Oral history: Leonard Kirschner

A major project of WSU’s Emeritus Society, these oral histories provide absorbing recollections of WSU history from the early 1950s on. Conducted and transcribed by history graduate student, now instructor, Katy Fry ’06, ’11, the histories deliver unfiltered memories of WSU through five presidencies and rich insight into how we came to be where we are now.

In this history, zoologist Leonard Kirschner (1953–1993) provides an irreverent but touching picture of 1950s Pullman, an absorbing account of his career in biological science, and a hilarious description of campus unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s and his part in it, including his firing by President Terrell from the Human Rights Committee.

Key: F is Katy Fry. LK is Leonard Kirschner.

F - All right, its March 9, 2010 and we are in the Emeritus Society Lounge, Owen Library, WSU campus. Will you start by telling us your name

LK - My name is Len Kirschner, Leonard.

F - And where were you born and when

LK - I was born in Chicago, Illinois just after the Civil War and when, in November, 1923.

F - What about; can you tell us a little bit about your family background and maybe the beginnings of your education

LK - That could keep us ‘til midnight. My family was middle class, Jewish; my dad was a dentist, um, I grew up in an apartment in Chicago. In fact the first time I ever lived in a house was when we came to Pullman. I have, and I’ve just become aware of this, I have very, very few recollections of my public education, which must have been ok. I have no memories of elementary school; teachers; I can remember the building from the outside, can’t remember the hallway layouts or anything about it and this was impressed on me recently because my younger daughter, that’s daddy’s girl, she knows all her; and she is 49 now, so its been a long time. She can recite off a list of teachers and what they were about and what they looked like and I can remember from high school 2 teachers, a German teacher that I had for 4 years, the same lady, and a zoology teacher probably because I wound up being a zoologist and so I was kind of interested in that. Nothing else about the place. I’ve just joined the alumni association of this high school. I was a mediocre student, sort of B- kind of stuff; shy; I had a lady love but was too shy to let her know that. Then I graduated in ’41, in February, and went to the University of Illinois-Urbana, its about 150 miles from Chicago. I was a very poor student initially, undergraduate. I’d been pretty sheltered, as I say kind of shy and here I, on my own, no momma, no daddy, I met girls and I met beer and I met bowling and who had time for physics labs. I did very well my first semester, about half As and half Bs and then the novelty wore off and by my third semester, I was on probation. I wound up, um, I probably had the second worst undergraduate record of any professor in North America; the worst was my younger brother who flunked out of college twice; he became a professor of history in Canada. It just takes some of us longer to grow up than others. In ’44 I would have been in my junior year, the Navy grabbed me, almost all still vertical males under 50 years of age were in service in those days and they shipped me off to a small college in Indiana where I finished my senior year, but my degree is from Illinois in absentia. So obviously I did survive the undergraduate curriculum. I was on probation, as I say, twice and fortunately in 1943 I took a course from a guy that just turned me around 180 degrees. From the spring of 1943 when I was on my second semester of probation, there was no doubt in my mind what I was gonna do with my life and this is what a good teacher can do. This guy was spectacular. Ok, then I spent 3 years in the Navy. I loved being at sea, I was on ships for a couple of those 3 years but I hated the Navy. I am just not personally intuned to these rigid structures, um, anyway, I survived. The Navy probably had an uglier time with me than I did with the Navy. Then I was out in ’46. Today I would never get in to a graduate program with my undergraduate record. I had an accumulative maybe 2.3 where 2. is a C. We don’t let people into graduate school, but at the end of the war, if you had a degree from your state university, they had to admit you to; and you were a veteran, they had to admit you to the graduate program so bless their hearts. So I started back at Illinois and did a, uh, what in retrospect is reasonably spectacular. I did a research master’s degree in one year, which is; that’s pretty fast for doing a research thesis. And at the end of that year, now this is very typical of graduate students; I had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and this was sort of being inutero for me. I didn’t wanta be born into the world so I talked to this professor about staying for a Ph.D. and he said no, you have 2 degrees from here, you need to go out and meet new people and new ideas and do your degree somewhere else and he said you just tell me what you’re interested in and we’ll get you placed. So I wound up at Madison, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin in ’47 and I got my Ph.D. there mid-year January in ’51.

F - And that was in zoology

LK - That was; well no, that was in physiology, but physiology at Illinois at that time was inside of zoology so my degree is zoology but I’ve been in physiology all the way. That’s actually one branch of zoology. Just before I finished at Wisconsin, I met a very, uh, attractive young blond woman, a nurse, and we were married in December. I used to annoy her by saying just in time to have my thesis typed and then I got my degree in January and we went then to Denmark for a post-doc. We actually went with the, its kind of interesting, with a; we had a thousand dollars in the bank and no support and I thought well we’ll just live as long as this thousand dollars will last and then I will wire daddy help, we need fare to come home, but I got a post-doc from what today is called a March of Dimes; in those days it was called Polio Society and so we were able to stay on for 2 years. Our first child, a son, was born there and our daughter was conceived there, but born just after we got back. Denmark is still near and dear to my heart. We spent 2 years there as a new family. I spent a sabbatical year in the mid-80s there and from that time through retirement in ’93, I went back each summer to do research and this expression historical artifact. The first time that was used was by one of my colleagues in that institute. I’m now a historical artifact at the August Crogue Institute in Copenhagen. So that’s kind of a thumbnail sketch of early years.

F - So then from Copenhagen, you learned about an opening at WSU

LK - Yeah, we got back and of course I had no, I hadn’t been (can’t understand) with the system here, didn’t really know much about the education system at the university level, but this man who had turned me on and essentially created me as a scientist, uh, was very in touch, he was President of a couple arts societies and he dug up 6 openings; one was in Mississippi which was easy to rule out because I’d have been lynched down there in those days. One was in Maine where even though no academic salaries were very outstanding and Maine was just poverty. I was interested in UCal-Riverside which had just started but they chose somebody else and so Pullman was one of, it was almost the only one that I was still interested in and I corresponded with the then Chairman of the Zoology Department. He almost lost me because he; in one of his letters, he pointed out that from his house he could walk 10 minutes in any direction and be out in the wheat fields. You know I’m a Chicago boy, I don’t know wheat fields from a hole in the wall and that just did not sound very attractive, but here I am. This is close to 60 years later and a lot of the wheat fields are now development of course, but well I have to say if I were gonna sum up our whole interview, its been a good ride for me, that’s a long productive interesting career and I’ve enjoyed nearly all of it. Not all, but nearly all.

F - What was your impression of, when you got here, you got here in ’53, what was your impression of the campus, the students, the administration; it was much smaller then

LK - You know, I’ve been worried all morning about how

F - You don’t have to answer anything

LK - I was gonna answer that because I do have some pretty; first of all the ambience, the place; the university looked very small, I was used to Illinois and Wisconsin which are, today they’re 40, 45,000 students. Even in those days, they were 12 to 14,000. Here I can remember the number very well because we had 4800 students at WSC in those days and my initial salary was $4800, so I got a dollar a student here and the university looked small, but you know, like a university and at the top of the town, that was very strange for me because I was used to big city streets where you could get on a bus and your destination was 40 minutes later. In Pullman, you could walk 40 minutes and be in Palouse, but not under traffic. It was; and again, you know, we had a young family; we had 2 kids at that stage and well one of my negative impressions was the growth like cancer of administration. When I came, you know the campus pretty well

F - Not really

LK - Oh you know that building with the round tower

F - Uh huh, that was the first

LK - Foreign languages now; that was the administration; the whole administration was in that building. We had a President, who I could walk into his office without an appointment and if he wasn’t busy, he would see me

F - Now was that French

LK - That was French and he was a crusty old guy, I mean this was not because he was a namby-pamby; it was just, you know pretty informal. Today I don’t think without an appointment I would get to see the President’s secretary. The number two guy in those days was not called a Provost, he was the Dean of the Faculty, but it was equivalent. The difference is he was a teaching physicist. I just looked in the university handbook, not handbook, the telephone book at the Provost’s office. I have forgotten, I counted at the time; I’m not sure the number I’m gonna recite is absolutely correct, but something like 7 Assistant and Associate Provosts in the Provost’s office. At that time, behind the Provost there was in the Central Administration, a Dean of Men and a Dean of Women. The main job of the latter as far as I could tell was making sure that the girls were in at 10:30 during the week and I think it was 1 o'clock on weekends. Beyond that, there were the Deans of colleges like we have them today, but not with the support apparatus including professional money grubbers in each college. What we have now is just mind-boggling for somebody that comes out of that kind of (can’t understand) and I do not buy the argument that just because we’re 4 times as large we need 10 times the administration. Ok, that’s a bias, I won’t ask for your forgiveness. The other early memory that has to do with the change from an idealistic young professor to an old cynic, well not so old, but a cynic, came in my, about my 5th year here. As I say, I started with 4800. At the end of the first year, I got no raise, which, you know; the second year I got a 200 dollar raise. At the end of the third year I got another 200 dollar raise. So I’m at 5200 and the next year my salary went up to 6300, which percent wise is pretty impressive. The Chairman in those days, bless his heart, was a what I’d call a (can’t understand) a very emotional kind of guy and he, when you got promoted or got a raise, he would carry the President’s letter into you and just drool all over you and so he brought this letter in and I thanked him for recommending me for such a big raise. Oh he said I didn’t have much more than that for the whole department. I said well if you didn’t recommend it, how did it get that way and I, uh, he looked at me and he said well I recommended you for what we could afford, then that was boosted in the Office of the Dean of the College, at that time it was Liberal Arts and Science, and it was boosted again in the office of what we call today the Provost and I don’t remember what my words were, but I said something about like gee its nice that the higher administration is aware of who’s doing a good job teaching and his eyes rolled back and he got this oh you wet behind the ears child look, and he reminded me that I had just gotten my first continuing NIH grant. Never occurred to me that that had anything to do with your rank or salary. I got a grant because I couldn’t operate my research lab. Well you know we talk today about corporatization of the university and belly-ache, belly-ache aspects of that kind of behavior and structure were already; and this was 50 years ago, uh, as I say, when my 5th year here I had no idea that getting a grant had anything to do with your status. Its worse now than it was then, but only in terms of magnitude. As I say, this means we’re already there. So that’s the story of Len Kirschner up to year 5 in Pullman.

F - Well that’s a good segway into my next question. You came; when you came what was the expectations as far as your research and as far as your teaching because certainly; and how did those expectations change over the decades.

LK - They didn’t change very much. The thing that changed was my family status because my wife finally gave up on a husband that she didn’t see often enough. I taught a full course every semester and that’s with lab sections, especially initially, we didn’t have very big graduate programs, so the boss was usually in the labs. Later on, um, the labs really were run by graduate students. I might be in the first one of the week, but not after that. I loved and really lived for both teaching and research. I, um, I was in a perfect job for me. But with the years, my research; I would, if I had to rank the two, I would say research was the more important to which my former wife would not vigorously, but I loved teaching as well and the problem was by probably 1960, so this is like 7, 6-7 years after I came, my research program then had grown and I was really thinking boy I could sure use a semester off from teaching just to keep this show on the road, but that never happened. I taught both semesters ‘til the day I retired and you know it wasn’t a big item. I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed the interaction with students. I was warned early on by this Chairman of mine. I was the generation that came out of the Second World War. Until then, say through the 30s, being a professor especially if you were gonna lecture, you wore a suit coat, a tie with your shirt. Most professors had no taste in clothes. They might have a blue double breasted suit coat with a green shirt and a red tie or something, but coat and tie. I lectured in blue jeans. Now today, that’s; I notice you’re wearing them; everybody wears them and that wouldn’t cause any eyebrows to rise, but Herb, like he used to say to girls, they’re gonna go into the Dean and complain about how you’re; always the girls, you know, uh, no, it didn’t happen. Well I got one letter from an irate young lady who had not done very well in the course and among her complaints was a pair of; and these were her words vomit colored trousers that I wore. They were really pretty awful. My mother had bought them in southern California as a gift and you know you don’t wanta throw, you know, clothes out just because they’re ugly, at least I don’t and so I wore them. But that was the only complaint I had; girls or boys about clothes. The other thing which may be more substantial but still not too important. I’m a night person. I’ve been a night person since I guess I graduated from high school. Last night just for example, I went to bed about 2:30 a.m. and I got up about 9:30. I do not get up at 6 or like most human beings do. And again this Chairman used to say they’re gonna be on my back and the Dean about they can’t find you at 8 o'clock. Well as I’m sure you know, students learn patterns pretty well and if the only time they could find you is at midnight, that’s when they’ll show up, they’ll find you and that’s basically how it happened.

F - They come to your office, you’d be in your office at

LK - Oh yeah, well, this is what cost me my lady love, uh, I would come home, we by that time had 4 kids, and we had dinner, always as a family, and then the kids would go to bed at 8 or 8:30 and I’d go back up to the lab and work ‘til 2 or 2:30 in the morning. That was, you know, just; and I did have students that would come in at 1 or 1:30 a.m. with they had some problem or question or very often it was the low score they got on an exam, um, but again, his; he was a very you would say today, a straight person. I’m sure he was up and down with the sun and a great guy, but sort of rigid and

F - What was his name

LK - Eastlake, one of our buildings is named after him, one of the life science buildings. He was really uh, dedicated to the department, to especially the pre-medical program and he was a very effective pre-med mentor. In those days, the advising for pre-meds, the first two years were handled just by the faculty. I would come in a week before the semester began and there’d be a packet of 5 or 6 folders and these were gonna be my student advisees but for the junior and senior year, after we’d weeded out a lot of them like me as a student, um, he got all of them and he; in those days you couldn’t do this today, but he could pick up a telephone and call one of three universities; UW in Seattle, one in Texas the name of which I’ve forgotten, a medical school, and Washington University in St. Louis. All first line medical schools and he could say I’ve got an absolute winner you’ve got to; his grades somehow are marginal, um, in pre-med if their grades go pretty much below 3.5, they’re very iffy and they would take them. No way today would he or anybody else do that, you’d wind up in court. So; but he was effective and just revered, not by everybody. An occasional pre-med, you know, he was a benevolent autocrat, you’d say, and some of the kids, including the guy that wound up my personal physician, just resented, but mostly he was just almost deified. When he retired, we had a dinner at the CUB and the dining room was packed with his former students from all over the country and probably from some countries outside of this one, so he was; well I think he was an ideal chair person and a pre-med advisor, but it cost him what I would never have given up, which is his research. You can’t do everything well, so he just lived for those programs and he had a very supportive wife.

F - Was he, um, or you involved in the development of the WWAMI program

LK - I lectured in WWAMI almost from the outset, but I don’t remember whether Herb was; I don’t think he was involved in that, although I’m sure he would have been interested in, because some of the WWAMI students probably were his products. Yeah, I; in fact I had an ophthalmologist a couple years ago who had been a WWAMI student. Its occurred to me off and on since I taught in the physiology course almost all the pre-health delivery people, pre-meds, pre-dance, pre-nursing, pre-physical therapy and so on, had to take this physiology course and its occurred to me, but not very seriously, that my life would be in danger because I might have given one of these now doctors a C or a D in a course, but that hasn’t happened, so; so

F - Yeah, when you, in those early years when you were here, what was the interactions between departments like and did that change as the university got bigger, administration got bigger

LK - Well its changed at least formally, I can only talk of course about the departments I knew, um, in an informal way, my interactions were very important with biochemistry which in those days was a part of chemistry and botany because of a few people up there, but the departments as a whole I don’t think really interacted a lot in a formal way like joint seminars or whatever. Today there is, by the way, no longer a department of zoology, there, or botany. There is now a School of Biological Sciences which has engulfed both botany and zoology and I must say, as an onlooker and I still have an office up here so I come up almost daily, um, I don’t think the interactions among the faculty are any closer than they were in those days. There were 3 people in botany, uh, that shared some of my research interests. One was, had very close ties with the atomic energy commission and he’s really the guy that got our nuclear reactor set up and going; he had a lot of impact. I think he had worked with the AEC during the war, I’m not sure, but

F - What was his name

LK - Uh that was Orland Biddault. Then there was a plant psytologist, cell biologist named Noey Higginbottom, that’s a wonder British name, Higginbottom; um, and I found him, he was doing research wasn’t you know, nobody outside of Pullman knew much about the research, but he was interested and I found him soaking disks of potatoes, slices of potatoes, into distilled water and my hair just stood up. An animal physiologist you can’t soak a tissue in distilled water, the cells all (can’t understand) they, they’re destroyed, but I didn’t know anything about cell walls and so on, and he was measuring the loss of potassium to the distilled water and as a result, my interest was transport alliance like sodium and potassium and so on and so we had a common interest and I had, because of my sojourn in Denmark which was really a center for the development of radioactive nucleods in biology. I had become sort of an early specialist using radioactive isotopes and he of course latched onto that, so we interacted quite a bit and those were probably the two closest in botany. Biochemistry there were a handful of people. My work was pretty mild biochemical and all through graduate school although I majored in physiology, it was all; I think I probably took maybe more courses in physical and biochemistry than I did in physiology. So I had a number of colleagues over there, one of whom you probably maybe have made a connection, Ralph Yount

F - Yesterday

LK - Well he and I kind of grew up together. He came a few years after I did, but he’s also a mine and he’s been very, very into much more than I, into the departmental structure and so on. He’s chaired, that’s a horror for me. I absolutely refuse to do anything administrative. Well you know my love’s for my teaching, my research and my wife and kids and there was really no room for anything administrative. I did chair a committee maybe that’ll come later, this would be in the late ‘60s

F - Yeah, I wanta hold off on; I know, I think I know where you’re going and

LK - You what

F - I think I know where you’re going and I wanta hold off on that

LK - Ok

F - Maybe that will have to be our follow up hour, um, so what was the tenure process like

LK - What was

F - The tenure process; you didn’t know initially how important it was

LK - Yes, tenure; I was never interested in rank or income, um, but tenure was very important because especially when I was younger, I had what today would be called what, a liberal left wing, uh points of view, I was involved in the racial flap here, which is where we’re gonna go sometime, uh, and you know, in those days before tenure, you could be fired for any reason; your chairman didn’t like you or his wife didn’t like you, um, so tenure was for me very important and I got tenure pretty I think maybe my 5th year or so, it was about the time of that NIH grant, so maybe the reason was not very good, but that was important. I; and I still think its terribly important for people who are otherwise very vulnerable to whatever biases their, you know, that they don’t agree with, so I don’t think I’d have had trouble because this Herb Eastlake was, he was also pretty liberal person, um, but that, as I say, just in general say tenure is extremely important.

F - Yesterday Dr. Yount indicated that he thought perhaps that tenure was being given out too freely to some people, did you feel like that

LK - Well its hard to say, uh, I know where he’s coming from and I agree. It does protect people who aren’t necessarily getting incompetent, but they’re just dead in the water, um, and that’s a price that you pay, uh, for protecting other guys who maybe are first-rate professionally but shoot their mouths off, so maybe Ralph and I wouldn’t agree on you know on whether tenure is or isn’t a plus. For me, it’s a super plus and even recognizing as we all have to, that you’ve got dead wood on the faculty, got same thing in the school systems, secondary schools especially, uh, they; I don’t know if they call it tenure, but their unions are very powerful, its very hard to fire a teacher and the result is you’ve got a lot of maybe incompetent, but maybe just lazy people who; as I say, they’re the price you pay for what I think is very important, but yes, I saw the same things that Ralph talked about.

F - Is there a union at WSU for faculty

LK - Yeah

F - and was that in place when you arrived here

LK - Tenure

F - Unions

LK - Oh no, uh, I don’t think we’ve ever had a union. The staff I think has a union.

F - Has there ever been a push to have a faculty union

LK - I; no, uh, I belong to what is the closest thing to a union that we have in most universities. A few have unionized the faculty, but I belong to an outfit called the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, and we had apparently a chapter on this campus that I was completely unaware of. I belong to the national; I suppose since early in my career, um, I didn’t even know we had a chapter here and the result was that it finally got down to 2 people that belonged, one of whom was the University’s President and so just disbanded. They have just this semester picked it up. We have a young lady, well Charlotte isn’t all that young any more, but her name is Charlotte O’Moto and she is a Professor in Biological Sciences and she’s one of these motors. For her, I don’t think research comes near the importance she attributes to teaching. She is very strong on teaching and very resentful of the way; the one thing that really has been eroded is what we called shared governance where the faculty has important input on anything to do with the research and teaching issue of the university. That’s just been taken over by administrators. Now they build buildings without getting the faculty involved. Two examples right across from the football stadium, biotech buildings, I’m sure you know there are people in biology who were talking to the administration but the faculty is; I never, for example, heard anything when these buildings were being discussed, about putting them up. Charlotte is up in arms now because they are totally dedicated to research which if you’re cynical, you can see as a money maker for the university in contrast to teaching. They have not a single teaching lab in either of those buildings. I think you’d love to see her face flush and she’s very, uh, very into that kind of thing. And you know I think all of us have our pet projects, so

F - Not to keep harping on the early ‘50s but when you came it was the height of McCarthyism and certainly other colleges were greatly affected by the reds scare. Did WSU, WSC experience

LK - Well that was the kind of thing that was on my mind in connection with tenure because that is if you were accused as anybody liberal; I hate those terms, liberal, left wing and so on, but you know what I mean, uh, you’re very vulnerable to being accused of being a communist sympathizer or whatever your current term is, um, and that in, during the McCarthy days, that was potentially lethal. Even with tenure there were people that were fired, um, that lost positions over that. I think; and tenure was pretty young at the time. I think now its solid enough that trying to fire a tenured person on an allegation of belonging to whatever political party, you’d wind up in court, so; but that was not always the case then, so yeah, um, you know, I think the faculty just as a general thing, I don’t think has changed too much. What’s changed again is the; and I attribute this to again, to a malignant administration, you’ll excuse me if I air my bias, uh, the role of the faculty in shaping the teaching and research of the university which has been taken away in two ways. Administration just makes decisions if it involves spending money like building buildings, uh, and the growth of I don’t know how much you’ve heard about a contingent faculty, these are people that are hired on a year to year basis, no tenure, no; I think no health protection. I don’t think they get any benefits, I’m not sure about that, but they; and no tenure for sure. They now constitute, I don’t know what the percentage is at WSU, but in many universities they’re 50 or 60 percent of the teaching faculty, uh, they’re really, really second class citizens in their salaries are lower, they’re very vulnerable, just all the administration has to do is say your contract is terminated at the end of the year; too bad, bye, bye. And this in turn since they constitute in many places more than half of the faculty, that really weakens the faculty’s position, vis-à-vis administration. So yeah, all is not well, um, and I, you know, I don’t think its lethal these institutions will go on, uh, they’ll change and I don’t think for the better, but um, they’ll continue to function and crank out social leaders, some of them.

F - Just to go back to the McCarthy era a little bit, did; do you know of any specific, I mean was anyone at WSC fired for being

LK - WSU

F - Yeah, that you know of

LK - I don’t think so, I was fired once but only as a committee chairman. This is the value of tenure, because I had made a President very angry and I think

F - Was this Terrell

LK - Terrell, yeah, who’s a friend. But I; one day I really sent him into orbit and should I tell you that story

F - Well yeah, maybe, um, we don’t have to break it up so, but I did wanta spend a great deal of time on your work with civil rights, um, on campus here because I think that’s, I mean when I was looking through your papers, I was surprised to find all of that information in the middle of your papers and your conference panels and I thought I had hit the gold mine and so I just wanta make sure we can devote enough time to talk about that, so...