Brown, David S.: Oral History, August 3, 1989
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David Springer Brown (1915-96) was a Professor Emeritus of Management in the School of Government and business administration at The George Washington University, where he was a faculty member and program director for 31 years. Dr. Brown was among those principally responsible for the creation of the Department of Public Administration at the university, functioning as coordinator, director, and chair. This included creating a masters degree program in association management, the first such in the country.
ANDERSON: This is the interview with Dr. David S. Brown, August 3rd, 1989, tape 2, side 1. Dr. Brown, we ended the last tape with your remembrances of the circumstances that brought you to the George Washington University. I’d like to pick this up on your thought on experiences when you first arrived, and the dean’s programs that you were working with, and so forth.
BROWN: I arrived at the university in August, September 1954. I had been brought into the university by Dean Arthur Burns, but had very little orientation, either to George Washington University or to university teaching beyond what I had managed to acquire a number of years earlier. I had, perhaps as other tapes will show, come here to George Washington University because of my interest in teaching an evening class or two. My application was as a part-time teacher and I had given no particular thought to coming here on a career basis. I talked with Dean Burns, a very pleasant man and a somewhat lackadaisical one in many respects, and I was referred as a result of my first visits to him to somebody in the business administration department who was shortly to be leaving for Washington University in St. Louis. I was also referred to another teacher in the business administration department, Joe Jessup, who was continuing here under a grant from an Air Force program, in which he was responsible for conducting programs in executive development. I was just finishing my doctoral dissertation which had been done at the request of a close friend of mine and my wife, who had felt for some reason or another that I ought to be interested in academia, and had gone on to Maine for a couple of weeks there.
When I returned, a telephone call had been taken by a cleaning woman who was in the house one day or two days for purposes of getting it in better order than it was, and she told me that Dean Burns had called. I made the call to Dean Burns. This was either in mid July or August. He invited me to come in and talk with him. It became clear to me that I was not for the business administration department and I made this clear to Dean Burns who accepted it and then asked me if I was interested in public administration. Even though my degree had been in Public Administration and Political Science I was not quite sure what it involved here at George Washington University, but indicated an interest in it. Within a couple of weeks he called me to come in again, which I did, and he told me that he would like to talk to me about the possibility of coming in to the university full time.
At that moment I had four children to support and no other job prospects in mind, but had been discussing the possibility of returning to the federal service, probably at a lower level position than the one which I had previously held, and previously been separated from in a reduction in force process. My wife and I discussed this possibility, she urging me to consider it, which I did. We agreed that I would be willing to come to George Washington University, provided that I got a salary of $7,500 a year. This we considered minimal, and I think I indicated earlier that a phrase that I used in discussing this with Dean Burns indicated that I would accept a salary cut from the Grade 15 that I’d had in the federal government, which was in the $11,000 area, but I wouldn’t “accept an amputation.”
Later this quotation of mine was repeated to me and apparently had amused others in the university. So Dean Burns offered me a position, at $7,500. I don’t recall much of the details of what I was supposed to do other than to teach three classes and sort of head up the Public Administration program. At that time as I think I indicated earlier, the program was being directed by a man named Rex Johnson, who was also a teacher of Marketing and Business Administration, but had spent some ten years or so in the federal government and was presumed to know enough about it to be able to teach it. In effect, I discussed with Dean Burns, rather than the head of the department the courses that I was to teach, and we agreed upon three, and with that as a preliminary, I came into the university in time for the fall semester.
ANDERSON: Of course, your career, which at George Washington, which spans the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s … one thing I’d like to reflect upon was your research interest from the earlier period, and could you evolve that through the ‘80s as well?
BROWN: Yes, my research interests basically were non-existent at the time that I came to the university. I was fresh from a major study which had become my doctoral dissertation on public advisory boards in the federal government. These are institutions where effort has been made primarily by Congress to bring into Administration persons from the outside who are presumed to have some knowledge of what is done and to act as consultants if the administrator is willing to use them. I had done considerable research in the field and as previously indicated I had been executive secretary of the Public Advisory Board for Mutual Security, which was part of the Marshall Plan, so that I knew a great deal about this particular board and learned about several other boards as a result of my studies. I taught a course initially and in the first year or two that made use of quite a bit of the information acquired here.
From that point on, I began to develop an interest in aspects of public administration, and indeed in aspects of managing government agencies, which took me in a somewhat different direction than is true of traditional public administration. I might add parenthetically that one of the problems that I had is that I disagreed so strongly with many of the people in the field of professional administration, that is, teachers and academicians, as to the nature of it. It has always seemed to me that they have wanted to teach too much in advanced political science which got the young men and women that came to us as students more into the policy making areas than true public administration involved. And in association with Dr. Lowell Hatttery of American University, who died a week ago and has for years been the best friend of mine, I turned in another direction.
The other direction that I turned in was having a concern of the management of large organizations. This is ultimately the title of one of my books, Managing Large Organizations, and expressing a concern for how one manages bigness, particularly public bigness, something that had preoccupied me for at least twenty of the past thirty-five or so years. I continue to write on the subject. I continue to make judgments that I hope will be helpful with respect to it. Now traditional public administration, as I indicated earlier, seems to follow a different norm, a different drummer, if you will. It initially was concerned with providing expertness in the various staff functions which I was willing to do on a limited basis, in the program at George Washington University. And while as indicated I was willing to do part of this, I felt that it should not so fully occupy the programs in public administration that we’re about to undertake at George Washington University that encompassed most of the curriculum.
In fact as part of my first year here I undertook the study of what some twenty or twenty-five other universities were doing in the field. I found that there was an emphasis so fully upon staff areas – budgeting, personnel, management science, and the like, that very little attention was given to the concern that the agency was likely to have for doing the kind of work that the law prescribed. Most of my friends who’d gone through public administration programs at Syracuse University had specialized in these staff areas and were now chiefs of personnel and heads of budget offices and the like, and very few of them were concerned with what the agency was actually required to do.
As a result of my study I tried to bring in greater attention to the field of managing the agency, the requirements of managing the agency, which involved more than that, and which were at times more allied with what has now become the Department of Management Science, than they were with the political science of public administration. I was supported in this by a number of people. One of them was a Professor Jessup, who invited me to become part of the staff of the Air Force Executive Program here. And I had an opportunity to observe what Air Force officers needed most, and what Jessup and his associates were trying to give them. Also, I was influenced in it by a Gordon Lippit, who I later was instrumental in bringing to the university in the Department of Management Science, and who was a psychologist and a behavioral scientist. It was through Lippit that I was able to relate much of what I had done in my years at various government agencies with a kind of thing which I felt that we ought to be teaching. Now I’d like to say parenthetically that even after thirty-five years in the field I still find that the public administration people continue to avoid the area of management science and management training, and to continue to lead students in areas which they themselves had studied when they were in graduate school.
During my first years at George Washington I brought into my classes a variety of government people, some legislators, several congressmen and a senator, an ex governor or two and people who held high offices in administration, and gave them free reign to talk about what concerned them most. In fact, I think some stature to the Public Administration program was achieved, because the students appreciated greatly the fact that I brought so many practitioners into the program. They performed notably, and not only was this helpful to me as a neophyte in the field, someone who was teaching with very few written materials to support him, but also because the students relished the opportunity to get to meet high ranking people.
I’ve always felt that I would prefer to teach persons experienced in government, who had decided that previous educational background was not sufficient for many of the problems that they faced, and came to George Washington University because they valued some of the ideas that they could get here, rather than the new students fresh out of college. Of course, we needed them because they were interested in doing better than their undergraduate degrees qualified them for, but I discovered that the new students had very little knowledge of the day-by-day activities that went on in the administration. And when I was able to bring in a number of people who had been through the mill, this enhanced our reputation greatly.
I’ve always felt it was an unhappy fact of life that I was not able to convince more people in the School of Government and Business Administration that our future lay with the Washington people already experienced in administration but desirous of doing better than they were currently doing. Standing in the way of this I have felt is that fact that Public Administration faculty members were only too eager to repeat many of the things that they had learned in graduate school, and were as a result too “political sciencey” in their approach. But also the fact that members of other departments were reluctant for one reason or another to join a program which the School of Government and Business Administration, which it later came to be known, contributed, that is the Department of Business Administration and the Department of Management Science, the Department of Public Administration, the Department of Accounting and so forth, that even though in name we were a single school, we had great difficulty in bringing the departments together in the fashion that was indicated that they were supposed to be related.
There were always problems of accreditation with the accrediting associations which were very restrictive in terms of how much that they could offer to students in other departments. There was always the factor of shortages of students in the university accounting system which required that you had so many degree candidates before the university will provide you with the funds for doing the business that you were set up to do, and the like. Also I think the feeling on the part of many business administration faculty members that the American economy needed business and business education more than it needed anything else. And the fact that they were often themselves teaching government people, that is, people already working in the government who came in in the evenings to do graduate work, convinced them that business administration was the only solution to the kind of their problems, which of course was far removed. The job of directing the, conducting the public’s business, requires much more than the traditional curriculum in business administration covers. The fact that business administration people have an enormous dislike of much of government keeps them from getting to know it better than they do. I’ve often said that one of the differences between public administration students and faculty and business administration students and faculty members is that public administration students and faculty members tend to be Republican in background, and business administration students and faculty members tend to be Republicans. And there is a built-in liking for the government service or a distrust of it depending upon where you come down.
ANDERSON: Was this, these attitudes that you were relating, was this pretty consistent from the late ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s’, or was it something that changed with the period, from U.S. attitudes, presidential administrations, things of this nature?
BROWN: Well, David, change is always slow to take place. If someone develops a new computer or word processor or something that has obvious implications for all of us, we’re more likely to adopt it than we are changes in our thinking. When we talked earlier about the changes by decade or changes by time period, it occurred to me that the changes were more from an historical perspective than they were from the actual practitioner’s perspective. And the reason for this is that we change slowly.
I would say that while changes have taken place in the public administration curriculum and to be egotistical about it I’ve heard several members of the faculty saying, “well we’re now doing some of the things that David Brown said we ought to have been doing 10 years ago.” Which is satisfying but not fully satisfactory. I would say that the members of the faculty have accepted certain notions, certain ideas, but they, for a variety of reasons, have not accepted enough of them. They have introduced their students to a couple of new professors who are teaching in the field of human relations, which they prefer to have done by people in their own faculty rather than people in management science, who I feel probably are much more qualified, even though they don’t have the knowledge of public service to support them.
We are into computers, we are into statistics, but there’s a reluctance of the people in the department because they get so little support from their own associations, such as the American Society for Public Administration. . . . support, courses which I tried to indicate ought to be taught in the management of bigness. Or to put it in another way, how does one go about having influence in a large agency or department?
ANDERSON: Were the majority of students in the School of Government and Business Administration, as it is now called, working in Washington or were there a great many that came from outside that wanted to go into the business or public administration fields? What was the view?
BROWN: I’ve forgotten the statistics on it but the majority of the people that came to the school, the total school, were people already employed in the federal government. And if you add to this the number of people that came into us under our variety of extension programs, the number is probably at least three from the government to every one person who would come in from another college or university and was not yet being employed. I have found, with the exception of the fact that persons who have come to us as young students from university undergraduate degrees, I’ve found with the exception of the fact that they don’t have an appreciation of what large scale management involves, are receptive to new ideas, which is what I have tried to bring them.
I’ve tried to expand upon the textbooks available to us which are written by professors at the University of Kansas, the University of California at Los Angeles, etc., the University of Idaho, universities of various other local nature. We in Washington are a quite different community and we must give attention to quite different kinds of affairs, than the textbook writers in North Carolina or Florida whatever. It’s still a problem because many of those in North Carolina and Virginia etc. have names, which the publishers are ready to publish. And to break into this fraternity requires more than one person bringing in ideas. The sources of teaching in our field are basically the books where are obtainable. There are very few books which would support the ideas that I’m trying to indicate. In my courses I use a variety of books from a variety of different sources, which was the best I could do. ANDERSON: I’m basically going the direction of student attitudes now. Was there a correlation between the attitudes of the students of the late ‘50s and let’s say the late ‘70s as opposed to the disturbances in the ‘60s as far as the MBA generation or the now generation, as far as G.W. was related, because I know there was quite a bit of activity at George Washington in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s?
BROWN: Well, there was not as much here as there was elsewhere. I remember clearly only one student, and he happened to be a student of business administration, that reflected some of the student parades, some of the excesses of the particular period of the sixties. He happened to be a very good student and while President Elliot did the sensible thing of concluding the spring semester one year a couple of weeks short of the time when it would ordinarily cease, this student, for the final examination, told me that he planned to come to the examination, but he felt that so many things ought to be done with the educational system that he wouldn’t take the exam. He would come in but not take it. He was an A student, and he did come in, and I remember his sitting through the two-hour examination period with the blue book in front of him and not opening it, which posed something of a problem for me. I don’t remember fully what I did, because obviously he had done good work previously, and I think that I gave him a B and got him out of the school. But this is the only instance that I remember of students doing anything specific that were disruptive.
Now remember, we were working with practitioners or students who intended to be practitioners. We were not working with the kind of students who, as the Chinese students appeared to want to do, have in mind changing the world, or changing the system. I recall no difficulties in class in thirty some years of teaching. This was the only instance that I can think of of a student not following what was laid out them. Bear in mind that with a majority of the students that we were getting, who were practitioners, they were paying at least a part of the tuition themselves, and they were reluctant to lose the whole thing as a result of following the mobs in the street. In fact there was very little repercussion here on the campus as I remember it about anything of that nature.
ANDERSON: Was there, as far as the School of Government and Business Administration, what effect did the change in presidencies have from Dr. Marvin to Dr. Elliot, because I know they had fairly different philosophies as far as education as a whole. How did it directly affect your particular programs?
BROWN: Well, it had very little effect upon my particular program. I would like to say that I had very little difficulty with either the dean or the president or the provost, or the vice-president of the university for academic affairs, with any of the suggestions that I made. They were all mature people. They understood many of the reasons which I was making them. I was always fairly easy to get along with as far as they were concerned because they supported me for the most part in some of the kind of things that I was doing. The problem that I faced was neither with them or with the students. The problem was always with other faculty members, who, whatever they were hired to do, insisted on doing the kind of thing that they wanted to do, which is usually the case of faculty members. I worked with, I worked under Dr. Marvin for two or three years. Dr. Marvin was a fatherly type of person as far as I was concerned, and one time he attacked one of the things that I was doing, which was in effect using a color system.
BROWN: At the time I that I came to the university faculty, Dr. Marvin met all of his new prospective faculty members. I don’t know what his role in selecting them was. I expected very little, because I was hired by Dr. Colclough and Dean Burns, basically and Dr. Marvin met with me, welcomed me to the university, etc. The only occasion I was to feel any interference from Dr. Marvin was at a faculty meeting when he brought to the attention to the total faculty a number of pieces of paper that I had distributed. Now, in the absence of some of the material that I had needed in the teaching of my classes I had kept a number of items from my days in government, and to indicate the importance of them I had them done on a cover sheet that had one of two or three colors on it, and because the university colors were buff and blue, I had used buff and blue and something reasonably close to them. Let me correct that. I used colors for them to put on top of the mimeograph, in those days the material that we had. And the buff was more an ochre, it was a bright ochre, which the president if he had any concern for university colors might find were abhorrent to him, and the blue was a wonderful sky blue, blue quite different from what the university had President Marvin had gone to the trouble of having had a pair of George Washington’s trousers looked into in the internal seams to see what the color was, and the color that I had used, buff, or my ochre, was considerably different from that.
I remember, the president on the speaker’s platform, waving these two or three sheets that I produced and saying that a young faculty member had desecrated the colors of the university and I'm afraid this fashion indicated it. I was in fact appalled by it and wondering what the outcome was going to be. I talked it over with Dean Burns who was greatly amused by what happened and laughed heartily at it. I said, “What should I do? Should I get rid of these colors?” He said, “No, this is one of the kind of things that the president could be expected to react to, but he said nothing about getting rid of them, so continue doing what you’re doing,” which I did and there were no further instances of it.
I did have a call from the president’s office one day, with President Marvin making the call. I had recently appointed somebody from the government service to teach at night a single course, which he and I had discussed. That is, the teacher and I had discussed it. Dr. Marvin invited me over to the president’s office at my convenience, which meant for me fifteen minutes after he gave me the call. His request, which was made in a very pleasant way, was that he would not like me to use this particular person next year. He gave no particular reasons for it, other than to say that there were some things of which he was aware of that he didn’t want to discuss with me that would suggest that wasn’t the kind of person that ought to be associated with the university. I thought a great deal about it. Now the person was a person who had not taught the course in a fashion that I had wanted it taught, and while I had received no complaints about it, I knew some of the things that he had done, and I proposed using him again. But, my recollection is ultimately I decided not to, and I did talk with him about it and I told him that I didn’t know what the reasons were, but I had been asked not to renew the contract, and I was in my first year or two at the university and decided not to do it. He accepted this. He wasn’t very happy with it.
He later went on to become a full time member of the faculty at American University and I still don’t know anything what it was all about. Now these are the only two instances in the three or four years that I was with President Marvin’s presidency, in his last years. I got the feeling though from talking with others who feared his intersession in many instance that his continuation as president of the university did not help the university very greatly. I felt that when he first came to the university in the ‘20’s he had managed to lift it from being a university of only some local standing into one that was known on a considerably wider scale. And if he had continued as president for another four or five years, which I think he would like to have done, he would have gotten it back to the same condition that it was when he first came in.
I might add that in the meantime, President Colclough, acting President Colclough, wanted to be appointed full time president. As a faculty member I followed the policy of taking no part in the selection of university presidents or of deans. I’ve had an opinion in them but I felt that because I had been permitted full freedom to do the things that I wanted to do, I had no greet need of engaging in the politics of the selection. I know that acting President Colclough wanted the job, but I knew that also that other members of the faculty didn’t relish the idea of having a former naval officer, a person with of the temperament of Dr. Colclough being president of the university. Ultimately, a new president was selected, before Dr. Elliott . . . Dr. Carroll. I have seen Dr. Carroll go into great rages at faculty meetings. The rages were expressed in the kinds of remarks that he made. They seemed out of the, extraordinary in nature that I resolved to have nothing to do with him that wasn’t required. He received me a couple of times in the president’s office for one reason or another. He was always enormously supportive of the kinds of things I tried to do and because of that I expressed no particular opinions concerning what had happened.
And then there had been an agreement between the Ford Foundation of which he was vice president and the university that the Ford Foundation would make a gift of several million dollars to the university, and the university for its part would consider him favorably as its president. I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not but the president died, the vice–president died, before the gift was made, and it was never made, as far as I understand it.
I knew something of President Elliott before he came to George Washington University because not only was I a graduate of the University of Maine where he had been president for four or five years, but also because I knew slightly the chairman of the board, who was my wife’s doctor when she was dying of cancer when we were in Maine. I also knew of him through another source. A cousin of mine was his family dentist in Bangor, Maine, who immediately went out of his way to inform President Elliott that he was to be president of the university of which I was a faculty member and met him in that fashion. The views of the chairman of the board about Dr. Elliott were lukewarm, to say the best. Dr. Elliott had a difficult assignment because in addition to working with the board of trustees he had to work with the Maine state legislature, which was a difficult group to work with, as Dr. Elliott told me. His assignment up there was a nearly impossible one.
He came to George Washington University with only a board of trustees to work with. I was not so enthusiastic with him the first two or three years based upon some of the things I’d heard from Maine, to believe that he would easily make it here. But with the passage of time I became a strong supporter of Dr. Elliott, and told him so. I talked with him on a number of occasions about matters I thought were of interest to him. In fact, he read my book and used it in his own teaching. The book was called Managing a Large Organization, sort of like managing a university in so far as the president does manage a university, one of dealing with a lot of in a relatively large organization. I came to have a somewhat different view of Elliott, talked with him about a number of things, found him most willing to listen to faculty members, if I’m a representative of that, and I became in fact a friend as well as supporter of him.
ANDERSON: I’d like to ask your early tenure in the school of Government and Business Administration. You took a leave of absence, to Scotland and I believe some other places. That seems fairly liberal as far as your young tenure was concerned. Would you comment on that?
BROWN: My first trip to Scotland to Wick (?) Royal College of Technology as part of a management development area was as a result of an invitation from them to go there for a period of two months. Because it was somewhat in conflict with my semester at this university I agreed to go there for only six weeks or so, something so that I merely lost two weeks in part of the summer session which usually I didn’t teach in, and this constituted no problem. The second leave, which was to go to Pakistan, involved a year and a half of leave. I had not had a sabbatical at that time, which was 1961. It was the year when I was due to have a sabbatical. I asked for a sabbatical. The university wouldn’t give me one because I indicated that my purpose was to go to Pakistan, and be part of the University of Southern California program. They interpreted that as continuing more or less to do some of the same kinds of things that I had done before, but they indicated that they would give me a year’s leave of absence, and then would renew it at the end of the year, which would give me a year and a half.
Later, a semester later, I got the sabbatical that I requested. One of the reasons that I decided to accept the assignment, in addition to wanting to go to Pakistan, wanting to have service outside the country in a less developed area, was that I was unhappy with some of the kind of things that the then dean was doing in the School of Government. His name was Arch Woodruff, and Woodruff later went to the University of Hartford, where he became chancellor of the university. I discovered an interesting thing about Woodruff. While my relations with him at the beginning were good, he didn’t make good on some of the promises that he had indicated for me. I was very anxious to have encouraged an interest in program and public administration which would be open to executives from the federal government, and while Woodruff had said that it was very much in keeping with some things that he wanted, he preferred as it turned out for me to continue with the military programs as director of one of them, that we were then having them, he said he would release me when this program was completed.
I didn’t like the idea of continuing beyond the several years that I’d spent with the Air Force Events Management program. I didn’t like the cavalier manner in which he had reacted to my request to provide another program director, nor did I like the fact that I had been turned down for sabbatical at that particular time and so I asked for something that he couldn’t easily refuse, a leave of absence. He granted it because Dr. Colcroft, who was, I think at the time still with the university would have approved it, or as a matter of fact, for any faculty member that was asking it, and a refusal to do this would have meant that I would have been free as a baseball or football player to go to another university for a contract renewal.
I’d also asked Dr. Woodruff a number of other things that he ought to consider. We didn’t have a doctorate degree at the time in public administration and I was anxious to have a doctorate degree established. And Woodruff had given me assurances that he would do this. In fact, as I remember one of his assurances that he had already supported it, I found out from private sources that this was not a true statement. That in other words, he’d not told me what the true situation was. And I then found out there were other faculty members who were facing some of the same problems, that the dean had given them assurances of matters that were not so. I used the occasion at a faculty meeting later on to raise a question with him. And he gave me that statement once again that this had been done. And later I learned that it hadn’t been done. But the president, Carroll at the time, had talked with Woodruff earlier because Woodroff had had an offer from the Hartford University to come up there as provost, the number two person. And that he decided against it. And President Carroll and he appeared to have had some falling out as a result of a number of things that indicated that Woodroff had exhibited some of the same characteristics to the president of the university that he did to me. And Woodroff changed his mind.
And I’ve often felt that the breaking point was his statement in a full faculty that he’d done something that he hadn’t done. I might say, afterwards he had no excuse for not supporting the doctorate degree and we got it although the faculty never passed judgment on it. So Woodruff went to Hartford as a provost at the university up there, and after he’d been there a year or two the president of the university died and he was given the job. So I feel that I ought to have some credit for helping him along the way to become president of the university.
ANDERSON: You reflect with your book, Leadership Resources, Incorporated. What was the general attitude towards outside work at SGBA (School of Government and Business Administration) during this period?
BROWN: The university has a rule that one can give a day or so a week to outside activity as long as it is a kind of work that the university approves. Earlier I had been invited to be a consultant on management matters with an international trade union which was in some difficulty because the president and his board were using, or supposed to be using funds for political privileges, which the law indicated they shouldn’t be used. I was invited to be a, the chairman of a committee of outsiders, a sort of public advisory board to come into the union to make recommendations to them as to what should be done. I took the matter up with Dean Burns and Dr. Colclough. Both of them urged me to take on the assignment, which I did. It lasted about a year or so. The trade union did some of the kind of things that it was supposed to do.
I mention this to indicate that the university was willing to be supportive of some of the kind of things that we as faculty members were invited to do. When I was invited to be a member of Leadership Resources, a group of behavioral scientists who were concerned with training and management consultancy, I talked it over with the dean, and he indicated for me to go ahead. Basically, I followed the university pattern of not being involved more than a day a week, although obviously some days I would be involved several days, other weeks, not at all. And I found that the university was very agreeable to my doing this at least, as indicated, gave me no indication that anything I ever did along these lines it should be critical of. In fact, the pattern that I followed was followed for the most part by other faculty members. There were some who I was of the opinion, clearly violated the one day a week. They were faculty members who were in business in a variety of ways. There were some who made investments of such a nature that obviously they had to give more than a day a week probably to support these investments. But the university was always very reasonable. I think that chiefly they were interested that we learned from this, that our income was improved from this, and that we could bring some of the information that we had back into our classrooms. I learned a great deal from my association with Leadership Resources. Some of the other university people who were associated with it, and I think on the whole that it was worthwhile. It occupied a period of ten to twelve years of my life. It may have been more. It may have been less than that.
ANDERSON: This covered the ‘60s and ‘70s. Did this attitude of the university continue through the ‘70s and ‘80s?
BROWN: Yes, the attitude of the university always continued to my knowledge. I kept the deans informed in general of my relationship. But those of us who were teaching in the management area, teaching particularly at the graduate level, were always being invited to do a certain amount of speaking, a certain amount of consulting, as long as it wasn’t too great. I think that nobody felt it was unreasonable. As a matter of fact I did know of a few instances of people who spent more time on outside activities than they spent time at the university. As far as I know none of them were ever asked particularly about it.
ANDERSON: One thing I’d like to conclude with this particular tape is a review of your specific philosophy of education, application in the classroom curriculum, things of this nature. Would you expound on it?
BROWN: Yes, I’d be pleased to do so. When I came into teaching at this university, note should be made of the fact that I had never intended to be a university faculty member or a professor. In fact I had wanted to be in the world of administration because I felt that action sometimes is more important than words, and I felt that faculty members too often were associated with their own fields and were detached in some fashion from actual administration. I came to believe over a period of time something of the opposite, that if our attention could be given to learning what ought to be done and then conveying it to our students that this was probably in a practitioner’s field, which was what I was in, the field of administration, that this was probably somewhat of the best things that we could possibly do.
So over a period of time I concerned myself with bringing to students, many of who had very ordinary tasks to perform on the job some new or fresh ideas that they ought to be considering. And I suppose that I came to that more by an osmotic process than by actually thinking it out. But in the graduate study that I had done, I tried to get away from doing what so many professors had done . . . asked students to bring in papers on which they droned on for an hour or two on some matter that they weren’t really well informed of, to inviting their participation, but as persons who were members of a class system. By that I don’t mean social class but by members of pedagogical arrangement in which they were always invited to be participants. And when I brought speakers, I did everything I could to limit the speaker’s time to thirty minutes or forty-five minutes or something of that sort so that students would have a chance to discuss with them what they wanted to discuss.
In fact, I tried to put as much emphasis that I could upon student participation and in my later writing, which has culminated in the advancement of a theory called Developing a Concert for Action. I have felt that the efforts of those in administrative jobs, even though some of them had considerable power, ought to be primarily focused upon how other people could be brought into the arrangement in such a fashion as not only to get the best out of the participants but also to advance the cause to which all of them are committed. In general, this has been a philosophy that has developed over a period of time, and my chief role was to indicate to the participants some of the things that I thought that they ought to take into consideration. The building of a “concert for action,” as the conductor of an orchestra ought to know, as a dean ought to know, or a university president or the head of a hospital ought to know is putting into action what is needed to make sure that some of the best results come from it. It’s totally apart from the directing and controlling phenomenon that has been so long a part of management and teaching, and management structures.
ANDERSON: Well, I look forward to reading the article on management and concert building now that you expressed the overview of that, because I feel it is something applicable to all areas of administration or management, whether it be business or government or anything else. With that I’d like to thank you very much for your participation in this, and we will conclude with that. Thank you again.
(End of interview)
See also: Brown, David S.
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Author or Source: MS0371/Oral History Collection
Document Location: University Archives
Date Added to Encyclopedia: May 1, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist
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