there were several things in the canyon that were interesting, which he was going to do something about someday. One of them was a cactus, and one was a member of the same family that the "four o'clock" belonged to. But it was so wildly remote from the genus. Mirabilis. it never occurred te us, frankly, that it could be the same thing. He had it grossly misplaced. 46 Constance: I also was responsible for the naming of a phlox with Dr. Wherry at the University of Pennsylvania who asked me to collect material of it, which I did — growing in a clump of prickly pear. He published it in our names. I don't think it had a great deal going for it. but 'it was very interesting to be involved in such a thing. [indicating en photograph again] This was the ether way of getting in — the pack train — going up the side of the canyon. But those beat trips up the Snake River were certainly one of the most interesting phenomena. While I was at Pullman, in one way or another I spent as much time as I could trying to learn the flora and to see what the country was like. I remember an incident in one of the years — this one was 1935 — in which we got thoroughly snowed-on when we were in camp. There was nothing you could do; you were just snowed-on. Lage: Constance; Lage: Constance ; Lage: Constance : What time of year would that have been? It probably was about April, off my beets trying to get my horrible case of poison oak. I remember that I burned the soles feet warm, and Rollins got a I took my wife en a trip in 1937 — we were married in 1936 — and this was essentially her first outdoor experience. I wouldn't say it was the last, but she was net as happy abeut it as she might have been. I suppose it really didn't occur to me hew much of a shock it would be for her because it was completely foreign te her whole experience. I remember we landed en this river bar. I was in charge ef the whole excur sion and was responsible for trying to get things set up. And what happened was that I get things set up, but I didn't do anything for us. She was stuck with the job ef trying te put up the tent, which she had never dene, and it was a fairly grim initiation for her. But it was fascinating country; she appre ciated the country but her tradition was not a — She was mere ef a city girl? That's right. She was not an eut-of-deers type. New, did that continue? Did she net take part in your various collecting trips? She went with me most ef the time, excepting when I went some distance off the road. But we did everything together, essentially. From time te time, somebody would visit Pullman, and that was such a rarity and such an exciting thing that it was great fun. One ef the visitors I remember particularly was the late 47 Constance: J. W. Stacey of the Stacey book company in San Francisco. He was an expert on sedges, which are a particularly nasty group of grass-like plants. He would go around to the colleges osten sibly to peddle the books the Stacey corporation was publishing. But if there was any herbarium material there, he usually would desert the book-agency role for that of a taxonomist. [indicating another photograph] This was Harold St. John, who paid a visit to Pullman when I was there; he is new in his nineties. Conservative Administration at Washington State Constance: I think I did tell you that when we were at Pullman there was a student revolt, which I suppose was a sort of preeducatien for Berkeley. I have a flyer of their demands which included [reading from flyer]: "More student than faculty control, a progressive clean-minded administration, new closing hours — eleven o'clock week nights and one o'clock weekend nights — " Lage: That's pretty radical. Constance: "College and social rules should be published, no compulsory class attendance. Wednesday night mixers and desserts, abolition of Dean Annie's suggested picnic and social rulings, abolition of ultraconservative dictatorial administrative policies." Signed, the Students Liberty Association. Lage: Can you elaborate en any of these? Constance: My recollection is that students couldn't carry a blanket if they went en picnics. And I don't really remember quite what else. But restrictions were, by and large, fairly heavy-handed Victorian rules. Pullman was a very conservative town. It had more churches than most anything else. The people were basic ally fairly solid midwest Protestants. My own chairman was, I think, a deacon. I forget whether the Methodist church has deacons or not. If they do, he was one. II Constance: He was also dean of the graduate division. The thing that was particularly startling to me as a biologist was that he didn't believe in evolution. Lage: This was the head of your department? 48 Constance: Lage: Constance : Lage: The head of the department, and also the dean of the graduate division. We had seme sort of a departmental seminar — all departments seem to have seminars — and some student was reporting. I couldn't tell you what he was reporting about, but it had something t'e do with evolution. The student said some thing — some reference to evolution — and everybody said, "Heh, heh, heh, heh. heh." Well, I didn't get the message, and I climbed down the student's neck and — New, why did you climb down the student's neck? For pooh-poohing the idea of evolution, He made some nasty remark about it and all the other kids laughed; obviously, evolution was something you sneered at. My recollection is that the chairman of the department didn't return to any of the seminars thereafter. Did he make any comment to you? Constance: He never said anything, net te me, no. [indicating a clipping in the phote beek] This was a little item. One of the English professors was fired for writing a book that had been reported to be racy. [reading] It said, "Dr. Samuel M. Steward returned home here today" — this is Columbus, Ohio — "and said his removal from the English department of Washington State College resulted from 'rumors' that he had written a racy novel. Dr. Steward, who was dismissed by President Helland. also said that he had been accused of taking part in a student strike. 'Four hours after the president delivered his commencement address extolling the virtues of liberty and free speech,' Dr. Steward said, 'he summarily dis missed me for exercising a little academic freedom and told me that my going was but the forerunner of six or eight more to go. '" Lage: Do you remember that incident? Constance: Oh, yes, I knew him. He wrote a book called — I think it was Angels en the Bough. I don't think I ever read it. I don't knew how risque it was — by modern standards, net very. But I think it dees suggest that it was a fairly tight little community, and that there was a very strict dichotomy between the older people and the - inger people. I think I've said this before: there were abou o members ef the faculty the younger people respected, and ve w ef the deans and the president were included in that s- roup. Incidentally, here ; committee notes and reports. This is the Committee e .emic Freedom and Tenure reporting on the Steward case at Wasnington State College. [reads seme of 49 Constance; Lage: Constance: Lage: the report] "Angels on the Beugh has received favorable reviews and appears to the chairman of the committee as a book showing great promise. Since being refused reappeintment at the State College of Washington* Dr. Steward has been employed by Loyola University of Chicago.11 The administrators at this Catholic institution had read his book before appointing him. It was a big controversy, then, among the faculty. This was a committee of the national group, the American Association of University Professors. It was interesting because when faculty members are net rehired, they are supposed to be given some kind of adequate warning. Steward was fired after commencement. One of the regulations reads as follows: "In case it is necessary to notify a member of the faculty he must sever his connection with this institution, the Board of Regents is authorized that this notice be given ordinarily net later than April 15. and with very few exceptions, net later than commencement day.11 So does that tell us something about the tone of the school that you were portraying last time? Constance: Yes. I think it tells you a good deal about it. Lage: That and the head of the graduate division not believing in evolution. Constance: That's right. It's come a long, long way since then. In spring of 1937, I was invited to come to Berkeley. One of the last things I did from Pullman was to go to the one- hundredth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Denver. I drove with my colleague Clements all the way to Denver and back. These were various things along the way. [indicating en photographs] This was Harry Clements, my colleague who went to Hawaii, and this was Leonard Machlis. who was a student and who later was chairman of Botany here. We were at Denver. Rollins, who had been at Harvard, came out, and we spent a day together in Rocky Mountain Park. These are pictures on the way back home. This was another trip when they were building Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington. Lage: Did you do any collecting, in that instance, to get something that might be destroyed by the dam? Constance: No, we didn't. It was dene later from Washington State, actually, after we had left. 50 Constance: This was more collecting in Idaho. My wife was with me, and we met the Pennells from Philadelphia and camped. They were trying to fellow Lewis and Clark's trail, and we got them up into some fairly weird, wonderful country. This is our last day in Pullman. We lived in an apartment house which was familiarly known as "the slum." This is my friend Harry dements and his wife. She just died in Hawaii, recently. Ashley Weeks is a sociologist and Paul Fendrick was a psychologist. They were among our closest friends. Sally had her own opportunities to assert her independence, too. She got the idea of painting the walls of our apartment blue-green. Nobody in Pullman had had anything but beige-colored walls in the memory of man. and this really created quite a sensation. Lage: With the landlord? Constance: No, the landlord apparently didn't give a damn. But just within the community — "Do you like Sally's walls?" They were horrible, according to seme ef the mere conservative residents. One person who's net shewn was a women's physical education instructor who was interested in dance and a disciple ef Martha Graham. After we got to Berkeley she wrete Sally that she had painted her walls "Australian prune"! This, I think, gives you a fair idea ef my thoughts about it. As we left Pullman, I looked back and took a picture and I said, "A reusing Bronx cheer for you. Smug little cow college." Lage: [laughing] It sounds like you were quite happy to be coming to Berkeley. Constance: That's right. And that's a picture ef Harry Clements and me. Lage: Although you had a number of good friends, it seems. Constance: We always had good friends. Lage: All in the same beat. Constance: Yes, that's right. Well, ef course, that makes, I think, for long friendships. Mutual adversity is a very, very strong bend. Lage: How about your wife — was she glad to be leaving? Constance: Yes. 51 V BOTANY AT BERKELEY: THE PREWAR YEARS The Department following S etch ell' 8 Retirement II Lage: Let's review the situation in the Department of Botany at Berkeley during the prewar period. Constance: I officially joined the department in 1937. Setchell — the forty-year chairman — had retired at the end of June 1934 (the same time I received my doctorate and left for Pullman.) Jepson retired in 1937. and that gave the occasion for my return. Lage: You more or less replaced Jepson? Constance: I was more or less a replacement for Jepson. Actually, when Setchell retired, the question of departmental chairmanship came up. The logical person to assume the chair was probably Good- speed. Goodspeed was quite ambitious. As I've indicated before, he was a genius at getting together a group of assistants in some sort of a combined research activity, which some felt was really not quite proper — a little ahead of its time, at any rate. And he had apparently lobbied very hard to be chairman. Why anybody wanted to be chairman still remains a mystery to me. Lage: Who would pick the chairman? Constance: The chairman was probably at that time picked by President Spreul himself, probably on the nomination of the dean — though I'm not sure about that — probably after some polling of the wishes of the faculty. I know what it was like later; I'm not entirely sure of what it was like then, but I expect that that would be the way it would go. At all events. Goodspeed had lined up some very strong support among the Regents but had apparently antagonized others as well. There undoubtedly was a faculty committee at work on the problem, because Sproul was very good about using faculty committees. 52 Constance: Just about this time, Dennis Hoagland — who was in charge of the laboratory of plant nutrition and was a very fine scholar noted for his work on essential elements in plant growth — was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. I assume, without really knowing it, that the committee may have been deadlocked or at least had varying' opinions. But here, all of a sudden, was a botanist — at least a plant physiologist — who received one of the highest accolades and was a natural alternative candidate. Jepson would probably have been about the world's worst chairman, but he hated Geodspeed and probably would have accepted it rather than see Geodspeed get it. It would have been courteous to offer it to Jepson. but they didn't dare because he might have accepted it to keep Goodspeed from getting it. [laughter] So the Heagland solution was really ideal except for Hoagland, who, I think, hated all administration with a great passion. What happened was that — again. I assume as the result of the advice of the committee, they took plant nutrition and part of plant pathology and some other elements from the College of Agriculture and merged them with botany to give botany a broader, and. to seme extent, a mere experimental base. Lage: New who would have determined that? Would this have been Heagland' s idea, or was this something Spreul had in mind? Constance: I don't knew. I suspect it would be a natural outcome of such an investigation at that time. Plant physiology, which is a key sub-unit ef any study of plant life, was very weak in the department — so much so that the teaching of it had gone pretty largely over te Agriculture. There was always seme feeling that Agriculture was trying to muscle in on plant science and seme feeling in Agriculture, certainly, that they didn't like the way seme ef plant science was taught in the botany department. Constance: So there was always a certain amount of border warfare. Agri culture, after all, had the weight of the agricultural community behind it. And botany really didn't have any influential con stituents when you come right down te it. Botany is always at a disadvantage. Nowadays, there are very few botany departments; most plant study, excepting in agricultural schools, is under biology. In biology departments, botany is usually the runtiest pig in the litter. Zoologists tend to look at plants as one mere phylum ef animals and not necessarily the most important one. S© the botanists are almost always in a minority, both in number and influence. 53 Constance: I remember serving en a committee at Cornell, having to do with the reorganization of their botany and biology because botany there was in the College of Arts and Sciences, which is the private institution, whereas most of plant science was in the agricultural part,' which is the state College of Agriculture. They were trying to put them together. I remember getting a telephone call from one of the vice-presidents we had met with saying, "Ve're having trouble with our botanists. Can you explain it to me?" I said, "Sure, very simple. If people were plants, you'd be having trouble with your zoologists." [laughter] So there was always a little bit of that. Some of my younger colleagues who were mycologists — students of fungi — felt that the plant pathologists in the College of Agriculture, were trying to overwhelm them and steal their stuff. Physiolo gists felt rather similarly. But at any rate. Alva R. Davis, who had a real flair for administration, succeeded Hoagland after a couple years. Again it's a guess, but my guess is that the committee originally wanted to appoint Davis, but that they ran into the Goods peed business; as a result, they put in Hoagland to serve in transition. He served around two years, and then Davis became chairman. Davis was chairman by the time I got here in 1937. He was an outstanding chairman. He was not only my predecessor as chairman of the department, but as dean of Letters and Science and also as vice-chancellor. And I have a world of affection and admiration for him. He certainly is the person who get me involved in university affairs. The interesting thing is that he was not very happy with my performance, at least above the departmental level, because I insisted on continuing to teach and do research. He felt this to be a denigration of the administrative job. He, himself, gave up his professional field when he went into administration. Then, of course, when he retired from it, he was lest. I had seen that happen to so many people that it was a trap I was not about to walk into if I could help it. Well, what happened was that a number of people were brought into the department from plant pathology, plant nutrition, and I believe a few others. Most of them ultimately returned to the place whence they came; a few ethers stayed. When I came, I was put in charge en very short notice — right in the first semester — of general botany. Lage: That must have been an introductory botany course. Constance: That's right. Someone had decided that every laboratory section should have a faculty member in charge of it. These people who were transferred in from Agriculture, who would have had a 54 Constance: minimum ef student contact, were net very happy at this rele. And, as I say. most of them had figured out some way ef getting the hell out ef it. But I remember one man. a plant pathologist who was still there. I knew him; I liked him very much. But I finally went to the head ef the department and said, "Leek, he's miserable, and he really isn't doing anything for us. Why don't you let him 'out ef it?" So they did. And that was pretty much the end ef the amalgamation, I think, excepting that Davis remained as chairman, and Howard Reed stayed until his retirement. In one way or another, there was a broadening ef the attitudes ef the department. Several of the people who had been professors when I was a student were now retiring. Se it was basically a new department, and Davis set out to build a department with real morale. He was very successful; he built a really distinguished one. Lage: He was good at attracting faculty? Constance: Not only that — he was good at developing high morale in the faculty that were here. Geedspeed essentially went his own way. Davis ence said that he never gave him any trouble. He had the botanical garden, and he went his own way and never came to departmental meetings or things ef that sort, se that was net a problem. So there was just a small group ef us. and we get along very, very well. Lage: Were you all ef a mind about what direction botany should take? Constance: Well, I don't think there were any particular doctrinal struggles. We did our best in our own areas, and we accepted what our colleagues did in theirs. When eur activities touched upon each ether, we cooperated. We used to have joint projects from time te time, seme of which I will mention later. Mostly we did eur own jobs, and we were on excellent terms with each other. We saw each other socially, to seme extent — you knew, seme more than others — depending partly upon age and where we lived and so on. But it was a very harmonious time. In my first years, up until, certainly, the time I went to Washington, I lived essentially within my department. I think I went te a faculty meeting very seen after I came here. President Spreul got up and said something and seme faculty member popped up and jumped down his threat. Spreul very benignly heard him out, deferred te him, and se on. The 55 Constance: contrast with Pullman was fantastic, and I thought that the university administration was in good hands, and I wouldn't really concern myself with it. I remember that fairly early Davis said once. "I think you and [Ralph] Emerson ought to get involved in university affairs." I told him, "I don't think we're ready to. I don't think we really know enough." And I think that was probably right. So we really didn't. We were working in our own vine yards, to be trite. I was active in the herbarium and in teaching elementary botany. I worked closely with my senior colleague. Herbert Mason. Ihe way things were set up, he had the graduate students unless they expressly insisted en working with me. I didn't pay any attention to who were his graduate students and who were mine. He tended to give his students a sort of hands-eff treatment, and they'd come to me and I'd try to work things through with them and with him. It was all very harmonious. Lage: So you worked with some students that were officially his. Constance: That's right. I mentioned Morrison, who had been a student of Jepson's, and was now a student of Mason's. We went on exten sive field trips together; we were nearly the same age. Lage: Did you enter in more with your students because of your reaction to your own treatment — not just at Pullman, but when you were a graduate student here? Or was it your youth? Constance: I just don't know. I didn't have any scars. I was happy to be here. Once I got to Berkeley, it would never have occurred to me to leave. One thing that's interesting — this came up years later — that I hadn't known about, was that one of the members of the Academic Senate budget committee told me that he had run across a document that showed that somebody — either the provost or the president or whomever — had recommended during World War II that for economic reason a particular age group of faculty be let go. It was my group — right across the boardl It included at least one Nobel laureate and maybe a couple. Apparently, the budget committee talked the president out of doing this and suggested he give them war leave instead. Lage: You mean, let them go so they could — ? Constance: Let them go so they wouldn't be a drag on the University. You know, the University was under straitened circumstances during the war, so you would just fire them. 56 Constance: Lage: Constance; I knew the University of Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor, fired all the people they had hired in the previous year or two. My colleague, George Papenfuss, had joined the staff at Hawaii and come clear from Sweden, where he was studying; he was in Sweden from South Africa. He got to Hawaii and was promptly fired because they decided to cut back on faculty. At all events, we didn't know about it. But, as I said, it never occurred to me, once I get here, that they could get along without me. That course would have had quite an effect en the University. I wonder how seriously that was entertained. I don't know. It could have been disastrous because immediately after the war we had this fantastic flood of students, and the University staffed very, very rapidly. It made some mistakes in doing it. but en the whole it did pretty well. Setchell and Jepsen at Odds Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : You told me before something about the division between Jepson and Setchell and hew it came out in doctoral exams. I wonder if you would want to tell something about that. I don't think, as far as I know, that either of them ever used the opportunity to attack each other through the students. If yei remember in George R. Stewart's Rector's Oral — do yeu knew that? I haven' t read it. Well, it is a stery about a graduate student who is the victim of warring professors. The thing is, we knew perfectly well that Jepsen1 s ideas and Setchell' s ideas were somewhat different. And it was even more tricky; I had Geodspeed and {Ernest B.] Babceck en one or another of my committees with Jepsen. Goedspeed and Jepsen were net on speaking terms. [Richard M. ] Hoi man was on one of them, and he was on speaking terms with scarcely anybody by that time. And there you were: if you were asked a question, how were you to answer it? You knew that if yeu said one thing, yeu weuld offend Jepson. If yeu answered it te please him, yeu might offend the people in genetics. So it required agile tightrope walking. What kinds of things were the disagreements over? just personal things, they were — These weren't No, they had te do. te some extent, with the fact that taxonetny-- the classification of plants — was at the stage of depending upon a wider range of characters than previously, such things as 57 Constance: Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : cytology and genetics, which had net really been a part of the mix of methodology in Jepson's training, let's say. He was pretty much self- trained, anyway. But these things were just coming to the fore. I mentioned that one of my friends was Reid Brooks, who was a graduate student with Goodspeed. I took a course in cytology from Goodspeed here, but he didn't teach us anything I really wanted to know. He didn't teach us methods we could apply taxonemically. which is what I would have liked. We were given prepared slides, and we looked at these endlessly. That was fine, but it didn't really turn into something we could use. I was working on the taxonomy of a group of plants. I had heard about polyploidy. which is the addition and multiplication of chromosomes — hence genetic material — and I wanted to investigate it. So through Reid and others. I actually learned how to make root-tip smears and counted a few of these things. But I didn't dare tell Jepson that I had dene it. New. he might net have minded — I don't know. But the general supposition was that he'd probably throw you out on your ear if you get into things of this sort. I remember after one of the oral exams. I felt I had dene wretchedly. I ran into Babcock and Goodspeed. who congratulated me on having passed. Geedspeed said. "I think it's wonderful the way you pulled the wool ever Jepson's eyes." Then a little later I ran into Jepson when I was back in my office. Jepson tapped en my deer and came in beaming, congratulated me. and said it was wonderful the way I had taken care of Geedspeed and Babcock. [laughing] You must have had a way — I must have had a rabbit's foot in my pocket, very good to me. But they were all What about Setchell in that kind of controversy? Was he mere receptive to new ideas? Setchell was a "big-picture" man. He was interested in world distributions, and formation of coral atolls, and all sorts ef things. He was a very stimulating teacher in that respect. He made you think; he knew what had been written about this or that. A Scotsman came out with a three-part book on the evolu tion of ferns. Setchell promptly taught a course on it. He had dene a lot of traveling in the South Pacific, and he had pictures and materials. He was extraordinarily stimulating. Jepson. you see. we didn't have much contact with. He was a remote figure, and we were in awe of him and had a great deal of admiration for him. 58 Lage: He was more of a narrow-focused — ? Constance: Yes, he was a native son who was interested in the flora of California, He thought it was his God-given preserve, and it was a time when just to know what was here was the first order of the day, so to speak. So it was appropriate to the time. It wasn't so much that Setchell and Jepson were opposed on some theory, doctrine, or anything of that sort — it's simply that, for one thing, Setchell was working on marine algae and seaweeds and Jepson was working on the land flora. Setchell had broad ideas — he was interested in the relations of temperature to the flowering of plants, "waves of anthesis", for example. But mostly they didn't cross each other in respect to science. But, as I say, I never had the least trouble with either of them; they were very nice to me. There were not very many up-and- coming graduate students in the department, so the attention wasn't too surprising. David Goddard was one of the most distinguished graduate students we've had; he was on good terms with both of them, too. So. I don't think that their rivalry was a very major barrier for graduate students. Entries from Field Notebook. 1937-1942 [Interview 3: February 13, 1986] ## Lage: Constance We've covered a lot of personal background in the last two interviews: early life, early career as a botanist. You tell me that you've reviewed some things and have some additional remarks, so you begin. I went back and tried to trace the actual places and dates from the time of leaving Washington State. College at Pullman in August of 1937 down through my early years at Berkeley. I see that we did, indeed, leave Pullman in August 1937 and drove to Berkeley, stopping to see my wife's and my families in Portland and Eugene. In September, we saw my former associate Harry Clements off to Hawaii, and another associate, Edward Ullman. returned to Harvard to complete graduate work in geography. I find no other entries until December, when we went north to Portland and Eugene for Christmas with our families. Lage: Let me ask you what you mean by "entries." 59 Constance: Lage: Constance: Lage: Constance; These were entries in my field notebook. Botanists who collect customarily keep a running list of the things they collect and the conditions under which they collect them — localities and other data. In 1938 I remember particularly being guests of Professor Alva R. Davis, who was botany department chairman, at the Sierra Ski Lodge. My idea, I'm afraid, of skiing was sitting by the fireplace having something to warm you internally while other people were out on or in the snow. In 1938 I made an extensive tour of northern California during the spring and summer — mostly by myself, partly in company with Robert Hoover who was later a botanist with California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo. Was he a student? He was one of Jepson's last students that I actually had not met. He took his doctorate here after an undergraduate career at Stanford. Professor Goodspeed. from his base in the botanical garden, launched a series of botanical garden expeditions to the Andes. The second one was just going off when I arrived; he invited me to go but, obviously, when I was just joining the faculty I was not in any position to take off for strange parts — so I didn't. Did that expedition have a particular focus? Goodspeed studying tobacco. You've mentioned Yes, that's right. Most of the tobaccos are native to the Andes. That was the prime reason for going, and since he was going. I guess people collected other things, which were accumu lated in the herbarium. I'm sure that that model intrigued me to some extent; South America looked very interesting. So, of course, in time I followed it up. Just to give an idea of the scope of my field work, this is the list of counties I recorded: Alameda, Napa, Yolo, Santa Clara. Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Kings County, Kern County, Fresno, Tulare, San Bernardino, Kern, Tulare, Mariposa. Napa, Lake, Sonoma. Colusa. And then with Morrison, in Calaveras, Amador, El Dorado. Placer, Nevada, Butte. Tehama, Glenn, and Contra Costa, all in April. In May, Stanislaus, Tuolomne. Madera. Fresno. San Benito, Alameda. San Francisco County. San Mateo, San Benito. Then with Morrison, again, in the latter part of May for three days in San Benito in the Idriaserpentine region where we climbed all of the larger eminences — Santa Rita Peak, and others. 60 Lage : Is this for the climbing of mountains, or the finding of flowers? Constance: No. I never cl imb. mountains just to be climbing. My interest runs out as soon as the plants do. We were attempting to retrace the route of William Brewer, who was one of the prime geologists and also plant collectors in California in connection with the California Geological Survey of the 1860s. Lage: Were you comparing what he found with what was still there? Constance: We were trying to find the places that he had collected things so as to better reidentify the material. He got into this really fantastic serpentine area in San Benito County and that's why we were pursuing it. In June, I was in Placer County, Nevada County, Yuba, Sierra, Plumas, Las sen, Madera. In August, in Tuolumne, Mono, Inyo. Mono, and Alpine. In most of these, my wife was my companion and also my recording secretary. She had to put up with a good deal in the way of the general inconveniences of field work. In December of 1938, we and my wife's mother and sister spent the holidays in Victoria. British Columbia. In 1939, I did considerably less field work. What usually happened was that I did field work one summer and the next summer I taught summer school to pay for it. So my field work was alternately very considerable and rather slight. Lage: You mentioned Morrison — have we identified Morrison? Constance: Morrison was another of the graduate students who was here when I came back. He started working with Jepson and finished his work with Mason and spent his subsequent career teaching at Syracuse University. Lage: And what was his first name? Constance: John L. Morrison, he's now retired to Occidental, California. He was very influential in sending graduate students to the department over the years, a number of them received their inspiration from him, although he did very little research himself. He apparently was a very successful teacher and inspirer of young people who, indeed, might go on. In 1939, a few events that I can document were the departure of one of the University of California Botanical Garden's expeditions to the Andes, of which Morrison was a member, by the way. In May, I did field work in El Dorado, 61 Constance: Colusa and Mendocino Counties. In July, in Marin County. That was also the year of the San Francisco World's Fair. Although I did not visit it abundantly, we did, indeed, visit it. In August, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences held meetings at Stanford. My former student. Reed Rollins, with a companion graduate student at Harvard. Carlos Munoz from Chile, visited us in October. 1940 was another year of abundant field work. Starting in March, I was in Contra Costa County, San Joaquin. Merced. San Luis Obispo, Kings, western Fresno. In April, in Alameda. Lake. Marin, Contra Costa, either by myself or myself and my wife and other botanists. Lage: Did you have a specific purpose in all this field work, or was it just learning about the flora of the area? Constance: It was a combination of both. I would say that in my first two years at Berkeley I worked full-time at becoming a botanist, at trying to learn the flora, and learn as much about California as I could. I published, I went to scientific meetings. Those were the main activities. I was also starting to do research on the family Hydrophyllaceae, on which I worked for a number of years and on which I became, to some extent I suppose, an authority. In May, I was in Merced County, and also in Alameda County and was beginning to get interested in a polyploid complex in the genus Phacelia, which became the subject of considerable interest and field work for some years. In June, with my first Ph,D. graduate student at Berkeley, Alan Beetle. I did field work in the coastal counties of Mendo cino and Humboldt. In Eureka, we met with Joseph P. Tracy, who was a particularly excellent regional botanist. Later I em barked on a six-week trip to the Pacific Northwest with my wife and Alan Beetle. We traveled up the Oregon coast to Portland, east along the Columbia River, where we revisited Pullman and saw some of our friends there. We went on into Idaho. We worked in the field by ourselves or picked up such local botan ists as LeRoy Detling in Oregon and Marion Ownbey at Pullman. Lage: Were these local, amateur botanists? Constance: No, they were professionals. Detling was the botanist at Eugene, and Marion Ownbey was one of my successors at Washington State. (The herbarium there is now named for him.) Then we went on, in June, to the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences in Seattle. In Tacoma I picked up Louis F. Henderson (who had been my first guide into systematic botany, really) and had the pleasure of 62 Constance: introducing him to Professor Jepson, who had never met him. So that was some of the fairly extensive field work, mostly devoted to the family Hydrophyllaceae, on which I began to publish in 1939 with a series of papers. Lage: When you say you're studying a large family like this, is there a particular point you're trying to get out of it? Constance: Yes, in theory you're trying to understand better the representation, distribution, and diversification — physiologically, ecologically, structurally, and perhaps, reproductively — and to learn as much as you can about it, to try to organize it more efficiently than it's ever been organized before. Hopefully, as each family or other group is studied more and more intensively from various points of view, you hope that you will put together something that can be used as a kind of building block in attempting to understand better the whole evolutionary picture. I selected the family Hydrophyllaceae, specifically, when I returned to Berkeley because I wanted to work on a group that was well-represented in the area so I could study it in the field, and one that was small enough that you weren't always frustrated by the fact that some of its key representatives were in Asia or elsewhere. This turned out to be a happy selection. Cytological Investigations with Marion Cave; Developing Additional Information for Taxonomists Constance: At the same time, I wanted to try to use cytological informa tion. So I began a survey — really a chromosome number survey with Marion Cave. Marion Cave was a cytologist who had various connections from time to time with the University of California Botanical Garden. Although she was really an expert in three different fields, she never had a formal university appointment. Lage: Is there a reason for that? Constance: Probably for the reason you would suspect. For one, her husband was a professor of economics at San Francisco State, and the idea that there should be a woman faculty member in the depart ment simply had not yet arrived. She was an expert cytologist, embryologist of the lilies, an expert on fresh-water algae and also on Hydrophyllaceae. We published together over a series of years and eventually I summed the work up. [looking at some papers] In 1950, we published a paper on chromosome numbers in 63 Constance: the Hydrophyllaceae. She was senior author on all our papers. As I always said, it was eminently fair because she was doing all the work. Lage: How was the work divided? Constance: Well, the project was my idea. I did the identifications, I collected material; she counted the chromosomes and made camera lucida drawings; I wrote the papers. Lage: Now, when you would write the papers, would she review them, or was there mutual input? Constance: She certainly reviewed the specifics of the proper stage of cell division, but I was responsible for the identification and any interpretations; in other words, she said, "You write the papers." So from my standpoint, it was a very happy relation ship, and I think she was happy with it, too. A few of my colleagues looked a little askance at the fact that I was junior author; but, as I may have said before, I found that being junior author was a very fine position to be in because the people who knew nothing about it assumed that you probably did all the work. I think that in all the joint authorships in which I have been involved that there usually was a pretty fair division of labor. Lage: Did you and Marion ever discuss women in botany at the University? Constance: Not really, although I knew she felt strongly about it, understandably. Lage: What did it have to do with her husband being a professor in economics at San Francisco? Constance: Nothing, particularly, except the general assumption was that since she had a husband with a good job — why did she need one too? After all, the department gave her a place to work. I'm sure you've heard some of this before. It wasn't very overt, but it probably was rather characteristic of masculine thinking of the time, I suppose. At all events, that was what I was working on mostly. I started really with the genus Nemophila — the baby blue-eyes, which most people know by the common name, and moved on to other genera, and eventually got into the Phacelia, which is the major 64 Constance: genus. I eventually wrote up the family for[LeRoy] Abrams's Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States. I've done a little work with it since, but not very much. Lage: Was using the cytological information something new at Berkeley or overall? Constance: This topic, I suppose, is possibly of general interest. Cyto logy is a pretty broad field, and today's cytologists would scarcely think of this as cytology. But the fact that plants have different chromosome numbers really turned up in the tens and twenties of the twentieth century. It wasn't until about 1930 that there was any real attempt to put classification and chromosome number together. One of the pioneers in it was actually Professor Goodspeed in his work with Nicotiana, and Edgar Anderson at the Missouri Botanical Garden was very much interested in it. But most taxonomists and most cytologists went their own ways and were largely isolated from each other. The early cytologists who were interested in chromosome number would go out into the botanical garden and look at the labels on the plants, from which they took materials. If they got a chromosome count, they would report it without any real documen tation. And since material in botanical gardens is notoriously unreliably identified, a lot of the counts could not be veri fied — some of them are clearly wrong. So actually, all of those before about 1930 are suspect. Some interesting things were found: the discovery that some plants carried a double set of chromosomes (which indicated that they were derived by hybridization and so on from two different species) — the classic example is Primula kewensis. But in general, there was no close correlation. When I started working on Nemophila, I originally got into the chromosome- number thing because the most striking species — the baby blue- eyes — is extraordinarily diverse in color and color pattern. I had heard about polyploid complexes, and I thought this might indeed be one. Lage: Do you want to define that term? Constance: A polyploid complex is a series of closely related things with different chromosome numbers, some of which are usually multiples of others. This has not only the value for classifi cation in that it differentiates different populations because they have different numbers; but if you have a species, let's say, with a basic number of nine, another one with eight, and some others with seventeen, there's at least a strong supposi tion that there may have been some progenitor-descendent 65 Constance: relationship. And you get into autoploids and aneuploids and so on; you can get a very complicated structure which may or may not help to explain what has gone on in an evolutionary way. I got interested in this, and I don't know that I would call myself a pioneer, but by and large, the tazonomists ignored this sort of thing and the cytologists didn't know enough about taxonomy to know how to apply it intelligently. In the sense of trying to put the two together, I think I probably made some contribution. I went out of my way to try to publicize this, in a way. I adopted the policy of. after publishing pictures of the chromosomes, making duplicates of these and distributing them with the appropriate specimens. I know for a fact that a number of my taxonomic colleagues around the country threw the pictures in the wastebasket because they didn't think this cytological information was appropriate for a herbarium. Now. I don't think anybody would discard it. Lage: So is it part of a catalog of the herbarium now? Constance: It's very likely to be — it's usually indicated on the label. But then it was not a common practice, as it is now. Lage: Was is even a little offensive to some of your colleagues? Constance: I assume so. Lage: It's interesting how disciplines develop certain prejudices. Constance: That's right. But the general reaction to anything new, of course, is likely to be negative. Mostly. I think, the reaction was more one of amazement than anything else: Why would anybody go to all this trouble? But I think it helped to popularize the approach, and in that sense it was at least missionary work. Probably the easiest way to make a reputation is to bring in something from one field and inject it into another. You don't have to exert much cerebral energy. At any rate, it worked out that way. Early Work on Umbelliferae with Mildred Mathias* Constance: About 1940. I began working with Dr. Mildred Mathias on Umbelliferae, which was the second of my coauthorship ventures with a distinguished lady botanist. The way this came about was as follows. When I was at Washington State, I did a lot of collecting. As I did later in California, I tried to learn as *See Mildred E. Mathias, Among the Plants of the Earth, an oral history conducted by Mary Terrall in 1978 and 1979, Oral History Program, University of California at Los Angeles, 66 Constance: much as I could about the flora by identifying material and trying to get in touch with specialists elsewhere who might be able to second-guess my identifications. In that way, I made a large number of interesting associations. One of the groups that was particularly well represented in the area in Idaho and eastern Washington where I did field work was the family Umbellif erae or Apiaceae which I usually refer to as "the parsleys" and which Dr. Mathias always called "the carrots." It is a group with very inconspicuous flowers, most of which look very much alike, and common wisdom is they all look alike, which of course isn't true. It's like saying all members of a family look just alike and probably is not true to the view of people in the family, shall we say. Most of their classification is based on the fruits, and in fact that has been the emphasis for the several hundred years that people have been classifying them. One of the groups that I had particular trouble with was this family. I had heard that there was a lady botanist some where, who had taken her degree at the Missouri Botanical Garden, who was an expert in the group. I never could find out where she was because every time I heard she was somewhere, I learned that she was not there but had gone somewhere else. Her husband, a physicist, had moved from institution to institution, and she went along. When I came back to Berkeley, I discovered that she was here working in the herbarium. She was working on the revision of the genus Lomatium, which is — Lage: Is this part of the family? Constance: This is part of the family. It's the largest western American genus of the family. This was being done as part of a fest schrift for the botanist Jesse M. Greenman, who was her major professor at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. In the course of this study, she had to learn a good deal about the geography of the western United States, which was unfamiliar to her and, by and large, fairly familiar to me. So I kibitzed. At the same time, I was still carrying around with me a hundred or so specimens of Umbelliferae, which I had collected and on which I was hoping to get expert advice. So we put the two things together; she was impressed by the fact that I had actually identified some of them correctly, which was unusual. Lage: It must be a difficult family. Constance: It's supposed to be, which makes it particularly nice because most everybody leaves it alone. At all events, that was the beginning of the association. 67 Constance : Lage: Constance: Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Then, about 1940 — maybe a little earlier — she came in one day and said. "KJerald and I have decided we're going to have a family, and I'm going to give up the Umbellif erae, and I want you to take them over." I said. 'Veil, I'll have to think about this for a while." You already had a plant family. I already had a plant family. At any rate, I countered the proposal — that I would work with her until she had completed all of the commitments she had made, and she had made plenty. She was supposed to "do" the family Umbellif erae for Abrams's Illus trated Flora of the Pacific States, for Mnrth American Flora. which is published by the New York Botanical Garden, (which includes all of North America including Mexico), Flora of Arizona, and I believe some others. Well, once you've done the North American, would the others just be spin-offs, or would they go into more detail? To some extent. In this business of specializing, you keep repeating yourself; there's no question about it. On the other hand, every time you do a regional or area! or local thing* you usually try to go beyond what you did before. You're constantly adding to, revising, subtracting from, and so on, so it isn't a simple repetition; you have to reevaluate the whole thing every time around. Isn't this a giant family? How many different genera and soecies would vou be runnina into? XOLl U Lil-LO a. g,XO.UU 0. OLAU J-L.y • I. species would you be running It's terribly hard to say. Customarily, the estimates are something like three thousand species, maybe three hundred genera. The family is one of those which is a so-called "natural" family. It was perhaps the first family of flowering plants recognized as having been something of a unit, a recog nition which goes clear back to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. It was the first family to be monographed, by the English botanist, Robert Morison, I can't think of the dates offhand, but let's say it was in the seventeenth century [1620- 1683]. Members of the family have a very strong family resemblance. You said it was a "natural" family. That's right. Another example is the Compositae — the sunflower family — also the Leguminoseae, or pea family. There is such a strong family resemblance that the genera are founded on what would seem to be rather trivial characteristics otherwise. And as a result, you have the kind of general law that the more 68 Constance: "natural" the family, the more artificial the genera; therefore, trying to say how many genera there are is almost futile. It's very much a matter of opinion, and sometimes the next new entity discovered torpedoes two or three established genera. The figure of something like three hundred genera is just a figure from the air, so to speak. We did start to work in this way and our work — the early stages of it — really culminated in the treatment for North American Flora, which was a fairly major job. Actually, we completed that in 1943 or 1944, while I was in Washington and Mildred was in Binghamton. New York. II Constance: This is the treatment in North American Flora, volume 28b, of which Dr. Mathias and I did the Umbellif erae. Lage : Is this entire volume devoted to Umbellif erae? Constance: It has a few other items in it. It also has the family Araliaceae and the family Cornaceae, and a few others. We did not do those. Then there was an extensive bibliography. But it runs to four or five hundred pages. Lage: So that was quite a major bit of work. Constance: Well, it's something over two hundred pages long [looks at volume] — pages forty-three to 295, which, I suppose, one would call a book-length monograph. Lage: How did the joint authorship work with Dr. Mathias? Constance: It worked very well. We started working together here, and then her husband went to Binghamton, New York, in the early stages of the war. I worked here, and she worked there, and we shipped stuff back and forth. Then, later, in 1943, I went to Washington for a couple of years, and she was in New York part of the time. We were not in the same place again for over a number of years, but we had worked together long enough that we knew each other's way of going at it. We found that one of us could start some thing and work on it awhile and send it to the other one; the other one could pick it up, modify it, and send it back. It worked out very well. It says something about the turn of mind that we were very compatible and were able to do this and con tinue doing it for some forty years, thereabouts. So we were the co-experts, so to speak, on the family and pretty well monopolized anything that was done on it in the New World. We really started publishing together, I believe, in 1940 and continued for thirty-five to forty years. 69 Prewar Trips Constance: Lage: Let's see if I can bring us up to my departure for Washington. D.C. In 1942, the botanists were meeting with the AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Sciences] in Philadelphia. I had never been East, and had been waiting for an opportunity to visit the principal botanical establishments. The AAAS meeting seemed to be the appropriate occasion. I stopped first in Chicago to see Edward Ullman, who had been my friend at Pullman and who was completing his doctorate there in geography. I visited his family, and I caught the flu and spent a week in bed, which slowed things up a little. Then I went on to Harvard, where Rollins was going to meet me; but since I had been put to bed for a week, he had had to go on home to Wyoming, and some of his friends stepped in and took me over. Then we went to the meetings in Philadelphia. Afterward I went to the New York Botanical Garden, which is one of the big institutions in my field, and then on to Washington, meeting the leading botanists along the way and renewing acquaintances with others I had met before. In Washington I stayed with Jack Clark, who had been one of my field companions at Pullman. I met, pretty much, my peers across the board, most of the important people in my field. In most cases, I continued the relations by visit and by correspondence. It was quite a valuable experience. Was this standard in your field, that people would have a great circle of acquaintances? Constance: Not necesssarily. I liked it, I found it very fascinating. One of the botanists I met in Washington was Ellsworth Killip. quite an interesting chap. He was quite a good botan ist. He had collected in both North and South America when it was quite the thing to do. His principal problem was that he a bit of an alcoholic, but he was fun to see at meetings if you didn't see too much of him, shall we say. Lage: Is this why he's on the page [in the photo album] with the champagne glass? Constance: I think probably. Well, he was on good terms with Goodspeed and also with Charles B. Lipman. who was then dean of the graduate division at Berkeley. He [Killip] always wanted to go on parties. So far as I could discover, at any party he went on, he got sadder and sadder as the evening went along: and when he came out to Berkeley, I think he had hosted Lipman often, Lipman wanted to do something in return. 70 Constance: So we picked up different people to provide a party for Killip — A. R, Davis, Francis MacBride, who was with the Chicago Field Museum, Dennis Hoagland, and Charles Lipman. Francis Drouet and Don Richards were also from the Chicago Museum; they were, to some extent, friends of Lipman's. Lipman was a very interesting character. He was a very good dean of the graduate division. He was something less than the world's greatest scientist, I think. He got interested in the presence of live bacteria, presumably in meteorites and anthracite coal and so on. He was quite convinced that these were semi-immortal organisms which had been there all the time, happily ticking away. Most people, I think, felt that the chances of contamination were considerably greater than the chances that these were really indigenous. But, at any rate, he went back to places like the Smithsonian and the Field Museum — probably when he was on official jaunts — and looked over their old collections to see if he could culture bacteria. We got acquainted with some of these people. I remember on one occa sion I took them over to the City to meet Izzie Gomez — did you ever hear of Izzie Gomez? Lage: No. Constance: Well, Izzie Gomez was the King of Little Bohemia — one of the last of the Barbary Coast. He was a big, fat Portuguese with a broad hat, which he never removed. And what was it? — a Grappa punch, or something, which must have be r. pretty awful. But Gomez was kind of fun, you know. Coming from a place like Pullman, we found it terribly exciting to have access to San Francisco. I'm sure I spent more time in San Francisco in those days than I ever have since. In May of 1942, Reed Rollins, who was on the faculty at Stanford, and I made a field trip together of several weeks into northwestern California and adjacent Oregon. Reed was working on the genus Ajj^is. on which he became the expert. I was still mostly interested in Hydrophyllaceae. We took an old Dodge car that belonged to Stanford University, and we had a wonderful trip. We camped out and got rained on fairly consistently, but we discovered some items which had never been collected before. One item we were particularly interested in we found exactly forty years after it had first been collected, and it had not been collected since. We had an absolutely wonderful time, and we decided we would do this every year. We never did it again. Then in August of that year I made a trip with Milo S. Baker, who was the botanist at Santa Rosa Junior College, and that was the last trip before the war. 71 VI WARTIME SERVICE Geobotanist for the OSS Constance: Here's a picture of the department in 1942 as it was beginning to break up for the war. Davis had a reserve commission — he was the chairman. He went down to San Diego and in this picture he was a major in coast artillery at Camp Cullan in San Diego. Emerson taught physics for a while and then went to Salinas and worked in the Guayule program. I stayed around for a while. The university seemed, at first, to tell us that it wanted us to stay on the job, and then we gradually became an embarrassment. I tried to get into the navy, but I was turned down on eyesight twice. By that time I decided, okay, they've got a Selective Service that's supposed to tell you what to do, so I'll wait until they tell me. Our son was born on December 6, 1942. I wrote a little poem and printed it and sent it out. [reading] "Santa CLaus came to Berkeley, preceded by the stork, which made our Christ mas letters as scarce as eggs or pork. These greatly bedazzled parents, unused to baby things, hadn't time to notice the days were taking wings. Better late than never, to send out New Tear's wishes, so may your 1943 turn out a much happier year than this is." I didn't really fancy myself as a poet, but it was kind of cute and fun. I printed it myself, too; we had a little hand-press. Here he is with his maternal grandmother and his mother. I was waiting until something called, and I got a call from my friend Ed Ullman in Washington. D.C., asking if I would like to come back and work for the OSS [Office of Strategic Ser vices], which I'd never heard of. He said they often had quest ions involving biology in one way or another, and they didn't have any biologists. The OSS was populated at various times by 72 Constance: waves of historians, economists, geographers, or whatever. He said that what they really wanted was somebody who was, I guess, bright and adaptable. Whether that represented me or not, I don't know. But at any rate, they really didn't know what to do with me because I' didn't fit into any classification. So I was appointed geobotanist, research analyst, and editor — the govern ment's first geobotanist, I think. Lage: This put you in the military service? Constance: No, I was a civilian. The OSS was created outside the military service. It was the forerunner of the CIA. Both the army and navy had used their intelligence branches as dumping grounds between wars. So President Roosevelt called on General Donovan to set up a really quasi-independent intelligence outfit. That's where I was, and I couldn't tell you now the way it was all set up, but there were regional divisions, and there were subject-matter divisions, I think. At any rate, I was in the Research and Analysis Branch of the Euro-African Division. Lage: What were you supposed to be doing? Constance: Our job was supposedly to prepare background material ostensibly for the use of our invading forces. We tried to find out all we could find out about Sicily, and North Africa, and Normandy, and so on. Lage: Did this involve travel? Constance: Some people went overseas, but by and large almost all were working from published materials of one sort or another, or somebody's confidential reports. It was an erratic kind of thing; you wouldn't do anything for days, and then would work all night for three nights in a row. I was pretty cynical about most of it. I was there, it was my job. okay, and you do the best you can. There were a lot of young graduate students who came down with their professors. Some of their professors had reserve commissions, and they went from being professors to colonels and so on. A lot of them were impossible. One of my bosses was Preston James, who was a professor of geography at Michigan. Another was Richard Hartshorne, who was a professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. My friend Ullman was a geo grapher, so I really came in with a geographer wave. Another boss was Sherman Kent from the Marin County family of Kents. He was a history professor at Yale, but he stayed in the outfit. At any rate, I got a letter from Ullman asking me if I would be interested in this. As I said, I was getting increasingly embarrassed to be here, alive and not in uniform, 73 Constance: and I expected I would be drafted most anytime. I never was drafted. The OSS had the authority to ask for draft waivers for certain people, but I was just at the upper edge — I think I was thirty-four, and obviously I wouldn't be much good as a private. So I was always be'ing put up for — Lage: They didn't ask for a waiver? Constance: Oh, yes. They had put me on the list to ask for a draft defer ral. But what would happen is that, all of a sudden, somebody ten years younger than I, who was somebody's favorite graduate student, was endangered, so they'd put him ahead on the list and move me down. So I spent all my time sort of going back and forth. I didn't pay much attention to it. I told myself I didn't give a damn. It was in the hands of Selective Service, and they could worry about it. Here's a picture of one group, which gives you an idea — you see, these people are mostly military. My boss. Preston James, had moved me up and down and back and forth, and he came in one day and said, "I've recommended you for commissioning" — it was either for commissioning or for exemption, I'm not sure now. And he said, "You're going to have to go before a board." So I went before the board, and James said. "I've got to have you, so get in there." So. I went in and met with this group of majors and colonels and so on; they were all military people, half a dozen of them. The first thing I was asked was essentially, "Can you tell us why the war effort would come to a stop if you were drafted?" I said, "No. I can't think of any reason why it should." And that apparently waa not the thing to say. The officer cleared his throat and said. "You mean you could do what you're doing now just as well in uniform?" I said. "Well. I'd sacrifice a little independence. I probably couldn't talk back to the major as freely as I can now, but I don't think it would make any particular difference." And this went on for some time and finally they excused me. I came out. and James buzzed around saying. "How'd you come out?" I said. "If you think you're going to get me deferred, it's probably up to you. I don't think I did anything to help you." Well, apparently, this was such an unusual stance that I was deferred. Lage: They probably thought you were slightly crazy. Constance: They must have, and I think probably they were right. But I became essentially a wandering editor. I had had more exper ience writing than a lot of these young people. Some of these people were — a lot of their work was just terribly naive. These kids would get hold of an article in the encyclopedia and spend 74 Constance: a week getting down a half-page statement about something. In the early days at the OSS they used to get retired YMCA secretaries, or other people who had had experience in China, or wherever. It turned out that a lot of the experts — people who were really very good in their subject — were not much good at doing the sort of .thing that we had to do. Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board Constance: At any rate, as the war went on, it was pretty clear that the Europe- Africa division's days were numbered. So Preston James, now a colonel, called me in and said, "I think my opposite number in the Latin-American section is going to ask for you and I'm afraid that he's got more priority right now than I have." I said. "Well, I've been invited to go over to something called the Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board," which was a multi-service thing — army intelligence, naval intelligence, the OSS, and I don't remember what else. The job there was to put together almost a symposium on a particular area. The military added things that were out of our province. But we'd do things on the climate, the geography, the crops, people, all sorts of things. Some of them would be done by these different intelligence groups, and some we would do. Our job was to put them all together. Lage: And then who would they be used by? Constance: The assumption was that they were going to be used by the people who went into the area. What it turned out was that basically they were used by the people who went into military government, if at all. We published what were called the JANIS reports. They were kind of fun because we had the services of the army map division. and it was like publishing a book, really. That was pretty good. I remember working with a geographer (actually, he was originally from Berkeley) — whom I had not known before. We were trying to describe Borneo. I remember I came up with a phrase, something about a peripheral inhabited zone versus a primeval interior, or something of that sort. It was rather interesting. Those were the better parts of it, I think. Lage: Did your family join you there? Constance: I went in February 1943. Since my son was born on 6 December 1942, that was one day from making me a legitimate father, you see, for Selective Service purposes. So far as Selective 75 Constance: Service was concerned, I was childless; if my son had been born on the first of December or earlier. I would have been considered a legitimate father; but I wasn't — this didn't count. Well, my wife took our son to her mother's place in Portland, Oregon, and stayed there, She decided that this might go on forever, who knows. So she decided to come back and join me — she came to Washington in November, 1943. These are pic tures of our son in Portland. When she arrived, he was about as big as she was. They came clear across the country by train — a miserable jaunt. But at any rate she arrived in November; meanwhile. I had rented an apartment in Parkfairfax. which was Metropolitain Life's very fancy community in suburban Alexandria. I remember that Richard Nixon lived a few blocks from us; we didn't know it. It was mostly young military and civilian families. They used to say of the development next door, Fairlington, that everything was pregnant, including the dogs. Fairlington was a similar community, although Parkfairfax was probably the more elegant. It was just at that stage when everybody had children, which made it kind of nice, in a way. We were out on the edge of Alexandria. The transportation was pretty horrible. There were buses, and sometimes they'd get there, and frequently they didn't. Two of our best friends were Olga and Tom Lynch. Olga was a truant officer in New Jersey — I'm not sure where. [indicating on photograph] That's their daughter. And she [Olga] was, shall we say, streetwise; Sally, my wife, was pretty naive and Olga looked after her. Sally was very meticulous about looking after our son, Bill. The way the thing was set up, you had all these kids and all these buildings, and the mothers usually became desperate, so they dumped them out in the middle. You know, it was like a scene from a mob in Iran, I would think. Lage: Did they have playgrounds in there? Constance: It wasn't developed, really. No, they just went tearing around crying Indian, scalping each other, and whatever. Lage: Having a lot of fun, probably. Constance: Oh, a lot of fun. but only if your nerves were good enough to take it. Our other close friends, who lived some little distance from us were Kurt Stone, who was a geographer and has just retired from the University of Georgia, and his wife — they were our closest friends. 76 Constance: Lage: Constance ; Transportation was difficult, and there were shortages. I remember one classical incident. The pediatrician said our son ought to have some fruit juice. You know, we were getting things with red stickers — rationing. I had to do the shopping in Washington, D.C., after the work day was over — mostly in the colored section, because that's where my office located most of the time. I finally found a can of pineapple juice for which I paid some exorbitant sum in cash and ration points. I got it home and opened it, didn't pay much attention, and discovered our son was pouring it down the sink because he had never had any before and didn't know what it was. Life was fairly rigorous, but it was not bad considering it was wartime. There were a lot of minor privations, et cetera, but I'm sure there were everywhere. We took one trip down to Williamsburg with a colleague of mine who was an English professor at Columbia. The whole group sounds like a group of professors, uate students. if not grad- Lage: We were, mostly. The OSS was largely inhabited by such, [indicating on more photographs] This was the Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board that I was on. Part of it was under the Joint Chiefs of Staff — I had forgotten that. Peveril Meigs was a California doctorate in geography, whom I had not known before. Stuart Sharpe was an expert on shore erosion. Ed Ullman was really the senior member. We had a colonel in charge, but the colonel just turned it over to him. The colonel's sole aim in life was getting there early and getting his name on the roster (we had to sign a roster every day). If anybody got there before the colonel, the colonel very carefully signed above it. Then he'd go out to breakfast and wouldn't be heard from again until after noon; about then, he started figuring out how to get home with the least difficulty. This chap was another geographer from Pennsylvania. Louis Quam was a geographer from Colorado; he became an official of the Arctic Institute. Wally Werble was a very interesting chap. He ran a little pharmacy trade newspaper in Washington. He was a sergeant and everybody else in the place was at least a lieuten ant. He was probably the most capable of the bunch, and I think that probably everybody would have agreed. These were pictures taken at various times. This chap, Grant, was sent over from whatever the British equivalent of the OSS was — there were two of them who came over. I made some very good friends there. One of my particular friends was Thomas Chubb, who was a Yale graduate, a gentleman yachtsman. Were these people you kept in touch with? 77 Constance: Well, most of them have died, unfortunately. But a number of them I did keep in touch with for some time. In fact, a few years later I went out briefly and visited what had been the OSS and by that time, I think, was IRIS. The chap who had been one of my bosses, Dan 'Clinton asked if he could get me to come back. I thought, "Does he have rocks in his head?" [laughter] But it was a congenial group and I really enjoyed it. And it was fairly intelligent work because at least you were doing some writing and trying to organize things. Lage: Did any of this kind of work carry over or make it easier for you to write later? Did you learn things about writing, or did you already take that with you? Constance: I'm sure I learned some things about writing. One of the things I learned there was that if you did anything for the military, you wrote it in a series of progressive summaries because, presumably, the thing went to a general; the general tore it into three pieces, gave it to three colonels; the colonels tore their parts into pieces and gave them to majors, and they tore them up and gave them to captains and so on. So you had to have a summary at each step. That was probably good practice. Stuff that went to General MacArthur — he insisted it had to be com pletely rewritten, I think, or it was rejected outright. And of course, there's the usual story that before some invasion some where, an army general looks at these documents and says. "Isn't this marvelous? Here's all the stuff that we needed to know. Too bad we can't use it — it's done by the navy." [laughter] Whether that's true or not. it's good apocryphal stuff — there was some of that involved, certainly. To some extent. I think, we avoided that because we involved all the services. One of the things we used to do was trace the coastline. We did that by looking in the ifydrographic Office manuals; they take you from point to point to point. Most of these things were done by WAVES. Unfortunately, every so often they'd get going in the wrong direction. I remember we did the coast of China up one way and back down the other until we found one that matched. But it was still interesting work and fairly respectable. The other thing I did — before my wife came, at least — was to go and work nights at the Smithsonian Institution on botany. So I got acquainted there, and I got quite a little work done. I did some little botanical work while I was back there. At any rate. I was there until the fall of 1945, and then we left as soon as possible and drove back across the country and resumed life in Berkeley. 78 VII POST-WAR YEARS AT BERKELEY AND HARVARD A Call from Harvard Lage : Constance: Lage: What kinds of changes did you see at the University after the war? Constance: By the summer and early fall of 1945, the war was coming to an end, and a number of my colleagues in these agencies were trying to see how they could stay on in Washington, and I was trying to see how quickly I could get out and get back home. I remember receiving a letter from my departmental chairman saying that I had been promoted to associate professor while I was away and that he hoped my salary would reach the four- thousand-dollar figure by the time I got back. It didn't quite — How did that salary compare with other universities? I don't think I know. I would suspect it was probably about par for the course. Berkeley salaries have usually been pretty well comparable. At any rate, I was invited to return, and we drove back across the country as quickly as reasonably possible. Lage: That means that you were promoted to tenure status while you were away — Constance: That's right. Lage: — so this kind of decision- making was going on — Constance: I was also fired, as I think I told you earlier. Lage: And you never knew it. [laughs] Constance: I never knew it. So the promotion came as less of a surprise than it night have otherwise. Well, coming back was a great joy, of course. But the University was suddenly inundated by returning service people and others. It was a very stimulating I 79 Constance: period because the returning students were very serious, somewhat senior, and many of them extremely talented. When I came back, I continued to teach the first half of the beginning botany course, and I remember that at least one year — I think probably the first, one — I had four former majors as teaching assistants. And since I came very close to being a private myself, this was a fairly heady experience. I don't remember any great change in affairs. I came back in '45. I guess the most novel thing that came along, so far as I can recall, was that late in 1946 I received a letter from Harvard saying that I was being considered for a position, and they would like to invite me to come back to the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences meetings and then stay a week to be interviewed. For some reason, I seemed to have felt particularly harried at the time. And I was so glad to be back in California that I couldn't think of anything that would induce me to return to the East Coast for any length of time. I wrote back and said I appreciated the honor greatly, but I didn't think I would be interested, and I didn't think it would be proper to take the offered expense money since that was the case. Almost immediately, I got back a telegram saying "We need your advice — no obligation involved." As a westerner who had only once visited Harvard and the East Coast, the invitation to go back and give advice, of course, was an overwhelming inducement. So I did accept the invitation. I persuaded my colleague. Herbert Mason, who was very leery of eastern entanglements, to go back with me. I stayed the additional week and was pretty thoroughly interviewed. Lage : Was this just a subterfuge, their needing your advice? Constance: No. The situation with Harvard was rather an interesting one. They had some eleven botanical institutions, and Harvard has the philosophy which is commonly phrased as "Every tub on its own bottom." They [the separate institutions] had as little to do with each other as possible; thus, the botanical institutions distanced themselves as far as possible from instruction in biology, although most of the senior figures taught a course under the general biology rubric from time to time. But the senior figures in charge of the two principal botanical institutions, which were the Gray Herbarium and the Arnold Arboretum, respectively, were at the point of retirement. Actually, Dr. Fernald of the Gray Herbarium had already retired and Elmer D. Merrill, who had once been dean of the College of Agriculture at Berkeley, was supposed to retire the next year. Harvard's central adminstration had decided that there should be 80 Constance: a thorough reexamination of the situation before new appointments were made. So a Harvard group of botanists and biologists had independently started studying the matter themselves. The chair, really, of this enterprise was Irving Bailey, who was a -very distinguished wood anatomist. The administration learned of the existence of such a report and essentially ordered it to be produced. The wheels were set in motion for a fairly extensive reorganization. This coincided with the efforts, naturally enough, of the younger people in the different institutions concerned to succeed to the position of those who were retiring. As a result. Bailey and others who were involved in this effort, found that they got very conflicting advice, which was very much intermixed with individual goals. They really did feel the need of someone from outside, who was not personally concerned, to look at the situation. The fact that I was not personally interested in it made me seem unusually useful as a source. Lage : They were probably even more glad to have you after they got that letter saying you simply weren't interested. Constance: If I had really wanted to be considered, that was the best way to be considered, though I had not intended it that way. At all events, I fell in love with Bailey, who was one of the finest people I've ever had any professional association with, and really my only regret in not staying. I think, was that I had to disappoint him. I talked to him and others — everybody went out of their way to be nice to me. I talked a few times to students and others. Pretty obviously, the velvet carpet was being unrolled. At any rate, when it was about time to leave, I had a discussion with Bailey, and I remember him saying. "Well, there are really three choices." In the first place, he hoped that I would join them. He suspected that I had some reservations about this. The second one was that I would decline. The third was that I might be willing, if it could be worked out with the Berkeley authorities, to spend some time really helping them make an appointment to the position if I declined it, and in general, advising them on the whole business. They wanted to set up a committee, which they wanted to have me on. It would really have to do with planning the governance and organization of the different botanical establishments. At all events, I did come back to Berkeley, and I did go to my chairman, A. R. Davis. Before I had gone to Harvard, he asked me just one thing — not to make a decision until I returned. So I frankly more or less forgot about it until I ran into him in the hall one day. He asked me if I had made the 81 Constance: decision, and I said, "I've already declined, and I forgot to tell you." But Harvard asked if I would come back for a year as a visiting lecturer, as it turned out. I told him this, and he supported me. He went to Provost Deutsch for approval, and Deutsch was dubious. Lage: Was this unusual to get leave to go to another university? Constance: I really don't know. I was too unsophisticated in university ways to know. At any rate. Provost Deutsch was very skeptical about it. He said, "I think they're just trying to get him back there so they can work on him." And Davis said, "Okay, probably true." But he said, "I think that if he goes, he will come back, and if he doesn't, that's too bad. But I think he would always resent it, feeling that he had been denied an opportunity, whereas if he goes and does come back, then I think he'll be quite content, and everybody will be happy." At all events, Deutsch did agree to that, and I did go. Lage: Do you think you would have felt some resentment if they hadn't agreed to it; would it have changed your perception or your feeling about being at Berkeley? Constance: It's hard to say. My feeling about Berkeley always was that I was better treated than I deserved to be. When I did tell Davis that I had turned the thing down, he said. "I will see that you never regret it." I said, "Well, I'd like you to know that I made my decision on the treatment I have already received and not on anything I was expecting to gain." One of the things that depressed me about Harvard was that I observed that the latest person to arrive always got the best deal. And one of the reasons I was not particularly attracted to it was that there were people on the Harvard faculty whom I thought were considerably more deserving than I, who were still at the assis tant or associate professor level. They were perfectly willing to offer me a full professorship. I didn't think that that's the way you want to play the ball game. At all events, I don't know how I would have felt. I did go, and it turned out to be a quite fascinating year in many ways. Observations of Harvard. 19A7-1948 Constance: I was asked if I could get there by the first of July, so we drove across the country again. We had an old car which we had driven West from Washington in 1945, and there was no way you could get a new car at that time without getting it on the 82 Constance : Lage: Constance : Constance: black market, so we drove back East again. We expected it would collapse part way there, but it didn't. So we sper.t a little time visiting the Pennsylvania-Dutch country, which my wife's family had come from. We got to Cambridge about the first of July, and I had beer, told about a committee that was operating to administer things; but it turned out that of the members. Albert C. Smith was in Fiji doing field work, Ivan Johnston was at the Harvard Forest teaching a summer class, so I was the only taxonomist in town. Bailey immediately took me out and put me in charge of the Gray Herbarium, which produced all sorts of agony on the part of various people who were hoping to succeed to the directorship. Lage: Had that not been part of the agreement before you went back there? Not with me; it was news to me. But I was there; I was at their service. That's what they wanted me to do. Did that need some reorganizing, itself? Well, it needed somebody to manage it, I discovered that my prime duty was to convince the former director, Professor Fernald, that he had indeed retired because, as Bailey said, he had been running the place to his own advantage for the last twenty-five years, and Merrill had been doing the same thing at the Arnold Arboretum. All the younger people were standing around waiting their turn. So it was a little difficult to reorganize things peacefully. Basically, I didn't do much reorganization. My job was mostly to keep it running. But it was a very interesting experience because I was the man from Mars, so to speak. By this time, I knew all the characters, and there were some very fine people. But there was considerable emotional upset on their part as the picture was changing, and they wondered where they were going to fit into all this At the same time, I was very much interested in observing another university up close. I remember remarking, rather naively, to someone at a luncheon, I guess, that I really didn't understand how the Harvard budget system worked. After having put in one budget, I think, everybody laughed at me — they said they'd been doing it for years, and they didn't understand it either. [laughter] It was quite an education, all the way around. Lage: Were there a lot of contrasts with the way Berkeley worked? 83 Constance: More similarities than differences, I think. A private univer sity certainly has differences. A university with the kinds of traditions Harvard has probably has even more. The alumni have a much stronger voice in things. I was there when Conant was president. One of things I found particularly interesting is that I was asked if I would serve on a couple of appointment committees. Bailey said I might find it interesting, and "the fact that you're here and Harvard wouldn't have to pay your expenses would be a very strong inducement." So I served on a committee to appoint the director for the Farlow Herbarium, which was the mycology, fungus herbarium. And I served on the committee which would appoint a director of the Gray Herbarium. The appointee was Reed Rollins. Lage: Had he been a professor there at the time? Constance: He was a professor at Stanford then. He had been a graduate student at Harvard and a university fellow, but he was then at Stanford. That was very interesting. Conant served on both of those committees. That was something different from Berkeley because here the administration does not appear on appointment committees, so far as I'm aware. Lage: Did he take a dominant role? Constance: He took the role of devil's advocate, and since I was one of two outside people, I got in an argument with him first with the mycology appointment because he started saying. "Vhy don't we just forget about the Farlow Herbarium and get the greatest mycologist in the country?" And I said. "Well that's fine in theory, but you have a major institution that's got to be pro vided with leadership, and I don't see much point in worrying about the greatest mycologist in the country if he isn't capable of running the institution." Conant didn't particularly like this, but he did go along with the appointment we proposed. When we got to the Rollins committee — this sounds a little like Marcos in the Philippines — they had to present a brief on the candidate. I think I wrote the brief for the candidate. And then I was one of the "impartial outsiders," and Reed had been my first graduate student. So that was kind of a shooin. The thing that happened that was most interesting is that Henry Gleason from New York Botanical Garden, who was a friend of mine, was the other "outsider." As soon as Rollins' name was proposed. Gleason remarked that he had just recommended Reed to replace him at the New York Botanical Garden. It was the last thing he had done before he left New York. Since both he and I were strongly pro. that appointment-committee meeting didn't last very long. I remember Conant took us to lunch afterwards. Conant was a chemist, of course. He went to some length to tell me how he almost became a botanist himself, as a matter of fact. 84 Constance: Anyway, I learned something about how Harvard worked. In many ways, as I say, there are more similarities than differences. I even went to a few Harvard faculty meetings; they sounded very much like Berkeley Academic Senate meetings. You could pick out the long-winded individuals, the special pleaders, and so on. They are more or less equivalent from institution to institution. That was my Harvard experience. The one fly in the ointment was that there was a feeling that, having come back for a year, if somebody spoke the proper words I might decide to stay. I made it perfectly clear that I didn't intend to. Bailey came to me in the spring and said, "I'm quite sure you mean what you said. Although I don't like it, I'm willing to accept it, but some of my colleagues won't accept it. So I wonder if you'd be willing to meet with the provost." Buck, a historian who later became director of the Widener Library at Harvard, was provost. Bailey said. "If you will meet with Buck and he can't change your mind, then I think my colleagues will agree to go ahead with an appointment." So I did meet with Buck. Buck, who, I think, was from Ohio, remarked how much he thought of Berkeley and that if he'd had the opportunity, he'd have liked to come here himself. So he didn't talk me out of it. The funniest thing was that the Baileys wanted to give a party for us. a reception. But my wife and young son spent most of the year fighting flu, measles, or something, and they couldn't really get things together until almost the time we were to leave. About that time, George Wald, who is a Nobel laureate expert on the retina and a strong political activist, had just been appointed. So they decided it would be nice to combine the two occasions. Lage : Now what had he been appointed to? Constance: A professorship in biology. So they had a reception for us. They had the Walds on one side, the Constances on the other, and Mrs. Bailey was between Wald and me. She was an absolutely marvelous person, a bone-deep Bostonian. Somehow, she got the idea that his name was "Bald," and he was, as a matter of fact, [laughter] At any rate, it was a hilarious occasion because as people were coming down the reception line, she introduced them to "Mr. Bald", and people were saying, of course, "We're so delighted you're joining us." And then she introduced them to Mr. Constance, but what do you say to Mr. Constance — "We're so delighted you're going"? It was really just hilarious because every time she said "Mr. Bald," poor George blushed. 85 Constance: Well, we made wonderful friends at Harvard. I thought then, and I think now, that we were happier here, and I think that they would be happier having us here than they would have been if we had stayed in Cambridge, although I think we probably could have gotten along all tight. Lage: You made the comment in our first interview that you never really understood your mother until you spent that year in Cambridge. Elaborate on that a little bit. Constance: That's right. You really have to read some of the books on the Bostonians, I suppose, to get to the bottom of that. There's a certain proper-Bostonian atmosphere that's really difficult to characterize. It's a seriousness of purpose, a recognition of the importance of intellectual things. A certain lack of sense of humor tends to go with it, but, basically, they're very fine, somewhat reserved. But once they accept you, you're in, so to speak. And I never really felt at all strange, although I'm probably much more informal. But I was always treated with great respect and affection, I think, which I always returned. The other thing I was going to say was that, when I did talk to Buck, toward the close of the conversation, he said, "We've enjoyed having you so much here. I'm assured that you've been a great help to us in our planning, and I wonder if you wouldn't like to have some continuing association with Harvard after you get back to Berkeley.11 Well, it sounded fine. I said, "I don't know what you have in mind, but certainly I shall always have great respect for Harvard; after all, it isn't every institution that offers you a position. Anything I can do, I'd be interested in doing." Bailey asked me afterward what Buck had said. I told him. He said, "You know what he had in mind, don't you?" and I said. "No — no idea." He didn't explain it. He said, "Some of my colleagues got the idea that maybe we could work out an arrangement with Berkeley whereby you would spend six months of every year here and six months there." I said, "I think it's absolutely preposterous. I wouldn't be any damn good to either of them." He said, "That's what I thought." Lage: [laughing] Buck never made that clear. Constance: Buck didn't make that clear. f* Constance: I suppose the natural sequence to that was that I did serve Harvard for seven years on the Visiting Committee for biology. So I did have a continuing relationship with Harvard. Actually, at one time I had three former students who were professors at 86 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Harvard. Reed Rollins is now retired, Carroll Wood is still there, and Otto Solbrig is still there. So in some ways, I have, I think, had a continuing influence and association. How did your wife' feel about the possibility of living in Cambridge? She had a pretty miserable year. It was a very snowy, wet one. She and our son had the flu and measles and various other things. She liked some parts of it, but I think her mother had told her that she thought that she was too "western" ever to really enjoy living in the East. I don't think that's neces sarily true. I think we would have enjoyed it all right, but I don't think either of us ever felt any great regret about staying. I had a question about Harvard's interest in you, and we really didn't make it clear, partly because you're very modest. You asked why Harvard was interested in me. The nearest thing I know about it is that Harvard has a very diverse faculty—always has had. Harvard, by and large, has the policy of waiting until people have "made it" and then giving them a call. That used to work; it doesn't work so well anymore. Not everybody comes when Harvard whistles. They were losing, by retirement, some of their senior members so they had a committee, or committees, debating the possible replacements. I don't know how my name originally got in the pot, I think probably one of the major reasons was that I had sponsored Reed Rollins at Harvard, and he did fabulously well. So that shed glory' on me. Sometime when I was at Harvard, I ran across a letter which I probably should not have seen, but it was in the files, I guess, in my office. It said, in essence, that Constance is reputed to be one of the best of the younger people in the West, although his record doesn't show it. Of course, most of the people at Harvard weren't trying to teach four courses on a half-time job, working seven days a week, twelve hours a day. as I had been at Pullman for three years. At any rate, undoubtedly there were various candidates favored by various people, who, in the face of different rival ries, and vested interests of one sort or another, cancelled each other out. And perhaps because I wasn't very well known to some of them 1 was favorably known to a few, they discovered they could r agreement on me, whereas they couldn't on some of the others o were under consideration. Would there have been contact or any closeness with faculty members here who might have recommended you? 87 Constance: Elmer Merrill had been Dean of the College of Agriculture here, and he went on to be director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard. He almost surely was in touch with somebody here. But I really don't know. I knew several of the people at Harvard reasonably well or not very well. The field is so small that "everybody knows everybody" to some degree. It's probably old- boy network. I suppose. I just don't know. Probably not primarily my published record. I would guess. But I think the feelings at Harvard were so intense that they were hoping to have someone who would be relatively objective, dispassionate, not too closely tied to any particular group. At least after they interviewed me, they decided that I was such a person. The Associates in Tropical Biogeography Constance: I realize I passed by one thing. At Christmas 1946, before I went back to the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences meetings in Cambridge. I had been asked if I would be interested in taking a trip to Baja California under the imprint of the Associates in Tropical Biogeography. This was an organization which was established largely, I think, at the instance of Carl Sauer, who was the dominant influence and one time professor of geography. Sauer and other people in the natural sciences — particularly those branches of the sciences that were involved in field work — felt that the university gave rather a short shrift to support of field work as opposed to support of laboratory science. So a number of people, including [Ernest] Babcock from genetics, I think probably [Richard] Goldschmidt from zoology, and [G. Ledyard, Jr.] Stebbins from genetics and a number of others — people from paleontology and geology — got together and formed this organization. Lage: Were you involved in that at all? Constance: I was involved in that in several ways, as a matter of fact. At any rate. I think we got a grant of twelve thousand dollars from President Sproul, which I think Sauer probably negotated personally. Eventually, at least. Morris Stewart who was an parasitologist and dean of the Graduate Division — I'm not sure of the exact timing of all of this — but for a number of years he, as dean of the Graduate Division, and I. as dean of Letters and Science, kept the Associates in Tropical Biogeography going. I don't think it's still going. But at any rate it enabled a lot of people, particularly graduate students, to get support 88 Constance: for field work in Latin America. It was tropical biogeography; we called it tropical, defined as meaning anything south of San Diego. I used to characterize it by saying that Carl Sauer would give a graduate student in geography a handful of raisins and a hundred dollars and tell him to go south and come back with his thesis. With Carl Sauer in Baja California Constance: At all events, they decided it would be nice to have a kind of a sample model expedition involving people from different disciplines. One of the arguments for this was the thought that maybe people in different disciplines could combine forces in field work. So much to my surprise, when I got back from Cambridge, I discovered that this expedition was leaving the first of February or something of that sort — which at that time was an intersemester interval. The personnel was Carl Sauer of geography; Howel Williams, a volcanologist in geology; Reuben Stirton, a vertebrate paleontologist; myself; and a graduate student in entomology and two in geography, as I recall. I think that was the entire personnel. We had two little International Harvester trucks. We started out from Berkeley and drove to San Diego. Carl Sauer was back on the east coast as a member of the Guggenheim selection committee, so he didn't join us until we were fairly well down the peninsula. Basically, what we did was to drive from Berkeley to the tip of Baja California, making a number of stops, mostly along the west coast, but with some trans-peninsular jaunts and — Lage: Did you have an overall goal? Constance: Well, the overall goal was a bone of contention. As I said, the thing was supposed to be a model and was to have people with different objectives and different disciplines work together in the field. And each of us went with some objective. Howel Williams wanted to see volcanoes. There are three volcanoes, the Tres Virgenos in Baja California, and he got to spend a half day with them. Stirton really was interested in fossils, but he figured that on such a short trip he probably couldn't do much, really, extricating fossils if he found any. So he took along a fairly elaborate kit to collect modern mammals. I had some specific botanical objective, but mostly I wanted to obtain material for the herbarium and for my own information, which was fine. But Sauer had objectives for all of us which he didn't confide to us except during the course of the trip. He was interested in the human use of plants, so he had me in the role 89 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance ; Lage: of collector of and identifier of, obtainer of, ethno-botanical information. He was interested in the concept of eustatic terraces, which is the phenomenon that the rising and falling of sea level has left telltale terraces so that you could tell what had happened geologically, if you had such terraces and evaluated them properly. And he wanted Stirton to teach one of his graduate students how to excavate the remains of any aboriginal natives who might have been interred over time. So there was some confusion of objectives, shall we say. So he had an overall purpose for this expedition, but it wasn't defined in advance. He had an overall purpose, and it wasn't necessarily the same as ours. But he was a very interesting chap, very broad in his interests and so on. but he was used to traveling with strictly his subordinates and mostly graduate students. His wiser colleagues knew better than to go in the field with him. One of them remarked later that he had never gone into the field with Sauer. That was John Leighley. who was a long-time associate. [He recently died in his nineties.] Was Sauer older than the rest of you? Yes. he was older. We got along just fine until Sauer caught up with us. And then we discovered certain idiosyncrasies of his which didn't necessarily jive with the certain idiosyncrasies of ours. My first experience with it was that I was trying to collect plants. You can't collect plants and dry them properly without a considerable outlay of time, which obviously would complicate things for other people. So I would get up at the crack of dawn and go out and collect plants and try to get them all organized, usually foregoing breakfast in the process so I wouldn't hold anybody up. And I got a lot of stuff. But I had to stop sometime during the day to dry out the driers that were taking moisture out of plants so the things wouldn't spoil. The second or third day, I think, after Sauer j oined us, I had gotten up at dawn, collected, and was drying out some plants. Sauer walked up to me and said, "You won't have time for that today11; this didn't please me much. He elaborated on this a bit. and I pointed out that 1 had gone way out of my way to keep from holding up anybody. This didn't impress him, so I finally said, "Well, if you think that I spent the University's money to collect plants only to let them rot. you have another think coming." So that was the beginning of a certain amount of unpleasantness. Did the others speak up as well? 90 Constance: They couldn't speak up really. Williams was the chairman of geology, and he probably was the only person who could've told Sauer at his own level to buzz off. Williams was a quiet little Welshman, a wonderful guy, who'd mutter about Sauer under his breath, but wouldn't really take a stand. Stirton was an associate professor — very outspoken and fairly emotional. Things got tenser and tenser as time went along because we were completely frustrated. If Sauer wanted to stop, we'd stop for half a day while Sauer chatted with one of the estancia owners or whomever, and we found ourselves camping in the yard with all the buffalo chips, fleas, and so on. and eating in places which were really impossible. We would have been much happier camping out in the country, but Sauer liked to be around people. So things got more and more tense. Sauer wouldn't let the graduate students stop at a cantina even though the tempera ture was soaring. So pretty soon, the group divided between the two trucks; Sauer and the graduate students were in one, and the rest of us were in the other. We'd stop where we pleased and they'd go by with their tongues hanging out, so to speak. At any rate, I decided that Stirton might very well find Sauer on his review committee for promotion or something, but Sauer wouldn't be very likely to be on mine. So things began to build up. We were down in one of the southern towns near the tip of the peninsula and one of graduate students who happened to be riding with us that day wanted to stop at a bakery to get some pan dulce [cookies], if I remember correctly. I think he was the entomologist. So we stopped for that. And then my two colleagues were kidding me by saying, *Vhy don't you go ahead and collect plants?" Here I was in tropical country that I'd never seen before. I resisted for a while — I was driving. They said, "Oh. we'll help you," so we did stop. We weren't very much delayed, but we were about an hour or so behind the other truck. Sauer always said we had to stay within sight of each other, which was silly because the second truck always got all the dust from the first one. It was really dusty! At all events, we did collect things, doing it as fast as possible. I was driving, and I looked up the stretch of road to see the other car parked at the side of the road. Sauer was standing in the middle of the road with his hands on his hips, glaring. So I drove up to a few feet from him, turned off the engine, and got out. I said. "Professor Sauer, we're delayed because I stopped to collect plants." He glared at me, took off his hat and slammed it down in the dirt, turned around and walked off. That's all we ever heard about it. Lage: What an experiencel 91 Constance; Lage : Later. I applied for a Guggenheim fellowship. Henry Alan Moe was the executive secretary. I think. Sauer had had a long history of association with the Guggenheim Foundation. I wanted to go to Chile to investigate the relationship between California plants -and plants of the southern temperate zone. I don't remember how much I asked for, but at any rate. Moe responded that I really had asked for too much for too short a time. I think for a half-year I was asking for something like fourteen-hundred dollars, maybe. Moe said, "But that's all right. I'm sure it can be worked out, but what you really should do is go over and talk to Carl Sauer on your campus." So I went over and talked to Sauer. Nobody could have been more helpful. That's very interesting. Constance: He was very nice. All he needed was somebody to talk back to him. Lage: Was he an influential figure on campus? Constance: Probably at various times. He was quite a faculty leader at one time and sort of dropped out of it. But he was a very interesting personality and a very forceful one. He was one of the major Calif or ni a- La tin American associates. 92 VIII BAY AREA BOTANISTS AND BOTANICAL THOUGHT Women in Botany: Eastwood, Mexia, Alexander. Carter Lage : I wanted to talk a little more about women in botany. That's a project our office has begun — interviewing a few women in botany. You worked closely with Marion Cave and Mildred Mathias. I wondered what other women botanists you knew here in the Bay Area. For instance, you mentioned Alice Eastwood in one of your articles. Was she associated with Cal? Constance: No, she was the grand old lady at the California Academy of Sciences. Of course I knew her. Lage: You mentioned something about her j oy in making new species, Constance: Well. Alice Eastwood is a very revered San Francisco figure. She had been a high school teacher in Grand Junction, Colorado, and just under what circumstances she came West. I really don't know. But at any rate, she's been written about fairly extensively. She appeared at the California Academy of Sciences and became the chairlady of botany. She was there for many years. She never married; there's a story that she was engaged to a distinguished geologist, but he died suddenly, and she never married. She did a great deal of field work in conjunction with her associate John Thomas Howell, who had been one of Jepson's students. He is now in his early eighties and has been working for many years on the flora of the Sierra Nevada. She was a very hearty soul. I think it would be fair to say that she was. to some extent, a perpetual amateur. She knew a lot. She had to handle all the questions that arose in San Francisco about cultivated plants. She knew everything in Golden Gate Park. She had a tremendous knowledge of the flora of California, but I think that she wasn't particularly inter ested in any one specific group. She tended to know quite a little about almost everything, which perhaps was appropriate 93 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : for her role as the principal botanist at the Academy and the sort of plant information service it provided for San Francisco, She didn't have any students because she was not in a teaching situation; she had no other institutional affiliation. In what age group would she have been? She lived into her nineties. I couldn't, just off the top of my head, tell you — but I could easily find out. [goes across room] She lived from 1859 to 1953. One of the cute things about her was that she was very nice to younger botanists. She always made a point of knitting a sweater for each of the younger botanist's first child. She said she wouldn't go beyond the first one. She knitted one for our son. As I say, her interests were very generalized — she knew a lot. Like most amateur botanists, she was tremendously interested in novelties, and she turned up a lot of them. One of her good friends remarked once that she had described more kinds of manzanita than there were shrubs on Mt. Tamalpais. which may have been a slight exaggeration, but was probably not too far off. How about Ynes Mexia? University? Was she somebody who was around the Mrs. Mexia was the daughter of a Mexican general whose name was Mexia. There's a town of Mexia in Texas. I believe that he was one of the Mexican officers at the Alamo. She was married — I don't know what happened to the marriage — but she returned to her maiden name and was known as Mrs. Mexia. She was a professional collector. She collected from at least Mexico to Patagonia that I know about. I'm not too sure of all her comings and goings. I think that she supported herself simply by sale of collections. Does this imply "identify" or just "collect?" I don't think she identified. I think identification was made by others. The material was handled, at least part of the time, through the University herbarium here by Mrs. Floy Bracelin, who acted as her secretary, amanuensis, agent, or whatever. We have quite a lot of her material, which is very valuable; it's also at the Smithsonian and a number of other places. She seems like a very adventuresome woman. Well, she was very frail in appearance and didn't look at all husky, as I recall — I didn't know her well. I can't tell you exactly when I saw her. I suppose she probably was here when I 94 Constance: first came, or she came in from time to time. But that's really about all I know about her. She has been written up briefly by Mrs. Bracelin.* I think that she did some collecting for the botanical garden while Goodspeed was in charge of it. He may have sponsored some of that. Lage : Was Annie Alexander interested in botany? Constance: Annie Alexander was one of the university's great benefac tresses. I wrote once that she was as important to the sciences as Phoebe Hearst was to anthropology and classic archaeology. She was the descendent of one of the first families of Hawaii — the Alexander family. But she had no interest in social things, per se. She was brought up on a ranch in Kauai, was a great horseback rider, and so on. When she was at Berkeley as a student, she became interested in paleontology. Later, she was primarily responsible for the establishment of both the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology — in other words, the fossil and the living. She got her interest or her stimulation, I assume, primarily from John C. Merriam, who was a professor in geology. There was no Department of Paleontology at that time. The Department of Paleontology was a spin-off from the museum. She was responsible for Joseph Grinnell coming here as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. And as a matter of fact, there are letters in the university's files in which she needles President Wheeler to get busy and make the appoint ment and get the museum established. Lage: Does it sound as if she chose Grinnell? Constance: It sounds very much as if she chose him. He was at Throop Polytechnic, which was the ancestor of Cal Tech. At all events, she was the guardian angel of the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Lage: Did she help fund botanical enterprises? Constance: Unfortunately, she didn't. Late in life, she and her associate, Louise Kellogg, got interested in collecting plants. They worked particularly on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, which is the most difficult place for people with a full academic schedule to get to. They turned up some very interesting stuff. *Mexia family papers and material on Ynez Mexia are in The Bancroft Library. 95 Constance: An unfortunate result, however, of her activities was that she set up the two museums in such a way that they had faculty members as curators; but the herbarium and botanical garden did not share in that largesse. As a result, they did not have faculty members as curators; so we had to go to a non-faculty series of position's to staff them. It would have been nice if she hadn't used up all her assets before she got interested in botany. She was a wonderful person. Lage: Anybody else that you can think of? Constance: There were several people associated with the University Herbarium who were quite outstanding people. One of them is Annetta Carter, who is still active. She got interested a number of years ago in Baja California. She actually went there accompanying the Misses Alexander and Kellogg. They went there, I think, because they were interested in what various people who had done field work there — including myself — reported about the place. And from that initial experience, she has had a career- long concern with the flora of the Sierra Giganta; she is still working on the plants. I think those are the people that come to mind offhand.* ** The Biosystematists Constance: You asked a question about the Biosystematists. This was a group which was formed, I believe, in 1936, which was the last year I was still at the State College of Washington. So I was not in on the initial founding of the group. Someone asked me not long ago in the presence of Professor Ledyard Stebbins if I had been a charter member of the group. And I said, "No. I was sure I had not. I think it actually was founded in 1936 before I returned to Berkeley on the faculty." Professor Stebbins said, ''Oh, nol Nobody knew who you were, so we didn't invite you." So I assume that that was probably the official reason that I was not a charter member. In the thirties, approximately, the effects of the findings of cytology and genetics became employed more and more in dis cussions of evolution and systematics. And I believe that the group — the Biosystematists — which involved plant taxonomists, geneticists, paleontologists, and a few others, was really *See interview with Annetta Carter in California Women in Botany. Regional Oral History Office, 1987. 96 Constance: created by the leaders of the Division of Plant Biology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who were at that point, and still are, located at Stanford University. Several of the appropriate senior people at Berkeley were also involved, not ably Professor Babcock, who was chairman of genetics; Professor Sauer, who was chairman of geography — although he did not remain active in it; Professor Chaney, who was chairman of the Department of Paleontology. There were quite a few others, and a number of younger people. I think that the group was originally organized to conduct general discussions of Huxley's book called The New Systematics, I believe is the title. Huxley's book was really the compilation of discussions held by a similar group in England. So apparently the same kinds of discussions were going on not only here but also in England. Lage: And this wasn't just botany? Constance: No. This was quite broad — primarily natural scientists, that is, biologists, geologists, geographers, geneticists, and so on. But it particularly marked the influence of genetical and cytological information on discussions which previously had been based almost wholly on morphology — structure — and so on. This organization has continued to the present day and is still active, although I haven't been very active in it for some time. Lage: What is their focus now? Constance: Their focus is still the same. It's really — although they're not wedded, obviously, to any single topic — evolution. They hold bimonthly meetings and they have to do, primarily, with discussions of evolution, of phylogeny, classification, and so forth. I remember that in the early days, we spent most of our time debating such issues as the proper definition of species. In retrospect, it amuses me that this serious group of scien tists sat around and debated that subject. We'd come in with a different definition almost every month, and it was very easy to shoot down any definition anyone came in with. But I must confess that it wasn't for another ten years that I realized that a single definition of species is obviously impossible and that, mostly, it was a waste of time. But the discussions were very good, and I'm sure they influenced the thinking of all of us. In this instance, discussions of this type — the Biosystematists sort of thing — were far ahead of anything that was going on in the eastern United States, so far as I'm aware. 97 Constance: There were many people who were interested in all the different components of our discussions, but they never put them together. Indeed, when I was at Harvard in '47. I gave a lecture on the relationship of cytology to classification of a particular group and discovered that the subject was completely novel. I gave it to the New England Botanical (Hub, and I had visions of being thrown out on my ear because this wasn't considered really an appropriate subject for discussion. All the information was there. The geneticists had one end of it. the systematists had the other. But there was little if any effort to put it together. And it wasn't really for some time until — well, I suppose that I pioneered, actually, at Harvard, the linkage of these two things. Lage: How did they accept your ideas? Did they throw you out on your ear? Constance: No. One of my good friends, who was a taxonomist, kept saying. "How do you know that the next chromosome count you get won't be different?" I said. "You don't," But over time, statistically, these things narrow down, and in most groups, you find that there is some pattern to these things, and it's the pattern that you're after. So I think that that attitude certainly infused my teaching and research and. basically, that of all the students who went out of Berkeley in that general period to other institutions. Lage: It's an interesting attempt at sort of a larger picture. Constance: That's right. Well, systematics. as I've probably said many times over, has always had the same general objectives. But it changes its configuration by the addition of all kinds of data. That's always been my message, that this, indeed, is what should happen. Lage: But is that the message of most of your field? Constance: I think that's all accepted now. The pioneering stage is past and now they're on to other things, some of which I'm conversant with and some of which I'm not. H Jepson' s Will: Creation of Jepson Herbarium and Library Constance: One thing I didn't mention, which has been of some importance, is the Jepson Herbarium and Library, because that was a recurring theme. Willis Linn Jepson was my major professor, and 98 Constance: when he died in 1946, he left his herbarium, his library, and his house to the University. Altogether, after his house was sold, I think the estate came to about $300,000, to set up the herbarium and library as basically a memorial to himself. My first contact with that situation was a notice in November 1946 from his attorney saying that I would shortly receive by mail a printed notice of the probate of Dr. Jepson's will. It is sent to me [reading] "because you are mentioned in the will. He says, 'I give to my former student, Dr. Lincoln Constance, my silk gown and doctor's hood.1 And he also names you as one of the three trustees to administer the Jepson Research Fund." The other two trustees were Alva R. Davis, who was departmental chairman, and Helen Marr Wheeler, later Mrs. Beard, who was a close friend and daughter of a college classmate here at the university. This was an interesting situation because I was the sole plant taxonomist — which was Jepson's field — of the trustees. Miss Wheeler was uncritically devoted to Dr. Jepson and his memory and was anxious to see carried out to a last dotting of an "i" everything he specified. Lage: Did he specify quite a bit about how it should be run? Constance: He left a will, if I remember correctly, with twelve hand written codicils, each of which was a little more drastic than the preceding. I don't think they contradicted each other — they simply added on. Jepson was a remarkable man, a very fine scientist in his own way. I said somewhere in writing his biographical sketches, which I have done several times, that he had an exaggerated sense of the dramatic. Other people call it paranoia. At any rate, he managed to be at odds with almost everybody most of the time, certainly with all the university people with whom he had contact who were at all close to his field or in anyway related to him administratively. So he didn't like the president, he didn't like the vice-president, he didn't like any of the deans — especially the dean of the graduate division, who was a particular bete noj.r. He had disliked Professor Setchell, who was chairman of the botany department, for most of the forty years he had been chairman. Lage: He must have liked Davis, though; he made him a trustee. Constance: Davis had gone out of his way to be very deferential to him. Davis was a very fine person, very fair, and he certainly did everything he could to make life pleasant for Jepson. So, he did like him. He probably wouldn't have liked him for very long, but at least initially it worked out well, and it would be 99 Constance: part of Jepson's respect for institutional integrity that the chairman of the department should be director of the trustees. After all, I was pretty young at the time; I was an assistant professor who had been here a relatively few years, and he would have thought it a little premature, I think, to give this much responsiblity to me. It became quite an interesting exercise to know how the University should handle this. I wrote a letter to Davis as chairman in March 1947, the main thrust of which was that I knew for a fact that most of Jepson's accumulation of specimens — and a good deal of his accumulation of literature — had been done on university time and with university funds. And I thought the University ought to simply take over, or claim, the material, which was largely housed in the Life Sciences Building, part of the area where the Biology Library is now, and not pay much attention to the stipulations — only to those which seemed to make some kind of sense. Because, clearly, in addition to, in a sense, threatening the University with losing this material, Jepson was also trying to pay of f a number of personal grudges, particularly against my colleague Professor Mason, who was the director of the herbarium. Lage: So he didn't want the two collections merged? Constance: Well, that was part of it, but there was more than that. He specified that the director of the herbarium should have no part in any aspect of the estate. And to some extent, the thing was set up so if I had wanted to continue his work, it was really set up to make it possible for me to do so. Lage: Had he discussed that with you? Constance: No, he never discussed it with me at all. [reading Jepson's will] He said, "On account of his strange and unexplainable treachery in the years 1934 and later, I direct that H. L. Mason shall not in any way share the benefits or endowments of this will, and I express to Dr. A.R. Davis the hope that this intention will be carried out." That, I believe, was the final codicil. At all events. I remember meeting with Davis, with Jepson's attorney, and with President Sproul. I believe those were all who were present. I remember making the points that I have just noted orally, and Sproul saying, "I'm sure the University could make a good case out of it. But from a public relations standpoint." — perhaps he didn't say this, but at any rate, that was the idea — "Jepson was a professor for fifty years at the University, and he was recently given an honorary doctorate. He has given this large" — for its time — "donation to the University, and it would really be a scandal if we did this, and probably we 100 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: Constance : might very reasonably do it. So I think the best thing to do is for the University to accept it with the fewest commitments possible, and long after you and I are dead, it may prove to be useful." Basically, of course, that is what happened to it. When you say that "long after you and I are dead, it will be useful," does that mean that his stipulations didn't allow it to be useful? Some of the stipulations couldn't be carried out. One of them was to publish an anonymous document after his death, the title of which, if I recall, was something to the effect of "Men Who Are Vile," and then which went on to enumerate a fair share of the faculty, administration, and whomever. We did not have possession of this manuscript at that point. I think probably Miss Wheeler had it, because she was the one who was going to be the anonymous publisher. Davis suggested he might like to see some of the letters Jepson had written me to give the judge an idea of what was probably in this volume. The university lawyer was involved also. Apparently, they turned the letters over to the court and I didn't get them back, which I rather regretted. But apparently the judge was convinced, and when the estate was settled, a number of these things were simply ruled out. Was Miss Wheeler amenable to that? She wasn't very happy about it, but I guess she didn't think she could do much about it. Over the course of years, I think she has clearly come to realize that some of these things were not prudent, shall we say, at least. Is she still alive? She's still alive; I've been chairman of trustees for a number of years, and still am. and I'm still in touch with her. The trustees haven't met for several years, primarily because she lives in Trinidad [California], and it's not easy for her to get down. I've offered to hold a meeting anytime she wants one, but she hasn't wanted to. The Jepson Herbarium finally was integrated with the University Herbarium, wasn't it? That's correct. The Jepson Herbarium and Library have stayed as a distinct unit — it was necessary to box a lot of the books because we didn't have room to put them together. We even got the best of the furniture in his house. But during World War II. it was stored in various odd places and got pretty well demolished. We used to have some of the chairs around the 101 Constance: dean's office, but eventually they've gone down the tube, too. So there isn't much left in the way of furniture. But the herbarium and library operated very successfully as a research unit. And now in-the new plans for reorganization of biology, the herbarium is combined with the University Herbarium. The Jepson Herbarium is solely of California plants, and it has been combined with the California representation of the general herbarium, although they are all in separate folders and dis tinctively marked. So anyone working on the California flora has all this material together. This is important at this point because one of the other specifications in Jepson's will was that his Manual of the Flowering Plants of California, which was published in 1925, was to be kept permanently in print. It is now being revised with a number of people working on it. Lage: And the funds that he left allow for this? Constance: The funds probably are insufficient to publish it. and exactly how it's going to be financed still remains to be seen. But at least the work is going forward with it. so I think that we are carrying forward at least all the important things that Jepson really wanted to have done and at the same time, passing over things that probably would not have been very wise to do, which I think, really, in his deepest thoughts he would not have wanted to be done. 102 IX THE UNIVERSITY LOYALTY OATH CRISIS Robert Gordon Sproul and the Faculty Lage : Let's move on to our university-related topics. We were going to start off talking about the loyalty oath. Constance: It comes out a little better, I think, if we go at it another way. You asked also about Sproul, and I noticed [in my files] the first thing I have that relates specifically to him. He handed me my Ph.D. diploma when I took my degree in 1934, but I had no reason to believe that he remembered me. I note that on December 9. 1942. I received an invitation, which reads "On Tuesday, December 22. I'm inviting a few members of the faculty to the President's house for cocktails before the Faculty dub Christmas dinner. I should like very much to have you join us between four and six o'clock. Sincerely yours, Robert G. Sproul." I didn't know it at the time, but apparently this group comprised the assistant professors who were to be recom mended to go to associate professorship and tenure the following year. As I say, I didn't know that until much later. I think I told you earlier that I found out a few years ago that with the stringencies of World War II, it was decided to fire my generation of assistant professors, but that, instead, the budget committee, I am informed, convinced Sproul that he should ask the Regents to approve war leave (which was already available to those going into the armed services). And I find a letter. June 30, 1943, addressed to me in "N" Building. Washington. D.C.. where I was working for the O.S.S.. saying that he had recommended that my leave of absence be extended for the year 1943-44. [reads from letter] "Unless you hear from me to the contrary, you may assume that such extension has been granted." And, presumably, it was. Lage: The invitation to cocktails — would that have been a way of looking over these young assistant professors? 103 Constance: Lage : Constance : Lage: Constance : I think so. Sproul wanted to be sure he knew them. Oh. I think the decisions had already been made, probably. But it was a very gracious gesture, and it was, so to speak, welcoming us to the permanent faculty. Would you give some background about Sproul and how he related to faculty members? You have to go out of the chronology to make it sensible. I see that on July 14, 1949, I have a communication from Sproul — obviously not a personal one — in which he relates that the Regents of the University of California, on June 24, 1949, after consultation and agreement between the President of the University and the advisory committee, of the two sections of the Academic Senate approved the following resolution (which is a long resolution): "Beginning at its birth, the University of California was dedicated to the search for truth . . »" And at the end attaches an oath, and then at the bottom there is a detachable portion which is to be mailed to the President: "I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability, that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath, or a party to any agreement or under arty commitment that is in conflict with my obligation under this oath." And this one was supposed to be signed and notarized. What was the date of this? July 1949? Was this the one that came out in That's right. And I have another letter from Sproul on September 28. This one asked me to serve on a committee to advise him on the need for a marine laboratory. On October 20, a letter from Sproul says, "No reply having come to the form letter about the loyalty oath which I sent you some weeks ago, I am writing to ask if you received it and also to call your attention to the following statement which was agreed upon and issued with the advisory committee of the northern and southern sections," which is quoted. "It is hoped that we shall hear from you soon in order that errors in recording the responses of faculty members, and the absence thereof, may not be made. Yours sincerely..." My understanding is that President Sproul called each of the people who had not sent in the signed oath. (In those days, one had to sign his contract and send it in annually.) When he called me. he said he understood that my contract had not been received with the oath and so on. He asked if this were inad vertent or intentional. I said it was intentional, and he asked if I would like to tell him why. I said I would be delighted 104 Constance: to, and I told him why at seme length. He was very patient and very pleasant about it. And I said, "Now that I've told you, I'm going to write you what I told you, and I will send in my signed contract because I feel I'm not in a position, at this point, having just turned down a professorship at Harvard, tc make an issue of it." So I wrote him on the 24th of October: Dear Mr. President: In answer to ynur letter of October 20 may I assure you I did receive the form letter about the loyalty oath. I hope that your letter may be con strued as an invitation to say a word as to my reasons for having failed to sign and return the form before this time. Like many of my colleagues, I delayed complying with the original request for early return of the signed oath in the earnest hope that The Regents would pay serious heed to the fact that its objections to what many of us believed, and still believe, to be an ill-advised requirement, severely prejudicial to the reputation of the University. This hope has now, of course, been disappointed, since it seems evident that The Regents have no intention of making any important modifications in the original stipulation. I should like to make it perfectly clear that I agree fully with the stated objectives of The Regents' policy. Not only do I have no personal commitment to the Communist Party (of which I am not now, and never have been, and certainly never expect to be, a member) or to any other organizations which impairs my impar tiality as a teacher and scientist but I also do not believe a Communist would be a fit member of a university faculty. If there is such a thing as "inactive Communist," I've never seen one, and I am sure no man can serve two masters wholeheartedly. I do think, however, that charges against an individual should be based upon his activities rather than upon his associations. This point of view does not automatically lend me, however, to enthusiasic acceptance of what seems to me a unilaterally imposed change in the qualifications for tenure appointment in the University Faculty. My reluctance to sign this or any similar special oath can be summed up in the statement that I feel the imposition of such a test to be incompatible with the high reputation of this University, and being required to sign it to be incompaf' ble with the dignity and self-respect which every member of this Faculty should 105 Constance : possess. Since the oath requirement evokes this repugnance in me, I believe I should have ill-served my employers, my students and my conscience, by exhibiting, unseemly haste in complying with this demand. This might have been interpreted as agreement with a policy I cannot conscientiously defend. My delay in compliance was. then, deliberate and constituted my personal protest. I realize that a series of mistakes and misunder standings have so confused the fundamental issue that it is now difficult to discern its original outlines. Since further protest has been rendered ineffective and likely only to give comfort to the group the requirement was originally designed to embarrass (and which I personally despise), I feel I should now comply with your original request. I should like to make it clear that I am signing the oath without any mental reservation, but with a feeling of deep humiliation. Respectfully your s. ... An Extraordinarily Difficult Period — Background to the Oath Lage: I hope we can elaborate on some of that. Constance: Do you want to elaborate on it? Doesn't it say enough in itself? Lage: Well, it leads to other things, like the different groups of the faculty that you referred to and — Constance: Well, it was an extraordinarily difficult period. Again, the old story, "I don't know how much I know and how much I think I know. " In my files I found a Daily Californian editorial page item, which will give an idea of the temper of those times. It had a paraphrase of a pamphlet entitled "Red-ucators at the University of California. Stanford University and California Institute of Technology." This was May 17, 1950. [reading] "Thirty-three professors at the University of California have been affiliated with the following communist front organizations and enterprises." It then goes ahead and lists seventy-six organizations. They singled out Raymond T. Birge. who was the chairman of physics for twenty-five years, I think, and Robert Gordon, professor of economics. Then there were G. P. Adams. R, A. Brady, 0. Bridgman, A. G. Brodeur (Engl ish) ,' Constance (botany), Denr.es. 106 Lage: They named you also? Constance: Oh. yes. Lage: What organization do you think they were speaking of with you? Constance: God knows. Lage: Now. this was the Daily Cal talking about this report? Constance: Yes. Well, it was one of the McCarthy things, you know. It was interesting in a way because it was indicative of the kind of McCarthy era atmosphere in which the loyalty oath was hatched. I don't want to belabor that. I'd forgotten I had been listed. Lage: They painted with a pretty broad brush. Constance: Oh. yes. This was the McCarthy period. At any rate, the universities and all public bodies were under stress. McCarthy was fishing "communists" out of the federal government and most any place else. The legislature was affected. The President was convinced that if the University did not do something to blunt such an attack on the University, the legislature might very well push through some much more damaging regulation. The President did consult with certain senior figures in the Academic Senate. Lage: Is that the advisory committee the letter referred to? Constance: I'm not sure exactly whom — I'm sure he did consult a number of them. I mean, he was on close, personal terms with most, essentially, all the senior faculty, and I'm sure that he did consult with the people who were in positions which were regarded by the faculty as leadership positions. They knew Sproul. They were aware of the situation. They had a deep feeling of loyalty to him, and I think, probably, the general message was "We know you, you know us, we can trust each other. We don't think that the faculty will seriously object." And Sproul came to the presidency by way of the controller's office rather than by faculty membership. Considering this, Sproul was extraordinarily astute in judging the "faculty mind." But this was one spot where, he admitted later, he made a serious mistake. I think that most faculty members would have recognized that some of the faculty, at least, would be offended. Faculty do not like to have other people make decisions for them, even for their own good! I don't want to say that faculty members are childish, but it's very much like making decisions for an adult child. It may well be for his or her own good, but 107 Constance: that doesn't mean it will necessarily be applauded. And you could be almost sure that someone would kick ever the traces on this. There was a very wide range of responses. I know some people signed the thing because they were sure that no one would ever be fired. It would be incomprehensible that the University would fire anybody so just go ahead and sign and forget about it. Lage : They didn't give it that much thought as an issue. Constance: That's right. I had a very good friend who was a humanist, very astute, for whom I had tremendous admiration and affection and still do. Ke said, "Well. I figured there was going to be an oath of some kind, so I decided to sign it and then never think about it any more." But then there were some who felt it was a life and death issue. My good friend Curt Stern who was a very distinguished geneticist and zoologist, felt that this was the first stage in the appearance of America's Hitler. You see. there was every range of opinion at that period as to how serious this was. I had trouble, myself, trying to decide. Is this where you star. a on barricades, or are you kidding yourself? Are you blowing it clear out of proportion? Lage: Even at the time — Constance: That's right. I mean, I didn't like it. I thought it was insulting, and it was insulting. There was no question about it because the faculty were really picked out as a suspect group. It was completely unjustified, and they never did find a real live Communist in the University. I think they finally found a woman who was playing the piano in the physical education department at UCLA who reportedly was a Communist. But if there were any Communists in the faculty, they remained cryptic, I think, so, it was completely unjustified in my judgment. It was tragic for Sproul because he had done extraordin arily well over a long period of time, but the Regents boxed him in. They were playing politics. Sproul was very close to Governor Warren, and there were one or more of the Regents who had always had wanted to see Warren embarrassed. Lage: Do you think it was a way of getting at Earl Warren? Constance: Oh, I dor.'t think there's any question that it was employed politically in the Regents. The Regents split on it. Admiral Nimitz was one of the Regents. He was a very fine naval officer, but his attitude towards the faculty was basically, 108 Constance: "Well, they've been ordered to do it, so they do it, or else they'll be flogged at the main mast." It was that sort of thing. The faculty were treated as ordinary employees, a treatment which faculty don't particularly appreciate. There is always the question of "Who is the University?" The students think they are; the faculty think they are; occasionally, the administration gets the misapprehension that it is. So all these different things played in their own way, and I think it was a very tragic and damaging thing to the University. Quite a number of people left and didn't return. I was reminded today of one classicist, who had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who would never return to this campus. They tried to bring him here as a Sather lecturer, but he refused. He would have nothing to do with the Berkeley campus after that had happened. Lage: How about the Department of Botany? Were there a lot of different opinions within your own department? Constance: I don't remember much discussion of it. The department was pretty conservative. I don't think anybody really liked it, but I don't think it was discussed much at the departmental level, really. It was kind of above and beyond. I'm sure that Davis, the chairman, who was an intimate friend of Sproul's, would have been very unhappy about it. On the other hand, he might not have been too sympathetic about people stirring up a fuss, because he could see that Sproul was sort of caught in the middle. Lage: Were there any members of the department who would have left or planned to leave? Constance: I suppose that I was the most under- the-gun, as one of the youngest. I do remember that when I went to Harvard, someone made a great point of the fact that I would not have to sign a loyalty oath at Harvard but I had to sign one for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts [laughter], so it didn't really matter all that much. Lage: Did you get involved in Academic Senate meetings and — ? Constance: Not very much. I was on the budget committee by that time. And the chairman of the budget committee was Malcolm Davisson from economics. The oath virtually destroyed him. 109 Lage: In what way would that have been? Constance: Well, he was generally conceded to be. I think, the faculty's fair—haired boy and he might very well succeed Sproul as president. The whole thing left him a wreck. He was a very decent, sensitive person who was absolutely destroyed by some of the Regents' politics. There were some who were particularly brutal. John Francis Neylan, who was Hearst's attorney, was originally opposed to the oath. He really got Sproul to commit himself to it and then he wouldn't let him out of it. His lieutenant was Goodwin Knight, who eventually succeeded Warren as governor. So that's part of the business. Lage: When you say that a faculty member was virtually destroyed, you are referring to the politics within the faculty? Constance: No. Well, of course there were problems with the faculty, too. Lifelong friendships were broken up. people stopped speaking to each other. It was quite dire, shall we say. Sproul' s Strengths Constance: I noticed here's a note I wrote to Sproul — don't ask me why — I thought it was a good idea. I guess. I said, "Dear Mr. President: I wish to express my personal gratification for the manner in which you defended before the Board of Regents the faculty's interpretation of the signifi cance of the hearing held in the Academic Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure. We all earnestly hope you will be wholly successful in convincing the Regents of the justness and reasonableness of the committee recommendations. However, I share what is, I believe, the essentially unanimous conviction of the factor that win. lose, or draw, you have not in any way spared yourself on behalf of the welfare of the University in a defense of true academic freedom. No matter what the outcome may be, I sincerely hope that no consideration whatsoever will induce you to deprive us of your tested leadership in the undoubtedly critical days ahead," (There were rumors that Sproul might leave.) "I. for one, feel that such a loss would be truly calamitous to all of us and to our university." 110 Lage: You felt that after making the origir.al mistake Sproul came around? Constance: Sure, there's no question about it. He replied August 1, 1950: "Your letter of July 18. in which you were good enough to express continuing confidence in me, even in the face of the difficulties which have plagued us all during the past year, is deeply appreciated. In reply I can say no more than that I shall not run away from the presidency as long as I am convinced that I can be useful to the University. Thank you very much for taking the trouble to write to me at a time when an encouraging word was most helpful." I was never really close to Sproul, but I had a lot of admiration for him and I was fond of him on a personal level too. Lage: What were his most admirable qualities or accomplishments? Constance: I suppose his strength was his ability to weld the University's various factions together and to hold the alumni — build the alumni into a feeling of family solidarity — and to command legislative support and respect. Those, I think, were the paramount things. I suppose it's fair to say that Wheeler was the president who really succeeded in bringing the University to a level of national, international distinction. But he ran the place with an essentially iron hand. Eventually he came a cropper. After that, things were somewhat chaotic. There was a president or two and there were various committees and various regents and whatever. But Sproul came in as a young man in 1930, and for nearly three decades, he really was the University of California in the eyes of the faculty, the state, and just about everybody else. Not everybody was equally enthusiastic. I'm sure. There were those who felt, since Wheeler was a student of classics, that probably the president ought to be a student of humanities or something of the sort. But Sproul was the first president after Wheeler, I think, who really subsumed the university. Lage: You have always been a strong spokesman, in the conversations we've had. for faculty as administrators. Constance: Oh yes, I believe in it. Lage: And here we have Sproul, who was an exception. Ill Constance: Yes, but Sproul also believed ir. it. That's right. Sproul was very good about consulting the faculty. As I said, he was exceptional, considering his background, in understanding what made faculty minds tick. And that's why it was so sad. in a way, that in this one instance, as he himself said, when he made a mistake, he made a beauty. He certainly did; he missed the boat on that, but how much he could have done about it is hard to say. I came across something I wrote about President Sproul. I don't know quite when it was written, but I listed myself as Ph.D.t 1934, so it may have been an alumnus thing of some sort. I said: "Each of us will have his own recollections of President Sproul. My first one is of his inauguration as President during my first semester at Berkeley as a graduate student. To me, he and the distinguished institution he did so much to build were never again wholly separable in my mind. My second is of his presiding ably over meetings of the Academic Senate or answering barbed questions at the early All-University Faculty Conferences. He could call every speaker by name, and he could lister, with good-natured patience, even to attacks on his own policies. My third is of the grim Year of the Oath, when he found himself caught between an intractable faction of the Regents, and an indignant and increasingly embittered faculty, and an uncomprehending or unsympathetic public. He struggled gallantly and ultimately successfully to save the University. His lasting legacy is the inspired vision of what a great state university can become and what this one partially has become." I guess that's probably about as close to my version of him as I could reasonably come up with. I don't know what I wrote that for. Principles or Personal Power Struggles? Lage : David Gardner [current president of the University], in his book on the loyalty oath [The California Oath Controversy. Berkeley, 1967], said that the controversy over the loyalty oath was not over principles but was a power struggle, "... a series of personal encounters between proud and influential men." Do you agree with that interpretation? 112 Constance: I think that probably was true about the Regents. I read the book, but I haven't seen it recently enough. I think that agrees with what I said about Neylan and the governors — Warren and Knight. In that sense, it was indeed a series of personal encounters although it had very strong political motives in it. But I think the faculty resistance and unhappiness were clearly a matter of principle. I don't think there's any doubt about that. One can argue that the non-signers perhaps exaggerated the importance of the thing. A number of them were people of European extraction who had seen fascism in Europe and felt that they had been quiescent when it came up the first time and they should have done something about it. And here it was coming again. So I think it's no accident that quite a few of the non- signers were Europe an- trained. They were also, to some degree, people who liked to make issues of things and who were not about to take something in which they didn't believe. I had great admiration for them. I didn't admire the judgment of all of them, but they certainly had the courage of their conviction. In fact, I was always a little unhappy that I didn't take a stronger position myself. But I just felt I was not in a position to do it. Tolman could afford to; I couldn't. Lage: Well, I think that was probably true of a lot of people. Constance: But one of the people mentioned again today was David Saxon, who apparently had seven daughters, I think, at the time, and he refused to sign and was fired. I think he pumped gas, or something of the sort, during part of the time he was out. Lage: And then came back to the University? Constance: That's right. One of the interesting post-mortems on the oath was that Kerr eventually prevailed on the Regents to name the building that houses psychology Tolman Hall, after Edward Tolman, who was the leader of the non-signers. My recollection is that Kerr got Catherine Hearst to make the action! Lage: [laughing] Wonderful 1 In reading a few of our oral histories — and I don't remember which one it was in — that was mentioned. It was also mentioned that Kerr felt that it led to a residue of ill feeling toward him, on the Board of Regents. Constance: It could be. I don't know how many people were still on the Board of Regents at that time who were involved. And, of course, I really don't know the situation in the Regents very well. I was not a visitor to the Regents' meetings at that time. I was sometime later, but even then, you know, you were excluded from the real fights. 113 Long- Term Divisive Effects of the Oath Lage : Anything on long-term effects of the oath that you'd want to say? Constance: It's very hard to know just what things contributed to it, but I personally felt that, to some extent, it loosened the bonds which I. at least, had always felt between faculty and administration. In other words, as you would say I am a great believer in faculty being involved in administration. I never felt that there was ever any distinction between faculty and administration. A lot of the younger people — people who came later from different backgrounds — probably did not feel this as strongly as I did. But I think the faculty never trusted the administration as fully after the oath as they had before. And when things like the troubles of the sixties came along, there were, if you like, fault lines or zones of weakness which could very easily be exploited. It certainly had continuing effects of divisiveness, but again, it's very hard to pin them down exactly. Lage: What about effects on recruiting? Would you know of any cases where it was more difficult to get — ? Constance: There were certainly instances in which people flatly refused to join the University. It hurt the University's reputation nationally, without any question. Again, it's awfully hard to document that sort of thing. I remember some discussion somewhere, which I'm sure was second- or third-hand, in which two or three people from other institutions were talking down to a University of California faculty member. One of the people from another institution said to a second, "The only difference is that at California, they fought it, while at yours they all acquiesced without a struggle." [laughter] So there was a little of that — there was some admiration in academic circles, I think that the faculty didn't take it lightly. But I don't think that that compensated — I mean, it should never have happened in the first place because Berkeley did have a faculty that enjoyed more influence than at any other university I know of. Lage: Were you aware of how the faculty at the other UC campuses felt? Did Berkeley take the main brunt of it? Constance: Berkeley took the main brunt. UCLA took some. I don't remember. I think there was probably someone on almost every campus. I would guess that something like two-thirds of the 114 Constance: Lage : Constance : Lage : Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: non-signers were at Berkeley and, if not another third, at least another quarter at UCLA. There were several people at UCLA who were very strong opponents of the oath. So it wasn't a case of division between Berkeley and the other campuses? No. I don't think so. One would guess that the Davis faculty at that time — it was much closer to the soil and, let's say, the farmers of the state would be much less sympathetic to the Berkeley faculty's attitude, but I don't even know that. I was looking at George Stewart's book- which is interesting, written right in the heat of the battle [The Year of the Oath. New York. 1950], Yes. well George's, of course, is very much my idea of it. George was a good friend of mine, too, although I didn't know him particularly well at that time, I think. He implied a great sense of paranoia — the feeling that phones were being tapped, that certain people were stool pigeons, and — Well, there was certainly that; I don't remember the phone- tapping sort of thing. Certainly, nobody tapped mine, I'm sure. But there was distress among the faculty. One of the lines of cleavage: Ernest Lawrence, of course, was the big gun in the physical sciences at the University because of the distinction he had obtained with the cyclotron. I didn't know him well, but he was a very decent person. He was very close to John Francis Neylan and that was pretty much the center of the pro-oath sort of thing. Anybody tied in with that was pretty much a suspect to everybody else. Tied in with Lawrence and his group? Constance: That's right. Lage: I noticed the reference to "certain scientists". Constance: Well, Ralph Chaney, who was a paleobotanist, somehow got involved with Lawrence and acted as a kind of stalking horse. I don't know how much Lawrence was involved. I'm sure he deeply deplored it and probably didn't understand or see that it was all that important. But you expect, particularly, the humanists to be shocked at this sort of thing. But it was very erratic. I knew most of the non-signers. Some of them were on the faculty and had very distinguished careers. 115 Constance: One of the things that was most painful — I was on the budget committee at the time, and several young people who were not tenured were r.cn- signers. They came up for tenure review, and it was very difficult because nobody wanted to turn them down. Yet some of them were clearly born losers, and this produced a lot of hard feelings. I remember we went to great lengths to try to get away from the political cleavage here, and if we could get a really liberal committee to say no, we knew we were doing all right. And I think, by and large, we were successful; but it made the whole business of judging faculty and all sorts of other judgments very difficult for some years. So, I'd say it hurt the University externally, it hurt the University internally. There was no excuse for it in the first place. But we survived it. Lage : How long before it was just sort of forgotten? Constance: The moment that you bring it up to the faculty in my group, you immediately get the adrenal glands flowing. In fact, I tried it out today at lunch — a couple of people who were there then still feel strongly. So I suppose that, say, the sixties put it out of our minds. But I think it did the institution quite a bit of damage. Tough institution, though. Lage: Did it increase faculty self-government at all? Did it bring back new interest in becoming active in governance affairs? Constance: I'm really not sure. I would say it was overshadowed, really, by the great and rapid influx of new people at about that time. People were basically back here after the war by 1945-46. This was 1950-52. The old unity was pretty much superseded partly by the oath, perhaps even more by the influx of people who were not familiar with it. Let's see, Sproul retired in '58. It was kind of a new ball game* I suppose, so it would be pretty hard to say just when it faded out. I would say there were still repercussions for ten years, but maybe not major ones. 116 X SERVICE ON ACADEMIC SENATE COMMITTEES The Senate Editorial Committee — Advising the University Press Lage : Constance ; We should talk more about the budget committee, I think, that fit into the chronology here? Does Lage: Constance : Okay. I think we can probably talk about my Academic Senate committee activities — probably that is the best way to get at this. My recollection is that the first Academic Senate Committee I served on was probably the Editorial Committee in about 1948. That's as soon as I came back from my year at Harvard. I think that my departmental chairman decided, although nobody here had ever recognized it. that if Harvard thought I had some adminis trative talent, maybe they better take advantage of it. So I believe I was recommended to serve on the committee for research before I went to Harvard; but the invitation had not been issued so I didn't have to respond to it. So I never served on a research committee — I heard about that afterward. But I think I did go on to the Academic Senate Editorial Committee. And, indeed, the Editorial Committee is something that I served on, off and on, really almost up until my retirement. I noticed I was on it in '71-'72. I served on it, I believe, for a year at that time. I remember we had something like five committee members from Berkeley and three from UCLA and that was it. We operated for the entire university faculty. Did you meet together with UCLA faculty? Yes. My recollection is that at that time, we always met up here because that's where the majority of us and the office of the press, were. My recollection of the makeup of the committee was as follows: Theodore McCown, of anthropology as chairman; Arthur Hutson of English, Ronald Walpole of French, and James 117 Constance: King of history are the others that come tc mind. I wouldn't dare try to tell which of the UCLA people were on it. But the Editorial Committee is a particularly plush committee from the faculty standpoint,! because what you're discussing is basically books, articles, and scholarship. And. of course, the faculty is never happier than discussing that sort of thing. Lage: And what does it basically do? Constance: The University Press was originally organized to publish the scholarly productions of the faculty, and it did this by publishing a number of so-called series. There were series in different biological sciences and history and English — all sorts of things. Over the course of time, the nature of the press changed so that, now, university presses are simply scholarly publishing houses. They do not feel any particular affinity for the faculty of the institution with which they are associated. In fact, if anything, they sometimes feel a hostility toward it. They're always afraid they're going to be pushed i"to publishing something thev don't want to because somebody at that particular university wrote it. At one point, the University Press was involved in publishing university documents and so on, but that job was shunted off many years ago to the university printing office, or whatever they call it. So basically, it's a publishing house, but with an emphasis on scholarly books. The Editorial Committee is the only agency that can authorize the use of the University's imprint. In other words, the director of the press and his staff cannot publish anything under the University of California aegis without the concurrence of the Editorial Commiftee. So what the Editorial Committee basically does is read manuscripts. These manuscripts are also reviewed by outside readers either suggested by the staff or by the committee or both. At least when I was concerned with it (and I think it still is the case), every manuscript was discussed — sometimes ad infinitum. So it's a fairly scholarly apparatus. Lage: And was the Editorial Committee really the decision-making body or did the press — ? Constance: It was the decision- making body, period. Lage: Period. Constance: That's right. Lage: I wonder if that has changed over time. 1 18 Constance : Lage: Constance ; Lage: Constance: Lage: Constance Lage: Constance I don't believe so. Now, the different editors, who are members of the staff, may very well discourage manuscripts they dor.'t like the looks of from ever getting to that point. They seemed more concerned with profitability now. I don't know. I think probably one would say that they are concerned with making the losses as little cataclysmic as possible. But it's only once in a decade that something like Theodora Kroeber's Ishi comes along, which turns out to be a best-seller. I don't think the University Press has ever approved anything on the grounds that it probably wouldn't be a best-seller. They certainly have discouraged things that they didn't think they could manage to get into more than three libraries. They have to keep some kind of balance; but the general view, at least when I was concerned with it (which, as I said, was over a twenty-year period at least, off and on), was that they published things that were of true value and that the chips had to fall where they might. Were you on the committee during the time of the transition from publishing primarily University faculty? Yes. In fact, I was always an exponent of their continuing to publish some of the series in fields where I thought that kind of publication was appropriate, which, it happens, includes my own, but it's considerably broader than that. Over time, as it became easier to publish things as books, a great many of the series simply went out of business for lack of interest. But there still were, and 'still are, fields in which this kind of publication is the accepted way to go. I became a champion of that aspect of it and. several times, sponsored revisions to the rules, to keep them going. And did you succeed? I succeeded as long as I was on the committee. I'm not quite sure where it is now. But the last I knew, they were still following the Constance plan on series as late as something like '75, shall we say. I was on it for 1948. and then I was asked to replace at least two other committee members who died later on. So I was on it intermittently over a series of years. And did you work closely with the head of the press? have worked with August Fruge? Would you I know August very well. I never chaired the committee. I knew the various committee members well, as I went along. When I went off the last time I managed to get one of my 119 Constance: colleagues appointed. He was on it very successfully for several years. At any rate, I served on the Editorial Committee for the first time in 1948-49. The Budget Committee; Jurisdiction over UCSF and UC Davis Budgetary Affairs Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance: Then in 1949-50, I went on the Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations. And you became chairman of it in 1950? The first year I was on it, the chairman was Malcolm Davisson and the others whom I recall were Robert Erode of physics. Harry Wellman of agricultural economics, Willard Farnham of English, and I think there must have been another member, but I can't recall who it might have been. Obviously, this was an exploratory year for me. We actually served as a faculty personnel committee. We were the senate's voice to consult with the President on all appointments and promotions. We also voted on salary increases. We looked into things we were asked to look into; we also looked into anything we thought needed to be looked into. Having to do with budget — ? That's right. We also. I should say. represented the Northern Section of the Academic Senate, and we had jurisdiction over the Davis and San Francisco campuses, as well as Berkeley. And you must have had some representation from them. We did not at that point. No representation? That must have made for ill-feelings. At that point. We divided up the budget in different areas. By some miscue of fate I got the budget of the university's medical school at San Francisco. This apparently was the first time that any budget committee had ever looked at it, and it was a mess. Lage : Had the others just overlooked it on purpose, do you think? they not want to interfere? Did 120 Constance: It may r.ever have come to them. It may well be that it was settled between the President and the San Francisco campus — I don't know. The San Francisco campus was run as, shall we say, an oligarchy, maybe? It probably wasn't a complete dictatorship. But we found all sorts of things that were contrary to University practice. We found ladies who had been on non- faculty, non-tenure appointments for at least ten, fifteen years — and they were supposedly limited to eight — and a whole series of things which seemed to us to be transgressions of all that was a good, pure, and proper in the university system. I was not one to pull my punches. And, while nobody ever told me so, I suspect it created a hell of a furor. At any rate, Davisson seemed to be able to handle this. Then, as I think I mentioned, he was siphoned off to represent the faculty in the oath controversy, and Erode became chairman. Erode, I think it would be fair to say, was really a militantly independent faculty member — a very fine person. We often used to disagree because of the our different points of view. He used to pull out a slide rule and say, "Classics doesn't deserve more than one professor of Greek because they've only had so many students, " and so on. I would come back and say, "Look Bob, I don't give a damn how many students they've got. A university that's worth a hoot in hell has to have a strong classics department and you can't do it on the slide rule." So. we argued a lot. Malcolm Davisson stayed as chairman of the committee for the rest of that year (I went on in January), but the next year Brode was chairman, and that year we got along beautifully. I think he was so impressed with my operating on the medical school budget that he gave me the Davis campus budget. Lage: To create more friendships. Constance: That's right. At the same time, they put John Saunders. who later became chancellor of the San Francisco campus, on the committee, so I got rid of the medical school. They got themselves put in order by someone who was really competent to do it. The Question of Academic Titles for Davis Personnel Constance: Again. I had a very ir. esting assignment because this was just at the point when it h. been decided that each of the campuses would have its own committee structure. So there was to be a Davis budget committee. This was a little like the — what did the British call it? It was a "shadow committee". 1 21 Constance: The Davis Committee on Committees set up a shadow budget committee, and I was the liaison officer between the Northern Division Budget Committee, which had some power, and the shadow Davis committee which didn't yet have any. My job was to educate them and to try, if possible, to communicate to them cur way of thinking. Brode used to say, "You mustn't let them do that. Tell them not to do that." I said, "Look Bob, you can't tell them to do anything and make them do it. You simply have to convince them that they don't want to. And if we're lucky, why, maybe we can." Lage: What were the differences? Constance: Davis had a relatively unique situation. It had started as an agricultural experiment station, I suppose largely because land was cheaper in the Sacramento Valley than it was in Berkeley. So for many years, it was just that — it was an experiment station. It worked very closely with the county agents, and they gave short courses for farmers and so on. There was relatively little teaching of a university type. It was a short-course, extension sort of thing which was obviously very important; but. it wasn't really the thing that universities were made of. So most of the people had titles in the experiment station, but did not have academic titles — a few of them did. Since they were very scarce, they were very desirable, and everybody wanted an academic title. The faculty of the Davis campus felt terribly put-upon because they didn't all have academic titles, and they would use all kinds of devices to try to get them. They would assign three people to teach one one-semester course, and they all wanted academic titles although it was a two-unit course, which obviously meant there would be a very minimum involvement in teaching. And then a lot of them were teaching a short course sort of thing to people who probably couldn't have qualified to enter the University, anyway. So the general feeling of Berkeley people, which probably was not shared by Davis people, was that most of these Davis people were simply not entitled by the terms of their activities to have academic titles. There was a strong feeling on the part of the Davis people that Berkeley, which was directly identified with anything unpleasant, was preventing them from getting academic titles, which would add directly to their prestige. So there was a very strong push on the part of some of the Davis faculty that, as soon as they got out from under the jurisdiction of the Northern Division committee — which was Berkeley — that they then were going to give academic titles a lot more liberally than had been the case in the past. There were passionate speeches at Academic Senate meetings and so on, because there was a Northern Division of the Academic Senate, 122 Constance Lage: Constance ; Lage : Constance Lage: Constance : Lage : which probably met in Berkeley all the time. So, as you can imagine, there was considerable animosity toward "erkeley and some basis for it. It used to be said that it was a lot farther from Berkeley to Davis than from Davis to Berkeley. [laughter] But I became very well acquainted with the people on the Davis committees. I think all of them have now had buildings at Davis named for them; it's very nostalgic when I get up there. Would their decisions have to be approved by your committee anymore? No, they would not after the next year. They would go directly to the President. I said, "Look, I know there's a lot of pressure or. you to do this, and there's nobody to stop you if you want to do it. But I think before you do it, you ought to realize that the people who have really held the line are some of the most distinguished faculty members you have." How about Wellman — how did he feel about that? He was not on the budget committee any more; he was only on it my first year and he refused to be chairman. I think he became director of the Giannini Foundation at that time or he was already amply loaded with committee assignments. I'm sure that I had support from Claude Hutchison, who was the vice-president for agriculture statewide. At all events, the Davis committee basically adhered to our standards, and didn't give in to the pressure. In fact, one of the provosts told me later, "They were worse than you werel" So we really felt the transition was very successful. Was there a thought at that time of their broadening to a liberal arts college, or did that come a bit later? It came later [1959]. I'm sure there was thought about it, but most of these things were not seriously thought about until Sproul's retirement. I think it would be fair to say. Later, I did serve on the search committee for a chancellor, so I learned a lot about it. One of the things, incidentally, that Sproul did that I think was very good in his later years, was to inaugurate an All- University Faculty Conference, which was held on different campuses. [looking at some documents] I see that he asked me to be a delegate to the fifth conference. This was dated 1950; they must have started about 1945. Was that an attempt to provide more unity to the various campuses? 123 Constance: Yes. And he was awfully good at it. He'd have a question period. I think, at the end of things, over which he presided. Ke'd take any question from anybody on anything and handle them in a masterful way. He was very good at that sort of thing. Budget Committee Chairman during Campus Transition Constance: Why don't we go on with the budget committee? The sort of normal sequence, if you didn't think of an excuse to get off earlier, was to serve two years as a committee member and a third as chairman. So I did that and at that point. Kerr came in as chancellor. Lage: That was '52? Constance: That was '52. I was asked if I would serve an additional year as budget committee chairman. I remember Davis saying, "Sproul makes great use of the budget committee because he thinks it's a good idea. Kerr will also, because he believes in it." [laughter] I think you asked some place where the budget committee came in in its decisions and recommendations. You always have to remember — I always point this out — that the President was instructed by the Regents to consult with the faculty, and we were the faculty's consulting arm in this business. Our opinions, our recommendations, were always advisory; there was never any question that the administration could ignore our recommendations if it wished. But I think that the administration followed our recommendations well over ninety percent of the time. So. as far as most of the faculty was concerned, they felt we had made the decision. I learned later that UCLA's budget committee didn't have that high a batting average. Lage: With Sproul? Constance: With Sproul. yes. At any rate, he took us very seriously. Even after I was off the budget committee. Sproul called me up about some faculty matter. He said. "I'm being pressured very strongly for a promotion, and I see the committee is divided. I really don't know what to do about it. What do you advise?" I said, "The only thing the committee agreed on was that it was premature." I said I thought that that would probably be a fairly safe position to take, and he took it. 124 Special Problems of the School of Nursing Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: He had regental pressure on him. There was pressure from the School of Nursing.- The School of Nursing was the epitomy of the plight of a largely women's group — or exclusively women's group — in a very macho male community. I don't think it would be unfair to say that the prevalent state of mind of most male physicians was that nurses ought to be happy emptying bedpans and smiling while they're doing it, damn it. and bring back some coffee on the way. [laughter] That may be overstating it a little, but not too much. The subject of nursing. I would say, is very hard to detect a field of scholarship in. In fact, I don't know anybody who ever really succeeded in doing it. So. since the budget commit tee automatically investigated cases where there had been no change in status for the normal period (three years, or even five), we would reinvestigate. We'd appoint committees and the committees would split or come in with a negative report. Now this would be for someone to get reappointed? For advancement, for tenure. Were they professors? They were instructors, assistant professors, and usually the chairman would be a professor; but it was awfully tough-going for them. Because they didn't publish research? Well, it is not an academic field, is what you actually come down to. If you tried to make it an academic field, the physicians were really huffy because you were invading their territory. They used to write theses on the curriculum for the School of Nursing at Minnesota State College, or something like that. It was just awfully hard to make something out of that. I remember Sproul — I think it was a different occasion — called again. I think, when I was off the committee. He said. "What am I going to do about the School of Nursing?" and I said. "Look, you're always going to have this problem as long as you have an external committee looking at this thing. He said, "Well, I wish your committee would tell me what to do about it." But there wasn't much of anything you could do about it. really. It was just one of those things. Could they have devised different criteria for the School of Nursing? 125 Constance: They probably should r.ot have giver, professorial appointments, I suppose. I don't know; it's hard to say. They really were more at the technical level. I was on the advisory committee for the School of Nursing at one time or another. But it was very tough, because their faculty weren't really trained for an academic role. The only thing they could do was to teach other nurses to teach other nurses to teach other nurses. It was one of these very unfortunate things. But the real problem was that there wasn't a basic field of scholarship there. Certainly, there is something to patient care, but it's awfully hard to find a really academic, really scientific field in that. Lage : It's clinical. Constance: It's pretty much clinical, that's right, and clinical's always a problem too. So much for the budget committee. I did serve on it for four years — two years as a chairman. The Promotion Process Lage: I have a few more questions on the budget committee. Constance: Go ahead. Lage: I want to get the general idea of how you reviewed faculty appointments — how they came up. and whether you listened to the departments as much as Sproul listened to you. and so on. Constance: All appointments originated at -the departmental level. Exactly how the department arrived at its recommendations was not always all that clear. In the better-governed departments, according to my way of thinking, particularly the larger ones, there would be a specific committee, an ad hoc committee appointed from the faculty members. Having. I presume, decided where an appointment should be made, they would come up with a list of candidates, look into their writings, get other information about them, and probably make a report to the faculty as a whole. Certainly there were some departments in which the chairman did this himself. That was generally frowned-upon by people like me who felt that the responsibility should be more widely spread. The recommendation would go from the department to the dean of .whatever college or school was involved. It would then be forwarded, originally to the President's Office, later [after 1952] to the Chancellor's Office. The budget committee would be notified and asked to react, normally; but there are all sorts of variations possible on these things. Where an administrative 126 Constance: Lage: position was involved, the Chancellor or President might ask for a slate from which he would select. In our day, the thing came to the budget committee, and we would appoint an ad hoc committee to review the case. So every promotion or appointment had a committee to review it? Constance: That's generally true. There has been some modification of that in recent years. I think, perhaps, they don't do as much reviewing in the early stages, now, by committee; I'm not quite sure. Certainly, advancement to tenure is a time of review. Lage: And then in choosing the committee, what did you think about? Who you might get to serve, or — ? Constance: We never thought about that. We thought about the people who were best qualified. We assumed they would serve. Lage: And was that the case? Constance: Almost unanimously so. People very rarely ducked out of it. I remember one potential committee member calling me and saying, "I feel that when I'm called upon I should do my duty." This was the general faculty attitude. He said, "In this case, I just don't think I can be objective. You see. the candidate was married to my sister, and there was a messy divorce." I said, "I don't think you need to tell me any more," Overall, it was pretty rare for a faculty member to refuse to serve. Again. I haven't followed it in recent years. I gather it's progressively more difficult. But, of course, the character of the faculty has changed a great deal — partly as a matter of size, partly as a matter of, I suppose, different priorities would be the nice way to put it. Lage: One thing that occurred to me is probably something you just accept, but it's what you say and hear about the vision of the University. What kind of a vision was there as you were deciding who to promote and who to hire? You know, the difference between somebody who was competent and somebody who really had qualities of excellence. Constance: We had to rely primarily on the recommendations we got. And this goes on through the whole business. I think that I. at least (I don't know how many people I want to try speak for) — My feeling has always been that the University is strongest if it appoints the best young people it can get and gives them good support. I don't like the system, by and large, of looking for stars, which Harvard made a great deal of. and the University of Texas has been using in recent years. 127 Constance: But I think the kind of unity it seems to me we once had or. the faculty arose ir. large measure from this way of going at thir.as. Now, there's r.o question that you can't have a purely home-grown institution, because if you aren't careful, you get an internal old-boy network, and the whole thing stagnates. You need to bring in people from time to time. You have to keep examining yourself to be sure you're not developing weaknesses; and when you discover that you have, you may have to make some senior appointments to get away from it. But I don't think that the system of simply so to speak, combing the journals for upcoming stars is any way to build a strong university. But, as I say, Harvard has been verv successful with it. Faculty Role in University Governance Constance: Sometime in the fifties, I guess, the late Professor Joseph Harris, who was in the Department of Political Science, was asked to look at the University's committee structure and see if this is the way these things ought to be done. And I take it that I was chairman of the budget committee at the time and wrote this account of it to him. [reads letter to Professor Joseph P. Harris; see following page] Lage: It seems to indicate that there was some ill-feeling toward the budget committee, I would say. Constance: Every new professional dean that arrived objected to the budget committee. I remember — Lage: Deans of the professional schools, this would be? Constance: That's right. And there were various moves to take the different professional schools out from under the budget committee. The one successful move was accomplished by the School of Law. The budget committee — I think, when Brode was chairman — met with Bill Wurster, who was the dean of what's now the College of Environmental Design and Bill Prosser, who was dean of the School of Law. We thought that this would aid relations. They were not used to working with a faculty group of this sort, and to some degree, they felt it was an imposition. They felt they should to be able to go directly to the President or the Chancellor. And I suppose, probably, the Chancellor may have encouraged their meeting together. 128 Constance Lage: Constance ; Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: They had given us recommendations for faculty appointments almost completely devoid of any documentation at all. They were prone to recommend appointments at above-scale salaries of fifty or twenty- five thousand, which were not in the cards at that time. And no doc amenta tion whatever excepting. "I say he's the best man in the country — we've got to have himl" The dean of the School of Law came in with the names of people he would like to appoint, and he had on it the name of substantially every dean of a major law school in this country. — who he wanted to appoint as faculty here? That's right. And the dean of Environmental Design came in with pretty much the same sort of thing. I remember Brode. who was a scientist and very objective about things, kept probing Wurster and saying. 'Veil, all right, these people are all distinguished architects; but. you know, there are an awful lot of good architects out there. How do you decide which architects you would like to have in your faculty as opposed to others?" And Wurster sputtered and finally said. "It's soull" Soul? Well, we couldn't do very much with that. But we insisted that when he recommended an appointment, we should have some documen tation, and that he get letters for us. So he sent in. in one case I think, something like fifty letters from his cronies around the country, the general gist of which were about two lines that said, "If Bill Wurster says he wants it, you should let him have it," So we let him have it, all right. Did he get the people? Not very many. So was this a case where he wanted more appointments than you thought were warranted? There were certainly more appointments than warranted, no real evidence of a rational plan, no evidence of consideration of what the rest of the university was going to run on while they were doing their thing, and so on. The constraining role of the budget committee was a common complaint of the professional deans. I discussed this somewhat with Henry Vaux. who was quite understanding — Constance: Which wav? L28a Dear Professor Harris: I welcome your Invitation to comment on your recent memor andum with regard to the Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations. Inasmuch as I shall be away from the campus next se mester, I hope you will not object to my making a rather broader reply than the Immediate memorandum , Itself, may seem to Indicate* The University of California possesses a system of government In which the general faculty, through the eommlttees of the Aca demic Senate, enjoys a degree of Influence unprecedented, to my ••knowledge , among American universities. It is a natter of pained surprise to me that most proposals to "reorganise11 procedures here apnear to have as their objective the weakening rather than the strengthening of this faculty role. That such an Impulse should come from some deans and chairmen, particularly those who are relatively new to the University of California and accustomed to systems wherein administrative officers enjoy a very large measure of autonomy, Is not difficult to understand. But why It should also enjoy some support among the faculty at large, I find incom prehensible. It would appear that some faculty members would prefer being told what to do rather than to exercise the role of constructive academic citizenship which the University of Cali fornia system expects of them. Complaints against such active faculty participation in academic government usually allege that it is unorthodox, time- consuming, capricious, largely uninformed, and irresponsible. Conversely, it would be assumed that more ortnodox academic con trol solely by professional administrators is speedy, consistent, all-wise, and fully responsible. From my own limited experience with three large Institutions, in two of which the faculty had essentially no role in the determination of affairs above the departmental level, I have found no basis for such a comparison. On the contrary, I find no indication that either faculty or Administration has a monopoly upon good Judgment, freedom from error, or devotion to the welfare of the institution. Maintenance of the high standards of an institution demands the vlgllence and effort of both faculty and Administration. The unique aspect of the University of California system Is that it has all the usual administrative officers and channels and, ^n addition, a mechanism whereby the administrator faced with de cisions may also secure advice from regularly constituted faculty committees quite Independent of the regular administrative chain- of-command. It would appear to be only sensible that any adminis trator should enjoy full freedom to secure counsel wherever he thinks he can obtain it. And yet, the effect of a number of pro posals put forward in recent years, some of them by faculty groups, has been in the direction of limiting the advisory role of the Senate Committees, ox^eelng to It that their advie-e reaches the administrator so late, or In such general terms, that he will be less inclined to consider it with any seriousness. The assumption seems to be that "good government" lies only along the regular administrative channels, and thatjladvlce from any other source Is apt to be uninformed and Irresponsible. As a palpable sop, it is suggested that the Senate Committees forego their work with "minor details." which will be delegated to sub-deans, budget officers. of "principles" and "policy." These suggestions run counter to the common knowledge that significant policies and principles usually arise out of decisions with regard to "minor details," and that If these de cisions are withdrawn entirely from faculty Influence, they will be made by administrative "experts." This appears to me to be a decidedly backward step. As concerns the Commit tea on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, the criticism seems to be that, although It obtains Its Information only from the written record and concentrates too much on "minor details,14 it is economy-minded, and Its advice is taken so seriously by (some) deans and higher administrative officers, that it results in chairman and (some) deana failing to get what they want. The implication is that the chairmen and (some) deans could get what they want if there were only the normal administrative channels to deal with, but that "irre- 'sponslble"^ from the Budget Committee constitutes a frustrating and in surmountable obstacle. (If this advice is uninformed and capricious, it is difficult to see why any administrator attaches Importance to it'.) During recent years, the Budget Committee has recommended both decreases and increases every year. If it has rather more frequently supported the former than the latter, this la because of: (1) the trend of Legislative climate with regard to the University budget; (2) the fact that the Budget Committee has more recent information from the office of the President and/or the Chancellor as to the level of expenditure the Administration will support; (3) the fact that soae rec oooi en ding officers fall to recognize the existence of any budgetary celling whatever. Under present conditions, without some equalization of sacrifice, it is more than likely that the basic and leas aggressive departments would suffer in comparison with the shinier and more spec tacular activities, which sometimes come equipped with their own, highly vocal, pressure-groups. Such a function is of both administra tive and faculty concern, since distribution of funds profoundly in fluences the form and quality of the whole institution. It seems to me that the faculty, through the Budget Committee, should have an Important voice in the equalizing process. Whereas the Budget Committee frequently doe s consult with recom mending officers about their budgets, it la to be assumed that fcrery budgetary request should standybr fall on the basis of the documentation provided. I should agree that there might well be freer and franker two-way discussion up and down the present administrative channels, and I understand that the Chancellor is taking steps to bring this about. Tola, however, is an administrative flatter and not a direct concern of the Academic Senate. I should be inclined to think that the same thing is true of the precise organization of the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science. I should like to re-emphasize one common misconception: the Budget Committee makes n£ administrative decisions'. Decisions are made only by administrative officers. Since the Budget Committee only presents advice to the administrative officer, there is no violation of the principle that responsibility for results whould go with budget decisions. It is of the utmost importance, in my opinion, that the committees of the Academic Senate keep themselves out of the adminis trative chain- of -command, but that the Administration should always be able to turn to them for carefully considered, independent advic«, which Is based primarily on concern for high academic standards un modified by the expediency wnlch administrators customarily find them selves bound to heed. 128c administrator* depends upon when it would be moat uaeful to him and when he would me most inclined to give it weight. Moat deans have not, I believe, wel comed the idea of a faculty committee having an op portunity to exeunlne their comments on the recommen dations of the departioenal chairmen . Others have not indicated any such reserv.at ions; and still others, I suspect, do not give any weight at all to Budget Com- a it tee comments and recommendations. Specifically, I believe the chief concern of the Academic Senate and of its Reorganisation Committee should be that the advice of the Budget Committee be of the kind found most useful by the decision-Baking administrator, and that it should be available to him when he most needs it. To violate either or these common-sense points would be to substantially diminish the Influence of the faculty in the whole budget-making process. Sincerely, Lincoln Constance •6 2 O D 129 Lage: Of the budget committee's point of view, but also his own needs in the School of Forestry. Constance: Oh. sure. Anybody that worked on both sides of the street, as I did later, knows there's something to be said on both sides. But I still think the budget committee is simply one of the greatest things we have going for us. Lage: His point was that it was difficult when he needed to appoint somebody in a field that was professional — that required professional competence — to get the budget committee to understand somebody's excellence. Constance: That's quite right. The thing is that there's no question that the budget committee system worked best in relatively "pure" academic areas. When you got into the professional areas, it was more difficult. The law school was a very difficult one, no question about it, because the prevailing salaries in the legal profession go far beyond the University's, and it would be very difficult to build a really first-rate law school without granting above-scale salaries. But I don't think the way either of the deans was going about it was any way to build one either. Be that as it may, I still stick by my guns. I think that it basically was and is a sound system. Lage: How did the people on the budget committee — just being faculty members in various departments — develop this broad view of what the University needed? Constance: We learned fast. Ideally, they had the same kinds of considera tions within their own departments. If the department was democratically run, they had participated in these kinds of decisions. I mentioned the budget committee nominated ad hoc review committees, and they had served on that sort of thing. Partly, it was inbred, it was observed, it was produced by experience, by discussions with other people involved, and so on. It seems to me that any academic could do it, if he got his mind out of his particular field. These people were very carefully chosen by a committee of their colleagues, who were elected. You see. this is the democratic end of it because all committee appointments of the Academic Senate committees are made by an elected Committee on Committees. At one time, I served on the Committee on Committees. Somewhere in these papers I found the notice of my election. Lage: And that was actually elected by mail vote of the faculty? Constance: That's right — all the faculty that voted, anyway. [finding what he is looking for] Ah. here we are. [reads] "Nineteen fifty- three, the result of the recent election was as follows: 942 130 Constance: ballots received." I remember Kerr was absolutely stunned that as a member of the budget committee — chairman of the budget committee — I got the highest number of votes. Lage : [laughing] You were supposed to be an unpopular figure? Constance: I wasn't popular with everybody, including some of the deans, but basically I got along all right with them. Lage: What about with different departments that you had to deny requests for — or advise against, I guess we should say — ? Constance: That's right — we advised against. And. as I said, something over ninety percent of the time, our advice was taken. We didn't do it idly. In the first place, the budget committee had the best records, I think, of anybody on campus, and they were cumulative. By the time a faculty member had worked his way up the ladder to associate professor, we had comments that had been made at each of his salary steps, for his tenure promotion, and so on. So we really knew quite a lot about him. So I don't think we made very many internal mistakes. The mistakes we made internally were probably being too easy rather than too tough. In my administrative career, the worst mistakes I made were going against my better judgment and being too easy. Lage: Earlier you mentioned a faculty member whose failure to get tenure was controversial. Constance: Well, one of the common phenomena that, of course, is a little derogatory to students, but has at least a little bit of wormood in it, but also a bit of truth to it, is this: the students are dying to come to the University because of its great distinction. As soon as they get here, they do their best to transform it into a junior college they will be happy with, and all the things that make the University important, and its cachet of value, they would destroy (an overstatement, obviously). But there are certain faculty members, from time to time, usually those with some gift of gab. who often are quite fancy lecturers, but who aren't anything else because they have nothing else to back them up. The students see the glitter and very often the instructors, professors, or whatever they are recognize that they're not all that important to their col leagues. They find the students are a much more sympathetic audience, and so they play to it for all they're worth. So when they are reviewed by their colleagues, their colleagues often say, "Well, the teaching presentation is obviously very popular, and it may even be very good. But we 131 Constance: don't find any record whatever of serious scholarship." It's common knowledge that this kind of flashy lecture performance usually does not last throughout a career if the man isn't doing anything beyond it to grow as a scholar. Therefore, we think the individual's a bad risk. Of course, a common student response is that his colleagues are mad because he's getting all the students; therefore, they're out to cut his throat. People being human, undoubtedly there is some element of truth in it in some instances. But I think that, in general, the budget committee-ad hoc committee combination tends to get away from that. That's probably the best insurance you could get; you can never be absolutely sure. Certainly, some people have been dinged, perhaps, improperly. But I think that on the whole it has usually worked out pretty well. Lage: Constance Lage: But you see. I'm an advocate of faculty government, and I think it works out much better than an administrator could do alone. And I say this because I was an administrator for ten years, and I think I know what I'm talking about. During that time, of course. I reviewed all the appointments and promotions in Letters and Science for seven years and all those on campus for three years. I worked closely with the budget committee, did not always agree with them when I was in an administrative position, but I wouldn't do anything without them. If you didn1 1 agree with them, did you turn down their advice? I never was in the position of making the final decision. I'm not sure whether the Chancellor ever overrode my advice when I was vice-chancellor or not. I would not have objected if he had, but the times when I disagreed with the budget committee were so rare that it really didn't amount to anything. When I became dean of Letters and Science, incidentally, I insisted that I should see the budget committee's recommendations before I made mine. That was objected to by some of the other faculty members and some of the other deans because they didn't have that privilege. On the other hand, I had fifty-odd departments and they had one or two. And I found the budget committee advice overwhelmingly important. As I said, the only times I think I probably was wrong was when I didn't follow my own hunches and say "no" in a few cases. I would think, "Ten people have looked at this. Who am I to say that my judgment is better than theirs?" Unless I really had very strong reasons. I went along with committee decisions. That's what you have to do if you have a democratic system and you believe in it. But were there times you were sorry later? 132 Constance: Yes. a few, but relatively few. Lage : [laughs] I think we should finish up for today. Constance: Is there any thing- that we need to clean up at this point? Lage: To wind up our discussion on the budget committee, we should talk about the effect of dark Kerr coming in as Chancellor. Constance: Well, I think probably the only thing that you can say about it, really, is that Kerr indeed did use the budget committee, at least as conscientiously as Sproul had. As chairman of the budget committee, in that fourth year — my second year as chairman — I got to know him very well, and that is probably why I got involved in administration later. 133 XI THE EARLY PIETIES: ADMINISTRATION AND ADDRESSES [Interview 5: February 27. 1986] ## Relationship with Clark Kerr Lage: We're going to start today with a discussion about Clark Kerr and your work with him. You covered quite a time span. We'll probably elaborate more when we get into the period of the L & S dear.ship. Constance: Well, it's part of it. really. Obviously my tenure in administration is a kind of a block in the middle of the road, so you can't go around it. It comes i"to almost any discussion, I think. My relationship with Clark Kerr. my acquaintance with him, really dates from my experience as a member of the budget committee. I just ran into — I don't think I've mentioned before — the notice of my appointment on December 14, 1948. I was to replace Ken Pitzer. who took leave from the university to accept a position with the Atomic Energy Commission. At the same time, Robert Brode- who died just recently, also came on the committee as a replacement. I served four years on the committee. I think it prohably was my second or third year on the committee that I met with the Committee on Privilege and Tenure, which Dr. Kerr chaired. As far as I can recall, that was my first direct acquaintance with him. I just uncovered, in looking in my files, a letter from Murray Benedict — who served on the budget committee, at least a couple of years with me — who was then in Washington D. C., and he refers in a letter of February 6, 1952. to the appointment of Kerr as chancellor. He says, "I'm really quite delighted about the selection that has been made, though I had not previously thought of Kerr in this connection. My contact with him has been less ir.timate than with some of the others who are under consideration. I believe, however, I would put him about at the 134 Constance: top of my list. As you have mentioned, he is of the faculty and will have a real appreciation of its problems and attitudes. In addition, dark is a very fine person — well-balanced and easy to work with. He also has a good deal of ability. He comes, I think, with the Pennsylvania Quakers and has in his makeup a good deal of their quiet friendliness and dignity. I don't think he is an over- ambitious climber. My guess is that he will fill the gap there in an effective and generally satisfactory way. " Benedict was quite conservative, but a very fine person in whom I had a great deal of confidence. So I think I was probably predisposed to be pleased with the appointment, even though I, again, knew some of the other people considerably better than I did Kerr. Lage : You say you knew who was being considered. Did everybody kr.ow who was being considered and have some say in it. or how did that work? Constance: There's no doubt that there were discussions of who was being considered; whether any of it was official or not, I don't know. I was not involved in any direct way that I can recall. So I suspect that maybe it was just faculty conversation. Such matters are usually discussed, and newspapers often pick it up and send up a few trial balloons, and so on. I don't remember very much discussion about it. But Kerr, who was the head of the Institute of Industrial Relations, was very well-known in some parts of the campus but probably less in mine, let's say, in the scientific area. Lage: Had he become somewhat well-known in the loyalty oath dispute? Constance: Indeed he was. and of course he won great respect from the faculty because he defended the faculty very strongly, if unsuccessfully. I remember that he told the Regents, "You're not catching Communists; what you're doing is imprisoning the free spirit of the faculty," which, as a statement, is rather hard to beat, I think. Looking in my own files, the first item I find from Kerr was dated May 29. 1953, congratulating me on receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1953. He says [reading], "This will mean a well-deserved year of research for you after the heavy obligations of your service as chairman of the budget committee. I hope the South American flora will prove as alluring, in fact, as is the vague memory of Dorothy Lamour movies, which the words conjure up. With all best wishes, Clark." Perhaps I should say that that was at the end of my second year as chairman of the 135 Constance: budget committee. I had served that year primarily because Kerr had indicated that coming in as chancellor, he wanted to have the advice of the budget committee. I think I've said that I was almost the only veteran on it. so I agreed to stay on for that time. Lage: Last time, we talked about the budget committee, and then we looked at the reference to the Academic Advisory Council and the coordinating committee. Do you recall working with Kerr in those capacities? Constance: That's correct. I was involved with both the AAC [Academic Advisory Committee] and the CAAC [Chancellor's Advisory Administrative Council]. I'm trying to sort this thing out so that it makes sense. I find a letter which I wrote to Kerr in September 1953. "With regard to a question raised by the President as to whether the chairman of the budget committee should be on eleven months' appointment during his term of service, I believe I shall have to maintain the same position I have in the past in regard to such arrangements. You may recall that I unsuccessfully advocated the departmental chairman not be put on eleven months' appointment, and this matter was discussed in the Chancellor's Academic Advisory Council." This was the 29th of September, so Kerr was in office. "In the latter case, I suppose that a chairman of the department is more nearly a part of the administration than is the chairman of the budget committee. Basis for my view is the perhaps rather idealistic position that no extra compensation should be paid for services rendered by a member of the faculty to a colleague. In arguing against an increase in stipend for the chairman of the budget committee, it seems to me that granting monetary advantage would have two undesirable tendencies: one. to perpetuate the chairman in office for too long a term, and two, what is really another aspect of the same thing — to make committee chairmanship a career in itself. I fdrmly believe that all members of the faculty should be active scholars, insofar as possible, and that, unless they go completely into administrative work, they continue to have an obligation to scholarship in their field. If greater financial awards come to be attainable in a number of other ways, there will always be a tendency for individuals to bypass scholarship. "As I have told the CAAC, this is an idealistic and perhaps unrealistic position, The university seems to me to be moving steadily and rapidly in the direction of eleven months' appoint ment for everyone. At least there's no certain rhyme or reason in the present division of terms of appointment. There's no question in my mind that the chairman of the budget committee must actually serve an eleven month period or more. However, his responsibility is peculiarly toward his colleagues on the 136 Constance: faculty rather than to the administration, He should be giver. special consideration, I think, in relieving him from other duties during his term of service. Perhaps this is the same thing that was proposed to the president, but in a different guise. For whatever it is worth, however, I shall forever remain a champion of the idealistic position. Sincerely, — " What that seems to say is that, yes indeed, as chairman of the budget committee, I did. from the beginning of its organization, serve on the CAAC. with the others members of the group, who were primarily deans. My role, as I recall, was in large measure to assist in the process of informing the deans, because the CAAC was largely an informational thing. As I think I've said earlier. President Sproul really preferred to deal individually with the deans. Kerr preferred to deal with them as a collectivity, so to speak. Not that he didn't, of course, have contact with deans individually, but he wanted to equalize things and treat them essentially all the same way. which often wasn't possible because the responsibilities of the different deans varied so widely. I find a note written to me by Kerr on March 26, 1954. I probably received it in South America. It says, "Dear Lincoln, I was very pleased to receive your card and to learn you've given up trying to set the world on fire." That's a private joke. "Climbing a volcano sounds strenuous, but no more so, I assure you, than pouring water or gasoline, as the case may be, on sparks which fly on campus. I suppose none of our current grievances can be characterized as 'unusual', for my perception of what constitutes 'unusual' grows dimmer with experience. You might be interested to know that we now have an addition to CAAC — a new group, also called CAAC. for purposes of general confusion. This is the Chancellor's Academic Advisory Committee, made up of several key deans and senate committee chairmen to consider broad topics which cut across budget, educa tional policy, physical planning, and other major areas. We've also set up a committee on criteria to consider qualitative measures so as to forestall imposition of rigid quantitative standards. Life sure is busy. I envy you your locale, even without palm trees or Dorothy Lamour. Best regards, dark Kerr." Lage: So you did keep in touch while you were on your sabbatical. Constance: Yes. Not much, but some. Lage: It makes it sound like that chancellor's advisory committee was new at that time. Constance: That's right, March '54, so apparently it was set up — well, I don't know quite when it was set up — in the '53-'54 year, which is the vear I was on sabbatical. 137 Constance: I know he also wrote me, perhaps later — I don't seem to have such a letter. But on May 7. I received a letter. He says. "On recommendation of Dean Davis, I take pleasure ir. appointing you chairman of the Department of Botany for the academic year 1954-55." Lage : Had that been discussed before, or did you just receive the letter? Constance: No. He wrote and asked me. The occasion of the other letter was, I think, when I got to Puerto Montt, which is in south Chile. The farther south I got, just for fun, I sent a few postcards — I sent one to him and I sent one to President Sproul. I don't think President Sproul answered, and I was very much surprised that Kerr did. So it was probably the next month after this, or so, that he wrote and asked if I would be amenable to becoming chairman — Davis had recommended I be chairman of the Department of Botany. [indicating a document] This is simply a formal notification. [reading] I said, "I just received your letter of May 7, forwarded to me here" — this is from Santiago, Chile — "advising me of my appointment as chairman of the Department of Botany for the academic year 1954-55. If it is the desire of my colleagues in the department, of Dean Davis, and of yourself, I shall, of course, accept the appoint ment for 1954-55 and do my best to justify your confidence in me." And here is a letter I wrote to him from Santiago in response to his first note. [reads] It says, "Your good letter of March 26 was as welcome as it was unexpected. Time since I returned from the south — it being winter here — has been spent largely in collecting in other people's herbariums, which has proven to be rather more rewarding on the whole than my own efforts in the field. We've just returned from a week's visit at the flesh pots of Buenos Aires, which was the high spot of our trip. A beautiful city — very spacious and metropolitan. It seems incredible that such an apparently up-and-coming people should have had the bad luck to be stuck with the government they have. The steaks were all they are reputed to be. and the Chilean food is a pretty sad anticlimax. We flew both ways, and the trip back to Santiago yesterday made in clear sunshine was something to remember. We came so close to Aconcagua, the highest point in the western hemisphere, that we could practically have tweaked its nose. At any rate, we had that week in Argentina before receiving your official letter. "Momentarily, I feel so completely remote from anything resembling departmental affairs, that I can't help feeling that you and Sailor must be completely mistaken to harbor the view that I am the man for the job. I hope I can rise and stay risen to the occasion when I get back into the familiar locale. I was 138 Constance: just beginning to let myself hope the lightning would strike somewhere else and that I could look forward to a few pleasant years of uninterrupted — hah! — teaching and research, and mostly the latter. But there is the considerable probability that my colleagues will vote to throw me out by a year from now, so I can keep hoping. Seriously, I am glad to fit into the precedent of 'reluctant administrators,' which you yourself have set. and I'll do my best to justify your trust. "We have booked passage to Callao, Peru, for June 4 so there is a desperate lot of packing to be done here. I may yet have to take my truck to sea and sink it. In Peru, I hope to get in a little more field work- but we also want to see something of the country. Our post-Peruvian program depends upon the whimsical schedule of Grace Line freighters, but we expect to reach Berkeley in August. I hope I shall not see you then, because I trust that you will be enjoying a muy tranquil lo vacation somewhere with your family in Berkeley." Constance: Then I had a note from June 1. He says. "Dear Lincoln: By your account, I'm surprised you're even coming back to Berkeley. But needless to say. we will be delighted to have you back and serving as department chairman, even though a reluctant one, dark" Lage: At some point, are these letters going to get into The Bancroft Library? Constance: They'll probably get into my own file, which probably will be in the Jepson Herbarium. After all. they have my library, and someday will have my correspondence. "The Versatile Taxonomist". 1950 Lage: Let's talk about three of the influential papers you gave in the fifties — what the occasions were, what some of the general ideas were, and what their influence was. Constance: Most of those things are questions you really can't answer. I can tell you the occasions for them. In September. 1950, I gave the presidential address for the American Society of Plant Taxor.omists. I don't remember exactly when my affiliation with the American Society of Plant Taxonomists began, but my recollection is that I served for several years as a member of the council. I remember raising the caveat that, being on the West Coast. I really was a long way away from the center of the thing. Dr. Henry Allen Gleason. with the New York Botanical 139 Constance: Garden said, "Nonsense. There are probably more good taxonomists within a hundred miles of Berkeley than there are of New York City." Lage: AT. admission I wouldn't expect. Constance: He was from Illinois, which might have accounted for it. At any rate, I found myself giving the presidential address in September, 1950. One of the things that I think spots my career probably is that I like to think up titles, which I hope will be provocative, and then try to figure out how to write up some thing to go with the title. Lage: You start with the title? Constance: I started with the title; I don't always do it, but I did this time. The title I thought of was "The Versatile Taxonomist," and that became a phrase which more or less haunted me over the years. In fact, I'm not infrequently introduced as "the versatile taxonomist. " The general theme that I tried to emphasize in that, and as I have, I think, throughout my career, is the same idea that was expressed in The New Systematics. Plant classification is as old as people's knowledge of plants. One can go back to tribal ethno-botany, if you like, as Professor Berlin in anthropology does. And really, the only thing that changes are the different kinds of information from different kinds of methodology that can be applied to the same purpose. And so I was advocating the idea that taxonomy cannot get along without support from the basic disciplines of the science; and as an evolutionary synthesis, it can serve as a necessary bridge between the experimental and the observational phases of biology. In short, we can all be proud of being taxonomists, but only when we have made a taxonomy in this country something of which to be proud. Lage: Did you have the feeling that taxonomy needed to be upgraded? Constance: Yes. Lage: How was that received by your colleagues in the society? Constance: Some probably didn't like it very much. But I think I said that the groups like the Biosystematists on the West Coast had really pioneered in bringing evidence from genetics and cytology into the general exercise of classification; as a result, this was gradually entering and spreading, I would say. throughout the country. But some areas succumbed to it more quickly than others, probably. Lage: Lage: 140 Did being president of the Society of Plant Taxor.omists give you an ability to make any changes or encourage changes? Constance: It gave me an ability to talk to them. Lage: What kinds of things would you do as president of the society? Constance: The only thing you had to do as president of that society was give a speech when you stopped being president of the society, [laughter] I might say it was an almost ideal society. So the governing council didn't have a great deal of influence. Constance: Not very much. I mean, it had some, but that's probably all. "The Role of Plant Ecology in Biosystematics," 1952 Constance: The second paper you asked me about, "The Role of Plant Ecology in Biosystematics," was a vice-presidential speech. The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences [AAAS] has a series of sections, and section G is. I think, the botanical one, although it could have been broader than botany. At all events, I was vice-president of that section, and I had the responsibility of giving a talk as I went out of office. This was given at St. Louis on December 29, 1952. Lage: You weren1 1 speaking particularly to ecologists, were you? Constance: Well, this was part of the problem, as a matter of fact. At this particular point in the history of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, a number of the societies of which it was made up (which had their annual meetings with the AAAS) were breaking away and having their own meetings. There was a real question as to whether very many people would show up for this meeting. It occurred to me that I might have to get my own audience. So I picked a list of about twenty or twenty- five people who were either in St. Louis or in the general area of the Midwest, who I thought might conceivably attend, and gave a series of topics that I might talk on. I think I gave them about half a dozen. I don't remember now what the topics were, but two of them were plant ecology and biosystematics. which really had never been brought together before. I discovered on the basis of this informal poll that these were the two topics that most 141 Constance: people expressed an interest in. So I decided to put them together, thereby hopefully additively increasing my audience, [laughter] It actually worked out pretty well. The paper discussed particularly the work of the Carnegie Laboratory team of Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey, then situated at Stanford University. Their work was really a series of experiments--basically, transplant studies — of the behavior of parts, clones of the same plants under different altitudinal and. hence, climatic conditions. These were collectively labelled "experimental taxonomy." My thesis was that these were actually "experimental ecology" because taxonomy has really a further dimension. Taxonomy involves a decision, a judgment, based on accumulated information. And the kind of new information that was being produced was clearly ecological. Lage: They were clones — they were actually the same plant put in different ecological settings? Constance: That's correct — to see what characteristics remained unchanged, and what characteristics did change. In other words, an opportunity to distinguish between those changes which were genetically determined and those which were habitally or ecologically determined. Several of the ecologists had made a few slightly deprecatory remarks to the effect that this work really ought to be a lesson for taxonomists. But none of them seemed to realize that it had anything to do with ecology, whereas, basically, it was ecological. So I made a survey of ecological textbooks and found there was almost nothing in them that was related to the topic at all. A few of them mentioned a little European work of the same general nature; but otherwise the ecologists proceeded as though species were distinct objects which were immutable — an idea that most taxonomists had already learned was hopelessly passe. I found one paper in the ecological literature which challenged this view. It was written by a man I didn't know named Egler and was published two years earlier, actually. It was called "A Commentary on American Plant Ecology Based on the Textbooks of 1947-1949." I didn't know about this, and I didn't know about him. But. to a large extent, I really followed up on his survey — at least his critique of ecological literature. Lage: Did he have some of the same criticisms that you do? Constance: He had almost the same ones. The interesting thing was that it turned out he was there, sitting in the second row, I think, and nearly had a stroke when he heard me lecturing on his topic. 142 Lage: Now, were you not aware of his article at the time? Constance: I was aware of his article. And that, in some ways, was really the theme of my talk. It was a nineteen-page article, published in Ecology. But certainly nobody paid much attention to it, as far as I was aware. That was his view, too — that nobody had really responded to it. At all events, it was rather fun to beat ecologists over the head. Lage: [laughs] You did seem somewhat critical of the field. Constance: I was very critical. The reason I was critical is that I once taught ecology and one of the things I learned early about American plant ecologists at that time was that most of them didn't know anything about the plants they were talking about. Very often their identifications were wildly off. and, as I mentioned, they almost all proceeded on the basis that species were essentially, if you like, separate acts of creation — again, something that taxonomists, by and large, had long ago given up. The paper had rather interesting repercussions. Some of the ecologists were greatly offended, and some of them were delighted. I had drawn an amazing number of ecologists. as a matter of fact, with my title. They didn't know what to expect and some of them didn't like what they got. It had been customary to publish the presidential address in the journal, Ecology. I gather, although I cannot prove this, that there was considerable debate on the board of editors whether or not this should be published. But finally it was. From the number of reprints I was asked for, it was widely subscribed to. That was my only excursion into plant ecology, shall we say. Lage: Have you followed up on the field, since? Constance: No. Well, ecology has become much more complicated. It's become mathematical and so on. Whether or not it's become much more profound, I don't know. Of course, ecologists are in a difficult position because ecology is really, if you like, field genetics, field ecology, under conditions that make experiment very difficult. It can be descriptive, and often is; but as soon as it becomes more experimental, they probably have to bring it into the house and then it becomes something else — Lage: They've lost the ecology part of it. Constance: That's right. It's really difficult to do. Well, one of the great improvements in the field has been the development of controlled greenhouses, or phytotrons, etc., where all the conditions can be controlled at once. Otherwise, the ecologist 143 Constance: has the problem of trying to control all but one variable, and in the field this is extraordinarily difficult for numerous reasons. The first phytotron was at Cal Tech; they abandoned that one when all- the biologists went over to molecular biology instead. So the first one in California, I guess, was also the last one. But now the tendency is not to build these terribly elaborate things, but rather smaller greenhouses or growth chambers that can be controlled. "Plant Taxonomy in an Age of Experiment." 1957 Constance: The third address you mentioned was in 1957, "Plant Taxonomy in an Age of Experiment." This, again, was an invitational affair. The occasion for this was the celebration of the fiftieth birthday of the Botanical Society of America, which was eventually commemorated by a book published by McGraw-Hill under the title of Fifty Years of Botany; Golden Jubilee Volume of the Botanical Society of America and edited by William C. Steere, who was then director of the New York Botanical Garden. The attempt in this jubilee was to have a series of people discuss the half-century of development in their particular specialties. The papers were mostly, at least, given at a meeting at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. What I was trying to do was. as I've indicated, simply to indicate the changes that had occurred. My thesis was — as usual, I think — that the goal of taxonomy 'is. as it has always been, an attempt to further the understanding of, in this case, the plants of the world by an arrangement that would indicate their relationships and their similarities and dissimilarities at the same time so that the maximum amount of information could be expressed. Lage : By this time, was that still a controversial point of view? Constance: Not really, I think. Everybody was for it, but not everybody was doing it, I'd say. Again, I talked about the inclusion of information from comparative morphology, from cytology and gene tics, from embryology, from paleontology, and a lot of miscella neous things that were all more or less tied together. [looking through some papers] I noticed that I have a letter from Kerr. [reading] It says, "I was interested to read in the Berkeley Gazette recently of your participation in the Golden Jubilee Symposium sponsored by the Botanical Society of America at the annual convention of the American Institute of Biological Sciences." (The Botanical Society was now meeting with the AIBS instead of the AAAS.) "As you know, I am highly 144 Constance: i-r- favor of leavening the loaf of administrative responsibility with continued work in one's chosen academic field. I know this is hard to do. My congratulations on your doing it. Best regards, Clark Kerr." Lage : So that address came in the midst of your dear-ship? Constance: That is correct. Lage: And was that somewhat unusual for a dean to keep that active? Constance: It was very easy then, and perhaps is still easier now. to be pulled out of your academic discipline by getting into admini stration. It's probably like a diet. You have to keep at it, or very soon you're lost. Lage: Did you have a regular time for working in your office here? Constance: I mostly came down to the office about seven o'clock and worked till eight. It sounds awfully early to me now, but I believe those were the hours. At any rate, I was the early morning and Saturday morning worker, and that is the way I managed to do at least something all the time. I don't know that this particular paper had any great resonance, but it was nice to be asked and people seemed to be relatively happy with the results. So it was another duty discharged in my field while I was getting more and more involved in other things. 145 XII SABBATICAL YEAR IN SOUTH AMERICA. 1953-1954 Guggenheim Fellowship to Study Plant Relationships North and South Constance: I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year 1953-54. which was the year after I completed my four years on the budget committee. I felt strongly in need of some refresh ment. I had never beer, able to travel very much, and this struck me as something very nice to do. There had been a tradition in the department of some involvement with South American botanical exploration, primarily by the botanical garden through the efforts of my then colleague, T. Harper Goodspeed. This University of California clip sheet of November 17, 1953, says, "Plans for a plant-hunting expedition in the western regions of South America have been revealed by Dr. Lincoln Constance, professor of botany at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. He plans to spend about eight months in South America, most of the time in Chile, but hopes to visit Peru and Argentina as well. The purpose is to gather plant specimens, seeds, and information leading to an explanation of the relationship between native plants of the North American temperate zone and similar plants in the temperate zone of South America." Lage : You had a larger, overriding purpose. Constance: That was the broad objective. [continues reading] '"It seems strange,' said Dr. Constance, 'that some plants are common in both northern and southern temperate zones, but are not found at all in between the two zones.' He will confine his studies to two families of plants on whose North American species he is a specialist. He says that he hopes the results of his published research on South American varieties will help to explain how these plants have come to be where they are today." Lage: And did it? Constance: Oh, to some degree, but not to the point that you could write a general essay on the subject. But I found out pretty much what I wanted to know about the specific things, and I learned something about the botany of the area. 146 In Transit; Twelve Passengers and a Cargo of Dynamite Lage: Constance Lage: Constance : Lage: Shall we talk a little bit about that trip more specifically — about what it was-like? I hear you had a very interesting vehicle that you had prepared for the trip. Ah. yes. Well, the problem of doing field work in Latin America is basically the problem of transportation. I had very helpful advice from Professor Goodspeed, He put me in touch with the Grace Line, which then ran freighters from San Francisco part of the way around Cape Horn, at least around the southern tip of South America. Through his good offices I was able to get them to take a vehicle for me. I think we also got a reduced passenger rate, if I remember correctly. It may be that the reduced passenger rate had something to do with the fact that they were carrying a cargo of dynamite, but I'm not quite sure about that. They were carrying a cargo of dynamite? We were — we were carrying a cargo of dynamite. They didn't tell us this until we were almost ready to leave and, not too surprisingly, my wife, who with my eleven-year-old son was going with me, was somewhat perturbed at this, and we went over and talked to the Grace people. They assured her and me — I wasn't too concerned about it — that carrying explosives was standard procedure; one had never blown up yet I At all events, we did go. I tried to find a suitable vehicle; I'm not sure whether jeeps were available then or not, but people impressed upon me. the necessity of having a car that you could lock because they were sure that everything you had would be stolen if you couldn't. So I finally obtained from the university garage an International Harvester delivery vehicle. It was essentially a box-like, enclosed truck. My friends used to say it looked like a milk wagon, and indeed I understand that the one we left in Santiago was used as a milk distributor for some years. So you left it down there when you came back? Constance Lage: I left it down there when we came home. The Grace Line was willing to carry it one way, but not the other, and it would cost considerably more to bring it back than the thing was worth when we got it here. It wasn't, unfortunately, all that satisfactory anyway. It did have to advantage that you could lock it. When you've said that, you've said most of it. It must have had four-wheel drive. THE FAMILY Upper and lover left: Passport photos for South American sabbatical, 1954. Latter right: Constance with wife, Sally, and son, Bill, on Berkeley campus, 1952. 147 Constance: I don't remember — I'm not sure that it would have that much luxury to it. At any rate, it was better than nothing — mejor que nada. Lage : Were you fluent in Spanish at this time? Constance: I never was; I'm not yet. Lage: Oh. you're still not? I saw this Spanish paper here. Constance: Oh, I can read it reasonably well, but I'm essentially self- taught. At any rate, we made all our arrangements and we left a little before Christmas. Traveling on a freighter, as passengers, we were clearly supercargo, and we moved when the freight moved and in the same direction, but not before and not with any very special flourishes. We were supposed to leave sometime in the fall and then things dragged on and on and we didn't know when we were going to leave. Finally, we left about two days before Christmas. The thing I remember is that we went aboard the ship, which was one of the Santas, the Santa Eli ana, in the early evening. Then in the middle of the night we moved over to Hunter's Point, and the stevedores loaded dynamite all night. There were lights cast on the operation, and it certainly looked like a scene out of hell. The ship was a little world all of its own. In the morning, we sailed out under the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate and past the Farallones and so on. One had the interesting sensation that the umbilical cord had been cut. We were simply operating on another trajectory completely. Some of my friends had been worried that since I was known to be fairly active and not a little impatient, I would drive myself and everybody crazy on shipboard, but that didn't turn out to be the case. I felt perfectly relaxed on shipboard. Lage: How long was the whole trip? Constance: The whole trip was about six weeks, I think. Six weeks to Valparaiso from San Francisco. We stopped in every country south of Mexico, excepting Honduras, I believe. We had some interesting times. If 148 Constance: We were out in the Gulf of Tehuantepec when lightning was striking all around us. Since we were carrying dynamite, it was, shall we say. fairly exciting. Lage : Your son must have found all this pretty exciting. Constance: Oh. yes. He had a ball. It was a wonderful experience. There was a maximum of twelve passengers. As I said, they were clearly supercargo and had no special privileges. We ate with the officers, and they loved to tell us specious yams of one sort and another. My recollection is that when we went down we had, I think, a maximum of about eight people. One was a Guatemalan boy going home from some private schooling somewhere. One, who was very dignified and uncommunicative, was reported to be an Argentinian general. There was some elderly lady, who I think was a European refugee of some kind, going down to visit her son somewhere. There were several others: a graduate student from Santa Barbara who was going to a teaching position in Bolivia and his wife. The trip was interesting because we had the run of the ship. We ate the ship's fare, which was wholesome if not spectacular. We could go down in the middle of the night and make ourselves sandwiches and coffee if we wanted to. It was a kind of floating picnic in some ways. I spent some time getting notes and things ready for my travel, but I spent a lot of time working on Spanish. I had the reputation, by the time we got there, of knowing more Spanish grammar than anyone else on the boat and being able to speak less of it than anybody. One of the things that I was amazed by was the amount of communication that took place between the ship's officers and the various characters they ran into in ports and so on. The officers knew a few Spanish words, and the people in the ports knew a few English words; neither of them knew any grammar — with rare exceptions. But mostly they operated with about one word from the other language and three from their own, but understood each other perfectly. I didn't have the courage of my convictions. Lage: You mean you didn't try it out as much as you should have? Constance: No, I apparently didn't. Well, at any rate, whenever the ship stopped. I wanted to get off naturally; I wanted to see the plants of the areas we were going through. Sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn't. If we were going to be there for a few hours, they were careful not to let us off. If they were going to be there for some time, they were dying to get us out of their hair. So. among other things, we spent a week in 149 Constance: Salvador; that turned out to be a fairly hairy adventure, as a matter of fact. It was quite warm at this time, this must have been January. It was suggested to us that perhaps we would like to go to the capital, San Salvador, and then in a couple of days "they would call us," and then we'd drive down to La Union on the southwest coast, which I think is probably in non- governmental hands at the moment, or at least it was. We went up to San Salvador and stayed there for what seemed to be day after day after day and heard absolutely nothing. We were in the most expensive hotel at the time and. of course, were paying our own way and getting a little disturbed by this. I think probably all the passengers were off the ship; there were about seven of us who were together in San Salvador. Eventually we decided to drive down to La Union, which essentially meant bisecting the country. El Salvador, of course, is about the size of a postage stamp anyway. So we rented a taxi and drove to La Union. On the way, we picked up a few roadside refreshments, which turned out to not have been one of the wiser activities we might have engaged in. My son became very sick by the time we got to La Union, and I promptly followed him. I remember spending what seemed like an interminable time — it was actually maybe two or three days — lying in a hammock in what passed for a hotel on the ground floor of a court, listening to the ox-carts rolling over the cobblestone streets and hoping I would die before morning. Occasionally, I would get down on my hands and knees and crawl to the other end of the patio, where there was an appropriate facility, and then crawl back again. But, like all things, it came to an end. About the time I was almost over it — it must have been nearly a week. I think. collectively — in the middle of the night, a wild-haired chap came in. saying that the captain of our ship, which was now in Honduras and was supposed to come back and pick us up. wanted us to go with this man in an open boat across the body of water that separated Salvador from Honduras to join the ship. The party immediately split as to the advisability of doing this. The women were unanimously against it; the men were divided, and I came down on the side of the women. I couldn't believe that it would be wise for us to go out with someone we didn't know, who had no identification, cross an international boundary, involving two countries of which we were not citizens, in the middle of the night. I thought if the captain really intended for us to go- he would have sent us something in writing. At any rate, we didn't go. Later we discovered that, indeed, it was valid. I don't know why the captain sent this chap; but. he wasn't a very prepossessing ambassador. At all 150 Constance : Lage: Constance: events, there was a little train that ran from the town out to the dock. The ship had to come back and pick us up. which the Grace Line was not very happy about. When we started to get off. we discovered that there were police present who were going to arrest the whole bunch of us. Wher you started to get off the train to go on the ship? Right. It turned out that it either was, or had recently become, illegal to go in one port and come out another. The Grace Line advised us to do it — I'm sure in good faith — and of course we didn't know anything about it. I was still too sick to do very much, but two or three of the men volunteered to go with the officers, and eventually they decided to let us go. I can't remember whether they fined the Grace Line or not. At any rate, the Grace Line spent quite a little money getting the ship back to pick us up. The captain basically assumed responsibility for it. He said he would appreciate it if — if we felt we wanted to — we helped to reimburse him. But he said he wouldn't ask unless everybody agreed to it. One couple did not agree to it, so it wasn't done. I feel badly about this because the captain was very nice. So at all events, we got out of Salvador. We stopped in Nicaragua. We went ashore briefly. We were at San Juan del Sur — Saint John of the South — and there was a big crowd on the beach. The reason for the crowd was that there was a large shark which had been caught or beached, and the people were swarming around with knives carving out its liver, while the shark was still operating. The other thing that was interesting was that pelicans were diving for fish. They looked as if they'd break their necks when they hit the water, but they didn't. We went ashore briefly, and we were impressed by the very attractive pastel-washed houses — they were really quite lovely. From Nicaragua we went to Panama. We were there briefly. We went up the Panama Canal a ways, while our ship was docked at Antigua, the old port on the Pacific. Then the next stop was in Buenaventura. Colombia, the port on the west coast. We were there only, I think, for some part of a day. In Nicaragua we thought about going up to Managua — the capital — but it seemed difficult to arrange. It was difficult to take off from the ship for any length of time because they never knew quite when they wanted you back again. They used to tell us, helpfully, that if they were ready to go, 151 Constance: they would go. and if we weren't there, why. they'd leave us and we'd wind up in jail. And none of us were very anxious to be in a South American jail. In fact, we weren't anxious to be in a jail of any kind, -but least of all in a South American one. We stopped several places in Peru, but I think Callao. the port of Lima, was the only one where we really could get off and spend some time. We went from Callao to Lima and then stayed there. My recollection is that we were there several days and we got a pretty good look at it. Lima, of course, is a fasci nating city. Then we returned to the ship at Callao and went south to the town of Mcllendo. Mollendo has a railroad that runs to La Paz, Bolivia. I think I mentioned that there was a former graduate student in anthropology at Santa Barbara and his wife on board. He was going to a teaching position at a private school in Oruro. Bolivia. This couple had a small child, who was a very cute youngster, but the couple was ultra- permissive, and their child drove the crew absolutely crazy. The Automobile Association of Southern California, which had worked out their schedule for them, had decided that he should drive their cat — which was aboard — from Mollendo to La Paz. There's a road from Mollendo to La Paz, but they thought that the road trip would be too difficult for his wife — twelve hours — and that, therefore, she should stay on the ship and go on to Arica in Chile. And from there, there is a railroad line. But I gather the travel agency in Los Angeles didn't tell them very much about the nature of Peruvian ports. I remember we were at the side of the ship, as we were coming toward Mollendo, and the only thing you could see was a big, circular tank. Ke kept looking for the city, which was somewhere behind the tank. He asked me to go ashore with him and I did. There was a town there, of sorts, and I saw him off to La Paz. There are almost no ports on the west coast of South America, so various devices are used to get goods and passengers from ship to shore and vice versa. One of the ways is to crank them up with some sort of a motor. The first experience we had of this was actually in Guatemala, and there they had what was really a kitchen chair with four chains attached to the four corners of the chair as seen from above. My wife sat in the chair and our son and I. and I think the other two men, stood on the chair around her and hung onto the chains as we were lifted up to the dock. That was one way of doing it. Otherwise, the people were lowered into lighters (shallow boats) and then, somehow or another, lifted off at the other end. 152 (3onstar.ce: When we got to Arica, there was a notable lack of volunteers to get the lady and her daughter ashore, so I volunteered. Fortunately, I managed to get them landed safely. Lage: Now. what was your role in getting them off? Constance: I carried the baby, stepping down into the lighter and getting cranked up. so far as I can recall, on the other end. [laughter] At any rate, we got there. Life in Chile. Colleagues, and Field Work Constance: We went on down to Valparaiso, where we were met by at least three people, two of whom had been associated with Professor Goodspeed on one or another of his trips, and the third was Carlos Munoz. who was, I think I've said earlier, my first Chilean friend. This reception was particularly touching because this was February, and I think we had been expected for at least a couple of weeks. So my friend Munoz, who was spending his summer vacation — the southern summer — in the city of Los Angeles, Chile, had probably spent at least ten days waiting for us. I remember we were hauled off to lunch — I can't remember what they called it. It was, in essence I think, the navy club, decorated with pictures of ships and admirals. Most of these were memorials of the Guerro de Pacif ico — the War of the Pacific — which, fortunately, I had heard about; otherwise, it might have come as a complete surprise. The British Admiral Cochrane apparently lent his services to Chile in the War of the Pacific, which was initially between Peru and Chile versus Bolivia — it ended in taking away Bolivia's coast and leaving it a landlocked nation* as it still is. In the second stage, it became a war between Peru and Chile over who got the spoils. Chile, which was successful in the maritime war. came out the winner. But it was very interesting that in Peru there were all sorts of memorial statuary, mostly to people who were in charge of defeated units during the war; in Chile, to successful admirals, of one sort or another. In the town of Arica, which is in northernmost Chile, and either in or close to part of the coastal area taken from Bolivia, there is a very large rock. The Peruvian general apparently was in a hopeless position and rode his horse off the rock in an heroic, typically macho gesture. The Peruvians, of course, regarded this as a symbolic act of patriotism. The Chileans, somewhat less admiringly, referred to it as the first time in history a horse had ever committed suicide, [laughter] 153 Constance: At any rate, we got to Valparaiso and went through customs and rather quickly got to Santiago, which is about seventy- five miles inland. Santiago supposedly has a climate which is nearest to that of Sacramento, but it never seemed to me to be quite that warm. Munoz invited us to use their home. He was in the Ministry of Agriculture at that time and had a company house, so to speak. But my wife and I decided that neither of us was really up to doing the marketing in a Spanish-speaking country, so through the good offices of some of the people that he knew in the Museum of Natural History, we were able to find a pension run by a German woman in a suburb of Santiago. Pension Huber, incidentally, has now become a legend in our family. Lage : How were the accomodations there? Constance: They were quite pleasant. I was away a good share of the time, but it was a nice place for my wife and son. I had originally planned to take them out in the field with me, but after very little experimentation in this direction. I didn't think they would be very happy. The accomodations in small towns in Chile left a good deal to be desired. I couldn't very well take them into the field; it just wasn't very practical. We thought about putting our son in school and then we decided he wouldn't be there long enough for that to make much sense, so we didn't. Originally, I started out to do my own driving, but I discovered that if you did this in Chile, you tended to lose caste; however, I tended to lose my way -as well. I could find my way from town to town. But when I got into town. I often had trouble getting out in the right direction, so it didn't work very well. I don't know any way to summarize my experience there very well, quickly. I tried to sample all the different kinds of habitats. I got up into the lower Andes somewhat above. I tried to get to as many places and do as many different kinds of things as I could. When I had corresponded from California with people, my Chilean friends were practically standing in line — you know, they would drop their jobs and/or their commitments — to have the pleasure of showing me the country. When I got there, I discovered that they were not quite that available. It was probably the La tin- American tendency to be more than willing, but not to be able to really follow up. So it took about five weeks before I could really get started. I learned later that that's sort of standard procedure. Part of that was the problem of getting things through customs, which turned out to be a bureaucratic snarl with any goings or comings. 154 Lage: Getting your possessions off the boat? Constance: That's right — and getting the necessary licenses tc operate. You had to have a came, which is a personal police permit of some sort — Lage: To collect plants? Constance: To do anything. And every place you turned around, you had to get three more revenue stamps — come down next Tuesday, between the hours of this and that and such and such — to have something stamped. And, of course, when you did there was nobody there, and you had to come back next week. It was quite maddening, in a way, but in between times I learned quite a little about things. Actually, we got to Santiago in February, and it's a little like being in the Sacramento Valley in July — it was brown as far as you could see. What I really needed to do was get up into the high country, or to get farther south. I kept hearing about all these people who were going to make trips with me. Finally, I discovered that one of them — a Swede, Dr. Benkt Sparre, who was at the University of Concepcion considerably to the south — was the only one who was seriously prepared to go out in the field with me. So I provided myself with a chauffeur by buying the vacation time of one of the government chauffeurs and drove down to Concepcion. I bought his vacation. He acted as my chauffeur, companion, and assistant. We went into the volcanic country, which is south of the Andes proper and is really very beautiful. It's sometimes called the Switzerland of South America, both on the Patagonian or Argentine side and on the Chilean side. It has very high volcanic mountains — Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in the hemisphere, is there. We discovered that about timberline was at that time of the year the best place to look for materials of the kind I was interested in. There were ski resorts which were not operating at this time of year. But usually, they had someone in charge and usually we could get a meal and a place to stay. So we went up a series of the major volcanoes. We went to timberline. and I got a lot of material I was anxious to obtain. Sparre did general collecting for me, so I was able to come home with a sizable amount of material. We really led two lives there. One was the life of the pension, which was very interesting. People there were from most everywhere. Two of the most notable individuals were an Englishwoman real estate operator, who had come with her husband to Chile a number of years before. He had died, and she had 155 Constance: carried on the real estate business very successfully after that. Her name was Bobbins, and she looked exactly like the pictures of the later Queen Victoria. She turned out to be a remarkable and very warm person. I looked her up in 1966, shortly before her death. The second one, who was particularly nice to my family, was Charles Scott, originally from Aberdeen [Scotland], a forester, who had been in the British forest service — I can't remember now if it was in Singapore or Malaya. He had retired, and he was working for F.A.O. — the international food and agricultural organization. He and a retired French professor were trying to set up, under United Nation auspices, a graduate school of forestry at the University of Chile. They (Mrs. Hobbins and Mr. Scott) remained friends for the rest of their lives. So we made some very close friends there; on the other hand, I was out in the field as much as I could be. And in the course of it, I got to know all the Chilean botanists. Lage: Did you then take other field trips with other botanists? Constance: I took one with Agust£n Garavanta. who lived in Limache. north of Valparaiso. We climbed together, in company with an Argentine botanist. La Campana de Quillota. a mountain Darwin had climbed during the course of his voyage of the Beagle. The Chileans had put up a little memorial plaque to Darwin, and my friend Garavanta had carried it up there. He was of Italian extraction and was an excellent amateur botanist; he had a garden in Valparaiso, in which he grew a lot of native plants. I stayed with him and his family one weekend, and there was no one there who spoke any English at all. I think my Spanish probably hit its apogee. But then this visitor from Argentina arrived. Osvaldo Boelcke, who spoke colloquial English, which he apparently had taught himself. Language, unfortunately, doesn't come easy to me. I believe in it, but I'm afraid I have no natural ability for it. Lage: Did you make any comparison of what you found on the mountain that Darwin climbed with what Darwin found? Constance: There wasn't anything particular, I think, about that. It was interesting because it was the highest point in the coast ranges, which are not very well defined there, anymore than they are here. But mostly, I was absorbing information. I obtained a lot of interesting material; as I wrote someone, I was spending about as much time collecting plants in other people's collections as I was getting them in the field. People were very much interested in finding someone who shared their interests. 156 Constance: One of the people I remember particularly was Gualterio Looser, who was the Chilean expert on ferns. He was of Swiss extraction, and he had a little business making doorknobs or locks or something of the sort. My friend Muf.oz arranged for me to go and see hitnl I used to arrive, if I remember correctly, at something like 5:30 on Thursday afternoons. And his sister, who spoke English, would fix tea for us. Then she would excuse herself, and he would bring out his plants, and we'd go ahead and talk about plants. He didn't know any English, I knew very little Spanish, we both knew a little German — you can use Latin plant names. But we had no trouble communicating. I always wondered what language we did it in reallyl Ke was a delightful person. He took me to a meeting of the Chilean Academy of Sciences, or whatever it's called. I was really concerned because I received the invitation, and I couldn't read the signature, and I didn't know who had sent it. I was afraid it might produce some sort of a gaffe. As you may know, Latin-Americans do not sign their names. They basically have a special cryptic designation, which indeed is their name. I later discovered that wherever you went — if you had to sign into a hotel — you had to sign the register. On the register, there were separate columns for your name and for your signature. Both in Chile and Peru I noticed the clerk would watch me sign my name and turn the thing around and say, "Ah, el mismo!" — the same. Therefore, it's difficult to recognize some of these scrawls. In Chile, then. I essentially sampled the flora as well as I could with my somewhat restricted means of getting around. I should have liked to have gone out to the Archipelago of Juan Fernandez. I looked into it far enough to find that I could probably get out, but there was no assurance I could get back, I also was interested in the big island of Chiloe. But there again, it is a very popular tourist area — that is, tourist in the sense of mainland Chileans — and it didn't seem very likely I could get accommodations or transportation either, so I didn't do that. I stuck to the land, and we got down as far as Puerto Montt, which is where the Pan-American Highway ran out. You couldn't get beyond that without going over into Argentinian Patagonia. Lage: Which you did later. Constance: I did that later, but not on this trip. Almost the last thing that we did in Chile was to spend a week in Argentina. We flew across the Andes, and in some ways this worked out rather well because when I went to Chile I had talked to people in the consulate in San Francisco. They impressed upon me that if I planned to stay more than six months, I should not go with a tourist visa. 157 Constance: So I wer.t with some kind of an entrance permit. I found, of course, when I got down there, that this was the worst thing you could possibly have done because it was practically impossible to get out. Lage : It's an entrance permit but not an exit — ? Constance: Exactly. In going over to Argentina, I had real problems. I got a young lady botanist from the faculty of the University of Buenos Aires to go over with me. and she helped me through it. So we went to Buenos Aires, clearly as tourists, and then came back still as tourists, and after that there was no problem. When we actually left Chile, I went by myself and had no trouble going through the whole business. The visit to Buenos Aires was very pleasant because I met most of the botanists around Buenos Aires, and it was quite a distinguished group. Some of them are still close friends. That facilitated my having an opportunity to go back to Argentina some twelve years later. Lage: Did it also facilitate exchanges? Constance: Oh, yes, all sorts of interrelations. Lage: Did you find things on this trip that weren't in various collections, or is it just of value to see where they grow? Constance: Well, I certainly brought back things we didn't have in our collections. We probably have the best collection, anywhere, of the two groups of plants I'm interested in. My collecting, both in the field and getting material from other people, and establishing communication of one sort of another were highly instrumental in that. I don't think I found any real novelties, shall we say. You never know about these things because you collect things and maybe fifty years down the line, somebody will discover that this is something that had never been collected before. But I'm not aware that I did; that wasn't particularly what I was trying to do. I was really trying to see what the biogeographic circumstances were like, see what was where, and how they grew. This was the sort of thing that interested me: Two members of the parsleys, with which I had been particularly concerned, grow together in woodland in western North America. I found that in Chile they also grow together in woodland. You could practically transpose the two woodlands in general appearance, but their other species are not the same. Lage: Is there any explanation? 158 Constance: There are more explanations than there are proofs. But one of the common explanations, and probably the most generally accepted at the present time, is long-distance dispersal by animals, primarily birds. There are some things in California which look as if they were native which probably are not, and which may have been introduced by moving grazing animals back and forth between the hemispheres. I happened to run across a note wherein a botanist in southern California stated that there was no evidence they ever exchanged sheep between South America and North America, but if they did, it would be a lot easier to explain the distribution of some weeds. The moment I got to Chile, I recognized all the weeds. Lage : So they're the same plants growing in the two — ? Constance: The weeds are the same; that is, in both places they're mostly introductions from Europe and Asia. Lage: Oh, I see. When you say "weeds," you mean — Constance: I mean exotics — I don't mean the native species. No, weeds are aliens. For instance, you have not only the Old World Eurasian things that have been introduced in both places, but you have some introductions back and forth. For instance, the California poppy is so very abundant in some parts of Chile that they call it the flor jde ferrocarril — flower of the railway — because it grows along the railroad tracks. They hadn't, at that time at least, developed the weed-killers which kill off such species here. But they would also grow on the railroad tracks here if given half a chance. There they have the chance and take it. The common yellow-flowered lupines that used to be around the Presidio are quite abundant on the Chilean coast. Lage: Those are weeds? Constance: Those are weeds — that is, they're weeds down there. They're native here. So a weed is largely a matter of opinion, you see. If you want it to grow, it's not a weed; if you don't, it is. I can't think of anything particularly distinctive about the trip. It was my first excursion to South America and it deepened my interest in South American plants. It gave me a great many associations, which I had not had before. After we returned to Santiago from Buenos Aires, I worked largely in the museums there because it was getting too late in the year to do much in the way of additional field work. Then we obtained return passage to California on another .Santa ship. 159 Constance: Unfortunately, my wife and I both got the flu just before we left, and we spent a couple of uncomfortable nights in Valparaiso. By the time we got on the ship, we were both pretty miserable. So we. spent the ship time between Valparaiso and Callao pretty much in bed. Meanwhile, our son was having an absolutely wonderful time because we couldn't keep watch en him. I didn't say much about him before, but he had a wonderful time. Lage: I wonder how he did on his own? Constance: He had the run of the ship. He read the sailors' manual and then asked the officers questions. He was generally referred to as a horrible little monster, and the captain thought he was wonder f"l because he said that most of his officers hadn't dealt with any of this information since they were commissioned, or whatever thev are, in the first place. Bill would ask them questions like. "Well, at this point on the map, if there's a light here and a light there, whv is the light there brighter than the light here if they have the same electrical power?" and so on. He learned to read the charts and follow the ship's course. He had a thoroughly delightful time. Lage: What about on land — how did he like the experience in Chile, and how did your wife like it? Constance: They enjoyed it. They enjoyed the life in the pension. There were very pleasant people there, and it was interesting. Lage: Did they leam Spanish? Constance: They learned some. If he had had the chance, my son would have picked it up like a sponge. He didn't have too much chance, and I somewhat regret that we didn't get him into school, but it really wasn't very feasible. But they led a pleasant life — they read a lot, it was pleasant to walk around and there were enough people that they knew, or got to know, to prove interesting. They got a little coaching in Spanish by one of the women in pension, who had a Norwegian name. One of the things we discovered about Chile is that it was very hard to find any Chileans. Lage: I was wondering — so many of the people you mentioned came from here and there. Constance: The thing is, they almost invariably told you. "I'm Swiss," or "I'm Swedish." or "I'm German." I know that one of the people who met us at the ship — an associate of Goodspeed's, a senior physician at one of the hospitals in Valparaiso — was as English 160 Constance: as anyone I ever met. I didn't discover until I was back here that, sure, he was English on his father's side, but Chilean on his mother's. He certainly looked more than half English. This was one ' of the real problems in Chile — that people did not identify themselves ^s Chilean. They thought of themselves as whatever their foreign origin had been. They tended to keep up these national distinctions. I remember Mr. Garavanta had his children, I believe, in a school where they were learning German and then would send them to a French or English school. The different nationals tended not to mix. Before my year was out, I was introducing Chilean botanists to each other. Some of those of German extraction and those of Spanish extraction had nothing to do with each other. Lage: Was it a caste system, more or less? Constance: There was a pecking order, at any rate. South Chile is, essentially, German — heavily German — settled in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of the big farms are German-owned. And along with this, the Germans carried their tradition of interest in natural history. So most of the work on botany and things of that sort were done in the old German naturalist traditions. Lage: What about native Americans? Constance: The Chileans pretty well eliminated the natives. The most durable opponents of the Chileans were the Araucanians, who lived south of the Rio B£o-B£o, which runs through the town of Concepcion, If you think of Chile in relation to California, I always think of Concepcion as being approximately Santa Barbara, which gives you a little idea of place. The Araucanians were very fierce. They had the reputation of cutting the hearts out of anybody they captured. That tended to keep the Spanish Chileans at some distance. They pretty much maintained their control until relatively late. I can't tell you exactly how late that was, but at any rate, the Spanish Chileans didn't make much progress in the southern part of Chile. But the Germans did; they came in in large numbers. They were very industrious. They built towns like Valdivia and Osorno, which were very odd in a way, because they follow the plaza plan — you know, the Latin- American plan. (I suppose it's Spanish, too.) It has the cauld be your goal in that kind of elementary course? You wouldn't assume too many are going on with botany. No. Althouah in 1A and IB they must have something in mind. Yes, it's supposed to provide a basis for anybody who wants to go on in plant science of one sort or another, but now, of course, with the molecular approach — molecular, biochemical, and so on — it's much more complicated. As I say, I wouldn't dare to talk about aspects of plant physiology that I used to teach. Fortunately, I don't have to. What they're going to tearh in the future, I haven't any idea. So far as I can tell, nobody else does either, but that's something else. [laughs] Should be interesting. The Berkeley an article discussed the different types of biology which the herbarium would be associated with: "the group of integrative, organismal, ecological, and evolutionary biology." That's referring to the whole organism? 336 Constance: What they're talking about is that, traditionally, biological science has been divided into the plant and animal kingdoms, but even the division into the plant and animal kingdoms isn't as sacrosanct as it used to be. Now people think maybe there are anywhere from three to a dozen different kingdoms, really. Some of them simply dwindled away, disappeared entirely during evolutionary history, or were so reduced that — Lage: You mean three kingdoms other than plants and animals? Constance: Well, there's the question of what are fungi? Are fungi plants? Maybe so, maybe not. Are algae plants? Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Are all algae algae? That's debatable too, because if you go to a chemical basis for judging, you find different processes of obtaining energy, producing energy, of manufacture of nutritional material, and so on. If you take a strictly chemical view you probably could come up with I don't know how many — a large number. At any rate, the old division between plants and animal isn't what it used to be. But historically most courses in organisms and living things were organized that way. So what you did was to discuss the structure, the function, the physiology, the chemistry, whatever: the organization of different levels all the way from the cell to the highly complicated multicellular organisms, within the framework of animals on the one hand and plants on the other. But everybody knew that at the unicellular level the distinctions between plants and animals are so vague that they probably don't really exist, and that the botanist and the zoologist, to some extent, study some of the same things as parts of their own kingdom. Well, because of that, and the fact that it's been discovered that much of the genetics and chemistry in plants and animals is very similar, more and more institutions have tended to combine botany and zoology and make it biology per se. Then, in more recent times, not only have they done that, but the modes of study are so different; that is, in much of molecular biology, which is really the biochemistry of large molecules and proteins the modes of study are much more like those of the physical sciences, with very complicated laboratory equipment. So the tendency has been to slice things the other way: instead of slicing them vertically between plants and animals, to slice them other way and study them at the molecular level, the cellular level, the tissue level, organismic level, and so on. Much of the information at the genetical level, the unicellular and cellular level, is almost directly applicable to matters of medical interest — neurology, and so on. There's a 337 Constance : Lage: Constance: Lage: Const anc° : Lage: Constance ; Lage : Constance tendency to chop off biology at that point, and say that everything beyond that, that isn't related to people, is of no importance anyway. And that's where organismic biology is usually left, nowadays, with system atics and ecology. And it is very often centered around museums. That seems to be the trend. Here at the present time, the herbarium and the sy sterna tics' end of botany may indeed combine with the comparable aspects of zoology and paleontology into an organismic organization of some sort. What the rest of the organization is going to be I don't know — nor do I know what they're going to teach. There's something to be said for it; it's been done in many institutions, and obviously biology is so big you can slice it various ways, if you have to slice it. It certainly will affect the types of research though. I would think. It won't affect the types of research as much as the teaching, I don't think, because the question is, what are you going to teach? The whole bio1 ogical reorganization has been set up in terms of research, as far as I can see. They haven't even talked about teaching yet. No doubt we'll have a super committee which will figure out something — I don't know what. I don't think you will really be able to tell for perhaps twenty years whether it was good or bad. That's right. On the other hand, sometimes thinking all this through can enliven it. It can, there's no question about that, about every so often. It ought to be thought I had read that system atics was given a boost because of the environmental concerns about destruction of habitat. That' s quite right. More people went into study, and more money was available for research? Well, it simply has a wider public than it did. This also goes- I think, with gardens, that if it's fair to say that scientific support has tended to be inflated — or at least greatly increased — at the molecular, biochemical level, this doesn't do much for the public, at least outside of its medical applications. A few years ago there was an account in the Daily Californian that somebody was complaining that students who were interested in 338 Constance : Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance : biology were being pressured to go into biochemistry and molecular biology, when what they really were interested in was plants and animals. So, you know, you can never satisfy everyone. At any rate, the general public is interested in organisms, and it's rather intriguing that a number of physical scientists raise orchids, or are expert gardeners, or something of the sort, but that they consider this recreation, not science. Whereas, of course, those interested in organismic biology feel it's just as much science as anything else, and that by comparison chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology spend all their time dealing with things that are submicroscopic, or so simple they're not even interesting. So there's a bit of tension between those two? Well, there's no tension, because they have all the support, since it ties in with medicine. No, it's just a different concentration of interests. I think chemistry is fine, but I don't find it very fascinating. That's why you're not a chemist. That's why I'm not a chemist, but that's something else. I almost became a geologist once, The Freshman Cluster Program: Antidote to Ar.omie Lage: Okay. I have a note here on the Freshman Cluster Program — that was after you retired? Constance: That is true. The Freshman Cluster Program was devised in the College of Letters and Science. In every agency in the University that's involved with undergraduate students — at Berkeley, at any rate — there's always concern, although the students, I take it, wouldn't believe it, for trying to alleviate the sense of anomie, or whatever it is, that students tend to feel here. Because Berkeley is a big place a student has to be fairly sophisticated to simply move into it and take advantage of its opportunities. I know when I came here as a graduate student I was pretty much lost for a year or two. Many students who come here, who have the capacity to do well, don't, to some degree because they're lonesome and homesick and don't find anything to identify with, or find their own things to identify with. It really affects their work negatively. Some students, who are self-contained and 339 Constance: self-directed, will sail through very nicely. There's no question that for a student who has the capacity and knows what he wants to do. Berkeley's perfect. But for many students it's not; i t1 s a very d-ismal place to be. So what do you do? Well, one of the obvious solutions — any committee, of course, will decide that advising should be improved. So one is always improving advising. I mentioned that when I became dean, the committee on Letters and Science had recommended that every faculty member become a student advisor, and I carried that through as well as I could. But, like any system, that one goes for about so long, until people figure out how to beat it. So that was allowed pretty much to decline, until someone came up with the idea for what became the freshman cluster program. Many people I'm sure have had the same idea; there was something that was in vogue when I came here as an assistant professor. You gather together somehow a group of new students, or old students, and put them in touch with an advisor who has similar interests. And you do various things to try to encourage interrelationships, so they feel easy with each other, so that the new student is able to get special attention. He feels that somebody knows him; he has access to some kind of advice. The whole mechanism of setting up an ombudsman, not only in universities and on this campus, but in public life in general. is pretty much that same idea. Any institution becomes bureaucratized to some extent, and you wouldn't have the lobbyists in Washington, probably, if it were so easy to get the right kind of attention when you need it. But instead you have a very elaborate system of influence peddlers who are doing the same thing: they're enabling people to find their way through the machinery. And a lot of the complaint about the University from the students, in the sixties at least, was that the machinery was more or less impenetrable, or at least they couldn't get what they wanted. So the cluster program was one of these devices for getting a faculty member to take under his or her wing a group of students with ostensibly similar interests. I think the first faculty director — this was set up in the College of Letters and Science — was Walter Horn, in History of Art. He is a very fine and distinguished scholar, and a very warm person, and he successfully acted as director of it for several years. The director's job was primarily to induce faculty members to take on responsibility. Shortly after I retired, it occurred to the college that I wasn't doing enough to keep me busy, so they induced me to take it on, and I did it for several years, so long as the program continued. 340 Constance: The results were pretty much what you would expect — that with the right people and the right chemistry, it works just fine. Lage: The right chemistry? Constance: Between the faculty member and the students. Some of these were highly successful, and a lot of them — Well, let's put it this way: one of the things that quite often happens is that the faculty member would decide to get his group together and would arrange, say, for a barbecue, or a restaurant meal, or something, and two of his twenty people would show up. That was fairly common. Part of it was the difficulty of newly arrived students on campus in finding where they were supposed to be. Simply failure to make connections. Part of it was — well, it's another story--but the students will tell you that they go to their faculty advisor's, student hours, and he isn't there. The faculty member will tell you that he kept his student hours religiously for the first two months, and no students ever showed up until after the first midterm. So it's trying to overcome those natural reactions in the college community. Lage: There must be certain sense of awkwardness, between this young freshman and — Constance: Well, yes, that is part of the problem. Some of the students want absolutely nothing to with any advice whatever. They feel it's an assault on their manhood or womanhood; others want it and are afraid to ask; and the ones who don't need it usually get it. Lage: Usually they're the ones who come in and know how to discuss things. Constance: That's right. It's a very difficult problem, and I'm sure every college and university struggles with this. The larger the institution, the more it's a problem. In small colleges I suppose that very often the problem is the other way around: there's so much togetherness that nobody gets anything done. I remember talking to someone who came here from Oberlin, and I said, "It must be very nice to be able to work so closely with a small number of students." He said, 'Veil, it's nice for the students when they think nothing of calling you up at two o'clock in the morning and telling you the details of their love life, and that gets rather tiresome." Lage: [laughs] Two extremes. 341 Constance: Nothing's perfect. At any rate, I enjoyed the college cluster thing. Lage: Did you mainly get students together as a group, or would they come in — ? Constance: Well, mostly it was getting faculty members to agree to take them. I did not get involved with individual groups. I forget how many groups there were, but let's say there were forty or fifty or something like that; my job was simply to come up with faculty advisors, and that wasn't always that easy. Rather interesting that the most difficult people to get any help from were, I think, the great research scientists on campus — with the exception of people like Glenn Seaborg who enjoyed, apparently, doing this sort of thing. Most of the very hot research people couldn't be bothered. In choosing the advisors I worked through the deans and departmental chairmen. Since at about this time the great reform of biology was coming along, and they were going to do away with all antiquated biology and just have, you know, really very significant biology. So I went to the then dean of biological sciences, and I said, "Since this is the direction that biology is going, it seems to me that we probably should stop selecting the advisors in the Freshman Cluster Program from people who are interested in plants and animals, and get people who are interested in the new, revolutionary biological research. " He said, "Oh, that is great." I hoped that he would give me a little help. He gave me some names of people, and I called up a number of diem, and I found they were all too busy to waste their time on undergraduates. So not everything works. But I was very fortunate. My name was still remembered as the former dean. Lage: You still knew everyone around the campus. Constance: No, but they knew my name, and that helped. It was rather fun, and, as I say, I kept it up until there was a change in the deanship, and the new dean decided he would handle it a little differently, and then he left, and it's no longer in existence as far as I know. Lage: They're no doubt trying some other method for solving that same problem. Constance: The same problem. The problem is still there, and the same and many other methods will be tried, without a doubt. And to some extent that's good, as we talked about looking at biology from a different view. All these attempts have their value, and also 342 Constance: it's a good idea to change every so often, because any system you set up is going to come unstuck within a few years. It simply runs down because people see that it is less than perfect. So they f.eel, 'tyhy should I spend my time on that, when there are so many other things I ought to be doing?" But it gave me a nice little chore, gave me contact with the college, so I stayed with it for several years. President of the California Academy of Sciences: Broa de ni ng the Decision- Making Process Lage: Constance : Lage: Constance Lage: Constance: We have just a few odds and ends for you to comment on [referring to interview outline]. Yes. There's one thing on that list, incidentally — I think somewhere it says something about my being a member of the Association of the Advancement of Science. One of the things I learned going through records was that I became a fellow in 1949, which I'd forgotten. I've told you about the Patagonia project, I think. There is an ongoing Flora of Patagonia, which is being published in Argentina, under the aegis of what really amounts to the research arm of the Ministry of Agriculture (I.N.T.A.). I was invited to come to Argentina and do field work preparatory to providing a treatment of Umbelliferae for that. I did that in '66-'67. For various reasons it's been delayed. Presumably it's on the verge of appearing — I used to think it was going to be my first postmortem publication, but with luck it may actually come out soon. What did the presidency of the California Academy of Sciences involve? That's more than an honorary position? Yes. I was also a trustee at the same time; you can't really differentiate the two. I was active in the California Academy, really, for about ten years, and served as president for three, I believe, [trustee, 1969-1985; president. 1975-1978] »f Does the president of the academy have a policy-making role? Yes. Well, the academy really has a dual organization. It is governed by a board of trustees, with a chairman, which is made up primarily of city fathers and mothers of San Francisco — interested, dedicated, contributing citizens — and a few academics. It has a permanent director. The president of the 343 Constance: Lage: Constance: Lage : Constance : Lage: academy, who is automatically a member of the trustees, is really the head of the academics. He chairs the Science Council, which consists of the director, the chairmen of the departments, plus -the few academic trustees, and now also a couple of representatives from the Fellows of the Academy, who are the collective elected members of the academy. This Science Council really sets the policy for the research activities of the academy. So it is of some importance. Any contribution I made, I think, was probably in the direction of trying to get the Science Council to become a kind of academic senate. Because, at least when I first became involved, the departments — the staff — had almost nothing to say about anything. Nobody asked their opinion, or at least not very often. And certainly they weren't deeply involved in any decision-making. And was it the director who made the decisions? The director determined essentially everything. With some of my predecessors and the fellow academic trustees particularly, we set out to make this a more democratic and responsible organization. I think that that has worked out very well. Is that a function of the particular director, or just the tradition of the organization? It was the tradition of the organization, and like many of these things, when one person is in office for a number of years he tends to follow the pattern of doing it himself and not particularly welcoming extraneous advice. The person that really carried it through was the late Professor Richard Jahr.s, dean of earth sciences at Stanford University, who succeeded me as president. I didn't start it, but I pushed it hard, and he pushed it further; I think it has worked out exceedingly well. There also was a change in director, and the new director — being new — was a little more receptive. I think it has considerably strengthened the academy. So I'll take that much credit, anyway. But I enjoyed the academy association very much, Let's see. I think I was trustee for fourteen years and decided that was long enough, Besides, I wanted to reduce the age of the trustees. The most obvious way to do that easily was get people like myself off it. so I declined to stand for re-election. It is an elected office? 344 Constance: There is a membership committee, which determine people's wishes as they go along. It was pretty clear that it was time for me to step out. Besides they're in a big fundraisir.g mode, and I'm not able to do very much in that direction. My contributions were pretty clearly academic. [See "Reflections on Fourteen Years as a Trustee." Fellows Newsletter 6:7-8, (1986).] Lage: Did the presidency of the Botanical Society of America [1970] carry with it certain responsibilities? Constance: No, most of those national organizations are pretty purely honorary. Lage: You make an address. Constance: You make an address as you go out. You don't have any great opportunity to do much — at least, I didn't do much. I treated it as- an honorary office. A Lasting Influence Lage: Are there any outstanding graduate students you want to mention? Constance: I was thinking about that. I had two graduate students at Washington State, one of whom went on to become one of the most distinguished people in my field in this country. He's retired now as Asa Gray professor at Harvard. That's Reed Rollins. Then, when I came to Berkeley I didn't take any graduate students for some years. The department was set up in such a way that my senior colleague. Professor Mason, would normally have the graduate students, and I would not. unless I either made an effort to obtain some, or some student expressed a stubborn wish to work with me. I was perfectly happy working in conjunction with my colleagues Mason and Foster. I served on the committees of essentially all the students that came along in systematics, and there didn't seem to be any particular necessity for me to carve out a slice of my own — or else I wasn't very aggressive in doing so. The first graduate student I had was in 1941; that's four years after I came here. That was Alan Beetle. I don't know that there's any particular point in going on through this, but I have had quite a series of distinguished students, and they are pretty much all over the country. I think I may have said earlier that I had four Chinese Ph.D.s, and a Costa Rican one, a New Zealand one. I think all the others have been American. At one point I had three former Ph.D.s on the faculty at Harvard! 345 Lage: That does make your influence kind of spread. Constance: That's right. I think I've been able to influence the direction of my tiny field t;o some extent. Of course, that's a satisfaction, and that's probably why I've headed various societies at one time or another. This August I'm supposed to go East to receive the Asa Gray Award of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists; that's probably my final kudo. I suspect. Lage: You probably said that a couple of years ago. Constance: I said that a couple of years ago and meant it too. But at any rate I've been very well treated. I've received as much recognition in my field as I could hope for. I've stayed active, by and large, longer than most of my contemporaries, I think. And I intend to keep on doing so as long as possible. Lage: From the looks of your office — Constance: From the looks of the unfinished efforts we have around here, it is pretty clear that — Lage: Well, it's a working office. I wasn't commenting on the piles here. Constance: I know, but I was. It is a working office, there's no doubt about that. No, I find it stimulating. It's very pleasant indeed, and it is a great privilege to be able to continue to work. People apparently trust me enough to still lend me specimens and send me inquiries, and I have a lively correspondence, which is getting out of hand, as usual. Transcriber: Kate Stephenson Final typist: Johanna Wolgast 346 TAPE GUIDE — Lincoln Constance Interview 1: January 23, 1986 tape 1, side A tape 1, side B tape 2, side A tape 2, side B Interview 2: January 30, 1986 tape 3, side A tape 3, side B tape 4, side A tape 4, side B Interview 3: February 13, 1986 tape 5 tape 5, side A side B insert from tape 4, side A tape 6, side A tape 6, side B insert from tape 5, side B insert from tape 9, sides A and B Interview 4: February 20, 1986 tape 7, side A tape 7, side B tape 8, side A tape 8, side B Interview 5: February 27, 1986 tape 9, side A tape 9, side B insert from tape 12 side A return to tape 9, side B tape 10, side A tape 10, side B tape 11, side A Interview 6 tape 12, tape 12 March 6, side A side B 1986 tape 13, side A tape 13, side- B 1 1 10 21 31 38 38 47 51 52 58 58 68 71 78 85 92 97 102 102 108 119 127 133 133 138 140 145 147 155 164 167 167 170 179 192 347 Interview 7: Cape 14, tape 14, March 13, 1986 side A side B tape 15, side A tape 15, side B Interview 8: tape 16. tape 16, April 3, 1986 side A side B tape 17, side A tape 17, side B Interview 9: April 10, 1986 tape 18, side A tape 18, side B tape 19, side A Interview 10: April 29, 1986 tape 20, side A tape 20, side B tape 21, side A tape 21, side B Interview 11: May 8, 1986 tape 22, side A tape 22, side B tape 23, side A 196 196 205 214 225 230 230 240 249 260 268 268 277 288 293 203 302 312 320 324 324 332 342 343 APPENDIX LINCOLN CONSTANCE Curriculum Vitae Born 16 February 1909, Eugene, Oregon Married Sara Luten, 12 July 1936, one son Education: B.A. 1930, University of Oregon (Biology) M.A. 1932, University of California, Berkeley Ph. D. 1934, University of California, Berkeley Employment : Instructor in Botany, Assistant Professor, State College of Washington, 1934-1937 Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1937-1943 Associate Geobotanist, 1943, Geobotanist, 1943-1944, Research Analyst, 1944-1945, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, D.C. Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1943-1947 Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1947 to 1976 Visiting Lecturer and Acting Director, Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, 1947-1948 Emeritus Professor, 1976-present Honors : Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi Guggenheim Fellow, 1954-1955 "Certificate of Merit," Botanical Society of America "Miembre Correspondiente, " Sociedad Argentina de Botanica Elected to Societe de Biogeographie (Paris) "Miembro Academico Correspondiente," Academia Chilena de Ciencias Naturales Member, Institute Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales (Quito) Member, Sociedad Botanica de la Libertad (Trujillo, Peru) Elected Foreign Member, Linnean Society of London, 1969 First Parodi Lecturer, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1967 Invited Symposium Speaker, Xth International Botanical Congress, Edinburgh Elected Foreign Member, Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, 1971 Invited Speaker, Symposium on Umbelliferae , University of Reading, England, 1970 Honorary Vice President, Xllth International Botanical Congress, Leningrad Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1950 Moses Lecturer, 1978 Fellows Medal, California Academy of Sciences, 1985 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1947 Asa Gray Award, American Society of Plant Taxonomists, 1986 LINCOLN CONSTANCE Record of Service to the Berkeley Ca-.npus , compiled from Biobibliographical Supplements (which go back only to 1950-1951); department committees and promotional committees not included: Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs 1962-1965 Acting Chancellor at various times during this period of extreme upheaval, including the interlude between Chancellors Dean, College of Letters & Science 1955-1962; ex officio on many committees Acting Chancellor for one month Chairman, Department of Botany 1954-1955 Director, University Herbarium 1963-1975 Curator of Seed Plants, University Herbarium 1943-47 (Asst.), 1947-66 (full) Trustee, Jepson Herbarium & Library ca. 1960 to date; Chm. ca. 1967 to date Advisory Committee Systematics Collections for the Berkeley Campus ?-l?73 Regents Professorships & Lectureships Committee 1971-1975, chm. 1973-1975 Search Committee, Dean, College of Natural Resources 1974-1975. chm. L&S Reading & Composition Cocnittee 7-1975, chm. Graduate Council Committee on Paleontology 1972-1974 Lowie Museum Advisory Committee 1971-1973, chm. Life Sciences Building Space Subcommittee 1968-1973 Chancellor's Task Force on Reorganization 1971-1972 Hitchcock Professorship Corjaittee 1958-1963, chm.; 1971-1974 Letters & Science Executive Committee 1968-1971 Representative Assembly, Academic Senate 1971-1972 Committee on International Exchange 1969-1970 Academic Planning Committee 1967-1970 Comittec on Naming of Buildings 197C-1S71 UC-Chile Program, Science Subcommittee 1966-1970 Environmental Health & Safety Committee 1964-1969 UC Press Editorial Committee & various additional advisory capacities extending back as far as the files go (1950-1951) UC-Negro Colleges Program 1965-1966 Berkeley Committee on Year-R.ound Operation 1963-1964 Chancellor's Academic Advisory Committee 1956-1964 Chancellor's Advisory Administrative Council 1956-1964 Chancellor's Committee on Television 1961-1963 Advisory Committee for the White Mountain Research Station 1961-1963 Committee on University Affairs 1958-1963 S'.udent Affairs Committee 1958-1963 Advisory Committee to School of Nursing 1958-1963 Student Affairs Committee 1958-1963 Bancroft Library Ccmiittee 1954-1963, chm. 1960-1963 LY.ecutive Coinr.ittee, Associates in Tropical Biogeography 1958-1963 Advisory Committee, Naval Biological Laboratory 1958-1961 Ad hoc Ccm:iittee on Grants & Contract Research 1960-1961 Ad hoc Coui.r.iutce on Berkeley Personnel Office 1960-1961 Ad hoc Coirjnitt'je on Berkeley Registrar's Office 1960-1961 Ad hoc Committee on Late Applications for Readraission 1959-1960 Advisory Ccr.ran.ttee for Teacher Education 1957-1960 Counseling Center Advisory Committee 1958-1959 Committee to Prevent Duplication in Official Publications 1958-1959 • Committee on Interdepartmental Faculty Seminars 1958-1959 DtiL-kolc-y-Staurord Liaison Committee 1958-1959 Committee on I'.ducational Policy 1954-1955 350 LINCOLN CONSTANCE Special Committee on Student Facilities, chairman 1954-1955 Budget Committee, 1950-1954; chairman 1952-1954 Academic Council, 1952-1962 Coordinating Committee, 1952-1962 Letters & Science Committee on Committees, 1952-1955 Committee on Graduation Matters (ex officio), 1955-1962 "Outside" Service; American Association for the Advancement of Science: Vice President and Chairman, Sec. G, 1952 American Academy of Arts & Science: Member, Executive Committee r Western Division, 1969-1971 American Society of Plant Taxonomists: Council, 1944-1951, 1952-1958; Chairman of Ccuncil, 1947; President, 1950 California Academy of Sciences: Trustee, 1969-1983; Vice President, 1972-1975, President, 1976-1979 California Botanical Society: President, 1955 Botanical Society of America: President, 197.0, Council 1970-1973, Committee on Corresponding Members, 1971-1973; Merit Awards Committee Kosmos Club: President, 1969-1970 Sigaa Xi: Vice President, 1967-1968; President, 1968-1969 Member, Commission for Education in the Biological Sciences (CUEBS) , 1964-1965 Member, Commission on Education in the Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources (CEANAR) , 1965-1968 Member, Svstematics Subcommittee, International Biological Program, NAS-HRC, 1965- 1966 KSF Divisional Committee for Biological & Medical Sciences, 1960-1963 AI33-NSF Committee on Communications Media in Biology, Chairman, 1960-1963 Visiting Committee to Cornell University on Systematic Collections, 1965-1965 Advisory Committee to Secretary of Smithsonian Institution 1964-1965 Steering Committee, Flora North America Project, 1966-1968 Advisory Committee, Hunt Botanical Library, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1965-19( Visiting Committee for Biology and Related Research Facilities, Harvard University, 1965-1971 Chairman, Visiting Committee for Stanford University Natural History Museum, 1961-1963 Member, Search Committee, Dean of Natural Sciences, Ss.n Francisco State Univer sity, 1974-1975 Hoblitzelle National Award Committee, 1961-1963 351 INDEX -- Lincoln Constance academic freedom, 48-49,249-253 . Aikin, Charles, 204,205 Alexander, Annie, 94-95 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 49, 61, 69, 140 American Society of Plant Taxonomists, 138-140, 345 an ti- apartheid demonstrations, 272, 288-289 Aptheker, Bettina, 276 Bailey, Irving, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85 Bell, C. Ritchie, 301-302 Benedict, Murray, 133-134 Biosystematists, 95-97, 139 Bolton, Earl, 275,277 Botanical Society of America, 143-144, 344 botany field trips, 11-12, 21, 28-31, 43-47, 59-62, 70, 88-91, 154-156, 162-163 taxonomy, 8-9, 21-23, 56-57, 62-65, 67-68, 95-97, 138-144 teaching of, 170-172,334-338 women in, 41,62-68,92-95,331-334 See also ecology, plant; herbaria; Umbelliferae Brown, Edmund G., Jr., 189-190 California Academy of Sciences, 92, 342-344 Cannon, John, 310-311 Carter, Annetta, 95, 333 Cave, Marion, 62-65 Cerceau-Larrival, Marie Therese, 309 Chile, 152-161, 164-166 Chuang, Tsan-Iang, 312-313,321 Civilian Conservation Corps, 28-29 Clements, Frederick E., 27 Clements, Harry, 30, 35 communists, 107, 249-253, 276 Constance, Clifford Llewellyn (brother), 4-6 Constance, Ella Clifford (mother), 1-5, 10, 12, 38 Constance, Lewis Llewellyn (father), 1-5, 10 Constance, Sara Luten (wife), 16, 32-36, 46, 74-76, 86, 146, 317 Constance, William (son), 71,74-76 Crater Lake National Park, 17 Crum, Ethel, 328,332 cytology, 62-65, 95-97, 139, 301-302 352 Davis, Alva R., 53-55, 80-81, 98-100, 108, 173, 177, 179 Davisson, Malcolm, 108, 174 Dodd, Paul, 228 Depression, 1930s, 15-16, 25, 33 Eastwood, Alice, 92-93 ecology, plant, 27-28,140-143 education, undergraduate, 8-13, 17-18, 26-27, 171, 182-195, 212-213, 220-221, 235- 237, 289- 292, 334-342 Eriophvllum. 20-21 Goodspeed, T. Harper, 41, 51-52 Grace Line, 146-152, 159, 163 Feder, Edward, 196-197 Ferruolo, Amolfo, 202-203 Fischel, Walter, 201-202 Free Speech Movement (FSM), 235, 254-280, 288-289 Fretter, William, 204-205 Froebe, Hans, 313-314 Harris, Joseph P., 127 Han, James D., 200 Harvard University, 79-87, 97, 108 Heirich, Max, 263-264,267 Henderson, Louis F., 8, 9, 11, 62 herbaria, 29-30, 65, 324-327. See also University of California, Herbarium; Jepson Herbarium; Washington State College Heyns, Roger, 253, 285-287 Hiroe, Minosuke, 305-308 Hoagland, Dennis, 52 Hydrophyllaceae, 61-64 Jepson, Willis L., 17-20, 28, 31-32, 35, 36-37, 51-52, 56-58, 62, 97-101, 293, 326 Jepson Herbarium, 97-101 Katz, Eli, 249-253 Kerr, Clark as chancellor, 123, 132, 133-138, 143-144, 173-176, 179, 196, 202, 206, 209-219, 226, 230-234 and loyalty oath, 112, 134 as president, 193, 238-240, 243-247, 253, 254-256, 265-288 passim 353 Latin America botanical research in, 59, 87-91, 154-158, 162-164, 319-320, 342 personal experiences in, 137-138, 149-166 Lawrence, Ernest, 1 14, 223, 254 Lipman, Charles B., 69-70 loyalty oath controversy, University of California, 102-1 15, 223, 253 Machlis, Leonard, 43, 303 Malloy, Kitty, 257, 264, 268, 273-274, 283 Mason, Herbert, 19, 55, 79, 99, 326, 332, 333, 344 Mathias, Mildred, 65-68, 294-296, 299-300, 302, 308, 309, 313, 315, 319 Mathiasella. 300 Mauchlin, Enrol, 277, 281-282 May, Henry, 277 McCown, Theodore, 205 Merrill, Elmer D., 79, 82, 87 Mexia, Ynes, 93-94 Meyerson, Martin, 280-284 Mirabilis macfarlanei. 45 Moore, A.R., 14-15 Mukherjee, Pransanta K., 315-319 Munoz, Carlos, 61, 152, 153 Nasir, Eugene, 308-309 Naufraga balearica. 310-312 New Svstematics. The. 96, 139 Nimitz, Admiral Chester, 107-108 Oregon, boyhood in, 4-9, 38-40 Papandreou, Andreas, 201 Pawek, Jean, 320 Pimenov, Michael, 321-323 Pullman, Washington, 47, 50. See also Washington State College Rollins, Reed, 30, 43-44, 46, 61, 83, 86, 344 Rodriguez, Rafael Lucas, 302-305 Sauer.Carl, 87-91,201 Savio, Mario, 255, 261-262 Scalapino, Robert, 275-276 Seaborg, Glenn, 222-223, 225-226, 269, 341 354 Searcy, Alan, 257, 258, 262, 267-268, 281-282 Setchell, William A., 18-19, 31, 33-34, 51, 56-58, 332 ShanRen-Hwa, 297-299 Sheikh, Muhammad Yusuf, 323 Shemffs, Alex, 257-264, 268, 274, 282, 283, 287 Sproul, Robert Gordon, 51,99, 102-1 11, 122-123, 173, 174-176,215,230,240,248, 269 Stacey, J.W., 47 Steward, Samuel M, 48-49 Stirton, Reuben, 88-90 Strong, Edward, 238, 250-256, 261-282 student unrest, 47, 255, 283. See also Free Speech Movement taxonomy. See botany, taxonomy teaching. See education, undergraduate Towle, {Catherine, 258-259 Ullman, Edward, 71,76 Umbelliferae, 65-68, 293-323, 342 United States Joint Intelligence Study Board, 74-77 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 71-74, 77 university governance. See Harvard University, University of California, Washington State College University of California Academic Senate, 106 Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, 102, 1 19-132, 134-135, 205, 207-208,216 Editorial Committee, 116-119 See also University of California, Berkeley, Academic Senate Board of Regents, 51, 103, 107-109, 111-112, 223, 227, 243, 246, 253, 255-256, 287 intercampus relations, 119-123, 176, 227-229, 245-249, 268 Lick Observatory, 215 See also loyalty oath controversy; University of California, Berkeley, relations with statewide administration University of California, Berkeley Academic Senate, Berkeley Division, 171, 231-232, 251-252. See also University of California, Academic Senate Associates in Tropical Biogeography, 87-88 Botanical Garden, 54, 59, 60, 62, 169-170, 330 Chancellor's Academic Advisory Council, 135-136, 230-233 Chancellor's Advisory Administrative Council, 135-136, 230-233 Chancellor's Office, 237-288 passim College of Agriculture, 52-53 College of Chemistry, 208 College of Letters and Science, 171, 172-222, 232-237, 338-342 355 University of California, Berkeley (continued) Department of Botany, 15-20, 40-42, 51-58, 108, 137, 167-172, 327, 334-338. See also Jepson, Willis; Setchell, William; UC Berkeley graduate education, Herbarium Department of Italian, 199, 202-203 Department of Near Eastern Languages, 201-202 departmental governance, 167-172, 197-203, 213-215, 218, 335-342 Extension, 191-192 faculty appointment and promotion, 35, 55-56, 78, 113-115, 125-131, 175, 225-226, 231,249-253 faculty-administration relations, 51, 54-55, 102-113, 179-181, 240-245, 249-253, 257, 265-267,271-273 graduate education, 15-23, 40-41, 56-58, 297-319 passim. 344-345 Herbarium, 99-101,325-333 Jepson Herbarium, 97-101, 331 professional schools and colleges, 127-129, 230-231, 242 relations with statewide administration, 268-288 students, 130-131,168,182-195,338-342. See also Free Speech Movement vice-chancellor of, 237-288 passim See also loyalty oath controversy; undergraduate education, University of California University of California, Davis, 120-122 University of California, Los Angeles, 1 16, 246-248 University of California Press, 117-119 University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, 1 19-120 University of California School of Nursing, 124- 125 University of Oregon, 6, 8-13 Vaux, Henry, 128-129,242 Washington State College, 24-37, 42, 47-50, 173, 330 Wheeler, Helen Marr, 98, 100 Williams, Howel, 88-90 women. See botany, women in World Warn, 55-56,71-77 Wurster, William, 127-128 356 UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES Documenting the history of the University of California has been a responsibility of the Regional Oral History Office since the Office vas established in 1954. Oral history memoirs with University-related persons are listed below. They have been underwritten by the U C. Berkeley Foundation, the Chancellor's Office, University departments, or by extramural funding for special projects. The oral histories, tapes and transcripts, are open to scholarly use in The Bancroft Library. Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts are available at cost to manuscript libraries. Adams, Frank. "Irrigation. Reclamation, and Water Administration.11 1956. 491 p. Amerine. Maynard A.. "The University of California and the State's Vine Industry." 1971. 142 p. Biervan. Jessie. "Maternal and Child Health in Montana. California* the U.S. Children's Bureau, and WHO. 1926-1967." 1987. 246 p. Bird. Grace. "Leader in Junior College Education at Bakersf ield and the University of California." Two volumes, 1978, 342 p. Birge. Raymond Thayer. "Raymond Thaver Birge. Physicist." 1960, 395 p. Blaisdell, Allen C,. "Foreign Students and the Berkeley International House. 1928-1961 " 1968. 419 p. Blaisdell. Thomas C. Jr. (in process). Professor Emeritus of Political Science. Chaney. Ralph Works. "Paleobotanist. Conservationist." 1950 277 p. Qiao. Yuen Ren, "Chinese Linguist. Phonologist. Composer, and Author," 1977. 242 p. Constance, Lincoln. "Versatile Berkeley Botanist: Plant Taxonomy and University Governance." 1987. 358 p. (est.) Corley. James V.. "Serving the University in Sacramento." 19*9 143 p. Cross. Ira Brown. "Portrait of an Economics Professor." 1967, 128 p. Cruess. William V., "A Half Century in Food and Wine Technology." 1<»67. 122 p. 357 Davidson. Mary Blossom. "The Dean of Women and the Importance of Students." 1967. 79 p. Dennet, William R., "Philosophy and the University Since 1915." 1970. 162 p. Donnelly. Ruth. "The University1* Role in Housing Services." 1970. 129 p. Dornin. May (in process). University Archivist. Ebright. Carroll *Ky". "California Varsity and Olympics Crew Coach." 1968. 74 p. Erdman. Henry E., "Agricultural Economics: Teaching. Research, and Writing: University of California. Berkeley. 1922-1969." 1971. 252 p. Evans. Clinton W.. "California Athlete. Coach. Administrator. Ambassador." 1968. 106 p. Foster. Herbert B.. "The Role of the Engineer's Office in the Development of the University of California Campuses." 1960. 134 p. Gordon, Walter A,. "Athlete. Officer in Lav Enforcement and Administration. Governor of the Virgin Islands." Two volumes. 1980. 621 p. Grether. Evald T. (in process). Dean Emeritus. School of Business Administration. Griffiths. Farnham P.. "The University of California and the California Bar." 1954. 46 p. Ha gar, Ella Barrows. "Continuing Memoirs: Family. Community. University." 1974. 272 p. Hamilton. Brutus. "Student Athletics and the Voluntary Discipline." 1967. 50 p. Harding. Sidney T. . "A Life in Western Water Development." 1967. 524 p. Harris. Joseph P.. "Professor and Practitioner: Government. Election Reform, and the Votomatic." 1983. 155 p. Hart, Janes D.. "Fine Printers in the San Francisco Bay Area." 1969, 86 p. Hays. William Charles, "Order, Taste, and Grace in Architecture." 1968, 241 p. Heller. Elinor Raas. "A Volunteer in Politics, in Higher Education, and on Governing Boards," 1984. 851 p. 358 Heyns. Roger W., "Berkeley Chancellor. 1965-1971; The University in a Turbulent Society." 1987, 180 p. Hildebrand, Joel H., "Chemistry, Education, and the University of California." 1962. 196 p. Hotchkis, Preston, Sr. , "One Man's Dynamic Role in California Politics and Water Development, and World Affairs," 1980. 121 p. Huff. Elizabeth, "Teacher and Founding Curator of the East Asiatic Library: From Urbana to Berkeley by Way of Peking," 1977. 278 p. Hur.tir.gton, Emily. "A Career in Consumer Economics and Social Insurance." 1971. Ill p. Hutchison. Claude B.. "The College of Agriculture, University of California. 1922-1952." 1962. 524 p. Jenny, Hans (in process). Professor of Plant and Soil Biology. Johnston. Marguerite Kulp, and Mixer. Joseph R,. "Student Housing. Welfare. and the ASUC." 1970. 157 p. Jones, Mary C.. "Harold S. Jones and Mary C. Jones. Partners in Longitudinal Studies," 1983, 154 p. Joslyn. Maynard A. "A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry," 1974, 151 p. Kendrick, James B. Jr. (in process), Vice- President, Agriculture and Natural Resources, retired. Kingman, Harry L. . "Citizenship in a Democracy." 1973, 292 p. Kroeber-Quinn. Theodora, "Timeless Woman, Writer and Interpreter of the California Indian World." 1982. 453 p. Landreth. Catherine. "The Nursery School of the Institute of Child Welfare of the University of California. Berkeley," 1983, 51 p. Langelier, Wilfred F.. "Teaching, Research, and Consultation in Water Purification and Sewage Treatment. University of California at Berkel ey- 1916-1955." 1982. 81 p. Lehman, Benjamin H., "Recollections and Reminiscences of Life in the Bay Area from 1920 Onward." 1969. 367 p. Lenzen, Victor F. . "Physics and Philosophy." 1965, 206 p. Lessing, Ferdinand D. . "Early Years," 1963, 70 p. 359 McGauhey. Percy H.. The Sanitary Engineering Reaearch Laboratory: Administration. Research, and Consultation. 1950-1972." 1974, 259 p. Mclaughlin. Donald, "Careers in Mining Geology and Management. University Governance and Teaching." 1975. 318 p. Merritt. Ralph P.. "After Me Cometh a Builder, the Recollections of Ralph Falser Merritt." 1962. 137 p. Metcalf. Woodbridge, "Extension Forester. 1926-1956." 1969. 138 p. Meyer. Karl F. , "Medical Research and Public Health." 1976. 439 p. Miles. Josephine. "Poetry. Teaching, and Scholarship," 1980. 344 p. Mitchell. Lucy Sprague. "Pioneering in Education," 1962. 174 p. Neuhaus. Eugen, Reminiscences: Bay Area Art and the University of California Art Department." 1961. 48 p. Neylan. John Francis, "Politics. Law, and the University of California," 1962. 319 p. O'Brien. Morrough P. (in process). Dean Emeritus, College of Engineering. OLmo, Harold P.. "Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties." 1976, 183 p. Olney, Mary McLean, Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880-1895." 1963. 173 p. Pepper. Stephen C., "Art and Philosophy at the University of California, 1919-1962." 1963. 471 p. Porter. Robert Langley, * Physician. Teacher, aad Guardian of the Public Health." 1960. 102 p. Richardson, Leon J., Berkeley Culture, University of California Highlights, and University Extension. 1892-1960." 1962. 248 p. Robb, Agnes Roddy; Robert Gordon Sproul and the University of California," 1976. 134 p. Selvin. Herman F.. "The University of California and California Law and Lawyers. 1920-1978." 1979. 217 p. Shields, Peter J.. "Reminiscences," 1954. 107 p. \ Sburtleff. Roy I~. "The University's Class of 1912. Investment Banking, and the Shurtleff Family History." 1982. 69 p. Sproul. Ida Wittschen. "The President's Wife," 1981. 347 p. 360 Steven*. Prank C.. "Forty Year* in the Office of the President. University of California. 1905-1945." 1959, 175 p. Stewart. George R. . "A Little of Myself," 1972. 319 p. Stewart. Jessie Harris. "Memories of Girlhood and the University." 1978. 70 p. Struve. Gleb (in process). Professor of Slavic Language and Literature. Taylor. Paul Schuster Volume I: "Education. Field Research, and Family * 1973, 342 p. Volume II and Volume III: "California Water and Agricultural Labor." 1975. 519 p. Towle. {Catherine A.. "Administration and Leadership." 1970. 369 p. Underbill. Robert M., 'University of California: L-ando, Finances, and Investments." 1968. 446 p. Vauz. Henry J. . "Forestry in the Public Interest: Education. Kcononics. State Policy. 1933-1983." 1987. 337+ p. Waring. Henry C. . "Henry C. Waring on University Extension." 1960, 130 p. Well man, Harry. "Teaching. Research, and Administration, University of California. 1925-1968." 1976, 259 p. Wessels. Glenn A.. "Education of an Artist." 1967. 326 p. Wilson. Garff B.. "The Invisible Man. or, Public Ceresionies Chairman at Berkeley for Thirty-Five Years." 1981. 442 p. Winkler. Albert J.. "Viticulture! Research at UC Davis. 1921-1971." 1973. 144 p. Witter. Jean C., T^e University, the Community, and the Lifeblood of Business." 1968. 109 p. Woods. Baldwin M. . "University of California Extension " 1957. 102 p. Woolman. Marjorie J. (in process). Secretary Emeritus of the Regents. University of California. Wurster. William Wilson. "College of Environmental Design. University of California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice," 1964. 339 p. 361 Multi- Interviewee Series Blake House Project (in process) Includes interviews with Mai Arbegast. Igor Blake. Ron and Myra Brocchini. Toichi Domoto. Eliot Evans. Tony Hail. Linda Haymaker. Charles Hitch. Flo Holmes, dark and Kay Kerr. G«rry Scott. George and Helena Thacher. Walter Vodden, and Norms Wilier. "Centennial History Project, 1954-1960." 329 p. Includes interviews with George P. Adams, Anson Stiles Blake. Walter C. Blasdale. Joel H, Hildebrand, Samuel J. Holmea, Alfred L. Kroeber. Ivan M, Linforth, George D. Louderback, Agnes Fay Morgan. and William Popper. "Thomas D. Church, Landscape Architect," Two volusjes. 1978. 803 p. Volume I: Includes interviews with Theodore Bernardi. Lucy Butler. June Meehan Campbell, Louis De Monte. Walter Doty. Donn Emmons, Floyd Gerow, Harriet Henderson, Joseph Howland. Ruth Jaff e. Burton Litton. Germane Milano* Miriam Pierce. George Rockrise. Robert Roys ton. Geraldine Knight Scott. Roger Sturtevant. Francis Violich, and Harold Watkin. Volume II: Includes interviews with Maggie Baylis. Elizabeth Roberts Church. Robert Glasner. Grace Hall. Lawrence Halprin, Proctor Mellquist. Bveritt Miller. Harry Sanders, Lou Schenone, Jack Stafford. Goodwin Steinberg, and Jack Wagstaff. "Dental History Project. University of California, San Francisco." 1969. 1114 p. Includes interviews with Dickson Bell. Reuben L. Blake. Willard C. Fleming. George A, Hughes. Leland D. Jones. George F. McGee, CS. Rutledge. William B. Ryder. Jr.. Herbert J. Samuela, Joseph Sciotto, William S. Smith. Harvey Stallard. George B* Steninger. and Abraham W. Ward. Disabled Students Project (in process) "Julia Morgan Architectural History Project." Two volumes. 1976. 621 p. Volume I: "The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, and the Department of Architecture. UCB. 1904-1954" Includes interviews with Walter T. Steilberg. Robert Ratcliff. Evelyn Paine Ratcliff. Norman L. Jensen, John P. Wagstaff. George C. Hodges. Edward B. Hussey. and Warren Charles Perry. Volume II: "Julia Morgan. Her Office, and a House" Includes interviews with Mary Grace Barron, Kirk 0. Rowlands. Norm a Wilier. Quintilla Williams, Catherine Freeman Nimitz. Polly Lawrence McNaught. Hettie Belle Marcus. Bjarne Dahl. Bjarne Dahl. Jr.. Morgan North, Dorothy Wormser Coblentz. and Flora d'Ule North, 36; "The Prytaneans: An Oral History of the Prytanaar. Society and its Members," Volume I: "1901-1920." 1970. 307 p. Volume II: "1921-1930." 1977. 313 p. "Robert Gordon Sproul Oral History Project." Two volumes. 1986, 904 p. Includes interviews with Horace Albright* Stuart LeRoy Anderson, Katherine Bradley, Dyke Brown. Natalie Cohen. Paul A. Dodd, May Dornin. Richard E. Erickaon, Walter S. Frederick, David P. Gardner. Vernon Goodin, Marion Sproul Goodin, Louis Heilbron, Clark Kerr, Adrian Kragen, Robert S. Johnson. Mary Bluaer Lawrence, Donald McLaughlin, Dean McHenry. Stanley B. McCaffrey, Kendric and Marion Morrish, William Penn Mott. Jr.. Herman Phleger. John B. deC. M, Saunders, Carl Sharsmith. John Sproul, Robert Gordon Sproul. Jr.. Wallace Sterling, Wakef ield Taylor. Robert Underbill. Garff Wilson, and Pete L. Yzaquirre. The Women's Faculty dub of the University of California at Berkeley. 1919- 1982." 1983. 312 p. Includes interviews with Josephine Smith, Margaret Murdock. Agnes Robb. May Dornin, Josephine Miles. Gudveig Gordon-Britland, Elizabeth Scott, Marian Diamond, Mary Ann Johnson, Eleanor Van Horn, and Katherine Van Valer William a. 9/87 ANN LAGE B.A., University of California, Berkeley, with major in history, 1963 M.A., University of California, Berkeley, history, 1965 Post-graduate studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1965-66, in American history and education; Junior College teaching credential Interviewer /member, Sierra Club History Committee, 1970-1974; cochairman, 1978-present Coordinator/Editor, Sierra Club Oral History Project, 1974-present Codirector, Sierra Club Documentation Project, Regional Oral History Office, 1980-present Interviewer/Editor, conservation and natural resources, university history, Regional Oral History Office, 1976-1986