Interview with Paul Wasserman Regarding the Early History of the College of Information Studies (transcription)

by: Esther Herman Taped: January 11, 1995

The College of Library and Information Services was originally called The School of Library and Information Services.

Esther Herman:
I have heard this story before and you have told this story before but talk about how it started and how the people came to you and their motivation in having the school here.

Dr. Wasserman:
Well, it really evolved as a consequence of the political sensitivity of librarians in the state, who had been without a formal academic education sequence for librarians. In the early part of the century, the larger institutions - public and academic libraries, would take responsibility for providing the apprenticeship opportunities for librarians. Over time, as the organizations grew and more people were needed, it became a more burdensome matter to have to prepare newly hired college graduates and requiring the head of the reference or cataloging department to train reference librarians or catalogers. The direction in professional education in the U.S. thru our history has always been to expect state universities to assume responsibility for affording educational opportunities for professional occupations. So, led by the library leaders in the state who were very finely attuned to how to make changes, they worked many, many years to get the legislature to enact their will. After many committees, and arduous effort from the 1930's to the 1960's, they ultimately succeeded in getting a climate of interest from the legislature based on the notion that the State required a professional education program for the library field and that the natural site for it would be the University of Maryland. There was still the question of where to lodge the education program. There were differences of opinion, as between the major population center of the state, Baltimore, and College Park, the main academic and research center of the University. While there were already a number of professional schools on the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland, it seemed more reasonable to locate the new professional school on the College Park Campus given the rich complex of libraries on campus and the many renowned libraries in the Washington, DC area. When the decision to launch the program was made by the legislature, it then was the responsibility of the President of the University to engage someone to prepare the blueprint, build the design and work through the sequence of campus processes for bringing the school into being.

Esther Herman:
Who was the President?

Dr. Wasserman:
The President of the University at that time was Wilson H. Elkins. More important perhaps was the then Vice President for Academic Affairs. This was R. Lee Hornbake, the man whose name graces the large building in which this program is housed. Lee Hornbake was and is a very modest and unassuming, but infatigable worker on behalf of the academic programs on the College Park campus. He assumed responsibility for chairing the committee to seek a prospective dean of the library school. The search committee began its work in the summer of 1964. In academic year 1963-64 I had been on leave from my position at Cornell University where I had been at the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration and had spent it at what was then Western Reserve University as a post-doctoral scholar in data processing and information retrieval. As I later learned, a mutual colleague of Hornbake's and mine named Bob Munn, the Director of Libraries at the University of West Virginia, gave the committee my name. Munn suggested me as a prospect with the proviso that if they were to invite me to come they were likely to get some fireworks. If they wanted calm and stability they might better look elsewhere. This apparently tantalized Lee Hornbake enough so that he did invite me to consider being a candidate for the role of dean. In September 1964, I had just returned to Cornell. I was heavily committed to developing my course work for the academic year and in the process of making the transition back. I had a heavy teaching load and was very busy when Hornbake communicated with me. After I had written expressing my interest in the post, I was invited to come to the Maryland campus to be interviewed. I simply was overburdened with things that I was doing at Cornell and so I told Hornbake in a telephone conversation that I just couldn't visit College Park immediately. It would have to be sometime later in the Fall before I could travel to College Park. Being Lee Hornbake, he suggested that if I had no objection he would be pleased to visit and talk with me at Cornell (and so he came to Ithaca). I like to think that part of the decision to invite me to Maryland was the consequence of Lee Hornbake's impressions of Cornell. I was situated in an attractive office in a handsome new building. When Lee came I took him to lunch at the Statler Club of the University, a very uncommon and attractive setting. Maryland then and now has nothing which compares. Perhaps Lee was more dazzled by Cornell than he was by me. In any event our day together went quite well and he returned to College Park and met with the committee and the determination was to invite me to come down to meet the president and the members of the search committee. I wasn't able to do that until some time in November and when I did I met the committee, saw the campus, and learned that it was a fairly open-ended invitation to build a program from scratch with not too many conditions or provisos. When I met President Wilson Elkins he essentially told me that I was going to be offered the position. He had apparently talked to a number of people about me, one of whom was a former Dean of mine, with whom I had not had the best of relations, who had said something to the effect that this is a fairly competent fellow but he is very aggressive, which was a code word I always thought. Wilson Elkins was kind enough to share that assessment with me in order essentially to let me know that I shouldn't let my enthusiasm get in the way of trying to accomplish things. But I was offered the position and I reflected upon it before accepting it. I established as one of the conditions that I couldn't come to College Park as soon as they would have liked, January 1, 1965. However, since it was expected that the program would begin in September 1965, and although I was committed until the end of the academic year, I felt that I could straddle between both places if it were tolerable to Maryland and Cornell. The Cornell Administration was agreeable, and Lee Hornbake was enough of an academic engineer to see that it would be possible to construct an appointment mechanism whereby I could commute -- spend half the week in College Park and half the week in Ithaca. So I did precisely that, I accepted the position in January 1965 and agreed to work toward Fall semester start-up. It was a very frantic Spring enduring the perils and the consequence of having to fly Mohawk Airlines every week, back and forth and Sunday south and Wednesday night north. Mohawk has since become US Air. During that time many things had to be put into place. We required a curriculum that would get through the review process of the Senate of the University; we had to engage prospective faculty, we had to post the banners and announce to the world that we were accepting students for the new school in September. We were given strange quarters in the topmost levels of the old McKeldin Library building. There we worked feverishly with a secretary newly hired; we worked to fashion the program and have it in place by Fall. And in residence that Fall were a very unusual, interesting and uncommon faculty made up of inter-disciplinary types from the United States and elsewhere, and a student body of unusually well qualified people who had apparently been standing in the wings simply waiting for Maryland to get going. We had the faculty, the students and the curriculum ready to begin our first offerings in McKeldin Library. We had been led to believe that some kind of air-conditioning would be ready and in place before the program got started, but this was a long time coming. Still it was an exciting time. It was exciting because the University of Maryland was then in a posture where things could and would happen. The library field was more promising than ever before, the University was at a stage in its history where it was looking for avenues of opportunity and the people who held positions of authority and responsibility on the campus, were sensitive enough to see the attraction of launching a program in a field which seemed to have extraordinary promise for the decades ahead. In that sense I think that the administration of the University was quite farseeing. Perhaps one of the most important elements of our equation was that we had in our corner Lee Hornbake. Hornbake was softspoken and unassuming, yet an indomitable workman. I think he understood that what we were doing was academically worthwhile and he was prepared to encourage and invest in whatever programs seemed appropriate and could be explained and rationalized in terms which might rebound to the benefit and reputational esteem of the institution. Because we had such a good relationship from the earliest stages of our association, I have always felt that many of the elements of the school's fortunes and success were inextricably tied to the climate of good will, mutual trust and respect that existed between Lee Hornbake and the faculty of the then School of Library and Information Services.

Esther Herman:
Even I learned some things. I was thinking about those early faculty members and what an interesting group it was. I can remember some of them, Jean Perreault, Lancaster, what was his first name?

Dr. Wasserman:
Lancaster was later.

Esther Herman:
He was later? Who was first, Perreault?

Dr. Wasserman:
Jean Perreault was one, Dan Bergen was another, Jack Mills was another, then there was John Colson and of course, Mary Lee Bundy was another.

Esther Herman:
What was the librarian's name?

Dr. Wasserman:
The librarian was Frances Thackston. One of the things that was very evident to us was that we were coming upon an era in which technology was going to play a far more influential role in the history and evolution of the field and there weren't very many people around who were terribly well equipped in the area of automation and technology. I was sensitive to this because I had spent the year 1963-64 as a post doctoral scholar trying to soak up what was going on in technology at Western Reserve. I recognized that professional education had to move this way and because we couldn't find anyone out of the conventional background of librarianship to offer such instruction, we seized upon the ploy of trying to get someone from one of the major corporations active in this field to work with us. Fortunately IBM was prepared to loan us some talent in our first year -- Claude Walston, who was then with their Federal Systems Division, was a Ph.D in electrical engineering with a background and orientation in computer processes. That was how we came to offer some of the earliest course work in library automation in the United States. We also recognized that in our small resident faculty it would not be possible to cover all of the requirements needed in a well rounded program. So we brought in adjuncts by combing the community institutions in the DC area in order to entice to our program faculty members who would come with us in order to offer educational offerings in their fields of specialty. We attracted some notable people, Wilf Lancaster was one of the early ones, Saul Herner was another. One of our very most important faculty members to be was an unusual individual whom many in the field will no longer remember. This was a man named Mortimer Taube. Taube was the president of a firm called Documentation, Inc. It was the first major, successful proprietary organization in the field of library and information services. Taube was a great visionary. He had had a distinguished career at the Library of Congress. He held a Ph.D in philosophy from Berkeley. He was president of Doc Inc. and perhaps he was also the first library millionaire. We hoped to engage Taube as a member of our adjunct faculty. We had had several meetings and were ready to sign a contract for his being a member of the faculty when on a boating weekend in Annapolis in Summer 1965, he died prematurely.

Part of our original orientation, and one which has lingered on in the culture of the College, has been to invite participation and involvement from faculty members with preparation in other fields, but who were interested in focusing on library type concerns. So from the start information work was seen intellectually in a much broader and wider context than simply in terms of pragmatic applications. In Jean Perrault we had a classification theorist many then and now would argue was ahead of his time. And we brought from England Jack Mills. Jack Mills was the spark plug of the British Classification Research Group, a formidable lecturer and brilliant instructor. Mary Lee Bundy was a legend in her own time, an individual who was passionately committed to the world of the mind and to the societal problems of the period. She was brought to the University under terms that were then fairly unique for higher education. Her position was funded in part by the University, in part by the State of Maryland. In this way she could divide her time between instructional responsibility and conducting research on librarianship in relation to problems of importance to the libraries in the State. So we had from the beginning, a strong link with the library interests in the State and I might add that during our earliest period, even before the beginning of the program, all through our history we have had the unlimited support of library instutions and library directors and staff members in the whole of Maryland and the Washington, DC area.

Esther Herman:
Paul, while we are talking about the faculty, I was thinking shortly thereafter several people joined the faculty some of whom are still here and some who aren't but who made a big impact. I'm thinking of Dr. Kidd, Dr. Leisener, Dr. Heilprin and I know there are others that you can think of.

Dr. Wasserman:
Yes, well consistent with the notion of nurturing perspectives which could enhance the educational and research effort of the program, we looked to disciplines which we felt to be promising for what they might contribute to our understanding and for developing the field. So someone out of a field like industrial psychology like Jerry Kidd seemed a natural for us and we invited him early in our history to join the faculty. He had been in consulting, he had been at the National Science Foundation, but he was really a displaced academic. Larry Heilprin had been with the Council on Library Resources; he was very heavily oriented to theory. His background as a physicist led to his appointment as the first physicist to be engaged by the Council of Library Resources. When he came to our faculty in a cross appointment between our program and computer science he was the first physicist that I knew of to be engaged by a library school. Jim Liesener came to us very early in our history to develop our offerings in school and media concerns. Jim came directly from the Ph.D program at the University of Michigan. As I reflect upon our history, we were moving forward on several tracks. First and foremost, was the responsibility to gain accreditation. In a field driven by the concern that people prepared for the occupation have the necessary credentials for employment, the standard measure is American Library Association (ALA) accreditation. We were very sensitive to the fact that we owed it to our student body to insure that they would be recognized. We worked with great dispatch to meet the requirements for making our case on accreditation to the ALA Committee on Accreditations. We met with the president of the University and explained our concern to have a formal visit from the ALA Committee as quickly as possible before the end of the first year of our program. The president urged prudence and suggested that we might defer the review. But the faculty saw it as essential to insure the students that the degree they would be receiving would be nationally recognized. So we argued the case for the visit, the president consented, we did have the committee visit and we were accredited in record time by the ALA and in this way every class from the first in August 1966, that ever graduated from this University in librarianship has been an accredited library student graduate. Another very significant element of our responsibility as we saw it, was to foster research. We felt that for a program of this kind to make its mark would take more than simply preparing qualified alumni to go into professional practice. We also needed to attempt to blaze a trail and point the way forward. That implied that our faculty would spend some of their time engaged in research efforts and that we would take responsibility for attempting to shape in some ways the next generation of scholars and researchers in our discipline. We worked very assiduously during the early years to develop research programs and to receive funding for our research efforts from some of the major national institutions like the National Library of Medicine, National Science Foundation, and the Office of Education. When we made our representation to the Senate of the University (in less than 3 years from the time the program was begun) we were able to demonstrate to our colleagues in other disciplines why we needed a Ph.D program and that we had the experience and we had encouragement and reinforcement of some major national institutions to bolster our argument for the fact that this was an essential element of our responsibility. Thus, launching the Ph.D program was seen from the earliest stages as essential to the program's development. There was another important initiative, and I must confess that this was less my conscience at work than it was that of Mary Lee Bundy. Mary Lee was powerfully committed to what has later come to be termed social responsibility. She saw very clearly that a field like librarianship had to take a stand and play a role in the context of the political world within which libraries were at work. She saw how library education had a responsibility to link up with practice to demonstrate that libraries could make a difference in furthering societal change. The effect of Mary Lee Bundy as our conscience, constantly reminding us of our responsibility led me and her other colleagues kicking and screaming all the way, to engage upon pioneering efforts. The best known was the unique High John project -- an experimental demonstration library managed and run by library school faculty and student body. This was a real operating public library created in a disadvantaged and impoverished community in Maryland and it led to the development of our unique education program for people from disadvanntaged quarters of the society who lacked formal credentials but who could demonstrate in other ways their readiness and purposeful ambition to use their formal library education to play roles in public librarianship. This effort brought unique students into our student body and made it an unusual mixture of classic and traditional middle class students and others drawn from uncommon sectors. It also made for extraordinary dynamics in the program during its early history. These were each important trails -- the strengthening of the basic masters degree program, the mounting of the research and doctoral program and the moving toward the development of programs tied to experimental work were applied to public library programs and activities in disadvantaged communities.

Esther Herman:
You did a book around that time called The Librarian in the Machine.

Dr. Wasserman:
That was the consequence of my year at Western Reserve.

Esther Herman:
So that was in 1963-64?

Dr. Wasserman:
No. I spent that year 1963-64 at Western Reserve. I wrote the book after that year during the time that I was commuting. It was published late in 1965.

Esther Herman:
You didn't have anything else to do that year? Could you at that time in any way foresee this dominance of this technology that is here now.

Dr. Wasserman:
There were clear indications at that time that technology would emerge as a very important element of concern in libraries over the next decade or two. Even in that 1965 book of mine I spoke of the library automation specialist as the modern hero of librarianship. Many already saw then the salvation of librarianship as being the emerging computer technology. We were then in the mainframe era. But it was abundantly clear that there would be important directions forged by technology that would propel the field forward. Engineers and systems analysts were beginning to see libraries as a potentially interactive playing ground for their expertise. We began to have an influx of such people into the library world. The early grant programs of the Council on Library Resources were oriented toward expenditures looking for solutions to library problems via the technology. I came from a background in business and public administration. At Cornell, sprinkled among the traditional business types were a number of behavioral scientists. The experience in such a multi-disciplinary setting had led me to understand that similar avenues of opportunity were possible for librarianship. And as a long standing student of management, I saw that problems of size and scale were becoming far more important to our field than they had ever been. This suggested that it was going to be necessary for the field to begin to develop heightened competence and sophistication in management. Having participated in and learned something of the workshops of mid-career executive development, I felt such activity deserved to be an element of our agenda here at Maryland. This led to the design of the Library Administrators Development Program. I felt that when people were being prepared to be librarians they were not being prepared to be managers. If libraries were becoming larger and more complex, using larger amounts of resources, where would the managers come from? Some might gravitate successfully upward, building on intuition and native sophistication to function effectively. But for many, assuming the burdens and responsibilties, and seizing the opportunities of the management role requires more than successful performance as a librarian. So the Library Administrators Development Program was seen as a device for bringing together people from the world of practice, who were already directors or emerging directors of libraries of all kinds, to come together for a concentrated two week mid-career learning experience. During this time they were exposed to ways of seeing their roles not from the perspective of librarianship, but rather from the perspective of management. The faculty was drawn from business, public administration, behavioral sciences, finance and marketing and the participants were expected to revise their self image and definition from that of librarians to managers. The LADP was begun in January 1967 and ran for a period of 22 years. We had an extraordinarily competent resident director during the period -- John Rizzo. John, during virtually all of that time, was part of the management faculty of Western Michigan University and his background was in Industrial Psychology. That program was, I think, one of our more interesting contributions to the field. The program ended when we had about run out of an adequate number of takers (some 300 or 400 library managers underwent the experience) and when other such programs had begun to be offered in other regions of the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Another important strand of our program has been international concerns. This is reflected in the fact that from our inception we have had heavy representation from foreign trained scholars as faculty members. It is reflected in the good proportion of our students who are drawn from foreign countries. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of our Washington, DC location. A number of our faculty have had considerable experience in the overseas context, working with developing countries and international organizations and programs around the world. A lot of my own personal interest has been in international librarianship.

Esther Herman:
We said something when we were first discussing the technology. You said that you saw that early on as a salvation for librarianship.

Dr. Wasserman:
I didn't say that I saw it, I said that many saw it. I think many who look at libraries do so in the same way people look at everything in society. They are constantly seeking the panacea, the cure-all, the wondrous thing which is going to solve every problem. Technology has this aura about it: it will make everything fall into place magically and mystically. It's very beguiling to think that there may be some process in which we are going to push the buttons and find all the answers. There are those who look to libraries that way and have heightened expectations that because of the emergence of a new technique or mechanism or machine all our difficulties will evaporate. I have never felt this way but there are many who did, do and will.

Esther Herman:
The only reason I said that is because in the early days I knew that I felt very strongly that there was a need for our program and the people it was creating. The graduates of the program thought "here we are world" and when we completed the program we had a vast array of job offerings and opportunities that today just don't exist.

Dr. Wasserman:
Well, it is a consequence of the times. When we began in the mid sixties, everything was go, everything was growing, everything was going to be bigger and better. Libraries and library activities are really the tail on the dog which wags or doesn't wag. If the dog is frisky then the tail wags, if the dog is lying down quietly then the tail doesn't move at all. We are the tail of the educational dog. The mid 60's was the time of the post-Sputnik boom. There was a heightened societal passion to build, to grow, to advance, to move ahead, to be first. Education was growing by leaps and bounds. Everything was possible. That is not to say that when we started the program, it was easy to get resources. You had to fight for it, you had to make a case for it, you had to rationalize it, you had to compete for it, but it was possible. It was not a time when the automatic answer was no. This has changed dramatically in the 30 years since our beginnings. From an affluent aspiring culture we have become a nay-saying nation. We look less toward future possibilities. There is a remorseless cutting back, a husbanding of scarcer and scarcer resources. It's a very retrogressive time, not just in education, not just in libraries, but in government, in corporations, in society generally. The keynote has changed from do to do not, to scalebacks and reductions. We still hear the words about 'wanting quality education' but the music has changed and so we simultaneously cut budgets and render quality infeasible. It's interesting reflecting upon the optimism which existed when the program was brought into being compared to more recent times. You'll remember that not very long ago, our program was called into question by the University of Maryland Senate. We had to defend ourselves against extinction or being submerged in another program. When we came into being it wasn't out of a passionate enthusiasm on the part of the faculty of the University of Maryland for a library school. We were a political construct. We came into being only after the legislature appropriated the money for the development of a needed new program and the University Administration accepted it. In 1965 the University Senate authorized our curriculum and our degree and there was a climate of acceptance. By 1990, when financial support for the University had been dramatically reduced, those driving the decisions about what was not perceived to be 'clearly linked to the mission of the University' was not the legislature which had brought the program into being, but a faculty senate committee. They looked at programs competitively, and comparatively, and reflected upon which and how resource allocations would be provided for the deserving programs on the campus. If in 1965 the faculty of the University had been asked whether librarian education was consistent with the University's mission probably most would have thought not. They were not asked but in 1990-91 questions were raised about whether this relatively minor program in terms of number of faculty, students, programs and activities should survive. Most faculty on this campus, if they think at all about our program, probably think that it's part of the library. Yet, this was the group that was deliberating our fate and our future. If there is any explanation for why the program survived, perhaps it was the result of the political sophistication demonstrated in the representations made by our faculty and the library leaders in the Washington/Baltimore area, the alumni and other supporters who very eloquently made the case for the importance of education in library and information science, as central to the University's mission in a time when the committee of the Senate was deliberating our fate.

Esther Herman:
In the early days, if you could have thought ahead 30 years, 25 or 30 years and looked at the future of the College, would it have been similar to what we have today or do you see different directions that we might have taken?

Dr. Wasserman:
I never knew exactly where it was going, ultimately. I knew that it needed stimuli from many quarters, I knew that it needed to be linked to the world of practice. I knew it needed to be research based, I knew that it needed articulate and reasoned leadership to make it survive and thrive. I would have expected that it would become a much bigger program. If it had developed as I perhaps perceived it, this College would be something like the scale of the University of Pittsburgh program. When we realized that we couldn't remain indefinitely in McKeldin we had to find a way to make the case for new quarters. The reason for the new location was that we had argued effectively for support from the Office of Education for support in constructing a building which would house both the library school and an undergraduate library. The whole south side of the building was intended for this school and we were expected to grow into whatever parts of the building we did not need on the date when we moved here from McKeldin. We occupy less space now in this building than we occupied when we came here from McKeldin in late 1972. My original sense was that we would become large enough to need all of the space in the south side originally earmarked for our use when the building was being planned. But we have not grown in the way that I had anticipated. I had a very ambitious design for the program, consistent with the aspirational tenor at the time of our beginning.

Esther Herman:
Considering that, as you said, the times have changed as well, do you think this could have been attainable?

Dr. Wasserman:
Well, I think that it is awkward for me to talk about these things. If I wanted to accomplish those things I should have stayed in the kitchen instead of getting out of it. One of the things that people ask me about is why I walked away from the deanship. I think that it is easier for people to understand these days than when it happened. I was the Dean of the College for 5 years. When I first came to Maryland, I told Wilson Elkins and Lee Hornbake I would be happy to come, it was a very exciting opportunity to start a school from scratch and I welcomed the opportunity. I said I would do it for five years, because I really preferred to do my own work, my own teaching and research rather than administer. They agreed. Then 4 and a half years into the job I went to them and said, well it's 4 and a half years and I'm going to resign the deanship at the end of the year and we need to start thinking about a successor. They really didn't understand. How could you resign the deanship when the program is going so well? Well, I was a dean not because I was passionate about occupying the office and enjoying the power which went with it, although it was fun to have power. I was excited about the opportunity to do interesting things in a way that seldom presents itself to someone in the academic world. That was the appeal of the deanship. But I didn't want to be a permanent dean. I didn't want to be a provost and I didn't want to be a college president when I grew up. I knew always that what I truly loved about academia was the role of the faculty member -- the teaching and the independence. No other place that I know of, affords one the luxury to write one's own agenda and to be responsible to himself or herself. In an imperfect world that's a very joyful condition. When I reverted from being a dean to professor, I escaped back into my own world of interests, opportunities and personal pleasures. I enjoy the class
Room too much. I like my own efforts, personal research and writing. I like consulting and international involvement. When I was a dean I was doing two or three jobs; I truly never had enough time for everything. It was too costly a time for me, physically and intellectually. So I had to get out of the deanship and go to what I really wanted to do and to be. That is the reason I left it. Now I had hoped that the follow on to my tenure in the program's development and evolution would have been more than in some ways it was to be, but you can't have everything you want.

Esther Herman: That is certainly true.