University of California Berkeley 



Regional Oral History Office University of California 

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 

Library School Oral History Series 

and 
University of California, Source of Community Leaders Series 



Patrick G. Wilson 

PHILOSOPHER OF INFORMATION: AN ECLECTIC IMPRINT ON 
BERKELEY S SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP, 1965-1991 



With an Introduction by 
Howard D. White 



Interviews Conducted by 

Laura McCreery 

in 1999 



Copyright 2000 by The Regents of the University of California 



Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading 
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of 
northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a method of 
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a 
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well- 
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the 
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for 
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected 
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and 
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, 
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete 
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in 
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, 
and irreplaceable. 



************************************ 



All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement 
between The Regents of the University of California and Patrick G. 
Wilson dated August 13, 1999. The manuscript is thereby made 
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the 
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The 
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part 
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written 
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University 
of California, Berkeley. 

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be 
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Bancroft Library, 
Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and 
should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, 
anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. 
The legal agreement with Patrick G. Wilson requires that he be 
notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond. 



It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: 



Patrick G. Wilson, "Philosopher of 
Information: An Eclectic Imprint on 
Berkeley s School of Librarianship, 1965- 
1991," an oral history conducted in 1999 
by Laura McCreery, Regional Oral History 
Office, The Bancroft Library, University 
of California, Berkeley, 2000. 



Copy no. 




Patrick G. Wilson, dean of the School of 
Librarianship, early 1970s. 



Cataloging Information 



WILSON, Patrick G. (b. 1927) Librarian 

Philosopher of Information: An Eclectic Imprint on Berkeley s School of 
Librarianship, 1965-1991, 2000, xi, 240 pp. 

Childhood and early musical achievements, Santa Cruz, CA; UC Berkeley, 
1945-1949, student jobs in the main library, influence of Richard Teggart; 
School of Librarianship, 1952-1953, positions as map librarian, South Asia 
bibliographer for the Modern India Project; Ph.D. in philosophy at 
Berkeley, 1960; teaching philosophy at UCLA, 1960-1965; Berkeley s School 
of Librarianship (later School of Library and Information Studies), since 
1965: deanship of Raynard C. Swank, the Institute of Library Research, 
Wilson s deanship, 1970-1975; changing the school and its curricula in an 
atmosphere of unrest; writing on bibliographical organization and control, 
library and information policy, and cognitive authority; serving on 
Academic Senate committees, chairing the Committee on Courses of 
Instruction; thoughts on librarianship as intellectual platform, 
librarianship as a "science", the future of librarianship; honored at 
Scandinavian conference, 1993. 

Introduction by Howard D. White, Professor, College of Information 
Science and Technology, Drexel University. 

Interviewed 1999 by Laura McCreery for the Library School Oral 
History Series. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft 
Library, University of California, Berkeley. 



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The Regional Oral History Office wishes to express its thanks 

to the following individuals and organizations 

whose encouragement and support have made possible 

the Library School Oral History Series 



Patricia Anderson Farquar Memorial Fund 
Morley S. Farquar, Patron 

Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment 

Alumni Association of the School of Librarianship and 
School of Library and Information Studies 

Corliss S. Lee 



In Memory of Patricia Anderson Farquar: 

John Baleix 

Willa K. Baum 

Robert L. Briscoe 

Irene Frew 
Jean E. Herring 

Lester Kurd 

Jean C. Marks 

Rebecca D. Mclntyre 

Sharon A. Moore 

Corinne Rath j ens 

Marlene B. Riley 

Juanita S. Vidalin 



In memory of Fredric J. Mosher: 

Ricki A. Blau 

Brigitte W. Dickinson 

Charlotte A. Tyler 



TABLE OF CONTENTS Patrick G. Wilson 



PREFACE i 

INTRODUCTION by Howard D. White v 

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Laura McCreery ix 

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xi 

I FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, EARLY EDUCATION 1 
California Roots: Great-Grandparents, Grandparents, and Parents 1 
Early Life and Schooling in California during the Great 

Depression 3 

Discovering the Piano; Earning Money as a Musician 8 

High School; Early Philosophical Interests; First Library Job 11 
Musical Directions in High School; World War II; Impressions of 

Libraries 17 

II COLLEGE, 1945-1949; MAIN LIBRARY JOBS; GRADUATE STUDY 23 
Summer Job in a Cannery; Getting to UC Berkeley 23 
Philosophy, Art, and Identity; Life Lessons Inside and Outside 

the Classroom 26 

Leaving Music Behind 31 

Student Jobs in the Main Library, from 1946 33 

Visits Home to Santa Cruz; Family Contact over the Years 39 
Political Interests; Loyalty Oath Controversy; Early Graduate 

Study, 1949-1950 40 
Principal Library Assistant in the Main Library; Discovering Maps 45 
"Just the Next Thing": Attending the School of Librarianship, 

1952-1953 48 

Reference Librarian at the General Reference Service, 1953-1954 54 

Additional Recollections of the Map Library 55 
Librarian and Bibliographer of the Modern India Project, 

1954-1957 58 

Returning to the Graduate Study of Philosophy, 1957-1960 66 

Teaching Philosophy at UCLA, 1960-1965 75 

Seeking a Niche for Writing and Publishing 77 

III THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP AT BERKELEY 81 
Returning to Berkeley and an Offer to Join the Librarianship 

Faculty 81 

Teaching Cataloging and Classification; The Rush to Tenure 84 

The Deanship of Raynard C. Swank 90 

Sabbatical Leave, 1966-1967; Writing Two Kinds of Power 95 

Campus Atmosphere of the Late Sixties; Effects on the School 99 

Recollections of University Librarians and School Colleagues 101 
The Institute of Library Research: Applying "Science" to 

Librarianship 105 



South Hall and the School s Visibility; Swank s Resignation 

as Dean, 1970 112 

Becoming Acting Dean of the School of Librarianship 116 
First Steps as Dean; Curriculum Revision in an Atmosphere of 

Unrest 119 

New Faculty of the Early Seventies 123 

Thoughts on the Acting and Permanent Deanships, 1970-1975 128 

Doctoral and Post-Master s Programs; Concerns with Students 131 

Summation of Deanship 137 

IV THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP AND THE PROFESSION 139 
Big Picture: Contemplating the School s Place in California 

Higher Education 139 
Curricula for the Times: Doctoral and Joint-Degree Master s 

Programs 141 

Influences of the ALA and Other Schools 144 
Representing the School: Interactions with Berkeley Colleagues 147 

Other Sources of School Funding 150 

School Leadership Issues: Gender, Tenure, Teaching Loads 154 

Assistant and Associate Deans 157 

A Terminal Appointment and a Libel Suit 158 

Ethics and Values: What Role for Librarians? 163 

The Future of Librarianship: Views in 1973 and 1999 167 

Student Job Placement; Foreign Language Requirements 171 

Virginia Pratt and the Library School Library 173 

The ALA and Accreditation 175 

Mentoring Doctoral Students 178 

A Second Book: Public Knowledge, Private Ignorance 181 

Additional Summations of Deanship 184 

V CODA: LIBRARY AND INFORMATION STUDIES 187 
Deanship of Michael K. Buckland 187 
Promotion to Full Professor; The Salary Scale 189 
Research Interest in Cognitive Authority; Writing a Third Book 192 
New Courses of the 1980s 197 
A Series of Short-Term Deans for the School 200 
Retirement, 1991 206 
"New" School: The Rise of SIMS 208 
Serving on Academic Senate Committees, 1985-1988 215 
Librarianship as Intellectual Platform; Scandinavian Conference 220 
Bookends: Concert (1945) to Conference (1993) 230 

TAPE GUIDE 232 

APPENDIX 

Patrick G. Wilson Curriculum Vitae 233 

INDEX 237 



SERIES PREFACE --Library School Oral History Series 



The Library School Oral History Series documents the history of 
librarianship education at the University of California, Berkeley. 
Through transcribed and edited oral history interviews, the series 
preserves personal recollections of those involved with Berkeley s 
graduate library school since the 1930s. In the process, the interviews 
touch on the history of libraries in the Bay Area and California and on 
remarkable changes to the profession of librarianship over time. 

Certain lines of inquiry are central to all the interviews. What 
were the changes to the School of Librarianship (later the School of 
Library and Information Studies) over the years? How were decisions 
made, and by whom? Historically, what is the proper role of and 
training for librarians? How has that changed? What, in the opinion of 
those interviewed, is the public s view of librarianship? 

Library education at Berkeley spans nearly a full century. In 
1901 Melvil Dewey, founding director of the New York State Library 
School and author of the Dewey Decimal classification system for books, 
wrote to University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, 
encouraging him to start a library school on the West Coast. Berkeley 
offered the first summer courses in librarianship in 1902, and summer 
training continued intermittently until 1918, when library education 
joined the curriculum of the regular academic year. 

In 1921, a Department of Librarianship was authorized for the 
College of Letters and Science, with instruction to begin in 1922. The 
state library school in Sacramento, which had offered courses since 
1914, closed its doors in 1921, turning over the training of librarians 
to the University of California. 

In 1926, Berkeley s departmental program became a separate 
graduate School of Librarianship, which existed until 1946 under the 
leadership of the founding dean, Sydney B. Mitchell. In the early 
years, with a staff of two core faculty members, Edith M. Coulter and 
Delia J. Sisler, Mitchell offered both a graduate Certificate in 
Librarianship and a second-year course leading to the Master of Arts 
degree. Generally the school accepted only fifty students each year 
from among several hundred applicants . 

In 1933, under new accreditation standards, the American Library 
Association named Berkeley a "Type I" school, one of only five so 
designated because of its graduate degree offerings. In 1937 an 
endowment grant of $150,000 from the Carnegie Corporation assured the 
school s place among American educational institutions. 



ii 



After World War II, during the deanship of J. Periam Danton (1946- 
1961), the school grew dramatically in size of faculty and number of 
students, while expanding and specializing every area of its programs. 
The graduate certificate was replaced in 1947 with a Bachelor of Library 
Science degree (BLS) and in 1955 with a Master of Library Science degree 
(MLS); Ph.D. and Doctor of Library Science (DLS) degree programs were 
inaugurated in 1954; and the school developed its own Library School 
Library as a branch of the main Doe Library. 

With the deanship of Raynard Coe Swank (1963-1970) came the 
school s first attention to computers and automation for libaries, an 
issue which eventually found its way into the curriculum and was taken 
up also through the school s Institute of Library Research. Swank s 
leadership culminated in the school s move from its quarters inside Doe 
Library to the venerable South Hall, one of two original buildings of 
the Berkeley campus (and the only one remaining). Throughout the 
seventies and eighties, under the leadership of Patrick Wilson and 
Michael Buckland, significant changes came to the curriculum and the 
faculty, as reflected in the eventual change of name to the School of 
Library and Information Studies . 

In the late eighties and nineties, the school and its curricula 
were evaluated as part of a larger review of the campus and its mission 
as a research university. The school had only one permanent dean during 
this period, Robert C. Berring, who served half time from 1986 to 1989. 
Much of the assessment took place under a series of acting deans. 
Eventually the School of Library and Information Studies ceased 
admitting new students, while the campus administration contemplated 
whether it had a future. 

Although the threat of complete dissolution was beaten back, in 
part owing to the efforts of alumni and their "Save Our School" 
campaign, the school was, in effect, compelled to close down its 
operations. It reopened as the School of Information Management and 
Systems (SIMS), which graduated its first master s students in 1999. 
Although a few faculty members have remained, the new school s 
curriculum bears little resemblance to the old, as it offers an 
electronically based, rather than print-oriented, training. SIMS did 
take over the library school s endowment and its location in South Hall. 
As of January 2000, SIMS also administers the alumni association that 
incorporates graduates of the former school. To date it has not sought 
accreditation from the American Library Association. 

Meanwhile, schools of librarianship across the country have 
closed, changed their missions, or been subsumed under other graduate 
schools. The library systems devised so carefully by nineteenth and 
twentieth century founders have given wayin academic, public, and 
special libraries of every kindto new ways of recording and managing 
collections and providing service to patrons. The Regional Oral History 



iii 

Office s Library School Oral History Series provides a strong narrative 
complement to written records of a key educational institution at a 
crucial time. With traditional education for librarianship fast 
disappearing, this series, like ROHO s broader University History 
Series, can serve as an enlightening case study of changes in education 
occurring throughout the United States . 

A significant gift from Morley S. Farquar in memory of his wife, 
Patricia Anderson Farquar 53, allowed this series to begin in the fall 
of 1998. Additional gifts from the Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment 
and the Alumni Association of the former School of Librarianship /Library 
and Information Studies, along with important individual donations, have 
further supported the collection of interviews. 

A key to creating this series has been the longevity of the 
individuals selected to be narrators. The first four interviewees for 
the series were born in 1914 or earlier and were between eighty- five and 
ninety years old at the time of their interviews. Two of them were 
students at the school in the 1930s, and their recollections shed light 
on the founding faculty members. Two of them had substantial experience 
in California public libraries. Three had long careers on the School of 
Librarianship faculty. Other narrators in the series will add their 
experiences as students, faculty members, and deans. Taken together, 
these oral histories will offer a rich history of librarianship 
education throughout the twentieth century and beyond. 

Special thanks go to the wise and thoughtful team of advisers for 
the Library School Oral History Series: Michael K. Buckland, Julia J. 
Cooke, Mary Kay Duggan, Debra L. Hansen, Robert D. Harlan, J. R. K. Kantor 
(who also proofread every transcript), Corliss S. Lee, and Charlotte 
Nolan. Special thanks go also to those whose ideas, assistance, and 
goodwill helped the series come to life: Willa K. Baum, Anne G. Lipow, 
Christine Orr, Shannon Page, Suzanne Riess, and Leticia Sanchez. 

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to 
augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library s materials on the 
history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are 
available for research use in The Bancroft Library and in the UCLA 
Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of 
Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of 
Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, 
University of California, Berkeley. 

Laura McCreery, Project Director 
Library School Oral History Series 

August 2000 

Regional Oral History Office 

The Bancroft Library 

University of California, Berkeley 



iv 



Library School Oral History Series 
December 2000 



Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie, A Career in Public Libraries and at UC Berkeley s 
School of Librarianship, 1937-1975, 2000 

J. Periam Danton, Dean and Professor at UC Berkeley s School of Librarianship, 
1946-1976, 2000 

Fredric J. Mosher, Reference and Rare Books: Three Decades at UC Berkeley s 
School of Librarianship, 1950-1981, 2000 

Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, "A Dukedom Large Enough": Forty Years in Northern 
California s Public and Academic Libraries, 1936-1976, 2000 

Patrick G. Wilson, Philosopher of Information: An Eclectic Imprint on 
Berkeley s School of Librarianship, 1965-1991, 2000 



Oral Histories in Process 



Fay M. Blake 
Robert D. Harlan 



INTRODUCTION by Howard D. White 



From typewriter days, 1976, I have a scuffed carbon copy of the 
letter I sent to Michael Buckland, then dean of the UC Berkeley s School 
of Librarianship, when Pat Wilson, his predecessor as dean, was up for 
promotion to full professor. Having completed my dissertation under 
Wilson in 1974, I had been an assistant professor of library and 
information science (L&IS) at Drexel University for less than two years. 

"I feel I owe Wilson a great debt," I wrote. "Quite simply, I 
believe he is at present the most interesting thinker in American 
librarianship. In reach and grasp of mind, I know of no one in the 
information science community who can touch him, despite the many clever 
people there. He should be made a full professor and encouraged to 
continue such pursuits as the Foundations of Knowledge course he 
developed a few years back, and his seminars. In introductory-level 
courses he may be caviar for the general, but in seminars and with 
people who respond to his philosophic bent, he is incredibly good--a 
permanent influence on their lives. I know in my case I still see most 
problems of bibliographic control through his eyes: I reread Two Kinds 
of Power and even old lecture notes from his classes with a continual 
sense of discovery and pleasure. (Once when I was alone in London for a 
long time, I would turn to 2KoP as if it were a friend, and I never felt 
disappointed.) I understand now that he is working on another book; I 
hope someone in Berkeley will urge him to send it to a publisher that 
will publicize it properly, because he is still too little known. He 
really thinks about the words he uses ( relevance, 1 "subject, 1 
information policy, etc.); he really cares about using them well. As 
a result he has a certain distinction in our fuzzy field solely as a 
prose stylist, and of course there is more to him than that. If he 
continues to write, he will probably produce a magisterial body of work 
--by which I mean work that is read and respected outside library 
schools, work that will attract people interested in language and 
science and philosophy. 

"Let me comment briefly on another matter--his kindness and 
helpfulness to me as a student. When I was in the master s program his 
encouragement led me to do some original research on bureaucratic means 
of publicizing the American technology transfer program. That research 
is still of value to me today; I plan to build on it and eventually 
publish it in my present job. Technology transfer is not one of 
Wilson s primary interests, but he subtly created a climate in which I 
wanted to explore on his behalf; he has a gift for making people want to 
share their intellectual excitements with him. I can think of no finer 
tribute for a teacher. 



vi 

"He was unfailingly right in pacing me through my dissertation. 
He did not nag when he could have; he always made me feel my work was 
worth doing; his criticism, e.g., when my tone was shrill or I belabored 
a point, was always fair and utilizable. On several of my earlier 
papers, his generous remarks were great for my morale, and this is no 
small thing in the long grind of a degree program, as I m sure you are 
aware. On the time or two when I needed his understanding in minor 
personal jams, he gave it, and did all he could to assist me into the 
bargain. That quality, too, makes him a fine teacher and a fine person. 
But mostly, I suppose, I am grateful to him for drawing me into 
teaching, which I love, but which I might have been too backward to 
enter without his concrete help." 

That letter is now older than some of my students, but it still 
holds true; those who knew Wilson at Berkeley, including such 
distinguished graduates of the doctoral program as Marcia Bates, Michael 
Carpenter, David Blair, Mark Rorvig, and Brian O Connor, could add their 
own stories but their sentiments, I think, would be essentially the 
same. Wilson is the real thing. As an administrator, he led the school 
through difficult and turbulent times, as his memoirs will show. Unlike 
many administrators, however, he is capable of genuinely brilliant 
scholarship. His papers and his great trio of books --Two Kinds of 
Power; Public Knowledge, Private Ignorance; and Secondhand Knowledge- 
are permanent additions to the L&IS canon; they put plain language at 
the service of subtle arguments, to Jamesian effect. Once you have read 
him on key L&IS concepts such as "relevance," you realize that you 
cannot go back to what passes for analysis elsewhere; you are changed. 

The quality I associate with him most is intellectual energy. He 
does not write like a journalist, but he has the indefatigability of a 
good journalist in pursuing his chosen themes. In my mind s eye I see 
him conducting a literature search as a physical quest: the call is to 
raise your bottom from the chair and track down attractive writings in 
the stacks, even if the stacks are blocks or miles away. I am just now 
publishing an article on individual citation patterns in which he is one 
of the citers studied; the number of different authors he has cited in 
his articles and books over time approaches 1,000, and they come from 
many different disciplines. Compare that with the languid scholarship 
of today s digital libraries people, for whom a reference to Vannevar 
Bush represents high historical consciousness. 

He was the very first teacher I had in library school; I walked 
into his class "Principles of Bibliographic Organization" in Dwinelle 
Hall on a January morning in 1968 and, having forgotten to bring a 
notebook, took my notes on the back of the leaflet I had been handed 
coming in through Sather Gate; the headline on the front, typical of 
those febrile days, was "The Shit Has Hit the Fan, Baby!" Wilson was a 
good lecturerearnest but also playful in a style that might be called 
Anglo-American Analytic, with a crooked smile and the slightly odd habit 



vii 

of sometimes grasping his ankle and resting his knee on the front table, 
which gave him a crane- like stance as he talked. He asked us to be 
"brutal" in our course evaluations. Never feeling the need for 
brutality, I went on to take a two-quarter seminar with him in the 
master s program and the above-mentioned "Foundations of Knowledge" 
course in the doctoral program, along with one or two independent 
studies. I ask myself now, "What did he teach me?" It is not something 
easily captured, but I think it has to do with the timelessness of the 
problems at the interface where human beings encounter literatures. 

Nowadays we should call it the human-computer-literature 
interface, but no one influenced by Wilson is likely to believe that 
computer technology will soon make the problems disappear. Part of his 
life was spent as a South Asian Studies bibliographer, and he knows 
something of Indian science and technology all the way back to Sanskrit. 
That is conducive to taking the long view when yet another automator 
reinvents indexing. ("Mortimer Taube," as he once dryly put it, 
speaking about the Uniterm man, "invented words.") It was not that he 
ignored his contemporaries in information science; he probably read them 
more diligently than they read each other. It was just that, as a 
humanist learned in philosophy and history, he also knew that certain 
questions are deeply unsettled and that ancestors like, for example, 
Leibnitz (whose other career was librarianship) or Ada, countess of 
Lovelace, (Lord Byron s mathematical daughter) might still have 
something to say to current researchers in L&IS. In that first course I 
took from him, he encouraged us to read the testimony on British Museum 
library catalog construction that Parliamentary commissions heard from 
Augustus De Morgan and Anthony Panizzi in the mid-nineteenth century; 
and he assigned early-twentieth-century papers on bibliographic matters 
by W. Stanley Jevons and George Sarton--not your standard fare in 
information science or library science. In lonely London, August of 
1970, I remember fighting to stay awake over E. W. Hulme s Statistical 
Bibliography in Relation to the Growth of Modern Civilizationdull 
book, hot day, Science Museum Library- -but that 1922 title had been on 
Wilson s list of recommended readings for his seminar the previous year, 
and I wanted to be literatethat was the way he made you feel. 

Hulme s slim volume, incidentally, was my foretaste of what in 
1969 had been renamed "bibliometrics, " a field not strongly identified 
with Berkeley before or since. Wilson promoted acquaintance with the 
full reaches of the discipline, however, even with parts he did not 
thrill to personally. Having myself gone on to dabble in bibliometrics, 
specifically in co-citation analysis, I should confess that I had never 
heard of co-anything until, in Wilson s seminar, a fellow student 
proposed a study of "co-circulated books"--that is, he thought that 
meaningful patterns might emerge if one gathered data on library books 
that were repeatedly checked out together. Given a sufficiently large 
sample of circulations, the idea has a certain plausibility; I believe 
it has since been followed up ("co-purchase" patterns are all the rage 



viii 

among today s data-miners). The point is that Wilson inspired such 
creativity. My own first stab at an empirical study, the one on 
publicity of federal technology transfer services, was made in that 
seminar. My methodology could hardly have differed more from his: he 
constructed elegant philosophical arguments; I mailed questionnaires to 
the field offices of the Small Business Administration! Yet Wilson 
respected individual talents and understood that their development 
cannot be forced. He never gave the impression of trying to clone 
himself. 

That may be just as well, because he is virtually unduplicatable. 
In 1993 some Scandinavian information scientists held a conference in 
his honor in Sweden, and I heard through the grapevine that he was 
pleased. He has a respectable lifetime citation record and is 
surprisingly big on the Web; a search on his name shows his ideas 
turning up in many Web publications ; Sue Easun and others have even 
dedicated a site to his work. Nevertheless, he remains insufficiently 
known and in urgent need of presentation beyond L&IS; his writings can 
bear the closest scrutiny by discerning outsiders. I wish our field had 
more like him. But of course it does not and will not. 

Howard D. White 

College of Information Science and Technology 

Drexel University 

June 2000 
Philadelphia, PA 



ix 



INTERVIEW HISTORY by Laura McCreery 



In July 1999 I made an appointment and went, with some 

anticipation, to meet Patrick G. Wilson at his office in South Hall. My 
series advisers had suggested that no oral history of Berkeley s School 
of Librarianship (later School of Library and Information Studies) could 
be complete without his remarks. One adviser, his former student, had 
described him as a "philosopher of information." Would this 
philosopher-librarian consent to be interviewed? 

The morning was hot, and as I offered Professor Wilson a sweaty 
hand, I saw immediately his openness and curiosity. We sat, and I began 
telling him about the project to document his former school. He 
listened intently, eyes darting about, and when his great laugh rolled 
forth and filled the room, I began to hope he d say yes. 

Professor Wilson did agree to participate, and during the months 
of August and September 1999, I came every Friday morning to South Hall. 
At my request, he would sit quite near the work table and microphone, 
often folding his slim frame onto one corner of his chair. Apart from 
the flickering eyes, only his hands were active, the long fingers 
alternately rising and resting as he spoke. 

As Professor Wilson told his story, he addressed familiar topics 
in new ways. Often, gently, he put my mundane expectations to rest, 
presenting instead a stream of ideas borne along on an ethos of 
formality and intellectual rigor. We laughed often. In the course of 
eight absorbing interview sessions, we produced twelve hours of tape. 

A California native and talented musician, Professor Wilson earned 
his own living as a church organist from about the age of twelve. He 
discovered an interest in both libraries and philosophy before 
graduating from Santa Cruz High School in 1945. 

While an undergraduate at Berkeley (1945-1949), he began his long 
association with the main Doe Library. After taking a B.L.S. at the 
School of Librarianship in 1953, he joined the library s General 
Reference Service for a year and then served as librarian and 
bibliographer for South Asia Studies (1954-1959). 

Professor Wilson resumed his study of philosophy, completing the 
Ph.D. in 1960. He taught philosophy at UCLA before joining Berkeley s 
School of Librarianship faculty in 1965. From 1970 until 1975 he was 
dean of the school; he later served as acting dean from 1989 until his 
retirement in 1991. Although few of his colleagues in the school lent 
their talents to general affairs of the campus, Professor Wilson rose to 
the occasion when asked, eventually chairing the Academic Senate s 



Committee on Courses of Instruction from 1985 to 1987 . His publications 
on information science and cognitive authority achieved international 
renown, culminating in a conference on his work held in Sweden in 1993. 

Having enjoyed a lifelong interest in different kinds of texts, 
Professor Wilson became an eager collaborator on this oral history 
volume. After some thought, he elected to edit the draft transcript 
very lightly, correcting only a few errors of meaning. Thus the 
finished work retains the flavor of the spoken word and the freshness of 
unprepared remarks. Those readers wishing to enjoy Professor Wilson s 
abundant laughter, however, will have to go to the tapes. 



Laura McCreery 
Interviewer /Editor 



June 2000 

Regional Oral History Office 

The Bancroft Library 

University of California, Berkeley 



xi 



Regional Oral History Office 
Room 486 The Bancroft Library 



University of California 
Berkeley, California 94720 



BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION 
(Please write clearly. Use black ink.) 



Your full name 




Date of birth 



^2 \ 



Father s full name 1) (&\n $&lt; 
Occupation 



Mother s full name 
Occupation _ 
Your spouse^ 



Occupation 



Your children 



Birthplace 



Birthplace 



L- T\ 



Birthplace 







Where did you grow up? 

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INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK G. WILSON 



I FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, EARLY EDUCATION 

[Interview 1: August 6, 1999] ## 

California Roots: Great-Grandparents, Grandparents and Parents 



McCreery: This is Laura McCreery speaking and I m interviewing Patrick G. 
Wilson at his office in South Hall for our oral history series 
on the library school. Good morning. 

Wilson: Good morning to you. 

McCreery: I wonder if you would start off today by stating your date of 
birth and telling me a little bit about where you were born. 

Wilson: Yes. I was born on the 29th of December, 1927, in Santa Cruz, 
California, where I grew up and lived until I left there when I 
was seventeen and came to Berkeley. My father, David Wilson, 
was a Calif ornian. I don t know where he was born, but some 
place in California. My mother, Lilah Dale, was a Calif ornian, 
and I think she was born in Santa Cruz, but I m not certain 
about that . 

Their parents are of some interest. My father s father, 
Adam Wilson, came to the United States from Glasgow, in 
Scotland, sometime in the late nineteenth century. I don t 
know when. My father was born in 1906, and he was the third of 
four children. I expect that Adam came somewhere in the 1880s 
or 1870s, something like that. He married Maggie Martin, who 
was a Calif ornian. She was the daughter, however, of a German 
woman and an English man. The German woman, Emma Hoffman, was 
born in a covered wagon crossing the United States somewhere in 
the 1860s. I don t know when, don t have any def initethere 
were no birth certificates, [laughter] 



## This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or 
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript. 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



She s important in my life because I lived with her, old 
Emma Hoffman Martin. She married Thomas Martin, an Englishman 
who came to the United States from England in--I don t know 
when-- 1870s, eighties, [and] about him I know nothing except 
the family legend had it that he had been a gardener for Queen 
Victoria. So there s an Englishman and a German woman on that 
side. 

And on the other side of the family, my mother s parents-- 
her father was John Dale, definitely an English name. Again, I 
don t know where he came from, but we thought he came to 
California from West Virginia. I don t know when. He was 
married to Creola--funny names--Creola Hazlett. English, very 
English. And the Hazletts--! don t know anything about John 
Dale s parents but I knew Creola Hazlett Dale s parents. I met 
them, and they were fascinating. I don t know when they came 
to California, but they were living in Mendocino County in the 
1870s or eighties. 

They came to Santa Cruz in 1906 and either opened or bought 
into a hotel in Santa Cruz. I don t know how long they stayed 
there. They left Santa Cruz and went to Los Angeles and again 
the family story is that there my great-grandmother Hazlett- -I 
don t know her first name- -was a real estate agent. She was a 
real estate dealer, whereas her husband was a socialist who 
spent his time out on sidewalks handing out socialist tracts, 
[laughter] It made a great story. I don t know whether it s 
true or not. [laughter] 

But it all came to a typically California ending, because 
the story has it that she gave all of her money, of which she 
had accumulated a lot, to Aimee Semple McPherson, the famous 
scam artist and evangelist. [laughter] And so the Hazletts 
ended up living in a tent in the mountains in a national 
forest. I met them one time. I was very tiny. I was, I 
think, maybe six or seven years old, but I met them. 

While they were up there you met them? 

In the mountains, someplace. Somewhere in the mountains. I 
don t know where. So I m a Calif ornian with some fairly deep 
roots. And that Aimee Semple McPherson connection is really 
the clincher. You had a chance for a fortune, but you lost it 



because they gave the money to Aimee Semple McPherson. 
a kind of distinction about that. [laughter] 



There s 



I agree. Yes, these deep California roots are rather rare. 
Well, yes. I think they really are. They really are. 



Early Life and Schooling in California during the Great 
Depression 



McCreery: Well, how did you come to live with your paternal grandmother? 

Wilson: Well, my mother had five children, but she kept giving them 

away. She was married before she married my father. I don t 
know the name of her first husband. She had three children, 
two girls and a boy. She separated from the husband and simply 
gave the children up for adoption by somebody else--I think 
adoption, I m not sure. In any case, the boy [Theodore C. 
Mason] grew upanother nice connection, the boy sank at Pearl 
Harbor but was not drowned. He was on a battleship in Pearl 
Harbor on December 7, 1941. He was in the navy. I think it 
was the battleship California, I ve forgotten now. He later 
wrote a book about this, I forget the name. I think Battleship 
Sailor or something. He went to work in advertising. I met 
him once when I was living in Los Angeles, much later. I never 
saw the girls, my half-sisters. I don t know who they are. 

Anyway, my mother then married my father, but when I was 
born I was almost immediately given away to my father s mother. 
And then taken back, and given away, and taken back, and given 
away. Back and forth for the first six or seven years of my 
life. That s not good for child development. At least no 
child development psychologist would say that was a good thing 
to do. But my life was split between the two. 

Father and Mother divorced, then remarried, then divorced 
again. At the final divorce--! think it was the final divorce 
--my mother was given custody of me. She had legal custody, 
and she got custody payments from my father. But she didn t 
want me to live with her, so she sent me off to live with my 
grandmother and kept the custody payments. [laughter] So it 
was not a good relationship. 

But my grandmother and her mother lived together then, the 
two old women. Now Emma Hoffman Martin and Maggie Martin 
Wilson lived together in a big house, and I lived with them. 

McCreery: Tell me a little bit more about your grandmother and what kind 
of a person she was. 

Wilson: She was a silent and depressed woman. A nervous, timid, silent 
and depressed woman. But she kept going. She was, I think, 
constantly bossed around by her mother, the German mother who 
was not silent and was not timid and was not depressed, 
[laughter] was a very powerful, strong, old woman. One of the 



questions that was never answered- -well no, one of the 
questions that was answered was, where was her husband, my 
grandmother s husband? Where was Adam Wilson? He was in the 
madhouse. He was in an insane asylum, in Agnews State 
Hospital, as it then was. It still exists, but it no longer 
works in the way it used to work. He died in the madhouse. I 
never met him. I never saw him. And there was some suspicion 
on the part of my father s sisters that he had been railroaded 
into the insane asylum by his mother-in-law, Emma Martin, the 
tough--and given the kind of passive and timid character of my 
grandmother, this seemed--well, plausible anyway. Not 
something you would write off as wholly impossible and 
unbelievable. It was believable. So there we were. 

McCreery: And did you have another sibling? 

Wilson: Yes, I had a younger brother [Tom Wilson]. He was three years 
younger than me and he stayed with my mother, though as he told 
me only quite recently, he always felt as if he were a boarder 
and notreluctantly, he was kept there. But he turned out all 
right, psychologically all right anyway. So there were five 
children, I was the fourth of five children. 

McCreery: Did you see your brother much growing up? 

Wilson: Yes. My father saw both of us generally once a week on 

weekends. The three of us would get together and we d go to 
the beach, go swimming or go in the mountains or something. So 
yes, we saw each other. 

McCreery: You were growing up, of course, during the height of the 
Depression in those early years. 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: What effects did that have on your family? 

Wilson: Well, it s funny. My father was never unemployed. He was a 
printer. He was a linotype operator and worked for the Santa 
Cruz newspaper, The Sentinel. It still exists. He had a good 
job throughout the Depression. He was a strong member of the 
linotype operators union, which was an AF of L union, and the 
linotype operators were very arrogant unionists . They were the 
literati, they were the intelligentsia of the union movement. 
They read what they printed, and they knew what was going on. 
[laughter] And they were really quite self-conscious about 
this. 



So my father was all right , but the money which he gave for 
my support never got to my grandmother, and how we lived I 
don t know. I don t know what source of moneythere wasn t 
any money that I could see. Here were two old women living in 
a house. There were no checks coming in. I don t know. I 
don t know what the source of income was. We were certainly 
not wealthy. There was no money at all. Remember, these are 
people who were recently off the farm. I think they must-- 
before they came to Santa Cruz--they must have lived in the 
Central Valley, in Turlock or Tulare or Fresno, around there, 
because I know there are relatives of Adam Wilson s in Fresno. 
We visited his sister and brotheryes , I think his brother-- 
when I was very small. My timid grandmother--timid she was, 
but she took me on the train down to Fresno to visit her 
husband s sister and brother. 

McCreery: And you believe they were farming down there? 

Wilson: They weren t. They were elderly by then, but there were other 
relatives who were farming. We lived in Santa Cruz, the two 
old women and me, we lived almost as if we were on a farm. The 
house that we lived in had an outbuilding, which was really a 
barn. It was a smallish barn. We had a large garden, and we 
grew all of our vegetables. There were fruit trees in the 
yard, and we preserved fruit. We put up the fruit and put up 
vegetables too, and so in the barn, or outbuilding, there were 
shelves full of jars of preserved vegetables and preserved 
fruits for wintertime, when there was nothing fresh. 

And the women made all of their own clothes. They d go to 
the dry goods store and buy, you know, yards of material and 
cut it up and make their own clothing. That was something the 
farm people did. My great-grandmother would take me out in the 
backyard, and we would have a chicken for supper. That is to 
say we would chop off the head of the chicken and pluck the 
chicken and eviscerate it, and do exactly what you would do if 
you were living on a farm. So I grew up, essentially, kind of 
halfway between a town boy and a country boy, simply because of 
the people I lived with and the way in which we lived. 

McCreery: What part of town did you live in? 

Wilson: Well, the wrong side of the river. On the east side of the San 
Lorenzo River. Generations later, when I was dean of the 
[library] school, I went down to the UC [Santa Cruz] campus and 
there was some reception and a woman at the reception came up 
to me and said, "Oh, you must be related to the Tanner 
Wilsons." And I said, "Other side of the river." [laughter] 



Now, this was the poorer side of town, not desperately poor, 
but definitely not the upper crust. 

McCreery: Can you tell me a little bit more about your father? 

Wilson: Not much. Yes. He was in some ways a violent and terribly 

neurotic man. He rode a motorcycle and rode with a motorcycle 
gang. Very much later Marlon Brando made famous the motorcycle 
gangs of the sort that did exist in Santa Cruz, Watsonville, 
Salinas, places around there, down the coast. And my father 
rode with those people. He had a terrible accident in, I 
think, 1936. He was riding drunk, and he crashed into a tree 
and broke a leg. He never rode with the gangs after that. 
What to say? 

McCreery: Did he talk to you much about his work? 

Wilson: No, he wouldn t have talked to me at all about his work. I saw 
him in action a couple of times, the business of getting up 
and- -you re dealing with molten lead, you know. This is very 
hot stuff to work with. I know about him that he was very 
unpopular with his coworkers because he was a maniacally driven 
worker. He couldn t work fast enough. He would work faster 
and faster and faster. He was a terribly fast worker, and this 
caused enormous resentment because this is called rate busting. 
This is one of the things that unions exist to forbid, to 
prevent. "Don t do this, slow down Wilson. For God sakes, 
slow down!" [laughter] But he couldn t, he couldn t. He 
wasn t built that way. I know that about him, but I m not even 
sure exactly how I know that . 

But no, he wouldn t have talked to me. I can t remember 
talking to him much about anything. There wasn t much 
communication there. I should say that the Wilsons were a 
taciturn group. We didn t talk. There wasn t any chat. There 
wasn t any chat. We didn t compare views on things. This was 
very much, I think, in the style of Adam Wilson, the Scot, 
maybe. You know, you don t waste any words. 

McCreery: Well, there s something to be said for that. 

Wilson: There is, there is, there is. I find myself coming from a 
culture which is violently different from the culture which 
surrounds me [now], in which people talk--as I m doing now 
[laughter] --talk endlessly on cell phones. We didn t have a 
telephone until I paid to put one in. I had one installed in 
our house when I was, I guess, sixteen. That s relevant. This 
is relevant too, because by that time we were on welfare, and 
we couldn t have the telephone put in without getting 



permission from the welfare people who had to come. I had to 
make it perfectly clear--! don t know how I did that, swear on 
a stack of Bibles or something- -"Look I m going to be paying 
for this. It s my telephone, it s not my grandmother s. It s 
my own personal telephone," which I put in to call up my 
friends in high school. And so this is about the money 
question. Finally there wasn t any money and we were on 
welfare. But I think that stopped and I don t know why. 

So money was always a mystery. But again you see, along 
with the taciturn character, we don t talk about things. There 
are many things we simply do not talk about. We do not talk 
about where your grandfather is. We don t mention your 
grandfather at all, not ever. There are things we simply don t 
talk about. That was the atmosphere in which I grew up. Very 
different from the atmosphere I found elsewhere. 

McCreery: I wonder about when you first started going to school and what 
that was like for you. 

Wilson: Well, yes. I can t remember whether there was a kindergarten 
there. But I know I skipped the second grade, so I went to 
first grade and then I skipped to third grade. Halfway through 
the third grade was when my parents broke up finally, and I 
moved from one school back to my grandmother s house, back to 
the school where I started. 

I was always happy in school. It figured. Teachers liked 
me. I was eager to please them. I liked doing what they liked 
me to do. Teachers kept an eye on people. The principal of 
the elementary school in particular, I know, kept an eye on her 
children. And if it didn t look as though they were doing 
well, she would make inquiries and look around. 

I m told by an aunt of mine that Miss [Edith] Fikes, the 
principal, decided that I didn t look as if I were getting 
enough to eat and made inquiries as to whether I was getting 
enough to eat. I don t know when that was, whether it was when 
I was living with my mother, which is more likely, or less 
likely when I was living with my grandmother. There you were 
fed, not fancy food, but plenty of it. But school was fine. I 
got along very well. 

There was a Japanese girl, Kyoko Okino, in third grade. 
She and I were very consciously in competition to see who was 
smartest. [laughter] That was serious. There was no 
hostility, it was just that we were competing head to head. 

McCreery: That s what kind of a kid you were. 



Wilson: That s right. Yes. She then, of course, disappeared during 
the war. I never heard of her again. 



Discovering the Piano; Earning Money as a Musician 



McCreery: How early did your musical interests begin? 

Wilson: Early. One of my father s three sisters, Florence [Wilson 

Miller], was herself interested in music. She had a baby grand 
piano in her house. We were not rich, but we were also not 
starving poor. Her husband ran an auto repair shop. He did 
well enough. They had their own house and she had this piano. 
There was an upright piano in my grandmother s house, and 
somehow my aunt got the idea that I should play the piano. She 
took me to a piano teacher, and she paid for piano lessons for 
me. And I started very early. I would have been seven years 
old, I guess, maybe seven or eight. And I just took off like a 
flash of lightning. That turned out to be just it. I was 
terrific at that, and so pretty soon I was doing things in 
recitals. 

By the time I finished high school, I was the chief 
musician in Santa Cruz. I was just the star. I gave a big 
recital in--I m sure it must have been in my senior year. 
Again, my music teacher really sponsored all of this. She paid 
for hiring a hall and advertising and so on, which I accepted 
without much thinking about it. Thinking about it later I 
realized, well of course, I was her advertisement. There were 
two main music teachers in Santa Cruz and they were in 
competition for pupils. How do you compete? Well, you show 
that you produce stars. I was her star, and so she showed me 
off to show what she could do. So we both benefited from this. 
I certainly did. She gave me a new kind of life. The piano 
was the beginning of life for me. It really was. 



McCreery: Did you have the same music teacher for your entire childhood? 

Wilson: Yes. I stuck with the same one. Well, there were others. 

Understand that in those days the public school system was very 
interested in musical education. And so in the elementary 
school, junior high school, and high school, there were 
orchestras. Children played in orchestras, as well as in 
bands, and there were choruses. There were music teachers in 
the school. Again, the music teachers in both the elementary 



and middle school, on the one hand, and the music teachers, two 
of them, in the high school, were very much interested in 
pushing me. In high school, somewhere along the line, I took 
up other instruments. 

My piano teacher was also an organist. She had one of the 
early Hammond electric organs. She had one in her house. She 
also played one in the Christian Science church. She was a 
member of the Christian Science church and she was also their 
organist. And she taught me to play that. Well, that s not a 
big stretch. If you can play a piano, then you just add the 
feet, the pedals, and you know, lots of--marvelous fun. Just 
marvelous fun. 

Somewhere along the line, I guess in high school, I learned 
to play the flute and also started to learn the viola. I got 
to be very good at the flute, but I wasn t so good- -I didn t 
work hard enough at the viola. That s a different and more 
difficult instrument. I loved it and it was good to have done 
it, but I did not become a good violist. But musical education 
was serious. It was part of a different cultural climate, a 
climate which, as far as I can tell, has completely vanished 
now. 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



It shows up in the fact that when I was in high school, I 
played the flute in a chamber orchestra made up of adults. It 
was a small orchestra, twenty or so people. It was sponsored 
by the Santa Cruz education department. They ran a night 
school, or a continuing education school, and they sponsored 
this adult chamber orchestra. They paid for a serious 
conductor to come down from San Francisco and act as 
instructor. So here I was playing the flute in an orchestra, 
all the other members of whom were adults . 

The instructor was Jacques van den Berg, who had been the 
conductor of one of the major orchestras in Holland before the 
war. He had been driven out by Hitler and ended up playing the 
viola in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra as a way of 
making a living. But he was a world class musician. Here he 
came down to Santa Cruz essentially to instruct this little 
group of twenty amateur musicians in Santa Cruz, and we played 
veryit was completely serious music. So there s an education 
for you, a fantastic education. 

Do you remember some of the pieces you were playing with that 
group? Any favorites? 

No, I can t remember--! remember one of the worst moments of my 
life, when I had a solo in one of the late Haydn symphonies, 



10 



101, 102? I don t know. It was a slow movement in which, at 
one point, the flute has a solo ending way up high. And I 
broke--the note broke. I m way out there and-- [laughter] 

McCreery: All by yourself. 

Wilson: All by myself. Bad. [laughter] But we played the kinds of 
things that you can play, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, that kind of 
stuff. When it came to piano, somehow I turned out to 
specialize in Bach. I played oceans of Bach. Nobody else was 
doing that, certainly no little boys. But it turns out Bach 
and Schumann and Brahms and Beethoven were the things that I 
played. I played tough stuff, very hard stuff. I now imagine 
that I didn t play it all that well. But I was thought to play 
it well at the time by the people who were listening there. 

When I came to Berkeley I suddenly got the idea that, uh- 
oh, being number one in Santa Cruz does not mean that you re 
going to be number one-- [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, tell me a little more about this piano teacher you 

studied with for so many years. What kind of an influence was 
she? 

Wilson: Violet Patterson. Well, what kind of an influence was Violet 
Patterson? I don t know that she was, other than giving me 
things, just giving me more and more complicated things to do. 
She didn t do things that she should have done. She didn t do 
things that I later felt, you know, God, I ve got no left hand 
and I can t do trills well. That s not good enough. But she 
had never pushed me, really, to develop technique and I think 
it s probably because she didn t know how to. I mean she spent 
her life dealing with little tiny boys and girls playing little 
tiny baby tunes on baby pianos. And once in a while somebody 
like me would come along. 

A few years before me there had been another young man who 
was her star for a while. Tom Pagenhart is his name. He 
turned out to be a professor of geography here at the 
university. And he was a star, but shethere was a ceiling, I 
think. There was a ceiling, and I got to the ceiling very fast 
and she really didn t have anything to tell me or to show me. 
She didn t have anything to show me. I could play better than 
she could. But that s not unheard of. 



McCreery; 
Wilson: 



No. 
No. 



11 



McCreery: So your impetus to continue with music and grow and improve, 
where did all that come from? 

Wilson: Who knows? [laughter] Who knows? I don t know. I had an 

awful lot of energy in those days and I can t understand how. 
All of my childhood I had multiple jobs. I worked for a living 
from very earliest times. Well, one of those was a musical 
job. I was a professional musician from the age of twelve. I 
got my first paid job at age twelvewell, I think twelve. It 
might have been thirteen- -as organist for the Second Methodist 
Church in Santa Cruz. They must have thought that was really 
cute, having this little boy up there playing the organ. Well, 
no problem for me. I could do it perfectly well. They paid me 
a lot. I think they paid me ten dollars a month, which would 
have been a huge sum in, what, 1941 or something? 
that can be right. That must be too much money, 
me, and I did that for several years. 



I m not sure 
But they paid 



But that was just two services on Sundays and a Wednesday 
evening. But I had many other jobs of various kinds to make 
money: delivering telegrams, working for Western Union, 
sweeping out haberdashery stores, clerking in a stationery 
store. I did that for a long time. I would work in the 
stationery store from six until nine at night, and then go home 
and practice the piano from nine to eleven at night, with my 
grandmother not asleep overhead. She didn t mind. I had an 
astonishing life for a little kid. I wasn t robust. When it 
came time to be called up for the draft I was 4-F. But I was 
plunging ahead. I don t know, working, working, working. 

When it came to schoolwork, I never did the homework. I 
didn t have to do that, so I saved time on that. Time saved 
not doing any homework was time saved for practicing the piano 
and working. 

McCreery: The schoolwork came fairly easily to you? 



Wilson: 



Very, very, very, 



High School; Early Philosophical Interests; First Library Job 



McCreery: Which high school did you attend? 

Wilson: There s only one in Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz High School. 



12 



McCreery: Okay. By then you were an accomplished wage earner and 
musician. 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Accomplished wage earner, professional musician. But there 
were good things in high school. Surprisingly, for a small 
town, they offered languages. They offered Latin. I got two 
years of Latin. I took to Latin- -oh my God. I thought that 
was the most wonderful thing I d ever encountered. Oh, I 
couldn t believe it. [laughter] So I just ate up Latin to the 
extent that the Latin teacher--again, this is my relationship 
with teachers, you see. She kept giving me more things. She 
said, "Here, here, here. Here s some Ammianus Marcellinus. If 



you can read this, this is serious history." 
got along beautifully with my Latin teacher. 



[laughter] So I 



But I loved the language. I thought that was- -just 
discovering the formal complexities of Latin syntax- -it was 
something that I just found absolutely irresistible. And so, 
there was nothing else, nothing like that elsewhere in my high 
school. I didn t like the rest of it very much. 

Oh. Other languages? 

Spanish. A little Spanish, taught by a man whom I knew better 
as the cellist in the chamber orchestra. We got along well 
outside the class. He wasn t much of a teacher. He didn t 
know much Spanish either. [laughter] 

Oh, dear. And a small world. 

Absolutely. Absolutely. That was funny. I guess I was known 
in the high school but not, I think, particularly, for 
outstanding classroom performance in the standard way. I was 
the musician. 

Did you continue to work in the church for quite some time? 

It can t have gone on too long because I ended up being a 
substitute organist for other churches. The girl whose father 
was the minister of the Presbyterian church persuaded me to 
become a Presbyterian, or at least try it out. And also, 
somehow, I got a job being the assistant organist in the 
Presbyterian church. That was nice because I liked the organ. 
It was, wow, a crazy, very old organ. That was kind of funny. 

This brings up the religion question. My grandmother had-- 
we lived nearby her church. She was a member of the Free 
Methodists. She was a Free Methodist. The Free Methodists-- 
they still exist. It s a small, very, very, very conservative, 



13 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



ultra-conservative fundamentalist Protestant sect. When I went 
to live with her, I was drawn into the church too. Everything 
was forbidden in that church. They didn t allow musical 
instruments in the church. There was only a capella singing 
allowed because they didn t believe in musical instruments. In 
personal life, of course, there was no drinking. Of course. 
No smoking. Women did not wear makeup. Dancing was not 
allowed. 

I got in big trouble with the church because in the, I 
think, junior high school, they were teaching us to dance. 
Teaching us, you know, ordinary ballroom dancing. And the Free 
Methodists heard about this, and they heard that I had been 
learning to dance. And they came down hard on me. "That s 
sinful. Stop that. Cut it out." No moving pictures. Didn t 
get to go to moving pictures. [laughter] So when I went to 
see a moving picture, that was a really sinful thing to do. 

I finally tried to leave them and go to the Presbyterians. 
The convention was that in order to change from one church to 
another, you had to get a letter from the old church allowing 
you to move to the new church. The old church would not give 
me a letter because I was such a sinner. Shortly thereafter 
all of my religion evaporated. [laughter] And shortly after 
that three or four of us in high school started the Young 
Atheists Society. That wasn t much of a society, but we were 
being avant-garde and we knew it. [laughter] 

That s interesting that you were considering the question at 
that level, though, in high school. 

I guess. Well, I discovered philosophy pretty early. 
Did you? 

Yes. I don t know how. Like many other people in the last 
fifty years, I got a copy of Will Durant s The Story of 
Philosophy. I read it and I said, "This is not without certain 
interest." 

You read that in high school then? 

Yes, I read it when I was in high school. Then I started 
reading other things. I found Schopenhauer while I was still 
in high school, you see. And Schopenhauer- -if you re a very 
troubled high school boy, reading Schopenhauer can be just the 
ticket. [laughter] Say, "Yes, the world is really rotten 
isn t it?" 



14 



McCreery: Just a little confirmation. 

Wilson: A little confirmation about how rotten the world was. So I 

started buying books. I don t know whether reading Will Durant 
started me on this, but I started buying books. There had been 
books around in the house --when my father and mother were 
together and when I was with them, there were no books around 
at all. My grandmother didn t know about books, but in a 
closet behind my bedroom there was a glass-fronted case full of 
books, which must have been my grandfather Adam s books. This 
was not high literature. These were adventure stories. This 
was Zane Grey and Max Brand and James Oliver Curwood he s a 
Canadian writer of more or less the same kind of stuff. But 
other things too, other kind of odd things. Some collections 
of poetry, but not famous poetry. These are collections of 
poems by ordinary people. Somebody collected poems from Mrs. 
Jones and Mrs. Smith and, you know, maybe got contributions 
from them to sponsor the publication of their poems. Funny, 
funny collections, anthologies, of poems by ordinary people. 
There were several of these. 

I d never seen anything like this and I ve rarely see 
things like that since. But it represents a kind of a cultural 
stratum which is, again, I think something that s disappeared 
entirely now. It goes along with a kind of aspiration to what 
you--you know there is culture, you know there is poetry and 
literature and so on, and you are interested in that and you 
want to be part of that and don t know quite what to do. 
That s condescending in a way, and I don t mean to be 
condescending. But it s not popular culture as we understand 
popular culture now. It s kind of comparable to what we used 
to call, in the musical world, semi-classical music. There was 
a whole genre of semi-classical music. Light classics, you 
know? 



McCreery: Yes. 
Wilson: 



Yes. So that kind of stuff I found right next to my bedroom, 
the very same kind of stuff I found in the public library when, 
at some point- -it was one of these times I got a job as a page 
in the Santa Cruz Public Library, because the main job was to 
reshelve books which had been returned by library patrons . And 
what you had to reshelve was primarily the hundreds and 
hundreds and hundreds of volumes, copies, of popular novels by, 
you know, Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood, but more 
importantly, Grace Livingston Hill, and people like that. 

She was the then-reigning popular woman novelist. People 
would come in and they would take out, not one novel by Grace 



15 



Livingston Hill, but a dozen novels by Grace Livingston Hill at 
a time. Read them all and come back for another dozen. Just 
stupendous quantities of novels by Grace Livingston Hill and 
other people. That s the only name I can remember, but she was 
one of the then-most-popular novelists. So here is a whole 
cultural world, cultural subworld-- 

McCreery: How did you get that job at Santa Cruz Public? 

Wilson: Can t remember. 

McCreery: Were you in high school at the time? 

Wilson: Yes, I was in high school at the time. I knew thelet s see, 
the other organist at the Presbyterian Church worked in the 
library. She might have suggested me- -yes, that s a 
possibility. She might have put me up to it. 

McCreery: How much do you feel you were on your own in discovering books 
and poetry and philosophy? 

Wilson: Pretty much on my own. Pretty much on my own. There was an 
English teacher with a Dutch name, George van de Wetering. I 
forget whether I took any classes from him, but I spent time 
talking to him and he started me off in the world of 
literature. He told me about poetry. He told me about modern 
literature. He was a personal friend of a minor poet named 
Witter Bynner. I don t know whether you ve heard of him. 
You d come across his name in histories of mid-century American 
literature. And van de Wetering was thoroughly, thoroughly 
plugged into modernist literature. So he steered me in the 
direction of modern literature, that is, high modernist 
literature- -Yeats, Eliot, that realm. Otherwise 1 would never 
have encountered it . Nobody else around knew anything about 
that, would have been in a position to tell me about it. 

So he had something to do with all this. He didn t know 
anything about philosophy. He had nothing to do with that. 
There was a bookstore run by a recently returned veteran of the 
Spanish Civil War, someone who had been a member of the Abraham 
Lincoln Brigade. And I used to--I say "used to," I don t know 
how many times I did, but sometimes I looked in his bookstore 
and talked to him. I can t remember now what he would have 
turned me on to. It wouldn t have been literature. It would 
have been politics. Somehow I really got connected with very 
odd things, very early, and in mysterious ways. 

While I was in high school I started subscribing to I. F. 
Stone s P/eekly . I started subscribing to that when I was in 



16 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 
McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



high school. Now why? How did I do that? I don t know. It s 
absolutely weird. The only possible connection is, maybe, the 
Spanish Civil War man, though I don t know that that is the 
source. Very strange. But I also started buying books and 
subscribing to mail order things. The Classics Club sold 
beautiful, beautiful books and I think I then signed up to 
start receiving books from the Classics Club. That would have 
been late in high school. 

It sounds as if the adults who may have been influential to you 
were outside your own family? 

Oh yes. Family knew nothing whatsoever of any of this. Yes. 
It was teachers and people that I accidentally met. 

But you may have been striking out on your own a fair amount as 
well? 



I was striking out on my own. 
myself. Yes, definitely. 



I was exploring. I was doing it 



Did your friends share any of these interests in high school? 

I had one friend, Jerry Ackerman, who shared most of these 
interests very, very keenly. We were very, very close friends. 
He ended up being a novelist, or he started writing novels and 
ended up being an art historian. And he and I were the- -among 
a million other things that we did, I would be asked to perform 
for various service clubs and things, the Kiwanis or the 
Rotarians or the equivalent. They d want some entertainment, 
so they d ask a little kid to come in and play a piece on the 
piano for them. My friend Jerry would come and, I forget what 
he did, I think he had a ventriloquist act or something like 
that. 

Frequently he and I would find ourselves both on the same 
program. We were the entertainment. One astonishing thing- 
there was a Santa Cruz chapter of the University Women s Club, 
and we found ourselves giving a joint book review to the 
University Women s Club. And the book review was of George 
Bernard Shaw s new book, Everybody s Political What s What. 
Now we can t possibly have known anything about that a 
preposterous thing to ask us to do. [laughter] But that s 
what we did. So Jerry must have--I don t know whether he 
showed me things that I didn t know about before. I kind of 
doubt it because he wasn t plugged in to other people any more 
than I was. We were kind of making things up on our own, 
making things up as we went along. 



17 



For music we had teachers. Other things, we had no 
teachers, really no teachers at all. 



Musical Directions in High School; World War II; Impressions of 
Libraries 



McCreery: Well, we were just talking about your high school years a 

little bit and I wonder, did your musical interests change by 
the time you were going through high school, or did you develop 
any certain direction with your own music? 

Wilson: Well, I m not sure. I started composing. 
McCreery: Did you? 

Wilson: Yes. In my final big recital I played a couple of my own 

pieces. And that s really funny becauseof course I didn t 
realize this at the time I d been playing music that the 
Polish composer, Karol Szymanowski composed, and of course 
Chopin. I played a lot of Chopin over the years. The pieces 
that I wrote and played in public two pieces by Patrick 
Wilson- -one was a perfectly agreeable Chopin waltz and the 
other was a really very nice, interesting, Szymanowski prelude, 
[laughter] I can still remember the Chopin waltz. I can t 
remember the other one. Of course you don t realize what 
you re doing when you do that kind of stuff, but it s what 
beginners do. It s kind of amusing to have done it and then to 
realize what you have done. 

McCreery: Later on. 
Wilson: Later on, yes. 

McCreery: But do you remember how you thought to start composing or how 
it happened? 

Wilson: No, no. I don t remember anything. I don t remember anything. 

McCreery: Well what were the circumstances of performing your own 
compositions? 

Wilson: Oh, I just told my music teacher, "I ve got these pieces. 
Here, I ll play them for you." And she d say, "All right. 
Those are nice. Let s put them on the program." [laughter] 
It wasn t a problem. It was quite nice. I m trying to 
remember, what did I play at the high school graduation? I 



18 



accompanied a girl soloist and then I played a couple of 
pieces. 

McCreery: What year was that? 

Wilson: 1945. I don t think I played my own pieces. I played the 
Chopin Revolutionary Etude and something else, I think. I 
can t remember anything about that. 

McCreery: Overall would you say you liked high school, or that time 
period in your life? 

Wilson: Hard to say. [laughter] I was eager to get out of there. 

I ll tell you how it ended up. I graduated from high school 
and in all this time nobody, nobody else, nobody had ever 
suggested anything about going to college. Nobody. It wasn t 
done. Children of working class parents didn t go to college. 
This was the time-- 1945 essentially represents a break, a 
cultural break, because up to then the natural assumption would 
be that you go to high school and then you get a job and get 
married. You get married and get a job, simultaneously. 

But nobody had ever suggested going to college. Somehow I 
got the idea somewhere, "Well I could go to San Jose State 
College and major in music. Maybe I could become a music 
teacher." I don t know. I had no idea. 

But I was literally picked up by a woman--! was working in 
this stationery store in the evenings and there was a woman who 
was a social worker. She was just back from Greece where she 
had been working for UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and 
Rehabilitation Agency, and we got to talking. And she invited 
me to come up to her place for a drink. [laughter] Charming. 
It was just that. And she took me up as a cause. So she was 
the accident-- [tape interruption] 

McCreery: Go ahead. You were talking about the social worker who took 
you up as a cause and encouraged you to go to college? Was 
that it? 

Wilson: She must be the reason I went to Berkeley. She s got to be the 
reason. I can t remember the details, however. But there s no 
other explanation for the fact that I came to Berkeley, but 
that she saw to it that I came to Berkeley. She took me off to 
a navy psychiatrist because she d figured out that I was really 
not very happy and was, perhaps, in need of some kind of help. 
And the navy psychiatrist said, "Kid, stay out of the armed 
forces." Apart from that he just gave me some advice. "Stay 
away!" I do remember that, but I don t remember what precisely 



19 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



she might have done to get me to go to Berkeley. She has to be 
the one who did it because nobody else knew about Berkeley. 
They didn t know about Berkeley. 

The navy psychiatrist reminds me to ask you, though, about the 
war, which was going on the entire time you were in high 
school. Did that have any effects on your own family? 

Yes. My father was in the army, was in Southeast Asia-- 
actually in Burma, working on the Burma Road. I m trying to 
think if there s anything else. That was the only effect on 



us. I can t remember anything else, 
limited to two pairs of shoes a year, 
two pairs of shoes a year in my life, 
was not a problem. 



Rationing. We were 
Why, hell, I d never had 
[laughter] So rationing 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Apart from that--the war was a constant presence, of 
course. Santa Cruz being on the water, all the boys in high 
school wanted to join the navy. And almost all of them did 
join the navy. I was one of the very, very few exceptions. I 
did try, actually, to get into the armed forces, despite the 
warning of the psychiatrist. I tried to get into a special 
program, training for radio specialists. I studied radio 
things furiously that summer after graduating from high school. 
I forget the circumstances of this, but it was a special 
program run by--maybe the navy? It had different entrance 
requirements and I couldn t have got in the regular way, but I 
thought I could get in through this special way. But after the 
atom bombs were dropped, the captain of the program suddenly 
called me up and said forget it. 

The war was always there but it wasn tno, I take this 
back. I take this back. I started reading Life magazine, the 
old Life magazine, full of pictures, when I was very young, 
when it first--! don t know when it first came out, but I 
remember with particular vividness following the Finnish- 
Russian War in the winter of 1940, I think, December of 1939. 
Russia invaded Finland, and I was just desperately interested 
in following this. Before that I d been desperately interested 
in following the Spanish Civil War when I was, you know, very, 
very young. 

Even before meeting the veteran from that war? 

Yes, yes. Before that. So I had started my own reading 
program. Again, because my father was a newspaper man I knew 
about newspapers. But he didn t get me to read Life magazine. 
I got myself to read Life magazine and followed the foreign 
correspondents and the foreign news. And there was so much 



20 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



foreign news . In one of my books , I use an example from China 
of indirectly indicating how old you are. If I say, "I 
remember the Panay," you can figure out how old I must be. 
Because this was an American gunboat which was shelled in the 
Yangtze River, I think, in 1936 maybe? I think. So I was 
reading these things from the beginning, from a very early age. 
Again, on my own. Not because somebody put me up to it. 



But you did follow the war with interest? 

I must have done. I don t remember it now. 
remember it now. Yes, I must have done. 



I just don t 



Well, before we leave your high school years, let s return a 
moment to working at the Santa Cruz Public Library. Can you 
tell me about some of the people you worked with there? 

Yes. Work. Geraldine Work was the librarian. She was a 
wonderful woman. She was tough and confident and aggressive 
and full of business. No nonsense. But, you know, not 
unpleasant. Very pleasant, just--she got things done, and she 
ran everything to the minutest detail. This was one of my 
jobs. There was a very heavyset middle-aged man who used to 
come in and sit in the reading room and fall asleep and snore 
very loudly. She had me pick up a huge, unabridged dictionary, 
take it over, and drop it right next to him. [laughter] 

That s very telling. 

Yes, that s very telling. That is customer service management, 
I guess. The other people in the librarydownstairs was the 
county librarian. This was the headquarters of the county 
library and the county librarian--! remember her only dimly, 
very dimly. All I remember is that downstairs was also a very 
large phonograph record collection, and I borrowed phonograph 
records from them. These are 78 [r.p.m.] records, big, heavy. 
I bought a 78 phonograph record player and played records at 
home and borrowed a lot of things from the county library s 
record collection. I don t remember anything more about her. 

Upstairs was the circulation desk and the only person I 
remember there was the one whom I ve already mentioned, who was 
the main organist at the Presbyterian church, not a child 
organist like me, but a grownup organist. 

Do you remember the name? 

I can t at the moment, no. It may come to me later on. 



21 



McCreery: Okay. Did Geraldine Work hire you personally? 

Wilson: 1 don t remember, but I would expect so. It was a small staff, 
just three or four people. 

McCreery: And your main duties were shelving books? 
Wilson: All I can remember doing was shelving books. 
McCreery: And occasionally dropping-- 

Wilson: And dropping one on purpose. [laughter] That s right. Yes, 

that was interesting, see. That really was interesting because 
this was the public library and this was my introduction to the 
public library. My view of public libraries has been 
repeatedly confirmed by all sorts of serious studies in 
subsequent years. The main business of the public library is 
exactly circulating fiction by the current equivalent of Grace 
Livingston Hill and Zane Grey. The names are different- 
Danielle Steele--but the function is the same. So that was 
interesting. 

McCreery: And though attempts to introduce other reading are much 

discussed by librarians- 
Wilson: Well, sure. 

McCreery: But you re suggesting, in essence, that that work doesn t 

change. It really is the popular novels- 
Wilson: That work doesn t change. I mean that s the core. There are 

additional things, particularly in large cities there are. But 
one of my cousins, who wasmay be still for all I knowwas a 
librarian at the library in Capitola, which is the little town 
five miles south of Santa Cruz. She is not a trained 
librarian, she just learned on the job. I used to talk to her 
about what she did and so on, and it s exactly as I would have 
expected. The beauty of it is that her library is very small. 
She knows all of her clients and she knows what each of them 
will want to read. And so she can say to a person, "We have a 
new book by so and so. You ll want to see this." Which is 
nice, the people love this. But what she is giving them is 
exactly the kind of thing which people were getting for 
themselves in my day, in my library. 

McCreery: Do you know if you even thought about those kinds of issues, 
though, when you were a high school student working in the 
public library? 



22 



Wilson: No, I couldn t. I was simply noticing the fact, I was 

registering the fact that there were hundreds of volumes of 
Grace Livingston Hill. Yes, and I was becoming dimly aware 
that there were all those other books out there like the ones I 
was getting from the Classics Club and the ones I was gradually 
learning about that were very different in character. 

McCreery: And if you were reading I. F. Stone s Weekly and other things- 
Wilson: Yes. I don t know what other periodicals I was reading besides 
I. F. Stone. 



23 



II COLLEGE, 1945-1949; MAIN LIBRARY JOBS; GRADUATE STUDY 



Summer Job in a Cannery; Getting to UC Berkeley 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Do you remember your thoughts when this social worker friend 
began suggesting Berkeley or some other college career? 

No, I don t. I don t remember anything. That s kind of a 
blank. It was a bad time, it was a very bad time. The summer 
after I graduated, I went to work in a cannery, a fruit and 
vegetable cannery. I was working ten hours a day, for thirty 
cents an hour. And I was suffering. I was thinking, I ve got 
to get out of here, I ve got to get out of here! Why I was 
doing that? Well, I had no income. I had no source of income. 
There was no--as I say, it was mysterious to me how my 
grandmother and great-grandmother survived. I never saw any 
money there. We had been, if we were not still, on welfare. I 
had to live. But my God, that work ten hours a day sweeping up 
and digging up garbage was enough to drive me almost mad. So I 
was in a state of, "I ve got to get out of here." 

So I really don t know. It s as if I blanked out during 
this period and somehow found myself at Berkeley. 



That fall you started as an undergraduate here, 
been to Berkeley much? 



Now, had you 



Never, never. I d been to San Jose once to hear a piano 
recital. I d been to Stanford once to hear a piano recital, 
but I d never been to Berkeley. 

And I gather you had not traveled much elsewhere, from Santa 
Cruz, during your childhood. 

Not much. So I didn t know what I was doing. But when I got 
here, I knew I was in the right place almost instantly. Well, 
it wasn t all that clear. 



McCreery: Well, do you remember your thoughts and impressions when you 
first arrived? 

Wilson: Two different things, two different areas. First outside the 
university, then inside the university. Practically my 
introduction to the thing was a curiously welcome one. I 
enrolled in an English class, English 1A I guess it was. It 
was taught by a visiting professor from Stanford. He set us to 
writing essays and practicallyvery early in the term, the 
first few days, he said, "Here is something I think you ought 
to hear. One of you has written this piece." And he started 
reading my piece as an example of what was good. Hey, that s 
all right. This may work out! [laughter] 

McCreery: How wonderful. 

Wilson: Yes. On the other hand, outside--! was living in, I guess, a 

boarding house, room and board, and I was sharing a room with a 
perfectly frightful, unpleasant person. It was so unpleasant 
that I had to get out. I had to make some other arrangement. 
I forget how it all worked out. But it was funny too, because 
the boarding house was run by two women, two sisters, one of 
whom had a little, tiny boy about four or five years old. And 
I got along well with them. I liked them a lot. I really 
liked them. And after I d been there a couple of months they 
said, "Say, we really hate to ask this of you but we ve got to 
get out of town. Could you lend us some money? We ll pay it 
right back as soon as we get to Hawaii." [laughter] And I 
had a little money because I d saved a few hundred dollars from 
all the jobs that I d done over the years. I was furiously 
saving money, I don t why except that, well, we were Scots. I 
mean, my grandfather was Adam Wilson the Scot. And so I had a 
few hundred dollars, so I lent them some money, I forget how 
much. Maybe only a hundred, maybe four hundred, I really now 
can t remember. Never saw that again. [laughter] So my first 
introduction to Berkeley there was, on the one hand, and on 
the other hand-- [laughter] 

McCreery: That s extraordinary. 

Wilson: Yes. It was kind of extraordinary. 

McCreery: So they left and you stayed. What happened next? 

Wilson: I found another place to live. I found another room. It was 
difficult making the adjustment. Again, my money was going to 
run out pretty soon. I was going to have to get a job fast. 
And I got a job hashing in a boarding house just off campus, 
for a while, I guess. That must have been right at the 



25 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



beginning, and getting food that way and living in a room up on 
Virginia Street. But clearly I was going to have to support 
myself somehow, get a job. 

So then, for the last time in my life, I applied for a job 
at the [UC Berkeley] library and was hired. I started in the 
beginning of 1946. I say it s the last time I have ever 
applied for a job. Always thereafter I was invited. But up 
until then I had done just dozens of things, dozens of little 
jobs, little short-term jobs, long-term jobs. 

Do you remember how you decided to apply to the library- -was it 
having worked in one before or do you have any recollection of 
how that came about? 

No recollection at all. There are a lot of possibilities. It 
might have beenthere s a job center on campus. You might go 
to the center and they d say, "Well, the library has jobs. Why 
don t you try them." One of my classmates, somebody I met in 
class, might have suggested that. Because hundreds of students 
worked in the library. That was quite a bunch. But how I got 



from Santa Cruz to Berkeley I don t really know, 
mystery to me. 



It s a 



Well, I wonder, what was it like here on campus when you first 
arrived? 

I really can t remember. There was much more open space for 
one thing. Whole buildings that are here had not been built 
then. Dwinelle Hall was not here, for instance. The library 
annex was not here. Moffitt Library was not here. Lots of 
empty space. 

But you knew fairly early on that you were on the right track? 

Oh, it was obvious. It was kind of like, in a sense, I ve 
thought of this before, it was like discovering the piano. I 
mean, when I started playing the piano, I took off. That was 
something I could do. And then when I came to Berkeley, in a 
different way, I took off. I discovered, oh, I can do this; 
oh, I can do this. Yes, it was clear right away that this was 
going to suit me very well. It didn t matter whether it was 
big classes or little classes. I d go to lecture classes, 800 
students in a lecture class, but then there "d be a section 
meeting. I remember being recruited by the section leader for 
the beginning anthropology class, Anthropology 1, which I must 
have taken in my first year. And the section leader says, 
"Say, have you thought of becoming an anthropologist?" I said, 
"Well, I don t know. I ll have to think about that." 



26 



Practically the first course I took was from a great German 
sociologist, Wolfram Eberhard, a professor here who died 
recently. Eberhard was German. He was a Chinese historian. 
His specialty was Chinese history in the early times, very 
early times. And so practically the first course I took was a 
course- -he said, "Well, we re talking about the sociology of 
the period of the warring kingdoms, around 200 B.C." I 
thought, "What?" I m not prepared for this at all, but I 
thought this was just wonderful. 

McCreery: You weren t in Santa Cruz anymore. 

Wilson: I m not in Santa Cruz anymore. That s right. This was the 

perfect time, the timing was wonderful. This was the time when 
Berkeley, the faculty, was just stuffed with the German 
emigres, the people who had been driven out of Europe by the 
war. A lot of them had spent the war years elsewhere. I think 
Eberhard had spent much of the war years in Turkey and had then 
come to the United States when it was easier to do so. The 
faculty was just studded with great names from European 
scholarship, and there they all were. 

And the student body here- -here were all the guys coming 
back from the war. Now, the people who in previous generations 
would never have gone to collegethey were sons and daughters 
of working class people, like me. They would never have gone 
to college before. But now they were all flooding in here. It 
was a completely new world. I can tell you, it was a good time 
to be at Berkeley. Not just Berkeley, of course, but Berkeley 
was a particularly fine place to be in those days. 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Philosophy, Art and Identity; Life Lessons Inside and Outside 
the Classroom 

Did you start off right away pursuing your interest in 
philosophy that you developed in high school? 

Yes. I immediately started taking philosophy and pretty soon 
it became clear to me that this was going to be my main 
interest. I didn t want to do anything else. I had to take 
other courses, and I had to have a minor. That was going to be 
my major subject, and I had to have a minor. I didn t really 
want to have a minor. So I was taking courses in French and I 
just kept taking more courses in French and so I ended up with 
a minor in French. 



27 



[Interview 2: August 13, 1999] ## 

McCreery: When we left off last time we had just begun discussing your 

time here at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and you were telling 
me that you immediately resumed your study of philosophy that 
you had started on your own in high school, and that you had 
minored in French almost by default because one had to have a 
minor. But I m wondering, with such an incredible array of 
educational experiences available to you here, why do you think 
philosophy held your interest so strongly? 

Wilson: Well, that is kind of a mystery. There s something else. I 

was interested in other things. I was very interested in art, 
all the arts. And my friends, my personal friends, were 
artists almost exclusively. They were writers, musicians, 
painters. I hung around with them, but in those days we didn t 
think that art was something you studied. Art was something 
you did, and you did it outside the university. So the very 
notion of taking a course in writing was inconceivable. It was 
absurd. It was preposterous. And so the poets and novelists 
that I knew--we were very active and we talked and everything, 
but we didn t think of that as suitable for academic study. 

So there is a branch of study which is kind of excluded. 
It s of absorbing interest, but it s not university study. 
Then on the other hand there s science, say, science and 
mathematics. Well, for some reason I was entirely 
uninterested. 1 was not only uninterested in, I was repelled 
by science in those days. One had to fulfill breadth 
requirements for the bachelor s degree, and so I did what many 
other people did. I took the easiest courses that I could 
findhuge lecture courses, one in geology, one in 
paleontology- -which were sort of understood to be designed for 
people who weren t really interested in science. [laughter] 

I was interested in anthropology and sociology up to a 
point. I mentioned that one of the anthropology section 
leaders tried to recruit me into anthropology, and the same 
thing happened in sociology. One of the instructors tried to 
recruit me into sociology. But I wasn t sufficiently 
interested at that time. Philosophy was everything. This was 
the big, centralit covered so much ground. I mean heavens, 
there s metaphysics, there s epistemology . There s ethics, 
there s aesthetics, there s language, philosophy of language. 
It was huge. It was huge. It was big enough. You couldn t 
learn all there was to learn about that even if you spent all 
your time doing it. And it was more than enough for me. 



28 



As a matter of fact, the best course I had in my 
undergraduate education was a course not exactly in philosophy, 
it was in the Oriental Languages department. It was the year 
long course on the history of Buddhism, which was a combination 
of philosophy and religion and history, the history of the rest 
of the world. It was a magnificent course, and I sat there 
absolutely spellbound or, as I tended to do when I was really 
entranced, I was laughing all the time, responding and laughing 
all the time with just complete- -this is fabulous. This is the 
greatest thing. [laughter] Even now I remember that as the--I 
took it in my senior year, and it was the best thing that 
happened to me in my undergraduate years . 

It opened philosophy up still further into new directions 
because, as it turned out, a lot of the stuff that was of 
contemporary philosophical interest meshed very nicely into 
very ancient Buddhist philosophy. The Buddhists had been there 
first. And this was quite remarkable. But as to your 
question, why just philosophy, I can t say any more than that. 
I don t really know why. I don t really know why. 

McCreery: Well, I wonder if you recallagain as an undergraduatewere 
you particularly drawn to the work of certain philosophers? 

Wilson: Well, David Hume was my hero. Hume ended up being my- -if I had 
a hero in life it would be David Hume. So that s kind of the 
central figure. But it wasn t so much a matter of individual 
philosophers as of problems, of problem solving. This was the 
time when really new philosophy was very much in the mode of a 
problem solving style. This was the time of the belated 
ascension here of logical positivism, which had been big in 
Europe in the 1930s but the war had quieted things down, and it 
was just beginning to make a big impression here. This is very 
much a matter of saying, okay, we can solve problems now. 
We re going to solve problems. 

The people that I read with great interest, Bertrand 
Russell, G. E. Moore, were very much in the mode of, we re 
going to solve these problems. We don t spend time dwelling on 
what people used to say about them. We want to look at the 
past only insofar as they can help us do something now. Is 
there anything there that s usable? Is there a usable past? 
Otherwise we re not interested in it. So we didn t spend one 
minute on Plotinus because there is nothing, there is nothing 
remotely usable about Plotinus now. Hasn t been for thousands 
of years. [laughter] 

But Aristotle is a different sort of case. Aristotle is a 
very different sort of case. There s a lot of usable stuff in 



29 



Aristotle. At some point in all of this I did a special study 
course on Aristotle, and found, look, that person had a great 
deal to say about rhetoric, about metaphor, about things that 
are of problematic interest to me. And what he said is 
remarkable, remarkably usable. So there we are. 

McCreery: He held up well. 

Wilson: And held up, indeed yes. Indeed yes. 

McCreery: Tell me about some of the professors that you enjoyed studying 
with. 

Wilson: Well, that s kind of odd, because I didn t really have any big 
favorites. I was lucky enough to have a great English teacher, 
Josephine Miles. I took the second half of the beginning 
English composition course with her, English IB, and she caught 
my attention in a very interesting way. I wrote a piece for 
her on something or other and she gave it back to me, and it 
was graded "A/F." That instantly caught my attention fully, 
[laughter] 

I talked to her and we had a marvelous conversation, during 
which she was saying, "Look, this is marvelous. This is very 
interesting, very enlightening. You completely missed the 
point. [laughter] You just somehow managed to get way into a 
different realm, and this is where you should have been." And 
so on. So, "Yes indeed, Miss Miles, I see your point." 
[laughter] And I liked her and, in a sense, I didn t exactly 
study with her. But years later she and two or three other 
faculty members had a private, informal discussion group. They 
would meet once a month and someone would read a paper. And 
they invited me to join the group. This was when I was a 
graduate student. 

And so for some time I was a member of Josephine Miles "s 
informal discussion group. That was one of the great 
experiences of my life because that was a continuing, ongoing, 
completely informal, completely serious, completely inventive 
and wonderful kind of thing. That sort of thing does not 
happen much in life. That was one of two or three continuing 
conversational groups that I ve been involved with, and those 
have been the most productive parts of my life I think. 

So the people who influenced me most didn t do so much in 
class, in formal class settings. They were people that I saw 
in informal settings like that. 



30 



I had another friend who was, in fact, a professor in the 
speech department. He was a philosopher though. The speech 
department hired lots of philosophers in those days. I saw him 
a lot, and we talked incessantly about philosophy and 
literature and so on. He was a very important influence on me, 
but this was outside of the classroom setting entirely. 

McCreery: His name? 

Wilson: His name was William Holther. I ll come back to that because 
there s a story about that. No, I ll tell it right now. He 
didn t get tenure, and the understanding was that he didn t get 
it because he was known to be a homosexual. Now I was a 
homosexual too, and still am. So this was important. This was 
an important event. This was, for me, one of those things that 
are kind of life shaping. This is what happens to you if you 
get known to be what you are. And so the point is, you must 
not be known to be what you are. So concealment, disguise and 
hiding become necessary if you are to survive. Now that s a 
kind of a background to everything that I ve done in my adult 
life. 

McCreery: Are you aware of whether there was any precedent for what 

happened to him, denial of tenure or something that serious, on 
those grounds? 

Wilson: Well, I had no proof that those were the grounds, and I m sure 
that if one had inquired people would have denied that those 
were the grounds . 

McCreery: Yes, of course. I m just thinking of what the talk was about 
whether that had happened before? 

Wilson: No, I don t really know. I don t really know. That s not 

something on which one heard much. No. Everything was very 
much kept in thesomething was written about this. There was, 
oh, now I can t remember, one of the members of the French 
department, a woman, wrote a novel exactly about this. I 
haven t thought of this in twenty- five or thirty years. I may 
be able to remember it ultimately. But there was certainly no 
public discussion of anything like that, and it certainly 
wasn t ever overtly acknowledged as a reason or the reason why. 
But the understanding was, we can t have people like that. 

McCreery: And times were very different then as you say, concealment 
and-- 



31 



Wilson: Yes, exactly. Times were very different then. They were very 
different. Well, sometimes I m not sure how different they 
were. [laughter] This will come up again. 



Leaving Music Behind 



McCreery: You mentioned that your personal friends were artists and 

writers and musicians and so on when you were an undergraduate. 
And I m wondering, coming from Santa Cruz and being a rather 
self-made young man, how easily did you connect with others 
once you arrived here? 

Wilson: Easily. Easily, as far as--I had no feeling of isolation or 
difficulty in making contact with others, partly through the 
library. As I mentioned, I almost immediately started working 
in the library. That s twenty hours a week, twenty hours a 
week spent in the company of a large, rapidly changing 
population of undergraduates who, because they also are working 
in the library, are more likely to be interested in the kinds 
of things you are interested in than a randomly chosen bunch of 
people. There were very few baseball players and football 
players on the student staff of the university library. 
Relatively more musicians. 

I had a friend, for instance, instantly made great friends 
with a black musician who worked in the library. Not a black 
jazz musician, a black classical musician, a most serious 
classicalhe actually taught me some harmony. I had never 
studied harmony or counterpart. No, no, no I had studied a 
little harmony before, but not counterpart. And so he started 
me out on classical counterpart. And I did some lessons and 
then was very happy to have done it, though I didn t go very 
far. 

McCreery: I m wondering, to what extent did you continue your music once 
you started in your new life here? 

Wilson: Not very much, but a little bit. You could rent a piano. You 
could rent a practice room, a piano in a practice room, and I 
did for a while when I was first here. But it was not fun and 
it was expensive. I didn t have all that much time, and I 
stopped doing it. You could also rent time on the organ at one 
of the churches over here, a couple of blocks off campus. And 
I did for a while. I would go in and I would play the organ 
for an hour or two. In the philosophy department, I met 
another boy organist, former boy organist. Richard Montague 



32 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



was his name. Like me he, at a very early age, had been the 
organist of a church in Oakland, I think. That was kind of 
funny because he thought that because he--well, I was from 
Santa Cruz and I probably didn t know very much about playing 
the organ, and so he would offer to give me lessons. So we did 
meet a couple of times, but as it turned out he didn t really 
have much to teach me. I don t remember that he taught me 
anything . 

What he did come away with was a completely mistaken notion 
of the tenacity of my musical memory. I had a very good 
musical memory. I learned things fast and remembered them 
forever. He was immensely impressed by that and once 
embarrassed me hideously in Los Angeles by saying, quite 
falsely, that I could listen to an opera once and then play the 
whole thing on the piano, which is, you know- -no, no! 
[laughter] But we were friends, but it was complicated because 
he was an absolute genius at logic. He really was, and he 
became one of the world s most important logicians. And I was 
not a world-class logician by any means. Formalists--! mean 
this is formal mathematical logic. I was good at verbal 
conceptual reasoning but not good at mathematical, formal work. 
I could do it and I wanted to understand what other people were 
doing, I tried very hard to follow and I would work and work 
and work to be sure I got things right and knew what was going 
on, but I had no fluency whatsoever in mathematical- style work. 

Now that had important consequences for me later on, very 
important consequences . 

In your study of philosophy? 

Yes, and later in teaching philosophy. So, back to that. 

Okay. Just one last question about music though. Did you give 
any further concerts after you left Santa Cruz? 

No. No, I never played in public again. Once in a while I 
would play in people s houses. There would be a group of 
people. The head of the music library used to playkind of 
informal little chamber music groups would form in people s 
houses and I would once in a while play in those. But that was 
just private stuff. Nice. People used to do that. They don t 
do it anymore as far as I know. 

Did you miss your music? 

No. That s the odd thing. That s the very odd thing. I m 
glad you asked that because this is important for me, I mean to 



33 



me, as kind of one of the odd characteristics of my history. I 
ended up in Santa Cruz in 1945 giving public recitals, playing 
music in a high school graduation, doing all of these things, 
having been just intensely involved in music for years. I came 
to Berkeley and it fell away. And I didn t regret it a bit. 
Not a bit. 

Well, later on during the rest of my life there would be 
periods when I would have a piano and I would play the piano. 
I did play until just a few years ago. I d play for my own 
pleasure. But I never did anything serious in public and I 
never thought about it. I never wanted to do it. I didn t 
care, it was gone, I was doing other things. Moving on. Doing 
something else. [laughter] So good-bye music. Yes. 
Interesting. 



Student Jobs in the Main Library, from 1946 



McCreery: Well, let s talk a little bit more about your student job in 

the library. Now you mentioned that you got that job in order 
to support yourself and it was twenty hours a week or so. Tell 
me where exactly in the library were you working, and what were 
your duties? 

Wilson: Two places. I divided the time between the loan department, on 
the one hand, and the newly formed, as it was then known, 
Social Sciences Reference Service. The loan department was 
where all the kids worked. In those days you put in requests 
for books at the loan desk. And there were dozens of kids, 
pages, who went into the stacks and got the books and brought 
them back to the desk. And then books had to be reshelved, 
they had to be moved around. It was a huge operation of 
fetching and carrying, and reshelving and reading shelves to be 
sure that everything was in place. Just an immense amount of 
physical labor of moving books around. Hundreds of boys and 
girls doing this, supervised by supervisors. [laughter] It 
was fun work, it wasn t bad work. We were all very happy about 
that. A very cheerful atmosphere was prevalent in the place. 

McCreery: Who was head of the loan department then, do you recall? 

Wilson: Margaret Uridge, probably. She was certainly head sometime or 
other. She was around, my goodness, she was around for a long 
time. Lydia Park was the non--Uridge was a professional 
librarian, Lydia Park was not a professional librarian, would 



have been the nonprofessional supervisor. She was the one who 
actually ran the shop, ran the kids. 

McCreery: What was she like? 

Wilson: Ahh, wonderful Lydia. She was married to David Park, who was 
becoming a very well-known painter in the west coast school of 
painting that was becoming famous then. And she supported him 
by working in the library. I mentioned this one time, and she 
said frankly, "David is on the Lydia Park scholarship." 
[laughter] She was just a marvelously sensible, open, bright, 
friendly, but wise, ironic woman. It was a pleasure, it was 
always an absolute pleasure, to work for her. So that was half 
the job. 

The other job was remarkable. I was there at the opening 
day for the Social Sciences Reference Service. I put the books 
on the shelves. I was the founding page for that thing. And 
since that s the direct ancestor of the current business 
library, I really have very deep roots in the library system at 
Berkeley. 

This was extraordinarily influential because of who the 
people were. There were two librarians. The head of the SSRS, 
as it was abbreviated, was Richard Teggart. He had a Ph.D. in 
economics. He was the son of a famous historian, Frederick J. 
Teggart, who wrote a famous book called Rome and China. 

The first thing I did for Teggart was to do something about 
moving his father s books and papers from one place in the 
library to another. I forget now what it was, but it had 
something to do with his father s stuff. Anyway, Teggart had 
become a librarian sometime in the thirties. I think there was 
no prospect of his getting a job as an economist, or he wasn t 
interested in the kinds of jobs that he could get. Something 
like that. 

His assistant was another librarian, Helen Porterfield, as 
she then was. Mrs. Porterfield. She later married somebody 
named Worden and she was Helen Morison Porterfield Worden. 
Ultimately she ended up associate librarian. She should have 
been made head librarian at Berkeley. She should have been 
made head librarian, but she wasn t. But she was a very smart, 
sharp, sharp -tongued, bright woman. She ran the map 
collection. The SSRS had under its scope the map collection, 
and she ran that and I worked for her at that. 

I m again moving everything around, but here now very 
different kinds of stuff. Maps. I suddenly began to learn 



35 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



about maps and that was wonderful. That was really a glorious 
new discovery. One of the first things that happened was that 
we had to do something with the huge accumulation of maps 
captured by the American army from the German army in the 
Second World War and given to thesomehow they ended up in the 
possession of the university. So here were something like a 
hundred thousand sheet maps, German army maps, that we had to 
deal with. And we did deal with them, and it was absolutely 
fascinating. Teggart was the one- -both of them influenced me a 
lot, but Teggart was really a very important character in my 
development . 

For one thing, he taught me how to dress. I was from the 
sticks. I was from Santa Cruz. I didn t know how to dress. 
Nobody had ever told me how to dress. I had been buying my own 
clothes since I was twelve years old because I couldn t stand 
to wear the bib overalls, the farmers kind of clothes that my 
grandmother and her mother dressed me in when I was a little 
boy. But I don t know how I decided what to buy. But Teggart 
was appalled by the way I dressed. [laughter] So he proceeded 
to teach me slowly, carefully. Now where do you go and what 
kind of shirts do you buy? It s Oxford cloth, it s button-down 
collars. Item by item, he got me dressed to his standard, 
which was very much kind of an Ivy League standard, collegiate, 
[laughter] 

What did you think of all that? 

Oh, I was perfectly willing to be taught. [laughter] That was 
all right. He knew something I didn t know. In his way he was 
being benevolent. 



McCreery: Go ahead about Teggart, if you will. 

Wilson: Teggart not only taught me how to dress, he really profoundly 
influenced my views on lots of other things . He was an 
economist, and the reference service that he was offering was 
aimed at economics and business. It said "social sciences" but 
his interests really were in economics and business. 

I began to get interested in that. Business, for heaven s 
sake. How could I possibly be interested in business? Well I 
did get interested in business, but from kind of a funny slant. 
I got interested in it from a kind of a Marxist slant, 
[laughter] I wasn t a political Marxist, I was an anti- 
Communist from an early time, but very much a pro-dialectical 
materialism sort of person. I thought, now there s a great 



36 



deal to historical materialism, as recently James Carville in 
the presidential election was saying, "It s the economy, 
stupid." And that impressed itself on me very early, very 



early, 
from. 



It s the economy, stupid. Coming from where I d come 



McCreery: I was just going to say, your own roots made it real for you. 

Wilson: That was powerfully persuasive. So working for Teggart in a 
climate of exclusive primary concern with economics and 
business was intellectually influential. In a sense that was 
as much a part of my general education as courses taken in the 
academic departments. I probably learned more from him than I 
learned from most of the professors that I took courses from. 
I know I learned more from him than I learned from most of the 
professors that I took courses from. 

McCreery: So again, outside the classroom setting. 

Wilson: Outside the classroom. Outside the classroom setting, yes. 

McCreery: Seems to be a theme here. 

Wilson: It does, doesn t it? It does begin to sound that way. Yes, 
that s right, though. That s quite right. 

There s another aspect to this. You ll see that this will 
be clearly relevant to what s coming up. Teggart was 
completely contemptuous of distinctions between professional 
and nonprofessional, that sort of thing. He had me doing 
things, pretty soon, which were way over my head. So I was 
doing bibliographical checking that kids should not have been 
doing. And I was doing--! can t remember now exactly what, but 
later on this turned out to be just exquisitely-- 

So his contempt for the idea that nonprofessionals were 
people who didn t know how to do anything, couldn t do 
any thing- -he made me into something that he could set up 
against anybody else. 

McCreery: I wonder, did you have any sense of how that compared to the 
way that the rest of the library was run at that time? The 
distinction between professionals and non, and the role of 
students versus 

Wilson: It was different. Well, I don t really know how sensitive I 
was to it. I don t really know, because the kids I knew, the 
other students I knew, were primarily working in the reserve 
book room and loan department and doing just the business of 



37 



handing out books. I didn t have any comparison. So I 
probably didn t have a sense then of how differently I was 
being treated from other people in analogous situations. I m 
not sure there were all that many analogous situations. 

McCreery: Probably right. Did you seek out the reference service or did 
it find you, do you remember? 

Wilson: I didn t seek it out, it must have found me. It must be 

accident, it must be pure accident, that first bit. I don t 
know how it came about that I ended up being split between the 
loan desk and Teggart and company. 

McCreery: I m interested in Teggart s own interests and how those were 

manifested in this new branch of the library and the collection 
he was developing there, and so on. 

Wilson: At first he didn t have a collection. It wasn t until the 

annex was built, and that was during this time. I forget when 
it started but I do remember being involved with him in 
planning what the furniture was going to be like. [laughter] 
But we just had a few books on open shelves at one end of what 
used to be the big main reference room in the library. 

McCreery: Well, tell me about the reference service that you provided. 

Wilson: No, I can t, because I don t really know. That s one of the 
bizarre features of all of this. There was a reference 
service, but I m not sure that anybody ever asked for it. It 
was not as if there were people lined up waiting to ask 
questions. The actual work was not reference service at all, 
it was ordering books. Teggart read reviews in journals, and 
he looked at lists of new books and checked things on the 
lists. He would choose things to be added to the library 
collections. 

In those days the final decisions were left to faculty 
members , so one of the things I had to do was to come over here 
to South Hall carrying the order requests and distribute them 
to the economics department, the business people, the 
international relations people, the political science people- 
all in this buildingand get them to sign the requests and 
then take them back. So I knew that was going on, but as for 
reference service, very odd. There wasn t all that much. I 
mean he must havewell, he was a formidable man and I can t 
imagine a kid going up to him and asking a question about, you 
know, explain to me this or how do I find out about that? He 
would have scared them away. 



38 



McCreery: What was his personal style? 

Wilson: He was crippled, and so he sat. He couldn t walk at all well. 
He was a big, florid man and did notwho did he look like? 
No, I can t do that, don t know who he looked like. He would 
scowl. He was good at scowling. I never saw him smile. I 
can t imagine him ever smiling. His face wasn t built to 
smile. It was built to sneer and to scowl. 

McCreery: What effect did that have on you? 

Wilson: I liked it. [laughter] I got along fine. We got along just 
great. I don t know why. I wasn t put off a bit by this. He 
could insult me furiously. He was particularly outraged, he 
was just outraged by--I had a pair of purple sandals which I 
wore. [laughter] He thought those the most obscene, 
disgusting things in the world and told me so at some 
considerable length. [laughter] Well, all right. We ll see 
about this. No, it s odd but I wasn t put off by him at all. 

McCreery: He was quite an influence. 
Wilson: Yes, sure. 

McCreery: As you think back on it, were you having a lot of conversations 
with him about some of these new, sort of philosophical areas 
that you were getting into? 

Wilson: I can t remember that. I really cannot remember that. He 
would initiate the conversations, I wouldn t. It was up to 
him. After all, he was one who was at work. There he was, 
see. He s at work. And what is he doing while he s at work? 
Well, he s talking to his page. The page does not bring up 
these philosophical problems, and so on. 

McCreery: Yes, of course, it would have been at his initiation. 

Wilson: Absolutely. 

McCreery: If ever. 

Wilson: Absolutely. 

McCreery: That s a good point. Do you have any recollection of what kind 
of salary you earned in that student page job? 

Wilson: Sixty cents an hour. That was twice what I had been getting in 
the cannery. [laughter] 



39 

McCreery: I was just recalling your summer after high school. 

Wilson: Thirty cents an hour. Sixty was good. 

McCreery: So that was all right. 

Wilson: It was all right. Yes. 

Visits Home to Santa Cruz; Family Contact over the Years 



McCreery: And you were supporting yourself ably on that half-time 
position? 

Wilson: Yes. As a matter of fact I had a little income supplement. 
After I went to college my father started giving me money, 
which he was still legally obligated to give until I was 
twenty-one. I m not sure when this started and I m not sure 
how long it lasted, but he would give me ten dollars a month, I 
think regularly. I can t be definite about this, but I know he 
did it. I mean ten dollars a month was more then than it is 
now, by a great deal. At some point I told him to stop, I 
can t remember when though. 

McCreery: Well, since you ve mentioned your father, I m wondering- -after 
you left home in 1945--how much contact did you have with your 
family, or visits home and so on? 

Wilson: I would visit--! would go back to Santa Cruz regularly, quite 
frequently, to visit my grandmother. And I would see other 
relatives, aunts. My father had three sisters and they were 
all living there in town and I would see them. No, two of them 
were living in town. 

I would see my father from time to time. He had been in 
the war, he d come back from the war and he moved around for a 
while. He becameit s almost a technical term--a tramp 
printer, a person who doesn t stay very long in one place. He 
takes a job on this newspaper, and then he quits after a little 
while and goes to another newspaper, always around here in 
northern California. 

But his health began to get very bad and he ended up in- -he 
somehow acquired a little cottage in Santa Cruz and I did, from 
time to time, see him. Not often, not often. Once in a while. 
My grandmother was the one I regularly visited. 



40 



McCreery: What did she think of all your new adventures, I wonder? Any 
idea? 

Wilson: No idea. 

McCreery: And what became of your younger brother? 

Wilson: Ah, well he flourished, in a way. After a certain amount of 
time involved with local low- level criminal gangs, he joined 
the air force and went off. He was in the air force for a 
while, came back. He moved to San Francisco, got a job. He 
was an auto mechanic and worked at various places as an auto 
mechanic . 

After my father died, we inherited the little cottage, the 
little property, and under state law each of us got half the 
value of this. I gave him my half, which would give him just 
enough money to open his own shop. So he opened an auto repair 
shop of his own. Went on for years, really flourishing. It 
was a specialty auto repair in Marin County, working only on 
specialty cars. 

McCreery: Did you see him much? 

Wilson: Once in a while, yes. Once in a while. He looked me up. He 
looked me up. He kind of followed me around. He frightened 
me, because we would go out driving and he would drive at such 
incredible reckless speeds, I thought he was going to kill us. 
And I thought, "He s after you. He s going to kill you." 
Because he was a mechanic and I was an academic, and I didn t 
know how he felt about that. 



Political Interests; Loyalty Oath Controversy; Early Graduate 
Study, 19A9-1950 



McCreery: Okay, thank you. Let me bring you back to the library on 

campus here one more time, if I may. I know you were just a 
student page at the time we re talking about, but I m wondering 
if you had occasion to get to know any of the other leaders of 
the various departments at the library at that time? 

Wilson: Not at that time, not at that time. Later on, after I had 
graduated and when I went back to work as a full-time 
nonprofessional librarian, then I knew everybody. But as an 
undergraduate, no. I was just one of hundreds. 



McCreery: At what point, if you know, did you first consider the idea of 
going to library school, or was that later? 

Wilson: That s later. Teggart made me do that. 
McCreery: Did he? 

Wilson: Yes. After I graduated and spent one year as a graduate 

student and a teaching assistant, and then quit in disgust. 
Again, another rejection. Bad! Go away! No more philosophy 
for me! [laughter] And then I went back to work for Teggart 
full time as a principal library assistant, was the title then. 
I don t know what that would be now. After a while he said, 
"Look, if you re going to do this kind of work you might as 
well get a library degree. It makes no sense for you to do 
this without a degree. It s money. It s money and benefits. 
So you ve got to do this." So he made me do it and I did it. 
See, very influential man. 

McCreery: I m wondering, as an undergraduate, if you felt the students 
around you--I read that Berkeley had a total of about 22,000 
students at that time, it was really one of the larger campuses 
in the country. I think only three others were larger, 
approximately. Do you feel that there was much interest in 
politics by the student body? 

Wilson: Oh, yes. Good grief. Oh my goodness yes. Right from the 
beginning I was involved in a kind of continuous political 
argument with friends. The first question was whether to vote 
for Henry [Agard] Wallace in the 1948 election. I couldn t 
vote then because I wasn t twenty-one, quite. But the question 
was, do you vote for that person? My friends were strong 
Wallace supporters. I lived in a hive of Communists 
[laughter], and politics was a very strong undercurrent all the 
time. In the library, for instance, the kids on the library 
staff may not have included many football players, but they 
certainly included political radicals. Lots of political 
radicals. 

McCreery: Were you one of them? 

Wilson: No. I was an anti-radical. I was a skeptic. I wanted to be a 
radical, but I couldn t believe. I would have liked to have 
been a Marxist, but I couldn t. I can t believe that stuff. 
They re Utopians, and that s crazy. [laughter] So I just 
couldn t do it. 

McCreery: You couldn t swallow any of these things whole? 



42 



Wilson: I couldn t swallow them. I simply couldn t swallow them. Then 
on the other hand, there was the other feature of this. I 
remember- -this now, this is getting a little later, toward the 
end of the undergraduate career I guess, about the time of the 
war in North Korea, the Korean War. This was a terrifying 
period. I remember sitting in coffee shops down on Telegraph 
Avenue with friends saying, "Oh, it s the bomb. Any day now, 
any day now." We really did think that the end of the world 
was coming because we didn t trust either side. We really did 
not trust the Russians and we did not trust the Americans. And 
we were seriously prepared for doomsday. 

So politics was omnipresent, heavy. Everything was colored 
by, "Where are you on this? Where are you on that? What about 
Alger Hiss? What do you think about this?" 

McCreery: That leads me to ask if you and your friends had much awareness 
of the loyalty oath controversy in the late forties when you 
were an undergraduate? 

Wilson: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Oh yes, I signed it. I had to sign it 
in order to get employed as a teaching assistant. That was 
bitter decision. I really hated that. 

McCreery: So that was your very first job after graduation? 

Wilson: That was the first after graduation. My first job was being a 
teaching assistant and the question was, okay, sign or not? If 
you don t sign, no job. And I signed. And I felt like an 
idiot. 

McCreery: That would have been 1949, so really at the height of this, 
before it was later resolved by the Supreme Court and 
everything. I mean, this was really in the middle of it, in 
the thick of it. 

Wilson: Yes, this was in the thick of it. This was when a handful of 
people were refusing to sign and were going away. And the 
question was, why aren t you refusing to sign too? Well, got 
to live. 



McCreery: Was that hard to decide in the end? 

Wilson: I remember struggling, but I can t say. I can t now say, well 
how hard did I struggle? Yes, I signed. Yes. 



McCreery: I was reading that one of the faculty members in philosophy, 

William Dennes, was, I think, head of the northern division of 
the Academic Senate during part of that. 

Wilson: He was on my dissertation committee. 

McCreery: Okay. So I don t know if it was a particular interest in your 

department- 
Wilson: No, I don t remember--! don t connect that with the philosophy 

department at all. That was outside entirely, for me, friends 

on the outside. Students. 

McCreery: Well, since you graduated with your A.B. in philosophy in 1949, 
I know you went on to this position as a teaching assistant, 
but had you decided what you would do next at graduation time, 
or how did this decision come about? 

Wilson: You keep asking me these questions that I can t answer. 
McCreery: Well, that s all right. 

Wilson: I can t answer. I don t know. I drifted into it. [laughter] 
It was one of the things one did. I had nothing else in mind. 
I had no career aspirations. I had no idea what I was going to 
be when I grew up. I had no idea at all. That s kind of 
central. I was available for anything. My friends in the 
philosophy department--! had, you know, fairly close friends-- 
they said, "Well, be a graduate student. Be a T.A. We ll all 
be T.A.s." 

And so I did, so I did. I don t remember liking it. I 
don t remember being happy at it all. I don t remember being 
comfortable at it or good at it. I do remember a very odd 
thing. I was a teaching assistant for George Adams, a 
professor in the philosophy department, George Plimpton Adams. 
He s a Boston Adams. Marvelous, marvelous man. I was one of 
his teaching assistants. I was also taking the notes on his 
course for the off -campus commercial note service, then called 
Fy-Bate Notes. And somebody blew the whistle on me, saying 
that this was corrupt and illegal and odious and wicked. And I 
thought, I m in an excellent position to take good notes, 
[laughter] And I was doing it because Fran Herndon, who ran 
the thing, had asked me to do it, and she knew what the 
situation was. 



McCreery: It s not like the notes were wrong! [laughter] 



44 



Wilson: No, it s not as if there was anything wrong with the notes. 

[laughter] So somehow this all came up to Professor Adams, and 
Adams dismissed the whole thing. He said, "Nonsense, nonsense. 
There s no problem here at all." 

McCreery: That was in the days before we talked so freely about conflicts 
of interest. 



Wilson: Yes, yes. I suppose it was a conflict of interest but I didn t 
feel it. Besides, I needed the money. 

But that was a bad year. It was a bad year of philosophy. 
For one thing I took the seminar in mathematical logic, and as 
I say, I m not fluent in that and I worked, my God, I worked my 
tail off on that. I worked twenty hours a week at logic and 
didn t feel I was getting anywhere. Well, it was a stupid kind 
of course. We were going line by line through the first part 
of [Alfred North] Whitehead and [Bertrand] Russell s Principle 
Mathematics, which is the great classic of early modern 
mathematical logic, from 1910 or 12. They set out to prove 
that you could found mathematics on elementary logical 
principles. You know, three huge volumes of detailed proofs, 
and so on. But they re not complete proofs, they re sketches 
of proofs. So we start on page one and start making complete 
proofs, line by line, symbol by symbol. Inexorable! Hundreds 
of pages of this. Argh! I m going mad! And this was just 
awful. I wasn t good at it, I didn t like it. It was just 
torture. 

The other courses I took, I don t remember anything from 
them. I was not happy that year. But I ended it in another 
one of those things I did in those days. I kind of burned my 
bridges. I was in a seminar with Dennes, with William Ray 
Dennes, a seminar on philosophical naturalism. We were reading 
a book that had just been published by C. I. Lewis, Clarence 
Irving Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. A big, 
boring book. For some reason I just couldn t stand that, and I 
thought it was all wrong. And not just that, but there was 
something really wrong about the whole enterprise that was 
going on there. And so I made kind of a speech in the seminar, 
denouncing the thing. 

McCreery: Just Lewis, or the whole thing? 

Wilson: Lewis and everything else too. And then I walked out with the 
sense that, I m out of here, and they ll never let me back. I 
have committed suicide. I have committed hara-kiri. I have 
just killed myself. 



45 



McCreery: Philosophical suicide. 

Wilson: Philosophical suicide, yes. I now cannot remember at all what 
I said, what it was like, but I know it was a big denunciation 
of that book and everything surrounding it. [laughter] And to 
do this to Dennes, whom I in general liked. I thought, well 
he s harmless. His brand of philosophizing was a bland and 
harmless kind. But maybe that irritated me. Maybe that s what 
angered me, I don t know. 

McCreery: Did you plan your speech ahead of time? 

Wilson: I don t know. But I ended my philosophical career, I thought. 

McCreery: For the moment. 

Wilson: For the moment. I thought it was forever. 

McCreery: That was 1950. 

Wilson: Yes. I did one year. 

McCreery: And you hadn t liked teaching. 

Wilson: No, not much. No. I hadn t enjoyed that. I don t remember 
anything about it either. It just wasn t anything. 



Principal Library Assistant in the Main Library; Discovering 
Maps ## 



McCreery: Now, at the end of your year as a teaching assistant in 1950, 
you had, as you say, burned your bridges with philosophy for 
the time being. Can you tell me what happened next? 

Wilson: Yes. Well somehow I found myself back working for Teggart 
again. I don t remember how I got there, I must have let 
people know in the library that 1 now was looking for a job. I 
suppose somebody said, "Well, all right. Do you want to work 
for Teggart?" I don t remember going to him and asking him, 
"Can I have a job?" But he had a position and I took it. 

McCreery: So this was full time? 

Wilson: This was now full time as a principal library assistant. It 
turned out that I spent about half my time running the map 
room. I d started out right at the beginning working with Mrs. 



46 



McCreery : 



Wilson: 



then-Porterfield doing maps. Now I had the place all to 
myself, and that was glorious. So I cataloged the maps, and I 
did everything you needed to do with maps. And I did reference 
work. I bought maps, and I did all the processing that needed 
to be done. And that was fun, instructive, and influential for 
me. It added to my repertory of kinds of textual material. 

I started out on music, which has its own kind of 
textuality. Here I have collections of scores, musical scores. 
Then there s poetry. Then there was philosophical texts. Then 
here are maps. Here s visual representations, but very 
structured and artificial visual representations of reality. 
The contour line, for instance, the line drawn on the map at 
points of equal distance from sea level. The structure of 
contour lines depict, in general, the shape of the physical 
surface, the elevations of the physical surface. This sort of 
thing was, you know, this was a new way, a new kind of text, a 
new body of textual materials. I liked that a lot. 

For the other part of the job, I was doing reference work 
and book selection, and miscellaneous jobs in what was then- 
was it still Social Sciences Reference Service? I guess it was 
still, but still heavily skewed towards business and economics. 
There I would spend a great deal of timewell, as a matter of 
fact, I guess kind of legally, I was sitting at the reference 
desk, but I was reading all of the radical magazines that came 
through. So I had a thorough grasp of the current radical 
literature, as well as the business literature. So I d read 
Fortune magazine with one hand, and I d read Dissent and 
Partisan Review, and so on, and Monthly Review, with the other 
hand. So I got a good, balanced view of business and finance 
and economics. So that was all very interesting, all very 
useful. 

But after a while the time came when, as Teggart said, 
"It s time for you to go to library school." This is all very 
well, but you know, if you re going to do this, do it under a 
professional guise. Now as I said, he was completely 
contemptuous of the distinction between professional and 
nonprofessional. He wasn t saying, you can t do any of these 
things unless you re a professional. No. I was answering 
reference questions. Hell, he didn t care about that. You do 
what you can do. You do what you know how to do. 

And by then you were doing also book selection as one part of 
the job, and cataloging- - 

Yes. Cataloging. I was doing everything. I was doing 
everything a librarian does. I was doing all of those things. 



47 



And I was doing it, you know, in one of the big branches of one 
of the big university libraries. I was a librarian. Then I 
went to library school. 

McCreery: That map section of the Social Sciences Reference Service, was 
that really your baby from the beginning? 

Wilson: That was, yes. It was exclusively mine for those couple of 
years, yes. That was all mine. Oh, yes. 

McCreery: Were you drawn to particular kinds of maps? 

Wilson: No. Basic topographical maps are the stock in trade of --the 

standard maps that you buy at map-making agencies all over the 
world. Every country has its own map-making agency. In Great 
Britain it s the Ordnance Survey. In the United States it s 
the [U.S.] Geological Survey. Everybody has their own map- 
making agencies, and they all make roughly comparable kinds of 
maps . 

McCreery: Did you ever have occasion to compare Berkeley s collection to 
those of other universities? 

Wilson: Of maps, no. I did some comparative stuff that we ll come to 
very shortly, but it wasn t in terms of maps. So I don t 
really know what the comparative strength or weakness of 
Berkeleyit would be interesting. I d like to know that. 
There was another thing. We had aeronautical photographs too. 
Now my memory of those is bad, because we didn t know really 
what to do with those. And they were a completely different 
category of material, were not well assimilated into the 
system. 

And I don t remember what we did. I don t remember, did we 
catalog them? Did we process them in any way? Did we just sit 
there and say, what do we do with these things now? Here are 
these thousands of aeronautical photographs taken in series, 
you know, as if a plane is going along and going click, click, 
click, click, click. And now, of course, there is an 
overwhelming amount of visual data from sensors overhead, which 
has completely changed the picture and I don t know anything 
about that. But I know that the world has changed just 
remarkably in that regard. 

McCreery: But at the time that was really something. 

Wilson: It was something, yes. We didn t know what to do with it. 



48 



McCreery: I m interested in this aspect of developing a new program and 
new systems for dealing with these archival materials. How 
much was that an excitement for you, solving the problems of a 
new area in the library? 

Wilson: Oh, it was a great excitement, but I didn t do anything very 
complicated. For instance, there were all those leftover 
German military maps from the Second World War. They were 
actually German overlays of Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, 
Polish, White Russian maps, overprinted with German military 
terminology- -you know, huge quantities of them. I had to make 
index maps for them. I had to organize these somehow. They 
came to us just in an unorganized mass. So I had to figure out 
which went with where, how they fit together, and then make 
myself little index maps which would indicate, this map is a 
map of this place in the country, and so on, to allow you to 
get from the index to the maps themselves. That was fun, 
making my own indexes to the maps was great fun and exciting, 
but nothing novel. Nothing novel, because for the maps made by 
the Geological Survey, it produces its own index maps and 
provides them with its other stuff. I was just copying the 
sort of thing that other people did. 

McCreery: Who else was on Teggart s staff at that time? 

Wilson: Geraldine Scalzo. I don t know whether you know her. She then 
later became the head of the successor to the Social Sciences 
Reference Service, the Business Library, briefly called the 
Hans Kelsen Social Science Library and then changed its name to 
the business library, because the business school gave them 
money. Geraldine Scalzo. My goodness, a lot of people. Ruth 
Nystrom, who later married Teggart, was one of the librarians 
on the staff. Let s see, Ruth, Scalzo, I can t remember. 
There were other people coming and going, but 1 can t remember 
anybody else. It wasn t a big staff. 



"Just the Next Thing"; Attending the School of Librarianship, 
1952-1953 



McCreery: Okay. Were you much aware of the presence of the library 
school before Teggart began to urge you to attend? 

Wilson: I knew it was there. I had known it was there right from the 
first time I walked into the library, because the library 
school was in a big room right off the main loan department, 
loan hall, and Miss [Katherine R.] McCreery. And then Mr. [J, 



49 



Periam] Danton arrived suddenly [to assume the deanship of the 
school] and I was aware of the arrival. Everybody was aware of 
the arrival of Captain Danton, or Admiral Danton. 

McCreery: What were those first impressions? 

Wilson: A military officer. 

McCreery: He had just returned from the war. 

Wilson: Very much a military officer, in full command. Yes. 
[laughter] 

McCreery: Well, I don t know if this is a fair question, but do you know 
anything about relations between the library school and the 
main library staff? 

Wilson: No. 

McCreery: You weren t in a position to-- 

Wilson: No, I wasn t in a position to know anything. I knew it was 
there, I knew it was there. 

McCreery: So Teggart urged you along, and do you remember anything more 
about how you decided to take that plunge? 

Wilson: No. No, I don t remember anything at all. [laughter] 

McCreery: The process of applying? Were you interviewed or anything? 

Wilson: I don t know. I don t know. [laughter] 

McCreery: "What did you know and when did you know it?" [laughter] 

Wilson: I just put in my application. They couldn t haveit would 
have been bizarre for them to turn me down. 

McCreery: Oh, of course. 

Wilson: So I think it was routine acceptance. 

McCreery: Do you know if you had a sense then, though, of actually 
deciding to become a librarian for the future? 

Wilson: No. I had a sense of going to library school. [laughter] 
McCreery: The next thing. 



50 



Wilson: Yes, that s all it was. It was just the next thing. The odd 
thing was, however, that I approached this with complete 
cynicism, absolute complete cynicism. I didn t expect anything 
from them. I didn t want anything from them except a degree. 
And 1 didn t get anything from them except a degree. So it all 
worked out all right. [laughter] 

McCreery: Do you care to tell me what you mean by that? 

Wilson: I didn t learn anything. I already knew more than they had to 
tell me. And what they did have to tell me that I didn t know, 
I didn t want to know or need to know. I ll really be vicious 
and dump on Danton. He would require the students of his class 
in library administration to memorize the past presidents of 
the American Library Association for the last ten or fifteen 
years. That sort of thing. And when you consider that the 
people in the class were graduate students at the University of 
California at Berkeley- -we had, for instance, philosophy 
majors, psychology majors, a friend of mine, Ray Brian, in that 
class, a psychology major, and that sort of thing, this was-- 

McCreery: It was a bit condescending? 

Wilson: It was contemptible. It was contemptible. So we didn t like 

that and we didn t think well of that. And we thought very ill 
of that. We thought it was a farce. We thought it was 
something that had to be got through, and so we got through it 
by whatever means was necessary. We would cheat, copy. We 
would use any means whatsoever to get through the necessary- 
no, we really, it wasn t a matter of hatred, but of contempt. 
Now this is bothersome, it s very bothersome. But I don t know 
what it was like for people coming in who weren t like me and 
Ray Brian, who already knew a lot. 

Maybe people who were coming in with no background had a 
completely different take on this. But for somebody who had 
been already doing essentially professional-level work, to be 
subjected to these indignities-- [laughter] it was not amusing. 
It was not amusing. I was so full of contempt for this, I was 
taking a course from Louis Sass, I think it was Louis Sass. 

McCreery: I think that was his first year there, if I m not mistaken. 

Wilson: Yes, he wasn t there very long, I don t think. I thought so 

little of him, that--I had to write a paper, and I invented--! 
wrote a paper which was a complete fabrication from beginning 
to end. I invented everything. I invented bibliographical 
citations. It was purely imaginary. It was absolutely, 
totally imaginary. He loved it. Now maybe, of course, I m 



51 



doing him a disservice. Maybe he thought it was very clever of 
me to think I could pass off this imaginary paper. [laughter] 
So clever indeed that he d pretend to-- 

McCreery: Well, that s possible. 

Wilson: It s possible, but I don t think so. So anyway, I didn t think 
much of that. I didn t expect anything, I didn t get anything 
except a degree. So that s that. 

McCreery: Okay. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about Miss 
Markley, who was teaching the cataloging courses? 

Wilson: I don t remember her from then. I do remember her very much 

from later, but from then I don t remember her at all. I don t 
know why. I remember Fred Mosher. 

McCreery: Well, what can you tell me about his courses? 

Wilson: Well, he asked me to lecture to the class on the bibliography 
of philosophy. And he asked my friend Ray Brian to lecture to 
the class on the bibliography of psychology. Now, this was 
preposterous, but he didn t realize it. And this, again, was 
part of the problem, one of the big problems. I didn t know 
anything at all about the bibliography of philosophy, because 
students of philosophy don t use the printed bibliographical 
apparatus of philosophy. We d never heard of any of the things 
that were being taught and talked about in the library school. 

But the library school faculty were completely unaware of 
the fact that nobody ever used the bibliographical works that 
they were busily instructing people in the use of. So Fred 
simply assumed, entirely falsely, that naturally I would know 
about these things. Well, I didn t know but I quickly found 
out, no problem about that. 

McCreery: So you did deliver some sort of lecture. 

Wilson: Sure, sure, sure. No problem. One looked at the things on the 
list and looked through them, and then got up and described 
them. He thought that was great. I didn t think it was great, 
because I thought it was damn nonsense to be talking about this 
when there was a question of whether anybody else had ever 
looked at any of those things besides me, for future reference, 
[laughter] That s exactly the kind of mistaken assumption 
about the world which people in the school would make all the 
time. It was insane. They didn t know what they were talking 
about, literally. 



52 



So that s one of the reasons why people outside the school 
would tend to feel contemptuous towards people in the school. 
Because, they d say, "They [in the school] don t know what 
they re talking about." 

McCreery: People in the library would feel this way then? 

Wilson: Well-- [laughter] 

McCreery: Who would feel so contemptuous, besides yourself? 

Wilson: Teggart. He went to the school. Imagine him in that kind of-- 
well, of course, he d taken classes from Miss McCreery and Miss 
Sisler, Delia Sisler. I don t know what they were like. They 
may have been very different. Or Sydney Mitchell may have been 
very different, could have been. 

McCreery: But as a young student you easily identified a discrepancy 
between what was being taught and what was happening in 
practice in libraries. 

Wilson: Sure, sure. 

McCreery: How widespread was that discrepancy? 

Wilson: Well, I didn t spend a lot of time at this. It wasn t until 

much later that I started kind of thinking systematically about 
the difference, the discrepancy between what was assumed in 
library school and what was known about practice. I saw how 
wide it was . 

McCreery: Later on [when you were dean of the school] it was your job to 
think about it. 

Wilson: Later on it was my job, and my pleasure, to think about it. 

That was a bad [student] year, but that was something which I 
had very much in mind when I came back [to the school]. "We re 
not going to do that, are we? We re not going to do that." 

McCreery: I m interested in your class in library school, 1952-53. I 

have learned that there were sixty-seven students enrolled and 
about sixty who received the BLS degree at the end of the year. 
That was, of course, before the master s degree was offered. 
And about half the class were women and half men. 

Wilson: That surprises me. I didn t remember that. 
McCreery: I thought it was unusual. 



53 



Wilson: That s unusual. That s unusual, yes. All the years I was 

here, after 1968, we never had a fifty-fifty split between male 
and female MLS . 

McCreery: And of course after the war men were flooding back from the 
service in many fields, and the numbers were rising for men 
students. 

Wilson: That s odd, that s odd. Now of course, there s a technical 

reason why I might not have been aware of this. Remember, the 
school was then on the fourth floor of the general library, and 
each of us had a little desk in a little carrel, a little 
cubicle sort of thing. We didn t see the class. We would see 
the class if we went to lectures, but if we avoided lectures or 
if we were asleep during lectures, we could very well not 
really have a very good sense of what was going on. [laughter] 

McCreery: And did we avoid lectures? 

Wilson: Did we ever. [laughter] Oh yes, we d have notetaking cabals. 
Undergraduates do this, and we certainly did this. 

McCreery: Well, this doesn t relate to the ratio of men to women, but I 
wonder to what extent do you think the other students shared 
your views of the whole experience? 

Wilson: Well, it s hard to tell because I didn t spend a lot of time 
with them. I know some of them did. The ones I knew very 
well, Portia Hawley, who later married Ray Swank, Portia 
Hawley, Ray Brian, a few others. I can t remember anybody else 
right now. The ones that I knew, we all had the same attitude 
towards this . 

Now this is bad news for the ROHO [Regional Oral History 
Office] project. Bad history, or bad vibes from the past. 

McCreery: Not necessarily. That was your experience. 

Wilson: That was the experience. And again it s very much a question 
of, to what extent was that simply because of the fact that I 
had been poisoned for the school already. Teggart had poisoned 
me by making me into a librarian and by making me contemptuous 
of the distinction between professional and nonprofessional. 
Anyway, so that ended. 

McCreery: While we re on the subject of the library school, now I know 

that Miss Edith Coulter had already retired from teaching back 
in 1949, but I gather she was still around the school a lot, 
and I wonder if you had any occasion to get to know her. 



54 



Wilson: No, not at all. 

McCreery: Okay. She s a figure of great interest, of course, in the 
history of the school. 

Wilson: Oh yes. 

McCreery: And was always said to have a certain personal style, and so 
on. 

Wilson: Yes. No, I knew who she was. I think she was around the 
library all the time but I never met her, I think. 

McCreery: And did you ever meet Sydney Mitchell? 
Wilson: No. He was gone before I got there. 



Reference Librarian at the General Reference Service, 1953-1954 



McCreery: Well, again let me touch on this idea of whether you had any 

plan for what you would do after finishing library school. You 
were kind of just trying to get through it, it seems. Any 
thoughts for the future? 

Wilson: I was still working half time for Teggart. 1 don t remember 

then that I had any ideas. It s odd, it really is bizarre, but 
even then I had no career aspirations. So when, at the end of 
this time or sometime very close to the end, I was invited to-- 
this time I really was invited--to become a reference librarian 
at the General Reference Service, I guess I said, "Well, why 
not?" I hadn t anything better in mind. So I ll do it. 

Now that was a mistake too. Boring job. Terrible, boring 
job. [laughter] I had to work nights a lot of the time, a lot 
of night and weekend work. I d be the only person at the main 
reference desk. There weren t any questions to ask, except 
directional questions. "Where s the bathroom? How late is the 
library open?" What I did was circulate books, and what I 
circulated was copies of plot summary books. Kids writing book 
reports or term papers or something needed summaries of books 
they hadn t read and plays they hadn t read and so on. And we 
kept them at the desk and I circulated them. 

So the other thing I remember doing at that job waswhat 
was it, Mudge? Winchell? The guide to reference works, the 
standard guide to reference works. It was then Mudge Guide to 



55 



Reference Works, predecessor of Winchell, which is predecessor 
of, I forget what it is now. The guide was a list of reference 
works, and so I had to take this list of reference works and 
find the call numbers of all the books in the thing and 
annotate the desk copy of Mudge with the call numbers of the 
books. So okay, where is the encyclopedia, this and that, 
okay. Well, that wasn t so much fun, and why couldn t you have 
a page do that? Why did you have to have a newly minted 
Bachelor of Library Science degree holder doing the annotation, 
the copying of call numbers from one place to another? 

McCreery: Who were you working for in the job? 

Wilson: Jean McFarland, the head of reference. So that was really a 
stupid operation. The things I then did could perfectly well 
have been done by a freshman. And in other parts of the world, 
in other libraries, at other times, other places, they are done 
by freshmen and done perfectly well. 

McCreery: And you had done, certainly, more than that for Teggart. 

Wilson: 1 had done that and much, much, much more working for Teggart. 
So I thought, you know, this is stupid, this is dumb. Let me 
out of here. [laughter] 

McCreery: Do you recall your salary in that job? 
Wilson: No, I don t remember. 



Additional Recollections of the Map Library 

[Interview 3: August 20, 1999] //# 



McCreery: I wanted to return this morning, as I warned you, just briefly 
to the subject of the time you spent setting up the map library 
under Mr. Teggart. And I just wonder if there is anything more 
to be said about the actual cataloging system that you set up 
for the maps? 

Wilson: I must have misled you because I didn t set up something new, I 
inherited something that had been developed by professional 
librarians who had worked before. Mrs. Porterfield, later Mrs. 
Worden, had been in charge of that when I first came to work 
for Teggart and her. I don t know whether she set the system 
up or not, or whether she was continuing something that 
somebody else had set up. 



56 



When I came on and, as a nonprofessional, became completely 
in charge of the map room I didn t, in fact, start a new 
system. That would have been presumptuous, I don t think I 
could have gone that far. So I continued, though I did 
simplify things as much as 1 could, take lots of shortcuts and 
stop doing some things that I thought were useless. 

The problem was that the old system, in a sense, involved a 
huge amount of completely pointless recordmaking. The way the 
majority of the most important maps appear, they appear in 
sets. So the United States Geological Survey issues a complete 
set of maps covering all of the United States on each of 
several different scales; that is, very detailed, not so 
detailed, not at all detailed. And each of these different 
scales represents a different complete mapping of the United 
States. There would be hundreds, thousands of sheets, each 
covering a little piece of the United States. They re all part 
of a big set. 

The system 1 inherited was one in which every time a new 
edition of one sheet, one little piece, was publishedand this 
would happen repeatedly because people kept revising the maps-- 
we would make a new catalog card for that sheet. These would 
be very detailed descriptions of that one sheet. 

Well, there was no point in doing this. There was no point 
at all in doing this, because if a person wanted to look at a 
particular place in the United States, they wouldn t go to the 
catalog at all. They d say, "I want to see the United States 
Geological Survey map--" They might know what they wanted, 
they would want the Topanga quadrangle, or something like that. 
--"I want to see a detailed map of Los Banos." In that case 
you d go to an index map, which would be a map of California 
divided into squares, and you d look to see which little square 
covered Los Banos and that square would be numbered. You d 
see, okay, that s map number so-and-so. So then you d go get 
that map. You d never use the catalog, never go indirectly 
through the catalog in order to get at those maps. 

So here was an activity of cataloging thousands, thousands 
of maps, which was entirely pointless. It was obviously 
pointless. It was clearly pointless. And yet it was an 
entrenched practice. 

McCreery: What changes did you make? 

Wilson: I can t remember. I really can t remember now. 

McCreery: But the point was to eliminate unneeded steps? 



57 



Wilson: Yes, yes. For instance, I m fairly certain now that I simply 

tried to institute the habit of treating a series of maps, or a 
set of maps, as a single unitmake one card for a whole set of 
maps. In cataloging books, books appear in series, and it was 
a bad practice. See, things are so funny because when the 
catalog department was cataloging series of monographs 
published by scholarly societies in Europe, say, here would be 
dozens or hundreds of separate volumes, each of which was a 
highly specialized, technical, scholarly study of some matter. 
They would treat the whole thing as a unit, treat the whole 
series as a unit, and make no catalog cards for the separate 
volumes in the series . 

Well, now this was insane because the separate volumes were 
unique individual items, and there was no connection among them 
except that they were published by the same organization. So 
the catalog department would treat a big series of things as 
single units, and that was bad. The map department, on the 
other hand, would treat big series of things not as single 
units, and that was bad. So I was trying to say, look, treat a 
set of maps as a single unit. The way you get at the parts of 
it was by an index map, not by looking at cards for the 
separate sheets of the collection. So the whole principle was 
to make bigger units, rather than break things out into the 
largest possible set of parts. So that would have been the 
principle. 

Now, I can t in detail remember how far I got with this or 
what I did, but that was certainly the idea. 

McCreery: Well, I gather the system that you had in place when you left 
held up well. In fact, I ve spoken to your successor as map 
librarian, Sheila Dowd-- 

Wilson: Ah, Sheila, yes. 

McCreery: And she was very complimentary about what she inherited from 
you. 

Wilson: Really? Well, I know my fingerprints are all over that map 

collection, because even just a few years ago, at the very end 
just before the map collection finally moved out of the main 
library off into another building entirely--! went over and 
looked at it, looked at the catalog. There was my handwriting 
all over the place, after many, many, many years. 

McCreery: She happened to be telling me that she got out of the game 

before it became commonplace to convert to Library of Congress 



58 



cataloging for that material, but that she had very happily 
used your system for twenty years. 

Wilson: Whatever it was. [laughter] Maybe I did more than I remember. 
It was very interesting. It was just enormously fascinating. 

McCreery: Thank you. We did talk last time already about that year you 
spent in general reference service. Now, I gather once you 
began that job it was full time? You were no longer map 
librarian? 

Wilson: That s right. I moved away from Teggart s branch and into the 
general reference service. Jean McFarland was head of the 
general reference service. She left shortly after I came on, 
as I remember. 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Okay. And I gather there isn t too much more to say about that 
job. 



No, nothing whatsoever, 
far as I was concerned, 
and energy. 



[laughter] That was an empty job as 
That was nothing, total waste of time 



Librarian and Bibliographer of the Modern India Project, 195A- 
1957 



McCreery: Well, I know that in 1954 you left the main library to go to 

the first of your string of positions involved with South Asia 
studies. 

Wilson: No, the interesting thing was that I didn t leave the library 
at all. There was, for the time, a very novel administrative 
arrangement. The Institute of International Studies had got a 
big chunk of money from the Ford Foundation to study Indian 
politics and government. And the man who was running this, 
Richard L. Park of the political science department, wanted a 
librarian. It was finally proposed that he not have a 
librarian on his staff but that the library appoint a person 
who would be on the library staff but working for him, jointly 
administered by the library and the Modern India Project. And 
it was arranged that Richard Teggart s department, the Social 
Sciences Reference Service, would be technically, 
administratively, the library home department. 

So I was a full member of the library staff, but also a 
full member of the research staff. The money for my library 



59 



salary came from the research staff, but it was important that 
I be technically a member of the library staff, because what I 
was going to be doing was ordering materials for the library, 
dealing all the time with the librarians, as a librarian, as 
well as dealing with other people as a member of the research 
staff. So the dual status was really crucial to all of this. 
And it worked out well. It worked beautifully. It had never 
been done before, and it was a real experiment. It was a very 
successful experiment. 

McCreery: How were you chosen for the job? 

Wilson: I haven t any idea. [laughter] I don t know. I have no 
memory whatsoever of that. 

McCreery: Did you know Professor Park? 

Wilson: Nope. Never heard of him. Knew nothing about India either, 
except the bits that I had learned in that wonderful yearlong 
course on the history of Buddhism that I mentioned. 

McCreery: You did. Who taught that course, by the way? 

Wilson: Lessing, Ferdinand Lessing, professor of Oriental languages. A 
great man. Wonderful man. So the beauty of the work for the 
Modern India Project was that Professor Park knew he wanted a 
librarian, but he didn t know what he wanted the librarian to 
do. And Teggart wanted to have the librarian in a dual status 
with some library connection, but he didn t have anything in 
mind other than keeping that connection. So it was up to me to 
define the job myself. 

Well, that turned out to be just right, just the ticket, 
[laughter] So I poked around and started playing. Park had 
one thing in mind. He had a favorite Indian politician and 
friend, and he wanted me to make a list of that man s writings. 
This was a marvelously interesting Indian politician who had 
been one of the founders of the Mexican Communist Party and the 
German Communist Party and been sent to Shanghai in 1926 by 
Joseph Stalin to find out what was going on with the Chinese. 
This is M. N. Roy, and he is one of the most interesting people 
in the twentieth century, I think. So did Park. That s why 
Park wanted a list of his writings, and I made the list. But 
that didn t take long. That was a small job. 

So I started doing other things. I started buying 
material. The idea was that I wasn t going to make a library 
for Park, because the project wasn t going to last very long. 



60 



I would keep things for a while but funnel them ultimately into 
the main library. 

McCreery: Do you know the length of the original Ford Foundation grant? 

Wilson: Three years. 

McCreery: Three years, and were you getting in at the outset? 

Wilson: Right at the outset, yes. We were all starting simultaneously. 

McCreery: Where was IIS located at that time? 

Wilson: Our offices were in the library on the fourth floor. Well, the 
thing is, I started doing things and, when I look back, the 
range of things that I did is just incredible. I started 
buying materials in the first place, and I would make a monthly 
acquisitions list and send out copies to all of the staff 
members. But then increasingly this went to a wider and wider 
circle of people. Pretty soon it was going to the Library of 
Congress, where it was used as Berkeley s input to what was 
then the Library of Congress Southern Asia accessions list. 
They had a bibliography of current publications from South 
Asia, and I was feeding in input to the Library of Congress. 

McCreery: Were bibliographies in English relatively new at that time on 
this topic? 

Wilson: It was new for there to be interest, in Western countries, 

interest in publications from India. It simply hadn t been on 
anybody s radar screen up to that point. Okay, so this was one 
kind of thing. 

Then I started work on a big bibliography, which was to end 
up a 5,200 item bibliography on politics and government of 
India and Pakistan in the modern period, from 1885, which is 
the foundation of the Indian National Congress Party. I 
started gathering materials from wherever I could get them. 
Professor Park sent me on a tour of the United States to look 
in other libraries. I went to the Library of Congress, and the 
New York Public Library, and Harvard and Cornell and a couple 
of other places, I guess. Because when I came back I wrote a 
report on that, describing nine libraries, I think. I don t 
even have a copy of that report now. 

McCreery: That is the number given in the catalog item, nine libraries. 

Wilson: The most interesting part of that visit was my one encounter 

with a Communist spy. Park knew of a man who had a big private 



61 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



collection of publications of the Indian Communist Party, and 
we were very interested in that. "Oh, I d love to be able to 
get my hands on that and describe that, and include that in my 
bibliography." So Park set it up that I should go and meet the 
man and get to see his collection. "But don t talk about this 



to anybody. Don t say who it is 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



I went to New York, met the man in his business offices. 
We went off to his estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. I stayed 
in the guest cottage on his estate. I spent a day furiously 
writing, making descriptions of his collection of pamphlets. I 
had dinner with him and--I wish I could remember his name, one 
of the very best known labor lawyers in Washington, D.C., a 
very big name at the time. The man whom I was dealing with was 
named Philip Jaffe. He is the principal in what has come to be 
known as the Amerasia spy case. He was publishing a magazine, 
and he started publishing secret State Department documents. 

The FBI was listening to him, finally, and caught him in a 
marvelous kind of humorous discussion in which he was saying, 
he wanted to get these to the Soviets and the question was 
whether it was easier to do it by giving it to a courier to 
carry to Moscow, or simply to keep publishing them in his 
magazine? And he decided just to keep publishing them in his 
magazine. [laughter] He was a spy all right. He was doing 
espionage. A couple of books have been written about this 
since. He was caught, but the Justice Department could not 
make the case public because they would have had to go to court 
and too much would have been revealed that they did not want to 
make public. So he was charged with a very minor offense and 
paid a $5,000 fine, or something like that. 

So anyway, a marvelous, marvelous encounter for me. 
[laughter] Yes. I didn t know any of this at the time. I 
didn t know about the spying business. I just knew that this 
was hush-hush and I mustn t say who I was seeing. 

Another den of Communists. 

Yes, that s right. [laughter] Anyway I came back and kept 

working on this bibliography. Just to show what kind of an 

operation this was, we decided to publish the bibliography 
ourselves . 

At IIS? 

Yes. And so we hired a typist and we consulted with the 
University [of California] Press people on how to produce this. 
And they gave us oversize sheets of paper on which we typed 



62 



this, and then they would reduce the things photographically to 
a smaller size. They bound it all up and printed a cover for 
this, and we sent out advertisements and we sold copies. We 
did the whole thing. We decided what we were going to publish. 
We decided how the bibliography waswhat was to be in it; how 
it was to be organized; how it was to be arranged. We then 
produced it ourselves and published it. And this was 
wonderful, very successful. We sold all the copies that we 
made. 

McCreery: What kind of a response did it get? 

Wilson: It got a vastly enthusiastic response. It was instantly 

recognized as the bibliography for modern Indian history. It 
was immediately listed in the American Library Association s 
guide to reference books, then known as f/inchellConstance 
Winchell was the editor. It was "Winchell-ed, " and that was 
the greatyou get "Winchell-ed," that s like getting a Nobel 
Prize. [laughter] So that was an enormous, enormous success. 

I did lots of other things, however. I was commissioned by 
the Library of Congress, during this time, to write a report on 
what was needed in the way of bibliographical support for South 
Asia studies. What was the state of the bibliographical 
apparatus? What was good? What was bad? What was soft? What 
was hard? And so on. 

So now, from having made bibliographies and published 
bibliographies, and so on, the thing was to go up the next step 
and say, what about the whole apparatus? What needs to be 
done? What else might there be and ought there to be? So this 
was a big step upwards. 

Another kind of thing I didthe Institute of Pacific 
Relations, which was headquartered in San Francisco, 
commissioned me to prepare a recommended reading guide for 
South Asia studies, a fifty- or sixty-page book listing things 
and describing what you ought to read if you want to know about 
this, and what s good and what s bad, and so on. Now, this is 
a completely other kind of work. That was the most terrifying 
job I ever did in the library world. When you suddenly have to 
say to the general public, under the auspices of an 
organization like the Institute of Pacific Relations, this is 
what is worth reading on this topic. This is the best thing. 
This is the next best thing. This is the- -suddenly you break 
out in a cold sweat. You say, oh my God. I don t know enough 
to do this. Who am I to say these things? [laughter] 

McCreery: How did you decide what to recommend? 



63 



Wilson: Good question. [laughter] I worried a lot, read a lot, 

compared a lot, and then checked with other people. I drafted 
the thing and got people in the academic departments, a couple 
of people whom I knew by then 

McCreery: Do you remember who you consulted? 

Wilson: Robert North, I wonder? Robert North at Stanford? Could I 
have done? I might have done. Somebody at Chicago. I ll 
think of his name later [Milton Singer] . But people in history 
and political science. Not many, a couple. But still, I was 
just trying to get reassurance. And I got it, I got it. They 
said, "No, that s fine. This is the way to go." I did a lot 
of other things too. I did a dozen bibliographies and a couple 
of other papers, and surveys of bibliography. Just a huge 
amount of stuff in a very, very short period of time. 

But the thing that impresses me in retrospect is that I did 
every conceivable kind of permutation of work, from the gut 
work of making corrections on the camera-ready copythat meant 
pasting on little tiny strips of paper, you know, making 
corrections for the camera-ready copyto making a survey of 
the state of bibliography for South Asia studies, what needs to 
be done next . 



McCreery: From the lowest to the loftiest. 

Wilson: That s right, that s right. In retrospect it seems to me that 
was profoundly important for everything I did later when I came 
back to the school and started writing. 

McCreery: What do you think you learned from that experience? 

Wilson: Everything. [laughter] I learned, for instance, for a while I 
was the world s expert on the bibliography of Indian politics. 
It took me completely by surprise. I mean I really was. 
Nobody in the world knew more than I did, and other people 
recognized that. So a couple of years later I was offered a 
job by the Library of Congress to go to India and do some big 
bibliographical job for them. And Horace Poleman at the 
Library of Congress says, "Everybody agrees you re the person 
to do this." 

Now, it was nothing to boast about. That is, you know, it 
was nothing to get a swelled head about . But it was revealing 
to know at first hand about what people meant by talking about 
being the world expert in so-and-so. "Yes, I see how that 
works." But also the fragility of this, the extreme fragility 
of expertise and of the situation of being the world s expert, 



64 



was something that was very clear right from the start. The 
exposedness, the desperate danger, the dangerousness of the 
situation that one puts oneself in when you take up that kind 
of a position. Here I am saying what needs to be done next, 
and this is what you should read. [laughter] So this is--to 
have got a chance to do this, not because somebody told me I 
had to do it but because somebody gave me an opportunity. I 
said, let s go all the way to see what it was like. 

McCreery: This was the autodidact in action. 
Wilson: Absolutely, yes. 

McCreery: Because again it sounds as if you were completely self taught 
in this subject, for the most part? 

Wilson: For the most part I was, yes. I could ask particular questions 
of particular people, but nobody else knew anything about this. 

McCreery: And you were responsible for making all this happen? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Tell me a little more about Robert Park. 

Wilson: The big question was whether he had been an American spy in 

India. [laughter] There was some feeling among the members of 
the staff of the Modern India Project that he was a man with a 
past, and we were kind of suspicious of his connections in 
India. We thought he worked for the American government, and 
we thought that the Indian government thought that he worked 
for the American government. This was a time when the Indians 
were really quite sensitive to Americans, suspecting them of 
espionage, and they were probably right. 

But now, apart from that, I don t know what I d say about 
him except that he had a fascinating and kind of omnivorous 
interest in India, from his interest in M. N. Roy, who was then 
head of an Indian trade union movement, to- -who was that woman 
in Madras? Some great spiritual leader in Madras he was very 
close to and very interested in. So he was covering the whole 
map so far as-- 

McCreery: Political, spiritual- 
Wilson: Political and spiritual, absolutely. So he had the widest 

interests, and he collected a wide and useful and interesting 

bunch of people to work for him. 



65 



McCreery: Yes, I d like to actually hear more about the others working on 
the project. 

fl 

McCreery: Aside from yourself and Robert Park then, who else was involved 
with the Modern India Project? 

Wilson: Oh, there were a lot of people. It was a very large staff. I 
mean there were more than a dozen people, I should think. 

McCreery: All supported by the Ford Foundation grant? 

Wilson: Yes, yes. It was a big grant for those days. Marshall 

Windmiller was somebody I worked quite closely with. He went 
off later to teach at San Francisco State University. Irene 
Tinker is now here, back on the Berkeley campus. I always kind 
of hoped that I would run into her, but I didn t want to look 
her up because I didn t want to put myself in the position of 
saying, "I don t suppose you remember me? I was the 
librarian?" She became very well known in, I guess, political 
science. And Joan Bondurant was--I m not sure if she was paid 
from the project funds. She was connected with the project. 
She was famous for a study of Mahatma Gandhi. She was in the 
political science department, I think, at the time. There are 
a lot of other names. 

McCreery: I wonder how much personal interest did you find in these 
individuals that you were meeting and working with on this 
project? 

Wilson: Well, Joan Bondurant I really felt fairly close to, actually, 
and Marshall Windmiller, pretty much. The others were more 
remote. I saw them as professional people with whom I didn t 
have anything personal. 

McCreery: Did this project and the various bibliographies you were doing, 
did those mesh in any way with your own spiritual interests? 
Eastern religions, and so on? 

Wilson: No, no. It was purely a professional interest. Purely 
professional. It was just a subject of interest. 

McCreery: But you were able to read voraciously in Indian- 
Wilson: Oh yes, I read voraciously, my God! Indian history and 

politics, I had to read hugely in history, politics, economics, 
social studies of all kinds, particularly in order to make that 
terrifying recommended reading list . So I learned a hell of a 



66 



lot about India. I was interested in India, but not for 
religio-spiritual reasons at all. Only as an interesting part 
of the world. 

McCreery: Do you remember how much money Ford gave for the project? 
Wilson: No, I don t. 

McCreery: And are you aware whether they had--the Ford Foundation staff 
hadmuch of a role in the direction of the work? 

Wilson: I don t think they had much of any, but I m not sure. I paid a 
courtesy call on the Ford Foundation offices in New York when I 
was on my big trip. 

McCreery: Tell me about that. 

Wilson: No, I can t. Because I don t really remember anything about it 
except being overwhelmed by the magnificence of the offices and 
the opulence of the coffee service that was produced, 
[laughter] 

McCreery: You were living rather well on that trip. [laughter] 

Wilson: On that trip. [laughter] Yes. But the thing that astonishes 
me is that that was three years, and in three years I don t 
know how I did as much work as I did. It baffles me. But then 
it was over. 

McCreery: Then it was over. 



Returning to the Graduate Study of Philosophy, 1957-1960 



Wilson: Then it was over, and along the way I decided to go back to 
philosophy. 

McCreery: Yes. 

Wilson: There was a definite trigger for that, because I used to go 
once in a while to listen to public lectures in philosophy. 
The philosophy department had a public lecture series, the 
Howison Lectures, and famous people would come through once a 
year, give a public lecture. In 56 maybe, Gilbert Ryle came 
from England, from Oxford, and gave a lecture. That just fired 
me up. I thought, "Oh, well now we re talking an entirely 
dif ferent--we re singing a different song nowadays." This is 



67 



something I could see my way [laughter] --it was new. 
Philosophy had changed. It had changed quite drastically in 
England, and now the repercussions were being felt in the 
United States. 

McCreery: What were the changes he described that fired you up so much? 

Wilson: It was a different approach. He was taking what a non- 
philosopher would describe as a kind of a behaviorist approach 
to questions of mind. He was being a behaviorist. Not a 
physical, nuts and bolts behaviorist. But he was saying, if 
you want to talk about the mind, don t do it the way Rene 
Descartes did. Don t do it by introspection. Forget about 
introspection. Let s see what people do and what they say. 
See how they operate and see how they talk, and that s the way 
we find out about the mind. Well, I thought yes, that is a 
very good idea. 

So, anyway, listening to Ryle and then reading his book- -he 
wrote a great book called, The Concept of Mind. I thought, oh 
yes, this is it. This is good stuff. This is the kind of 
thing, this is an approach which I like. 

So after the Modern India Project closed down, I stayed on 
in the library as a half-time South Asia librarian. They kept 
me on as a South Asia specialist because they liked the idea, 
they d now got addicted to the idea, of having subject 
specialists. I was the first, but they thought, this is all 
right. This is a good idea. We ll have somebody on the staff 
whose business it is to specialize in collection development 
and reference service and so on in a geographical area. Area 
studies was big then, in those days. I don t know that it is 
now. It was new as a way of organizing intellectual, academic 
life. It was new and it was fashionable. It was popular, and 
this was a reflection of that I think. So they kept me on, 
half time anyway. 

McCreery: And where were you affiliated-- 

Wilson: Teggart, still Teggart. Guess who? [laughter] So I was still 
working for Teggart after all these years. But I don t 
remember what I did do. Half time working as the South Asia 
librarian and South Asia bibliographer, whatever. 

McCreery: By then you had something of a reputation, of course, in that 
area. 

Wilson: Boy, I ll say. Yes. 



68 



McCreery: Were you called upon in that half-time job to-- 

Wilson: I don t remember. 

McCreery: You know, from the outside world? 

Wilson: Yes. The Journal of Asian Studies editor was Don Shively here 
on campus, and he asked me to write a survey of bibliographies 
on Southern Asia for publication in his journal. I think it 
was during that period. It had to be during that period, I m 
not sure exactly when. Some things came on later, after I d 
left the library. But I don t remember anything much going on, 
because I was now back in the philosophy department after my-- 

McCreery: Well, did your burned bridges have to be rebuilt? 

Wilson: No, it turned out that they were used to this sort of thing 
from students. They think, oh God, temperamental brats. 
They ll get over it. They ll come whining back. [laughter] 

McCreery: And of course you had changed. 

Wilson: I d changed and the faculty had changed. There were different 
people on the faculty. Benson Mates, who turned out to be my 
doctoral dissertation supervisor, had originally been my 
teaching assistant in the history of philosophy course years 
before. He was now a professor, or on the faculty anyway. I 
started off by taking a course with him in philosophy of 
language, I guess. And the first paper I wrote for the seminar 
I sent off to a journal, a philosophical journal. I don t know 
whether he suggested that or whether I just took it on myself 
to say, I ll try to get this published. I was used to 
publishing by then. I had published a lot. 

I sent it off to the top of the mountain. I sent it off to 
the English journal Mind, which was the chief English-language 
philosophical journal, edited by Gilbert Ryle. I didn t hear 
anything from the journal for a long time. After some long 
time I wrote a note saying, "Hey, what about my article." And 
the supreme being wrote back a note saying, "Yes, yes I have 
your paper. Yes, it s quite good enough. Yes, I could publish 
it. But of course a lot of other things that I have are quite 
good enough too. We ll just have to see." So I wrote back 
saying, "Give it back." [laughter] 

I sent it off to another journal, published in Norway, an 
English-language journal edited by Norway s chief philosopher, 
Arne Naess, whom we had connections with. Benson Mates had 
reviewed a book of his, and he d been here, and we knew him. 



69 



He was delighted to take my article and published it right 
away. 

McCreery: So you worked with Mates from the beginning, from the time you 
went back? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Did you know specifically what you wanted to work on? 

Wilson: I guess I was working up to--I was figuring it out as I went 
along, yes. I must have been doing that. 

McCreery: But you had the starting point from Gilbert Ryle. 

Wilson: Yes, yes. Yes, Ryle was the starting point. 

McCreery: At what point did David Hume become an important figure? 

Wilson: Oh, Hume always had been, had been originally. Right from the 
time I was an undergraduate freshman. Hume was kind of the 
culture hero for people like me. He s the skeptic. Hume is 
the eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic. Yes. 

McCreery: You could relate. 

Wilson: That s right. [laughter] But I went charging through the 
philosophy department, and I want to charge through this 
[discussion of it] , too, I think. Because I really approached 
this the way I approached library school. I want the degree, 
but I don t want to spend a lot of time getting it. The usual 
thing, in Ph.D. courses of study- -in chemistry departments, 
say, a three-year Ph.D. would be quite normal. I mean, you 
just move right along and it s all planned, and you re in and 
out fast. In the humanities, however, it s well known. People 
will drag on for nine, ten, fifteen years doing the Ph.D. 
Well, I was not going to do that. So I took courses for two 
years and then put myself up for examination. 

Right at the beginning of the academic year 1959, I sat for 
qualifying examinations and passed them and started writing a 
dissertation. I was out of there by--the final examination for 
the dissertation was at the end of May of 1960. So the 
philosophy department could not believe it. Nobody had ever 
done anything like that, and I m not sure they liked it. This 
is rate busting. This is going too fast. [laughter] 

McCreery: It sounds like your father working in the print shop. 



70 



Wilson: That s exactly what I suddenly realized, it did sound like 
that. [laughter] 

McCreery: But you entered this round of philosophical adventure with the 
intent to rush through and get that degree . 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Why did you want the degree? 

Wilson: To show I could, just to prove that I could. I didn t have 

anything further in mind. I just thought, well, I need a Ph.D. 
I don t have one. Other people have Ph.D.s. I ll get one too. 
Doesn t sound like a good enough reason, does it? I don t 
know, why not? 

McCreery: It might be just fine. 

Wilson: Well, yes. If you re living in an academic world in which 
everybody has a Ph.D. and you don t. 

McCreery: And as with librarianship, you were fairly far along in that 
world in some sense, by your work experience? 

Wilson: Well, hard to say. I don t know that I would say that. No. 

But I d done enough. I was well along in the sense that I had 
already shown that I was good at doing a certain style of 
philosophical work. I d shown that during my first year in 
graduate study. In the seminars that I did I wrote papers 
whichthis sort of thing was grinding analysis. 

I remember analyzing a paper by G. E. Moore, a great 
British philosopher of the early twentieth centurythis was 
kind of a narrow, Jesuitical examination. Does he mean this or 
does he mean that? If you interpret it this way? If you 
interpret it that way? The implications of this would be that, 
and so on. It s a kind of explication of text and close 
reading in a literary critical sense, and analysis of concepts. 
I kind of put on a display of this. I took two sessions of the 
seminar to get through about two pages. I mean this was just 
going too far. But the professor says, "Right. That s the way 
you do it." [laughter] 

McCreery: Loved it. 

Wilson: Loved it. Loved it. That s the way you do it. So there was a 
certain style of work which I already knew how to do, and now 
it was a matter of kind of covering ground. I had to be 
examined in, my God, I had to be examined in seven fields, not 



71 



just in philosophy. French, German, history of philosophy, 
mathematical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of language, Hume s 
philosophy, I think, or somebody s. How many is that? But 
covering ground and learning enough to show that I had some 
breadth as well as kind of the technical ability to do the 
kinds of things which analytic philosophers are expected to do. 

McCreery: You mentioned before that you didn t feel mathematical logic 
was your strong suit. 

Wilson: Absolutely not. As a matter of fact I kind of suspect that 

when I took the examination in mathematical logic, I m not sure 
that I really passed that examination. I think they may have 
let me pass because I was good in other things and they didn t 
want to cut me off for that reason alone. I don t know that, 
it s just kind of a feeling. That certainly was not an 
impressive pass if it was a pass at all, which I doubt, 
[laughter] But still, it let me through. 

Then I wrote a dissertation. Again, this was my idea, and 
it was a kind of a Rylian idea. I was going to write about 
interpretation, the interpretation of what people say and 
write. How do you figure out what people mean? Well, that had 
been something that I d been interested in for a long time, so 
this had been percolating, I think. The question was what 
approach to take? And I took really a kind of a Rylian 
behaviorist approach. 

I d say, just imagine dialog. You want to know what people 
mean by what they say, well ask them. There will be an 
exchange. They say this, and then you say, do you mean that? 
And they say, no I meant that. And you say, well that doesn t 
sound right. And they say no, no what I meant was this. So 
here is a process. This is all you have to go on in finding 
out what people mean by what they say. So the process of 
interpretation, imagined as kind of an endless dialog was what 
I was proposing. 

Now, I also proposed and this was the part that the people 
didn t really, some people, didn t like about the dissertation 
--this doesn t really work very well. There s no good way of 
telling when you ve got it right. There s no good way of 
telling whether or not you really know what the other person is 
talking about or what they mean. This is a very imperfect 
process. Nevertheless, this is one of the ways to think about 
it. So this was my take on interpretation. 

McCreery: Was that a new thing to say? 



72 



Wilson: Yes, yes it was. Nobody had done this kind of thing before. 

Nobody had talked about this kind of problem in philosophy. It 
was not then recognized as a really big, serious problem. A 
few years later it became recognized as a huge big serious 
problem, when people from other branches of the intellectual 
world started talking about hermeneutics . And people from 
other branches of the intellectual universe started publishing 
things on interpretation and hermeneutics. Then it turned out 
that I had been writing about hermeneutics. 

But in that sense I was ahead of my time and out of place. 
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a sense. But I 
think it was not bad. 

McCreery: To what extent were you drawing on the work of others? 

Wilson: Well, I was kind of densely drawing on the work of some 

literary critics, but only as foils. I was trying to prove 
them wrong. William Empson, the great literary critic, student 
of I. A. Richards, was somebody that drove me to distraction. 
1 thought, well, I can reinterpret everything you say, Empson, 
so it won t be so crazy. I drew on the work of Arne Naess, the 
Norwegian philosopher who was the editor of that journal, who 
had also written about interpretation. He d written a big book 
about interpretation, which Benson Mates, my chairman, had 
written a review of. Now that had to influence me, though I 
can t now remember what form the influence took. He wasn t 
doing my kind of thing, but he was in the ballpark. We were 
both in the same ballpark, and we were the only ones there. 
Who else? I can t remember. A couple of others. I was 
criticizing other people, saying this approach would solve 
so-and-so s problem. 

McCreery: But these were not necessarily the philosophers? 

Wilson: No, no. I ended up by writing about a recent publication by 

Willard Van Orman Quine, who was the big American philosopher, 
kind of the king of American philosophy. He was writing about 
meaning too, and his way of doing it was a kind of behaviorist 
way but completely different from mine, completely different 
from mine. So I was in dead opposition to him and had to write 
against him. I later published an article attacking him. That 
was years later. 

McCreery: How was your dissertation received? 

Wilson: With astonishment. That is to say, I turned it in to Mates 

after, my God, it can t have taken me more than five months to 
write, six months at most. I turned it in finished to him. I 



73 



didn t give him drafts to look at, I gave him the final copy. 
And he read it, "All right, yes. That s very good." 
[laughter] And William Ray Dennes was on my committee. He 
read it and he jokingly said, "Oh, well you re going to write a 
dissertation that can be read. That hasn t been done for a 
long time, not since John Reed." That s John Reed of Ten Days 
that Shook the World. [laughter] 

So he was very complimentary. But nothing whatsoever to 
say about the content. The third member of the committee, Paul 
Edwards, was in the speech department then, though he is a 
philosopher and he was subsequently the editor of the 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He didn t like it at all. He 
hated it. But he went along. He wasn t going to say no. 

McCreery: What did he hate about it? 

Wilson: I don t know, he didn t say. Or if he did I don t remember. 

In those days the Ph.D. process involved having a public final 
oral examination, out in public, with an audience. I had a 
final public examination, which was fairly terrifying. People 
kept asking me questions to which I d say, "I don t know that. 
There s no way I could know that kind of thing." And they d 
say, "Well, when do you think you ll find out?" And I d say, 
"Oh, maybe never. I don t know." [laughter] I don t know, I 
think a lot of people did not like that very much. 

I remember one young man came up to me in the opera house 
in San Francisco some time thereafter and just practically spat 
at me, saying, in effect, "How could they possibly give a Ph.D. 
to a person like you for a piece of rubbish like that?" So not 
everybody liked it. But anyway, it served its purpose. 

McCreery: How did you respond to the controversy? 

Wilson: Well, I didn t respond. But curiously I didn t do anything 

with the dissertation. I didn t try to publish any of it, and 
I don t know why. A normal thing would be to try to publish, 
particularly if you are aware of the need to publish, or if you 
think there is a need to publish. I d already published one 
article from a seminar paper. You d think I would have thought 
about publishing the thing, but I didn t. I didn t do anything 
with it at all, just let it sit. Well, anyway. 

Now, there s a curious thing about this, I realize in 
looking at my correspondence. By the time I started writing 
the dissertation I was already signed up to teach philosophy at 
UCLA. 



74 



McCreery: Oh, you were? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: How, exactly, did that happen? 

Wilson: It happened this way. I passed my qualifying examination. 
Horrible, horrible experience. Written exams and then oral 
qualifying exams with the glowering face of Edward Strong, 
Professor Edward Strong, who was later chancellor of the 
Berkeley campus. Horrible man. Sitting there just glaring at 
me. [laughter] Clearly he thought I didn t know anything and 
I was in the wrong field, or something like that. Certainly he 
was just radiating hostility throughout the entire exam. 
Horrible. Anyway, I passed. 

Thereafter I had a conversation with Benson Mates, who was 
my chairman, and he says, "Well, you can have one of three 
jobs. You can go to Princeton, or you can go to," 1 forget 
what the other one was, "or you can go to UCLA." He just 
assumed that I was going to teach. He didn t say, where would 
you like to go? Or, what would you like to do? This was then. 
This was the way things were done then. This was the time of 
extreme expansionism. Everything was beginning to explode, 
well, had already begun to explode, and there were jobs all 
over the place. And if you were a salable commodity, as I was, 
your faculty supervisor would simply be asked, "Well, who have 
you got? Have you got anybody for us?" You know, the chairman 
at Princeton would call up, "Mates, have you got anybody for 
us?" Or somebody would call from UCLA, "Mates, can you give 
us--" And he says, "Yes, I think I ve got one for you--" 
[laughter] 



McCreery: You were just telling me how Professor Mates offered you these 
three choices, assuming you wanted a teaching career. 

Wilson: Yes. The oddity was that I wasn t clear that I did want a 

teaching career. I really don t think I was clear at all. I 
hadn t gone into the philosophy department in order to become a 
teacher, that s definite. I d gone because I wanted to get a 
Ph.D. What I was going to do next was not at all clear. But, 
faced with these job offers, I don t know, I found myself 
saying, well let s see about UCLA. So I wrote to UCLA. I 
didn t go to UCLA, they bought me sight unseen. 

McCreery: Really? 



75 



Wilson: Oh, yes. No nonsense about interviews. [laughter] I just got 
a letter from the chairman offering me $5,200 a year for an 
acting assistant professorship, I guess. I hadn t even written 
the dissertation. So I said yes, okay. Started furiously 
writing the dissertation. Wrote it in a few months. After I 
said yes to UCLA, I got a job offer from the Library of 
Congress saying, do you want to go to India to do a big 
bibliographical project for us? And I said, sorry. "Sorry, 
breaks my heart that I have to say no. I ve already signed 
up. " 

But actually I think I would have said no anyway, because 
I d heard from Richard Park that there are two kinds of people 
who go from the United States to India. Some people go to 
India, they get off the airplane and they rush into the streets 
and they say, "Oh yes. This is wonderful. Oh, sandals, 
beads!" And the other kind of people get off the plane, they 
go into the street and they look at the beggars and the misery. 
They turn right around, and they get right back on the 
airplane, and they fly away. I think I would have been the one 
who turned around and flew away. 

McCreery: Because you had not been there. 

Wilson: No, I d never been. But anyway, I didn t go to India. 



Teaching Philosophy at UCLA. 1960-1965 



McCreery: Was it hard to decide what sort of a job to take on finishing 
the Ph.D.? 

Wilson: I don t remember that it was. [laughter] 

McCreery: This path was sort of laid out for you. 

Wilson: Well, it s a natural thing. It s what people do I suppose. 

McCreery: Who at UCLA hired you? 

Wilson: The chairman was Robert Yost, was his name. Casually I had 
already known a couple of people, one of whom was Richard 
Montague, who has already turned up as the other boy organist. 
He was now down there, an immensely successful logician, really 
running the place, almost. Another logician was Donald Kalish, 
who had been here and whom I d known slightly, not through 
school but he was someone I kind of saw on Telegraph Avenue, a 



76 



sort of bohemian life acquaintance. So I knew those two people 
already, and I knew a couple of people in the library at UCLA. 
So when I went down to UCLA I wasn t going into a totally 
strange environment, and I quickly made connections. So I was 
never socially isolated at all, and I was never intellectually 
isolated at all. 

But right from the start I was miserable. The teaching was 
just horrible. I was hired to take the place of a philosophy 
professor named Abraham Kaplan, who was very well known. He 
was a big name and he was a big star on the UCLA campus. He 
taught aesthetics, and he taught classes of 600 people. 

One morning, at nine o clock on a Monday morning, I went 
into his classroom, the classroom that had been assigned to 
him, and there were three people sitting in the front row of a 
900-person classroom. I was so frightened that I couldn t 
stand up, and I had to sit on the table of the platform. I was 
just terrified. It was just horrible. That was just 
awkwardness and first-day jitters. But they were certainly 
first-day jitters. But I got over that. As time wore on, I 
taught aesthetics several times and I built up a following 
myself. I was up to several hundred by the time I left, 
[laughter] 

That was all right, but I finally came to think that 
aesthetics was a nonsubject. This is not a serious part of 
philosophy. This is a big mistake. There are bits and pieces, 
there are little ends of this, there are questions which can be 
addressed under the rubric of aesthetics that are interesting 
questions, but they re incidental to what people think of as 
the big serious questions about the nature of art. Oh, the 
nature of art! Spare me. This is silly. [laughter] 

I finally ended up thinking, you know, this field should 
not exist. There s no need to recognize it. As it turned out 
ultimately, the proper study is the sociology of art. That s 
an interesting subject. But the philosophy of art is not an 
interesting subject at all. 

But anyway, the other things that I had to teach were 
really bad, mostly. I taught courses in the philosophy of 
religion. Well, I m totally irreligious myself. The approach 
that was taken- -and this was with everybody s full consent and 
understanding- -was that we only deal with philosophical 
questions, what would have been considered rational theology, 
say, in the old days. Proofs and so on, you know. We d refute 
the proofs, and we d say, this is all rubbish. [laughter] 



77 



But this was really controversial, and I had kind of a--not 
a cheering section, but a jeering section in my classes 
actually. There was a dentist who used to come to my classes 
and jeer. At one point, so I was told--I didn t independently 
verify this--I was publicly denounced by the chief rabbi of Los 
Angeles and the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles for being a 
vile blasphemer, or something. So the outside world didn t 
like it, but I didn t like it either. I had no interest 
teaching the philosophy of religion. I had to do it because I 
was told to as part of the teaching load. 

Then there were the introductory courses, the survey of 
problems in philosophy. And here was a matter of addressing 
huge multitudes of freshmen and sophomores, classes of 450 in a 
huge hall. This was appalling. I just found that absolutely 
awful. I didn t want to do that at all. 

I taught a few other things. The first year I was there I 
had to teach logic. Well, I told them, look I didn t want to 
do this, this is not my subject. This department is full of 
logicians. Why don t you teach logic? And they said, no, it s 
inconvenient. Montague is off this semester and Kalish is 
busy. No, no, this will be quite all right, you teach logic. 
And so I taught an elementary logic course. 

Well, with the help of my young lady teaching assistant, I 
was able to get through it. Only with her help was I able to 
get through it. Oh, it was agony, absolute agony. Things like 
that, things like that. No good. 



Seeking a Niche for Writing and Publishing 



Wilson: Then I began to have trouble writing and publishing. I was 

writing things, but I wasn t so fluent. Things weren t going 
fast, the way my dissertation went. The dissertation was a 
major, major thing. It was really big. And it went like that, 
[snaps fingers] Five months. But at UCLA the things I was 
finding to do, little crumbs of aesthetics. Well, then I d 
send off a piece to an editor and the editor would say, "Oh, 
this is out of our scope. It doesn t really fit our magazine." 
So I sent it off to another journal, and he d say, "This is 
full of fallacies, you don t know what you re talking about. 
You re crazy." 

I checked with my colleagues and I said, "Wait a minute, am 
I missing something here?" And they d say, "No, no. You re 



78 



quite right." So the editor s obtuse. Editor of an aesthetics 
journal, well what do you expect? What do you expect? 
[laughter] Another piece I sent off was accepted for 
publication. Then, at the very last minute, there was some 
readjustment of publication scheduling. It was put off. Then 
it was thrown out at the last minute for size or too big an 
issue or something like that, and it was the one that was 
easiest to throw out. The editor was very apologetic and said, 
"Look, I can get this published in Spain for you. I have a 
friend who runs a magazine in Catalonia. Let me do that for 
you." And I said, "Well." So he sent my manuscript off to 
Barcelona where somebody translated it into Spanish and it was 
published in a Spanish magazine, which was ridiculous. 

But oh, frustrations! I really fell into an awful 
depression after a couple of years. And sometime about 1963 I 
simply stopped writing. I had gone there in 1960 and here it 
is 1963 and I stopped writing. That s not good. That s not 
good. Now curiously, before that, in 1962, I began to get 
feelers from the School of Librarianship. 

McCreery: Oh, that early? 

Wilson: Yes. Really surprised me, and I verified that by looking in my 
small correspondence file. In fall of 1962, after I d been 
there only two years, LeRoy Merritt wrote me, saying, "I m just 
wondering whether you d be interested in coming back here." 
The thing that really surprises me now is that I wrote back a 
surprisingly ambiguous answer, not saying no. Saying I m 
interested, yes I often think about librarianship, and I often 
think of returning to librarianship, but I m very committed 
right now to certain-- [laughter] . Then at some point Ray 
[Raynard C.] Swank came down and interviewed me, or talked to 
me anyway, had a conversation down there. I can t remember 
what we talked about or anything, but he was pursuing me. 
Well, so I don t know. 

McCreery: Now, when you first went to UCLA you were acting assistant 
professor. Then were you brought into a tenure track 
appointment there? 

Wilson: That was a tenure track. "Acting" was only because I hadn t 
filed my dissertation when I was appointed. 

McCreery: I see. So there you were on the track- 
Wilson: I m on the track. I m on the track. 



79 



McCreery: But early on you began to get indications that the track might 
not be-- 



Wilson: The track might not be there. I m not sure, you see I was 

worried about, am I going to be able to produce these things? 
I remember talking to Yost, who was chairman, and he s bitter 
about the publication demands made by the campus 
administration. He kept going on at length about how easy it 
was for those people in the medical center to publish half a 
dozen articles a year, or a dozen little pieces, you know, 
spinoffs from this and that. Whereas for us to do one piece is 
a great deal of work. I d say, yes that s true. So partly it 
was worry about that, these rejection notices. I wasn t happy 
about rejection notices. 

And I wasn t happy about the difficulty of finding things 
to write about. It wasn t flowing. It wasn t flowing. That 
was the thing. My dissertation flowed. The work in the Modern 
India Project flowed. It was just a torrent. This wasn t. 
This was little bits. 

McCreery: And the aesthetics specialty- 
Wilson: The aesthetics specialty was not working out. This is not a 

good field. The other neighboring fields were kind of blocked 
off, particularly at UCLA. The philosophy of language would 
have been a natural one, but I was kind of faced with a 
mountain of technical, mathematically oriented specialists, 
glaring at me. Saying, this is our subject, you know. This is 
our subject. [laughter] So that wasn t working. Anyway, I 
fell into a terrible depression. 

McCreery: Did you have anyone to talk to about all this? 

Wilson: Yes, I talked to Renee Kaplan. Renee Kaplan was the wife of 
one of the young instructors. She was a social worker 
[laughter] and she said, go see the departmental psychiatrist, 
Dr. [James] Mott. She says, "Everybody sees him sooner or 
later." [laughter] So she steered me to the departmental- - 
it s funny, isn t it?--and I did. I went to a psychiatrist, 
saw him for a year, and at the end of the year quit my job. 

Then I felt [sigh of relief ] --that was the thing to do. 
That was what I had to do. I quit the job without having 
anything settled. I sent in my letter of resignation in the 
spring of 64. I said, "I m quitting at the end of next 
semester, guys. I m quitting at the end of fall of 64 or end 



of January 65, 
happy here . " 



and that s that. It s been fun, but I m not 



80 



McCreery: Were they surprised? 

Wilson: I don t know. I think maybe not. Not because I was seen as a 
failure. I was not seen as a failure. But I was seen as 
somebody who was pretty unhappy. That might have been enough 
to--one of the faculty members, the one faculty member who was 
really interested in European continental style of philosophy, 
quizzed me on this. He said, "Are they pushing you out? Are 
they trying to get rid of you?" Because he saw me as somebody 
who wasn t in the hard mathematical mode of operation, and 
somebody who was to his mind more civilized. [laughter] So I 
assured him, no, no. They re not trying to get rid of me. I m 
going on my own free will. 



81 



III THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP AT BERKELEY 



Returning to Berkeley and an Offer to Join the Librarianship 
Faculty 



Wilson: But anyway, I resigned not knowing what was coming up, coming 
next. I came up to Berkeley and talked to Helen Worden, Mrs. 
Porterfield, Mrs. Worden then, associate university librarian. 
I said, "Well, this is what my situation is. What do you 
think? What would my prospects be if I were to go back into 
the library world?" We talked about that and she must have 
said--I don t know what she said. She must have said, "Let me 
think about this for a while." I think she talked to somebody 
at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was exploring, 
suggesting that there might be a job in the library at Santa 
Cruz. But before I heard anything about that, the library 
school got to me. 

McCreery: They found you. 

Wilson: They found me. 

McCreery: You did not contact the school? 

Wilson: No, they contacted me. They contacted me. Now the mystery to 
me in all of this is who did it? Because I find a letter in my 
own files in which I report to Helen Worden, "I m sorry I 
didn t tell you this earlier because I really didn t know how 
it was going to come out, but I ve now been offered a job by 
the School of Librarianship." I was talked into it by Anne 
Ethelyn Markley and LeRoy Merritt . Now I have no memory 
whatever of being talked to by either of them. But on the 
other hand, I wouldn t have made that up for Helen Worden, so I 
must have done that. And that s very peculiar. [laughter] 
That really surprises me. Anyway, I was signed up by the fall 
of 1964. 



82 



McCreery: And you were back here in the area? Was that part easy, to 
decide to come back here to the Bay Area? 

Wilson: Oh, yes. I was glad to get out of Los Angeles. I hated Los 
Angeles, so I was glad to move back here. 

McCreery: So by the time this was arranged though you were here and-- 

Wilson: No, I was still living down there, I just kept coming back and 
forth, going back and forth, seeing people I knew here. 

McCreery: Tell me a little about LeRoy Merritt. Did you know him very 
well? I mean, you don t remember the exact circumstances of 
this offer, and so on, but-- 

Wilson: That s very odd. I had a correspondence with Merritt because 
once I d said yes, I ll do it, there was this crazy 
correspondence. It was always very unsatisfactory 
correspondence with Merritt. Merritt was horrible. He 
proposed a teaching load for me. He said, "Okay, you can teach 
this and that and the other thing." And I wrote back in 
despair, really, saying, "Look, you re giving me a fourteen- 
hour-a-day workload and I can t do that. I m sorry. I m going 
to have to withdraw my acceptance of the offer." And then he 
wrote back and said, "Oh well, I didn t think you d like it 
very much, I just thought I d suggest this." Incompetent. 
Incompetent, stupid stuff. 

This went on again and again and again. Then he proposed 
that I should teach rare book librarianship. And I said, 
"Look, you know that I know nothing whatsoever about this. 
[Robert D.] Harlan knows everything about this. It makes no 
sense for me to teach that, and I won t teach it." Again, "I 
can t take this job." And he said, "No, it wasn t serious. I 
just thought maybe, well, perhaps--" So every dealing with 
LeRoy Merritt was insanely difficult. He was impossible. 
Frivolous demands, ill- thought -out careless things. It was 
just agony dealing with him. So that was really bad. It was a 
bad beginning. It was a terribly bad beginning. 

McCreery: At a time when you, perhaps, were seeking a little clarity. 

Wilson: Yes, when I was seeking clarity. I didn t get any from him. 
It was terrible. 

McCreery: What were the terms of the offer? What rank, and so on? 

Wilson: Well, there was another thing. He kept saying, "Well, why 
don t we make it a lectureship?" And I said, "Well, no, 



83 



actually." He said, "Does it make any difference to you 
whether it s a lecturer or assistant professor?" "Yes, it 
makes a difference to me." And on and on. Every detail was 
horrible. 

Now, there s something else and I don t know about this, 
whether it s his responsibility or not. There was the question 
of how I got from UCLA to Berkeley in the administrative 
hierarchy in the University of California. This was ultimately 
a nearly fatal question for me, because there is a tenure clock 
and the question was, was I starting over again? Of course I 
understood that I would be starting over again. That s not the 
way it turned out . The way it turned out was that I was 
brought into the School of Librarianship as if I had already 
been in the School of Libarianship for four and a half years. 
That is, I was starting a new subject with four and a half 
years time already accumulated towards an absolute eight-year 
limit. 



Now this was a disaster. Now, could this have been 
avoided? Merritt was very happy, pleased as punch about this. 
He was congratulating himself on the fact that he had managed 
to make this a real transfer from one place to another, rather 
than a new appointment. Whereas for me, it being a transfer 
was an absolute disaster. Maybe nothing else could have been 
done, but it wasn t clear to him that it couldn t have been 
done. Otherwise he wouldn t have congratulated himself. So 
this was horrible. I came in under terrible circumstances- - 
just the worst possible circumstances. And I m faced with a 
tenure decision. I m coming into a new field- - 

McCreery: Was he able to adjust the salary to allow for the four and a 
half years elapsed? Or do you remember much about that? 

Wilson: I don t remember anything about that at all. No, I don t 

remember anything at all. The only thing I do remember was 
that at one point I said, "All right, well if you re going to 
count all this past UCLA service towards tenure, you d better 
count it towards sabbatical leave credit too." And they did, 
so I got a sabbatical leave in my sixth year. And during that 
year I wrote a book. No, seventh year. And that saved me. I 
mean, I got tenure on the basis of the book, but just barely. 

McCreery: So that clock was ticking in your ear from day one. 

Wilson: That clock was ticking in my ear, see. It s not like at my 

back I always hear Time s winged chariot hurrying near. Oh no, 
it was - - [ laughter ] 



McCreery: Well, do you remember much about whether it was hard to decide 
to come here? I know you needed something, and it sounds like 
you had had conversations with the school and indeed had 
considered very strongly going back to librarianship. But your 
experience of the school, on the other hand-- 

Wilson: Yes, that s what s so bizarre. Because my experience had been 
so bad, because I expected nothing and I got nothing from them. 
All I have- -I find a note that I wrote to somebody else and 
kept a copy myself, in which I said something like, "I m going 
back. I don t know what I ll do there. I suppose I ll do some 
bibliographies. Maybe I ll write a philosophical piece from 
time to time. Maybe I ll write some critical stuff about the 
junk that librarianship writes about classification." A kind 
of contemptuous dismissal. I was going into a field in which I 
had, coming in, no concept of what kind of intellectual work I 
would do. In fact, I had no concept that there was any to be 
done. I thought, well, you do bibliographies maybe, 
[laughter] 

McCreery: But you hadn t seen much evidence that there was more to it. 

Wilson: I certainly hadn t, [laughter] not from the people in the 

school. I mean there were no models, not here. Well, that s a 
little strong, isn t it? I was not aware, I was not strongly, 
admittedly, aware of useful models. [laughter] Later on I was 
aware. Anne Ethelyn Markley had done a useful survey of 
catalog use sometime, at one point. It was nice. 



Teaching Cataloging and Classification; The Rush to Tenure 



McCreery: So in February of 65-- 
Wilson: Here I am. 

McCreery: Here you were back at the main library and the School of 
Librarianship . 

Wilson: Yes. Things started going wrong right from the beginning. 
McCreery: Oh, why? 

Wilson: I had to teach cataloging. Well, that was all right. I was 
prepared to teach cataloging. I had a student assistant, I 
wish I could remember her name, a marvelous young woman who was 
a lieutenant commander in the naval reserve. Very impressive 



85 



young person. Got along fine with her, and got along 
reasonably well with the students. Didn t get along fine with 
Anne Ethelyn Markley. She began to audit my classes. And she 
would sit in the back of the room. She wore dozens of 
bracelets, metal, silver bracelets. And as time would go on 
they would begin to jingle. Jingle, jingle, jingle, jingle, 
jingle. [laughter] 

McCreery: What an image. 

Wilson: And the more they jingled, the more I knew I was in trouble, 
[laughter] 

[Interview 4: August 27, 1999] ## 

McCreery: Well, we said we would start out today talking about the period 
beginning in 1965 when you returned here to the then-School of 
Librarianship to join the faculty. I want to read you, very 
briefly, something out of the alumni newsletter that came out 
that winter of 65, authored by Ray Swank, who was the dean 
then. He is announcing that he has hired you, or that you have 
been hired, and he simply says, "Dr. Patrick Wilson joined the 
faculty as assistant professor at the beginning of the second 
semester to augment the Markley-Fruge team in classification 
and cataloging." He goes on to say where you had been before 
and so on. But that wording led me to ask whether you know, or 
did you know then, was that the primary task they had in mind 
for you? Teaching cataloging and classification? 

Wilson: I don t think it was clear to me then that that was what they 
had in mind. I knew that they expected me to teach cataloging 
and classification, and I was happy to do so. In my pained 
correspondence with LeRoy Merritt, written from Los Angeles, 
when he sent me my first teaching assignments in which he--I 
mentioned this before- -he was suggesting an incredibly huge 
workload which would keep me here until late at night. He 
proposed that I teach two sections of cataloging, one in the 
morning and one at five o clock in the afternoon, to be 
followed by four hours of laboratory. Four days a week. A 
"swing shift," as he described it. 

And I wrote back saying, in effect, no dice. I can t do 
that. I won t do that. I m not coming to Berkeley if that s 
what I have to do. And he retracted. But clearly it was a 
heavy emphasis on cataloging and classification. There was 
certainly no suggestion that I was going to join the Fred 
Mosher-Bob Harlan team [to teach reference] . No suggestion 
there at all. And since I wasn t a managerial type, by 



86 



default as things were then--I would have to be thought of as 
primarily on the Markley-Fruge side. 

McCreery: Okay, well, tell me a little bit about how it was to come back 
to the school. It was February of 1965 and here you came. Any 
memories of that first semester? First year? 

Wilson: Well, everything s all mixed up. After all, I was here 

teaching for only three semesters before I went on a sabbatical 
leave and plunged into the writing of the book, which I had 
desperately to do in order to have any chance of getting 
tenure. So the three semesters were terribly busy. 

I m not sure when this started, but I had been asked to do 
another big South Asia bibliographical project. There was to 
be a world conference on the history of science and technology 
in South Asia, to be held in New York at Rockefeller University 
in spring 1966. I had been asked to prepare a bibliography on 
the history of science and technology in South Asia, a subject 
on which I knew absolutely nothing, even though I knew a lot 
about other features of South Asian history. Also, I was asked 
to give a report on the state of bibliography covering South 
Asia. 



So here I was back in the line of work that I had done 
years before, ten years before, for the Modern India Project. 
I was doing this simultaneously with teaching courses new to 
me, teaching courses in cataloging and classification, and 
trying to learn the literature, trying to think, what am I 
going to write about? What shall I do? What literature is 
there? So I was furiously reading and reading, trying to learn 
what the literature was of my new field of studies, as well as 
teaching and doing this bibliographical project. 

Now, I was teaching not only cataloging and classification, 
but also a course called "subject bibliography," which was of 
no interest whatsoever, apparently, to Mosher and Harlan. 
Because I think, as a matter of fact, Miss Markley taught that 
from time to time. I asked the kids in the class if they would 
like to help me work on a real project, do a real bibliography, 
under great pressure of time [laughter] and so on. I said you 
don t have to do this if you want to do something else, but 
this is what the real world is like. And most of them said, 
yes, they would like to help. So they did, and this turned out 
to be marvelous. They were a big help, even though I still had 
to go over everything that they did. So it wasn t a huge 
saving of time to me, but still it was a marvelous way of 
focusing everybody s attention on real problems, rather than 



87 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



talking in the abstract about what the problems might be that 
you might face. So that was good. 

As for teaching cataloging, I really don t remember very 
much about that except that I got in big trouble, because my 
way of approaching this was to say, well okay, there are 
certainly rules here which we ve got to learn, but the big 
question is why on earth these rules rather than some other 
rules? And how does this fit in with the rest of the 
bibliographical apparatus? How do these catalogs that we re 
supposed to be making fit in with other things? What s the 
connection between these catalogs and the indexes, for 
instance, that libraries are full of and that used to be part 
of catalogs? 

It used to be, after all, that people made index catalogs. 
That is, the contents of periodicals were also listed in with 
books. There are marvelous examples of printed catalogs from 
the nineteenth century in the United States which are 
combinations of periodical indexes and book catalogs. You 
can t tell one section from another. They re all together. 
Why don t we do that anymore? Well, this is the sort of thing 
which I would just naturally do. And this was very upsetting 
to the boss, that is, Miss Markley. In her view this is the 
kind of thing that has no place in a beginning cataloging 
course. 

Did you know Miss Markley before you joined the faculty here? 

Yes, I d taken a course with her when I was--I think. I think 
I did. [laughter] But yes, I knew her, sure. But only in a 
kind of distant way. 

What were her expectations, do you think, looking back? 

Well, that I should do what she did. I mean she knew perfectly 
well what was to be done. She was the expert. She knew the 
subject backwards and forwards. What was the point of making 
problems where there were no problems? Everything has been 
fixed. 

And there you were, asking why are we doing it this way. 

That s right, that s right. And suggesting, well, some of the 
things we do are just downright silly, foolish. And so on. 
There was bound to be conflict, and it became clear I think, 
right away, that there was going to be conflict and that I 
wasn t going to work out. 



88 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



What happened next? 

Well, my understanding of it is that Markley would have told 
Ray Swank, "This can t go on." So that when I came back from 
my sabbatical leave I was not asked to teach cataloging at all. 

So that was a natural breakpoint for you. 

That was a natural breaking. That was the natural breakpoint. 
So, before the sabbatical leave, there I was struggling. 



Yes. 

And this was a very difficult and conflict-ridden time, 
bad, very bad. 

How did you like the teaching here? 



Very 



McCreery: 



Well, I enjoyed teaching. Cataloging was very much a matter of 
talking and then going into a laboratory and doing examples. 
And one of the things I did, for instance, was to invent a new 
category of problem, namely, describing and classifying 
pictures, not great works of art and stuff like that, but just 
pictures I had cut out of magazines. I had been at the New 
York Public Library years before when I was doing my survey of 
South Asia collections, and I wandered into the picture 
collection of the New York Public Library and was absolutely 
stunned by it. There were thousands, tens of thousands, of 
just pictures out of magazines and things. You wanted to 
illustrate something, you wanted a picture to illustrate 
something. Okay, you poked around in the picture collection 
until you found something which would illustrate something. I 
thought, what a terrific problem for catalogers. Give them a 
handful of pictures, just miscellaneous things, and say, "All 
right now, how are going to organize these? On what possible 
principle can you? What can you think of? What kinds of ways 
of describing these? Of making some sense out of them? And 
there aren t any rules for this. The American Library 
Association does not tell you what to do in this case. So 
you re going to have to figure things out for yourselves." 

And this was terrific fun, I thought. I m not sure what 
the students thought, [laughter] but I thought it was great fun 
and a good idea and a good thing to do. But it was certainly 
not a standard thing to do. 

I know you already had an interest in different kinds of texts. 
And so here, in pictures, was a different category of text but, 



89 



as you say, the problem of how to catalog is with you no matter 
what kind of text. 



Wilson: No matter what kind of text, that s right. But the problems 

are going to be different because the texts are different, the 
nature of the texts is different. You have to adapt and you 
have to figure out new things. Things that will work with one 
kind of textual material simply won t work at all with other 
kinds of textual material. So that seemed to me- -this is the 
way we ought to be approaching these things, as problem- 
oriented and kind of designing things as we go along, rather 
than certainly learning to apply a pre-established set of 
rules. And that s where there were irreconcilable differences 
between me and Miss Markley. So that wouldn t do. 

McCreery: Well, I m going to take you back to my eternal question of 

career intentions. I m wondering, when you joined the faculty 
here, what were your expectations of what you would do? 

Wilson: No, see, I didn t have expectations. I grew up in a different 
class, at a different time. Kids in working-class families in 
Santa Cruz did not have career expectations. The notion of a 
career is a middle-class notion. We didn t have the concept of 
a career. We had the concept of a job, of getting a job and 
holding a job, and that s very different. The notion of a 
career suggests this is a scenario which will work out over 
time, with stages and goals and culminations and so on. But I 
never had anything of that sort at all, ever. It just was 
lacking. We didn t have those things where I came from, 
[laughter] So it s a different social world, and it s an 
important difference I think. It s a very significant 
difference. It s a different style of life. 

McCreery: But you were faced with the problem that we talked about last 
time, which was the tenure clock ticking away, four and a half 
years gone already-- 

Wilson: Absolutely. Four and a half years gone already. 

McCreery: Trying to identify an area where you could do your research and 
writing in your new field. 

Wilson: And what were the expectations? I mean here I am in a new 
field. See, the horrible thing--! wasn t aware of the 
seriousness of what I d gotten myself into until I d got myself 
into it. And then I suddenly realized, my God, I m in an 
entirely new field and I have to do something which is 
recognizable as worthy of tenure at the University of 
California at Berkeley in this new field. And I have to do it 



90 



--ordinarily people get seven years to do it, and I have to do 
it in three years. 

Now this was an absolutely desperate situation. This was 
just terrifying. I had no idea of what constituted research in 
the new field. Here I was starting out doing a bibliography on 
the history of science in South Asia, and I suddenly realized, 
my God, this may not count. It s very good if you re a 
librarian, but is it of any value at all, does it count at all 
if you re up for tenure at the University of California at 
Berkeley in an academic department? And suddenly I realized 
this may not add anything. This is a total waste of time. 
Only I wasn t sure about this. 

Now, I looked around, I guess, [laughter] desperately. I 
started thinking and writing the sketches. I wrote something 
or other on--I can t now remember what it was, I wrote some 
piece which somehow got into the hands of Robert M. Hayes at 
UCLA, and he took violent exception to it and denounced it and 
started essentially was asking for a fight. And I didn t 
continue it. I didn t continue the fight, for some reason. I 
don t know why. I was under time pressure. 1 thought I m not 
sure I want to get into a fight with the big professor at 
UCLA s library school, and so on. But I was desperately trying 
towhat am I supposed to be doing? What kinds of things will 
count? I really don t know. So that was a very frightening 
situation to be in. 



The Deanship of Raynard C. Swank 



McCreery: Well, let s talk for a moment about the leadership here at this 
school at that time. Now, you told me in detail that you were 
trying to work out all these things about coming with Mr. 
Merritt, who was of course acting dean for a couple of years. 

Wilson: Oh was he? I didn t remember that. 

McCreery: Yes. But was Ray Swank the dean, I think, by the time you 
actually arrived? 

Wilson: Yes, he was dean. 

McCreery: Tell me a little bit about him and what interactions you may 
have had with him your first few years here. 



91 



Wilson: I can t tell you very much except that he supported me very 
warmly indeed. He went to great lengths to support me. But 
the only things that I have evidence of are his support at the 
point of tenure. When I went on sabbatical leave at the end of 
the spring semester of 1966, I must have written twenty-four 
hours a day, something, because I must have produced something 
with incredible speed. Because in the fall of that year he was 
saying to the chancellor--! have a copy of the letter--he was 
saying, "We re very impressed by what we have seen of Wilson s 
work in progress and we think that we could review him for 
tenure this spring." ( 67) 

The chancellor or the vice chancellor, or somebody, wrote 
back saying, "Not a good idea. He hasn t been here very long. 
You d better give him more chance to finish up his work and see 
how it goes." [laughter] But Swank was optimistic and pushing 
hard to get me to tenure. When I finished a draft manuscript, 
he had it mimeographed and copies sent out. He solicited 
opinions from bunches of people. I didn t know that. And he 
pushed its publication in the subsidized series of publications 
in librarianship, which was published by the University of 
California Press, one of the subsidized scholarly series of 
things . 

McCreery: He arranged that publication for you? 

Wilson: I think so, I think so. I mean, there was an editorial board 

and he was not on the editorial board, but I m pretty sure that 
he must have pushed hard to get the editors to agree to 
publication of this. So he pushed hard. 

And subsequently, when I came back, he in effect gave me a 
free hand to make up my own courses. Clearly I wasn t going to 
go back and teach cataloging and classification with Anne 
Ethelyn Markley. So he let me do whatever I wanted. And what 
I did was to invent the kind of course that I thought there 
ought to be, [laughter] instead of the kind of courses that 
there were. And I started inventing introductions to 
bibliography, the kind of introductory course which was, in a 
sense, compensating for what the school had not offered in the 
past. In essence a kind of a way of saying, "Look, it doesn t 
have to be as bad as it used to be. It doesn t have to be as 
intellectually disreputable as it used to be. It can be 
serious." And now, arrogance, arrogance! Well, I was 



arrogant. I knew how it ought to go, by God. 
Swank supported me. 



[laughter] And 



McCreery: Well, it sounds as if he was, in this and in other things, open 
to new ideas and changes . 



92 



Wilson: Oh, he was. He was. See, Swank was very much a lofty dean. 

He wasn t much of a nitty-gritty details sort of dean. That s 
why I had to deal with LeRoy Merritt on questions of teaching 
load and stuff like that. Swank wouldn t deal with that kind 
of thing. He was out looking around the world and making 
contacts with government agencies and other organizations. 
Thinking great big thoughts, seriously big thoughts about the 
future of library education, about the implications of the 
appearance of this new field called "information science." 
Looking for people, looking for faculty members outside. 
Scouting around. Looking ahead to see what the direction of 
education and research was going to be and what kind of people 
we can get who will change things, who will modify the whole 
character of the system. And I think he saw me as one of those 
people. On one side. On the other side he saw Bill Maron, for 
instance, coming out of an entirely different environment, 
entirely different kind of environment. 

McCreery: I do want to talk about that in detail. But just a little more 
on Mr. Swank. What did you think of having that kind of a dean 
for this school? What did that mean to you? 

Wilson: Well, I think I thought, this is the kind of thing deans ought 
to do. For instance, he would go out and sound out other 
agencies on the possibility of joint programs. At one time 
there was a visiting team from, I don t know, the East Coast, 
including the Columbia [University] sociologist Herbert Menzel, 
who was very prominent then, an important person in fields that 
are of interest to us. They came on a site visit in connection 
with Swank s attempt to get a big research grant for some kind 
of, I ve now forgotten what, some kind of --it must have been 
social research of some kind because Herbert Menzel was a big 
sociologist. 

And I thought yes, this is neat if he can do it. He was 
very heavily involved in- -well, it was his initiative that set 
up the Institute of Library Research. I m sure he was the one 
who got everything started and got the people in place. So he 
was the mover and shaker. He was somebody who was accustomed 
to dealing in large movements of money and power at higher 
levels of organization than I would have been accustomed to. 
And I thought, that s fine with me. 

McCreery: Now I wonder, among the existing faculty who had been here 

under the previous dean, how do you think Mr. Swank s style and 
his notions of what library schools are- -how do you think those 
went over? 



93 



Wilson: I don t think they went over well. I really don t think they 
went over well. I don t think that the faculty was very happy 
about this. It had been a very small faculty, and a very old- 
fashioned faculty. He was opening it up to new things that 
were not going to be comfortable--! mean, consider the very 
bizarre collection of interests. There were so many historians 
on the faculty. It was just astonishing that a tiny faculty 
should have had, you know, Ray Held was an historian and Fred 
Mosher was an historian, and Harlan was an historian, and who 
else? There were others, there must have been somebody else. 
Danton, insofar as he did research, did sort of historical 
research. 

Here s a huge bunch of historians, and Swank is thinking of 
a future which is going to be technologically and 
organizationally completely new and different, in which the 
place of historians it s hard to envision what role they would 
have in this . So I think that was one of the reasons that they 
were not comfortable with him. It s certainly one of the 
reasons that I had trouble when I became dean, because of this 
bizarre collection of research interests and styles of thinking 
of the older members of the faculty, of the already-there 
members of the faculty. 

McCreery: Did Mr. Swank hold regular faculty meetings? 

Wilson: We had regular faculty meetings, yes. I should mention, just 
as an indication of another way in which I was bound to get 
into trouble with Markley and Merritt. When I came I 
discovered that I was expected to have lunch with them every 
day. There was a table, the faculty table, at The Faculty 
Club, and we were all expected to join together for lunch every 
day. And after a very short while I found excuses not to join 
the faculty table. I mean, this was just intolerable to me. 
My goodness, the very notion! [laughter] But this, I think, 
was seen as an offensive refusal to participate or something 
like that. Swank never joined that group, that was Markley and 
Merritt. But we did, yes, always have regular faculty 
meetings, again, in a big room in The Faculty Club. 

McCreery: And what was Swank s way of soliciting your ideas about things? 

Wilson: Very democratic, very open. Very democratic. He wasn t 
anything like an autocrat. He was really very good at 
soliciting different views and being sure that everybody was 
given a chance-- 



McCreery: You were just talking a little bit more about Dean Swank. 

Wilson: Yes, the managerial style, so far as I was aware of it and so 
far as I saw it, and of course I didn t see very much because, 
as I say, he was not a big hands-on administrator. He was 
away, and he was-- 

McCreery: Some have made the criticism that he was away quite a lot, even 
in the earliest years of his deanship. I wonder if you have 
thoughts on that. 

Wilson: Yes, I don t have any thoughts on that, but I think that s 

true. That s certainly consistent with my recollections, which 
are by no means definite at all. I didn t see him. And though 
I have recollections of faculty meetings and I have 
recollections of his intervening on my behalf, that s 
consistent with his not being here very much. 

McCreery: And that s also consistent with what you said about the fact 

that he was thinking about the large issues of the future. And 
I know he was prominent on the national scene, and so on. 

Wilson: Absolutely. Very prominent on the national scene. Very 

prominent. Yes. That would explain, again, why he was not 
here all the time, because he was on the international scene 
too. 1 mean, I remember many, many years later after he had 
left, cleaning out some of his leftover files on the top floor 
of the library school. I found just endless folders of 
correspondence of international organizations, and national 
organizations, and state organizations, just a fantastic amount 
of stuff. All heavy involvement. So he really didn t have 
time to spend with us too much. 

McCreery: Well then, following that same thread, we were talking a moment 
ago about how you were faced with the problem of writing and 
publishing on your tenure clock, and so on. And you did have 
this sabbatical. He was very supportive. You felt that you 
weren t sure if this was the right kind of thing that would 
take you along the path to tenure. Did you ever seek any 
guidance from Dean Swank that you remember? 

Wilson: Not that I remember. I don t remember that I sought guidance 
from anybody on the particular point of what will they expect, 
what will do, what will get me through this. I don t think I 
did. I don t remember doing it. I couldn t have done it to 
Merritt. "Merritt wouldn t have known," he said in irritation! 
[laughter] And Swank- -it wasn t clear to me that Swank would 
have been very good at that kind of advice. It s not clear to 



95 



me that he would have really had much to say. 
was really absolutely on my own. 



So again, no, I 



Sabbatical Leave, 1966-1967; Writing Two Kinds of Power 



Wilson: As it turned out, that was all right. Because when I went out 
on my own, at the end of that spring semester, that third 
semester here, and went up on the hill outside my house in San 
Francisco and sat down on the bench and started writing, 
everything came together and there was no problem at all. 

McCreery: It was a return of the "flow of writing," shall we call it, 
that had been missing at UCLA? 

Wilson: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There s something about the scale of 
the thing, I think, that had to do with this. I seem to do 
better on fairly large-scale things, rather than little bits, 
little tiny bits. My dissertation went very fast, but it was a 
big project, it was a big thing. I had to put a lot of things 
together. And the book I wrote for tenure, Two Kinds of Power, 
was a big thing. Okay, I m going to explore the foundations of 
bibliographical organization and control, that is to say, the 
work of the librarian and bibliographer; the nature of the 
problems ; what you do and why you do it ; or what there is to do 
and why it needs to be done; whether or not you are the people 
to do it. 

McCreery: Big questions. 

Wilson: Yes. But once I got started it all came very quickly, and I 
don t know why. The thing that astonishes me--I reread the 
thing not so long ago--I wrote it at an enormous speed. It 
doesn t read anything like that to me, it s not speed written. 
It looks like it s the work of somebody who s got all the time 
in the world. [laughter] 

McCreery: That s interesting. 

Wilson: Yes. That s interesting. That s really interesting, yes. 

McCreery: Do you feel it held up well? 

Wilson: Yes. Yes. That s one of the things that interests me. See, I 
wasn t talking about local technical questions, technology, 
which would change from day to day, week to week, month to 
month. I was saying, you know, what s kind of the abstract 



96 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



characterization of the basic problem that we re facing? And 
that kind of stayed the same under a very great deal of 
technological change. It seems to me that it has stayed pretty 
muchthat essentially it still describes the situation. 

Now, in one sense it has not held up, because I don t think 
people starting out now would be able to read it. The style is 
too different. It s a style from another world, really, I 
think. It s not fast. The sentences are too long. A reviewer 
in one of the information science journals, a silly callow kid, 
wrote a short review of one of my books and said, "The 
sentences are so long." And it s in a style that I think 
people will be mostly too impatient to read. "Spare us, we 
don t need to go that deeply into this. Just give us a 
quick--" So it wouldn t surprise me at all if the book just 
fades out of --not at all. 

But as you say, you did show restraint in not being too 
grounded in the technology of the time? 

Oh yes. I didn t want to do that. Partly, you see, the point 
wasthe problem with library education as it was then, was 
that it was entirely tied to a particular technology, namely 
the card catalog. This was just at the time when the computer 
was beginning to appear on the horizon. I knew about computers 
and I was enormously interested in what s going to happen next. 
This was before it had happened. But it seemed obvious to me 
that this is all going to change . 

But the main thing is--the difference between taking a 
bibliographical point of view and taking a cataloger s point of 
view, is a bibliographical point of view is already a level 
more abstract than a catalog. A bibliography is not concerned 
with. any particular physical set of books, but with kind of an 
abstract collection, collections of things that are already 
just--well, I don t care what the physical realization of these 
things is, I m listing works, I m listing texts. They might 
appear in any kinds of forms. So nothing of importance changes 
for the bibliographer when computers suddenly appear and the 
stuff is on a computer instead in a physical volume in a 
physical library. The problems are still the same. 



But for the catalogers-- 

But for the catalogers, yes. 
They re out of a job. 



Their technology is now vanished. 



McCreery: I wonder, in writing this work, do you think you set out to 
bring bibliographers and catalogers together in some sense? 



97 



Wilson: Yes, oh yes. 
McCreery: With that intent? 

Wilson: Oh yes, absolutely. Definitely, yes. The follow-up to that 

was when I started doing my courseinvented courses. That was 
the basis of the whole thing. We started out not by separating 
off cataloging as one subject and reference and bibliography as 
another subject. We started out at a more abstract level, 
saying, "Okay, here are things that you can deal with in this 
way, that way, the other way." And so deliberately to start 
out by not distinguishing off cataloging and catalogers as 
separate kinds of activity. 

McCreery: And I think one of the other issues you raised in your book was 
something you had thought about in other contexts, which is 
that there s no way to measure whether you ve made satisfactory 
progress towards-- 

Wilson: Yes. The book I wrote is full of paradoxes, in a way. In the 
first place it can be read as a profoundly anti-quantitative 
book. Because I keep talking about --somebody will say okay, 
let s measure this and let s measure that. We ve got 100 
percent complete, 90 percent complete, 75 percent of what we 
want. I spent a great deal of time making fun of these, in 
essence saying why this makes practically no sense at all, or 
why this is idle talk or loose talk, rough, ready approximate 
talk, but not serious. You re not really seriously able to 
measure anything. So this was part of a kind of a twenty-year 
warfare with my colleagues, with people who describe themselves 
as information scientists, for whom the whole point was to 
start by measuring things and applying mathematics to another 
kind of abstract object. 

McCreery: But am I right that that was already a favorite theme of yours? 
How can you really measure, is one way of saying it, but how 
can you really tell if you re getting there? 

Wilson: Yes, you re right. This goes back to my dissertation, sure. 

My dissertation was about interpretation. How can you be sure 
you ve got it right? How can you be sure that you ve 
understood what somebody else is saying? And here in the new 
book the problem was, okay, you re trying to organize things in 
a way, and how can you tell you ve got it right? You want to 
give bibliographical advice to somebody else. How can that 
other person tell that your advice is any good? How can they 
tell whether you know anything or not? 



98 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 
McCreery: 
Wilson: 



And the answer is essentially, they can t really. It s a 
matter of luck and chance and trust. Hard to tell. [laughter] 
So in a way the book is a subversive book, subversive in 
several different ways. Subversive of the quantitative impulse 
to measure and count and give precise numerical values to 
interesting quantities. And on the other hand, subversive of 
claims to know how to do things, and to be able to teach people 
how to do things too. So it all ends up kind of skeptical. 



Yes. 

Yes. Well, that seems appropriate to me. 
back at all. [laughter] 



I don t take that 



Okay. Well, we ve talked about how that book, Two Kinds of 
Power, has held up, but I wonder what kind of a response did 
you get on it at the time? 

Got a very good review in the Library Quarterly, which was 
important. It was a glowing review, and it was a lead review. 

Who wrote it, do you recall? 

Yes. Elaine Svenonius. She later taught at UCLA. She had 
something of a philosophical background herself, I think, which 
made her more sympathetic to it than other people would have 
been. That was a piece of good luck for me. Over time it got 
a good reputation and it got read. It got used. It got used, 
in some places, for what it was not intended for, as a 
textbook. I went to the University of Chicago s library school 
some years later to give a talk at a colloquium or some kind of 
program, and I was mobbed by a bunch of students who said, "We 
read your book." And I said, "I m sorry. I m sorry." 
[laughter] 

You were a little leery of that adoration? 

No, they weren t adoring. They were saying, we have to read 
your book! 

Oh, I see. Accusingly. 

But it did all right. 

And it readily accomplished the goal of tenure? 

And it got tenure, just barely. I m not supposed to know this. 
One is not supposed to know anything about the tenure process, 
but I have it from somebody who was in a position to know, that 



99 



they almost said, "No, this is pretty thin stuff." And 
somebody said, "Oh, give the kid a chance. He changed fields, 
he hasn t been here long. Give him a chance, it ll work out. 
You won t be sorry." So they said, "Okay, all right." So by 
the skin of my teeth I got tenure. That was in 1968. 1968 was 
a great year in many, many other ways. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, tell me about that. 

Wilson: Well no, I mean 1968, the world-- 

McCreery: You re talking about the big year, on the big scene. 

Wilson: On the big scene, it was a very big year. But locally it was a 
big year for me. 



Campus Atmosphere of the Late Sixties; Effects on the School 



McCreery: Well, while we re still on these first few years that you were 
here, and so on, let s back up just a little bit and let me ask 
you about how the campus might have changed since you d been 
here, since you d been gone to UCLA for five years. I know the 
Free Speech Movement had broken out in the fall of 64, so just 
before you came back. And I just wonder, did you particularly 
notice big changes in the atmosphere here? 

Wilson: Well, I was very sympathetic to the anti-war movement right 

from the beginning. At UCLA, as a matter of fact, there was an 
echo of the Free Speech Movement. I once booed Angus Taylor 
who- -what was he then? He was later vice president of the 
university. He was making a speech in the Academic Senate at 
UCLA saying, this is none of our business, or calm down, shut 
up, mind your own business. Don t protest. And I booed 
loudly. [laughter] So when I came back here, lots of anti-war 
activity and so on. That was, sure, that was to be expected. 
I participated in that. 

McCreery: How was that manifested here in the school among the other 
faculty and so on? 

Wilson: Let s see. One time [Governor] Ronald Reagan s helicopters 

flew over the campus dropping tear gas, and it happened to be 
that the School of Librarianship was just coming out from a 
faculty meeting at The Faculty Club. We got a whiff of the 
tear gas and we were instantly radicalized, the whole school 
was. [laughter] We started signing petitions and taking out 



100 



McCreery: 



advertisements, I forget. I have a file at home of newspaper 
page ads that include my signature along with other faculty 
member signatures. Very big on taking out ads in newspapers, 
we were in those days. That was one form of protest. I don t 
know. 

I can remember an odd incident in which- -this is one time 
when Ray Swank got in trouble with the faculty. He imported a 
couple of Iranian librarian types. Now I forget the details of 
this, but the idea was that we were to somehow support the Shah 
of Iran and his educational institutions or something. I just 
forget all the details, but I found this just appalling. We 
can t support the Shah of Iran! I started talking among the 
faculty, and they said, no, we can t support the Shah of Iran. 
So whatever the proposal was for a formal joint arrangement 
between the School of Librarianship and some institution in 
Iran, we said we re not going to have anything to do with this. 
Nothing at all. And this was a kind of, I think, just another 
expression of the political climate of those years. 

Perhaps the tear gas incident served to mobilize even those who 
hadn t been so interested? 



Wilson: Yes, who otherwise would not have been. So that was the thing. 
I was already interested, but not everybody was already 
interested. 

McCreery: Did everyone go on teaching? 

Wilson: Yes, yes. There was the famous case of, when was it? The Kent 
State massacre. Was that in 1967? 

McCreery: It must be 67 or 68, yes. 

Wilson: There was a great meeting of faculty and students, and so on in 
the Greek Theatre-- 

McCreery: I have to take it back, in 1970 the students were killed at 
Kent State. 

Wilson: Oh really, that late? Oh yes, that s right. Yes, when that 

happened there was kind of a mass movement on campus. We said 
we re going to reconstitute the university. Reconstitute the 
university! Reconstitution was the big thing. Well, 
reconstitution didn t really mean very much. As a matter of 
fact, I wrote and published an article in the California 
Library Association s monthly magazine, California Librarian, 
"The Meaning of Reconstitution," in which I was kind of hedging 
and saying, well it doesn t mean we re going to go on strike. 



101 



We re not really going to go on strike. What would we strike 
against? The university? We are the university, very much. 

McCreery: We are them! 

Wilson: We are them. [laughter] But, no, we went on teaching. 
Nothing very serious actually happened. 

McCreery: What about library school students during this time? Do you 
recall much of how they responded to these events, the Free 
Speech Movement and the building of the Vietnam War, and so on? 

Wilson: Very much a mixture. There were a few very strong anti-war 

protesters among the students. Most of them not very strong. 
Well, they re older and pretty much vocationally oriented, as 
people in professional schools generally were. The protesters 
were more likely to come from liberal arts departments than 
from professional schools. 

McCreery: Let s talk about that. I gather that, you know, really ever 
since the period after World War II a lot of students had 
flooded into the school, either from other disciplines or from 
--I m trying to think, those who couldn t get teaching jobs in 
the social sciences and humanities--! think I saw references to 
a lot of them deciding to attend library school and so on. Did 
you have much of a sense of the makeup of the student body? 

Wilson: I didn t have any sense of it at all in the early period when I 
was first here. No. I was too worried about my own things to 
be paying attention to things like that. It wasn t until I 
became dean that I was kind of officially concerned with who 
they were and where they came from, and what the mixture was, 
and was it just right, and should we get rid of some of those 
people and get some different people in, that kind of thing. 
Then it became important. 



Recollections of University Librarians and School Colleagues 



McCreery: Okay, well before we leave this period, before your deanship, I 
wonder if I could just ask you to talk a little bit more about 
some of your other colleagues. You ve talked a little bit 
about Mr. Swank and Miss Markley. Now I take it Donald Coney 
had taught fairly often in the school, really going back to the 
time you were a student. And it reminds me to ask you, in any 
of your connections, did you know him very well? 



102 



Wilson: I knew him. [laughter] I knew him from practically the day I 
started working as a student assistant in the library. I was 
working in the loan department and there was a portal, a stack 
entrance, for people who had stack passes. Most people did not 
in those days. And I sat at the door in the entrance to the 
stacks and checked people s passes. One day I was sitting 
there and a friend of mine was standing by and I was talking, 
apparently excitedly, to my friend, whoever that was, and 
Donald Coney walks by and without looking at me and without 
slowing down, he points at me and says, "You re making too much 
noise," and goes on. That was my introduction to Donald Coney, 
[laughter] 

McCreery: I thought you were going to say you asked him for his pass! 
[laughter] 

Wilson: But then later I just knew him distantly as head of the 

library. When I was a nonprofessional librarian I was kind of 
a labor agitator. There was a staff association and we wanted 
more amenities, and this and that. But I didn t deal with him. 
I dealt with the associate librarian. Melvin Voigt was 
associate librarian then, and he found me troublesome too. 

Coney was a member of the faculty of the school, but he 
didn t teach in the school as far as 1 know. He was formally a 
member of the faculty. It was to ensure that he would be a 
member of the Academic Senate that he was appointed formally a 
member of the faculty when he was appointed head librarian. 
That was the way for a librarian to become a member of the 
Senate. Otherwise they wouldn t be a member of the Senate. 
The idea was you wanted to be a Senate member so you did it via 
appointment in the school at a zero percent time appointment. 
You are officially on the roll. It doesn t mean you teach 
anything. That s very popular. 

McCreery: Okay, so you didn t know him here as a colleague. 

Wilson: No. He came to faculty meetings, and I certainly knew him 

there because he had a waspish tongue. He was a very keen and 
sharp critic of many things. I can t remember what, but he 
would speak up, and he would let us know just what he was 
thinking about what we were doing and proposing. So he was an 
active participant in the school s self-government. For all I 
know he may have taught a seminar or something, I don t really 
know. But I kind of doubt that he did. 

McCreery: Any thoughts on his leadership of the main library over all 
those years? 



103 



Wilson: No, not really. I worked there all those years but I didn t 

have any views of what he was doing. I didn t know what he was 
doing . 

McCreery: Well, in this period we re talking about, 1965 to 70, or so, 
what do you think were relations between the library school 
faculty and the main library? Anything stand out to you there? 

Wilson: No, it was too short a period of time and my life was too busy. 
Jim [James E.] Skipper was appointed librarian to follow Donald 
Coney. I got along very well with Jim Skipper. Maybe that was 
after I was dean, maybe that s how I knew him. But at some 
point I remember going over with other faculty members to 
interpose ourselves between the mob and the card catalogs. 
There had been incidents of student protesters dumping glue in 
card catalogs. They did it at San Francisco State. And we 
were afraid they would do things like that. Or in other cases, 
ripping out bunches of cards and throwing them away. And we 
were afraid that they would do that. 

This was the time when "ripping off" was the term of art 
for stealing things from the library. So people would rip off 
books and journals, but would also do a lot of malicious stuff, 
tearing pages out of magazines. We were afraid at one point 
that there would be an attack on the card catalog. And so 
members of the library school faculty went over there to help 
the library staff to protect and defend the card catalog, 
[laughter] 

it 

McCreery: You were just talking about Donald Coney, and my notes say that 
he retired from the librarian s job in 1968, so it must have 
been some time shortly after that that Jim Skipper took over. 
Can you tell me a little bit about him? 

Wilson: Skipper couldn t have been more different from Coney. He was 

easy going, not the sharp- tongued, narrow-eyed type, but a much 
mellower type, like a kind of amiable businessman. He later 
left the library to become an amiable businessman in the 
library reprint business, I think. But I wouldn t be able to 
say anything about how he ran the library. 

Oh, Eldred [R.] Smith was temporarily librarian [1971- 
1972] . That must have been after Skipper left and before 
[Richard M.] Dougherty arrived. I don t think Eldred was there 
very long. He had been a member of the library staff. I 
forget what department he was in. I do remember something 
funny because I went over to talk to him one day and he said, 



104 



"I read your book." And he said, "It s very interesting. This 
is what you have to say." Whereupon he gave me a fifteen- 
minute precis of my book. I thought, "Well, say, thanks a lot. 
That sounds pretty good. Why are you doing this, Eldred?" It 
is very funny. [laughter] 

So I had one reader. I know I had one reader at least, 
because he d read the book. He went on later to the University 
of Minnesota, I think. He wasn t there very long. I wish I 
could remember interesting things about Jim Skipper, but I 
can t. 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery; 



Wilson: 



Okay. And then among the other people who were here in the 
school at that time, did you know Mr. [Edward] Wight very well? 

No, not at all well, and he left pretty soon. No, I didn t 
know him at all well. He was a remote and odd figure to me. 
Distant, remote, odd, bizarre. I didn t know him at all. 

Another colleague, Ray Held? 

Yes, Held was funny. He was associate dean for some while, and 
stayed on as associate dean when I was appointed acting dean. 
So I saw him. Yes, Heldwell, very quiet, very self- 
contained. Very, very, very, very conventional and 
traditional. He was so upset by the Berkeley upheavals. He 
must have suffered terribly at this. He wanted to go back to 
the farm, in the Midwest. And that s where he and Naomi, his 
wife, did go pretty soon. 

It was all a bit much? 

It was too much for him. It was too much for him. I mean, 
"This is chaos. I can t stand chaos." He wrote two monographs 
on the history of California libraries. He had a huge 
collection of newspaper clippings, and he reprocessed these 
newspaper clippings into a history of California libraries. 
Okay , okay . 

Well, I m wondering, in thinking about your faculty colleagues 
during this period, was there any marked split between old 
guard and new, or anything like that? Those are certainly 



questions, or issues, that come up later on. 
wondering, when you were newly here? 



But I m 



Well, I don t think there was, because it was all old guard. 
Harlan was the youngest, the newest person. And Harlan was not 
aggressive and would not distance himself from the old guard. 
His interests fit closely and comfortably with theirs, even 



105 



though his kind of sensibilities were more adventurous. He was 
open, but he wasn t going to make waves. So he and I were the 
new people. 



The Institute of Library Research: Applying "Science" to 
Librarianship 



Wilson: 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



I remember our discussing the appointment of Maron in faculty 
meetings during my first three--! don t know when Maron came 
here, but he wasn t here when I got here. He was appointed 
later. And the idea was, well, is this a good idea? We bring 
in a man as a full professor from the Rand Corporation? Never 
had anything whatsoever to do with libraries in his entire 
life? I mean, this is wild. This is the kind of thing that 
Swank would do, but nobody else would previously have done. I 
mean this sort of thing happens on campus, but it never would 
have happened here before. To bring in somebody at a full 
professor rank? Unheard of. Somebody from completely outside? 
Absolutely unheard of. So this was violently new. 

This was in 1966 that Bill Maron came, in the summer of that 
year. 



He did? 
of 65. 



So the discussion would have had to be in the spring 



So you had just arrived yourself. 
I had just arrived, yes. 

Now, as far as you know, was it entirely Swank s doing to bring 
him? 

Yes, oh absolutely. Absolutely. Definitely. Nobody else s. 
Couldn t have been anybody else s. 

And to back up, had Swank already established, I think, the 
Institute of Library Research, and was actively seeking 
someone- - 

That I don t know. That I don t know, it may be so. That may 
have been part of the deal, the package. The package was, we 
bring in Bill Maron as full professor and head of the Institute 
of Library Research. Yes, that could be. 



106 



McCreery: Well, tell me more about the discussions you had as a faculty 
about this. 

Wilson: No, I can t remember. Too long ago. 
McCreery: Were people in favor? Opposed? 

Wilson: I can t believe that they would have been in favor. How could 
they have been in favor? No library experience? No connection 
with libraries whatsoever? None with bibliography? Nothing. 
Only this abstract interest in information science, whatever 
that is. A mathematical theory of information science? What s 
that got to do with us? I didn t know what it was at that 
time, I hadn t read any of the stuff. So I don t know. As it 
happens, oddly enough, I did know who Maron was. Because Maron 
used to come to philosophy department colloquia at UCLA, and I 
saw him there. 

How I knew who he was? Well, I knew his brother. He had a 
brother named Stanley, whom I knew from the Modern India 
Project. See, everything is connected to everything else, 
[laughter] I knew Stanley and I liked Stanley. Stanley was--I 
don t know if he was really a South Asia expert. He lived in 
Israel. He was a big pro-Israeli and somehow I knew him. I 
knew him quite well, long before I knew his brother Bill. But 
I knew [Bill] Maron, but I didn t know anything about his work 
as an information scientist, so I don t know. I don t know 
what we thought, but I can t believe that anybody other than 
Swank, and maybe possibly me, though I don t remember, would 
have been in favor of bringing him in. 

McCreery: Well, tell me whatever it is that you know about the origins of 
the Institute itself. I do know that Swank officially started 
it in the fall of 1963, his first full year as dean. But I m 
not sure that it had much activity, and so on, in those 
earliest years. I do know it was a joint project with UCLA and 
had some involvement by the UC President s Office, some 
oversight. Do you recall when you first became aware of it? 
Was there overlap with your daily life on the faculty here? 

Wilson: No. Zero. At the beginning, zero overlap. Later on, I don t 
know, let s seethings were going on during some of my early 
years here, but I m not sure--I can t date them. When Maron 
arrived, it turned out that Maron was a head of the ILR in name 
only. I don t think he actually ran it at all. It was run by 
Ralph [M. ] Shoffner. Shoffner was a young, very aggressive 
engineer. As far as I know Shoffner did everything. Maron 
was, well, Maron was technically in charge. Maron would sign 



107 



the papers , but as far as I know anything that was done 
happened because Shoffner made it happen. 

McCreery: Who was doing the research? 

Wilson: What research? That was the question, what s going on here? 1 
do remember vaguely that Shoffner was conducting some 
experimental research, this may sound surprising, it is kind of 
surprising, in facsimile transmission--f ax--then, in the late 
sixties. It must have been late sixties. This was not yet a 
commercially available, established technology. It was 
experimental. It was still experimental. It had been 
discovered in about 1840, and it was still experimental in 
1968. So Shoffner was doing something with facsimile 
transmission. 

But then apart from that, there were big catalog production 
jobs. There was the business of producing a printed book 
catalog from the card catalogs of the main library here. I 
remember talking to Shoffner about this because when the 
printed book catalog came out, it turns out that they had 
failed to observe normal filing sequence, filing order, so that 
things were preposterously out of place in the sequence. You 
would not be able to find things that you looked for in the 
catalog because they were out of order, simply because the 
filing rules had not been followed in the process of 
constructing. And Shoffner introduced me to the new concept 
of, "Well, 85 percent accuracy, not bad." And I thought, "My 
God, we never thought about anything other than 100 percent 
accuracy." We didn t think mistakes were tolerable. And he s 
talking about 85 percent accuracy. So this is indeed a brave 
new world that we are living in. 

So I remember the facsimile transmission business and I 
remember the book catalog production business. But beyond that 
I can t remember what else was going on. Ultimately it turned 
out that the ILR devoted almost all of its effort to large- 
scale library automation projects, and that s why they moved to 
the president s office and the ILR was discontinued. What else 
they might have been doing at the beginning, I don t know. 

McCreery: They had a lot of money from the federal government, did they 
not? 

Wilson: Yes. I haven t any idea of the quantity, how much money. I 
don t know anything about what was going on at UCLA. Nothing 
whatsoever. No, see, the mysterious thing was, at the 
beginning- -well throughout most of the time the Institute of 
Library Research had no connection with the school except that 



108 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



it sat in the little building next door and Bill Maron was 
officially head of the ILR. But it made no difference to us. 
We didn t know what it was doing. We weren t involved in it. 
It was remote. So it didn t, in a sense, it did not work out. 



Did 
or 



I anyone on the faculty make any challenge to this situation 
question it openly, do you recall? 



Oh, I don t recall, but I would doubt that there would have 
been any- -no, I doubt that this would have happened. I mean, 
who would have done it? It wasn t our money that was being 
spent, it was other money. And insofar as there were people 
involved, they were other people. Ralph Shoffner wasn t a 
member of our faculty. I kind of dimly remember kids from the 
computer science department who worked for the Institute of 
Library Research. They were other people, you see, not our 
people at all. 

So it sounds like from the start it had these very strong 
connections with the engineering college, or with engineers. 

It was engineering oriented. Yes, I think that s fair to say. 
It was engineering oriented. And the rest of us were not 
engineering oriented at all. Now, we should have been more 
engineering oriented, and it should have been less engineering 
oriented. So in a sense this was--Swank was trying to--he 
failed. But he was trying to bring the old people into a new 
world, and he was trying to make connections with the serious 
technology side of the new world, but he failed. This was not 
the way to do it. Too bad. 

I read that he viewed this as a pivotal part of his deanship 
and his success as dean--success or failure, I guess one could 
say. 

Yes, he would. I mean, this was a big thing. This was a major 
thing. And it was not a failure, in the sense that it led 
ultimately to the production of what is now the Melvyl catalog, 
the statewide [University of California] library catalog. That 
came directly out of the work started in the Institute of 
Library Research. But that was ultimately done not here but in 
the Office of the President, as pure development work. 

I wonder if you can tell me a little more about Professor 
Maron s role on the faculty. I mean, I gather he had teaching 
duties as well. 

Oh, yes. It s hard to describe Maron s role because Maron was 
absolutely uninterested in learning anything about what we did. 



109 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Totally uninterested. He didn t need us, and he was 
uninterested in adjusting what he talked about and did to what 
everybody else talked about or did. So he went on, year after 
year after year, teaching essentially in a vacuum. This was a 
big problem. 

It certainly was a big problem for me when I was dean, 
thinking what on earth, what can we do? The problem was, here 
is somebody who comes in claiming that there s a new science, 
information science. This is a new approach to, you know, the 
study of a certain brand of empirical phenomena in the world 
and also, incidentally, a study which can provide you with the 
best technical means for solving practical problems. "We know 
what you ought to do. We have a mathematical formulation of 
the way in which you ought to proceed." This sounded 
important. And Swank, I think, was aware that Maron is not 
alone. There are other people who do this kind of thing. This 
does represent a new approach to our subject, and it certainly 
is our subject, though they don t see it as our subject. They 
see it as something different. So we must bring all this 
together. 

But Maron would never move. He was never able to say, 
"Okay now, the way what I do resembles what you do--and if I 
modify my way of doing things in this direction it would be 
more like--." No, nothing like that. He was a purist, a 
purist, and he was not going to compromise. This is probably 
not this is not fair. 

How much of a big picture did he have, of his own? 

I don t think he had a big picture at all. But that s because 
his picture was very different from mine, and I thought his 
picture fits into a very small part of my picture. I thought 
he had no big picture at all. 

Well, it would certainly seem, throughout this century, that 
science has been held up as something to apply to almost 
everything, but I m wondering how did you and your colleagues, 
as librarians, feel about these early attempts to apply science 
to you? 

Well, in the first place, it s not science. This is 
engineering of a sort. That s one of the things which has 
bothered me throughout the last thirty years of my life. I ve 
written about this again and again and again, and I keep 
talking about it . It was a clever move for the information 
scientists to claim the title "scientist." Because that 
automatically, just by the wording alone, kind of puts people 



110 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



into a frame of mind of classifying them with physics and 
biology and that kind of good stuff. They re not scientists in 
that sense at all, they re technologists. They re engineers. 
They ve got a rule, a procedure, an algorithm. They say, 
"Okay, now you calculate the probability that this will happen 
given that that happens. And you estimate this and you 
estimate that, and then you re set." 

As far as I m concerned there s absolutely nothing wrong 
with trying to do this. But trying is not good enough. You ve 
got to produce something which actually is useful. There are 
all sorts of failed technologies in the world. Not every 
technology succeeds . Not every technology works on the first 
attempt. Think of all that facsimile transmission stuff, they 
tried year after year after year. This doesn t work yet. Now 
other people, I think, are much more defensive about this. 
They say science, we re afraid of them or we put them off in a 
different department or something. When I was dean, 1 once was 
invited to go visit the University of Missouri library school, 
to be on the visiting team with a couple of other people. That 
was fascinating. They wanted to split the department into two, 
a librarianship and an information science department. 

It was kind of like here. Their Marons and Bill Coopers 
didn t want to have anything whatsoever to do with the 
remaining Markleys and Merritts and Fruges of their library 
schoolentirely different worlds so let s split, let s have 
different departments. We recommended against that on the 
grounds that these technologists were not, in fact, practicing 
something entirely different, they just misdescribed what they 
were doing. That was a great success, because when I came back 
I got a letter from the vice president of the University of 
Missouri inviting me to apply for a job as an administrator in 
the University of Missouri. [laughter] Thanks, but no thanks. 

But as you say, the label of science was very powerful. 

Very powerful, very powerful. Still is. But it s very 
misleading. It s totally misleading. 

So with Maron s appointment as full professor, I m fairly sure 
nothing like that had happened before. But was he able to 
establish himself among his colleagues here, having come in at 
that lofty level and with no background in libraries? 

I don t know what you mean. I don t think he felt that he had 



to establish himself, 
establish? 



What s the problem? What s to 



Ill 



McCreery: Interesting. 
Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: So the institute, I think it existed until about, well perhaps 
when you were dean, early seventies. 

Wilson: It was still going then, because Charles [P.] Bourne took over 
as head of the ILR for a while. And I forget when it finally 
closed, maybe in 74? 

McCreery: Tell me a little bit about Bourne. I know he d been on the 
faculty part time as a lecturer earlier and then worked his 
way-- 

Wilson: He was an engineer who knew he was an engineer. He didn t call 
himself a scientist. That s the difference. No pretentions to 
being a representative of the higher calling of science. Just 
an engineer making things work. Modest expectations, modest 
attainments. That s all. I can t remember what he did. I 
don t really know what was going on in those days. Not much, I 
think. 

McCreery: But his focus was different in that it wasn t a big attempt to 
legitimize librarianship through this affiliation with science? 

Wilson: Well, no, no. I mean the difference would be--see, Maron would 
say, "I don t have anything to do with libraries." Maron would 
say, "I m interested in pure information." Or something like 
this. Whereas Bourne would say, "Okay, so the library s got a 
problem? Here, I can help. We will fix their catalogs, we 
will mechanize their catalogs. We will put them online, we 
will do this and that." No, you d bring Bourne into the 
library as a consulting engineer and say, "Can you fix this for 
us?" He d say, "Absolutely. Give me so many dollars and so 
many staff, and give me so much time and I ll have that fixed." 
Very much the attitude of the consulting engineer who fixes 
things, which is diametrically opposed to Maron 1 s attitude, 
"Don t ask me to fix things. I don t do that sort of thing. 
My people will get back to your people." [laughter] 
Completely different personality types and approaches to the 
world. So Bourne, easy to deal with. Maron, impossible to 
deal with. 

McCreery: Well, do you remember how it came about that the institute and 
its work were transferred to the president s office? 

Wilson: No, I don t. But I do understand that it finally became clear 
to everybody that this was not a research outfit at all. They 



112 



were doing a production job for the university library system, 
and they were doing it not just for one library but for all the 
libraries, throughout the whole [UC] system. So it wasn t 
appropriate to attach it to any particular library. The only 
appropriate place for it was in the president s office. And so 
they, I guess, created an office of library automation, I 
forget what the title is now. 



South Hall and the School s Visibility; Swank s Resignation as 
Dean, 1970 

[Interview 5: September 3, 1999] ## 



McCreery: When we met last time we spent a fair amount of time talking 
about some of the campus turmoil of the sixties, the Free 
Speech Movement, the anti-war movement, and so on. And I just 
wanted to ask you one last question about that. You may have 
been on sabbatical at the time, but Clark Kerr was fired as the 
UC president in 1967. 

Wilson: Fired with enthusiasm. Went out the way he came in, as he 
said. [laughter] 

McCreery: I just wondered about your thoughts on that and what it meant 
for UC? 

Wilson: Well, I thought it was a disaster, but kind of a predictable 
and understandable disaster. The political climate was 
terrible, and it was not at all surprising, I think, to find 
that Clark Kerr should be shown the door very quickly. So 
apart from that, I mean this was a general disaster, I don t 
think I had anything more specific than that in the way of 
reaction. 

McCreery: And of course throughout that time and a bit beyond, Roger 

Heyns was chancellor of the Berkeley campus. And I guess we re 
at the point now of talking about, in 1970 you became dean of 
the school- - 

Wilson: Acting dean. 

McCreery: Acting dean. And that chain of events began with the 

resignation of Mr. Swank from that position. And I wonder, 
could you tell me how it came about? 



113 



Wilson: The surprise resignation of Ray Swank. That was a shock. He 
wasn t supposed to do that. [laughter] Later on it was 
understood that deans served for five-year terms, which could 
be repeated. You could have many five-year terms, but you 
weren t brought in with the expectation that you would serve 
indefinitely. But he was brought in with the expectation that 
he would serve indefinitely. At least that was my 
understanding. And I think, I m pretty sure of this, that all 
of us were startled, terribly surprised that he suddenly 
decided to give up the deanship. 

McCreery: How did you find out? 

Wilson: I don t remember. He must have just told us. 

McCreery: But, as you say, it was a complete surprise to everyone else as 
far as you know? 

Wilson: Yes. Absolutely. No warning at all. 
McCreery: Did he give any reason? 

Wilson: Not that I remember. Of course this was at kind of the height 
of the campus unrest. As a matter of fact I was looking back 
through some material that I had in my files from that period 
of time and I d been running a colloquium series in 1969-70, 
that academic year, with Michael Cooper who was then, at that 
time, a doctoral student. We had weekly speakers, and there 
was a very wide range of what, even now, looks like a very 
interesting series of speakers. But as I noted in my report on 
this thing, the last four meetings of the series were canceled 
due to campus unrest. 

I remember vividly one of the speakers was Philip McCord 
Morse, who was a physicist from MIT, and who actually had an 
odd peripheral interest in information processing because 
during the war he had studied ways to locate submarines at sea, 
and he d developed a technique of browsing for submarines. 
Much later he figured that, by George, this would work 
perfectly well browsing for information in a library too, and 
he wrote a very interesting paper on browsing. 

We asked him to come and talk. I moved him around. I was 
in charge and I had to drive him places and take him 
everywhere. At one point I took him out on the front steps of 
South Hall and we were faced with about 10,000 students 
marching in our direction. And we really ran for our lives, 
trying to get away from the mob. They weren t after us, but it 
was a situation in which we didn t want to be right in front of 



114 



these 10,000--well, you know, a large number of students, all 
coming in our direction. [laughter] So we got out of there 
fast. It was a wild time. 

Now, I can imagine that something like that might just have 
made Ray Swank think, I can t do this forever and maybe this is 
a good time to get out. Of course he didn t get out. He just 
gave up the deanship and stayed on as a professor. But other 
than that I never did find out anything, as far as I can 
recollect. I never had any explanation. 

McCreery: You mentioned South Hall, and I m recalling that at the 

beginning of that year, 1970, was when the library school had 
moved into South Hall. I know that that was viewed as a great 
accomplishment by Swank, get this building and fight the 
fights, and so on. 

Wilson: Yes, that was good. Fight the fights. [laughter] 

McCreery: What did you think about the library school changing quarters 
like that? 



Wilson: Oh, that was an immense improvement. That was a stupendous 
change for the better. We were cramped in the main library 
building, the Doe library building, being on the fourth floor 
with one classroom on the third floor. It was symbolically 
awful to have the library school up in the attic of the library 
building itself. Difficult to get to, hard to find. You know, 
we were off in odd corners of things . But to have our own 
building, to have an entire building, and to have such a 
fabulously attractive building, was a quantum leap into 
respectability and being taken seriously by the world. So this 
was a huge good thing for the school. 

McCreery: Was there a problem with being taken seriously before that? 

Wilson: Oh sure, of course. Yes. Everybody who teaches on the campus 
knows perfectly well that there is a monstrous sense of 
hierarchy and we were at the bottom. Well, let s see. The 
School of Education, could it possibly have been lower than we 
were? [laughter] Hard to tell. But education and 
librarianship would be at the bottom. 

McCreery: In general, I know, it s thought that the professional schools 
are below the academic colleges . 

Wilson: In general, I guess, yes. In general, I guess. [laughter] It 
depends. Well, I have a more complicated picture of the 
hierarchy because I think the professional schools themselves 



115 



have a natural ranking. The physics-based ones are on top 
because physics is on top. And the biology-based ones, like 
optometry, public health, come along next because biology is 
next. Agriculture, however, doesn t fit this very well because 
agriculture is sort of a little lower in prestige. Farmers 
have a little less prestige than eye doctors, by a little bit 
anyway. [laughter] So nothing could be done to change that 
kind of perception of ranking and hierarchy. Nothing can 
change real snobbery. But to have your own building at least 
makes you- -"Oh, those little people are coming up in the world 
a little bit, aren t they?" Social climbing. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, what about within librarianship, the profession s view of 
itself in the hierarchy of things? 

Wilson: Oh, you really are pushing things, pushing into dangerous 

territory. [laughter] My notion of our understanding of the 
hierarchy would be that academic librarianship, work in 
academic libraries is top of the line, followed closely, or 
maybe closely, by work in the better sort of special libraries. 
That is to say, organizational, business, and institutional 
libraries. Followed by public libraries, followed at the 
bottom by school libraries. Partly that is a reflection of 
different educational requirements, because most school 
librarians do not have master s degrees, do not go to schools 
like this one. They go to education schools and take a few 
courses in library work with children. And so we consider that 
they are- -this is a very large population, much larger than the 
population of fully licensed professional librarians. But it s 
a different group. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, let s return to this school s visibility on the campus. 

Wilson: Well, I can t--we haven t got to a point where I m in a 
position to say anything about that yet. 

McCreery: All right. Well, do you think the move to South Hall made much 
of a change? 

Wilson: Well, it had to in the sense that the building is inescapable. 
You can t miss the building. And since there had been some 
wrangling over who was to get the buildingright now I forget 
who Swank was fighting with. I think the Graduate Division, at 
one point, wanted to take over the building, which would have 
made sense. They did ultimately take over part of California 
Hall. But the more controversy there is, automatically the 
more visible you become. So word gets around, "Oh, the School 
of Librarianship is moving into- -didn t even know we had a 
school of--" [laughter] 



116 



McCreery: Did you get that from colleagues in other departments? 

Wilson: I don t remember, I really don t remember. I m partly making 
this up. 

McCreery: But it s certainly a possibility. 
Wilson: It s a possibility. 

McCreery: All right, well back to Swank s resignation as dean. You say 
you don t recall exactly how you found out, but do you recall 
among the faculty here at the time, what were the discussions? 
What happened next upon hearing this news? 

Wilson: It wouldn t be up to the faculty to do anything. This is 

purely a matter for the campus administration to do something. 

McCreery: But I wonder if the faculty, formally or informally, was 
discussing what they thought should happen. 

Wilson: I can t remember. The normal thing would be for a search 
committee to be formed, and a search committee was formed. 
Something had to be done quickly. The thing was, Swank must 
not simply have said, "I m not going to stay on as dean in 
perpetuity. I m going to get out of here." He must have said, 
"I quit now." Because otherwise they wouldn t have had to 
appoint an acting dean. The ordinary course of events would be 
to say, "I m going to quit at the end of next year, so you d 
better start looking for somebody now." Because it takes at 
least a year to do a search. Well, not at least a year, but it 
takes time. It takes time. And you want to give yourself a 
year to conduct a search. But he didn t do that. He can t 
have done that because I was appointed acting dean. 



Becoming Acting Dean of the School of Librarianship 



McCreery: How did you come into the picture then? 
Wilson: I was approached by the search committee. 
McCreery: Do you recall who was on it? 

Wilson: Only the chairman, and that was John [T.] Wheeler of the 

business school. And I don t know what he said, but I think he 
said something like, "Your colleagues seem to agree that you d 
be the best choice as temporary interim acting dean while we 



117 



look for a new dean, 
so, why not?" 



Would you do it?" And I said, "I guess 



One thing after another. I think that s what happened. I 
don t think that there was any group meeting in which the group 
said, "Please do this," or the group discussed, "Well, who will 
it be? It can t be you, it can t be you, and it can t be you. 
Because everybody hates you, and nobody trusts you." Can t do 
that. [laughter] 

So a reasonable guess would be that John Wheeler talked to 
the members of the faculty separately, maybe. Or he asked for 
them to give him their thoughts on who would be a satisfactory 
temporary replacement while they looked for a new dean. And 
then came up with my name, asked me, and I said 1 would. 

McCreery: So John Wheeler contacted you and somewhat out of the blue 
asked you, would you be dean? 

Wilson: Would I be acting dean. We ll put in your name. 
McCreery: What was that like to get that request? 

Wilson: It must have been very surprising indeed, but remember, we re 
in a revolutionary situation. 

McCreery: Was there kind of a sense of needing triage? 

Wilson: Well, no. But there was a sense of being in a situation in 

which anything could happen, at any time. From any direction 
something could come and hit you. As a matter of fact, I 
exploited the revolutionary air, or climate or something, soon 
thereafter. [laughter] I simply took advantage of the fact 
that everybody was so upset by the current political situation 
on the campus, in the city, in the nation, in the world. The 
whole world had been going through a series of astonishing 
political upheavals. So something like this, this is well--I 
mean it s a big surprise, but then on the other hand we live in 
a time of big surprises. 

McCreery: Good point. What did you do that took advantage of this 
atmosphere? 

Wilson: Oh, that was curriculum. That was total curriculum revision, 
[laughter] That kind of came a little later, in the year I 
guess, that first year. 

McCreery: Well, when it was announced that you were to be acting dean, 
what kind of a response did you get? 



118 



Wilson: But we haven t got there yet. I had to go through the 

administration. They had to call me in. I went to see John 
Henry Raleigh, who was the vice chancellor. And that was 
something in itself. I knew him in a way, knew who he was. He 
greeted me by saying, in the gloomiest, most depressed possible 
way, "Well, then it s to be you, I guess." Thanks a lot. 
That s really cheerful. [laughter] How to cheer up a new 
administrative appointee. And immediately he said, "Well, you 
won t need to have the same kind of appointment that Ray Swank 
had . " 

You probably know that faculty members are on what s 
technically called a nine-month appointment. They re paid 
twelve times a year but it s in theory for working nine months 
of the year. Administrators will ordinarily be appointed on an 
eleven-month year, which means that they are paid twelve times 
too, but they work eleven months and have one month off, one 
month of vacation. And the salary is greater by two ninths, 
okay. So John Henry Raleigh, the first thing he did was to say 
you only need to be a nine-month appointee, so we ll just make 
it that. And I said no, I won t do it unless it s an eleven- 
month appointment. [laughter] So he reluctantly said, "All 
right. Oh, very well." 

So that was my introduction to the administrative life. By 
being met with, in a sense, "My God, have we sunk this low?" 
[laughter] Now why? I haven t the foggiest notion. The only 
thing that I can think of is that he knew I was gay, or that 
he d heard it. He could very well have done. I knew his wife. 
Jo Shaw was her name when she was a young student . She worked 
in the library when I was in the library, and I knew her. I 
liked her. We got along well. She was a young woman of 
spectacular beauty, a Vogue model, just quite, quite 
outrageouslyso she was perceptible in the ranks of the 
student assistants in the library. Maybe she drew her own 
conclusions about me and told him. 

On the other hand, if you re going to make an 

administrative appointment you ll look around in the personnel 
files. And I later found out that the librarian s office 
contained a folder of letters denouncing me for being 
homosexual. They d never done anything with them. They just 
filed them away. They didn t throw them away, however, they 
kept them. So here was a folder of letters from the time when 
I was on the staff of the general library. And who knows? Who 
knows? Maybe John Henry Raleigh learned about that and decided 
this is really bad news. Things are bad enough already on 
campus, all we need now is for somebody to turn up as a dean, 
or even as an acting dean, who is subject to being denounced as 



119 



McCreery : 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



a criminal on the faculty. Homosexuality was still illegal, 
after all. So that s a possibility. 

Apart from that I really can t imagine what would have made 
him so depressed at the thought of appointing me acting dean. 
There wasn t anything else that I can think of that would make 
me all that unattractive a candidate. 

It is an unusual way to greet you, given that they seemed to 
need you so much at that time. 



That s right. 

Well, what was the next step after seeing Raleigh? 
talk to Roger Heyns directly? 



Did you 



No, I didn t talk to him until I was appointed dean, which was 
the following April. Well, I came back here. I talked to John 
Wheeler, search committee, saying okay, well, I m going to be 
it then. I said, "Now what do I do? How do you be an acting 
dean?" And he said, "Pretend you re the dean." Okay. In that 
case--. [laughter] 



First Steps as Dean; Curriculum Revision in an Atmosphere of 
Unrest 



Wilson: So the first thing I did was move the offices of the school. I 
said, we re going to move the main offices of the school from 
the third floor of the building down to this [first] floor. 
Ray Swank, for some reason, had given himself a very large 
office on the top floor of the building, empty of furniture 
except for a big desk. He was a big executive type. You go 
into the door at the end of the room and there, a long distance 
away, is a man sitting behind a big desk with nothing else 
around him. You walk a long way. And the entire office staff 
is squeezed into a little tiny office outside. And I said 
we re going to move this. It s too far away. The students 
can t get there. It s inconvenient for them. We re going to 
make it accessible to the students, and we re going to get rid 
of this big dean office junk. 

So I moved the office down here and used room 205, across 
the hall here, as the main office for the secretaries, student 
assistants. A big room for them. Right in front students 
could come in and get right at the people they wanted to talk 
to. I gave myself a little office off the main office. That s 



120 



the right proportion. [laughter] Of course, in order to get 
that room I had to evict Mrs. Roger, Mae Durham Roger, who had 
installed her collection of children s books, had made that a 
children s library. So I said, "Sorry, you re going to have to 
go up and take over Ray Swank s huge office." She didn t lose 
any square feet, but she did have to go up to the third floor. 
She did not like that at all. 



On the other hand, the students could now get directly at 
me and at the office staff, and I thought that was definitely, 
definitely the right thing to do. So that was the first thing. 
I don t know what the second thing was. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, there you were, an associate professor recently tenured, 
forty years old, thrust into the role of acting dean in your 
new profession, your new field. What was that like? 

Wilson: Hard to say. New to me. I didn t know what to do. [laughter] 
More to the point was what it wasn t like. It was clear that I 
wasn t going to be the kind of dean that Ray Swank was. He 
thought big and I said that s fine. Big thinking was good. 
But he also moved on a worldwide scale. He was a big 
organizational man, and I couldn t conceivably do that. I was 
just totally unfit for this. I hated it, loathed it, feared it, 
despised it. I was the last person in the world to try to do 
that sort of thing, so I didn t try. 

I did small-duty things that I felt I had to do. I 
dutifully joined the California Library Association and 
attended meetings, and spoke to committees when I was asked. 
If you re dean, people ask you to do things and I would do 
them, if I could reasonably well, and so on. But nothing on 
the scale of worldwide activity of Ray Swank. The thing I was 
interested in was curriculum revision. 

** 

McCreery: Go ahead, you were interested in making connections between the 
library school and the rest of the campus? 

Wilson: Yes, yes. In lots of different ways, various ways. One was 

joint degree programs. We started exploring the possibility of 
offering joint degree programs. The first was with the law 
school, where a person would get a law degree and a master s 
degree in the school, the deal being that you d cut down the 
requirements on both sides by some relatively small amount, so 
that it s slightly advantageous to get both degrees. You save 
a little, getting two for less than the price of two. 



121 



Ultimately we set up a joint degree program with the 
Department of Near Eastern Studies. We set up an informal 
joint program with the School of Public Policy. That s more 
complicated and I ll get back to that later on. That s one 
kind of thing. Then one thing to do was to encourage our 
students to go out and take courses in other departments, and 
one way to do that would be by revising our own requirements. 
So you can take as many as ten units out of forty-two quarter 
units, if that s what it was then, for the masters degree in 
other departments. We were trying to get people to explore 
outside things. 

We took advantage of, we didn t invent, but I took 
advantage of the possibility of offering undergraduate 
education for the first time since [about] 1904. [laughter] A 
long time ago there had been some undergraduate library 
education, education on how to use the library. About the time 
that I became acting dean, I think it was just about the 
beginning of that time, a small group of librarians in the 
general library decided that some formal classroom instruction 
in how to use the library was desirable and that they would 
like to offer a course. Well, the library could not offer a 
course, an academic department had to offer a course. So they 
came to us and said, "Would you like to take on this course, 
and take us on as instructors for the course." 



McCreery : 



I said yes. Kind of reluctantly at first but then, hey now 
wait a minute. This is a good idea. This is a very good idea. 
I mean this gets a lot of studentsnot only does it give them 
a little bit of useful knowledge, but they may get the idea 
that we exist and they know about us. Here s another subject. 
Maybe some of them will turn out to be more interested in us. 

I hadn t heard before that that was the idea of the library 
staff. 



Wilson: Yes, it was. It wasn t our idea. It was the library staff s 
idea. On the other hand, when they came on and they started 
doing this, I said, "This is a great idea. Let s do lots more 
of it." And they said no. [laughter] The librarians who were 
offering this, there were a small group of them. They worked 
together closely, and they d got a nice little thing going. I 
wanted to get more people involved, more instructors involved. 
More students. Let s double, triple, quadruple the number of 
sections, open it up. Let s take in thousands of students. 
And they said no, no way. 

And I finally overrode them and I said no, we re going to 
do it. We re going to expand the course. And the young woman 



122 



who was kind of the coordinator of the Bib. 
I forget whether she quit in protest. 



1 , she was furious . 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Who was that? 

Joan Herman, I think. 
I m not sure. 

We ll check it later. 



I m pretty sure. This may be a mistake, 



But in any case this was a real case of the administration 
coming down and saying, we will do this. We re going to do 
this. [laughter] 

Authoritarian. 

Yes, that s right. I decided this was good for us. We added 
other things . It was my idea to get Mrs . Roger to offer an 
undergraduate course to a general population. Turned out she 
loved that. And she was a show person. She was show business, 
and she drew mobs of the weirdest people. Football players 
kept swarming in to hear Mrs. Roger talk about children s 
literature. [laughter] She d tell stories. She was 
apparently a spellbinding storyteller. 

So this was again reaching out to- -offering something to 
the campus community in general. More of this from- -we started 
offering a course--! didn t want to call it the history of 
printing, so we got another title, "The book as an artifact." 
Treating this [subject] from the point of view of the history 
of technology, in a sense, not emphasizing the humanistic side 
of it, but emphasizing the carpenter side, the workman side of 
it, the physical object. The physical production of culture 
side of it, which was different, I thought, and useful, 
interesting, and worth offering to the campus. I mean, 
something which was a perfectly good, valid offering for the 
Berkeley campus . 

Sounds timely also. 

Yes, it was. It was at a good time. Things like this, this 
was part of the reaching out. Not all of the reaching out 
worked. A lot of these things faded out. This is the sort of 
thing that happens. It s like people start restaurants, 
restaurants all fail. People start small businesses, small 
business almost all fail. A few make it, most don t. I 
learned this myself the hard way. But the idea was to do a lot 
of things . 



123 



McCreery: It sounds as if you did have a good idea of what you wanted to 

accomplish as dean, or at least what direction- 
Wilson: Oh yes, I did. From the inside it was an intellectual 

direction. I wanted to reorganize the way people thought about 
the content of the thing. The idea was, we tell students 
straight out, "Look, the details you ll pick up on the job. 
Don t sweat the details." But the shape of the whole structure 
is something that you will not automatically pick up on the 
job, and this is a good time to start thinking about that. 
It s also now a good time to think about policies, about 
alternatives, about reshaping things, about filling in holes, 
about thinking of ways of reorganizing, and so on. 



New Faculty of the Early Seventies 



Wilson: That s why probably the best appointment I made was the 

appointment of Fay [M.] Blake, who was very definitely in the 
business of getting people to think about changing the way the 
institutions work. Serving the unserved and dealing with 
different audiences. Reaching out and so on. And that was a 
definite complement to my own more theoretical reorganization 
of things . 

McCreery: I know that she came in the summer of 1971, I guess as you were 
starting your second year. How did you find her? 

Wilson: She was recommended to me by a friend of mine from UCLA, a kid 
I knew who worked in the library. I forget how he knew her. 
She had a Ph.D. in English, and she probably got it at UCLA and 
he probably knew her there when she was working on her Ph.D. 
That would be a plausible scenario. So my library contact in 
UCLA said, "Get Fay Blake. She will stir things up. You ll be 
happy you did." [laughter] And I forget where she was at the 
time, but she was available and was interested and was willing 
to come . 



She instituted one of the best, most successful new parts 
of the program, the field studies program. The idea there was, 
in other schools at other times there have been apprenticeship 
programs along with library school teaching. You go and do a 
little work in an actual catalog department or something. We 
didn t want to do that. We wanted people to go in to work on 
specific ad hoc projects, problems, something new, something 
different, making up something new. The most spectacular case 
was the case of library service to the county jail in San 



124 



Francisco. There wasn t any library. And the students in the 
school here, they thought about this, consulted with people, 
drew up a plan, sought sources of money, got money, and started 
delivering stuff to prisoners in the San Francisco county jail. 

And the idea was that ultimately this would be taken over 
byafter they showed that it could work then the San Francisco 
Public Library would take it over, and I think that is what 
indeed happened. But I don t know. This could have failed 
because there were incidents. It didn t all go well, 
[laughter] But on the whole there were lots of these and Fay 
Blake ran this whole thing. She s just endlesslyshe was a 
born troublemaker, that was her style of life. She wanted to 
get out and stir everything up. Politically radical, as 
radical as you could get, as activist as you can possibly be 
and still walk on the ground rather than hurling into space, 
[laughter] 

McCreery: What an image. 

Wilson: So bringing her here to Berkeley, which already had plenty of 
activists but those activists were not in the school, or not 
very many of them. Now we had one. Now we had one. 

McCreery: She was able to facilitate these connections between the 
students and the real world that you were seeking. 

Wilson: Yes, exactly. I could never have done any of that myself. She 
was exactly the sort of person who could do that sort of thing 
spectacularly. So that was good. 

McCreery: And she did stay on and had quite a career here? 
Wilson: She stayed on for a long time, yes. 

McCreery: Well let s talk about some of the other people who started 
during your tenure as dean. Now, in the fall of 70, maybe 
this was not your doing, but William Cooper joined the faculty. 

Wilson: That would not have been my doing. He was here the previous 

year as a visiting professor, I think, because I remember that 
he was one of the speakers on that colloquium series that 
Michael Cooper and I were running, and he was identified as a 
University of Chicago faculty member visiting Berkeley. If he 
joined us, that would have been a Ray Swank appointment. 

McCreery: And could you tell a little bit about his role in the school s 
programs? 



125 



Wilson: It s going to sound bad. He and Maron were too much alike and 
their interests were entirely too close together. Bill Cooper 
was a logician. His Ph.D. is from Berkeley, from an 
interdisciplinary doctoral group in logic and methodology. 
He s an extreme purist, extreme formalist. Good mathematician, 
but his natural approach to any problem whatsoever is to recast 
it as a purely formal problem of logic or mathematics. 

McCreery: So it was that old quantitative problem again. 

Wilson: It s that again. Over the years he s been willing to get 
closer to practice, at least in the sense that he s been 
actively engaged in constructing real working systems, and 
trying to get them to work better and better and better. These 
are experimental systems. He s designed experimental 
information retrieval systems. But the problem for the school 
was that we now had two people whose interests were practically 
identical, and very formal and in a sense very narrow, very 
narrowly confined to formal theoretically possible mechanical 
systems for information storage and retrieval. 

And they did not there wasn t much they could do in the 
way of offering things that fit into a master s degree program. 
That was the problem. They had a bunch of courses, but these 
courses would always have enrollments of two or three people. 
They were fine for applied mathematicians, but they weren t 
fine for anybody else. So they really did not find a very 
significant role to play at the master s degree level. 

For that matter, one or the other or both of them really 
didn t believe in professional education anyway. Bill Cooper 
never wanted to be here in a professional school. It was 
always obvious to me that he wished he were someplace else. 
This was not his sort of school, and he was in the wrong place. 
There s no way of avoiding that conclusion, I think. He was in 
the wrong place, wrong school. He had a few doctoral students 
over time, a small handful of doctoral students who worked with 
him. And that s what he did for us. Now this is not very 
generous sounding, but as far as the school goes-- 

McCreery: You were, after all, primarily here to serve the master s 
degree. 

Wilson: Yes, that was the central part of the program. Yes. 

McCreery: And then, thinking of some other faculty, we already talked 
about Charles Bourne, but you also, in the summer of 72, 
brought in Michael Cooper. 



126 



Wilson: Oh, well, did I? I was trying to remember exactly when, how he 
got here. Sure. He was the most useful appointment, well he 
and Fay, the two of them, my God, in their very different ways. 
Michael Cooper had come into the doctoral program after working 
for IBM, I think, in Sweden just before he got here. He 
studied with Maron. His background was in business 
administration. He specialized in systems analysis. But he 
had learned computing. He was a computer programmer, and so he 
started studying with Maron. But somehow he got hooked up with 
me. He decided that I didn t know much, but I was perhaps 
educable and that it would be worth spending some time on me. 
So he undertook to educate me. [laughter] "Now you read this, 
and you read that." And he got me to read textbooks on systems 
analysis and one thing and another. 

And he and I spent hours and hours and hours and hours 
going over Bill Maron 1 s basic writings line by line, word by 
word, letter by letter, trying to figure out exactly what was 
going on and whether it would work. If it wouldn t work, why 
not? What was wrong with it? This was serious criticism. The 
two of us, we really worked hard on this and we finally came to 
the conclusion that it looked good at first, but the closer you 
got into details, the less good it looked. And so there we 
were. 

McCreery: Was it a specific information storage and retrieval system that 
you were reviewing, or his whole approach? 

Wilson: Not a system, but a theory. He had a theory of probabilistic 
indexing. How, in theory, you ought to go about indexing any 
collection of documents of any kind. How, in theory, you ought 
to do it. We figured out that that s not right. We satisfied 
ourselves anyway. But the thing was Michael Cooper was quite 
relentless with me, in a very low-key way. He kept at me 
though until I knew enough to be of some use to him. 
[laughter] 

McCreery: How did his attempts to educate you go over? 

Wilson: It was fine with me. I was delighted. I was very happy with 
all this . I was glad to learn the things that he was teaching 
me. That was very useful to me. I was happy to find a good 
teacher. No, we got along well. It was a mutual give and take 
thing. He got stuff from me, I got stuff from him. It was 
fine. 



McCreery: It is nice to find a colleague with such different interests 
and then create some common ground. 



127 



Wilson: And creating a common ground. See, that was so unusual, and 
unfortunately it was unique in the school, you see. It was 
unique in the school. Bill Cooper, for instance, and I had 
kind of a complementary set of interests but it didn t work out 
this way. I mean, it might have worked like that, but it 
didn t work like that. He and I once had offices across from 
each other, this is a little later, a few years later but not 
much later. I sat in my office writing a paper refuting his 
theory of how you ought to do indexing, and published it in the 
main information science journal. It was a one-page paper. I 
was very happy with a one-page paper, a note on this or that. 
I didn t show it to him, I just published it. Whereupon he 
published a reply in the same journal. 

Here s the bizarre situation. We re sitting ten feet apart 
from each other, but we re communicating by sending articles to 
New York. [laughter] The way that ended up I ll jump twenty 
years ahead- -the way this ended up, we finally team-taught a 
course. The last course that I taught, was it the last one? 
Almost if not the last course I taught. I was acting dean then 
again. We taught a course on cognitive science applications to 
information science. It was really funny because he would take 
an hour and give a highly formalized, mathematized version of 
some pieces of cognitive science that he thought was 
particularly unique. Fine. And I would then take an hour 
talking about the soft objections. Why the world isn t like 
that. Why the world isn t anything at all like that, 
[laughter] And we did this for ten weeks, twelve weeks, 
fifteen weeks. Back and forth, week after week after week. 
Hard, soft. Mathematical, nonmathematical. It was really 
bizarre. 

McCreery: Were you on any closer terms with him by then? 

Wilson: No. 

McCreery: I wonder how you came to team- teach a course at all. 

Wilson: I forget--! think I proposed it. 

McCreery: That sounds interesting. 

Wilson: Yes, it was. 

McCreery: The students probably thought so. 

Wilson: Yes, oh yes. It could have been fascinating. I don t know how 
it actually was in practice but it could have been really, 
really something interesting. 



128 



McCreery: It goes to show how many different research interests were 
represented here, and how far apart some of them were. 

Wilson: Yes, how far apart some of them were. Back to Michael Cooper 
though, appointing him was filling up a huge gap in the 
curriculum which hadn t been a gap before because we hadn t 
realized we needed systems analysis. We hadn t realized we 
needed library automation stuff. There hadn t been computers. 
So here was a huge area of managerial and technological stuff 
which was absolutely crucial for dealing with what was coming 
up, what was coming on, and Michael Cooper did that. And he 
was of immense value to us. 



Thoughts on the Acting and Permanent Deanships , 1970-1975 



McCreery: I d like to return for just a moment to this whole notion of 
your becoming dean, first on the acting basis and then the 
following year on a permanent basis for four more years. Do 
you know how the initial decision to make you acting dean was 
received by your colleagues? 

Wilson: No, I don t. I think they thought it was all right. I think 
they felt it was as good as they could get under the 
circumstances. At the beginning anyway, there wasn t anybody 
who actively opposed me. That wasn t true later on. 

McCreery: Well, it sounds as if initially it really was thought by all to 
be a temporary thing. 

Wilson: Yes. I had no idea that it would turn into a regular 
appointment. 

McCreery: But did you quickly become interested in staying on in that 
job? 

Wilson: I don t remember that I did, no. 

McCreery: Okay. Well, I wonder how it came about that the permanent 
appointment was made. Was there a search committee and the 
whole thing all over again? 

Wilson: Yes. Well, no. That would have been John Wheeler s committee, 
which started out by recommending a temporary acting dean and 
then went on to search for a regular dean. The thing that 
bothers me is that I can t remember who the other candidates 
were. [laughter] I have a vague memory of, at some point, a 



129 



husband and wife team, Sally and Walter Sedelow. He s a 
computational linguist. She is too, I guess. I just saw their 
names recently in some context. They came through here and 
it s possible that he was being considered as a possible dean. 
I can think of a couple of other people who came through, but I 
just can t remember whether they were being considered for dean 
or not. 

McCreery: How did you feel about continuing, do you recall? 
Wilson: No, I don t. 

McCreery: It does sound as if you had a lot of ideas and were already 
fully engaged in carrying them out. 

Wilson: Yes. There was a lot going on. There was a lot of stuff going 
on. So it would have been, I guess, disappointingwell not 
disappointing, but it would have felt a little incomplete, say, 
to stop. Particularly depending on who came in, because if a 
person came in and said, "Well, all these new courses that 
you ve developed, your curriculum revision, that will have to 
go. We can t do that." [laughter] That would really have 
been seriously bad. 

I was teaching all this time, I always taught. Ray Swank 
didn t when he was dean. He didn t. At least I don t remember 
him teaching. But again this is one of the contrasts. I was 
much more like a department chairman rather than a dean, I 
think. The school is about the size of a department. You 
know, lots of departments are bigger than the school and a 
department chair ordinarily will teach even if it s a reduced 
teaching load, and otherwise do the kinds of things which I 
would do as dean. So I was, in effect, in a one-department 
school. The dean is chairman and dean. But I was mostly 
chairman, I guess you d have to say. 

McCreery: Tell me about meeting with Roger Heyns. 

Wilson: Well, I can t remember very much. It was a relatively brief 
meeting. He s a very bland man, and this was a bland and 
noncommittal meeting. He didn t give me any instructions, he 
didn t give me any warnings, but at least he didn t say [as 
John Henry Raleigh had], "Well, it looks like it s--" 
[laughter] He didn t try to depress me. Otherwise I don t 
remember anything at all of that meeting. It wasn t much of a 
meeting. It wasn t much of a meeting at all. 

McCreery: Well, at that point they knew what they were getting in you. 



130 



Wilson: Yes, presumably. 

McCreery: I d like to read you something authored by you, from the spring 
and summer of 1971 issue of Calibrarian, the alumni newsletter 
shared by this school and the UCLA school at that time. "Notes 
from the dean s desk." This was towards the end of your first 
year. Perhaps you d been just appointed as permanent dean. 
Somewhere around that time. 

You say, "By now I have figured out why I was asked by 
Roger Heyns to be dean of the School of Librarianship. It must 
have been entirely a question of money. I do not cost the 
university much. Anyone else they considered must have been 
very much more expensive. I was the most economical dean they 
could find, so here I am. This thought causes me no chagrin. 
I have to confess that I rather like being an administrator. 
For one thing, it is much easier work than teaching or trying 
to write. And I do not resent the fact that I was chosen 
because I was so cheap. When the university is more affluent I 
shall cheerfully give up my place to a more expensive dean, 
grateful for the curious and fascinating insights into 
organizational and personal lives that I cannot avoid 
accumulating these days." 

Wilson: [laughter] Yes, I forgot about that. Yes, as a matter of fact 
I was underpaid. Later on Michael [K. ] Buckland wrote a memo 
to the then-vice chancellor saying that Wilson has been 
seriously, what s the phrase, "deaccelerated" over the years. 
Nobody, nobody kept track of promotions and salary increases, 
and here he is way down on the salary list compared to other 
people who have done very much less. So I was cheap. 

McCreery: Well, here they had tried to offer you a nine-month 
appointment . 

Wilson: Yes, on top of it. [laughter] 

McCreery: But then I was wondering, did you recall much about the time 
that you became the permanent dean, salary negotiation or any 
of that? 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



There wasn t any such thing as salary negotiation, 
negotiate, they didn t negotiate. 



I didn t 



Maybe I m assuming that things were different than they were. 
I don t mean to do that. 



131 



Wilson: 



McCreery : 

Wilson: 

McCreery; 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



No, see, if I d been coming in from the outside negotiation 
would have been in order. But since I was already here and I 
was on the salary scale already- 
Well, I could have insisted on--no, I could have 
negotiated. I could have said, "Jump me up a couple of levels 
on the salary scale and I ll do it." But it didn t occur to me 
to do that. I ve never been a salary negotiator. 

Well, certainly such things are more common and emphasized more 
now than they were then, is that true? 

Yes, I think that s so. I think that s so, yes. 

You may not have been unusual. 

No, I think that s quite possible. 

It s interesting that it didn t occur to you. 

Yes it is, I guess. No, as a matter of fact a good deal is 
being written these days in the magazines that I read about the 
vast changes in managerial expectations and about the vast 
changes in the difference between what managers make and what 
ordinary people make. It used to be that the differences were 
not very great, and that would be consistent with an older 
expectation that managers went pretty much smoothly up the 
salary scale like everybody else. They didn t take big jumps. 
But I can still say the same thing about it s easier being an 
administrator than it is being a teacher. And it s easier 
being an administrator than writing. So that part is still 
true. 

Well, the school was not getting a cheap dean in terms of 
content. You had many things that you wished to accomplish- 



Yes, there was enough content I think, 
content . 



There was enough 



Doctoral and Post-Master s Programs; Concerns with Students 



Wilson: One of the things that I wanted to do--I mention this, however, 
just to remind us that things you do don t necessarily last 
very long--I wanted to fix the doctoral programs. There were 
two doctoral programs when I came in, Ph.D. and D.L.S. When 
the school had originally been given the right to offer the 



132 



Ph.D., it was only with the express understanding that it would 
also offer a professional degree, the D.L.S. Over the years, 
for a long time there hadn t been any doctoral students or 
there had just been one or two. 

The doctoral program didn t take off at all until the late 
1960s when suddenly there were immense buckets of money pouring 
in through the Title IIB, whatever, the Higher Education Act of 
1965 was it, Title IIB. Just unparalleled sums of money. 
Gradually a bunch of doctoral students, like Michael Cooper, 
most of them in the Ph.D. program, some of them D.L.S--but it 
wasn t clear what the D.L.S. was. It was just undefined. It 
was vague and nobody knew what the difference between the two 
programs was. So I thought, well, we better do something about 
that. 

Now, there was more reason to do so because recently there 
had been a big flap on campus and the School of Criminology had 
been closed down. And in part that was because the faculty of 
the School of Criminology didn t want to produce professionals. 
They had a D.Crim. degree and they didn t want to offer it. 
They didn t want to do professional education. They wanted to 
study the root causes, the underlying causes, and so on. They 
were widely seen as being anti-law enforcement. The school was 
closed down. 

I took that as a warning: a professional school had better 
not turn its back on professional education, and in particular 
you d better not say we don t care about professional education 
at the doctoral level. So we d better do something about this 
D.L.S. degree. I set about trying to get it reconfigured, 
really re-understood. And I said, "Look, we re going to take 
our cue from the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Herbert Simon, 
who says that the heart of professional education is design. 
We re going to make this a design-oriented degree." So if you 
work for a D.L.S., you will be working on a design project. A 
real one or imaginary one, but designing is going to be the 
essence of this. 

McCreery: Do you have a favorite example? 

Wilson: No, I don t. Nothing springs to mind as a favorite example. 

McCreery: Okay, but just to illustrate that principle of design as the 
core. 

Wilson: It could be designing a system of bibliographical organization. 
It could be designing a system of library automation. It could 
be designing a new communication system for scholarly 



133 



McCreery : 



communication, a new publication system for electronic 
publication. 

But to emphasize the difference between a research Ph.D. and a 
D.L.S. 



Wilson: Yes. In the crudest, most violent terms the historians for 
instance, we still had lots of historians and lots of Ph.D.s 
doing historical studies. Here they are trying to reconstruct 
some little piece of the past, you know, what happened here? 
Who did this? Who did that? And so on, so as to find out how 
it really was. Well, to find out how it really was is one 
thing. To find out how we shall make it new is a completely 
different thing, and that s what the designer does. That 
emphasizes the engineering character of the thing and that s 
something which I ve done repeatedly over the years. We ve 
already touched on this. Whereas the information scientists 
claim the science title, I say no, no it s engineering. This 
side of our work is really engineering. It s building things, 
making things work, and designing things. 

So I wanted to make the D.L.S. into a design-oriented 
degree. And that seemed to be going pretty well, but it didn t 
last. Because when Michael Buckland came in, he despised the 
whole idea and threw it out. So that was work done in vain. 
But that was another part of my- -that was one of the things I 
was working on. 

McCreery: Okay. You also, in your tenure, oversaw the advent of several 
post-master s certificate programs. 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Can you tell me about the genesis of those? 

Wilson: No, I don t think I can reconstructwe did work on those. I 
remember deciding that something had to be done- -some thing 
could usefully be done in the way of offering further education 
for people who had taken a master s degree, gone out and wanted 
to refresh, wanted to come back and learn new technology, for 
instance, wanted to learn a new side of the field, for 
instance. 



McCreery: The school offered three types of these certificates, this is 
going back to 72, one in bibliography, one in library 
automation and information science, and one in library 
management . 



134 



Wilson: Yes, the library automation and information science was the 
obvious one for people wanted to catch up with what had been 
happening to the world since they went out of school. And the 
management too is a natural for people who want to move on, who 
want to move up, who want to change jobs and think that they 
can move into management more easily if they have a little 
management education. I forget what s in the bibliography one, 
but that was my heart, that s the heartland subject as far as 
I m concerned. 

McCreery: Were the other faculty members supportive of adding the post 
master s certificates to the curriculum? 

Wilson: Oh, I think so. For one thing it s a way of building up 
audience for advanced courses. The problem is if you 
concentrate on a one-year master s degree program, you spend an 
awful lot of time teaching the same courses every year and you 
don t have so much scope for teaching advanced courses, or less 
scope. So people say, well you know people don t stay here 
long enough to take my excellent advanced course in so-and-so. 
I say, okay but if we get some people coming back this is 
exactly the kind of course they will want to take. So yes, the 
information scientists, Michael Cooper, and the people in 
management would be happy with that . 

McCreery: Okay. Were the certificate programs a recruiting tool, then, 
for the doctoral programs? 

Wilson: Not really, though it happened. It happened. People did start 
in the certificate and go on to a Ph.D. They weren t designed 
that way and they weren t intended that way. It wasn t a 
fishing expedition, but if it happened that was fine. It was 
very comfortable as a matter of fact, it was a very nice way of 
finding out whether you wanted to go on and actually do a 
doctoral program. 

McCreery: Students could shop around a little. 

Wilson: They could shop around. They could try out more advanced 

materials and see whether this looked like something they would 
like to do still more of. So that was good. 

McCreery: Well, speaking of students, I note that one of the other things 
that seemed to be an emphasis of yours as dean was drawing 
students more into the decision making on their own education. 
For example, there was a point where student members began to 
sit on the various faculty standing committees of the school. 
How did that come about? 



135 



Wilson: That was part of reconstitution. That was just part of the 

spirit of the times. That was students demanding relevance and 
participation, participatory democracy. Participatory 
democracy is what we were all about in those days. See, when I 
started curriculum revision, I did it by getting a bunch of 
students in to redesign the curriculum. Students and faculty. 
I remember having meetings off campus at students apartments 
and we were plotting, planning, scheming to revise things 
seriously. But I deliberately drew in students to add to the 
revolutionary pressure on the school to change in ways that I 
had already-- [laughter] 

McCreery: What did you have in mind? 

Wilson: It was the introduction of a new introductory course, my first 
big coup d etat. An integrated introduction to everything. 
That was the thing. The total rejection of the previous, of 
everything that had gone before. And that took some doing. 
That took some doing. I must say the faculty didn t like that 
at all, except Crete [Fruge Cubie] . Crete was perfectly 
willing to go along with that and she did. She was wonderful. 

McCreery: And that was the combining of cataloging and bibliography- 
Wilson: And book selection and everything. 
McCreery: All the elements introduced jointly rather than separately. 

Wilson: Jointly, yes, and at a more abstract level than just cataloging 
books . 

McCreery: Who taught all those courses? Was it drawn from both the 
reference and cataloging sides? 

Wilson: I lectured. And then there were small discussion sections. 
Harlan taught, Crete taught. Some other people, part-time 
lecturers taught. Not Fred Mosher. Definitely not Fred 
Mosher. Oh, Portia [Hawley]? I guess not. I m not sure 
whether Portia was on the faculty then, whether she taught that 
or not. 

McCreery: But you were drawing on all the stores that you had. 
Wilson: As many as I could, sure. 

McCreery: Another aspect of students taking a larger role, as you say a 
reflection of the times, there were student evaluations of 
teaching for the first time in the early seventies. 



136 



Wilson: 
McCreery : 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Oh yes. 

Your thoughts? 

Slate Supplement was the first one, I think. Slate was a 
student magazine. This was, again, part of the general 
revolutionary participatory democracy and student 
participation. This wasn t unique to us. The Slate 
Supplement --you could buy a copy of this magazine at the 
beginning of term and it had ratings of all the professors on 
campus, including the Unabomber. The Unabomber [Theodore 
Kaczynski] was rated in the Slate Supplement one time, at least 
once. 

His brief stint in the math department was captured there? 

Yes. Didn t get good reviews at all. [laughter] But I don t 
think we made it into the campuswide things but there were-- 

Were evaluations, though, handed out directly in the classes 
for return to the professors? 

To the instructor, yes. 

How did all that go, do you recall? 

I can t recall, and I can t remember what was done with them 
either, other than the instructor found out what the students 
thought of the instructor. What I can t remember is whether I 
found out what the students thought of the instructor. I think 
I did, but I m not sure. That would have had to be with the 
consent of the instructor, however. 

Yes, in your Calibrarian newsletter article [Spring and Summer 
1971] you say, "One important area of student participation is 
that of the evaluation of teaching. No requests for promotion 
or pay increase can now be submitted at Berkeley without 
evidence gathered from students of the quality of teaching of 
the candidate for promotion or merit increase." 



There you go. 
the results. 



I had to have information, yes. So I had to see 



To what extent did you welcome greater participation from 
students? 

Oh, I welcomed it. I was all for it. The last thing I wanted 
was a passive and disenchantedthe last thing I wanted was a 
student body consisting of people whose attitude was like my 



137 



McCreery : 



Wilson: 



own had been when I was in the school. See, trying to create a 
different kind of environment so that people like me wouldn t 
react as people like me had reacted. 

You certainly had a long history of thinking about library 
schools, what they had been and what they should be. 

Yes, yes. 



Summation of Deanship 



McCreery: Did you enjoy being dean? 

Wilson: For a while, yes. By the last year it had become agony. I got 
into a terrible fight with one faculty member and that nearly 
killed me. So I was worn out by 1974, glad to tell George 
Maslach that I was going to quit at the end of 75. I wrote 
him a letter saying that, well I m going to quit at the end of 
"75 and go on sabbatical leave, if that s all right with you. 
Here are things I think you had better know about what I think 
was bad about my deanship that may help you in thinking about 
the future . The first is , you need somebody who is more 
oriented to the outside world than I was, more like Ray Swank-- 
I didn t say that but that s what I really had in mind. 
Somebody who is more out there selling the school to the 
outside world and making waves, making an impression out there. 
I couldn t do it . I just was constitutionally incapable of 
doing it, and I think the school suffered some for it. 

The second thing I said was, I think you need somebody who 
is a better politician than I am for dealing with the faculty 
that you ve got here. I said John Wheeler, the chairman of the 
old search committee, says that only a madman would take this 
job. And what he has in mind is something like this. You ve 
got a faculty in which there are these historians, on the one 
hand, and there are these purist, abstract, mathematically 
oriented information scientists on the other hand. They have 
nothing whatsoever to do with each other. The purists aren t 
interested in professional education and they d rather not be 
involved in professional education. 

And it s very hard to get any agreement on things like 
appointments. If somebody is proposed for an appointment, on 
the one hand people will say, "Oh, they don t have any library 
experience. We couldn t possibly hire anybody who didn t have 
any library experience." On the other hand, if they have 



138 



library experience people will say, "Oh, look at the quality of 
their publications. This is not nearly severe and scholarly 
and abstract enough. We couldn t possibly appoint a person 
like that." So that it had become almost impossible to get 
agreement on appointments. 

The split between the historically inclined and library- 
oriented types on the one hand, and the mathematically inclined 
types on the other handit was an unbridgeable gap. I 
couldn t do anything about it. I couldn t manage it. I was in 
the middle. Literally I was occupying most of the middle 
ground, I think. I could understand both of them and I felt 
that I could profit from both. 




Patrick G. Wilson addressing the Academic 
Senate, circa 1986. 



139 



IV THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP AND THE PROFESSION 



[Interview 6: September 10, 1999] ## 



Big Picture: Contemplating the School s Place in California 
Higher Education 



McCreery: One of the things we talked about last time was the place of 

the library school among all the other schools and colleges on 
the campus and the views that the other parts of the campus had 
of the school, and so on. You said you had some other thoughts 
about what you were trying to accomplish when you became dean 
in that regard. 

Wilson: Yes. One of the things that I was very conscious of, during 

all this period of time that I was dean, was the precariousness 
of a graduate program which was primarily devoted to a master s 
degree program, particularly a one-year master s degree 
program. That s very short. 

Now remember the situation statewide after the Master Plan 
for Higher Education in California was approved: the 
understanding was that the university had control over doctoral 
education but state colleges were expected to engage in a lot 
of master s degree education. 

It was very much in my mind that the campus could very 
easily decide, well, this is primarily a master s degree 
program, and a very short master s degree program. It has 
little connection with the rest of the campus. It would be 
very easy just to say, "Well, San Jose [State University] 
already has a very flourishing master s degree program. San 
Francisco, how would you like to take our master s degree 
program?" The idea being that it would free up some graduate 
division places. There was a terrible strain on the graduate 
division student budget. 



140 



The school, under Ray Swank, had been going out and getting 
bigger and bigger and bigger, heading towards a size of 300. I 
forget whether it ever got there, but it got at least to 250 
students. But later on the graduate division cut us back to a 
maximum enrollment of 190, and if they could have cut us back 
to zero, they could have made very good use of those 190 places 
elsewhere. Now, if we were solely taking in master s degree 
students, keeping them here for a year and sending them out- 
it s a relatively low-cost operation but also a relatively low- 
impact operation. And it seemed to me this was precarious. 
We re in danger. Nothing specific, but it s not a safe 
situation to be in. 

Now you understand that departmental creation and 
destruction is a continuous process at Berkeley. It s been 
going on since the beginning. Just during the years that I was 
around here the Department of Decorative Art was abolished, 
just sent away. 

When I got here, there was not a sociology department, but 
a Department of Social Institutions, whose members were my boss 
Teggart s father, Frederick Teggart, and one other professor. 
Two people in that department. That department was closed 
down, and the sociology department was established. There was 
a demography department that was started and then closed down. 

The criminology school, I ve already mentioned, closed 
down. Now that was a different kind of case, but again the 
idea that the campus is perfectly prepared to close down 
departments as well as to start new ones. So one had to think 
about that . That was a good reason for worrying about adding 
undergraduate connections, showing that we were valuable in 
teaching undergraduates to do things . 

If somebody said, "Why do we need such a big English 
department? Why do we need an English department at all?" 
Well, somebody has got to teach English composition, and so you 
can t very well throw out English composition. So we have an 
English department whose service function is to teach English 
composition, and whatever else they do after they do that we 
don t much care. 

Did we have a service function? We had no service function 
until we started doing the undergraduate "how to use the 
library" course. So that was a deliberate--! didn t start 
this. I didn t invent the undergraduate library [course] --we 
took it on kind of reluctantly. But once we took it on we saw, 
aha, this is very useful. And that was a good reason why I 
insisted on increasing the size of the program against the will 



141 



of the then-library instructors, who didn t want to increase 
the size. But I did, very much. 

Now the same goes for fiddling with doctoral programs and 
adding those certificate programs and adding joint degree 
programs with other departments, making connections with other 
departments so that it would be a little more difficult to get 
rid of us without people noticing it and maybe complaining. 
That would be, of course, what we would like to have happen. 
So the precariousness of a one-year master s degree program was 
something that really guided a lot of what I did during the 
time that I was dean. 

McCreery: Now this is an important point, isn t it, and I m wondering, do 
you recall what it was that first made you feel that the school 
might be vulnerable. Was it looking around you or any 
particular event? 

Wilson: No particular event. No particular event. Just kind of an 

awareness of the rise and fall of departments, of the kind of 
precariousness of academic life itself, an interest in the 
history of higher education, for instance. Things have not 
always been as they are now. English was not an acceptable 
field of studies until the very end of the nineteenth century- - 
no English departments in 1850. Whoever heard of such a thing? 
So I had kind of a general interest in the rise and fall of 
institutions. 

McCreery: Yes, but that s a good point in terms of the school s own 
history. 



Curricula for the Times: Doctoral and Joint-Degree Master s 
Programs 



McCreery: Now we talked last time about how you were interested in, as 
you called it, fixing the doctoral programs to make sure that 
there was a clear distinction between the two degrees offered 
and that there was indeed a professionally oriented D.L.S. 
program, and so on. 

And I suppose that there were a lot of challenges that you 
faced in terms of designing your curriculum, serving the needs 
of the vast majority of master s students, adding those few 
undergraduate courses, but also serving your doctoral students 
capably with the proper faculty guidance, even in very 
specialized courses. 



142 



Wilson: Yes, but that was a matter not so much of coursework. At the 
doctoral level you quickly run out of courses and you expect 
quickly to go into the mode of doing individualized 
instruction, one-on-one instruction, or seminars in which 
people explore individual topics collectively. So you don t 
have to worry so much about adding specialized courses, except 
some that will serve both advanced master s degree students- 
people who are hanging around taking more time than usual to 
finish their degreeor those certificate students, people 
coming back after an absence, and beginning doctoral students. 
A few courses, but it s not a huge problem. Not a huge 
problem. 

McCreery: Okay. While we re talking about courses and so on, I know that 
one of your visions for the curriculum from the beginning was, 
in a sense, eliminating what had been a pretty standard and 
required curriculum, except the 250 course. I want to hear 
your thoughts on what the idea was in terms of students really 
deciding their own course or having more choices? 

Wilson: Yes. There were a lot of roots to this. There was partly my 
own recollection of my distaste for the triviality of the 
things that were offered and required, and awareness that 
people coming into the school came from such very different 
backgrounds. It was crazy to expect that one set of 
requirements would make sense for all these people. So it 
ought to be very easy for people to avoid finding themselves in 
a course where they already knew the stuff or they never wanted 
to have to think about this in their entire lives or something 
like that. 

Then another strand of it was simply the times. These were 
the 1970s and there was a strong dislike for regimentation and 
for prescribing courses of action. We make our own way in this 
jungle, and so the idea would be to require as little as 
possible and give people as many chances as possible to make 
something for themselves, make something that they found made 
sense for them. 

This fit the mood of the time. It also seemed to me to 
make sense, given the variety of different places people were 
likely to be going next, as well as the variety of places they 
were coming from, and the relatively short time that they were 
here. 

McCreery: Yes. As you say, the main degree offered was only a year. 
Wilson: Only a year. 



143 



McCreery: Yes. Let s talk more about those joint degree programs. We 

touched on that a little bit before and you said you might have 
more to say, particularly about the joint program with public 
policy and perhaps how that came into being. 

Wilson: There s not really much to say about it except that it was a 
very funny kind of degree. I mean, it wasn t an official 
program at all. Aaron Wildavsky was the dean of public policy 
then and I knew him slightly. We got along well. I kind of 
liked him. We thought it was a good idea to make it possible 
for a few people in our school to get the indoctrination 
provided by his school and then come back and apply it here. 
But we knew it would take years to get formal approval for a 
formal joint degree program. 

So what we did was simply make an informal agreement. His 
faculty and our faculty, or rather he and I, jointly agreed and 
more or less told people that we would arrange so that students 
who were interested in public policy applications to 
information problemsof which there were a very small number, 
but some- -would have this kind of opportunity. 

They would apply to his school and, if accepted, they would 
go through the standard master s degree program there and then 
instantly start working on a dissertation project here rather 
than going through the usual pattern of predissertation work in 
the school here. We would simply accept their master s degree 
program as complete preparation for our doctoral program. 

Now, two or three people actually did this and it was 
successful, small, experimental, irregular, an irregular 
academic venture. But I thought it was a good idea and I m 
glad we did it, even though after a while it just died down. 
Nobody more wanted to do that when Buckland arrived. The idea 
disappeared. 

McCreery: Okay. Now were some of the other joint degree programs more 
formal in nature? 

Wilson: Yes. I can t remember now, but they were formal. We applied 
to the Graduate Division and got formal Graduate Division 
approval for Near Eastern studies, law, I think. 

McCreery: And students actually received both degrees at the culmination? 
Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Okay. Just sort of generally speaking, did many students take 
you up on these opportunities? 



144 



Wilson: No, no. Just a handful. A very small handful too. So that in 
a sense this was hardly worth the effort. I mean, it was worth 
trying to see whether it would attract people but, as it turned 
out, it did not attract people. Not very many anyway. 



Influences of the ALA and Other Schools 



McCreery: Do you know, was there any precedent at another library school 
for anything of that nature? 

Wilson: I never heard of anything. I certainly wasn t copying anybody 
else. I didn t find anything in any other library school worth 
copying, by the way. 

McCreery: In terms of curriculum? 

Wilson: Yes, in terms of curriculum or anything else. I looked around. 
I kept an eye out all the time. But I didn t find anything--! 
didn t find that other people were doing things that we would 
want to copy. 

McCreery: Why is that, do you think? 

Wilson: I don t know. [laughter] I don t know, except that the 
profession is really quite a conservative one. The one 
possible exception would be the way in which other people were 
dealing with the new field of information science, or rather 
the new- sounding, the new- seeming, approach to information 
problems proposed by people calling themselves information 
scientists . 



This is not quite the same thing as computerization in 
general. Computerization, when it finally arrivedit didn t 
really arrive until rather latercomputerization meaning 
either the automation of cataloging operations or, later on, 
the business of on-line searching, this was a different kind of 
thing . 

Online searching, for instance, was instantly adopted in 
the ordinary curriculum. I remember myself sitting down at a 
terminal surrounded by students and saying, "All right, this is 
the first time I ve ever done this. So I ll be first. I ll go 
in. I ll try. You can watch me fail." 

This was just straight machinery, just straight technology. 
But the quantitative theories of information scientists, that 



145 



McCreery : 



Wilson: 



was another thing, and other schools did this in different 
ways. There were separate information science departments in 
some cases. Well, we didn t think that was a good idea. I 
mentioned the split in the University of Missouri. There was 
nothing to admire there. We had to try to work things out 
ourselves. 

We didn t ultimately work things out very well ourselves. 
That s worthcould I dwell on this for just an instant? This 
was a problem, but again it s by no means unique to this field. 
This is the kind of situation which arises in field after field 
after field in the academic world. I mean, there are parallels 
everywhere. There was a parallel in philosophy, for instance. 
The logicians as against non- logicians. It was a situation I d 
already faced at UCLA in the philosophy department. 

In business schools this must happen again and again and 
again. You say we re going to fix this thing up by hiring some 
really hard-headed economists, mathematical economists. 
They ll come in and tell us how to run a business school. Just 
a setup for conflict. 

And even in biology departments there are conflicts between 
truly mathematically oriented population biologists, say, and 
people who are not mathematically oriented. So it was hard for 
us and we weren t successful at it, but on the other hand it s 
the sort of thing that happens all over the academic world and 
other people are not much more successful than we were. So 
okay. 

I m interested in your comments that you looked around at your 
counterparts at the other schools and their curricula and so 
on, and didn t find too much to emulate there. It sounds as if 
you were actively seeking change. 

Oh, sure. Two kinds of things. This kind of general feeling 
of precariousness of the master s program had other parts to it 
besides, you know, it s a one-year program. 

There s also the question of how will this look 
intellectually to other people on the campus? Anybody who 
happened to look at it, would they think, look these people 
have got some ideas? Well, we d better be damn sure that we 
have some ideas . When I wrote that book that I did for tenure 
I was, in a sense, trying to provide a respectable foundation 
for the activity which was central to the master s degree 
program, provide some foundations, okay? 



146 



But let s see what else we can do, see if there are any 
directions of change of practice as well as change of basic 
ideas . I was definitely trying to think of ways of changing 
practice. I don t claim success, however. 

McCreery: When you attended meetings with your counterparts elsewhere, 
let s say at ALA meetings or that sort of thing, were these 
kinds of attempts to change and curriculum reviews much 
discussed at those meetings? 

Wilson: The main place would be thewhat was it then calledthe 
Association for Library and Information Science Education 
[ALISE] . I went to those meetings every year. They were 
always held just before midwinter American Library Association 
meeting, wherever that was. Each year when I was dean I felt I 
had to go there, show the flag, represent the school. 

That was interesting because all the deans were there. 
There was a meeting of fifty deans. Nobody else but fifty 
deans. That s just one of the meetings. The other meetings 
were just, you know, general faculty members of library 
schools. Those were not very interesting. 

The meetings of deans were highly interesting, but not 
fruitful in the way of giving off ideas for curricular change. 
Not fruitful, really, for innovation of any kind. Defensive. 
Politically defensive. "How can we keep the resources that 
we ve got? Get some more resources? Influence Washington, 
D.C.?" That sort of thing at the external dean level, the dean 
as external ambassador and rainmaker. 

McCreery: How well did the library profession represent itself in 
Washington, D.C.? 

Wilson: Well, surprisingly well I think, on the whole. I wasn t close 
to this at all, but better than I would havesurprisingly 
well. There was a national commission on library- -library 
what? Library and information science? And a Washington 
director. It was right up front. American Library Association 
has been good at keeping itself in the Washington picture too. 
So, surprisingly good. 

McCreery: So the visibility of the whole profession was given due 
attention? 



Wilson: Given due attention, yes. I was surprised by this. It was 
really pretty good. Got more attention in Washington than 
you d get on your own campus . 



147 



McCreery: But your colleagues that you met there weren t a particular 
inspiration? 

Wilson: Well, I enjoyed being there. I enjoyed being with them and I 
kind of liked a few of them. But they were not sources of 
ideas. They were administrators, they weren t idea men. They 
weren t all men either, there were some women. They weren t 
idea women either. [laughter] 



Representing the School: Interactions with Berkeley Colleagues 



McCreery: Well, while we re talking about visibility here on the campus, 
maybe I ll bring up the theme of your interactions with other 
deans here at Berkeley and other administrators, both your 
peers and the higher authorities. What form did those 
interactions usually take? 

Wilson: Well, there was a very stylized form. There was a Council of 

Deans which met regularly with the chancellor. All of us deans 
sitting around a table in California Hall, upstairs, and 
talking pretty freely I thought. It was kind of interesting. 
But that was infrequent and the agenda was completely 
determined by the chancellor, whoever it was, Albert Bowker or 
Roger Heyns. I don t remember much of anything from that 
period. 

As far as my own informal- -when I became dean I made an 
appointment with the dean of engineering to go over and 
introduce myself and kind of make a connection and say, "Say, 
we may have something in common. We ve got these information 
science people on the faculty and we re kind of changing our 
interests." The dean was then George Maslach, who later became 
my boss as vice chancellor. And when I said we ve got these 
information scientists he roared at me, "We have information 
science!" [laughter] In effect, "Forget it kid, you just stay 
out of this. This is none of your business. This is us." And 
this, of course, has been another facet of this whole complex 
mess, because computer science recognizes a sub-branch of 
computer science called information science. 

McCreery: They actually call it the same thing? 

Wilson: They call it the same thing. [laughter] And it is sort of the 
same thing. Or it s much the same kind of thing. 

McCreery: Yes, that s a question, isn t it? 



148 



Wilson: It s a question, sure. It s absolutely a question. So I 

didn t get very far at that point with George Maslach. Then 
later when he became provost or vice chancellor, whichever the 
title was, I got along famously with him. I liked him a lot. 

McCreery: But in terms of some kind of crossover or relationship between 
the College of Engineering and the School of Librarianship, was 
that the beginning and the end right there? 

Wilson: That was both the beginning and the end right there. That was 
it. [laughter] That was it. I talked to education deans, at 
least one, because we shared a faculty member, Mae Durham 
Roger. So we had overlapping faculty and overlapping student 
bodies. There were things for us to talk about, and some 
trivial administrative--! don t remember any details at all but 
I know that I did talk to him. We did talk freely. There were 
questions of statewide accreditation of the library education 
program and I had to consult with him, and we had to coordinate 
and do a lot of things. So there was interaction simply 
because we were intertwined. 

I knew and liked very much the journalism dean, Ed Bay ley. 
I tried to figure out some way of connecting up more closely, 
but I never could figure out a way. There was a natural 
affinity or connection between the two schools, I thought, and 
I tried to think of some way of connecting us. 

He would have been willing I think, but I never got 
anywhere with it. I never thought of anything to propose. 
Incidentally, I always wondered, why wasn t journalism as 
precarious as I thought the library school was? It s a one- 
program school with no doctoral program, no research interests? 
Why don t they get wiped out? I never did figure that one out, 
except that the campus seemed to like to cultivate journalists. 
Good for business. [laughter] 

Beyond that I knew the dean of social welfare, Milton 
Chernin, very well and we talked a lot. We shared views about 
the character of professional education, but there was nothing 
to do. There was no interest to pursue there. I can t 
remember other connections. 

f* 

McCreery: We touched briefly on the chancellors who were serving the 

Berkeley campus at the time you were dean. We talked a little 
bit last time about Chancellor Heyns, whom you met with at the 
time you were appointed permanent dean. Did you have much 
other occasion to work directly with him? 



149 



Wilson: Never, ever. I probably wouldn t have spoken to him at all 

except maybe once in a while he would have some social event at 
the University House where he lived, and deans might be invited 
to come over and have a drink or maybe a lunch. But no. 

McCreery: And then in 1971, Chancellor Bowker took over, and I wonder 
what you can tell me about him from personal experience, if 
anything . 

Wilson: He looked like a bear and he talked like a bear. [laughter] 
He was gruff, brusque, and the question was whether he was 
really as insensitive as he appeared or whether it was a show. 
And the general conclusion of those who saw a lot of him was 
that he was exactly as insensitive as he appeared to be, which 
was completely insensitive. 

McCreery: What makes you say that? 

Wilson: The way he talked. The way he talked to us, the way he talked 
to everybody. 

McCreery: He served as chancellor for the majority of your time as dean. 
I wonder if you felt that he was reasonably accessible to you? 

Wilson: No, he wasn t accessible to me at all. Absolutely not, no. 
McCreery: You worked through Provost Maslach? 

Wilson: No, I only saw Maslach. A little dean like me--see, there were 
big deans and little deans. Big deans were the dean of L & S 
[Letters & Science], dean of engineering, maybe dean of public 
health, and so on. Then there are the little deans, the one- 
school, the one-department deans, journalism, social welfare, 
optometry, public policy. Little deans. And little deans did 
not get to see the chancellor, no. 

McCreery: Well, tell me something more about your working relationship 
with George Maslach. 

Wilson: Oh, I don t remember. [laughter] I don t remember. I don t 
remember anything except personnel difficulties. When I got 
into personnel problems he backed me up as best he could. 

McCreery: Okay. Just to return to an earlier theme, I wonder if you felt 
you had any particular challenges representing the school on 
the campuswide level, either in terms of budget or other 
measures . 



150 



Wilson: Well, I did. As far as the budget went, when I came in we were 
instantly told to cut the budget by some large figure and I 
called the budget of f icer--that was Errol Mauchlin at the time 
--and said, we can t do it. We don t have enough money. And 
he says, "Ohhhhhh, Patrick, you ve got to do it." 

And I said, "I can t do it and I won t do it. I ll quit 
rather than take such a cut." And he said, "Ohhhhh, Patrick 
you can--" [laughter] And we had a back and forth for a while 
and I finally did accept a permanent staff cut. We had this 
mysterious and very large allocation of FTE [full-time 
equivalents] for research assistants to work for faculty 
members, and so on. I think when I came in it was 2.6 FTE, 
which is huge. And I think I gave up one FTE. I can t be sure 
now and I have no records. All the administrative records I 
left behind in the administrative office, but I m pretty sure I 
gave up something, very reluctantly and after threatening to 
quit over large cuts, and so on. But as far as I can remember 
that was the one big budget fight during my time. 

McCreery: And that was early on? 

Wilson: That was early. The budget was very bad right in the early 

seventies. This must have been 70 or 71. Now, after that it 
wasn t a matter of going in and negotiating every year for a 
budget. You don t do that. Pretty much you are given what you 
had last year, if you re lucky. 



Other Sources of School Funding 



McCreery: I wonder about other sources of funding that you may have been 
able to pursue, either already in place or new? 

Wilson: Yes. I did. Yes, as a matter of fact. Curiouslythe school 
had a Carnegie Foundation endowment which was given to support 
the doctoral program. It wasn t very much money. It was only 
a tenth of the University of Chicago s massive Carnegie 
endowment, but nevertheless it was here. And oddly enough the 
money had been used to pay the salary of J. Periam Danton for 
years and years and years. When I came in I asked about this. 
"Why is Perry s salary being paid out of endowment funds?" I 
raised this with Mr. Mauchlin, and Mr. Mauchlin said, "We can 
fix this up. We can fix this up." 

And so Mauchlin transferred--! forget when, but sometime 
early during this period-- transferred Perry s salary onto 



151 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



permanent state funds and freed up the Carnegie money for 
supporting the doctoral program. And I said, okay we ll use 
this to support doctoral students. We ll use this for 
fellowship money. And we did. So without doing much of 
anything we managed to add a significant amount of money to 
fellowship funds. 

So your salary budget was "upped" to incorporate his salary 
where it should have been? 

Where it should have been all the time. 



McCreery: Yes, and then the endowment money could go to support students. 



McCreery; 



Right, that s right. 

Was there other money from the Carnegie Corporation at any 
point, do you recall? 

I can t recall, I can t remember. 

Okay. I know the endowment had been in place since the 
thirties but I was just- 
Really? 

I think so. It was quite early on. Long before the doctoral 
program- - 

I wonder why? Yes, then I don t understand how it ever got-- 

The original endowment anyway. What about a little discussion 
of Title IIB funds under the Higher Education Act? 

Well, yes. I can t remember details. That money came to us in 
the form of fellowships for doctoral students and some master s 
degree students too. I forget, I guess we applied for them 
every year, though I don t remember the details. I must have 
done this, put in an application and then find out how many you 
get. Actually we had an agent in the [federal] office of 
education. One of our former students was running the library 
programs division of the Office of Education and I counted on 
him being friendly to us. I don t know whether it worked or 
not. But we did for years get a lot of money from Title IIB. 
It dried up in the early seventies, 72 or 73, something like 
that. 

Yes. Was there any money there to support faculty research, do 
you know? 



152 



Wilson: Not from Title IIB that I remember at all, no. That s an 

interesting question too. I don t know whether you want to 
pursue this or not, but money for faculty research was not a 
problem because the kinds of research people did, didn t 
require anything special in the way of equipment or facilities 
or staff beyond what we already were able to supply out of our 
already existing budget. 

We had this research assistant budget, and we could supply 
a faculty member with research assistants without going outside 
for help. But the historiansremember who we had. We had 
these historians and they sat around and read books. They 
liked to have a research assistant fetch things from the 
library for them. 

On the other hand, we had the theorists, we had Maron and 
Bill Cooper. Well, they didn t need any money for research. 
Their research consisted of pencil and paper research. I was 
the same. Anything I did was sitting with a pencil and paper 
and a clipboard. Michael Cooper--! always expected him to go 
for money but he never would. He deliberately avoided doing 
the kinds of research which would involve appealing for funds 
to outside agencies. So he stuck to things that could be done 
on the cheap, I think as a matter of deliberate policy. 

McCreery: Did you ever talk about that with him? 

Wilson: Oh yes. Oh yes. I talked to him about it a lot, but I could 
not shake him. [laughter] 

McCreery: He might have been the obvious one to use-- 

Wilson: He would have been the obvious one. He was the only one who 

might have engaged in the kind of research which involved teams 
of people, for instance, teams of people and big equipment. 
But he didn t. No teams, no big equipment. 

So there we are. Now this brings us back to the Institute 
of Library Research, see, because there were huge amounts of 
money being spent there, doing things which involved teams of 
people. Remember, this is in the early days of computers and-- 
I d forgotten until I refreshed my memory from that survey I 
did in the early seventies they spent a huge amount of money 
developing what they described as an "information processing 
laboratory. " 

Where it was, what it was --it was a purely imaginary thing, 
but it involved programming the campus 1 central computer. This 
was an IBM 360. This is a long, long time ago. They 



153 



programmed the computer and then the computer was taken away. 
The campus got rid of its 360 in favor of a CDC 6400, I think 
that was the deal. These numbers are out of the distant past, 
but it was some big thing. 

But in any case ILR was doing things that involved a lot of 
people and big machinery. It didn t touch anybody on the 
faculty here. And this comes back to the detachability 
problem. The ILR was detachable because it had no essential 
connection with the school. It was doing the kinds of things-- 
you know, big machinery, big squads of peoplebut they could 
all be moved very easily off campus. 

McCreery: You had talked in an earlier session about Professor Bourne and 
some of the others leading that effort. I just want to return 
to your conversation with the then-dean of engineering, George 
Maslach, about "We have some common interests." You were clear 
that some of the ILR people really were engineers and I wonder, 
did they have formal or informal relationships with the 
engineering college or computer science- - 

Wilson: Informal. They hired computer science department students to 

do the work. I remember a couple, particularly an Indian Hindu 
kid from computer science who worked in the ILR. I think they 
hired a good many people. But again, they hired people but not 
from this school. They hired people from engineering rather 
than from this school. 

McCreery: So it s not surprising that ILR was detachable, as you say. 

Wilson: That s right, yes. Now what other kinds of connections the ILR 
had with engineering I don t know, beyond hiring their 
students. 

McCreery: Back to matters of faculty research, it sounds as if seeking 
funding for that was not a major issue or problem with your 
deanship because the research being done didn t require a lot 
of outside funding? 

Wilson: That s right. That s right. In any case, my understanding was 
that that wouldn t have been my job anyway. Individual faculty 
members are responsible for getting their own money for 
research. That s true even at the campus level. The Academic 
Senate controls a certain amount of money for faculty research 
support-- 

McCreery: Committee on Research. 



154 



Wilson: Committee on Research does. But individual faculty members put 
in their own requests for that, not the department chairman. 

McCreery: Oh right, I understand. But I take it your faculty did make 
use of those local campus funds at times? 

Wilson: I don t know. I did myself, but--I imagine they did. 



School Leadership Issues; Gender, Tenure, Teaching Loads 



McCreery: I d like to have you tell me a little bit more about how you 
operated as dean with your own faculty. What about faculty 
meetings- -how were those run and what was your style of 
leadership? 

Wilson: Oh well, it would have to be ultrademocratic. In those days it 
would just have to be, and was, completely open, free, students 
invited in to listen to us, and no laying down of law by the 
administration. Regular faculty meetings. Everything up for 
discussion. 

McCreery: I think it appears in this ALA accreditation self-study, dated 
November 74 which I have been looking at for a number of 
reasonsbut some discussion of the gender the school s 
faculty, saying that it was primarily male faculty with no 
women in tenure-track positions, and so on. I know we re 
talking about an era where this is just starting to get a lot 
of attention in the general world. I m just trying to think, 
we know how we talk about these sorts of issues today, but do 
you recall whether and what discussion there was at that time? 

Wilson: Well, I recall myself being extremely unhappy about the 

situation. For instance, when I hired Fay Blake I felt that I 
couldn t offer her anything except a lecturer appointment 
because I didn t think that she could be appointed to a regular 
faculty position. 

McCreery: Is that because her degree was in English, her training? 

Wilson: She hadn t published. She hadn t done any research. She 

didn t do research. I didn t see how I could make a case. The 
big thing forwhether department chairman, or a dean, or both 
in my caseis writing cases. I was good at writing cases, and 
George Maslach, when I left, said that the budget committee was 
particularly complimentary on my cases. They were excellent 
cases . 



155 



I took great pains making personnel cases, and I was 
terribly conscious of how could I possibly make a case for Fay 
Blake to be appointed, well, as an assistant professor? She 
wouldn t come for that. As an associate professor with tenure? 
No way! So all I could do was offer her a lectureship. But 
that s bad, because think of them. There s Crete Fruge, 
lecturer. There s Mae Durham Roger, lecturer. Right? It s 
not a good situation, but I didn t see any way out of it. The 
thing came up again later when I appointed Teddie [Theodora] 
Hodges as assistant dean after [Robert D.] Harlan resigned as 
associate dean. 

Wait a minute, I m forgetting something. [whistles] The 
Hodges case--I may be forgetting main facts. Well, she was 
appointed anyway as lecturer. The question is, had she 
previously been appointed, or did she subsequently request 
transfer to the tenure track and was turned down? I think 
that s it, but now this is-- 

McCreery: Let s turn off the tape for just a moment, there s one place we 
might be able to check that here. 

Wilson: Okay. 

[tape interruption] 

McCreery: Well, we didn t shed too much light on the problem, but in 
general, as you say, the difficulty of trying to find the 
appropriate kind of appointment, taking into account the 
realities of the tenure track and the research requirements, 
and so on. 

Wilson: Correct, correct. Yes. 

McCreery: I gather you did try to find parity for people where you saw 
long-term appointments in nonpermanent status? 

Wilson: I was very bothered about this. I can t say that I saw any of 
the other males on the faculty were bothered about this. It 
wasn t a topic of conversation or concern. Nobody brought it 
up that I can remember. 

McCreery: No, why would they? 

Wilson: Why would they? Why would they? 

McCreery: Yes, but I am just exploring this idea that you took it upon 

yourself as dean to look at each individual on your faculty and 
see, is anything needed here? 



156 



Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 
McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Oh sure. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. 

Tell me a little bit about faculty teaching loads and how 
things may have changed during your tenure as dean. 

Ah! Practically the first thing I did when I became dean was 
to reduce everybody s teaching load. We d been teaching six 
courses a year and I cut down to five. I thought six was too 
much. Fivethree one semester, two the second semesterwas 
much more reasonable. I didn t ask anybody, I just did it. 



Interestingly- -somehow I shouldn t have 
thisnobody mentioned it, then or ever. No 
Nobody said, "Thanks a lot, Pat." Or nobody 
a fool." Nobody said a word. This was very 
educational. Now, I always wondered whether 
mad doing that. I mean, you know, why did I 
thought it was too much. 



been surprised by 
one said a word, 
said, "You must be 
educational, very 
I had really gone 
do this? Well, I 



Actually much later I finally came across a cross-campus 
workload comparison study, and it turned out that there s a 
systematic difference in workloads. The humanities departments 
have the heaviest workloads, social sciences have a little 
lighter workload. Biology is a lot lighter. Physics and 
chemistry, very much lighter. The higher the subject on the 
scientific scale, the lower the workload. They do practically 
no teaching at all in formal classrooms. They do lots of 
teaching, but not in formal classrooms. Professional schools 
kind of parallel this. I had moved the school s workload from 
the overly demanding humanities side towards the middle of the 
road, social science side, so that I really was going in a 
perfectly reasonable direction. I was doing what everybody 
else on campus was doing. 

But you got no feedback. 

No feedback at all. 

What did that tell you about the situation in general? 

Well, different things. People might say don t bring it up. 
Maybe he didn t know what he was doing and if we call it to his 
attention he ll say, oh, my mistake, sorry. You ll have to 
teach an extra [laughter]--or else they say, it s only right. 
You don t have to thank a person for doing what s only right. 
But that s my main thing to say about workload. [laughter] 



157 



Assistant and Associate Deans 



McCreery: Thank you. I m also interested in the assistance that you had 
from various faculty members who served as associate dean. Now 
was Professor Harlan the first to serve in that capacity with 
you? 

Wilson: No. Held, Ray Held. 
McCreery: At the time you took over? 

Wilson: Yes, he was then already associate dean and he stayed on for a 
couple of years, a year anyway, and then quit that and Harlan 
came on. That was mostly a kind of dean of students sort of 
thing. Let the associate dean deal with admissions work and 
appeals from the students and things like that, as I remember 
now, mostly. Held was always very scrupulous and thorough, and 
did everything just right. It was much more fun working with 
Harlan because we got along very amiably. 

McCreery: How did you select him to take over that job? 

Wilson: Well, he had joined the school before me but not a great deal 
before me. He and I were kind of the same class, as it were, 
of entrants and we got to know each other, kind of sympathized 
with each other s situation. We had the same difficult 
relations with the preceding- -with the older people, with Fred 
Mosher and Danton and Miss Markley, and so on. 

McCreery: And understandably so, for at least some obvious reasons. 

Really being of a different generation, trained in a different 
era, and all that. 

Wilson: Yes, that s right. And he d been in Los Angeles too. He 

taught at USC, I guess while I was teaching at UCLA. So we had 
another incidental common bond. 



McCreery: But the job of associate dean was mainly having to do with 
student duties, admissions and so on? 

Wilson: I think so, yes. I can t remember any other kinds of things. 

McCreery: From reviewing the old newsletters it seems as if the main 
difficulty of admissions was being overwhelmed with 
applications for a small number of spaces. 

Wilson: Yes, we had huge, huge application numbers. Yes. 650 or 700, 
for a much smaller number of-- 



158 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 
Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



Because you were admitting somewhere around 190 for the 
master 1 s? 

Well, 190 was the enrollment limit overall. We d be admitting 
people to get a target entering class of ninety, or ninety- 
five, something like that. To do that you admit more, because 
not all of them show. You guess at the show rate and so say, 
well, we ll admit 140 or 130 to get so many. But it s a 
complicated business. It s a very difficult selection. 

Was there anything else in particular that the associate dean 
really had to be in charge of? 

I can t remember. 

Because that was his area? [laughter] 



That s right. [laughter] 

I know you had enough else happening on your own plate, 
there others serving as associate dean? 



Were 



No, nobody else. When Harlan got tired of the job and quit, 
then I appointed Teddie Hodges. Now why her, I m not quite 
sure except that I knew her and she had been a doctoral student 
of mine. I had supervised her dissertation. I hired her to do 
some research, to study what was happening to graduates of our 
programs, I think, and so she was kind of hanging around here. 
I knew her, and I knew that she would be good at doing exactly 
what assistant, associate deans did. 



A Terminal Appointment and a Libel Suit 



McCreery: We were talking a moment ago about some of the various faculty 
who held jobs as associate deans, and one thing and another, 
and exploring various issues of faculty relations. I was 
recalling that you made mention in a previous session about a 
serious problem with another faculty member, and I gather it 
was a situation of firing someone. I wonder, in light of the 
overall challenges of hiring and firing in your role as dean, 
if you could relate that incident somewhat? 

Wilson: Sure. This was Victor Rosenberg, who was appointed an 

assistant professor by Ray Swank, I guess. Yes, it had to be. 
He came from the University of Chicagodissertation looked 
very much like something along the lines of Bill Maron and Bill 



159 



Cooper. But after he got here things began to look very 
different indeed. I came to the conclusion pretty soon that 
this was not going to work, that he was not going to pass a 
tenure review at the end of the whole period. 

One of the things that you can do in the appointment and 
promotion business is to terminate a faculty member at the so- 
called mid-career point. Halfway to the final tenure review a 
faculty member is given a so-called mid-career review which 
says, what are the prospects? How does it look? Does this 
person look like they are going to go on and get tenure or not? 
If it looks as though the person is not going to get tenure 
then the alternative is available of giving them a terminal 
appointment. Saying, okay sorry. We ll give you another year 
but then that s it. I decided that that was the recommendation 
I was going to make. 

Now there was a faculty meeting and we discussed--this was 
a confidential meeting of the tenured members of the faculty-- 
and I made my case and told them what I wanted to do. After 
all these years, I don t remember how the discussion went. I 
don t remember even what the faculty members thought. I think 
they probably thought that I should not do this, that I should 
give himthat he should have as much chance as possible. But 
I put in a recommendation to the provost that a terminal 
appointment be given. Well, if the faculty had disagreed with 
me I would of course have said, the faculty is unanimously 
against this, and these are their reasons, and so on. 

Well, the campus administration enthusiastically agreed 
with me, and so I notified Professor Rosenberg that his 
appointment would not be renewed. He had a terminal year. 

Well, he fought back. He was not going to take this 
lightly. And I found myself being sued for libel, for 
$1,300,000. I found myself being charged before the Academic 
Senate s committee on privilege and tenure with all high crimes 
and misdemeanors in the book. I found myself subject to as 
much in the way of unpleasant pressure as you can possibly get, 
and this went on for a long time. 

As I say, I was supported by the campus administration. 
The provost appeared for me and with me before the Academic 
Senate s privilege and tenure committee. That was horrible 
because they voted first to dismiss the charges, but then a new 
committee came on and said, "No wait a minute, we want to look 
at those again. So, we ll just open the case up again." The 
provost sent his executive assistant to take me off to see the 
lawyers who were dealing with the libel suit. 



160 



McCreery : 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



The university provided tort insurance for its deans in 
those days. It doesn t do that any more. Anyway, the way it 
came out ultimately- -the law firm that was handling this for 
the insurance company that provided tort insurance decided to 
settle rather than fight the libel suit. 

There was a settlement and Rosenberg left, but he was given 
a year s salary, a year s salary in residence with no duties at 
all. So he stayed a year longer than he would otherwise have 
stayed. Nothing came of the Academic Senate s thing, it 
finally petered out. 



Was that the extent of the settlement, do you know? 
there additional monetary- - 



Or was 



No, it was just one year s salary, 
salary, no duties. 



That was it. One year of 



McCreery: 



Can you talk a little bit more about what first concerned you 
and led you to think he wouldn t make tenure? 

It was the characteristic of the work that he now began to do, 
or rather not do. It was totally different in character from 
his dissertation. I will not say anything further and I ll 
explain to you why I won t say anything further. 

The libel suit against me was based on a sentence which I 
had uttered in the closed personnel meeting in which I reported 
what somebody else had described to me about something that 
bore Rosenberg s signature, name, on the title page. Fred 
Mosher repeated that sentence to Rosenberg, and Rosenberg took 
that as the basis for a libel suit. Now it wasn t the basis 
for a libel suit and had it ever gone to court it would have 
been thrown out. But it was enough for a nuisance libel suit. 
But I got burned because of what I said in a confidential 
personnel meeting about something that bore Rosenberg s name on 
the title page. I don t do that anymore. [laughter] 

It sounds as if this whole case was dragged out for quite a 
while. 



Wilson: It was. 

McCreery: Especially by virtue of the fact that he stayed on "in 
residence" with a year s salary. 

Wilson: Oh yes, he was there to harass and insult the dean for some 
time. 






161 



McCreery: What effect did this have on you? 

Wilson: On me? It drove me to drink. That was too much for me, I 
couldn t stand that. I really couldn t stand that. 

McCreery: You were subjected to, as you put it, unpleasant pressure. 

That s putting it lightly, but it may have been coming from all 
sides for a while there, between the libel case and everything 
else? 

Wilson: Yes. I was having lunch in a cafe off campus. Sitting next to 
me was a crowd of faculty members and I heard somebody saying, 
"Oh, you can t believe the case that we ve got now on P and T," 
privilege and tenure. "Oh, this administrator is just 
unbelievably--" 

It was a history professor who was the chairman of the 
privilege and tenure committee. He was regaling a bunch of 
faculty members by describingin, to me, absolutely 
unrecognizable terms the case they were hearing involving 
Rosenberg and me. I really couldn t stand- -this was so 
bizarre. Finally I turned and I said, "I m sorry. I couldn t 
help overhearing." 

McCreery: Did you? 

Wilson: I did. "But you re talking about me." They did have the grace 
to stay stony silent, but not to say sorry. That wasn t a very 
good experience. That wasn t a very good experience. 

McCreery: Do you recall how the other faculty here responded to these 
events? 



Wilson: No. 

McCreery: Because I take it that such things don t happen too often. 

That s the kind of thing that can affect everyone around rather 
negatively. 

Wilson: Yes, it s bad. 

McCreery: Well, that s a perfect example of having the responsibility as 
dean to look at certain things, and having hard decisions to 
make and hard tasks to carry out. 

Wilson: Yes, that was the one big, bad case. 

McCreery: In terms of the so-called faculty split, did that particularly 
come into play with respect to this case, would you say? 



162 



Wilson: No, I don t think so. It was not seen by anybody, I think, as 
one side dean, the other side--it wasn t seen that way. 

McCreery: I m just thinking about this whole situation of being dean when 
there is a faculty split and some very difficult inherited 
things. Was it lonely at the top? 

Wilson: It got lonely. It wasn t lonely at first, but it got lonely. 

McCreery: It sounds very difficult. Were there other instances where you 
felt you had to terminate members of the faculty, either the 
permanent faculty or otherwise? 

Wilson: Not in that period, no. Later, much later when I came back as 
acting dean I did terminate a part-time employee, which had a 
funny aspect rather than an awful aspect. 

McCreery: Well, let s hear it. Maybe we need a moment of levity here. 

Wilson: I had to cut back on the size of the Bibliography I course, the 
"How to use the library" program. We were in dreadful 
financial shape and cuts simply had to be made someplace, so I 
cut back on the undergraduate programs a little bit. 

I had to let go some of the non-library people who were 
hangers on, who kind of formed a group that accumulated around 
Bib. I, just kind of permanent part-time faculty members. And 
I said you ve got to go and you ve got to go. Sorry, sorry, we 
just can t afford it this year. One of them filed a complaint 
with- -the office of civil rights? I don t know, the state 
human rights committee, commission, or something, charging me 
with discrimination against a handicapped person. She charged 
that I had let her go because she suffered from glaucoma. 

I said, what? [laughter] I had no idea that she suffered 
from glaucoma, for heaven s sake. That was, I thought, an 
absolute joke but it did require some phone calls to offices of 
the bureaucracy in San Francisco and Sacramento. Oh, my! 

McCreery: You probably thought you had seen everything. 

Wilson: I thought I had seen everything, but no. [laughter] Always 
something new. Oh, well. 



163 



Ethics and Values; What Role for Librarians? 



McCreery: Bringing up courses again, I take it from several different 

sources, both individuals and the background research that I ve 
done, there was some kind of ethical issues course added at 
some time? Maybe that wasn t the name of it. Was that the 
290, "The Librarian and Society"? 

Wilson: Oh, I don t know. That might be, that could be. That sounds 

like a Fay Blake course. I mean, the whole point of having Fay 
was to raise social issues to fever pitch. [laughter] Well, 
not only that, not only that. Her field studies thing was 
really a very useful and interesting, innovative and different 
kind of program. But she was to represent burning social 
issues. "Librarian and Society" certainly sounds like Fay 
Blake. I can t remember. 

McCreery: Okay. I just didn t know if there had been a really strong 
attempt on anyone s part to introduce ethical issues to 
students, or make that a larger part of the curriculum, or 
anything like that? 

Wilson: Sure. She s the one. Yes. Not me. I was never big on ethics 
when I was in the philosophy department. [laughter] 

McCreery: But I m just wondering, in terms of the message that you wanted 
to give to-- 

Wilson: [laughter] That wasn t my pitch. 

McCreery: Yes, but do you think it was important? 

Wilson: At the time. 

McCreery: Okay, so again taken in the context of the times. 

Wilson: Taken in the context of the times, it was definitely something 
that fit in. It fit in very well. It s appropriate, it s 
highly appropriate. It s comparable to talking about ethical 
and moral issues in a medical school, for heaven s sake. These 
things belong indiscussions ought to be brought up in 
professional contexts. The question is who s to do it and how 
much weight to it? With what kind of expectations and what 
kind of results? That s the thing. 

McCreery: But there really is this aspect of librarianship that is very 
much interacting with patrons and making decisions that will 
affect them all the time. 



164 



Wilson: Well, more or less. See, one of my interests in this was that 
I was kind of put off by the fact that the one bunch of 
librarians who were really interested in--well, how to put 
this? Children s librarians were very interested in telling 
people what was good and what was bad, or at least the ones I 
knew were. Mrs. Roger was very clear about the distinction 
between good and bad, and she wanted people to realize that she 
knew what people ought to read and what they ought not to read. 

McCreery: Can you think of one of her examples? 

Wilson: No, no. But this was her stock in trade, the difference 
between good books and bad books . I was totally out of 
sympathy with this. This was wild and wacky and bizarre--but 
here are these children s librarians a large fraction of the 
total population of librarians and they re all bigots in my 
way of viewing. These people are all bigots. 

So I m nervous, I m skittish about the values issues. 
Because here we ve got a whole entrenched group of people who 
werevalues are absolutely central to them. Now things are 
different when Fay Blake is doing it. She s not telling you 
whator is she? Or is she? 



I had my problems with her too. One of our doctoral 
students who went into the joint program with public policy was 
a black kid, young man, and she didn t want him admitted to the 
school. Why? Because he d been a policeman. [laughter] I 
said, now wait a minute. So I have problems with moralists. 
Moralists are troublesome people. 

McCreery: Whatever their stripe? 

Wilson: Whatever their stripe. So it s appropriate to have people 
discussing issues in professional schools, but I am very 
uncomfortable with any particular set of them. 

McCreery: We didn t have that term "politically correct" then. 
Wilson: No, we didn t, no. [laughter] 

McCreery: So you re saying that you have a problem when the teachers in 
these courses are telling people what they should read and 
shouldn t read, or making other kinds of value judgments. And 
yet, isn t there sort of a deep-seated tradition among 
librarians to try to raise the bar and provide the best 
materials for the patrons? 



165 



Wilson: This is one of the main traditions in the public library 

movement. It goes way back, way back. In the middle of the 
nineteenth century you find all these people in New England 
saying, how can we deal with these barbarians [i.e. recent 
immigrants]? Well, give them public libraries and give them 
good literature and this will improve their minds. There are 
still people who talk this way, and I think this is absolute 
nonsense myself. But it is part of a library tradition, yes. 

McCreery: I m thinking backway, way back--to when you were a page at 

the Santa Cruz Public and in reshelving books you noticed that 
the popular novels of the day were checked out and returned by 
the hundreds, and that s what people wanted, to some extent. 

Wilson: To all extent. [laughter] 

McCreery: So I m just thinking, in terms of running this school and in 
some senses reinventing it and whatever else you might have 
been doing at the time, these kinds of value judgments about 
what patrons should and shouldn t have, and so on-- 

Wilson: Well, I ll tell you frankly that--I didn t talk about this in 
public at all, but I wasn t interested in public libraries and 
didn t think that there was any particular value in having 
public libraries competing with booksellers in giving out 
Danielle Steel novels. There s no particular virtue in this. 
I can see a public library as a resource of serious 
information, but as simply a revolving library of popular 
fiction, I don t think this is valuable. 

McCreery: If it were up to you, what would a public library hold? 

Wilson: It would be a reference library. It would contain stuff that 

you went to use there, to look things up. Factual information. 
You go there to study. 

There are such things. There was in San Francisco, no 
longer, but there used to be, a business branch downtown in the 
business district which was primarily a consulting library. 
There were business financial services, all sorts of sources of 
information which people would come invery heavily used by 
people in the financial district. Things which were too 
expensive for them to buy themselves, things which they didn t 
use frequently enough to make it worthwhile to buy themselves. 

It was kind of a collective provision of sources of 
information which it would be crazy for a person to try to buy 
their own copies of and have at home. That sort of thing is a 



166 



perfectly sensible and admirable goal, 
it s not in this tradition. 



But it s not sexy and 



McCreery: Did this view of yours cause any trouble in actual curriculum 
development here? 

Wilson: Not really, no. Not really. 

McCreery: I know you did have specialists to teach public libraries and 
children s literature, and all that sort of thing. So I don t 
know how much you were involved in developing or changing those 
courses. 



Wilson: I wasn t at all. Not at all. 

McCreery: Returning to ethics, earlier there had been quite a fuss over 
censorship in California, as elsewhere. In the McCarthy era 
I ve discussed with others who were in librarianship at that 
time there was quite a lot of pressure on librarians, overt 
and covert I suppose you could say, in terms of book selection 
and ordering, and so on and so forth. 

Wilson: Again, that s a public library, mostly. Not entirely, not 

entirely. When I first went to work in the main library here 
well, not right away but sometime when I was working for 
Teggart, I realized that we were the custodians of what was 
then called Case 0. Case was Case Obscene. It was a filing 
cabinet or a couple of filing cabinets containing books which 
at some point had been declared to be obscene. But for 
heaven s sake! [laughter] So I now had access to Case and I 
took full advantage of this. Nice French translation of the 
Indian Kamasutra. Since I was studying French I borrowed that 
and readexcellent, excellent. Things like that. Silly, very 
silly. 

McCreery: But was there any manifestation of censorship problems or 
issues that were in the forefront when you were dean here? 
That was much later. 

Wilson: That was much later. Censorship was no longer an issue. Kind 
of a theoretical issue, but that would be in public library 
courses, I think. The public library is still sensitive to 
some things . 

McCreery: Okay, but in academic and special libraries- 
Wilson: No, no, no. Special libraries would always have been free of 
this. I mean the whole point of special librariesthese are 
functionally oriented libraries. Whatever it is that you need 



167 



you get. And academic librariesby now there s no question of 
censorship at all. It s only in public libraries. 

McCreery: What happened to Case 0, do you know? 

Wilson: No, I don t. At some point people said, oh, don t be silly, 
[laughter] 

McCreery: At least one person somewhere claimed that "0" stood for office 
because it was located in the administrator s office. 

Wilson: Oh, yes? [laughter] No, no, no. Dirty books. The dirty 
bookcase. 



The Future of Librarianship; Views in 1973 and 1999 

[Interview 7: September 17, 1999] ## 



McCreery: When we met last time you were nice enough to loan me a report 
that you did while you were dean, authored in the fall of 1973 
but titled, "Librarianship in the 1980s." I had to take a look 
at it to see that you were concerning yourself with the future 
of librarianship very much in planning for the school s course, 
and so on. 

I just wanted to return to that a little bit this morning. 
You had kind of an interesting passage here in which you said, 
"While we doubt that books and libraries will be superseded by 
other media of communication and other institutional 
arrangements for access, we are interested in a variety of 
alternative solutions to what we see as our central problems, 
bibliographical or intellectual access to the contents of 
texts, and physical access to copies of texts. We see no 
reason to think that these problems will become less intense as 
the years ago by. Quite the contrary, we are confident that 
they will continue to increase in urgency and in difficulty of 
solution." I just wanted to get your thoughts today, in 1999, 
about having said that. 

Wilson: I was right. I was absolutely right. The problems still 

exist. They ve been exacerbated by extensive computerization 
of everything. The sudden arrival of the Internet only a few 
years ago, (the Web didn t appear until 1994, three years after 
I retired), but already I readon every hand people say, 
"We re deluged with vast quantities of textual material. How 
do we tell the difference between what s worth having and 



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what s not worth having? How do we find the stuff that will be 
of value to us? How do we sort this all out? We need 
navigators, we need assistance." 

And so, far from going away, the problems of intellectual 
access that I was emphasizing then are still here, are 
accentuated if anything. More people are aware of them now 
than used to be aware of them. What librarians and 
bibliographers used to see as problems, but other people used 
not so clearly to see as problems, now very large numbers of 
people see as problems. 

There are now, I find to my absolute astonishment, lengthy 
articles in the business pages of the San Francisco Chronicle 
newspaper talking about ways of steering yourself through the 
Internet, search engines, the kinds of things which were 
invented originally by information scientists for library 
purposes. This has now become of lively public general 
interest. There is also a lot of money to be made eventually 
by somebody, and this will be of wide commercial interest- 
well, it already is. But the problems are the same as the 
problems which I was talking about all those years ago. 

McCreery: I was struck by how well the statement of the problem did hold 
up. I m wondering if you were to frame the same issue, of the 
future of librarianship, if you were to frame that now, would 
it differ significantly from what you wrote in "73, and if so 
how? 

Wilson: It would differ. Well, at least I would not now be very sure 
that libraries were going to continue to play a very big part 
in this simply because faster than I would have thought 
possible, I think faster than almost anybody would have thought 
possiblematerial that used to be available only in print is 
available online, is available in digital form. That means 
that you can get at it from anywhere. You don t depend on the 
existence of large physical collections of physical documents. 

I was just writing a review of a book on the future of the 
library or the librarian by an older teacher of librarianship 
who ended his book, astonishingly, by saying that librarians 
were the ones who controlled access to the graphic record. I 
couldn t believe that anybody in 1999 in the library business 
could say anything so preposterous, saying that librarians 
control access to the contents of records? This is insane. 
The question is, what will be the- -see, somebody will do the 
kinds of things which librarians have been doing, but it need 
not be librarians. 



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McCreery : 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



My point was and I have to confess I was always ambiguous 
about this--I was certain about the jobs to be done, but I was 
ambiguous about who was to do the jobs. They could be done by 
librarians, but it wasn t that only people called librarians 
could possibly do them. 

Yes, elsewhere in this report you accurately predicted that the 
so-called "professional work" would increasingly go to 
nonprofessionals--really, that very thing. 

Yes. 

Another brief excerpt, if I may, from this work. You wrote, 
"We think that increasingly the work of the librarian in large 
libraries will change in two different directions, in the 
direction of increased bibliographical specialization based not 
only on library education but on substantial non- library 
postgraduate education, and in the direction of increased 
responsibility for planning and management of library and 
bibliographical operations." 

Well, that seems fair enough. Certainly the planning and 
management part seems right. Now, you might very well expect 
you go into a libraryyou are the director of online services 
or you are a director in charge of organizing cooperation among 
different kinds of service providers, and so on. You don t 
have anything hands-on to do with books, for instance, ever. 
So this is perfectly possible. 

So far as subject specialization, yes. This is one of the 
possible ways of preserving a specialized role for the 
librarian. The question is, what role, if any, is to be played 
by a generalist? Or, is there a role for a generalist subject 
person, a person who s an information provider but an 
information provider of any kind of information whatsoever? 

I think there s no role for such a person. It s an 
impossible one except at the most superficial level. But given 
new technologies, there are going to be so many technological 
aids which will work at a most superficial level that there 
will be no need for, and no place for, the very superficial 
kind of library information service provider which would have 
been tolerable before the computer age. 

Is that happening now, then, obsolescence of the generalist? 

Well, I think so, but I m so out of touch with the actual daily 
workings of libraries that I m not in a position to say. I 
don t read library literature, for instance. 



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McCreery: This report, though, did really seem to be thinking quite a 

ways ahead, and again it was quite interesting to read it now, 
some twenty- five years later. Really, as you say, there was 
little prediction of the kinds of technological changes and so 
on. Indeed, many of them happened only a few years ago and 
were brought out into common use by the public. We touched a 
moment ago, in this excerpt, on the idea of training library 
students for management and leadership in libraries, and I 
think that was identified elsewhere as an area that needed 
improvement. There was some suggestion that students went out 
into the world of libraries after leaving the school and did 
not feel fully prepared. Any thoughts on that? 

Wilson: Not too much. It was always a problem, the question was 

whether there was some way of hooking up with the business 
school, say. Maybe we should send our students there? But 
nothing could ever work out. 

The problem was one of timing because ordinarily students 
would go out with the master s degree. They would not go into 
management positions of any complexity. They were just 
starting out. They were working as part of a team or at a 
relatively low-level job. It wouldn t be until later, as they 
worked their way up or changed jobs, that they d find 
themselves in a position where they suddenly had a lot of 
responsibility for running, organizing, managing, planning 
complex organizations. And they d say, "I do not know how to 
do this. Why didn t they teach me in library school?" 

Well, we couldn t very well have done that. It was too 
early. It would have been too early, and perhaps we wouldn t 
have been able to do it very well anyway, to teach this in a 
vacuum. See, I thought, hopefully we could teach people to get 
a sense of bibliographical organization, of problems of getting 
access to the contents of texts, because they were close enough 
to that. They were students, after all. They had just spent 
years dealing with texts. But getting them to have a sense of 
how you organize and plan and manage groups of people in 
complex situations, public or privatedealing with 
governments, dealing with competing organizations, dealing with 
funding sources, dealing with who knows what--to do this in a 
classroom setting seems difficult if not impossible. 

So that, in a sense, education for management was always 
something that we felt, we wish we could do it. But we re not 
sure that we can do it, and we re not sure that the timing is 
right for us to be doing it as part of the master s degree 
program. 



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McCreery: As you say, how much can it be taught in the classroom? 

Wilson: Indeed. Indeed. It s not clear to me, even now, that much can 
be taught. 

McCreery: You also made a point here that you were next-door neighbors, 

practically, to the graduate business school on the campus, and 
that to some extent students were free to seek out some of 
those kinds of courses, not specific to libraries but-- 

Wilson: Right. As a matter of fact, however, that turned out not to be 
such a good idea because the business school was not welcoming. 
They wouldn t allow people to come freely into their courses. 

McCreery: Oh, is that right? 

Wilson: So, professional schools differ in their degree of openness to 
outsiders. The business school was not open. 



Student Job Placement; Foreign Language Requirements 



McCreery: Well, talking about management and the kinds of jobs that 

students took after leaving library schooland I m thinking 
mainly of the MLS programwhat kind of function did the school 
have under your deanship in placing students in jobs after they 
left, if any? 

Wilson: We d given that job up entirely. There was now a campus 

placement service, a centralized office on campus which did 
placement work for lots of different types of occupational 
groups, and there was a representative in the campus placement 
service who dealt specifically with library jobs. 

We kept in close contact with the library person in the 
placement service. We would funnel information to her, (it was 
a her) . When people made inquiries of us or gave us 
information about job opportunities, we d pass on the 
information. But we wouldn t ourselves do as our predecessors 
had once done, try to match students to jobs at the master s 
degree level. Different at the Ph.D. level, but at the 
master s degree level we simply didn t do it. 

McCreery: How satisfactory was that system? 

Wilson: Well, during this period of time I think it was reasonably 

satisfactory because demand was still high. There were lots of 



172 



jobs, relatively lots of jobs. This was not a depressed 
period. This was not a depression time for librarians. So 
that just wasn t a problem. It was the admissions side that 
was our job. 

When we were talking the other day about the job of 
associate dean, or assistant dean, I forgot to mention that, 
from my point of view, the most important thing about the 
assistant or associate dean was that they talked at length to 
prospective students. 

People would come in saying, I don t know whether I want to 
go to this school or not, I want to talk to somebody. All 
right, well who are you going to talk to? Well, you re not 
going to talk to the dean. I had no time. You could talk to 
an associate dean, however, or an assistant dean. And so, as 
far as the dean was concerned, the chief function of the 
associate dean was to keep students and would-be students away 
from the dean by talking to them. [laughter] 

McCreery: Of course, it tied in with that position s role in the actual 
admissions process too. 

Wilson: Yes, absolutely yes. Definitely. 

McCreery: That reminds me to ask you something that I neglected before, 
which is that around the early time of your being dean the 
foreign language requirements for students were dropped, and I 
just wondered if you had any particular thoughts on why and how 
that happened? 

Wilson: No, I forgot about that entirely. I forgot that we had them. 
No, this is now such deep past that I can t even remember. We 
did have foreign language requirements? For heaven s sake. 

McCreery: For admission. 

Wilson: For admission. How astonishing. 

McCreery: It sounds as if you weren t strongly attached to them? 

Wilson: I don t remember them. It would have been a silly requirement, 
I would think. 



173 



Virginia Pratt and the Library School Library 



McCreery: I wanted to talk too, today, about the Library School Library, 
which had existed as a separate branch of the main campus 
library since before the time that you became dean. Perhaps 
you can just tell me little bit about how that worked here in 
South Hall and the kind of staff that you had, and so on. 

Wilson: As I remember it, originally it wasn t, I think, a branch of 

the- -I mean, going way, way back to when I was a student in the 
school, I think it started out as the "Z" classification 
volumes of the University Library. By the time I got here [as 
a faculty member] it was a fully fledged, separate library all 
of its own run by Virginia Pratt, who was a very important 
member of the- -I considered her a member of the staff of the 
school, even though she was technically a member of the library 
staff. But as far as I was concerned, she was a faculty 
member. 



She did, as a matter of fact, teach courses as a part-time 
faculty member. She had one full-time assistant and a part- 
time student assistant. So there was sufficient staff, and she 
ran an intensive collection. For instance, she kept files of 
unbound pamphlet and miscellaneous materials in subject 
categories. A lot of stuff was cataloged that would not have 
been cataloged in main collection. 

There were huge serials. She was devoted to the collection 
of minute and obscure serial publications connected with 
libraries and bibliography, and so on. So there was just an 
immense periodical collection. But the whole thing, as far as 
I was concerned, both as dean, as teacher, as research worker, 
it was a model. It was a model library. Of course, it ought 
to have been a model library. 

It was to kind of show the students what a good library 
could be like. It did, I think on the whole, show the students 
what a good subject-specialized library could be like. It 
provided a perfect browsing collection and provided an 
illustration of what s good about having a perfect browsing 
collection, what difference it makes. It provided just a 
perfect example of what the point is to have direct access to a 
classified collection of bound material. And by example, the 
staff members, Thora Hutchison, the nonprofessional--! think 
she was there during this time, she was there for a long time-- 
and Virginia Pratt were kind of exemplary librarians in the 
sense of knowing things, being prepared to help, being open, 
forthcoming, all virtues. Nothing but good. [laughter] 



174 



McCreery: I wonder what you recall about the situation that led to the 
Library School Library eventually being folded back into the 
main library. I take it that was after Ms. Pratt left? 

Wilson: Yes, that was long after. It was after I retired, too, so I 
was at a great distance from all this by then. The argument 
was, from the general library, that branches were costing too 
much money and some branches had to be closed down. This was 
in a period of time, when, as a matter of fact, I think the 
school had closed or at least the school was no longer 
admitting new students. The school was, internally, in a 
precarious position. It was under review. The future of the 
school was definitely in question. The administration of the 
school might have put up a fight, but was probably not in a 
good position to put up much of a fight, I guess. 

McCreery: So part of it was that timing? 

Wilson: I think it was partly a question of timing, partly a question 
of timing. 

McCreery: That certainly would make it vulnerable. 
Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Then sometime along there of course, Ms. Pratt and her system 
for the Library School Library were held up as an example by 
Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker. 



Wilson: Indeed, in The New Yorker I Astonishing, absolutely 

astonishing, to open The New Yorker magazine and find a 
discussion of the cataloging of children s literature or 
material for children in a library school library catalog in 
the pages of The New Yorker magazine. Absolutely unbelievable. 
I still [laughter] --most astonishing. 

McCreery: It s interesting that it took a non-librarian to make that case 
to the general public, in a sense. I m sure that article was 
much discussed by librarians? 

Wilson: I suppose so, though the people around here did not seem to be 
much excited about it. I was. I could hardly believe my eyes 
and came in and started babbling about this, and they said, 



"Oh, well. What does he know? Who cares?" 
hard to figure people s reactions sometimes, 



[laughter] It s 



175 



The ALA and Accreditation 






McCreery: Yes, you ve given me a few examples of that. Well, one of the 
other things that I wanted to spend some time on today was just 
a general discussion of the American Library Association, and 
then some specific discussion of their accreditation process as 
applied to the school when you were dean. 

Now, I think I recall your saying that you really only got 
involved with the American Library Association at the time that 
you became dean, that you weren t particularly taken up with it 
beforehand. I wonder, just generally, can you tell me what you 
thought of the organization after becoming involved? 

Wilson: Oh, I didn t think anything of it. I had no respect for it, no 
admiration for it, no concern for it. I m just not an 
institution person. I m not interested in that kind of thing. 

McCreery: And we ve talked about your saying, "I wasn t that kind of a 
dean. " 

Wilson: That s right, that s right. Not that kind of dean at all. 

McCreery: So I take your remarks in that light, but I just wonder, once 
you began to meet your colleagues in A.L.A. and to see what 
kind of work the organization was doing, and so on, did that 
help? 

Wilson: No, a lot of it seemed to me quite stupid. A lot of it was 
just completely stupid. For instance, there was a lot of 
political haggling. The A.L.A. will take positions on various 
political issues. "We won t hold our convention in this town 
because they re politically incorrect, and we won t do this and 
we won t do that." A great deal of gratuitous, I thought, 
pointless gratuitous politics and a lot of silly stuff. They 
pass resolutions guaranteeing that all information must be made 
available to all people, in all formats, in all languagesyou 
know, just wild, crazy, goofy--you know, that s silly stuff. I 
thought, by and large, when I went to a general membership 
meeting, I thought those were grotesque and silly. 

Now, some of the organization s central committee workthe 
intellectual freedom people, I thought they were dependably 
useful in the sense of supporting good causes. They would 
support the kinds of things that the American Civil Liberties 
Union would support. And I ve been a lifelong ardent supporter 
of the ACLU. So they were all right. But other than that, I 
didn t have anything to do with them. 



176 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 
McCreery; 
Wilson: 



As far as accreditation goes, that too was kind of a joke 
for us. We were so snobbish. I mean after all, who were they 
to come and tell us whether we were good enough to be offering 
professional degrees? Who were they? We didn t suppose that, 
for the American Library Association committee on accreditation 
to take a handful of people and say, "Go off and interrogate 
those people at Berkeley and see if they re doing all right, 
see if they re good enough." 

How could you tell? That was really the feeling. So, as 
far as I was concerned, the entire business of accreditation 
was a matter of pure politics and purely writing something 
which will satisfy them, getting this over in a way which is 
least costly, least disruptive to us, and just getting through 
with it. On the Berkeley campus in general there was often a 
feeling among the professional schools, let s get out of the 
accreditation business entirely, let s forget about this. 
Let s not ask for accreditation. 

You re saying among various professional schools? 

Yes, not just us. 

Really? 

Yes. The feeling was that the accreditation business was not 
worth it. Berkeley is not in need of accreditation. And it s 
expensive. It costs money. It s time consuming and we get 
nothing from it. So we don t like it and we don t want to do 
it. We decide, okay, we ll go along. In the library case, 
there s the difficulty that so many jobs required an accredited 
master s degree and we really had to go along with it simply on 
that ground. On no other ground. 



McCreery: Was it your understanding, then, that students going out into 
the workplace were being asked for degrees from A.L.A. 
accredited schools? 

Wilson: Oh, yes. This was quite clear, yes. Very often this would be 

explicitly part of a job description. Not everywhere, but very 

widely, particularly public service jobs. I mean, it was just 
a fact of life that we had to face. 

McCreery: Okay. To talk a little bit more about the accreditation 

process, as an every-f ive-year phenomenon it would seem that 
one would always be either engaged in preparing for 
accreditation, getting it, or immediately recovering. In other 



177 



words, it would seem to be something of a constant presence, 
but I note that this school s self -study in preparation for 
accreditation while you were dean came out in November of 1974. 
This is a sort of inch-and-a-half thick volume and as you say, 
it s a matter of going through and satisfying all of the 
requirements that the A.L.A. has asked for, and so on. Do you 
have any particular comments on the preparation for this 
document? 



Wilson: I can t remember. I think I did it all, or insofar as things 

had to be written, I wrote them. But it was a matter of simply 
assembling a huge quantity of materials, so my assistants would 
have done the assembling. It s routine stuff, or "routine plus 
propaganda." I would provide the propaganda. 

McCreery: Were you good at that? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: It would seem so. 

Wilson: Yes. [laughter] I could do that. That s what I was paid for. 
A dean is paid for various things including making propaganda 
when necessary, and being an ideologist, selling people on the 
virtues of the--I did that. I saw that explicitly as part of 
my job. I was not paid to put the school down. Though when I 
wrote books, that was another matter. When I re-read what I 
wrote, I say oh my goodness! I wonder that anyone would have 
spoken to me. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, we will talk about that some more. I m anxious to do 
that. To finish up about accreditation, though, I note that 
just at the end of your tenure as dean, in the spring of 1975, 
was when the A.L.A. accreditation committee came out to visit 
the school. 

Wilson: Oh, really? 

McCreery: Again, you may not remember this explicitly, but was the 

committee that came out outstanding in your memory in any way, 
or any aspect of that? 

Wilson: No, I can t remember who was on it. Maybe Jane Robbins was on 
it. I can t remember. 

McCreery: Did you ever serve as an accrediting individual for other 
schools or anything like that? 



Wilson: 



No. 



178 



McCreery: All right. The whole issue of accreditation, of course, comes 
up again later in this school s history. I know that once the 
library school as you knew it was closed and replaced by 
another school, accreditation came up again. But I m 
wondering, after you left the deanship and on up into the early 
nineties, when the school existed as the School of Library and 
Information Studies, did accreditation arise again as any kind 
of major issue, do you recall? 

Wilson: I don t recall that it did. Insofar as it came up, I m pretty 
sure that it would come up in the same kind of general sense. 
That is to say, oh we ve got to go through this again. Oh, can 
we get out of this? Oh, I guess not. I don t recall anything 
else. Nothing special. 



Mentoring Doctoral Students 



McCreery: I d like to talk for a few minutes about students. We ve 

touched on a number of things here and there but I m thinking 
particularly- -and I think this was during your tenure as dean-- 
it seems as if the faculty asked itself some questions about 
the mentoring of doctoral students and how that was done, and 
so on. 

Wilson: Oh, doctoral students. I was always heavily involved in that. 
As a matter of fact, I was more heavily involved with doctoral 
students than anybody else on the faculty the whole time that I 
was on the faculty. 

McCreery: Did that surprise you? 

Wilson: A little, a little yes. Yes, it did. But I had more doctoral 
students, I was chairman of more dissertation committees than 
anybody, by a lot. I was the big producer of Ph.D.s, and I was 
often, not always but often, chairman of the faculty committee 
on doctoral programs. I wrote a doctoral--yes, I forgot about 
this--a document which was called the Doctoral Digest, which 
was a booklet describing all the procedures, all the steps, all 
the requirements, all the ins and outs of getting a doctoral 
degree. I wrote that years and years ago and it stayed the 
same, unchanged, year after year after year. After I was gone 
it was still being used, so I had a heavy hand in the doctoral 
program. 

I also had a heavy hand in the sense that, when I was in 
charge of the program, I was inclined to manipulate it a little 



179 



bit in the sense of, in case a student was having trouble with 
a faculty member I would intervene. I did intervene on a 
number of occasions to fix things up, to get the faculty member 
to loosen up, or to move the student away from one faculty 
member to another faculty member. That happened, I forget how 
many times, certainly once or twice. That kind of thing, a 
certain amount of--not as dean, but just as "faculty inspector 
general." [laughter] 

McCreery: Why do you think you developed such a strong interest in the 
welfare of your doctoral students? I mean not only your own, 
but those in the program? 

Wilson: That s a highly creative part of the program. Right from the 
beginning I started realizing, oh my God, this is new stuff. 
Working with these people is working on new, brand-new stuff. 
The second book that I wrote--! described in a footnote early 
on, I got the idea for this book from working on Hillary 
Burton s dissertation with her. Hillary Burton gave me these 
ideas. She had written a dissertation in which she was 
exploring how individual faculty members built up personal 
libraries and little personal information systems, and I said, 
that s interesting. Yes, now that s very, very interesting. 
Let s see, you could carry this a long, long way. And I 
started doing that. 

So working with her was --and working with her means 
talking, reading, making suggestions--! d say, why not try 
this? Why not do that? Editing dissertations. This was all 
extremely inventive, creative, productive stuff. This is 
great. So my own experiences with doctoral students were just 
100 percent positive, 150 percent positive. They were just 
wonderful. 

I thought, this is the part of the program where, you know, 
we ve left land behind and we re now way out there and we re 
flying. Again and again, that did happen. We were flying. 
See, I came into the school absolutely unpersuaded that there 
was anything of intellectual substance to what went on in the 
school. And at first there had been a doctoral program, that 
is, Perry Danton had started the doctoral program. But it 
dragged on for year after year after year with one or two 
students. There weren t any doctoral students, or there were 
one or two. When I came it was just about the time that the 
money started flooding in from Title IIB and that meant, 
incidentally, that suddenly a bunch of students started finding 
interesting possibilities. 



180 



But also there was a correspondence. I came in not knowing 
anything, and not seeing, and not having any ideas at all about 
what was possible in the field. Then I ran into these doctoral 
students and started to--oh, my God! There really is something 
here. Hey wait a minute, we can make something out of this. 
So I was coming in absolutely unprepared but ready, and they 
were coming in wanting to do something, and it was a perfect 
fit. We got along perfectly, the doctoral students and I. 

McCreery: I wonder how you got so many. Was it subject area? 

Wilson: Yes, it was subject area I think. Subject area. I covered an 
awful lot of area. My God, I covered a huge area. Not 
history. Harlan did history. 

McCreery: What did you cover? How would you generally describe the areas 
under your purview, shall we say? 

Wilson: Everything to do with human behavior, everything to do with 

bibliographical organization, everything to do with indexing, 
classification, subject cataloging. Everything to do with 
content, everything to do with social organization of 
knowledge. Everything to do with language. That kind of 
stuff. It covers a lot of ground. 

McCreery: It sounds as if there were plenty of students coming in who had 
interests in these areas? 

Wilson: They were able to find things to do, yes. Oh yes. They were 

able to find interesting things to do. I mean, they would come 
in and we would explore things. I would suggest something, or 
they would make a countersuggestion. We would negotiate 
something. 

Sometimes--in one particular case, the student was writing 
about corporate authorship in cataloging. This was so nearly a 
collaboration at the end, it was so nearly a work of co- 
authorship , that in the annual report that the faculty member 
puts in, the annual supplement to your bio-bibliography for the 
official files, I listed his dissertation. I said I really 
could claim co-authorship in this dissertation because it was 
so much of my own ideas in that. That wasn t ordinarily the 
case. 



Another case, the case of Howard White, who teaches at 
Drexel [University] , he came in with a dissertationhere it 
is! He did to me what I had done to my own professor. 

McCreery: I thought that sounded familiar. 



181 



Wilson: That s right, he came in with something that was all finished. 
It was a study of social science data collections, voting 
survey results and things like that, how they are organized, 
what they could be used for, what might be done with them. A 
work of really serious interest, really serious interest. He 
came in because he d liked what I had written. He would not 
talk to me about it, but he would talk to other people about 
it. 

McCreery: He was seeking you out? 

Wilson: He sought me out and the reason was because he liked everything 
that I said. I mean, I was the right one. Lots of different-- 
every one different. My goodness, what a bunch. 



A Second Book; Public Knowledge, Private Ignorance 



McCreery: I m interested in this idea of getting from your students some 
of the specific ideas that would inform your own work. Perhaps 
we should go ahead and talk about your second book, Public 
Knowledge, Private Ignorance, which came out as a monograph in 
1977. What was the idea? 

Wilson: That really surprised me. That book really surprised me. The 
first book had been, I probably said this earlier, in a sense 
it was kind of applied philosophy. It was the sort of book 
that a philosopher would write if he turned his attention to 
the practical issues of bibliographical organization. 

But the second book took a completely different turn and I 
found myself doing something that I was unprepared to do and I 
really didn t know what I was doing. But that was the matter 
of getting the idea, from Hillary Burton s dissertation, of 
individuals developing their own information systems. I 
started saying, okay, now let s think about the organization of 
the entire society. Think about everybody having his own 
little truncated information system or big elaborate 
information system. Everybody s got one. Suppose you approach 
society from the point of view of saying everybody s got a 
systematic way of getting information, more or less systematic. 
If you want to have a general picture of the circulation of 
information in a society, what kind of model of or picture of 
individual behavior do you want? What are the variables that 
you want? What are the main features of this picture? What 
are the big dimensions of difference going to be? 



182 



What I did was to develop what is now called- -what I didn t 
call then because I didn t talk in these terms simply a model 
of individual information gathering behavior. Recently a 
doctoral student at another university, Indiana 1 think, wrote 
me about her own dissertation. She said she was basing hers on 
my chapter on individualshe said, "Which is, after all, an 
optimal foraging model." I said, "Oh it is? Oh, it is an 
optimal foraging model?" Yes. She s married to an 
anthropologist and anthropologists talk about things like 
optimal foraging models. 

McCreery: Fabulous term. 

Wilson: Yes, isn t it? [laughter] But I developed this really not 
knowing what I was doing. I didn t know what kind of work I 
was doing. But this was really, this just surprised the hell 
out of me when I was finished. What have I done? It was 
interesting how people have reacted to that. People in the 
field of communications loved it. People in the library field 
were- -well, I don t know. The reason they didn t like it was 
because it didn t promise very much to the librarians. The 
library didn t play a big part in this. 

At the end I went to very great lengths to figure out, 
well, why doesn t the library play a very big part in all of 
this? What could the library do to play a bigger part? How 
would things have to be different if the library were going to 
play a bigger part then it does play? And so on, and so on, 
and so on. But the results were, on the whole, negative. I 
mean, we re not going to conquer huge new worlds. The library 
has an important but highly specialized place in the 
information transfer business. 

Personal information gathering was the center part of the 
book. The beginning part was a discussion of public knowledge, 
which was the idea of saying libraries are storehouses of 
knowledge. Well maybe, but the question is how do you get the 
knowledge out of the storehouse? In what sense does the 
collection of books represent public knowledge? 

So I was working away painfully at trying to make sense of 
a notion of public knowledge, which turned out to be something 
in which again I was, in a sense, way ahead of the game. 
Because I said, well actually public knowledge is a social 
construction. It s the idea of the best picture of things you 
could put together by taking what you could get out of all of 
these books, most of which are full of nonsense and erroneous 
information, but the best picture of the world you could make 
up out of the rest. That s what public knowledge is. So this 



183 



is a constructivist picture and people didn t talk about 
constructivist pictures in those days. They do now. They do 
now in a big way. But they did not then. 

McCreery: I m interested in the other half of your title, this term 
"private ignorance." 

Wilson: Well, the question waspeople don t know very much. How do 

they get along knowing so little? So part of the thing was to 
figure out how you can survive on a small diet of 
misinformation, as people do, right? But the title was 
intentionally provocative. I stole the title from the 
eighteenth century. That s straight out of [Bernard] 
Mandeville s Fable of the Bees, the subtitle is "Private Vices, 
Public Benefits." 

McCreery: Provocative, like any good title. 

Wilson: That s right. Yes. You have to have good titles. 

McCreery: You identified this question to explore, and at what point did 
you work on the writing of the book itself? 

Wilson: Oh, that was a sabbatical leave. When I quit as dean in 75, I 
went on sabbatical leave and immediately sat down and wrote the 
book. 

McCreery: Did that just flow out quickly as the last one had? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Really? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: The magic was working? 

Wilson: It was working. Yes, it was really working. Yes, that went 
fast. 

McCreery: Well, how much did that experience do to revitalize you for 
your remaining career? 

Wilson: I guess that put me back together because that was clearly 
going all right . The funny thing was that I showed that 
manuscript to a couple of people because, in a sense, the 
model, my optimal foraging model, is in a way an economist s 
model. It was assuming that people will cut their losses and 
they ll say, I m not getting anything out of this. I have 



184 



enough now. This kind of thing, 
economist s model. 



So it was kind of loosely an 



I showed it to Michael Cooper, and I showed it to a 
visiting professor who was here, and they were both very 
negative about this. They said, "I don t know, I don t know." 
They didn t like this very much. They really--! didn t get any 
good feedback from colleagues. It wasn t until the reviews 
started coming in. The first review I saw was a sensational 
review. 

McCreery: In? 

Wilson: In Library Quarterly by a professor of communication at 
Stanford. 

McCreery: Well, you said the communication people loved it. 

Wilson: Yes, yes. So, that s funny. But yes, I guess that put me back 
together. I was able to come back and go to work under the new 
dean. 



Additional Summations of Deanship 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Well, just one last bit on the old dean, that is you, if you 
don t mind. We did talk in a previous session about your 
decision to step down as dean and some of the reasons for that, 
and how you wrote a letter making suggestions for what was 
needed in a new dean, perhaps identifying some of what needed 
working on, and so on and so forth. But I wonder, thinking 
back over your five years as dean of this school, what would 
you identify as the successes, the things that you could pass 
on that were much improved considering the difficulty of those 
times? 



Nothing, I guess, 
[laughter] 



since the school went away after a while. 



Oh, now you can t take credit for that. 

Oh, I don t know. The reorientation--well, the introduction of 
the bibliography course, the introduction to bibliography. 
Starting off with people centered on intellectual access, 
intellectual organization of content and so on as the big 
central problem. That lasted throughout the subsequent history 
of the school. 



185 



If we do finally talk about the end of the school, that 
will be at the point at which one would say just as I closed 
down Anne Ethelyn Markley s operations, somebody came along and 
closed down my operations, got rid of the bibliographical core. 

McCreery: But you say it did last a long time, a couple of decades. 

Wilson: Yes, twenty years. 

McCreery: Other things you take pride in from your deanship? 

Wilson: I don t know. Hard to say. I mentioned the attempted revision 
of the D.L.S. program, but that disappeared. Not only did 
Michael Buckland hate the idea and get rid of it as fast as 
possible, but there were only a couple of people who wanted the 
degree anyway. Only a couple of people got my new design- 
oriented D.L.S. degree. There wasn t any interest in it, so it 
was no loss. Other changes oh, minor changes. I don t know 
that I can remember anything. Faculty additions? The 
appointment of Michael Cooper? Well sure, that was cut and 
dried. He was the best candidate. That was important. 

McCreery: Did you get to try out most of the things you wanted to? 

Wilson: I think so, probably, yes. Sure. I didn t come in with a 

burning desire to be dean. I took the job because they said, 
well somebody has to do it. Would you do it? Oh, I guess so. 
It wasn t as though I had been brooding over this for a long 
time. "Oh, if only I were dean I d really do this and that." 
It wasn t as though I were so in love with the notion of 
library schools that I wanted to--you know, I ve always been of 
two minds about this. Well, one and a half minds about this 
school or any similar operation. 

McCreery: But once you did take the job as dean--? 

Wilson: I took it seriously. 

McCreery: How much were you guided by a sense of duty to that job? 

Wilson: Absolutely. I was absolutely guided by a sense of duty. I 

took it on, I had to do it. I had to do it as well as I could. 
That s why I was so obsessed with the fragility, or what I 
perceived as the fragility of the school, of its 
precariousness, doing what I could to change it, to make it 
less precarious. 



186 



McCreery: You were talking about your attention to the precariousness of 
the program that we talked about last time. 

Wilson: Yes, yes. I mean one of the things one could cite in support 
of the school, say, is look at how well our doctoral students 
are doing. Here we ve got two people at the World Bank. What 
do you think of that? Here, we ve got people teaching in 
business schools, not schools of librarianship or library and 
information studies. Here we ve got people teaching here and 
there, and people running this and that major library, and so 
on. They are people who are fully representative of the kinds 
of positions that you d hope for from a Berkeley professional 
school. 

As a matter of fact, they compare very favorably, I would 
think, to other professional schools in terms of the general 
seriousness of the positions that people were taking. So 
that s a serious success, and serious success is what makes you 
stable and relatively safe. So anything to support the 
doctoral program, make it strong and serious, was worth doing. 
Apart from that, I don t know. I was just working from day to 
day doing what I could think of. I can t claim major successes 
though . 

McCreery: It was certainly a huge job. 
Wilson: Hard work, yes. 



187 



CODA: LIBRARY AND INFORMATION STUDIES 



Deanship of Michael K. Buckland 



McCreery: Well, after you left the job and took your sabbatical, wrote 
your book, and came back to teaching, what was that like and 
what was going on? 

Wilson: Oh, busy, busy, busy. Buckland was here. I must point out 

that I went way back with Buckland because when I was dean, I 
had been scouting around for possible faculty appointments and 
two people in particular caught my eye. I approached them, 
wrote to them, and urged them to express interest in coming to 
Berkeley. One was Michael Buckland. He was then in England 
still, at [University of] Lancaster, I think. The other was 
Beverly Lynch, who subsequently became dean at UCLA. So the 
two people that I was most interested in were the two 
subsequent UC deans. 

Then, when the search committee for my own successor was 
appointed, I don t know whether I put Michael s name into the 
pot or not , but they had to hear about him from someplace . If 
they hadn t heard about him from somebody else, I certainly 
would have recommended him. I remember going to breakfast with 
him the morning he was on campus and he was going to have his 
big interview with George Maslach. I was trying to prepare 
him, I was trying to prep him for his interview with George so 
that he would make the best possible impression on George, 
[laughter] Then I had to write the case. I had to write a 
letter proposing his appointment as dean, because somebody has 
to write them. 

McCreery: You were good at writing those cases, as I recall. 

Wilson: I was good at writing those cases, and in particular I got 
compliments from on high for the Buckland case. That was a 
spectacular case. So Buckland got off to--I don t know whether 



188 



I got off to a good start with him, but he got off to a good 
start with me. Anyway, I thought he was the right one. 

Of course he came in and immediately started telling 
people, "Ah, when I got here the place was in absolute chaos, 
and I had to put things back together again." [laughter] 
Which is kind of funny because he didn t actually do anything 
with the curriculum. The minute I came back I was back in 
charge of the curriculum. I was still in charge of the central 
course. I started, of course, teaching new courses. I started 
adding courses of the kind that I thought we really needed. 
I d been concerned before that we didn t have courses that 
dealt with people as information consumers and information 
users. 



In the very old days LeRoy Merritt had represented the 
interests of communication, I think, in an old, old sense. A 
decrepit, old sense of communication. Well, since he d gone 
there hadn t been anybody on the faculty who represented that 
kind of interest. When I was dean I hired people from 
Stanford, from the Institute of Communication there, to come up 
and teach a course, one course a year, say, but that wasn t 
good. So I started turning myself into a sociologist. 

In effect I d done that in the course of various writings 
and doing the second book. I started teaching, first seminars, 
and then courses in social studies of information in addition 
to bibliography, cataloging, and so on. And doctoral students. 
Lots of doctoral students. 

McCreery: So you could do some optimal foraging? 

Wilson: [laughter] Yes, absolutely. Optimal foraging. 

McCreery: So Professor Buckland was a new dean for new times and came 
from the East to take that job at Berkeley, a new dean "from 
without" coming in. I wonder what difficulties he ran into not 
knowing Berkeley? 

Wilson: I don t know, I don t know. I really don t. We weren t close 
in the sense that he wasn t telling me about his problems, not 
then anyway. I m not sure that he would have had any 
particular problems because he s an Oxford man, that is to say 
he went to school at Oxford. In a snobbish place like 
Berkeley, you can t be snobbier than Oxford. 

McCreery: That little cachet served him well? 



189 



Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 



He came in with an advantage. He came in with a definite 
advantage. 

Well, so much the better. 

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. [laughter] I can t remember 
much about those times except that he was vigorously trying to 
change things, but not the curriculum, at least not the part 
that I was interested in. 

Is there much to say about the change of the school s name to 
Library and Information Studies? 



No, no there was no problem with that. 
No, fine, no problem. 



It was a good idea. 



I know that was happening in many schools across the country. 
But, as you say, the curriculum was not changing in any great 
substance. Then it was really just a change in name only, not 
in content? 

Yes, it was a change in name only. 

Now I m thinking of the so-called "faculty split" that we ve 
discussed many times. As time went on in the second half of 
the seventies and into the eighties, and so on, what with 
people coming and going, did that split stay the same, change? 
What happened to it in your view? 

Wilson: Stayed pretty much the same as far as I m concerned. Except 
that, in a sense, Buckland s coming in added weight to the 
center or to the side that would include me, Michael Cooper, 
and so on. It still was very much a two-person special wing, 
formal wing, that was kind of unchangeable. That didn t 
change. 

McCreery: But the problem of having a split didn t necessarily become 
worse? 

Wilson: No, I think not worse. No. 



Promotion to Full Professor; The Salary Scale 



McCreery: I take it you continued to work a lot with doctoral students 
when you returned from sabbatical? 



190 



Wilson: 



McCreery; 



Oh, a lot, yes. Definitely. All in all I did seventeen or 
eighteen Ph.D.s that I was chairman for, and I was on at least 
that many committees, you know, these three-person committees, 
two insiders and one outsider. So I would have been on half 
the doctoral committees of the school. At least half. Good 
grief! I don t think that was thought to be oppressive. There 
were no "Down with Wilson" protest marches. [laughter] 



Well, tell me about your promotion to full professor, 
came in 1978? 



That 



Wilson: 
McCreery: 



Did it? 

Or no, 77? 
second book. 



78? Anyway, I m thinking it was after that 



Wilson: Yes, it was after that. 

McCreery: Actually I don t have the year here, I apologize. 

Wilson: I don t know when it was. I don t know. It was just an 

administrative change as far as I was concerned. At one point 
Buckland wrote- -and I may have mentioned this before, yes I 
think I did--Buckland complained that I was severely underpaid 
and he pointed out that nobody had been paying any attention to 
my salary. You can t put yourself in for a raise, somebody 
else has to do it. In the case of a dean of a one-department 
school, who s to do it? I don t know what the conventions are 
but nobody was doing it for me and I didn t think to ask 
anybody, so I wasn t getting any raises. I was underpaid, and 
he tried to fix that up. He didn t manage. They said, well 
next time. Put him in for an extra raise next time. But he 
did put me up for promotion. 

McCreery: Yes, I gathered he was good about looking at the situation of 
each faculty member. 

Wilson: Yes, he was very scrupulous, very, very scrupulous about that. 

McCreery: But coming up to full professor was fairly routine in your 
case? 



Wilson: There was nothing to it. It was semi-automatic. Tenure is the 
big thing, after that everything is fairly routine. There are 
things that are not routine, I think. In other departments, in 
other schools and departments, faculty members get appointed to 
over-scale salaries. That is, there s a salary scale, you go 
through so many steps- -step one, two, three, four, five at this 
rank. Ordinarily you are promoted the next time you re up, 



191 



every three years or so. The standard time in step is three 
years, or whatever. So it s pretty much automatic. 

But departments like mathematics and physics and so on, 
nobody pays any attention to that nonsense. They are hired 
over-scale, and this is, by negotiation, we ll give you 
$150,000 instead of the piddling amounts. But that would be 
special- -we didn t even know about that kind of thing. 

McCreery: Yes, it really was just in certain other schools and colleges 
that that off -scale salary was a possibility. 

Wilson: Oh yes, definitely. 

McCreery: Were you concerned on your own behalf as far as salary was 
concerned, or over place in line? 

Wilson: No, no I wasn t. For one thing I was not a big producer of 
publications. I didn t publish a lot and it was my belief 
that quantity of publication was what really determined the 
speed of promotion. I think that s so. Because the way the 
letters come to you when you are promoted or something- -the 
provost will write a letter which clearly he s copying from 
something which the budget committee, the faculty committee, 
has told him. And he will say, "The quantity of publication is 
not outstanding, but the quality appears to be more than 
adequate." [laughter] Right, exactly, yes. Just so. You 
say, "I wrote a book and several articles." "Well, so? Only 
one book? Only several articles?" 

McCreery: I know that somewhere you compared the issueperhaps it was 

earlier when we were talking about your faculty appointment in 
philosophythe difference of publishing in one field versus 
another. I don t know where librarianship fits in with all 
that. 

Wilson: I don t either. I don t either. Partly it s a matter of 

field, partly it s a matter of personal style. Partly it s a 
matter of the particular line of research that you re doing. 
The kind of stuff that I did I could not just spin them out, 
you know, one a week or one a month. There are people who do 
that, even in philosophy. There s a famous case of a guy at 
the University of Pittsburgh who s published seventy or eighty 
books, plus hundreds of articles. It s just astonishing 
productivity. But I could never do that, so I didn t publish a 
lot. So I was not surprised. I did not expect to be promoted 
fast. 



192 



In any case, I got to the top of what was then the standard 
salary scale for professors. Bob [Robert C.] Berring put me on 
the top scale, so no complaints. 



Research Interest in Cognitive Authority; Writing a Third Book 



McCreery: You did get there. I m wonderingafter you returned to 

teaching and were no longer the dean, and so on- -how your own 
intellectual interests developed. You wrote the second book 
taking a direction that you described as more sociological than 
philosophical . 

Wilson: Definitely. 

McCreery: Where did your interests go from there? 

Wilson: Well, more sociological and then cognitive science began to 

appear as a new branch of study elsewhere in the intellectual 
world. Sociology of science appeared as a wildly controversial 
subspecialty in sociology. I began to follow these things, and 
related things, closely and get interested in them, and see 
what, if any, are the connections between what they re 
interested in now and what we do. 

So every year I would have a seminar for doctoral students 
and anybody else who wanted to come along, exploring some new 
topic. We did seminars introducing topics in cognitive science 
and seminars in cultural studies. One seminar in soft and 
hard, namely the general contrast between soft studies and hard 
studies, and so on. Soft inquiries and hard inquiries, a 
general exploration of that. Another seminar in subcultures as 
informational worlds, which is a marvelous, ripe subject for 
study in a school like this, but it had never been done before. 
That was glorious fun. All of this was kind of pushing me, 
however, in the direction of what was, finally, the third book 
I wrote, the one on cognitive authority. 

McCreery: Tell me about that. 

Wilson: Again, it s related to the other two books. The two later 

books, in a sense, look at the first book from different points 
of view, kind of getting out further and further away, but 
still looking at the central problem. In the cognitive 
authority one, the question is, how do we tell whom to believe? 
How do we decide whom to trust? How do we decide whom to take 
seriously and whom to dismiss as a fool or a fake or an idiot? 



193 



How do we decide? This is important in daily life for 
everybody. It s also absolutely crucial within the 
intellectual life because everybody depends primarily on what 
others tell them. 

In the sciences, the kind of standard story used to be that 
you approach problems with an absolutely open mind and 
everything that you come to think depends entirely on your own 
experience. Everything depends entirely on what you observe 
and what you ve done, which is complete and total nonsense. 
Practically everything that you think depends entirely, almost 
entirely, on what you ve learned from others. Science is 
nothing but a huge accumulation of other people s contributions 
somehow filtered out and sorted out. The working scientist 
depends for everything on what he or she gets from other 
working scientists, past and present. So this is true in the 
intellectual community, it s true in the world at large. 

So the huge problem, the huge question is, what determines 
who you believe and who you don t believe? What determines why 
you take this one seriously and dismiss that one? That was the 
problem that I set myself to. 

McCreery: How did you come up with that question? 

Wilson: I don t know. [laughter] How could I avoid it? How could I 
avoid it, because the question arises directly out of the 
attempt to make sense of library reference work. Because the 
reference librarian doesn t know anything much. But the 
reference librarian is expected to be able to find the answers 
to questions. 

Okay, how do they know when they ve found an answer? You 
look up something in a book, you find something that was 
written down in a book. Well, the book was published thirty 
years ago. Is it still true? Was it true at the time that it 
was written? How do you know? You look at another book and 
they say, "This book is full of serious errors." Argh! How do 
I know about this one? [laughter] You look up something in 
the Encyclopedia Britannica, say. Oh, very interesting. Then 
you look up somebody else s book about the Encyclopedia 
Britannica and they say, "Did you realize that all of the 
entries on Eastern European countries were written by the 
governments of the Eastern European countries themselves and 
furnished to the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannical" No, 
I didn t know that. That puts a different light on things, 
doesn t it? 



194 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



So reference librarians are faced with appalling problems, 
if they take it seriously. How do I know that I ve found the 
answer? But they don t take it seriously. They don t take it 
seriously. I looked in textbook after textbook after textbook 
trying to find anybody that seriously raised the question, "How 
do you tell when you ve found the right answer?" I found one 
sentence in one A. L. A. -sponsored, published textbook which 
says, "It is an interesting question which arises in some cases 
as to how you can tell that you have found the right answer." 
And that s the end of it. One sentence is said and then you 
pass on. 

So I say, "All right, librarians, you won t admit that you 
have a problem. But you do have a big problem." But everybody 
has a problem, everybody has a problem. So the question is, 
how do you solve it? So I go through a kind of sociological 
routine. These are the kind of standard ways we have of 
avoiding the problem, of solving the problem, and so on. And 
this is the kind of mess that we find ourselves in as a result 
of it. [laughter] 

Yes, somewhere you say that libraries are full of as much 
misinformation as information. 

Of course, of course. 

There s something authoritative in the written word and people 
tend to look at it and-- 

See, this is really serious and I talk about this in the third 
book explicitly in terms of librarians as quality controllers. 
They sometimes claim to be quality controllers but are they in 
fact, can they be? Could they be? In general, the answer is 
no. They re not. You can t expect it. It s not reasonable to 
expect it. They can t do it. Their professional preparation 
does not fit them for this. No professional preparation which 
an ordinary library school could provide would fit them for 
this . Nothing would fit them for this , for the role of 
general-purpose information evaluator, information quality 
controller. 



This is really interesting. It s really interesting that 
the propaganda for the new school in which we now sit [School 
of Information Management and Systems] repeats, emphasizes, 
that graduates of this school are going to be information 
quality controllers. They re going to be sure that you get 
real information. 

McCreery: You re saying that s pretty much impossible? 



195 



Wilson: It s impossible and there s nothing in the curriculum which 
even gestures in the direction of doing anything about that. 
It s pure propaganda. But also I feel a little bit obsessive 
about this because in all of the three books that I wrote one 
or another version of the same cluster of problems turns up. 
What can you expect of librarians? Can you expect them to 
identify what s going to be useful fifty years from now? Can 
you expect them to identify what is most reliable right now? 
These problems of evaluation and prediction are beyond their 
scope, which is not meant to put them down or denigrate them or 
insult them. It s beyond human scope, by and large. So, there 
you go. 

McCreery: These questions seem well fitted to these emerging fields of 

cognitive science and sociology- 
Wilson: Absolutely, absolutely. The scandal of the sociology of 

science has been that the sociologists of science have said, 
how do these scientists come to the conclusions that they do 
come to? Is it purely a matter of, as their propaganda has it, 
well you do experiments and you rigorously evaluate your 
experiments, and so on? No, no, no. It s a matter of, and 
then they start talking about social influences, power, blah 
blah, but something other than the standard ideology of 
science, which is that I don t get this from anybody else. 
This is nature talking directly to me. So the ideology of 
science meets the sociology of science and there is an 
explosion. Now it s the same kind of, it s in the neighborhood 
of, the kind of situation that I m constantly in when I m 
writing about cognitive authority or the information gathering 
habits of people in general. Trouble, lots of trouble. 

McCreery: You know the very first thing that came to my attention about 

your third book, Secondhand Knowledge, was that it was the only 
one of your three not to be cataloged among the Z s in the 
Library of Congress system. I wonder, what was your audience 
for that book? 

Wilson: It turned out it didn t have an audience. That was not so 

successful. It was the least successful of the three. It got 
a savage review in a sociology journal, or a contemptuous 
review in a sociology journal. But it wasn t widely reviewed. 
It was dismissed in the information science journals by and 
large. I got a letter from an Australian philosopher named 
Harry Redner who said, "I came across your book by accident." 
And he said, "You and I write the same kind of stuff." 



196 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 

McCreery; 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 



Just to let you finish about your Australian contact. 

Yes, he said, "How come I haven t heard about your book? We 
are talking about the same things, we are arriving at pretty 
much the same conclusions, we see the same problems, but I ve 
never heard of you." [laughter] And I wrote back, well no 
it s not surprising. Communication doesn t work this way. You 
learn about philosophy books but my book was published and 
distributed, advertised, only within the world of library and 
information studies and you wouldn t have heard about me. 

[tape interruption] 

I honestly don t know what that was about, [the tape recorder] 
shutting off on its own like that. Well, I was just going to 
say that that s a common problem of communications research. 
All these different fields are claiming it as their own and 
doing it in some isolation. 



Doing it in isolation. This 
Nothing strange about that, 
way? 

It is on. 



is very familiar to me, yes. 

Is this [tape recorder] on, by the 



But I wanted to say, this is not surprising. There s another 
feature about this, however. There s something touchy about 
this subject. It bothers people. They don t like to talk 
about it and they don t like to think about it. It s 
unsettling. It s like the question within librarianship, the 
bare question of the accuracy of information given out by 
reference librarians. For a long time it s been known that 
very much of the information given out by reference librarians 
is wrong. It s misinformation. Reports have been published, 
articles in the library journals. Nobody wants to talk about 
this. Nobody does talk about this. It has no impact. People 
simply turn a blind eye to this. They don t want to talk about 
it. 

Now, the cognitive authority question is, I think, 
something like this. We don t really want to bring this up. 
It gets sticky too fast. 

Is it a matter of cognitive dissonance, shall we say? 
Something like that, something like that. 

People don t like to face the question of who their authorities 
are? 



197 



Wilson: Yes, yes. But anyway, the fact is, you see, it s something 
which ought to be treated largely in sociology but it s not. 
In the sociology of science explicit discussions of this kind 
of thing occur once in a while. I knew of one or two good 
discussions which are entirely consistent with everything that 
I say, so I know I m not peddling some weird line that nobody 
else has ever thought of. But it doesn t get the kind of 
attention which it deserves. I think people simply find it 
uncomfortable . 

McCreery: " Did this surprise you? 
Wilson: Yes. Yes, it s interesting. 

McCreery: I was interested to hear you say, though, that your three books 
really related to one another quite a lot. 

Wilson: Oh, yes. Yes, as a matter of fact looking back at the first 
book I can see the seeds of the other two in the first book. 
Say, oh sure, take that sentence and make it into a book. 

McCreery: But even fifteen years later there was some strong progression, 
shall we say, of these ideas. 

Wilson: Yes. 



New Courses of the 1980s 



[Interview 8: September 24, 1999] 



McCreery: When we left off last week we had some conversation about the 
events here at the school after you left the deanship and 
Michael Buckland had taken over as dean. There are a couple of 
specific things I want to ask you about during that time 
period, namely the advent of the so-called "nonlibrary" 
professional programs. There was one in records management, 
inaugurated in 1981, and one in information systems management 
in 1982. Do you have any particular thoughts on those changes 
to the curriculum, or were you involved in those programs at 
all? 

Wilson: Well, not really. As far as I m concerned I don t remember 
those being developed programs at all. There was a records 
management course taught by a friend from University Hall, a 
friend of mine. 



198 



McCreery: Afton Crooks? 

Wilson: Yes, Afton Crooks. I thought that I had hired her first, but 
maybe not. 

McCreery: I think she came around 1980. 

Wilson: Okay, then I can t have been involved in appointing her. I 

somehow knew her and talked to her a lot. I can t imagine what 
the connection was. But as for there being a program, I don t 
remember that there was a program. One course is not enough to 
make a program, and she didn t do more than one course a year. 

McCreery: That s correct. And the information systems management? 

Wilson: Well, information systems management, I don t know. Michael 

Cooper was very active and creative in kind of building his own 
little track in the school. He developed a series of courses 
centered around systems analysis and system development. This 
would definitely have a culmination point because the showpiece 
would be, at the end of the spring semester his class would 
demonstrate a system, a working system, which they had invented 
from scratch. They built it out of nothing and it was a real 
working information system. Of course, this was always a real 
achievement and something that gave enormous satisfaction to 
the participants and also represented a kind of--this is an 
exciting, useful, new dimension of work, a new style of work in 
the program. 

Because, if you re a bibliographer you don t invent new 
systems or new working computer systems. If you re a 
cataloger, you use already existing systems. Well here were 
people inventing brand new ones, and that was fine. 

Now, as far as I was concerned, that was a splendid and a 
very desirable direction of development for a program like 
ours. Something that was just absolutely central to the 
identity of an information profession. So I was always 
extremely enthusiastic about that. That wasn t a separate 
degree program, but it was, as I remember it now, a kind of a 
more or less clearly defined track within the overall program 
of the school. 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



Okay, thank you. 
Yes. 



199 



McCreery: It would seem that Professor Buckland as dean was making an 

effort to reach out into these new areas. Did you have much of 
a sense of that? 

Wilson: Oh, I suppose so. It would be inevitable that he would. We 
had to, it was just the logic of the situation. It s not 
optional. It wasn t for me, and it wasn t for Buckland either. 
He couldn t have done otherwise without being seen to be the 
wrong person in the wrong place. 

McCreery: Now, you mentioned before that you felt he did not make major 
changes to the curriculum. 

Wilson: Didn t make any changes to my curriculum. [laughter] That is, 
to the things that I had been involved in trying to redesign at 
the beginning of the seventies. He didn t make any impact on 
that at all. We changed those things again in the early 
eighties, but I was the one who did it, not he. So there was a 
shifting, a reorganization of content and courses, a 
reorganization of the way in which we divided things up. 
You ve got to keep moving along and we were beginning to be hit 
by new technology, as now, for instance, online searching began 
to be a real, practical thing. That s not so long ago, but it 
was new then, and it was difficult for us to absorb that. It 
took real effort to take this, which was entirely new, a 
completely new technology, and a continuously changing 
completely new technology, and adjust ourselves to that. So 
that was a lot of work, but that wasn t Buckland s work. He 
wasn t involved in that at all. 

McCreery: Okay, I wonder what are the things about his deanship that 
stand out to you? That period was 1976 through 1984. 

Wilson: [laughter] I guess I just don t divide up the history in that 
way, I don t know. I don t have a history in my head which has 
the label big events produced by Buckland and big events 
produced by this one and that one. One thing that I remember 
with some ruefulness was that he was enormously contemptuous of 
the D.L.S. degree and proceeded to get rid of it. He didn t 
like the design seminar that I had so carefully and 
enthusiastically set up, and he got rid of that. Well, okay. 
In the first place, I had thought that we were required by our 
constitution to offer both degrees, and in fact we were 
required by our constitution to offer both degrees. So I 
didn t see it as an option to get rid of one. 

But he came in with, I guess, no sense of constitutions. 
He is an Englishman. They don t have constitutions, or not 
written constitutions. So he d say, we don t need this, do we? 



200 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



There s no difference between the two degrees. I thought, 
well, that s on the whole not a very good idea, to erase the 
difference between professional degrees and research degrees. 
But he insisted that you couldn t tell the difference and so he 
got rid of it. I think, on the whole, it didn t make much 
difference because it turned out there wasn t much interest 
among students in doing the professional degree. 

As I mentioned before, after I d gone to the trouble of 
trying to redefine the D.L.S., only a couple of people took 
that degree. So no harm was done, I guess. But it was, as far 
as I was concerned, a rather controversial move on his part. 

Did the faculty put up much of a fuss? 

I don t remember. I would doubt that they did. I don t think 
that anybody had an entrenched- -well, no, as a matter of fact 
I m certain that nobody would have had an investment in the 
D.L.S. degree other than me. 

Did faculty relations change much during that period that you 
recall? 

No, I don t remember that they did, no. 



A Series of Short-Term Deans for the School 



McCreery: Then in 1983 or 84, Professor Buckland was kicked upstairs to 
the president s office in a role as Assistant Vice President 
for Library Plans and Policies for the whole UC system. Do you 
recall how you heard about that change and what it meant at the 
time? 

Wilson: No, I don t remember how we heard about it. It was just 

announced. I don t remember whether he was still dean and was 
asked to leave the deanship and go to the Office of the 
President. I guess that was the way it worked, but I don t 
remember that. He s off in University Hall now. No particular 
reaction. It wasn t the kind of shock that Ray Swank s 
departure from the deanship was. I guess that s the point. It 
wasn t all that big a shock. 

McCreery: Then Professor Harlan took over as acting dean starting in 84, 
through the end of calendar year 85. So once again the school 
was finding itself in need of--that was kind of a transitional 
period. 



201 



Wilson: Transitional period. I do seem to remember being involved in 
the search for a successor. 

McCreery: What do you remember? 

Wilson: All 1 remember is reassuring [Provost] Doris Galloway that 
[Robert C.] Berring would be all right. I remember a 
conversation with her, at least I seem to remember a meeting at 
which there were students present and Doris Galloway was 
present, and Berring was introduced as the new dean. 

McCreery: But it was a nationwide search? 
Wilson: I don t think so, no. 

McCreery: Okay. Now he had already been on the faculty here, joint with 
the law school? 

Wilson: Well, no. An occasional lecturer, he would teach one course a 
year maybe, or one course every other year in law 
librarianship. Not a regular member of the faculty. But known 
to us, he d gone through the school. As a matter of fact, I d 
admitted him to the school. There had been some difficulty 
about his getting into the school and I had something to do 
with--I made some exception for him so that he could get in. 
He remembered this and he was also in my introductory class. 
So we went way back. Not all that far, it wasn t that great a 
period of time, but I d known him from the time he got here. 

McCreery: I m wondering, how was the news of his appointment received 
here in the school? 

Wilson: Hard for me to remember at this distance, but I think we were 
rather optimistic. We thought that this would do all right. 
At first we thought this would do all right. But as time wore 
on it became less attractive. I can t remember what the 
details were, but he was only half time as dean of the school. 
He was half-time dean of the school and half-time law librarian 
and professor of law. While maybe at first this seemed like an 
acceptable situation, as time wore on, we thought increasingly 
that it was not acceptable, and ultimately we came to the point 
of agreeing that we had to tell Berring, either you go full 
time or you go. And we did do that. 

I was, at some point, acting as chairman of the faculty. 
The faculty by this time had organized itself so that the dean 
wasn t automatically the chairman of the faculty. The faculty 
elected its own chairman. I was chairman of the faculty and in 
that role I wrote to the chancellor, or I wrote to the provost, 



202 

vice chancellor or provost I guess, I can t remember, saying 
that is no good. We need a full-time dean. 

McCreery: It sounds reasonable. 

Wilson: Yes. And Berring ought to make up his mind what he wants to 
do. 

McCreery: Do you remember the meeting that the faculty came to that 
decision? 

Wilson: No, I m not sure it was one meeting. It might have been kind 

of a continuous discussion, a discussion over a period of time. 

McCreery: Okay. What happened next? 
Wilson: I don t remember. 

McCreery: But in any event, Professor Berring did step down from the 
deanship in 1989. 

Wilson: And guess what? 
McCreery: Tell me what. 

Wilson: All I remember is that somebody in the administration--it was 
now another engineer who was vice chancellor or provost. 

McCreery: Would that be Chang-Lin Tien? 
Wilson: No, not Chang-Lin. 

McCreery: Before he was chancellor, he was vice chancellor or provost for 
research. 

Wilson: Yes, that s right. No, it wasn t he. Somebody who is also 
vice president right now. 

McCreery: [C.] Judson King? 

Wilson: Jud King, Jud King. Somebody, maybe it was Jud King, I 

remember somewhere somebody in the administration said, well we 
have to have an acting dean now. At this point we want 
somebody who is beyond ambition. Oh, how about Wilson? 
[laughter] I liked that. 

McCreery: I m just finding an excerpt in the summer 1989 issue of the 

alumni newsletter and it does say here, "Provost King, provost 
for professional schools and colleges on the Berkeley campus, 



203 



Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 
McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 
McCreery: 
Wilson: 
McCreery: 



insists he wants an intensive search for the best possible 
candidates," et cetera. This is from your letter to the alumni 
from that period, when you were suddenly taking over again. 

Right. 

Well, what did you think of this idea of standing at the helm 
once again? 

Well, I guess somebody has to do it. Had the review started? 
I guess not. About this time began a period of continuous 
review. It went on for years and years and years until the 
end. There was a search. Was the search turned off? 
Suspended, I guess. 

Yes, it sounds as if there were various incarnations of it. In 
this same newsletter excerpt you write, "The search committee 
appointed to look for his successor," meaning Professor 
Berring s successor, "is chaired by K. Patricia Cross, 
professor in the School of Education." So I think that 
committee was the starting point. 

Oh, yes. I had some terrible complaint about Pat Cross. I 



thought that was a really incompetent committee, but I 
remember the details now at all. 



can t 



So you were once again taking on the job of acting dean and you 
wrote in this or a subsequent newsletter that, "Oh, maybe I ll 
be here until next summer." But of course it was a full two 
years or so that you-- 

Two years. It would have been longer if the retirement 
question hadn t come up, if VERIP [Voluntary Early Retirement 
Incentive Program] hadn t suddenly arrived. 

So that s indicative of the state of the search over this 
period. 

That s right. 

It was not coming to completion. 

It was going nowhere. 

Well, in 1989 then, when you came back as acting dean, what was 
the main focus at that point, knowing it was kind of a short- 
term thing? How did you approach it? 



204 



Wilson: The main focus, I looked at the situation and I found, you 

know, we ve got problems. First and foremost, we ve got money 
problems. We ve got heavy investment in computers, computer 
technology, online searching, and so on, and no money to pay 
for it. It was a really critical situation in 1989. So the 
question was what to do. We had to do something. So I started 
eliminating courses, eliminating part-time instructors. That s 
when I got--I already mentioned that I was charged with 
discrimination against the handicapped for firing, or not 
reappointing, a part-time lecturer. She claimed that I didn t 
reappoint her because she had glaucoma. Yes. So it goes. But 
the main problem at that point was simply money. We didn t 
have any. 

McCreery: Okay. So you had to jump in and do some rearranging of 
faculty, part-time appointees and so on, and courses 
themselves. 

Wilson: Yes. Then the reviews started. I mean the campus review 

started, because I remember going off to meetings of campus 
reviewers and meeting people here in South Hall. 

McCreery: Here s an alumni newsletter excerpt from spring of 90 saying, 
"We are in the process of being reviewed by an ad hoc committee 
appointed by the graduate council. The chair of the committee 
is Professor Robert Oliver of the industrial engineering and 
operations research department." 

Wilson: That s right, Oliver. The first of the review committees. 
McCreery: I wonder what effect all this had on faculty morale? 

Wilson: Well, reviews are not exceptional. Reviews are expected. 
Every department on campus is likely to be visited with a 
review periodically. As a matter of fact during this very 
period of time--I think it was during this period of time--a 
very old friend of mine stopped by to see me, a mathematician 
whom I d known as a student . He was here as part of a review 
team. They were reviewing the Department of Computer Science 
in the College of Letters and Science. 

The review ultimately led to the Department of Computer 
Science in the College of Letters and Science being closed or 
moved over to, merged with, the Department of Electrical 
Engineering in the College of Engineering. So no one is exempt 
from reviews. So it makes you nervous, but it isn t that you 
think you re being unfairly picked on because everybody gets it 
sooner or later. 



205 



McCreery: So there may have been some unease but nothing extraordinary at 
that point, in terms of the school s future? 

Wilson: I don t think anything extraordinary. Oliver was tough but 
friendly. He was a good reviewer from my point of view. 
Oliver was a happy choice. We knew him. Michael Cooper in 
particular, I think, knew him and he knew Michael Cooper and 
thought well of him. Oliver could be counted on to be 
understanding of, and sympathetic with, the kind of systems- 
oriented programs that Michael Cooper was interested in, and 
certainly in the general process of the computerization of 
information handling. He would understand all about that. So 
he was a knowledgeable and maybe well-disposed reviewer. 

I ve forgotten what the result of all of this was. I don t 
think that Oliver said, "Close the school down." He may 
probably have had a lot to say about what needed to be done to 
improve it . 

McCreery: But this process of being reviewed and of your being acting 
dean might have continued on even longer than 1991? 

Wilson: Well, the review did go on. 

McCreery: That s true, yes. Quite a lot longer. 

Wilson: Yes. Because even in 1993 Charles Faulhaber of The Bancroft 

Library was writing a report on the future appropriate research 
interests for the school. Now, I forget at that point whether 
they were talking about the School of Library and Information 
Studies or whether they had got to the point of saying there 
has to be a different school. But in 1993, two years after I d 
retired, I was still reading drafts of their report and making 
suggestions for additions to their report, suggestions which 
were actually taken. So part of their report I wrote, which I 
thought was ironic. 

So the reviewing just seemed to go on endlessly. There was 
another- -no, I guess there wasn t. There wasn t another ALA 
accreditation during this period was there? You referred to 
one later accreditation review. 

McCreery: Yes, there was one again in the--I m not certain I have a date 
right at hand. We talked about the earlier one when you were 
dean in the seventies but there was another one somewhere along 
in here . 

Wilson: Somewhere along in there, I can t remember when. 



206 



McCreery: That would just probably complicate the whole situation, I m 
certain. Well, do you recall at what point the alumni became 
concerned enough about the school s future to start becoming 
involved? Or does that stand out to you in any way? 

Wilson: No, that doesn t stand out. The alumni, as far as I m 

concerned, were always a recessive rather than a dominant 
force. They were not proactive. They didn t intervene, 
weren t organized to intervene. 



Retirement. 1991 



McCreery: I d like to talk a little bit about your decision to retire in 
1991. 

Wilson: Well, as far as I can remember now that was simply a matter of 
inducements. The university made very attractive offers to 
faculty members to get as many senior faculty members as 
possible to retire. As a matter of fact, I had lived my entire 
life in the expectation that when I retired I would be poor. I 
didn t know this, but I d been poor when I was young and I d 
been poor most of my life, and I assumed that I d be poor when 
I retired. But when the VERIP proposals came out they said, 
now let s just calculate how much your retirement income will 
be, the combination of Social Security and benefits from the 
[university] retirement system. And it turned out to be, good 
grief! I ll be rich! Rich! (laughter] In other words, with 
my own savings, and so on, no loss of income at all. You mean 
I can go on with this huge income and not have to work at all? 
[laughter] And that was attractive. That was attractive. 

McCreery: To someone who had worked constantly since the age of twelve- - 

Wilson: Exactly, exactly. 

McCreery: It must have seemed remarkable. 

Wilson: Remarkable, my goodness. You mean I get to get out of this? 
The thing is, I was still teaching. All this time I d been 
teaching, doing classroom teaching, and it was hard work. 
Classroom teaching was hard work. I worked at it. I didn t 
repeat things. I had to make up new things all the time and it 
was hard work. I was not unhappy at the prospect of being able 
to stop doing classroom teaching. Administration, well that 
was purely a chore. That was purelythere s a job that has to 
be done and somebody has to do it. You re in the job, you do 



207 



it. 
it. 



But it was certainly not something you do for the fun of 



The nice part of the job was working with doctoral students 
on dissertations or near-dissertations, and doing research, 
kind of independent free-floating research. Those I could keep 
on doing, and did keep on doing. 

McCreery: Okay, so the whole thing was very attractive to you for all 
these reasons? 

Wilson: Yes, very attractive package. It made me nervous when I went 
to all these meetings the university sponsored, these huge 
meetings. It looked like a thousand prospective retirees. 

McCreery: They did head for the exits in great numbers. 
Wilson: We did head for the exits. 
it 

McCreery: Well, I wonder, what did the school do when it learned that you 
were leaving the acting deanship in the midst of these many 
reviews and all these events? 

Wilson: Oh, I don t remember that it did anything. The question would 
be, who will do it next? I don t know how it was settled that 
Nancy Van House would do it next. But there weren t all that 
many alternatives. 

McCreery: Well, I know for one thing Professor Maron and Julia Cooke left 
the same time you did. 

Wilson: Right, correct. 
McCreery: So who was left? 

Wilson: Well, Harlan was here, but he d already served as acting dean 
and he would have no particular reason to want to do it again. 
Michael Cooper was always absolutely unwilling to get involved 
in that kind of stuff. And William Cooper was strictly a no- 
involvement kind of person. Ray Larson, no. Younger and 
certainly not an administrator. Not very many alternatives. 

McCreery: Okay. Of course, Professor Van House had the mixed blessing, I 
suppose, of staying in that job until 1995. It was quite a 
long acting deanship for her, four years 1 time. 



208 



Wilson: Yes. Well, you know, the school had not had a full-time 

regular dean since Michael Buckland went to University Hall and 
that was in what, 1984? So there was a period of ten or eleven 
years during which the school was without a regular dean, a 
full-time regular dean. Not good, not good. 

McCreery: I m thinking back to your earlier concerns that the school was 
vulnerable for various reasons and certainly this is one 
reason, a lack of clear leadership. 

Wilson: Yes, absolutely. See, looking back on it, Herring s half-time 
thing may really have done serious harm to the school. I mean 
treating the job for several years as something, "Oh, well, 
it s just something you do for a little bit of time while 
you re doing your serious work in the law school." That s not 
a good attitude if that s the way it s seen by the campus. 
Everyone would say, oh right, who needs--? 

McCreery: Well, 1 know this was a period, then, of further reviews, the 

academic planning board, and so on and so forth. You were 

retired of course, still active but notdid you teach any 
further after retirement? 

Wilson: No. 

McCreery: Okay, so that did hold true. 

Wilson: But I did a lot of work for doctoral students. 



"New" School: The Rise of SIMS 



McCreery: Yes, yes. But just in terms of the school s fate, I guess it 
was really in 1995 that the School of Library and Information 
Studies as you knew it was closed. Then its successor school, 
the School of Information Management and Systems, opened that 
year. Can you just comment on the outcome of all of this? 

Wilson: Yes. [laughter] It s interesting. I was looking at some 

pieces of paper, the list of courses which are formally offered 
in the new school, and then the list of courses which are 
actually taught in the school, and the difference is quite 
startling. 

If you look at the list of courses that are formally 
offered, that are on the books, it looks like this is really a 
continuation of the old school in the sense that there are 



209 

courses which are recognizably successors to the courses which, 
for me, were the core of the curriculum: the organization of 
materials, the selection of materials, the information service, 
what you do for people, and so on. So it looks like what had 
happened was that the school was given a new name and a new 
orientation but at the heart of the school was still a visibly 
similar professional core. What people would do for people 
would be recognizably the same kind of stuff. 

On the other hand, if you look at the courses which are 
actually taught, none of those courses are taught. There is 
one introductory, generalized course on organization and 
search, organization of information. One course. Only one. 
None of the other courses are actually offered. 

So what has happened is thattaken from a very self- 
centered point of view- -I came into the school and made a 
revolution, tried to make a revolution, by reorganizing the 
heart of the curriculum. I went out, they closed the school 
and dropped the heart. They said that they were keeping it, 
but then they didn t actually do it. They threw out the 
courses, or they don t teach the courses, which represented 
what used to be the core of the curriculum. 

What remains is something which--! no longer can recognize 
a profession at all. I can recognize a set of interesting 
topics and interesting problems, like the problems centering 
around intellectual property, problems centering around 
privacy, problems centering around the organization of large- 
scale computer networks, technological problems of big computer 
systems in general. But I got no sense whatsoever of what a 
person could claim as their professional expertise which they 
would offer to use on behalf of other people. So it s a real 
mystery to me what has actually happened. 

Now, it may be that the idea is, we re not going to define 
a profession. We re going to let things evolve because the 
world is changing so fast that any attempt we made would be out 
of date almost instantly. So we ll just coast for a while and 
something will turn up. But as it is now I can t really 
understand what anybody thinks the job is that people are being 
prepared to do. 

McCreery: This reminds me of something I saw in an early section of your 
book, Public Knowledge, Private Ignorance, where you discuss 
the notion of a profession and you say, "One of the hallmarks 
of a profession such as medicine or law is its claim to an 
exclusive right to practice a certain art, and the social 



210 



recognition of an occupation as a profession involves 
recognition of this right." 

Wilson: Yes, that s a kind of a standard sociological line on 

professions. You try to figure out what makes a profession 
special. How do you distinguish a profession from other kinds 
of occupations? 

McCreery: Another way to frame it is, a profession is something where 
there s a specific body of knowledge to master. 

Wilson: Right, that s right. Now it s very special too. It s got to 
be a body of knowledge which is easy enough to master so that 
you don t have to be a genius to do it. You ve got to be 
intelligent, but you don t have to be a genius to do it. It s 
got to be within the capacity of moderately able people. On 
the other hand it can t be too simple. It can t be so simple 
that a person can pick it up without any preparation or without 
any education at all, just pick it up on the job in a few days, 
something like that. So it s hard to define exactly how 
special that body of knowledge is. 

My problem with the new school is I can t see what it is, I 
can t even see what s being claimed. I see what s being said 
in the announcements and the description. The description fits 
perfectly descriptions which I used to give of what the 
librarian was. I said the librarian was a bibliographer. A 
bibliographer does these things. A bibliographer searches for 
things, selects, describes, organizes, and so on, presents. 

If you look in the catalog of the new school there s 
practically a word-for-word repetition of that. We are 
preparing a new profession of people who will do exactly that. 
The wording is not exactly my wording but it translates word 
for word, except that the courses in which we used to talk 
about "what you do when you do that" are not being taught. So 
it s quite extraordinary. Very interesting. 

McCreery: Now, just to compare, librarianship as you were teaching it 
earlier, was that a distinct profession? 

Wilson: [laughter] Well, a questionable one. A questionable one, yes. 
Not really, not really a profession. In another part of that 
book or one of the other books that I wrote, I addressed the 
question of library information service, of reference service 
in libraries, where the reference service is the answering of 
questions. I argued that, as offered in libraries, it was not 
a professional service at all. The librarians never took any 
responsibility for the correctness of the information that they 



McCreery : 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



211 



gave. If you said, how do you know that s so, they d say, it 
says so in the encyclopedia or it says so in this handbook. 

So again, the cognitive authority question? 

Yes, absolutely. The cognitive authority question. So as far 
as I was concerned, the librarian as reference librarian was 
definitely not offering a professional service. On the other 
hand, the librarian as organizer of information was arguably 
offering kind of a weak professional service. You know a lot 
of stuff? All right, what kinds of things do you know? Well, 
you know about what exists in the way of kinds of literature, 
you know about how literature is organized, you know about 
where you have to go to find out about it, you know about how 
it s accessible. You know things which are not widely known, 
and you can t be an absolute dummy and do it well. You have to 
be pretty intelligent to do it well. 

So you can argue that the bibliographical part of the 
service, the literature searching part, or the part in which 
literature search is the heart of it, say, this is arguably a 
profession but not a strong profession. 

So even the older course of instructionquestionable as a 
profession. Really, you ve made a career out of questioning. 

Out of questioning it, absolutely. [laughter] Yes, 
absolutely. So, to carry that over to the new situation you 
say, "Well, so if the old one wasn t a profession, what s the 
beef about you can t see what the profession is in the new 
one?" Fair enough, fair enough. Except that I can t see even 
what people propose to say, "I know how to do this for you." 
What are people able to do for somebody? I can t tell from 
looking at the program. 

Let s return for a moment to something we touched on, on 
another day, which is the new school s claim that it s 
preparing specialists of specific information. In other words, 
in some sense people who can not only retrieve information but 



specialize in knowing about its content, 
phrasing that very well-- 



I don t know if I m 



Yes, that s not, I think, what they claim. The claim is that 
they can evaluate information. They can ensure the value of 
information that s provided to people. This seems to me a 
wholly baseless claim. Entirely baseless. Nothing in the 
curriculum suggests that they know how to do this. Nothing in 
the curriculum suggests that anybody on the faculty has thought 



212 



about it except me. So I don t think they know what they re 
talking about. I mean this is simply idle talk. 

McCreery: This new school earlier this year graduated its first class of 
master s students. Do you have much knowledge of how all this 
is going? 

Wilson: No. 

McCreery: Any interaction with the new school? 

Wilson: No, I have no interaction with the new students of the new 
school. Well, I ve talked to one or two students, but they 
were asking me what I meant by saying what I said in this book 
or that book. 

McCreery: I see. Now, the new school s dean, Hal Varian, is an 
economist. 



Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Any thoughts on that, how it fits into this whole question of 
"What is the new school?" 

Wilson: Well, my guess is that his orientation is that of an academic 
economist. He s not geared to professional education at all, 
which is one of the things that makes me a little surprised 
that he s the dean. I may be quite mistaken about this. I may 
have him all wrong. But nothing that I know about his 
background or nothing I know about what he s writtenand I ve 
read some bits that he s written, and some of them interesting 
--but nothing there suggests any interest in professions. So, 
in particular, no interest in trying to develop a new 
profession, and no particular reason to think that he thinks 
that there s any need for a separate school different from, 
say, a combination of computer science and business. That s 
been my suspicion, and that s been kind of reinforced by such 
conversations as I ve had with faculty members who are now 
teaching. 

McCreery: Of course, these are issues that you ve been considering since 
the 1970s, the relationship of this place to those other 
schools and departments. 

Wilson: Oh absolutely, yes. 

McCreery: Now the new school, SIMS, was able to claim the library 

school s endowment. As a former dean, can you comment on that? 



213 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 
Wilson: 

McCreery; 



Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



Tricky. Very nice. Very smart. They did that at the 
University of Chicago too. When the library school at Chicago 
closed, their endowment, ten times the size of ours, was 
reclaimed by the university even though it had been 
specifically given to support the graduate library school. So 
that s cute if you can do it. [laughter] I don t have any 
sense of this except that this is the sort of consideration 
which makes administrators deliberately be ambiguous about what 
they re claiming about the relationship between current schools 
and previous schools. If you go too far in claiming that this 
has no relation whatsoever to the old school you may endanger 
your claim on endowments. Whereas if you say this is a 
modification of the old school you can claim the endowments. 
On the other hand, if you re too cozy with the old school 
that s bad for your new image. So it s a dance. 

Do you know the approximate size of that endowment? 

No. It wasn t very big. I m sure my figures are way off but a 
long time ago the relative figures, many, many years ago, were 
a million at Chicago and $200,000 here for Carnegie endowments, 
but I don t know whether that s-- 



Well, that gives us an idea. 

The relative size was what concerned me. 
had five times as much money as we had. 



I knew that Chicago 



Well, it is an interesting situation. I guess a spare few 
faculty have made the crossover and are teaching actively in 
the new school, who were here before, but the face of it seems 
so much changed. 

Well, a couple of the younger faculty members were simply told 
to go away, or their contracts were not renewed. The people 
who had tenure all stayed on, with one exception, one 
disagreeably difficult exception. 

I know I ve talked to Professor [Mary Kay] Duggan about her 
situation a little bit. 

That s what I was referring to. Everybody else stayed on. 
Now, one of the odd things about all this is that when the new 
dean came in, the question would be, "What will be the 
curriculum of the new school?" And the curriculum of the new 
school was designed by, entirely designed by, the holdover 
members of the old school. No new members at all. 



McCreery: Really? 



214 



Wilson: Yes. The new dean did notwell, he did, I think, suggest a 
curriculum but it was one drawn fromthe University of 
Michigan, where he had been? Michigan was it? But he didn t 
insist on this and in any case it wasn t a new proposal of his 
own. He had no curricular plans. He came in without 
curricular plans, which to me is really significant, of course, 
since when I came in, I came in with nothing but curricular 
plans . 

McCreery: Even on short notice. 
Wilson: Yes. [laughter] 

McCreery: Well, it certainly is a rather unique situation. Perhaps this 
particular solution to the whole question was different, but of 
course library schools across the country have closed or 
changed or been subsumed into other schools and departments. I 
know at UCLA, in a similar situation, the decision was made to 
fold the library school into the School of Education, where it 
now resides. Any comment on that solution? 

Wilson: I thought that was very dangerous, in the sense that the 

library school would be sitting there ready to be plucked by a 
dean who would say, "Ah yes, well, here are some nice faculty 
positions that can be moved around." If you re a department in 
a school, the head of the school has the power to move 
positions around and money around. So you lose autonomy and 
you re really in big danger. 

But apparently that s worked out very well [at UCLA]. My 
informant on that is Howard Besser, who is a professor who 
teaches there and has been teaching here too, and is one of my 
former doctoral students. He thinks that there they have made 
a very successful readjustment of curriculum and administrative 
connections, keeping the best of the old traditions of library 
education while changing to put a new face on themselves and 
present themselves as a school of information, or a department 
of information studies or something. 

So they have been doing the kinds of self re-creation that 
practically everybody has to at least pretend to be interested 
in doing. He thinks that they ve done it very successfully. 
Now, Howard is quite a radical person himself, so if he says 
they re doing well, I m inclined to take it seriously. 

McCreery: In any event, it s certainly a very different solution than the 
one that was made here. 

Wilson: A drastically different solution, yes. Drastically, yes. 



215 



McCreery: One last thing about Berkeley s choice. Do you think the 

faculty and the alumni were misled about what the new school 
would be, what it would do? 

Wilson: Yes. Well, maybe not misled, because maybe nobodythe outcome 
of the various reviewing efforts, including for instance this 
long document that I mentioned before from Charles Faulhaber 
detailing research interests, that would have been, I think, 
completely reassuring. I was reassured by it, particularly 
after they incorporated all of my own suggestions for research 
areas. [laughter] I say, oh yes, that sounds pretty good now! 
But yes, there s nothing here that we would be against. 



Everything that we re interested in is included here, 
for it, that s fine. 



Let s go 



So, so far as the research orientation of the new school, 
the promise of that report would have been entirely 
satisfactory to the faculty. Now, when it turns out that the 
actual faculty appointments that are going to be made seem to 
be going in another direction or that it looks as though you 
are in fact heading in the direction of a split between 
business and computer science, say, or business and law and 
computer science, and are not emphasizing what used to be the 
core or the central areas of information processing, 
management, handling, and so on, then I think you might say, 
well, maybe misled is not the right word, but things have not 
turned out the way people thought they were going to turn out. 



Serving on Academic Senate Committees, 1985-1988 



McCreery: Well, thank you. I did want to return to one other more 

personal area of your own faculty work before you retired, 
which was your service on a couple of Academic Senate 
committees. We talked about this briefly off tape but I wanted 
to hear your telling of chairing this committee on the unit 
value of courses. I think it was actually called Committee on 
Courses of Instruction. How did you get drawn into that work? 

Wilson: I was appointed to the committee several years before that and 
I served on the committee for four or fivefive years, I 
guess, in all. It s a committee of the Academic Senate, the 
faculty body. Most committees on the Academic Senate are 
purely advisory. They re talking committees. But that s an 
administrative committee. That committee has real power. It 
decides things. It approves all courses. If a department 
wants to offer a new course or wants to change the content of 



216 

an old course, or change anything about the details of offering 
an old course, they have to get approval of the Committee on 
Courses . 

The Committee on Courses approves all degrees awarded on 
the campus. They approve all degree programs. They approve 
Extension courses. They re in control of the educational 
enterprise in a lot of ways. So it s a very, very powerful 
committee. It s also a big committee, and for the first couple 
of years I was chairman of a subcommittee which oversaw all the 
professional schools and colleges on campus, oversaw all the 
course changes that they proposed. 

If 

Wilson: So for a couple of years I was making recommendations to the 
whole committee about all the professional schools on campus. 
After a couple of years I got a call from the Committee on 
Committees asking me if I d be chairman of the whole Committee 
on Courses. I said, "No, I couldn t possibly do that." I 
could not see myself standing up on the floor of the Academic 
Senate general meetings and addressing the Academic Senate as a 
whole, all these Nobel Prize winners and, you knowI m not 
going to talk to them. 

But the guy who was talking to me, a psychologist named 
Mark Rosenzweig I think, talked me into it. So I did it [1985- 
1987]. And that was the most prominent position I ever held on 
campus. It s much more important than being a dean of a school 
during this period of time. There were lots of things that 
happened during those two years. It was a year crowded with 
incidents in the Committee on Courses. A big thing was about 
the unit value of courses. My predecessor, an engineer, Dan 
Mote, had done something which at the time I thought was 
illegal and immoral, wicked and disgusting, and had outraged 
the campus, leading to the formation of a committee to review 
the Committee on Courses of Instruction. 

He had changed the rules governing the assignment of unit 
value to courses and he d done it in an odious way. The 
English department had said, "We want to give four units for 
these courses which have three lecture hours a week." And he 
said, "Well, the rules say that everything depends on how much 
time students put in. Three hours a week student time is good 
for a unit. You have to prove that." So the English 
department collected questionnaires and did surveys, and so on, 
and came back with evidence that their students were actually 
spending a lot of time on their courses, enough to justify the 
unit value under the rule . 



217 



At which point Dan Mote announced, "Well, sorry. We re 
changing the rules now retroactively. The number of units has 
to match the number of lecture hours exactly. No exceptions. 
Nothing. So you re out of luck, English department." Well, 
they were furious and everybody else thought this was 
outrageous. 

So my first act was to go off to the new review committee 
which had been appointed to review the Committee [on Courses]. 
I went off in some terrible, rainy afternoon. I was sick as a 
dog anyway, and I argued with these people. "Look, I think we 
can fix this ourselves. Give us a chance. Let me try to talk 
the committee into reversing." They said, reluctantly, "Okay. 
Try it. You better fix this up, though." 

So, over the next period of time, I don t remember now how 
long it took, I managed to persuade the committee that this had 
been a dreadful mistake, that we had no authority to change the 
rules. The rules were set by the statewide [Academic Senate]. 
And I finally persuaded them that this had been a mistake. 

Well, in the course of things we not only reversed Dan 
Mote s decision, we relaxed our actual practice and we said, 
"Okay, English department and other departments, just give us 
some indication that your students are actually doing the work 
and you can have more units for your courses." Department 
after department started raising the unit value of their 
courses in the humanities and the social sciences. Not in the 
sciences, however, and the scientists were furious. 

There was a big, angry meeting of the Academic Senate 
during which one of the scientists got up and proposed a motion 
against the Committee on Courses. The wording of the thing was 
unfortunate. He made a mistake. So I got up and argued 
against this thing, taking advantage of his bad wording, 
saying, "This is not going to help. You re not going to like 
this at all. This won t have the outcome you want." And I 
talked them out of it. 

Anyway, ultimately things quieted down but there had been, 
for a period of time, a real intense, furious, clash of 
interests between people on one part of the campus who wanted 
to run courses one way, and people on another part of the 
campus. See, this all has economic consequences because the 
number of units that you assign to your courses shows up in 
your departmental workload. It shows, say, we re doing a lot 
more work because students are taking a lot more units from us 
than they used to do. So we need more money, and things like 
that. A thing of serious economic consequences. 



218 



McCreery: Tell me why you thought such a change was needed in behalf of 
the social sciences and humanities. 

Wilson: They wanted to run things in a particular way. They wanted to 
say, "Look, in our field it is not a matter of going in and 
sitting in lectures and writing things down fast while the 
professor explains, and gives you formulas, and explains them 
and so on. It s a different kind of subject matter. We talk 
about things and we have to go off and read and think about 
them. We spend relatively more time reading and thinking about 
things than the scientists do. So we want to have our students 
spend less time proportionately in class, and more time outside 
reading and thinking and writing." 

And I thought, All right, why not? There certainly is a 
difference in subject matter. There certainly really, 
honestly, is a big difference in the kinds of things that go on 
in the classes, the kinds of things that are written in the 
books that people read. There are different kinds of books. 
You learn them in different ways. If the campus cannot 
recognize the differences between subject matters and styles of 
teaching, and reflect this in the way they evaluate the 
weightiness of a course, there s something wrong with the 
system. So that was my argument and I managed to sell that to 
the Committee on Courses. 

McCreery: Were you surprised? 

Wilson: Oh, I don t know. It was hard work because it was a large 

committee, deliberately drawn from all parts of the campus- 
very difficult people, some of them, to deal with. But I 
really got along well with that committee and we did a lot of 
things . There were a lot of things that happened during those 
two years . 

McCreery: Well, tell me about going back to the English department to 
announce the result. 

Wilson: Oh well, having got all of this done for Carol Christ I went 
back to tell her, "Tough fight, Mom, but we got the units for 
you." And she says-- 

McCreery: Excuse me, it was her course that set the whole thing in 
motion? 



Wilson: Her department. She was chairman, so she would have put in the 
request. And she said in a very offhanded way, "Oh thanks. 
Was there something else?" And I thought, well, that was kind 
of cool, perhaps too cool. That s all right, though. 



219 



That made me very prominent and that drew some unattractive 
comments from people. The secretary of the Academic Senate 
told me about a letter he got from a member of one of the 
science departments which essentially said, "Can t you do 
something to prevent people of that sort being made chair of 
committees? Do we have to suffer this sort of thing?" 

McCreery: Referring to you? 

Wilson: Referring to me. And the secretary wrote back harshly saying, 
"Cut it out." [laughter] But on the other hand, that s not 
surprising because I was responsible for the committee s doing 
something which angered lots of people on campus, deeply 
angered them. 

McCreery: Shaking things up, really. 
Wilson: Yes, absolutely. Yes. 
McCreery: Was that the main event then? 

Wilson: That was the big event, yes. There were a lot of other smaller 
events but-- 

McCreery: Did you enjoy that work once you got into it? 

Wilson: That was exciting. That was really exciting. It was 

exhausting but it was very exciting work. Yes, that was 
important stuff. Yes, I enjoyed that. 

McCreery: Kind of applying some ideas to a new setting, in a way. 

Wilson: Absolutely, yes. Absolutely. But also trying to get twenty- 
four people from all across the campus to agree on things, that 
was really something. 

McCreery: Now, what about your personal interests in the sense that this 
change may have affected unit value of courses here at the 
library school? 

Wilson: No, no. It didn t have anything to do with us. Nothing. As a 
matter of fact, it didn t have much to do with the school 
except that it may have been a bit of maybe unwelcome publicity 
for the school, because here s Wilson now regularly up there 
reporting to the Academic Senate, representing the Committee on 
Courses of Instruction, and people would think who is this guy 
and what department does he come from? 

McCreery: You were used to that. 



220 



Wilson: Yes. [laughter] 
McCreery: For better or worse. 
Wilson: For better or worse. 

McCreery: Now, you also chaired the senate committee called Council for 
Ethnic Studies Curricula, 1987-88. 

Wilson: Weird. That s weird, yes. How did I get on that? I don t 
know, but my main attempt there was to get rid of the 
committee. I forget what the circumstances were, but 1 thought 
that this was the wrong committee in the wrong place . In the 
administrative setup it was no longer serving an appropriate 
function, and whatever it was doing ought to be done somewhere 
else in the university, not in the Academic Senate. 

McCreery: Had it existed very long, do you know? 

Wilson: Probably since the seventies, since the Third World College 
revolutionary fervor. So about then. 

McCreery: Did you get rid of the committee successfully? 
Wilson: I can t remember. I think so, but I m not sure. 
McCreery: It s hard to recall the timing. 

Wilson: Yes, yes. It was such a very uncomfortable thing for me to be 
on , though . 

McCreery: Was that also a large committee? 

Wilson: No, that was small and mostly ethnically oriented. They would 
say, "What is he doing here?" [laughter] So it goes. So 
that s that. 

McCreery: Well, that was your career of chairing senate committees. 



Librarianship as Intellectual Platform; Scandinavian Conference 



McCreery: Well, maybe we ll return just a little bit more to your own 
interests and influences, and so on. At our last meeting we 
ended up talking about the relationship of your three books to 
one another and the progression of your ideas over a period of 



221 



years. I know you ve published many articles as well. I 
wonder, which do you consider your most important publications? 

Wilson: Oh, those books. Simply because there are three of them and 
they fit together. They re not independent books in a sense. 
They re all facets of a central subject matter. See, from my 
point of view it turned out that leaving philosophy and coming 
back to librarianship--even though I didn t expect it at the 
time, I had no idea at the time that it was going to work out 
like thisbut it turned out that the bibliographical core, the 
bibliographical problem, bibliographical center, provided a 
perfect platform from which to look at everything else in the 
world. 

A few overly enthusiastic classifiers and catalogers have 
said in the past, you know, the classifier is in charge of all 
of knowledge, all of knowledge. Well, just in the sense that 
you re working with a classification system which tries to 
cover all of knowledge, you know, and so you kind of 
enthusiastically think of yourself as being somehow 
knowledgeable about all of knowledge. Well, in the weakest 
possible sense you are, I guess. But there is a kind of a 
grain of sense to that position. 

If you start from the situation of people saying things 
about the world, trying to find out about the world, lying 
about the world, concealing facts about the world, and writing 
it all down, this is a good place from which to start asking 
questions about knowledge and the world of which it s knowledge 
of, and so on. So it turned out to be a wonderful central 
position, platform. Somebody reviewing an article that I wrote 
fairly recently said, "Wilson provides a wonderful platform 
from which to address a whole range of questions of information 
policy," and so on. I say, yes. That s what you need. You 
need the right platform, the right standing place. The 
position has got to be right and--so the books are central in 
the sense that they all represent different facets of the way 
things look from the central standing point. 

McCreery: Yes, "platform" is a good term. And of course it s widely used 
now in connection with computer applications, so it s kind of a 
tidy little connection there, shall we say. But even though 
you left philosophy behind, formally at least, it really seems 
to have been present in everything that you did. 

Wilson: Sure, sure. 

McCreery: One of your former students I talked to described you as a 
philosopher of information. 



222 



Wilson: Really? Yes, yes. People in Scandinavia seem to like me 
particularly, and I m described there as a philosopher of 
information too, I think. 

McCreery: Yes. Well, speaking of Scandinavia, tell me about that 

conference in Sweden in 1993, which was centered entirely on 
your own work. 

Wilson: Centered on me. Yes this was in 1993, the Nordic Conference on 
Information Authority and User Knowledge. It was held at a 
Swedish town called Boras, but it was sponsored by the 
University of Gothenberg and paid for by the Swedish 
government. I think the idea was that Swedish higher education 
had not had an information science component before. They were 
starting one at the University of Gothenberg they had a center 
for information studies or something. They felt that they had 
to convince the Swedish academic authorities that there was 
some depth to their subject and so they thought that they would 
import a visiting--! can t say it can I? They would import 
somebody from the outside to show the Swedes that there was 
something serious to all of this business, and so they imported 
me. I was the main speaker, and other people talked about me 
and talked about my work, and talked about the topics that I 
have written about. 

It was a two-day conference. My goodness, that was a big 
deal for me. That doesn t happen to people much. So that s a 
good way to go out. 

It s interesting. There are various symmetries here too, 
because when I was in philosophy, the first paper I published 
in philosophy I published in Norway, the Norwegian journal 
Inquiry, published in English. The editor [Arne Naess] had 
been here at Berkeley. There had been a back-and-forth 
movement from Norway and Finland and Sweden to Berkeley in the 
philosophy department. 

I knew that, and when I wrote my dissertation part of what 
I wrote was a commentary on the Norwegian philosopher s work on 
the subject of interpretation, which was my topic too. So I 
have a Norwegian connection from way back. 

But then it turns out that the Royal Danish School of 
Librarianship liked my first book very much and they used this 
as a textbook. They translated part of it into Danish. So I 
was known to them that way. And I was known in Finland because 
of the Danish connection, I guess, and in Sweden because the 
Danes had come into Sweden to set up the information center. 
So there s some kind of intellectual and stylistic fit of 



223 



temper, style, something, between what I do and what the 
Nordics like, what they do. 

McCreery: Were you happy with the presentation of your work in that 
conference context? 

Wilson: Yes, reasonably so. Sure. Yes. 

McCreery: Did they get it right? 

Wilson: Yes, reasonably right. Yes. 

McCreery: Well, it must have been quite an experience. 

Wilson: Yes. Yes indeed. [laughter] To be the center of it all, yes, 
absolutely. 

McCreery: I know that there was some publication of various articles and 
things that grew out of that conference. 1 saw a reference to 
an appreciation by Erland Munch- Peter sen, the fellow from the 
Danish school. 

Wilson: Yes, he s the one who organized the whole thing in the first 
place. Yes, they were going to publish the proceedings but 
that project was stopped by the Norwegian representative, Johan 
Olaisen, who was one of my doctoral students. But he had his 
own ambitions for that and so he threw out the articles that he 
didn t like and put in a lot of new ones that he did like and 
produced a new book. He s a promoter. He s in the Norwegian 
school of management. He teaches in the management school, not 
in a library school. Two of my doctoral students are in 
management schools, not in library schools, which is 
interesting, I think. 

McCreery: Well, I was curious about the differences that you noted in the 
Scandinavian system. 

Wilson: Oh yes, they re as different as can be. 

McCreery: Were there any surprises in the content of the conference or 
the after-effects? 

Wilson: No, not really. I don t think so. 

McCreery: Okay. Well, let s talk a little about the influence of your 
work on the careers of other students and colleagues. 

Wilson: I don t know. No, I can t talk about that. 



224 



McCreery: I think you mentioned to me off tape a former student here who 
is teaching at UCLA and basing some coursework on your research 
and writing. 

Wilson: Well, people do that. But I don t know about this. See, 

Howard Besser came back from UCLA after the first time he was 
teaching there and he said he had mentioned me to them, and he 
said to the students there, "Do you know Wilson? Do you ever 
hear of Patrick Wilson?" And they said, "Do we ever hear of 
him, we read him!" Besser said, "You read him?" "Of course we 
read him." So I didn t know that. You have no way of knowing 
these things. 

McCreery: I learned that a faculty member at the University of Toronto 

was trying to establish a whole center and curriculum based on 
your works, although you say it didn t carry forward as far as 
you know. 

Wilson: No, as far as I know that s gone because she didn t stay at the 
University of Toronto. 

McCreery: But it must be nice to hear occasionally about how your work is 
being used in the current day. 

Wilson: Yes. Yes, just a couple of weeks ago one of my former students 
said that one of his colleagues at another library school was 
reading one of my books for the first time and had a visitor, 
someone visiting from an English department someplace. The 
English department man picked up my book and just started 
reading it and read the whole thing and said, "If you ever get 
word to Wilson, tell him that he wrote a great book, and tell 
him that he writes like Jane Austen." [laughter] All right. 

McCreery: Which book was it? 

Wilson: I guess the first one, Two Kinds of Power. Well, really. 

McCreery: Well, that s fairly pleasant. 

Wilson: Yes, I could take that all right. 

McCreery: Well, I know that we ve really touched on this at various 

times, but I just wonder how would you summarize the way that 
you made your mark on the way librarians think about themselves 
and about their work? Any way to do that? 

Wilson: No. See, my problem is that I don t have a clear picture of 
librarians as a group. I don t think one can get a clear 
picture of librarians as a group, so I couldn t generalize. I 



225 



know that there are people in the library community, 
particularly in the academic libraries, who have read what I 
have written and who think it s good. Yes, it may be fair to 
say that they d say, "Yes, Wilson is our philosopher." But I 
don t know that it actually makes any difference to anybody. 



have no way of knowing that . 
that. 



I don t know how you would know 



McCreery: I know that you re accustomed to thinking about things in terms 
of questions and the answers to questions, and not necessarily 
looking at events or effects on people, and so on. 

Wilson: I don t know, the cataloging department of the Library of 
Congress publishes a Cataloging Service bulletin, used to 
publish it anyway. I haven t seen it for years and years and 
years. One time I came across a recent issue of Cataloging 
Service and it says, "We are considering changing our policy on 
the assignment of subject headings at multiple levels of 
hierarchy to books. For the argument on this see Patrick 
Wilson s argument in Library Trends," or whatever it was. I 
forget what journal it was. And that s the one time I ve seen 
something definitely in a practice connection where they say, 
"Look at what he says." 

McCreery: It s interesting to me that over the course of your career you 
landed rather squarely in the information science side of 
things . 

Wilson: As opposed to what? [laughter] 

** 

Wilson: The way I ve seen this for some time, the way I ve seen the 
situation so far as research interests and intellectual 
orientations, or the way I described it in Sweden in the second 
of the two talks that I gave, was that under information 
science it was hard to decide whether to talk about information 
science or information studies. I dislike talking about 
information science at all because I thought that what was done 
under that rubric was generally engineering, making things, 
making systems, designing systems, rather than science, just 
looking at the world to see how things work. 

On the other hand, the part of the study which had to do 
with looking at the world to see how things work was directed 
at the human world, at the social world, at the cognitive 
world, at the economic world, the political world. So the 
information studies part of the package of information 
production, distribution, utilizationthat was the title Fritz 



226 

Machlup gave it. He was the Austrian economist who started a 
lot of this for a lot of us by writing a book in 1960 or 
thereabouts on the production and distribution of knowledge in 
the United States, and then later on several volumes of work on 
the production, distribution and utilization of knowledge. 

If you start thinking, as he did--he, along with a lot of 
other Austrian economists of the 1930s and forties, 
incidentallyif you start thinking in terms of information as 
something produced, distributed, consumed, utilized and you 
say, how does this work? How does this all work? You 
instantly find yourself just embroiled in a mad, complicated 
tangle of social institutions, of social patterns, of cognitive 
patterns, educational patterns, stylistic, cultural patterns. 
It s an endless and endlessly complicated and endlessly 
fascinating thing. 

What I was pointing out in Sweden, and I would point out in 
connection with this school too, for instance, is that the 
engineering side of the thing, the information science or 
really information technology, is relatively well defined and 
relatively well shaped, and it s relatively easy to say where 
we are at a given time and what would be desirable to do next, 
what s the next thing to do. 

On the other side of things, the information studies, it s 
not well defined. It s just huge, boundless, open. It s too 
much for anybody to grasp. And that makes difficulty for 
educational institutions like this one that don t know what to 
do with this. 

For instance, there s a branch studying the diffusion of 
innovations. Everett Rogers wrote a well-known book that s 
gone through many editions called The Diffusion of Innovations. 
Well, that s an important work in this area of information 
studies. How do people find out about new things, new 
technologies, new ways of doing things, and so on? How do you 
explain the differences in the degrees to which they re ready 
to adopt them or not adopt them. This is a branch of 
information studies, but it s just one little tiny current in a 
huge river of stuff. In some places this would be considered 
part of communication departments. So communication 
departments are one element of all this. But communication 
departments are historically and traditionally really very 
confined and intellectually not daring at all. Sociology of 
science is another branch of this. Just one, just one. 

McCreery: We talked about some of these emerging disciplines, shall we 
call them. 



227 



Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: But as you say, here in the library school you ve found a 

suitable platform for examining any and all of these questions. 

Wilson: Exactly, absolutely. Any and all of these. [laughter] 

McCreery: I guess 1 was kind of getting at the fact that there is this 

whole engineering side and you recognized it as such early on, 
but I wonder, was it a constant process of reconciling your 
interest in ideas with this whole, kind of, hardware, 
quantitative engineering? 

Wilson: I didn t find that difficult to do. It was not a difficulty. 
I mean, here is the hardware and people are going to be very 
silly about this and the engineers are typically quite dumb 
about users of things. They will have no notion what things 
might be good for, what people might want to use things for, 
what would be comfortable to use, what would not be comfortable 
to use. Those engineers need a lot of help so we d better be 
standing around ready to help the engineers, just from the 
point of view of seeing that progress is made in getting access 
to and control over information. 

McCreery: But is it fair to say that no matter what the changes in 

technology itself and in hardware, your questions about the 
ideas behind it can stay the same? 

Wilson: Oh yes, they re relatively independent of the technology. I 
mean, the current technology moves fast, it moves fast, but 
beyond that there s a big panoply of things that are pretty 
much the same. It s very amusing, for instance, thinking of 
the future of information service. Nowadays, if you look in 
ordinary magazines this week s issue of Newsweek magazine has 
a page on information searches in which they talk about 
browsers and directories, and they talk about the importance of 
companies that hire people tothey don t use the wordbut to 
classify things. The commercial firms have rediscovered 
classification and subject indexing. They call this "ontology" 
and the people who do it are ontologists. 

They re also discovering the idea of recommended reading 
lists. These are navigators. You need navigators through the 
Web. It s wonderful to watch the reinvention of things which 
librarians have been doing for generations, things being 
reinvented in a completely different context, in a commercial 
context. 

McCreery: Yes, very much so. 



228 



Wilson: 

McCreery : 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 

Wilson: 

McCreery: 
Wilson: 



McCreery: 



Wilson: 



So this is the soft technology. The hard technology of the 
physical objects and the programming and stuff, that changes 
fast too, but still-- 

What was your relationship to the hard technology personally? 
Do you remember when you got your first computer? 

I don t have a computer. 
No? 

Only in the office. Sure, I remember the school was 
temporarily down on Oxford Street. 

During the [seismic] renovation of South Hall? 

Yes, during the renovation. I got a PC and learned to use 
WordPerfect for word processing. It took several days, not 
very long, a couple of days maybe. I was an instant convert, 
absolutely instant convert. But that s to the flexibility, to 
the astonishing flexibility of using computer-based word 
processing systems. Because just before I did that I had spent 
some weeks with pieces of paper on the floor. I was cutting 
and pasting. I was putting together a speech that I was going 
to give in Los Angeles. All this cutting and pasting was 
driving me crazy, and here the computer allowed me to do 
cutting and pasting. Oh, my God. I couldn t believe it. So I 
was an absolutely instant convert to that. 

But I come to stopping points with technology. I m eager 
to learn up to a point, and then suddenly something will turn 
off and I will say, okay that s it. I ve had enough. You go 
ahead, I have to stay here. I ll just say enough is enough for 
me. 



Fair enough, 
taken you? 



Now, recently where have your research interests 



Well, they took me down a line which is not unexpected from 
where I d been. I started thinking about information overload, 
simply about the quantity, and thinking about how scholars, and 
scientists in particular, do and would, maybe should, respond 
to information overload, trying to describe what the problems 
might be, what the responses might be. And in particular, try 
to reconcile the phenomenon of information overload with what 
seemed to be the one philosophical requirement, absolute 
requirement, of rationality on scientific behavior, which was 
always make use of all relevant information whenever you re 
arriving at any conclusion, decision, and so on. This has been 



229 



the definition of rational behavior, to make use of all the 
relevant information. 

Well, now, under conditions of overload it quickly turns 
out--you can t do it. So, all crazy. So all scientists are 
irrational. Now, this immediately sets up a huge problem, 
because that requirement of all relevant information, it s 
something that my colleagues in this room, Bill Maron and Bill 
Cooper, they ve always taken this as the definition of the 
situation. But not just them. Everybody else does too who 
writes about rationality. So it s just built deeply into 
people, the Western understanding of the notion of rationality, 
that all relevant information has got to be used. 

So here s a problem. That absolute requirement meets 
information overload. Well, interesting. So I worked on that 
for several years and wrote a series of papers, half a dozen 
papers published. And that was the end of that. I m finished 
with that now. 

McCreery: Okay. Were those questions crossing over noticeably into other 
fields again in terms of your audience? 

Wilson: Well, this is something which dangerously involves everybody 

because this is the sort of thing which dangerously steers you 
in the direction of the sociology of knowledge. When you start 
thinking about, look how people in factfor instance, people 
in fact will simply say we can ignore this stuff. Oh, let s 
just forget about this. Economists, for instance, will say, 
"If you re doing theoretical economics, it s best not to think 
about the actual situations. It s best not to think about 
actual organizations. It just messes up your mind." They ll 
say this, they ll say this. Now, the more you think about 
this, the more you think this is worth thinking about a lot. 
[laughter] So this is something which again- -platforms. This 
gets at everything. 

McCreery: And perhaps again were you raising questions that people didn t 
want to think about? 

Wilson: Yes. 

McCreery: Didn t want to hear. You ve had fun doing that, haven t you? 

Wilson: Yes. 



230 
Bookends; Concert (1945) to Conference (1993) 



McCreery: I wonder what it is about your body of work and your ideas that 
you think is most lasting, or that you would like to be? You 
don t like these kinds of questions, do you? 

Wilson: Doesn t do any good. Lasting is not up to me. If anything 

lasts more than ten minutes it may be something that is, as far 
as you re concerned, entirely irrelevant. Something 
accidental, something you hadn t thought of, something you 
didn t realize you d said. 

McCreery: But you can see why I m interested in your idea on the question? 
Wilson: Yes, well, maybe. 
McCreery: What do you think? 

Wilson: I don t think. I have no expectations. My expectation is 
immediate oblivion, immediate forgetting. 

McCreery: Well, you ve been consistent in that regard, haven t you? 

Wilson: Yes, I think so. Yes. It s just a matter of luck if anything 
else happens. Pure luck. 

McCreery: Well, you re still coming to the school weekly and still a 
little bit involved with doctoral students? 

Wilson: Marginally, yes. I m still one and a half doctoral students 
involved. 

McCreery: That s great though, since that was such a great pleasure of 
your career. 

Wilson: Yes. And Nancy Van House has had, for a long time off and on, 
a reading group that I ve been participating in and that s been 
a great pleasure. She s turned the reading group into a formal 
seminar for the spring, and I ll sit in on that. 

McCreery: So you ll be in the classroom, if not in the old way. 
Wilson: Not in the old way, but yes. 

McCreery: That s something to look forward to since you got so much out 
of working with students. 

Wilson: Yes, absolutely. 



231 



McCreery: Well, I wonder what else I should have asked you? 
Wilson: Hard to tell. That was probably enough. 

McCreery: Well, you ve had quite an interesting time of it. I ve really 
enjoyed hearing about--! think what stands out is your tendency 
to ask questions about long established things. 

Wilson: I guess, yes. 

McCreery: "Why are we doing this?" 

Wilson: Why are we doing this, yes. [laughter] That has been 
habitual. I don t know why. 

McCreery: Well, at least you ve had a chance to ask those questions and 

to try out some new things by virtue of the positions you held. 

Wilson: Yes, I ve been lucky. 
McCreery: Have you? 

Wilson: Oh, I think so. I was thinking bookends. I gave you that 

[printed] program, that piano recital that I did when I was 

sixteen or seventeen. That s one end and this is the other 
end. 

McCreery: The Nordic Conference. 

Wilson: Yes, the Nordic Conference. Between those two. Could have 
been worse. 

McCreery: Well, the clock is striking noon. It s causing a reaction in 
you. It does seem we ve reached a stopping point, so if you 
don t think of anything else that you d like to say? You ve 
been very kind about letting me take you rather slowly through 
this whole process. I appreciate it very much and have enjoyed 
it very much. 

Wilson: Good, well. All right. 
McCreery: Thank you. 
Wilson: Okay. 



Transcribed by Rex Adams 

Final Typed by Grace Robinson and Jennifer Thomson 



232 
TAPE GUIDEPatrick G. Wilson 



Interview 1: August 6, 1999 

Tape 1, Side A 1 

Tape 1, Side B 8 

Tape 2, Side A 17 

Tape 2, Side B not recorded 

Interview 2: August 13, 1999 

Tape 3, Side A 27 

Tape 3, Side B 35 

Tape 4, Side A 45 

Tape 4, Side B not recorded 

Interview 3: August 20, 1999 

Tape 5, Side A 55 

Tape 5, Side B 64 

Tape 6, Side A 74 

Tape 6, Side B not recorded 

Interview 4: August 27, 1999 

Tape 7, Side A 85 

Tape 7, Side B 93 

Tape 8, Side A 103 

Tape 8, Side B not recorded 

Interview 5: September 3, 1999 

Tape 9, Side A 112 

Tape 9, Side B 120 

Tape 10, Side A 128 

Tape 10, Side B not recorded 

Interview 6: September 10, 1999 

Tape 11, Side A 139 

Tape 11, Side B 148 

Tape 12, Side A 158 

Tape 12, Side B not recorded 

Interview 7: September 17, 1999 

Tape 13, Side A 167 

Tape 13, Side B 176 

Tape 14, Side A 185 

Tape 14, Side B 195 

Interview 8: September 24, 1999 

Tape 15, Side A 197 

Tape 15, Side B 207 

Tape 16, Side A 216 

Tape 16, Side B 225 



233 APPENDIX 



VITA 



PATRICK WILSON 

Professor Emeritus, School of Library and Information Studies 
University of California at Berkeley 
Berkeley, CA 94720 

(510) 642-1477 

Born 29 December 1927, Santa Cruz, California 

Education: B.A. (Philosophy), 1949; B.L.S., 1953; Ph.D. 

(Philosophy) , 1960: all University of California, Berkeley 
Dissertation: On Interpretation and Understanding 

Professional Experience: Librarian, General Library, University 
of California, Berkeley, 1953-1959 (Librarian for South Asia 
Studies, 1954-1959) ; Assistant Professor, Philosophy 
Department, University of California, Los Angeles, 1960- 
1965; Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, 
School of Librarianship (later, School of Library and 
Information Studies) , University of California, Berkeley, 
1965-1991; Dean, 1970-1975; Acting Dean, 1989-1991 

PUBLICATIONS (Partial list) 
BIBLIOGRAPHIES 

Government and politics of India and Pakistan, 1885-1955: a 
bibliography of works in western languages. Berkeley: 
South Asia Studies, Institute of East Asiatic Studies, Univ. 
of California, 1956. 

South Asia: a selected bibliography on India, Pakistan, 
Ceylon. New York: American Institute of Pacific Relations, 
1957. Revised ed. published 1957. 

Science in South Asia, past and present: a preliminary 
bibliography. New York: Foreign Area Materials Center, 
University of the State of New York, 1966. 

MONOGRAPHS 

Two kinds of power: an essay on bibliographical control. 
(University of California publications: librarianship, 5) 
Berkeley, 1968. Reprint: California Library Reprint Series 
edition, 1978. Chapter 5 reprinted in: Theory of subject 
analysis, a sourcebook. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries 



234 
Unlimited, 1985. 

Public knowledge, private ignorance: toward a library and 
information policy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. 

Second-hand knowledge: an inquiry into cognitive authority. 
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. (American Society for 
Information Science Best Information Science Book award for 
1983) 

COLLECTIONS 

For information specialists: interpretations of reference 
and bibliographic work: Howard D. White, Marcia J. Bates, 
Patrick Wilson. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1992. 

Information science: from the development of the discipline 
to social interaction. Johan Olaisen, Erland Munch- 
Petersen, and Patrick Wilson, eds. Oslo: Scandinavian 
University Press, 1996. 

ARTICLES 

"Austin on knowing," Inquiry (Oslo) 3 (1960), 49-60. 
"Quine on translation," Inquiry (Oslo) 8 (1965), 198-211. 
"The need to justify," Monist 50 (1966), 267-80. 

"Situational relevance," Information storage and retrieval 
9 (1973), 457-71. 

"Some fundamental concepts of information retrieval," Drexel 
library quarterly 14 (1978), 10-24. 

"On the use of the records of research," Library quarterly 
49 (1979), 127-45. (With Mona Farid) 

"Utility-theoretic indexing," Journal of the American 
Society for Information Science 30 (1979) , 169-70. 

"The end of specificity," Library resources and technical 
services 23 (1979), 116-22. 

"Limits to the growth of knowledge," Library quarterly 50 
(1980) , 4-21. 

"The catalog as access mechanism: background and concepts," 
Library resources and technical services 27 (1983), 4-17. 
Reprinted in: Foundations of cataloging: a sourcebook. 
Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1985. 

"Bibliographical R&D," in: The Study of information: 
interdisciplinary messages, edited by Fritz Machlup & Una 



Mansfield. New York: Wiley, 1983. pp. 389-97. 

"Pragmatic bibliography," in: Back to the books: 
bibliographic instruction and the theory of information 
sources. Chicago: ACRL, 1983. pp. 5-14. Reprinted in: 
For information specialists: interpretations of reference 
and bibliographical work, by Howard D. White, Marcia J. 
Bates, & Patrick Wilson. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1992. 

"The face value rule in reference work," RQ 25 (1986), 468- 
75. 

"The second objective," in: The Conceptual foundations of 

descriptive cataloging, edited by Elaine Svenonius. San 

Diego: Academic Press, 1989. pp. 5-16. (Also published in 
Japanese. ) 

"Interpreting the second objective of the catalog," Library 
Quarterly 59 (1989), 339-53. (Also published in Japanese, 
in Technical Services (Tokyo) no. 30, June 1992, pp. 7-20. 

"Form subdivisions and genre," Library Resources & Technical 
Services 34 (1990) , 36-43 (with Nick Robinson) . 

"Copyright, derivative rights, and the First Amendment," 
Library Trends 39 (1990), 92-110. 

"Bibliographic instruction and cognitive authority," Library 
Trends 39 (1991), 259-70. 

"Searching: strategies and evaluation," in: For 
information specialists, by Howard D. White, Marcia J. 
Bates, & Patrick Wilson. Norwood, N. J. : Ablex, 1992, pp. 
153-181. 

"The value of currency," Library Trends 41 (1993), 632-43. 

"Communication efficiency in research and development," 
Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 
(1993) , 376-82. 

"Unused relevant information in research and development," 
Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46 
(1995), 45-51. 

"Some consequences of information overload and rapid 
conceptual change," in: Information science, Johan Olaisen, 
Erland Munch-Petersen and Patrick Wilson, eds. Oslo: 
Scandinavian University Press, 1996, pp. 21-34. 

"The future of research in our field," in: Information 
science, Johan Olaisen, Erland Munch-Petersen and Patrick 
Wilson, eds. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996, 
pp. 319-24. 



236 



"Interdisciplinary research and information overload," 
Library Trends 45 (1996), 192-203. 

"Patrick Wilson: a bibliographer among the catalogers, " 
Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 25 (1998) , 305-16 



INDEX--Patrick G. Wilson 



237 



Academic Senate, UC Berkeley, and 

senate committees, 153-154, 

159-161, 215-220 

accreditation, 154, 175-178, 205 
Ackerman, Jerry, 16-17 
Adams, George Plimpton, 43-44 
administration of libraries, 

courses in, 50 
American Library Association, 50, 

62, 88, 146, 154, 175-178, 194 
Association for Library and 

Information Science Education, 

146 



computerization in libraries, 

167-168 

Coney, Donald, 101-103 
Cooper, Michael D. , 113, 124, 

125-127, 128, 132, 134, 152, 

184, 185, 189, 198, 205, 207 
Cooper, William S., 110, 124-125, 

128, 152, 158-159, 207, 229 
Coulter, Edith M. , 53-54 
Crooks, Afton E., 197-198 
Cross, K. Patricia, 203 
Cubie, Crete (Fruge), 85, 86, 

110, 135, 155 



Baker, Nicholson, 174 

Bayley, Edwin R. , 148 

Berman, Joan, 122 

Berring, Robert C., 192, 201-202, 

208 

Besser, Howard, 214, 224 
bibliography, courses in, 51, 86, 

91, 97, 121-122 
Blake, Fay M. , 123-125, 126, 154- 

155, 163, 164 

Bourne, Charles P., Ill, 125, 153 
Bowker, Albert H., 147, 149 
Brian, Ray, 50, 51, 53 
Buckland, Michael K. , 130, 133, 

185, 187-189, 190, 197-200, 208 
Burton, Hilary D., 179, 181 



California Library Association, 

100, 120 

Galloway, Doris H., 201 
Capitola Public Library, 21 
card catalog, online (UC s 

Melvyl), 108 

Carnegie Corporation, 150-151 
cataloging, courses in, 51, 84- 

89, 91, 97 
censorship, 166 
Chernin, Milton, 148 



Dale, Lilah (mother), 1, 3, 7, 14 
Danton, J. Periam, 48-49, 50, 93, 

150-151, 157, 179 
Dennes, William Ray, 43, 44-45, 

73 

depression, effects of, 4-7 
Doe Library, UC Berkeley, 25, 31, 

33-39, 40-41, 45-48, 54-58, 114 
Dowd, Sheila, 57-58 
Duggan, Mary Kay, 213 
Durham, Mae. See Roger. 



Eberhard, Wolfram, 26 
Edwards, Paul, 73 



faculty appointment and promotion, 

UC, 158-162 

Faulhaber, Charles B., 205, 215 
Ford Foundation, 58, 60, 65, 66 
Free Speech Movement, 99, 101, 

112 
Fruge, Crete. See Cubie. 



Harlan, Robert D., 82, 85, 86, 
93, 104-105, 135, 155, 157, 
158, 180, 200, 207 



238 



Hawley, Portia Griswold, 53, 135 

Hayes, Robert M. , 90 

Held, Ray E., 93, 104, 157 

hermeneutics , 72 

Heyns, Roger, 112, 119, 129-130, 

147, 148-149 
Higher Education Act of 1965, 

132, 151-152 

Hodges, Theodora, 155, 158 
Holther, William B., 30 
Hume, David, 28, 69, 71 



India, bibliography on. See 

Modern India Project. 
Institute of Pacific Relations, 

62 
Institute of International 

Studies, UC Berkeley, 58 
Institute of Library Research, UC 

Berkeley. See School of 

Librarianship . 
internment of Japanese Americans, 

World War II, 7-8 



Jaffe, Philip, 61 



Kalish, Donald, 75-76, 77 
Kaplan, Renee, 79 
Kaplan, Abraham, 76 
Kerr, Clark, 112 
King, C. Judson, 202-203 



map library, UC Berkeley, 34-35, 

45-46, 47-48, 55-58 
Markley, Anne Ethelyn, 51, 81, 

84-89, 91, 93, 101, 110, 157, 

185 
Maron, M. E. (Bill), 92, 105-111, 

125, 126, 152, 158, 207, 229 
Maslach, George J., 137, 147-148, 

149, 153, 154, 187 
Mason, Theodore C. (brother), 3 
Master Plan for Higher Education, 

California, 139 

Mates, Benson, 68-69, 72-73, 74 
Mauchlin, Errol, 150-151 
McCreery, Katherine R. , 48, 52 
McFarland, Jean, 55, 58 
Melvyl online card catalog, UC, 

108 
Merritt, LeRoy C., 78, 81-83, 85, 

90, 92, 93, 94, 110, 188 
Miles, Josephine, 29 
Mitchell, Sydney B., 52, 54 
Modern India Project, 58-66, 67, 

79, 86, 106 

Montague, Richard, 31-32, 75, 77 
Morse, Philip McCord, 113 
Mosher, Fredric J., 51, 85, 86, 

93, 135, 157, 160 
Mote, C. Daniel, 216-217 
Munch-Petersen, Erland, 223 



Naess, Arne, 68-69, 72, 222 
Nystrom, Ruth, 48 



Larson, Ray, 207 

Lewis, Clarence Irving, 44 

Librarianship, School of, UC 

Berkeley. See School of 

Librarianship . 
Library of Congress, 60, 62, 63, 

75, 225; classification system 

for books, 57-58, 195 
Library Quarterly, 98, 184 
loyalty oath, 42-43 
Lynch, Beverly, 187 



Olaisen, Johan Leif, 223 
Oliver, Robert, 204-205 
online card catalog, UC (Melvyl), 
108 



Pagenhart, Tom, 10 

Pakistan, bibliography on. See 

Modern India Project. 
Park, Richard L., 58-66, 75 
Park, David, 34 
Park, Lydia, 33-34 
Poleman, Horace, 63 



239 



Porterfield, Helen Morison, 34, 

45-46, 55, 81 
Pratt, Virginia, 173-174 
public libraries, role and 

services of, 14-15, 20-22, 

165-166 



Raleigh, John Henry, 118-119, 129 

Redner, Harry, 195 

Roger, Mae Durham, 120, 122, 148, 

155, 164 

Rosenberg, Victor, 158-162 
Rosenzweig, Mark, 216 
Roy, M. N., 59, 64 
Ryle, Gilbert, 66-67, 68, 69, 71 



San Francisco Public Library, 124 

San Francisco Symphony, 9 

Santa Cruz Public Library, 14-15, 

20-22, 165 
Sass, Louis, 50-51 
Scalzo, Geraldine, 48 
School of Information Management 
and Systems, UC Berkeley, 194, 
208-215 
School of Librarianship, UC 

Berkeley; deanship of, 90-95, 
112-137, 184-189, 200-206; 
doctoral programs, 131-133, 
141-142, 178-181; field studies 
program, 123-124; Institute of 
Library Research, 92, 105-112, 
152-153; joint-degree programs, 
120-121, 141, 143-144; Library 
School Library, 173-174 
Sedelow, Sally, 129 
Sedelow, Walter, 129 
sexual orientation issues, 30-31, 

118-119 

Shaw, Jo, 118 
Shively, Donald H. , 68 
Shoffner, Ralph M. , 106-108 
Sisler, Delia J., 52 
Skipper, James E., 103, 104 
Smith, Eldred R., 103-104 
South Asia, bibliography on, 86. 
See also Modern India Project. 



South Hall, 37, 113, 114, 115, 
119-120, 173, 204, 228 

Strong, Edward A., 74 

Svenonius, Elaine, 98 

Swank, Raynard Coe, 78, 88, 90- 
95, 100, 101, 105, 108, 109, 
112-114, 115-116, 118, 119, 
120, 124, 129, 137, 140, 158 



Taylor, Angus, 99 

Teggart, Frederick J. , 34, 140 

Teggart, Richard, 34-38, 41, 45, 

46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 

59, 67, 166 



University of California, 

Berkeley. See Academic Senate, 
UC Berkeley; Doe Library, UC 
Berkeley; Free Speech Movement; 
Institute of International 
Studies, UC Berkeley; Institute 
of Library Research, UC 
Berkeley; Modern India Project; 
School of Librarianship, UC 
Berkeley. 

University of California, Los 
Angeles, 73-80, 83, 90, 95, 
98, 99, 106, 107, 123, 130, 
145, 157, 187, 214, 224 

University of California, Office 
of the President, 106, 108, 
111-112 

Uridge, Margaret D., 33 



van de Wetering, George, 15 
van den Berg, Jacques, 9 
Van House, Nancy A., 207, 230 
Varian, Hal, 212 
Voigt, Melvin, 102 



Wheeler, John T., 116-117, 119, 

128, 137 

White, Howard D., 180-181 

Wight, Edward A., 104 

Wildavsky, Aaron, 143 



240 



Wilson, David (father), 1, 3, 4- 

5, 6, 7, 14, 19, 39, 69-70 
Wilson, Tom (brother), 4, 40 
Worden, Helen. See Porterfield. 
Work, Geraldine, 20-21 
World War II, effects of, 7-8, 
19-20 



Yost, Robert M. , 75, 79 



Laura McCreery 



Laura McCreery is a writer and oral history consultant whose 
interests include California social and political history, 
history of libraries, public policy, higher education, and 
journalism. She has been a consulting interviewer /editor at 
ROHO since the inception of the Library School Oral History 
Series in 1998. She has also done oral history consulting, 
project management, training, interviewing, and editing for 
such clients as the East Bay Regional Park District, 
Prytanean Alumnae, Inc., and the Berkeley Historical 
Society. She holds a B.A. in Speech Communication from San 
Diego State University and an M.S. in Mass Communications 
from San Jose State University. 



