TOMPKINS CORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGEINTERVIEW: Dr. Carl Haynes and Walter Poland

INTERVIEWED BY: Nancy CraftJanuary 30, 2006

CH: My name is Carl Haynes, the current President at TC3. I joined TC3 as a faculty member in 1969, a year after Walter did. I served as a faculty member in business administration as well as a number of other positions here at the college over the years including Division Head for business as well as department chair earlier on. Later on, I was Associate Dean for a short period of time, Dean of Administration, Dean of Academic Services, Interim President and President.

WP: And I’m Walter Poland, the current and only Dean of Students at Tompkins Cortland Community College. I hold the only dean’s job that Carl has not held.

CH: Thankfully.

WP: I started with the college on July 1st of 1968 as Director of Student Affairs and I believe was promoted to Dean of Students probably in September of ’73. I have held that position and a couple of ancillary functions since the beginning of the college. I am also Director of International Programs at the college and the chief negotiator for the Board of Trustees in negotiating union contracts. I’ve obviously been through all of the stages of development of the college since it began. The picture here on the desk is our trip down memory lane.

NC: And I’m Nancy Craft. I came as a librarian in ’69, the same year Carl did, and retired in ’96. I’m working on the archives and we will start the interview process. You’ve already told us how you became associated with TC3. Who were some of the contemporaries? Who were some of the people you worked with in the early years and what were the early years like?

WP: Well, as the pictures here remind us, there were 10 or 11, including staff, who were the formative group of the college beginning in 1968. The person that obviously stands out the most in one’s memory, having lived through at least the first half of the life of Tompkins Cortland, was Hushang Bahar, a very dynamic personality and presence. It doesn’t take an entire room but five minutes to know that he’s there. In the community we served with three other institutions of higher education, Hu was the one who finally solidified in the minds of government officials that a community college was something that was really needed here. He was fond of saying that SUNY Cortland, Cornell University and Ithaca College were all regional and national and international in scope, only accepting a handful of local students. Tompkins Cortland was the college for all the local students who needed a place to study and were maybe homebound, maybe place-bound. It was an institution that had programs that were intended to serve the community. Much of that early philosophy came from Hushang and from one of the very first trustees, Robert Sprole, Sr., who was the Chief Executive Officer of Therm Incorporated. They had had a long collaboration, beginning with Hu’s position at Ithaca College in continuing education and graduate studies, before he became president at TC3.

There were other personalities as well, with varying kinds of impact on the institution. Our first Dean of the College, John McConkey, was here from 1968 into the first part of 1969. He was replaced by Peter Blomerley who stayed with us for quite a while and, I think, had a very

decided impact on the shape of our academic programs and the early staff. In the first five or six years of the college we hired a great many faculty and had a very rapid period of growth. Tommy Mecca, Director of Admissions, stayed at the college for quite a while and then ended up in South Carolina as a vice-president of another community college. Tom Murphy, who was our Chief Financial Officer and, in those days, Director of Administrative Services, ended up going to Monroe Community College as Vice-president of Administration in the ‘80s. Between Murphy and Bahar, there were a lot of early activities even before any other employees, other than secretarial staff, were hired. They were working with the local communities to really frame and get the college established in the minds of the local public. That would have occurred between December of ’67 and July of ’68. Classes began in September of ’68. Dean McConkey came in that spring of ’68 as well to establish academic programs. But, by and large, my recollection is that most of the local activity was in the hands of Murphy and Bahar.

CH: You can remember this better than I, Walter, but I seem to remember a story that the real anticipated opening of the college wasn’t going to be until ’69. Once Hu got going, however, he really pushed hard to get us open in ’68. Do you remember anything about those dynamics?

WP: That was very true. At some point in that spring of ’68, he became very convinced that the college could open in September. The issues surrounded the conversion of the first building, which was an old high school that had been used for storage and repair for Smith Corona Marchant. It was initially believed that it was going to take the better part of the year to get that building rehabilitated for academic purposes, but it became very clear early on that classrooms were going to be ready, and offices were generally ready. Hushang’s opinion was if the classrooms were ready, we were ready. The rest of us, who sit in offices all day long, could get fixed any time.

CH: And wasn’t he actually sitting on orange crates for a period of time in his original office?

WP: In fact…very good!

CH: The lore, I’ve heard that. I never observed it.

WP: No, it was true. In fact, there was a story that Hu was fond of telling that, early on, the first floor of the building was divided in half by a curtain. You go to the left and you went into Tompkins Cortland Community College. You went to the right; you went to the Smith Corona typewriter rehab plant. Some official came into the building and stepped up to this gentleman that looked like a janitor, because of the way he was dressed and the broom that he was sweeping the floor with, and asked if he could be directed to the President’s office. And the gentleman said, “Well, certainly. Follow me. I’ll take you to the President’s office.” They stepped about 20 feet down the hall, walked into Hushang’s office. Hushang put the broom up against the wall and sat down and said, “Can I help you?”

CH: That’s a good story.

WP: And it was true. At that point in time, it was actually an orange crate that he was seated on because furniture hadn’t arrived yet.

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NC: Ron Space, in his talk at the Dryden Historical Society, said that they talked SUNY Cortland into donating a whole bunch of desks and chairs. They especially needed one for Sharon Von Epps, who even predated Hu and had to answer the telephones.

WP: Over the years, we’ve actually gotten a lot of office equipment from SUNY Cortland out of their storage vaults.

NC: Do you have anything to add, Carl?

CH: Well, of course, I came a year later. I was a part of that first wave of faculty hiring that occurred in ’69 and, I think as I recall, we tripled that year and you were part of that hire as well.

NC: Yes.

CH: I think we went from something like eight professional staff to 24 is my recollection.I don’t know if that was total people or just total professional staff and faculty, I’m not sure. But, of course, Hu was a very compelling figure and remained so throughout his years. It’s hard to think of those early years without thinking of Hu’s personality, dynamic and charisma and, of course, the leadership that he provided during that time period. Then we went through a bit of a traumatic time soon after we all arrived in ’69. Walter covered this a bit more diplomatically than I will, but there was a bit of a confrontation with the board between Hu and our Academic Dean at that time, John McConkey. I think, fortunately for the college, Hu won. John, Dr. McConkey as he liked to be known, left the next day in November and we went through the rest of that year without an Academic Dean. I’m really trying to remember who picked up the ball during that period of time. It seems to me that maybe it was Tom Mecca, but I wouldn’t want to say for sure.

WP: I think Tom took on additional responsibilities but Hu was running the show.

CH: Yeah. I wasn’t a department head yet then. I became a department head the following year but I think probably Hu did run it. We went through a search process and then the following year, which I think must have been 1970, is when Peter Blomerley joined us as Academic Dean, a top-notch individual. He stayed with us for several years and then became president down at Broome Community College, and then left there and went to California to be president out there. So he was a very important figure, I think, in those early years as we continued to hire faculty, form new programs and restructure ourselves academically. We tended to have a different person for every program. Middle States early on encouraged us to academically organize in a bit more of a cluster fashion around programs, which in my view we kind of overdid over the next few years. We became very centralized academically and stayed that way until the last several years, when we began to go back to a much more decentralized academic structure. But there were a lot of folks who joined who have retired; like yourself. Another person who joined us that year and is still on the faculty is Basil Cooil, who has announced his retirement. He will be leaving the end of this year. Others include Joe Cambridge and Frank Bickford. They’re in these pictures here as well and they remain active on our faculty.

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WP: One of the most compelling thoughts that comes back to my mind in regards to the first, probably the first half a dozen, years in the life of the college was that there was also a lot of debate and discussion about how long was it going to take us to get provisional accreditation by Middle States. Accreditation was ordinarily thought to take upwards of six years for a new school. Like everything else, after we got started it became a challenge. We were an interestingly competitive group of professionals and it didn’t take much to take on Middle States and to beat their schedule and to meet our own. We thought we were going to be great, we’re going to get everything done, not only quickly, but in top-notch fashion and, in fact, I think we did. We certainly beat Middle States recommendation. I think we were accredited in the fifth year, a very, very dynamic period of time. I was fond of telling people in those days that I was out an average of three nights a week. We were always either at meetings in the college or in the community related to the college. There was a lot of evening work in the first four or five years of the college.

NC: I have pictures of some of those meetings. If you had decided to open in September, when did you start asking or telling students they could enroll? I know the first student was, Washington, something Washington.

WP: That’s right. Oh heavens! I can see him.

NC: He came back at the 25th anniversary and was taking courses.

WP: Leroy Washington.

NC: Leroy. That was it. And the first graduate in 1970 was Cheryl Lynn Schutt. When did you start advertising for students? In that fall or that summer?

WP: No, it would have been early in the spring. I believe after the Academic Dean was hired in the January/February timeframe, he hired the Director of Admissions, Tommy Mecca. Tom came on fairly early in the spring, in the February/March timeframe and started right away contacting the local high schools and letting them know that we were here and we were going to be ready for students.

CH: I think we had 150 students that first year. Is that the number?

NC: The first year.

CH: Then we tripled the next year. I think we went to 450 the year I came.

NC: And then ballooned the year we moved into this building.

CH: I might just comment further about that first year because, apparently, there was a lot of work underway almost immediately in terms of the permanent site for the campus and a lot of competition. I can recall, when I came in 1969, I moved into a then brand-new apartment complex in Groton that had been built by a number of local business leaders. Their motive was to build this as a demonstration of their capability and interest in wanting the campus located in

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Groton. I actually came across Gerald Barry’s photographs the other day, where there were aerial views of two or three sites around Groton that the town fathers had really identified and were trying to promote to the college leaders. And, of course, Dryden and others had sites as well.

NC: There were committees in all three towns.

CH: I can recall driving down Route 81 on my way to my first interview here, which would have been June of ’69. The counties had just rejected the purchase of 500 acres of land here for the purchase of the college and I was wondering a little bit about whether this college was really going to get going because it appeared like there wasn’t a lot of support. As I learned, the real issue was the amount of land they wanted to buy. Actually that original 500 acres included this 200 acres that we have today as well as a contiguous land that our foundation owns and some additional lands that, obviously, we no longer have any stake in. We eventually did get the approvals and Dryden was selected. As I recall the State had a fair amount of influence in it in terms of wanting the college located on a State highway roughly juxtaposed halfway between the two cities and so on.

WP: If you look at a map of both counties, it’s almost the geographic center of the two counties. There was a lot of debate and discussion about transportation in and out of Groton as a location. I believe Dryden, being located on Route 13 and being relatively central to both counties, was ultimately the driving force. I think in the ‘80s, municipal bus transportation actually began arriving here on campus and TC3 became one of the major destination points for Tomtran for Tompkins County. Eventually, a number of years later, Cortland County established a similar system. But I think once those bus systems got established, it really bore out the truth of locating the college here.

NC: How did the college work to develop the campus, this campus, the buildings and what changes did we bring about? Do you remember Frank Bowsma, the consultant we hired to talk to us about how to build a college?

WP: Wasn’t he a librarian?

NC: He was the head of the learning center.

WP: Well, they had a library in their learning center, I suppose.

NC: I’m sure they did. I was down there just once.

CH: I was only 23 when I came here. That first year, not only being a new faculty member and new at a growing college, but as Walter mentioned, these evening meetings and weekend meetings, and all-day Saturday meetings. We had people come in brainstorming ideas about what we wanted this campus to look like. They were truly exciting times. I’m sure you both remember that, for a period of time, the concept that seemed to be gaining about what this campus might look like was a chalet idea where there’d be a whole set of chalets up here programatically organized around certain clusters of programs.

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WP: The house concept.

CH: The house concept. And I don’t know really why that went away other than the one-building idea began to take shape.

NC: I think it was both economics and snow.

WP: It probably was economics.

NC: Sue Gantert said she’d be willing to ski between buildings but the rest of us weren’t.

WP: But eventually it boiled down to money.

CH: Yeah, I wasn’t privy to those kinds of conversations at that point.

WP: And then, of course, we identified an architectural firm that had done work in other community colleges. They had worked on the one-building concept in a number of other states, especially in Illinois. A bunch of us took a road trip to take a look at Marine Valley Community College, where the president’s desk was right in the midst of about a dozen other desks in an office area. So when this building opened, it was about 60 percent open space.

CH: What’s the story about why that was true?

NC: It was the thing in the ‘70s.

CH: Well, no, no, it was Tom Murphy really, who had been able to get us some Appalachia monies. And by getting the Appalachia monies, he did a huge favor for the counties because up until probably the mid-‘80s, Tompkins and Cortland Counties never had a nickel in this building because it was all charge-back money and grant money. The initial plans were to build just a portion of this building, but as a condition of the Appalachian grant we had to build a whole building.

WP: That’s right. We were overbuilt by about 50 percent at the time, maybe more. And then you combine that with a movement towards open learning, open space. I think it was primarily a movement in elementary schools in the country.

CH: That’s where Hu’s sociology background came out.

WP: Yeah. Social anthropologists came out and they believed very strongly that there was then the opportunity for the cross-fertilization of ideas and intellectual debate and exchange. What really turned out to be the case, in such an open environment, is that nobody could get their work done. There was a lot of disruption of classes and noise bleed-over from other classes going on in contiguous spaces.

NC: Especially if media was running.

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WP: Yes, especially if Nancy had sent movies to somebody. Of course, then there was always the faculty member whose whisper was usually a stage whisper. No matter where she was, you could hear her in the immediate 50 to 1,000 square feet.

WP: That pattern didn’t significantly change until the early ‘80s when Hushang went on a two-year leave to South Africa and we immediately built offices for faculty. We had already started to enclose some classroom space but the 80’s really began a period of consolidation of space, putting up walls and cutting down on noise transmission. But the very early concept was a very social concept in terms of what a historian might be able to dream up with a mathematician. Interesting debates.

CH: Actually I had a bit of a hand in all that because, by that time, Tom Murphy had left and I was Dean of Administration. One of the early things that I was asked to do was to reconcile some differences between the college and the counties in terms of the original construction fund. It took a while, it took maybe a good part of a year, to get that all sorted out but we got it reconciled. I don’t remember the amount of money, but it wasn’t a lot. It was under $100,000 but, back then, $70,000 or $80,000 dollars was actually a lot of money. And the counties actually turned those monies over to the college to administer. We had to have the counties’ permission to spend them, but we got to administer them and we continue to do that to this day, which isn’t necessarily true on all campuses. But the need to enclose the building and have some enclosed offices for faculty and so on was so compelling, that’s how we spent that money over the course of a couple years.

NC: I remember the faculty having difficulty holding private consultation with students.

CH: The challenge that we faced, and I think we did a reasonably good job with that, was to bring about enclosing the spaces but yet maintaining a sense of openness. Even in the library, when we expanded that some years later, there was a lot of glass up there and so on. So there was an attempt to try to do that, particularly in the larger areas.

WP: There is still a lot of visual openness in the building.

CH: Yeah.

NC: Do you remember when collective bargaining came and how it affected things?

CH: How could we forget?

WP: Yes, how could we forget? It changed my life dramatically when it happened.

CH: Before we get to that part, maybe you can share the story about how the CSEA got organized, because that’s the earliest part. We did have a CSEA union right from the very beginning.

NC: The faculty was AAUP for years and years and years.

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CH: A professional organization, not a union. But the story I remember, and you can fill in the blanks here, is that there was an effort on Tompkins County’s part to try to bring our classified staff employees into a county union. I think it was Tom Murphy, give him credit and be forever grateful to him, who said, “Look, we don’t want our employees as a part of a county union. They ought to have their own union.” And he probably took some steps to facilitate that. But the rest of the details on that, I don’t know.

WP: And I think that also went along with some growing sentiment early on in the support staff. Some of them wanted to be part of the union and I can recall, at least a few names start to come to mind, they really agitated for their own unit and to be organized. I think Murphy was right. They are a unit of the Tompkins County CSEA but that gave them a lot of independence.

CH: The significance of that today is really quite important. I don’t know whether Tom Murphy saw this coming or not. He’ll be interviewed as well. You may want to ask him about this.

NC: Dr. Robbins is interviewing him right now.

CH: Oh, he is. OK, that’s good. But I know there are community colleges today, as I speak to my colleagues, whose classified staff are a part of the local County union and it causes great frustration and difficulty. They really have a very small voice when they are blended with Social Service workers and Sheriff’s people and all these other kinds of union interests. The community college tends to take second shrift, and they don’t really have an opportunity to negotiate those kinds of unique working conditions that I think come with being a part of a community college.

WP: And the employer then becomes the County and not the college. The kinds of loyalties that ordinarily get developed with an employer - it’s a mixed message, a mixed process.

NC: That was one of the outgrowths of the two counties having to agree which one was going to be our employer of record. Initially, if I remember correctly, they tried to put the faculty in the County union, too, and Tom and the others fought that down.

WP: Yeah, there was discussion about that.

CH: We remained, shall we say, a professional staff until 1982. The way negotiations were done in those days was that, basically, whoever was chair of the college governance group met with Hu. To give you a little spin on that, for part of the first two or three years, governance was a committee of the whole.

NC: Town council.

CH: Hu would call a meeting and everybody would show up. I think even some of the classified staff would show up. We would vote on things, whether it was a new course, a new program, new policy, whatever it was. Of course, as we grew a little bit, that became unwieldy and we formed a College Senate, which was a representative body of all the constituencies. Reportedly,

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they had the authority to make recommendations to the President. The chair of the College Senate would sit down with Hu, figure out what we wanted for benefits or salary increases and they’d agree on something. I don’t know if we even voted on that necessarily in the Senate; we may have. Basically it would be announced. And, by and large, that worked fairly well. There was really very little pushback. We were one of only two community colleges in the state where our faculty and other management folks were not unionized. Corning was the only other college in that category.

There was an incident in the early ‘80s that tripped that up. That’s when one of our board members, together with Hu, decided that, as a negotiating tactic they would toss the nursing program into jeopardy. They said, “Look, the nursing program is too costly." We can’t afford it and, if you’re not going to give us any more money, we’re going to have to cut the nursing program.” That was, in my view, not a very good tactic and it didn’t work. The Counties really called their bluff, but it began some discussion here on campus about what would have been the result if they had gone along with that. Would the nursing faculty, in that particular case, have had any real rights? I think all these things really kind of converged really coincidentally into a perfect storm.

Hu had asked a group of people to meet because there had been some kind of dissatisfaction with the role of the College Senate. Again, Hu was a part of all that. Some of Hu’s desires had been kind of imposed on the senate and there was a little agitation about that. Some might remember the wine marketing program. We can talk more about that if you want, but that led to some discussions about the college senate and the role of it. So there are about a dozen people, maybe more. I don’t remember whether we volunteered or were appointed but we became part of a governance task force. I was elected chair of that group. As we began to deliberate and look at governance models, this matter of the union became very much a part of the discussion. It became very clear to me and to several others that, that in fact, our faculty really did not have any protections and that the only way to get those protections was to be formally organized. I remember Ted Lange, I think, and probably some other folks that got fairly active in that. We actually spun off a group out of the governance task force that started looking at unionization. I maintained a focus on the governance committee that I was chairing You would have to look at the files to see when that kind of separated off into something more formal but, over the course of the next year, the faculty began to do the formal process of getting cards signed and all that kind of thing.

NC: So that would have been ’82 because your committee report is dated December 1981.

CH: Yeah. Is that the final report? That’s a subcommittee report actually. I don’t think the final report got done until about a year later because it corresponded to the time when Hu went on sabbatical. Hu took a two-year leave from the college, ’82 to ’84. And again, the juxtaposition of all this was that the union activity was just kind of hitting stride, if you will, at the time he left. We had an interim president who came in.

WP: At the time Hu’s airplane was leaving Syracuse.

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CH: Yeah, yeah! I don’t think that was deliberate. Our interim president was a very anti-union person. Walter can kind of play in on this, since he would have been involved in those discussions with Doug Libbey who was our interim president at that time. I didn’t get to be administration until ’83 but I can recall, as chair of this governance task force, having an awful lot of difficulty. We thought we had pretty well worked out a plan with Hu. We had formed a different kind of structure for governance at that time and Hu had been involved in some of that and I think we felt we had his support. But then the union thing came together in timing with the change in governance and Hu leaving. It was another year or so, maybe even two years, before that got reconciled. In Doug’s mind, it was so inter-nested with the union thing that it took a couple of years to get that first contract signed.

WP: At least a year and a half.

CH: Were you…no, you didn’t negotiate that because he got a hired gun in for that.

WP: I finished it.

CH: What was that guy’s name?

WP: Bob Grey.

CH: He drove his big, white Lincoln in here every day to negotiate our contract. I’ll give you my bias, but he was a master at negotiating contracts that would keep him employed after the contract was signed. Is that a fair statement?

WP: That was probably a fair statement. Although he was representing at that time about 18 of the community colleges.

CH: He was highly respected among the management side.

WP: Highly respected; that’s right. Doug Libbey asked Albany for the baddest gun in the West. It was a favorite phrase between the interim president and, frankly, some members of our Board of Trustees at the time that it was “until Hell freezes over.” It got to be very contentious. Much of that, I contend, had to do with the nature of the collective bargaining process that was being used at the time. It served to fulfill and to express the frustrations, anxiety and, in some cases, the anger of the interim president. Prior to coming to TC3, he had a very disastrous organizing experience on a college in Pennsylvania where he was the founding president.

CH: Delaware Community College.

WP: He essentially went on leave after his campus organized and he brought those emotions into the TC3 environment. And it was also this basis upon which Bob Grey negotiated the contract. About 15 months in, our Director of Personnel at the time, Bryn Kehrli, had an opportunity to resign. His wife had been accepted at law school in San Diego and he and Doug were not the best of working friends and so he was very happy to unload his role at the bargaining table with Bob Grey. So there was just Bob Grey negotiating with the faculty at the time and Doug Libbey

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wanted another administrator to sit at the table and represent administration with Bob Grey. And that’s about the time that, you know, it’s like kids in grade school. The teacher’s going to ask for some kind of presentation, that’s when you start looking at your shoes.

Nobody wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I must have been smoking something, I’m not sure what, but the third time he asked, I raised my hand and I said I might be interested but only under certain conditions. I would be interested only if I could direct that attitude and the process of communication being used by our chief negotiator at the time, Bob Grey. I knew all of the faculty that were involved. I believed that I understood the issues and I also thought I had some insight into the process that was being used. Doug wasn’t about to approve that, so since no one else had any interest, we had a meeting with the Board of Trustees before our monthly board meeting. Interestingly enough, even though it had been very strongly felt that it was going to be “until Hell freezes over,” the board understood the point that I was making that this had gone on too long. We were at the point where we were into very old-fashioned labor relations.

NC: Who do you trust?

WP: That’s right, and is your antenna still on your car when you went out at night to go home? They agreed and, within a week’s time, by mutual arrangement, Bob Grey was no longer at the table. I was just there by myself taking with folks and Bob Grey was back-up sitting in the back room. It took 30 days and Jim Nichols, who was the President of the union at the time, and I kind of finished the contract over dinner at The Rusty Nail in Cortland. We had started to get back to some semblance of a rational relationship, and that’s been developing for the last 25 years. But we took a very different turn in collective bargaining after that. I think we took what was seen to be, and I believed to be at the time, a disaster in terms of our educational mission and "made lemonade out of lemon juice." I think we’ve changed the culture of the college through collective bargaining. It provided a structure that, frankly, had not been here during Hushang’s years. He had a very strong and paternalistic process of managing the college. A common issue in the first labor organizing that takes place in new organizations is usually in response to that kind of style.

NC: Especially as you grow larger and get more people.

CH: We’ve kind of drifted into the mid-‘80s here for the purpose of this study, which I think is up through 1980…

NC: And for the purpose of the archives, be my guest!

CH: No, that’s fine, but I’m just making the observation that from 1968 to basically ’82, which is a span of 14 years, we really didn’t have any union. We actually had, I think, a fair amount of satisfaction with how the process worked. A lot of collegiality and so on and, if it hadn’t been for that nursing incident, we may have continued going on for a period of time like that, I don’t know. That nursing incident had ramifications beyond what they could have possibly imagined. I still hear about that today. As a matter of fact, as recently as a year or two ago, I had somebody in the community say something to the effect when we were working with the counties, “Well,

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don’t you dare do anything with that nursing program.” You know, it was like we haven’t talked about in 25 or 30 years.

WP: What ended up happening after that is I think there were other things that occurred. It triggered a pile-on in the sense of other examples of where people were concerned about issues of fairness and job security. The nursing program was the focal point for all these other fears and anxieties to get attached to.

NC: The college foundation – was that formed fairly quickly or was that something that came about in this building? I know the legal ramifications that we couldn’t own certain things and they had to.

WP: That’s funny. We talked about that last week and I don’t think we nailed down the dates, but it was fairly early. There was not a lot of effort or productivity in the early years with the foundation.

CH: Probably Tom Murphy will have the most accurate reflection of that. Whether it was the impetus for the foundation or not, I’m not positive, but first the counties rejected the land purchase here and it got scaled back to the 220 acres that we have today. One of the trustees, Manley Thaler, who was an attorney in town, really wanted the college to have some additional land as a buffer. So he purchased the land next door, some 76, 77, 78 acres, as a matter of protecting it and he then wanted to donate it to the college. Obviously, they needed a legal vehicle in order to do that. I don’t know if that became the reason Hu went ahead and formed the foundation, so that Manley could donate his land and get his tax write-off and the foundation would own the land, or whether there might have been something else. For the early years, however, the foundation was primarily a vehicle that people could give some scholarship money to and they would be passed on. There was no real director other than Hu Tom Mecca probably was the earliest person, in terms of staff person, who worked with the foundation. He and Hugh, I think, literally ran the foundation out of a checkbook. It was that informal.

NC: Was the foundation necessary to run the newspaper and yearbook we had in those first years?

CH: No.

WP: That was FSA, Faculty Student Association.

NC: Then it was quite possibly ’72, ’74, in there. Who were some of the foundation leaders you remember? I couldn’t come up with names the other day at all.

CH: I think there were some area bankers and so on. I didn’t work with the foundation at that time. I don’t recall the details, but I do know that there was an incident that triggered a mass resignation of some board members at one time and the foundation kind of went into limbo for a period of time. That was either late in Hu’s presidency, or it might even have been until Eduardo took over. Do you remember?

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WP: I don’t remember when the fire really got built.

NC: It’s just sort of always been there in my mind. They own the dormitories, right?

CH: Today they do. They were built in ’85 or ’86, so that would have been the first major activity of the foundation, yeah. We had a new board by then.

NC: The next question is, what are some of the most interesting or exciting times? But you’ve covered a great many of them.

WP: Oh my. The last 40 years have been exciting when you think about it, just the development of something new. I mentioned that first half a dozen years. Every day had something new and interesting and exciting going on. But you know, that’s become the nature of TC3. I imagine that we’re not dissimilar from other community colleges, but it sure feels like there is some uniqueness that has existed here through our history, where we’ve been not only open to change, but often looking to make it happen ourselves. In fact, the motto of the college for a long time was “Make It Happen” as an expression of the organizational psychology.

NC: And it’s what made those first years so exciting and part of that was Hu’s attitude too, because I know, as a librarian, he allowed me to try a number of things. It was his attitude of OK, try it, go ahead.

WP: If some things don’t go wrong, you’re not trying hard enough. No one got punished or fired or reprimanded if something “failed.” But you had the responsibility to analyze it and understand after the fact why it happened. Could we have done something differently or was it something that was just before its time? We’ve had a number of things like that, I think, over the years. But the real interest, the real energy, was towards a dynamic, creative organization that would respond to the changing needs of students. As it turns out, also respond to the changing world of technology and the changing world in the classroom. Carl’s fond of saying it, he likes to be on the ragged edge but not the bleeding edge.

CH: Cutting edge.

WP: Cutting edge, not the bleeding edge! And we’ve always been out there looking for those things that are most appropriate for a community college education today.

NC: When and how and who did the idea of the global commitment come from?

CH: Well, the global connections? Do you want to get into that because that was ‘90s.

NC: I know, but it was certainly one of the more exciting changes we’ve done.

CH: Yeah, just to get back to the question and then I’ll answer that one as well. For me, I think, the exciting times were those early years. I commented a little bit a minute ago about just coming here as a 23-year-old kid. At most any other college where I might have had an opportunity to come in as a faculty member, I’d have been years away from having the kind of

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opportunity to be in meetings and being able to influence the direction of the college and the future of the college. That was exciting and then watching that go. I was just reflecting as Walter was chatting that we built this whole campus, the land acquisition, this whole building, for $14.2 million. And today our board and our counties just approved a $33 million budget to add a gymnasium and a field house and do some renovations in the building, so it gives you a little idea what money will do. We’re in a similar kind of exciting time where we’ve just been experiencing a lot of growth and now expanding the building and so on.

The global program was one of those things, as is true for several other things that I think have been turning points for the college, things that never were in any kind of long-range plan. They weren’t a part of any of our strategic goals or anything else. It was when Eduardo was here and I was Academic Dean. We had a couple of people walk in the building one day from Spain. They were the president and an assistant to the president for an organization called the World University that was located in Madrid, Spain. They had an arrangement with a community college out in Illinois. That provided an opportunity for their students to get an American-based experience as a part of their business curriculum in Spain. In their view, the arrangement wasn’t working well. The assistant to the president had lived in Ithaca for a period of time and had learned some English here and had some friends at Cornell. They came here to visit, with no real purpose in mind related to their reason for being in the country. As they talked about their business dilemma, that this thing wasn’t working out, their friends said, “Well, you ought to go over and talk to the community college.” As it turned out, we had an Hispanic president at time. They came over and talked with Eduardo and Ed introduced me to them.

I got pretty excited about it and Ed, I think, was a bit skeptical at first and I think we always felt like that might have been a bit cultural with the Cuban background that he had trying to work with Spaniards and so on. But he supported, I think, our early efforts by saying this is something that might pay some dividends for the college, might be a great experience to bring some international kids here and so on and so forth. That started it and then it grew significantly. Two years later I was Interim President. Jorge Huayhuaca, who was our Hotel Technology faculty at the time, was going down to Peru to do some consulting for the summer. He wanted my permission to talk to some university and college directors down there about our arrangement with this college in Spain to see if other colleges might be interested. To make a long story short, he came back that fall very excited. It led to my first out-of-country trip later that fall where we signed our first agreements and it really began to mature after that. Jorge really, he’s the dealmaker, you know.

It was easier to make deals than to make them work. We learned a lot of lessons about that over the years but it’s turned out, I think, to be very important and very significant for the college because it’s brought an international dynamic. More important than money is the idea of bringing people from other cultures here to interact with our students, who by and large don’t get a chance to interact with other international students. One of the things we’re busy working on today, Walter’s heavily involved in this, is trying to create more opportunities for our students to study abroad. We get a lot of students coming here because they want to come to America from other parts of the world but, in this day and age, it’s just as important for our students to study abroad and get an international experience. And that’s more difficult to do with our financial aid structures and all that. But we are cracking that nut, I think. I’m feeling more optimistic about

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that than I have in a long time. We just got our foundation to approve a $6,000 or $7,000 scholarship fund to support students who need it to travel. That’s going to go up to $10,000 over the course of the next three years. There are some federal monies that look like they are becoming available to encourage study abroad. I’m working very closely with our congressman to make sure that, when the legislation goes through, the funds will be available for community colleges as well because there tends to be a lot of four-year colleges and universities that are driving that agenda right now.

NC: I think it goes back to Walter’s earlier comment, too, that we feel, and in many ways are, unique as a community college.

CH: I think one of the reasons we were able to accommodate that first arrangement with the World University in Madrid was because we had some experience. We’ve always had a lot of international students here. Walter gets to sign off on all the F-1s or whatever. With Cornell here in our community, we’ve always had a fairly significant number of international students who come here. Not counting our Global Connections program, we would probably be able to get a couple hundred students from maybe 60 or 70 different countries around the world today anyway, and that’s always been there. It hasn’t been that big but even in the early years we always got students. I can remember as a faculty member having people from Nigeria and Ghana and different parts of Africa and Hispanic countries and so on in my classes.

So we had the infrastructure that was here already, you know, in terms of English as a Second Language. I don’t think we did well with that in the early years but we began to ramp up we got more serious about how we delivered English as a Second Language and support services and so on. Amazingly, the students kept coming anyway, and so it forced us to begin to think about how we served those students. I think we’re still learning, but I think we are doing a lot better today than we did back in the ‘70s.

NC: Would you discuss the impact of the college on the community, good, bad and indifferent? And let’s go back to the beginning, the early days.

CH: Well, one of my early recollections is in ’69, and Walter probably heard this as well in that first year, but there was still a lot of community debate about why these communities needed another college. A lot of folks, people on the street so to speak, would have said, “Look, we’ve got Cornell University, Ithaca College and SUNY Cortland. What do we need another college for?” And that was just a reflection, in my view, of how people really didn’t understand what this community college idea was all about. I bet this will come out of this study that is looking at in the SUNY community colleges. When you look at the founding presidents of these community colleges in New York State you’re going to find a unique breed of people that really had what I’ll characterize as a missionary zeal for the concept of the community college. I think very few of those founding presidents had been in community colleges because there weren’t that many community colleges around.

Hu came here from Ithaca College, but somehow or other, he had learned about community colleges. He had a passion for what a community college was, what a community college could do to a community and what it would mean to a community. That passion and that missionary

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zeal that I talked about is what he did particularly well in those early years or any time any group needed somebody to come talk. We were a bit of a novelty, you know, in those early years. Hu, of course, was a particularly charismatic leader, so a lot of people wanted to meet him and listen to him speak . He’d be out there talking about what the community college would mean. Of course, we were here trying to make sure that we could deliver on what he was talking about.

Today I don’t think you’ll find anybody in these communities who would debate the role that the college has and the importance of the college to the communities. A good measure of that has been the media in the last several years, particularly the Tompkins County media. For decades it was Cornell and Ithaca College. I would say 90 percent of the time today, when they talk about Cornell and Ithaca College, they also mention Tompkins Cortland Community College. It’s may not be a statistically valid way of looking at it, but I think it’s a pretty good indicator to say that we’ve arrived. It’s the same in the Cortland media when we talk about the role of our college and SUNY Cortland. But in those early years, that was an uphill battle.

NC: I remember the phrase “glorified high school.”

CH: Yeah, we were “tee-hee-hee” for a long time among local students. Historically a lot of the community colleges around the country grew out of high schools. If you go back to the early 1900’s there was the notion that it really was an extension of high school more than the first two years of college, even though it’s sort of saying the same thing. In New York in the late ‘40s, they already had the ag and tech colleges that were two-year schools. But community colleges were something very different and there have been debates over the years about whether we should have had our own system. You know, some states grew a community college system independent of their university system. So we’re a bit of a maverick and I think there’s probably more upside than downside to that.

I’ve got an issue going on this afternoon, as a matter of fact, where there is some new State law approved that covers all kinds of public entities, and yet the County Attorney and our attorney are telling us it doesn’t include community colleges. We’re not a part of it, and that leaves us legally vulnerable on some other matters. The unique structure of community colleges in the State are such that, , if you don’t mention community colleges in legislation that might pertain to other public entities, then we’re not a part of anything. We’re not a State agency, we’re not a local municipality, we’re not a public benefit corporation, we’re not a town or village corporation, we’re not anything else. So if you don’t mention community colleges, then new laws and things that might apply to us don’t. I could go on with a whole bunch of examples of that. I don’t remember how I got off on that tangent. What was the original question?

NC: The impact on the community.

CH: And I guess I drew on a little bit of the history of the State University. I think becoming a part of the State University has a lot of benefit, particularly for us. When I’ve been in South America talking to colleges and universities about partnering with us, I’m a unit of the State University of New York. And SUNY has an incredibly strong reputation in South America because back in the ‘60s they used to support a lot of the community development down there. Now those people are leaders in the government and in the universities there and SUNY is highly

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reputable. I used to somewhat jokingly say that I think SUNY had a stronger reputation down there than it does here in our own country. In any event, we could go on about the relationship but I think it’s been very, very good.

NC: When did we start picking up the business relationship, bringing people in who were out of work? Was Smith Corona the first?

WP: Actually, probably not. It would have been when Brockway truck closed.

CH: That’s in the ‘70s. The Brockway thing would have probably been in the mid- to late 70’s and SCM went through a couple phases. The earlier one would have been in the early ‘80s. That’s when the Groton plant shut down. So we had a wave of people that we trained then. And then, later on in the ‘90s, when they really closed down the Cortland operation, we had another wave of enrollment then.

WP: You see, and maybe it goes back to actually your last question, TC3 became established with the underlying reason of supporting business and industry in the area. Bob Sprole was absolutely convinced of it as he looked for his own needs at Therm Incorporated in Ithaca, as he looked around the country and talked with CEOs from other similar, high-tech corporations. They had close working relationships with their area community colleges and the technical training that went on seemed to be critical to the development of those local economies. He was the major motivator, initially in Tompkins County and then across both counties, for the establishment of the college. And so it’s been part of our mission from the start.

CH: I might point out that, and opinions would differ on this around the college and perhaps even the community, but I think we almost kind of went too far in that direction in the early years. Probably because of Bob’s influence and Hu’s,, there was, I think, a need reaction in terms of trying to convince the community to support us. It was “we’re here to prepare your workforce,” almost to the exclusion of the transfer side of things. It wasn’t until maybe the late ‘80s and ‘90s that we tried to bring a little bit more balance. And it took a long time to get a reasonable balance, if you will, in terms of what I’ll call the occupational programs that would prepare people for jobs, and the transfer programs that would prepare people for transfer. We weren’t seen as a transfer institution for a long time.

NC: For a long time, although that first graduate transferred to Cornell.

CH: Not to say that it didn’t happen. But by and large, high school students didn’t see us that way. They didn’t see us as the first two years. It’s still amazing to me that I’ll run into people from time to time who say, “You mean you can go to Cornell from TC3?” But a decade, or maybe 15 years, ago that was much more prevalent and I think it kind of grew out of those early years where all the programs we added were technology programs or business programs, computer programs, anything that was going to train or prepare people for jobs. It was almost like we were a little bit embarrassed to promote the fact that our liberal arts programs were pretty good as well and you could really transfer to Cornell or Cortland from here.

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WP: In fact in those days, there was a lot of actual internal discussion and, at times, angst over Hu’s pushing of the concept that the liberal arts and sciences were support to technology and business. They didn’t exist for their own program structure. And so we were graduating between 60 and 70 percent of our graduates in the career programs. As Carl indicated, about 15 years ago, maybe almost 20 now, we made a deliberate decision towards a more balanced approach. So now it’s really clear that all of the program areas, frankly I think, have their own identity.

NC: What was the relationship between the college and SUNY Central in the early days and how did it change over time? You mentioned part of this in your office the other day that the attitude of SUNY Central had changed towards the community colleges as they matured.

CH: Actually, Neal Robbins, who’s heading up this study, was there so he’s the one that can really answer that. From the hinterlands looking back at it, we had some community college staff, and Neal was one of them. Probably in the mid-‘70s, the SUNY community college office had a staff but we weren’t plugged in directly to the chancellor and I don’t think we were seen as one of the sectors. We were seen as a product of the legislature because we were the local communities and that’s where we were going to get our attention. What changed that didn’t happen until the mid-‘90s with a report called the ENCHEMS Report, that was an analysis of the community college system. At that time, there was some strong feeling among some folks about whether the community colleges should really advocate to be broken off from SUNY and become their own system, because we really were not getting any support from SUNY. There was a lot of frustration about that on the campuses. I was kind of in the middle of that as a part of the Presidents’ Association; I think I was just Interim President at the time, The ENCHEMS Report came from a highly reputable group of people that came around and interviewed a lot of the presidents, including myself, and staff and SUNY professionals. They concluded that long-term the community colleges probably had more to benefit by being a part of SUNY than not, but listed the kinds of things that SUNY needed to do to really demonstrate that such as needing a vice-chancellor for community colleges to report to the chancellor. The board did that and has maintained that commitment. When there was turnover in the office giving an opportunity to perhaps demote the position, they have not done that. We’re the only sector within SUNY that has a Board of Trustee Committee that focuses just on community colleges. We’ve got a SUNY person who’s tagged to the community colleges for our unique lobbying efforts, in addition to other staff that deal with the SUNY campuses and the medical school and all the other kinds of things. So that’s been, I think, a major transformation in the past 10 to 15 years. In the early years, I think we were a bit more of an afterthought.

NC: I know there was a unique library office, too. I did a sabbatical in 1980 and it was very active at that point. Walter, you’re probably the best one for this. What other programs at the college, like student services, community services programs, what other kinds of things were there or were those all in the ‘90s, too?

WP: Well, there is probably kind of a timeline in the area of student services. The very first service that was developed was in the area of financial aid. We had financial aid programs in place by 1969 and then the second area was in the area of student support. Pat Ryan was our first Director of Counseling and he hired Susan Bravman as the first counselor on the staff. They

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crafted the general studies program out of counseling. In addition, there were also the seeds for what became the Baker Learning Center, looking at the general learning needs of students and providing support and tutoring from a general academic perspective. In the first year we also established the Faculty Student Association, to house what the four-year campuses would call auxiliary services, such as the bookstore. The student activity fee was housed under the Faculty Student Association, as was the management of that fee, which eventually became intercollegiate athletics and recreation.

NC: Athletics was one of the programs that I wondered about.

WP: And then daycare was added in. That was also probably in the ‘70s. We were one of the first units of State University to have a daycare on campus. That has an interesting story attached to it because we had been struggling for a couple of years. Charlie McMullen, when he was in charge of the social science department, had a grant related to early childhood education and started a daycare center as a learning mechanism for the students. The grant ran out and the center went away. This building was designed with a childcare center in the northeast corner. It’s always been there since we opened. Initially, it was a teaching school, if you will with a one-way observation window, but all that went away when the grant went away. There was a lot of debate about whether it was appropriate to have a full-fledged, full-time childcare center in the college. Hushang made me understand that very clearly that it certainly wasn’t going to come out of operational funds. Well, two things came together. TC3 over its history has had a number of perfect storms, where all the stars are aligned and something happens. This happened on a Board Thursday when a Board member came in early. She was from Cortland back in the ‘70s named Charlotte Angell and she happened to notice on the second floor there was a classroom with an entryway onto the main hallway. There was a class going on in there and there was a playpen in the hallway with a toddler in it. She made it her business to hold a conversation with the mother of that child and before you knew it, I was given the directive to start a childcare center.

CH: What year would that have been?

WP: Maybe ’75, ’74. It was early ‘70s.

NC: Very early, because we’ve had the childcare center going most of the time in this building.

WP: The next question was: How are we going to fund it? It was probably the early days of the lottery. I hated game machines. I think, like today’s computer games, they can be habituating and students can spend hours on them. But if the State can have gambling, TC3 can fund a childcare, a worthwhile service, out of the quarters that other students will put into those machines. So we converted a space at the end of the bookstore that was a storage room and we moved in game machines. That first year, we raised $4,000 in quarters. That’s the money we used to run our childcare center. The childcare director worked for the amount of money we had to offer in those days.

CH: Was that Barbara?

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WP: No, Barbara was our second or third director. I’ve forgotten the name, but there was a young fellow who was the director early on. In any case, Barbara did come on early in the program. We’ve discussed daycare, as one of the examples of growth in student services, but as has been the case in many services at TC3, we had to look for a creative way to actually fund it and make it possible. The State has come along in subsequent years to help underwrite a lot of the expenses, but we still piece together every year. There aren’t any operating dollars that directly go into childcare. Early on, the college actually charged the daycare rent. I forget when we ended that, perhaps in the mid-‘80s, but that didn’t make any sense. I was able to show the president that having daycare available was actually was bringing in FTE’s to the college and it was a bit insulting to actually require them to pay rent for a service they were providing to TC3.

CH: You probably had that debate with Tom Murphy, right?

WP: Yes, I did. And so childcare was one of the developments. The bookstore was another development early on. We’ve had a bookstore, obviously, as long as the college has been open. It was originally run by a faculty member who just passed away this year.

CH: Part of our retail business manager program. Fred Janke. By that time, I was department chair for business, and Fred ran the bookstore as a part of a lab, if you will, for the retail management. Actually, there are a lot of examples of that early on and, I don’t know why but unfortunately none of those have stayed the course. Early ones included the daycare center, the bookstore with our retail program, and the cafeteria as we came up here with our food science program. The early contract with the cafeteria had an obligation for them to be hiring students and work with our foodservice people.

NC: Now that you’re back into an early childhood education program, maybe daycare will go back to a learning situation.

CH: Well, I think there’s opportunity to do more. There is some connectivity but now it is in internships and co-op.

WP: More in the area of internships now. But the bookstore started in a little room in the basement of the building in Groton. It eventually needed a home and that became the Faculty Student Association. Athletics was never intended, in Hu’s mind at least, to be any part of the community college experience. It would have been recreation, recreational basketball, recreational softball.

CH: There is a good example of that. In recent years since we have been trying to encourage the development of our athletic program here, we have learned that there are only two other community colleges in the State system that don’t have a stand-alone athletic facility for their students. And that’s part of the argument I used to try to get the funding to build a facility. Who else has a gym in the middle of their academic building, other than for Hu’s views about this recreational kind of activity? That was his vision. He would respond spottily over the years to people that wanted to coach. Ted Lange, for example, coached basketball for a while. I remember Andy Mason, who was our Director of Admissions for a period of time, coached the

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baseball team. So he came in and he said, “Yeah, I’ve got some kids who want to play baseball and want to play basketball. Can we do it?”

NC: Sue Gantert had a team of some sort.

CH: Did she have a swim team? There’s another example. Our swimming pool is just short of the regulations that you need for competitive swimming.

WP: In the original drawings, the swimming pool was a natatorium to be used by biologists, and the basketball court was a multipurpose room.

CH: Yeah, it wasn’t called a gymnasium.

NC: And the Frank K. Taylor Forum was a lecture hall.

CH: That’s right. And so we had these attempts at trying to do something, but it never really got college support. It got a little support apparently from FSA. You’d know more about that. But we earned a reputation of really not being very committed to athletics here. What would happen, therefore, is that a lot of the young people in our communities who really wanted to and had the skill to play post-secondary level athletics would go someplace else. They’d go to Herkimer and Onondaga and Corning and other places and, when that happens, the County charge-back money goes with them. It costs the communities money and, of course, we forego the opportunity to have served them. So that’s one of the things that we’ve attempted to change here in the last decade or so.

WP: We actually had a period from maybe 1978 to ’81, when we had no athletic activities at all. We just did away with the program for a number of reasons. The most telling reason was that, when we analyzed the win/loss record to that date, it was abysmal. It was very apparent that there was just no support of any kind. FSA support wasn’t even at the level that was necessary to sustain a quality program. The FSA board decided to re-establish athletics only after a three-year period of study and review. We went out and looked at all the area high schools, looked at all the community colleges and developed a master plan that was going to be based on interest and available competition. By that time of course, we had been in this facility for a number of years.. The basketball court is of minimum standards, so we could play competitively on this floor. We hired a full-time athletic and recreation director, Larry Hinkle. We hadn’t been able to do that in the college. At some time in the early ‘70s, I had actually put a half-time athletic director in the budget and it got all the way to the first of the hearings that we go through annually. It never got to the floor of the legislature. It got to the floor of the forum here at TC3 and I think it was Jim Ray, from Newfield who raised the question, “If you’re going to have an athletic director now, when are you going to submit the director of bands?” You know, they saw it as the high school model, which was never going to happen here. That day that position was excised from that budget proposal and never saw the light of day after that. It had to be the Faculty Student Association that came forward, made the decision and hired a director. To this day, the director of athletics is not a college employee. He is a Faculty Student Association employee.

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CH: That is somewhat unique around the State, and is part of what we’ve had to contend with in the last several years. I remember early on in my presidency trying to understand how these other colleges support this infrastructure of athletics, because it gets down to the fee that FSA has to charge for an athletic fee. And, of course, there’s always this contention about how much does the fee support. I think, by that time, Mick McDaniel had taken over as athletic director. He did a study for us that gave an estimate of the amount of investment that the colleges themselves make. Oftentimes, coaches are either college employees who also do coaching as a part of their duties or the athletic director or some other position that the college would be paying for. The athletic fee would then be picking up other incidental costs of running an athletic program. So anyway, that’s been a challenge that we’ve had to contend with in the last several years.

NC: What attracted you to the college, what challenges did you come in with? Have you met them, have you not met them? What would have liked to do?

WP: I’ll start with that, I guess. What attracted me to TC 3 was Hu Bahar. Of all of the people [in this picture] of the first faculty and administration, probably half of them were personal invitees by Hu to join the college. He had prior experience with Earl Levengood. They worked together at Corning. Murphy’s not [in the picture]. Oh, McMullen came the first year.He’s not there either. Charlie McMullen, in PhysEd had worked with Hu at Corning. I had been a student of Hu’s at Corning and we developed a personal relationship over the next several years. Beryl Schicker had worked with Hu at Corning. She was an English faculty there. I think he had some prior experience with Ron Alexander in biology. Then Hu actually went out and recruited a couple of others.

I still remember getting a telephone call when I was working as the Director of Admissions and Housing at Corning Community College. The Dean of the College, John McConkey, was on the other end of the line. His secretary said, “Dr. McConkey would like to speak with you.” Back then I was the same as I am today. I said, “Dr. McConkey? I don’t know any Dr. McConkey.” You know, it’s like on e-mail today. The address doesn’t look right, so it’s a delete. I thought, “Well, all right, I’ll take the call.” Good thing I did! He said, “Hello, I’m Dr. John X. McConkey. I’m the Dean of the College at Tompkins Cortland Community College and President Bahar would like to speak with you.” I said, “Oh, that’s it!” Because I knew Hu had been talking with a few other people at Corning at the time. Actually, he had a faculty member in mind for the Director of Student Affairs initially, business faculty. The guy got along famously with students and had probably 10, 12 years of experience at that point, but he didn’t want to leave Corning. And so I thought, well, I know [Hu] because he kept track of me through graduate school and we’d have dinner periodically, and so he calls me. And he says he thinks he has an opportunity for me. Could I come up and spend some time with him in Groton? I had to do a conference the next week in Plattsburgh and so I took a day’s vacation, went up a day early and spent the entire day in Groton. It’s funny the things that stand out in conversations. We were down in the cafeteria, in the basement of the building, and he says, “Bob Sprole,” and he goes on to explain who Bob Sprole was, “wants me to hire people that are going to stay at the college. He gets upset when he sees, whether it’s Cornell or other schools, that people come and they stay for a couple years and then they leave.” He says, “We’re to be building a college that’s

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going to have an impact on the community and we’re to be part of the community.” I said, “Oh, I’ll move here.”

On the way to Groton I’m thinking to myself that I’m not going to take anything less than Director of Admissions. Now, I’d been in admissions for a couple of years at that point. I figure I’m going to have to work my way into some things. Then I get to the college and I discover he’s already got a Director of Admissions, Tommy Mecca. So I wonder what’s he want to talk to me about? Well, he wanted me to start the student affairs division, be Director of Student Affairs. That was frightening, frankly since, at that point, I was just two years out of graduate school. I was a young kid, like Carl just a year earlier. But he caught my attention. Hu had this way; he could tell a story and just create an emotional excitement and anticipation of what was to come and I would have this opportunity to help form this new thing, this new community college. “And we’re gonna do it right." I told him right away, “I’d love to come to Groton!” A year and a half earlier, I had really wanted to go to Corning, go back to my alma mater. But boy, the chances to do something like this are scarce.

After the conference, I returned to Corning and sat down with the Dean of Students I reported to, Bob Chapman, who later went on to be a president of a community college in Connecticut. I described to him my conversation with Hushang and he said, “Well, I’ve got a story to tell you, but the short part is that, if you’re ready to swim with the sharks, have your learning curve straight up and be frightened for the next couple of years but have the greatest experience of your life as an educator and an administrator, this is your opportunity.” He had started at Corning the same way. The founding president of Corning came from Harvard and Bob Chapman was invited right out of his master’s program to start the student affairs division at Corning. And Bob was absolutely right.

My wife is now afraid that I’ll never retire because, you know, I might be an adrenaline junkie. I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been at the center of TC3 since its founding. It would be hard to give that up. There have been times she’s said to me, “Go in the classroom. Work nine months a year.” When I stop and I think of it now, I can’t do that. There are too many exciting things going on, because TC3 didn’t have just one exciting president, Hu Bahar. Eduardo came along and he created his own kind of excitement and had an equal commitment to the community college model and what it does for a community. And then, of course, Carl comes along. We haven’t eaten lunch together for years without talking about how to get the president to do what we want him to do!

NC: I can confirm that it’s hard to give up and walk since obviously I keep coming back to work on projects.

WP: Well that’s how I got here and it’s how I stayed here. You know, we have an orientation program at the college were all new employees have about 28, 30 people they go around to, and I’m usually one of the last ones. The deans are kind of just before [the president]. I like to tell them that we feel very much today in the early 2000s like we did in the late 1960s and well into the ‘70s in terms of our development, our growth, the changes that are going on programmatically and about the largest capital construction project that we’ve had since the college was built. It’s all the same feeling. We’re still hiring people. It’s a part of early

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incentive for retiring and so we’ve been changing faculty over about 50 percent, 60 percent. There are a lot of new things happening and I think our new staff has all of the same opportunities that I thought I saw in the winter of 1968 and every one of those things, and some I never even dreamt of, came true

I went to a conference one time and told a dean from Michigan, “I don’t know why the hell you’re involved in collective bargaining. It’s got nothing to do with your job.” Four years after that week, I’m doing the same thing and backing up one night thinking, “Oh, this is why John did that.” The skill set was there from counseling. I had the commitment to the institution. I’d grown up with it. I knew what we ought to be about. And so, all of the sudden, I’m doing it. I never, ever imagined that I would have been able to do the kind of traveling I’ve done. And it’s Carl’s comment, but I’ll never forget Carl going off to Antofagasta, Chile that first year to give a speech to a meeting of rectors down there, and he says, “I’m just a country boy from Arkport. What am I doing going to Chile?” I’ve been all over the world now. In the wintertime, I love to look at my passport and see where I’ve been and look at the maps in my office and see where I can go.

CH: How would a country boy, or a city boy, from Corning get to dance with Mrs. Yeltsin from Russia, the President’s wife.

WP: That’s right; in the scale of things, an intimate dinner party, sixteen people including Mrs. Yeltsin, in Moscow. They had a smallish-sized ballroom on the top floor of the President Hotel in downtown Moscow. I keep that picture right up there and some employees actually recognize her. Very few do, but I say, “See that lady there I’m dancing with? That’s Mrs. Boris Yeltsin.” I never would have imagined anything like that.

And so, for me, TC3 has fulfilled all of my dreams and then it’s continued to create dreams, which is really the neat part. Sunday afternoons, my wife will say, “Why are you so quiet? What are you thinking about?” “I’m thinking about the week. I’m looking forward to Monday. What it is that I’ve got to be doing this week, what the discussions are we’ve got coming up.” And I finally discovered this year, through our process of Strength Quest that we have going on, why this happens to me. I like ideas and I like the conversations, being in the middle of those conversations and Hu Bahar made it all possible.

NC: He was quite a man. Carl, you’ve come all the way up through. What challenges did you face and what succeeded and what didn’t?

CH: Well, going back to the early involvement here, I’ve shared this story with some others but just to share it here today, I had gotten to know a fellow by the name of Charlie Schafer when I was at grad school in Syracuse. He and I met on a commuter bus going back and forth and kind of became friends. I know you know Charlie. He was an older fellow who had run a restaurant until highway 81 went through and destroyed his business. He was going back to college as an adult to learn accounting and create a whole new career for himself. During the first year that the college was open here Charlie was teaching an adjunct course. I don’t know if it was accounting or something in the business area.

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WP: It would have been accounting.

CH: Then as they were hiring for the second year, I heard they were going to be hiring two or three more business faculty. So Charlie started talking to me, maybe in the spring of ’69, and was saying, “You know, there is this little community college starting up down near Cortland. They’re going to be hiring some business faculty.” I was teaching in the Syracuse school system at that time. I had finished my graduate studies and was teaching high school. And he said, “If you’re ever interested in community colleges, you really ought to take a look at this college.” I kept thinking about it; I had an interest in community colleges anyway. I’d looked at a job at Finger Lakes Community College when they were starting just the year before but had taken this job in Syracuse for a couple of reasons.

My hometown, which Walter just mentioned, was Arkport, New York, and I went home that Memorial Day weekend. Earl Levengood, who was one of the original faculty members here, had been my high school typing teacher and when he first moved to Arkport, he lived right across the street from my family. At the festivities in town I ran into some people who said, “Gee, Earl Levengood’s been in town and he’s looking for you. He said he’s involved in some community college up there and may have a job opportunity for you.” Well, I never ran into Earl that weekend, but I went for probably a month thinking that I had two deals going; one with this little community college that Earl had mentioned up near Ithaca, New York someplace, and then, of course, Charlie with this little community college around Cortland. So one night comparing notes on the phone with Charlie Schafer, he said, “You know, if you’re serious, they’re getting ready to do some hiring. You ought to get your application in.” So I said, “Well, what do I do?” And he says, “Well, write a letter to a fellow by the name of Earl Levengood.” And I said, “Earl Levengood? You’re kidding me!” And so we had a long chat then about what my experience was with Earl and how I knew him and how it was really one college and not two. So my odds of getting a job in a community college just got halved. But I popped off a letter and came down, and I told you the story about driving down here when I heard on the radio about the college land deal being turned down.

I came for the interview and Earl, Dean McConkey and Hu all interviewed me together in Hu’s office. It was an unusual interview. Everyone that was interviewed by Hu has a story to tell about the interview. They were having a great debate apparently at the college at that time about the general studies program, and it was pretty evident that Hu didn’t like the idea of a general studies program. He just didn’t see that. It didn’t have a career focus and we’ve already talked about his interest in careers. They were kind of joking about how, “Well, you know, we can prepare general studies students and then they can get bachelor’s degrees in general studies and then they can get master’s degrees in general studies and then they can come back here and teach people in general studies.” They were kind of going on with this kind of chatter. This whole internal debate went on for about 45 minutes and I’m just sitting here like a bump on a log watching this conversation. Hu finally turned to me and said, “Can you teach this stuff that he wants you to teach?” pointing to Earl. And I said, “Yeah, I can do that.” And he says, “Good.” And that was it! That was the interview. That was in the evening, too, an evening interview.

WP: We did everything in the evening!

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CH: We proceeded to work things out and work out some kind of salary arrangement and teaching load and all that and that very first semester, they didn’t have enough for me to teach. So I was asked, as a make-up for my load, to apply for and administer the very first grant that the college had. It was an MDTA, Manpower Development Training Act, grant, which was a forerunner of what we know today as Workforce Investment. I was able to get a grant and then they asked me to administer the grant, where we actually trained clerk-typists. We got monies to rent some space and buy equipment and all that over in Terrace Hill, which it turns out had been one of the potential sites that Tompkins County had offered to locate the college in before they really got connected with Cortland.

Anyway, it’s almost like right from the very beginning, there was always an opportunity to be involved in something else. I enjoyed teaching and, as I’m always fond of saying, I never really remember making a decision that I didn’t want to teach anymore. It’s just that gradually, over the years as other opportunities would come along to be a department chair and you’d have little bit of reduced load, then we became division heads or something of that sort, and early on that was kind of still a faculty position with a little bit of a reduced load. And then they kept asking more and more out of division heads and, you know, by the time we got to the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, division heads were full-time, 12-month administrators. That was kind of a big deal at the time that happened. We still could teach. Usually, I think maybe that was an overload basis at that time if we wanted to teach. Then Dawn Cooper, who was Associate Dean, went on a sabbatical and so I got asked to take over and, actually, I wound up doing both jobs for a year, doing the Associate Dean’s job as well as the department chair work. Then Tom Murphy left and went to Monroe Community College and our comptroller left and went to Schenectady Community College and there was nobody in the business area. Hu was in Africa and we had this interim president. He called me in the office one day very late August and said, “I’d like you to be our Dean of Administration.” Tom Murphy was an accountant; the comptroller, of course, was an accountant. People often assume that just because you have a business background you can do accounting. I couldn’t work my way out of a paper bag in accounting and I explained this to Doug. I won’t tell you exactly what he said, but basically it was colorful. The point was that he wanted somebody in the dean’s job who was more of a management person, he would hire an accounting person for the comptroller’s job. He, therefore, wanted to know if I would be willing to do that and I thought about it over the weekend and came back and said I would be willing to give that a try.

That was a real right turn for me career-wise because at that point I had finished my doctoral work and really saw myself as becoming more of an Academic Dean. That’s where I was and what I knew and what my interest really was and to go off and be Dean of Administration and be in charge of budget and facilities and personnel and all that kind of thing was a real challenge. And of course the first challenge I had was to find somebody that understood accounting so that I could get a real strong backup person in that job. We wound up hiring Rick Carnrike, who did a terrific job in that work for five, six, seven years. To make sure I was getting somebody good, I got our audit firm involved in helping me with that search because I really needed help at that point. We got some good help and guidance from them and we got a really topnotch person.

By that time, Peter Burnham, who was Academic Dean, left and became president at Schenectady. This is an interesting story. We were in a bank building in downtown Cortland

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and doing long-range planning work for the college. There was maybe six or eight or ten of us there and Peter Burnham gets the telephone call from Schenectady that he was being offered the presidency up there. And all of a sudden it dawned on all of us that the only person in the room that didn’t have acting or interim associated with their title was Walter. He was the only one! We had an interim president, I was an interim, Bob Ross was doing some interim assistant to the president work. We now were losing our Academic Dean, so who knew what was going to happen there. And here we’re doing long-range planning for this college. We quickly realized the futility and we went across the street to a bar and drank the rest of the afternoon. That’s probably not a great testament for the future of this college, but that’s kind of what we did. Anyway, Doug was here for two years and Hu was coming back. We were starting the search for an Academic Dean and starting the search for Dean of Administration. I don’t know if there were some other searches going on, but I was interested in the Academic Dean’s job.

I applied for both jobs actually at Hu’s urging. Hu called me in and I think I was in the top two or three for both positions within the committees that had interviewed me. Hu made it very clear to me that he came back feeling a bit betrayed. That might be a little strong, but Walter can comment on this. He might have been closer to him at the time. But Hu… You know, the people had unionized at that point, he had family problems, there had been some things going on at the board level that had left him feeling pretty disenchanted with the board. He was beginning to see the end in terms of his tenure here, and he really didn’t want to have to engage in the communities. By that time I’d worked for a year or so with the counties on budget matters and had kind of gotten up to speed on all that work and he didn’t want somebody new coming into that and he didn’t want to do it himself. So he basically told me, he said, “I don’t want you to be Academic Dean. I want you to keep on doing what you’re doing. You’re doing a good job of it and I need somebody I can depend on to keep track of the budget and keep us out of trouble and keep me out of trouble and that’s what I want you to do.” So I didn’t have any choice in the matter if I wanted to be a dean and, at that point, I could have gone back to faculty I think, but I did the Dean of Administration thing and stayed there until Eduardo came.

Then we did a little restructuring a year after Ed was here. There was a period of time for about three or four years when we had four deans, because Bob Ross was a dean of something called College Services, I was Dean of Administration and then there was Walter and a fellow by the name of Jim Speer, who was the Academic Dean. That just seemed a little top heavy for a small college our size, so we consolidated the three and Jim Speer left. I think it’s fair to say that was a little bit of an involuntary departure. I became Academic Dean and Bob became Dean of College Services, dropping the Dean of Administration title. We basically divided up the work among the three of us in a way that seemed to make sense at the time. So I served as Academic Dean for eight years under Eduardo and, actually, that may be another little piece of the story you may want in the record as well. A year later then, after I’d been Dean of Administration for two or three years, Hu, of course, announced his retirement, so we were starting a search for president. I applied as an internal candidate for that job and felt qualified because of the work I’d been doing with the counties and all that. I had my shiny, new PhD that was maybe three or four years old. Again, as is well known, I didn’t get the job. It came down to Eduardo and myself and there was a third person that I think either backed out or wasn’t a serious contender. The board felt at that time, for various reasons and issues that had gone on here, they really needed an external person. They didn’t want somebody from the inside. At least, that’s what I

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was told at the time was a key part of it and it was probably because of a couple of other things as well.

So Eduard came in. Well, when you’re a senior level person, internal, last person for the same position and you’re still going to be hanging around, your tenure is about 10 minutes. Of course, I was quite hurt and disappointed from not getting the job but within a half an hour after we both were informed Ed was on the phone to me. He said, “Look, I’ve been where you are right now. I know about you. I want you on my team.” And he gave me a lot of assurances and so on that he really wanted me to stay and work with him. Of course, I appreciated that and wound up staying but for probably several months or a year I looked pretty seriously at other opportunities and had a pretty strong opportunity one place. When I really sat back and looked at it, however, I still wanted to bet on TC3’s and my future here rather than going someplace else. I didn’t want to run away from whatever disappointment I had. And Ed and I got along great. In retrospect, I think I was able to do more for the college as Academic Dean during those years than I might have done as President. I think, in retrospect, for the college it was the best thing that ever happened. And of course, Ed was saying all these years that he was going to retire from here.

Then after eight years of being Academic Dean, I kind of felt like I’d been there, done that and was ready to do something different. A member of our business faculty, Earl Levengood as it turns out, was leaving, so I said, “Gee, we’ve got a vacancy in the business faculty. Maybe it’s time for me to go back to teaching.” I’d just gotten kind of drawn along into this administrative work and never felt I had consciously left teaching. I really enjoyed teaching when I still had a chance to do some adjunct or something. So there were a lot of details to work that out because, the bridge, so to speak, between administration and faculty had kind of been blown up and there was some negotiating that had to be worked out with the union Ed accepted my resignation and commitment to return to teaching the following semester. We started building a teaching schedule for me. We started the search for a new Academic Dean and, then in March or April, Ed got a telephone call. He calls me into his office and he said, “I’m being recruited to go down to Corning and be their president.” I said, “You’re not going to leave, are you?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know yet.” Within a matter of six or eight weeks, he went from a telephone call to an interview to being hired to leaving.

So the board asked if I would stay on for a year as the interim president while they went ahead and looked for a president. During that year I agreed and the board agreed that they really wanted me to have the opportunity to apply. SUNY had a policy at that time that if you were an interim president you weren’t eligible to apply for the presidency. The board made it very clear to me, however, that they wanted me to have that opportunity if I wanted to. At the beginning, I was pretty sure I didn’t. You know, burned once is OK but not twice, and I had this faculty position available to me. But about halfway through the year, I took my chance again and the board, to their credit, did a national search. That was probably the most trying time I had, being again the internal candidate with all the hallway kibitzing that goes on. People are comparing the various candidates during that process and yet I was serving as the interim and trying to do the work for the college and not make it appear that I somehow was doing things that were furthering my potential for the real job. The board had made it clear that the reason they wanted me to do the interim work was the college was starting on the road to some real change and they didn’t want to lose momentum. They didn’t want any seat-warmer in the job but wanted

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somebody who was going to keep the thing rolling. The last time we had an interim president, and we all knew we didn't want to go that route again. So anyway, the board did hire me and then I’ve had this opportunity to serve as president.

And there is only one other person right now that is serving as a community college president in the State that has a similar story, Gail Rice up at North Country, where she started as a faculty member back in the late ‘60s as that college was growing. And she became president there a year or two before I became president here. We’re still presidents and have been in our communities and have been in our colleges for our whole careers, because it is pretty unusual when you look at the fact that I’m only the third president here. Most colleges our size and our age, have four, five, six presidents by now. As a matter of fact, there are some colleges that have had two or three just since I’ve been president. Walter said this already in terms of dreams realized. I wasn’t even dreaming these kinds of dreams back in the late ‘60s when I came here. I wasn’t even dreaming these dreams in the ‘70s.

NC: A lot changed in the ‘80s.

CH: It wasn’t until I got my doctorate and began to think that at least I was qualified to be a president or be a dean. My whole job was I thought I could really serve well as a dean, do administrative work and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working with people, enjoyed working with faculty and so on and thought I could make a real contribution. Then the closer I got working with the president, I realized that maybe I could do that work, particularly in the Dean of Administration where I was working with the communities. I think it was that experience that helped me realize that I could work with communities as well. That is a big part of doing your work as president, being connected in the community.

NC: You said we had a 50 percent faculty turnover here as we matured. I know there was a feeling when we came from Groton, where we were very much a family. If you wanted to see somebody, you ran up the stairs to see them. We went to the meetings and were excited about plans. We lost a little of that when we came here and spread out into this huge building. Is there a feeling that we’ve lost more of the family feeling as we get new people in?

CH: My view on that is that the feeling we had in the ‘70s, that family feeling that you refer to, is something that I don’t think we’ll ever really have again. I think there’s something unique about those first decades of the development of our community colleges and I think this would be true in other places as well. Whether you’re working in administration or at the senior level, like Hu and Walter as dean and president, or working as faculty, there is a certain kind of person that takes a risk to come into a new college. It’s uncertain and the workload is much more demanding than coming into a well-established institution. I think there are some unique experiences that one has and or feels because you’re a part of something very special. Then that institution, this institution, matures as we did by the mid-‘80s. We had some harsh growing-up experiences with the unionization and all those kinds of things and then, shortly after that the administrative staff unionized. Those began to mature us in a way, so we’re a different kind of organization today. Those that have been around for a lot of years think, “Boy, wouldn’t it be great to go back to that.” You can’t go back.

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What you’ve got to do is go forward, try to nurture a culture that does maintain some of those same kinds of excitements that we had then, to nurture a culture that maintains a spirit of willingness to take some risks, and maintain a culture that recognizes the only reason we do anything around here is for students and to make sure that we’re developing things that respond to the community’s needs. I think the way we look at community today is very different. We’re looking at a global community. We’re not just looking at Tompkins and Cortland Counties. We’re not as insular as we were in those early years. We’re looking much more regionally, much more globally, I think, in terms of how we have to prepare students and the kind of students that we can prepare for our communities and the workforce and transfer opportunities.

One of the challenges that we’ve talked about recently and we’re trying to do a little better at, is to have more common ties when we can come together as a college community and celebrate. We had a wonderful opportunity last year with this technology award that we won. We all got together one afternoon, had some beer and soft drinks and some goodies and just celebrated together. But it’s not like it was in the ‘70s, where every Friday afternoon we celebrated that we got through another week. We were younger then and drinking ages were different then and we, I’m sure all in retrospect, agree that we drank too much back than, but that was kind of the social culture of the time.

NC: There was always something new and exciting happening in that week to celebrate.

CH: For me it was as a rookie faculty member to be able to go down to the Legion after a board meeting, or later on to go down to the Galleon here and hang out with the people that were making the decisions affecting this college. It was pretty heady stuff to a young teacher to just listen to those conversations and throw in an opinion here and there once in a while.. So you can’t recreate those years and those of us that were there can reflect on them and reflect on the goodness and the joy and the fun that those years had for us but I think it’d be wrong to think that’s what we want to do is to go back and recreate that.

I think we have different kinds of challenges in terms of the culture we need to create for all these new people that are coming in here. And out of these new folks it is my hope and prayer that we will have our future leadership of this college. I’d like to believe that right now, in the wave of faculty we’re hiring here in the next two years, there is a future president of this college. [I would like to believe] that we really can grow our own, so that the future leadership of this college will be people that have matured professionally within a culture that appreciates that culture and want to continue to work toward allowing it to flourish and not come in with some different agenda and transform the thing in a lot of different ways.

NC: Let’s not turn into a four-year college. Culture is a big word. I heard a comment not too long ago about the advertising for students from other areas, and yet it’s our tax money. And yet, getting our students aware of the global community is important.

CH: I get that comment once in a while. If I get a chance to sit down with people who will say that and talk about the economics of what it takes to run a community college, I can usually get them to see another viewpoint. But there are different attitudes. I had a young lady in my office the other day that didn’t get into our nursing program and yet some people from another country

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were in it and that wasn’t right because she was a local taxpayer and all this kind of thing. I think I come back really to the almost passion I have that our young students coming out of the school districts oftentimes don’t have an opportunity to interact with people from other countries. And we have an obligation, I think, to provide those opportunities. Sometimes those opportunities are nothing more than sitting in a class with people from other countries, getting to know them, going out and hanging out, having a cup of coffee or hanging out with them in some social event or something of that sort. Anecdotally, we know that every once in a while one of those people will get invited back home to somebody else’s country for a holiday or something and have an experience that you couldn’t describe it in monetary terms. It’s just a wonderful experience for people, a life-changing experience in many cases. And there’s an opportunity, there is a demand for people to come here from other countries because they want an American experience. The community college concept in other countries is getting to be more and more understood and, through our partnerships, we’ve been able to accommodate that. If we don’t do it, somebody else is, so why not? And it is financially rewarding to the college. It does add revenues to the college that then help us do other kinds of things as well. In addition, I think it’s contributing to the overall social fabric of this college.

When I was inaugurated, the audience included the vice president of Peru, a vice-rector of a university down in the Dominican Republic and the president of a university in Spain. We did that deliberately because we really wanted to make a statement that thinking globally is the future of what we need to be doing as a community college. I’ve had people in these communities as recently as about three months ago debating with me about Hu Bahar’s community college and what it meant at that time. I’m talking about these communities, such as the Lee Road folks who don’t like us having student housing up here, but this college has moved on from that.

NC: And changed a lot of that direction.

CH: It’s changed in a lot of ways and Hu Bahar’s community college was the ‘70s and the ‘80s and, if we were still doing that today, we wouldn’t be serving these communities with the kinds of workforce, the kinds of training, the kinds of cultural experiences that these students today deserve if they’re going to be prepared to meet that global marketplace. So those kinds of thoughts, those kinds of opinions, still prevail. I believe, however, we are serving these communities well with the direction we’re heading and there is certainly a lot of support for it in the leadership in the communities

NC: OK, I’ve learned a great deal this afternoon and I appreciate it. Anything you’d like to add? I think we’ve covered a lot of territory and I appreciate your coming.

CH: Probably I think most of our focus was on those first years, even though we drifted into somewhat more recent years, but as you get into the ‘80s and ‘90s, there are a lot of good things to be talked about. We can do that another day.

NC: From the point of view of the archives, I may very well come back at you for another one.

CH: Yeah, that’d be fun.

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