Interview with Henry Chen

This interview is being conducted in the Towson Room of the Towson University Archives. The archives are located on the 5th floor of the Cook Library on the Towson University campus.

This is part of a series of interviews comprising the TURFA Oral History Project, conceived and supported by the Towson University Retired Faculty Association. Henry, thanks for coming in this afternoon.

Oh, you're very welcome. It's good to see you back on campus. I know you come in... In fact, you were at a seminar today.

You were born in Shanghai, China on May 10th, 1940. Those were the early days of World War II. Japan had occupied China and China was engaging in a civil war between the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek and the

communists led by Mao Zedong. It was a chaotic time to be in China. Were your parents native to Shanghai? Sort of.

I mean, they came from outlying provinces, but Shanghai was where we were during the war. My father had gotten his PhD in the states in the 1930s and then he'd gone back to China.

He was teaching in a place called Fukien Christian University, and that was on the coast where my... And that was the area where my mom was. Then when the Japanese started to get too close, they had to

move the university inland. And, but my mom then, because she was pregnant with me, came to Shanghai because the facilities, the medical facilities are probably much better there.

And then for my birth, my father came from the university. They'd been taken inland, back to the coast. And then the Japanese cut the road. And so we were doing the, from the time I was born until 1945,

we were in China. It's never been clear how we survived since presumably he wasn't working. Well, when you matriculated to the United States, where did you

settle? We set up in the Philadelphia area, and that's where I went to boarding school. So basically we're from Philly.

So your dad had gotten the degree, you said, from the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s. Was he a scientist? Yes, he was a physicist.

So there's where the tie-in comes. Well, I tried to avoid physics like the plague. I just fell into it. What was your mother like?

Well, she had, let's see. It's not clear. She was at university in China. I think she was in sociology and things like that. When she came

to the States then for a while she she was a housewife because in the 40s and 50s most women were. And then she got a job as a typist and then she became a

histologist at the University of Pennsylvania in the anatomy department. And that's where she learned these techniques from a Chinese anatomist.

And so that's where my sort of biophysics came from there. Well, did you have siblings? Yes, one sister who was four years younger or five years

younger. And she lives in the States today? Yes, she's in New York City, where she's been since she graduated from college in, what, 60...

Let's see, I guess about '68. So she's been in New York City since. She's an actress, playwright, dancer, sort of. When did you first start developing an interest in

science? Probably as a kid. I was always fairly curious about things and I remember I liked to take things apart, you know, like a lot of boys do. In

China, I still remember, this is in, what, '46 or '47? I was six or seven and I managed to take apart a switch to a light.

I managed to take it apart and got a nice shock from that. So I've always liked it. And then, you know, when we were kids in Upper Darby in 1946, '47, kids went out to play, as you remember, they'd go out and

play. And so we used to go to the fields and, you know, get frogs' eggs and bring them home and, you know, watch the eggs develop.

But so I was always interested in things, natural things, biological, you know. Well, after high school in the 1950s, I guess, the late 1950s, you matriculated to Harvard College. Yep.

And you majored in biochemistry. I majored in biochemical sciences. Yeah. This was sort of a catch all scientific for people who were

going into sort of medicine or pre-med or physiology. I was interested in becoming a neurophysiologist. And so I had met some guy named Otto Loewi through a German connection, actually, and he convinced me that if I wanted to

be really broadly educated, I should major in the sciences because he said, you know, if you want to be broadly educated and you're a scientist, you can still do art, you can still do music, you can do art history like he did.

You know, he went to medical school, but the Germans have a very free system there. And so for the first three or four semesters of his medical school, he was in Italy doing art history.

And his point was that once you get to the point where if you're a humanist, the world of the sciences is almost completely closed to you, you know, whereas if you're a scientist, all that stuff is still open to you.

And that's what convinced me then to change from being a German major to a biochemical sciences major because they demanded about five semesters of chemistry, you know, two or three of physics, some of biology and physiology.

So it was a good broad scientific background for being a neurophysiologist. Well, after receiving your AB degree in 1963, you moved to Baltimore and entered Johns Hopkins' biophysics program.

Is that correct? Yes. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, it was a department that had been created from many

physicists who after the atom bomb decided that they couldn't work in the physics field anymore. So it was a very physically oriented biophysics department. So when you came in immediately you were expected to take, you

know, sort of upper level physics courses and you were expected to take quantum mechanics. And since under the biochemistry, biochemical sciences major at Harvard, I had only had like three semesters of physics, I was just

completely unprepared for the physics courses that I was taking at Hopkins. I mean, I managed to pass them, but they were sort of gift C minuses or things like that.

And in general, I wasn't very happy. It was really a very interesting department and they were doing lots of interesting work, but I just really wasn't prepared for the physics, the physics that I needed for that.

The people who in general, I mean, most of them were either physics and chemistry majors or physics undergraduates. And I just wasn't ready. And I, in general, I wasn't ready because as an undergraduate I

had poor grades. I graduated. What's they called? Group 4?

They're all, there's six groups. OK, so Group 4 was C's, a couple of B's thrown in. My best courses were in music or German. All my courses in the sciences in general were, ehh. So I really

wasn't ready. And they told me that I had to, you know, I would leave at the end of the academic year, '64, '65. So I was waiting around to hear from the Peace Corps because I

had applied to go to the Peace Corps. And by the middle of August, it was clear the Peace Corps wasn't going to, you know, I hadn't heard nothing from the Peace Corps.

So it was in the middle of August that I started looking for a job. And you saw one at Towson State College. No, actually I decided to just, you know, do the best thing, I mean, with no master's and so on.

So I went to Baltimore City to see if I could get a job teaching something. And I was hired to teach 7th or 8th grade algebra in Baltimore City.

And I, the guy was very nice and we talked and, you know, he had three positions he had to fill. And then as I was practically out the door, he said to me, you know, sometimes people like you all don't always like

teaching at this level. Maybe, you know, we need you and we'll hire you. But maybe you should try a community college. Maybe you'll find a position there where you will be happier.

So I called some community college, I don't even know what it was, Anne Arundel or something, and they said no, we don't have any openings. But I just got a call a couple of days ago from Lou Cox at

Towson Normal, I think you called it by then Towson State Teachers College, and I think they have a position there. And I didn't even know where Towson State Teachers College

was. You know, when I drove up York Road to go to Goucher College, I never looked to the left up the

hill to see that there was anything there. And so in the middle of August, I come in and I have a like a 30-minute interview. I made clear my academic record wasn't that good.

I hadn't finished my master's yet, but they needed somebody to fill a 12-hour load in teaching physical science one. At that time, I would say 95% of the students were still teacher ed.

And in teacher ed, to be certified in Maryland, they needed 12 credits of science. It was 4 physical science, 4 biological science. So there was that course in your department, in the Biological

Sciences department and in physical science. And then there they had a, they could take an elective of four credits somewhere to fulfill. And so basically all of us in physical science taught this one

course, physical science one. I was one of probably seven. And the reason there was an opening was that after '63, the Board of Education could see this great flux of students

coming in that would need bachelor's degrees. And so Towson decided then that if they had to do this, they needed real science majors. And so they had a new science department, which was what we

now call Old Smith Hall. And they were evidently having lots of trouble because by the middle of August or the beginning of August, the things weren't being finished.

And, you know, things, they were having lots of trouble. And because Bob Dale in physical science had some experience in construction, you know, he had built his own house or something.

This is indicative of how unique that little setting was. They took a full time faculty member, made him the liaison to the contractors, OK, even though he had no real training. Now today, you know exactly what they do.

They hire a bunch of adjuncts. That would be it. But back then, you know, they really wanted a full time person to cover the twelve hours.

And so I think the attitude was, well, he's going to be teaching physical science one. We're all going to be teaching physical science one. He'll have lots of help.

You know, he can't, he seems pretty bright. He can't ruin the students too badly. So, you know, we'll hire him. And so I was hired with no master's, you know, and

having essentially flunked out of Hopkins, but I made fairly clear that I was flunking out of Hopkins. Well, you do go on to come back and get your biophysics degree in 1969.

Well, what I did was then I had essentially taken all the courses. I just hadn't written up my thesis work, which was on, you know, I mean, phospholipids in various invertebrates.

And because I'm not good or I was not good at that time in writing papers, it took me four years to finish writing it up and get the master's degree. Did you participate in offload teaching while you were at that

stage? Yes, actually, it's interesting. I think after the... In my first year, after they had converted the temporary position to a full time tenure track position,

there was an organic chemistry course lab that was being taught in the summer school and nobody wanted to do it because the two people who taught... The three, actually, were, you know, otherwise occupied.

And so I said, well, I've had, you know, physical chemistry, I've certainly had an organic and biochemistry and so on. Why don't I teach the organic chemistry lab? So I think the end of the first, my first year, I got to teach

organic chemistry lab here. Well, so you started off teaching physical science one. Yes. And I did that for about five years.

And then what other courses did you end up teaching in your whole career? Oh, my whole career. There's a huge long list that I can give.

Well, that's... Just give me give me a couple of examples. OK, well, here's what I'll say. The graduate student training for physicists is extremely broad and everybody basically takes the same thing.

It hasn't changed in fifty years because I had a student who decided to go back to graduate school in 2016 and she took basically the same things, classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, mathematical physics, quantum mechanics, some

kind of a lab course. And the textbooks that she used were sort of basically the same. OK. And so everybody in the physics department can teach basically

all the core courses, not the upper level electives. And so I've taught everything. I've made a tabulation. I've taught nineteen courses in the department.

What was your favorite course? Didn't have one, didn't have one. I loved a lot of them, but there were several that were interesting.

I started the Physics of Sound and Music course and that was good for a music major, but I really thought it would be best for the people in speech and hearing because we can show things in our labs in a way that they really can't show about

sound and all these things. And I also enjoyed physics of... It was called the History of Physics. I took a history of physics course at College Park at one

point, and that was interesting because it was a second writing course. And so I got to read these papers and I got to lecture on, you know, something else that's not in my field, which, I have

all these things that I love. I learned a lot in teaching history of physics. You know, when I think about you and your career at Towson, my mind conjures up a photo that appeared in two editions of

Tower Echoes. That's of course the college yearbook. It's the one of you lecturing in Smith Hall with your dog Mina at your feet, sound asleep.

What are the circumstances surrounding that photo? It's well known to many people of my generation. Did she regularly come to your classes? One of the best things that happened to me in my life was

that I was flunking out of Hopkins, one of the postdocs in biology said, I have this lovely dog. I found her wandering around Hopkins.

Can you keep her for a few weeks until I find a new home for her? And that was Mina. She was just such a lovely creature. And after a couple of weeks, it was clear, I mean, she really needed a

home and she was, she just was so easy. So I, she was my dog. That was my parting gift from Hopkins, which I'm eternally grateful.

And she was just such an easy, you know. And so I started bringing her here at school and the kids loved her. Nobody in the department complained. Nobody in the faculty complained.

And she got to the point where she knew the building forwards and back, She knew the campus. So she would, if she needed to go out, she would walk out somewhere, sit by a door on the stairwell until it opened, and

then she'd run through. And so she'd make her way gradually downstairs. She'd do whatever she had to do and then she would recognize certain people or she'd just wait at doors until they opened

it and she'd run through and opened it and she run through and then she'd come back. And so she really sort of had free run for the campus because she knew where Smith Hall was.

And then later on, I had, for a while, because things at Smith were crowded, I had an office in Linthicum along with Byron Hall and Elmer Kreisel.

There's some biology people over there too. And she knew who in Smith Hall had offices in Linthicum. So she saw one. She would then go, (imitates barking) because she knew they were going

to Linthicum. And so, and the third place she knew I would be is that if I dropped off the car at Holland Chase, you know, on the corner, she knew where that was.

And so they still talk about sometimes she would come to Holland Chase and she would jump on the lid of the car and sit there and wait for me to come to the lid of the car. Well, describe the campus here in 19, mid 1960s when you were a

student compared to, you know, what you might have encountered the last decade of your career. I mean, I don't even recognize some of the stuff. Luckily I come to this campus every once in a while.

And so I enter the buildings. Basically everything was on York Road, right? There was the three brick buildings there. All the classes until '65 were held in Stevens Hall.

That's the college main building that still now houses business, that's what. And the people lived in the dormitories. Prettyman Hall and Scarborough were the two halls.

In fact, my first lectures were, about the first two weeks were in the basement of Scarborough because Smith Hall wasn't finished before the academic year. There was Lida Lee Tall, which is where the, what, the Fine Arts

building? No, what's where, what's in place of where Lida Lee Tall is? That's where the new liberal arts...

Liberal arts. OK. Yeah. And then in between, gosh, well, you have to look at old... In between Cook Library and wherever there was the power

plant. Still there. Is it still there? I'm glad you're... And Prettyman, let's see, there were dining rooms above there for students and so on.

And that's where the faculty staff dining room was, in the basement of Prettyman I guess. And that's where then faculty really literally met all the faculty because things were so close that almost all faculty

came to the dining room. And this is before the days that people didn't want to eat full lunches. They had to watch their waist.

And then so you know that they would eat at home. And there was, I mean, not eat home, but eat at their office and take lunch and so on. Literally, this is one of the social meeting places.

And so within a semester, I met practically all the main members of the faculty. Everybody. It's amazing.

Oh, it was amazing. Yeah. I mean, and I literally knew people in all the departments. I mean, that was just... Well, your discipline is physics,

but you were, of course, in a physical sciences department, at least initially. What were the class sizes like in those days and how do they differ today?

Well, when Smith Hall was built, the labs were limited, at least in our department, to 24 because the research, it shows that once you get beyond that, you know, it's not... If you have a lab of 30 or 35, it's really hard to run.

I mean, one person just can't do it. And so the labs were built specifically to hold only 24. And the thought was that you would have at the maximum a lecture of three sections.

So the largest lectures in our department were 72. And so what I had my first semester and second semester were about 75 maybe. OK, but basically that, and because physical science one

was feared by all, even though you were supposed to take it, it was a 200 level course, you're supposed to take it as a sophomore. But mostly people waited until their junior or senior year or they waited for summer school if they could get it, you know, and

they were taking Mr. Dale because he had the reputation for being, you know, helping students. And so very few people flunked Mr.

Dale's course. So when they saw Mr. Chen, you know, they had no idea what they were getting into. But they loved, I mean, I loved it.

You know, the students worked hard. They were all, they all had a respect for learning because they were going to be teachers. Well, how did that, how does that differ from perhaps later

in your career? Was the level of preparedness the same? The level of preparedness I think was very good. Throughout your career.

Well, no, it was better at the beginning. It was better in the mid 60s than it was later on. OK, these people, a lot of the girls, and they were girls, you know, I mean 18, 19, they came from Catholic schools where

they worked really hard and they studied, you know, and the guys too. I mean, they wanted, this was their way into the middle class and it was a profession.

And so, I mean, you never had to tell people to not talk in class. I mean, it was just understood they wouldn't, that they weren't going to talk in class.

Many of them could do algebra and these were, you know, across the board. Well, that's not completely... I mean, there were people who were really pretty terrible in

algebra, but I think no more terrible than what we get now. Because the standards of being able to do algebra have, I think through the decades gradually decreased. I mean, students in those days could still multiply by 1,000 by

moving the decimal point three places, right? And I know 20-30 years after that, I still remember teaching, these are biology majors, science field. And they didn't feel secure in multiplying by 1,000.

They had to punch in the number and then times 1,000. I mean, by then, you know, the dependency on handheld calculators had really done its damage. I don't know how it is now.

And of course back then I didn't teach physics majors. You know, later on I started teaching physics majors. Of course, their math preparation was much better. But the non-science people, I mean, I was very happy with the

preparation that they had. Good, good, good people. I mean, they worked hard. Well, in 1975 and all the way through to 1978, you weren't on

campus, took a leave of absence from the college. What were the circumstances surrounding those three years? OK, because I had done so poorly in graduate school when I was taking my sabbatical, I guess '71, '70, '71 or

something, I couldn't get into a graduate program anywhere in the sciences. But I was told, I found out that at College Park, if I took a test, some kind of a proficiency test, and if I did

well in it, then they would overlook partly my bad grades and I could get in as a provisional student in science education. And so I did well in the test and I was allowed.

And so when I went to College Park for my year as my sabbatical year, because I was in a physical science department, I took physics courses. I took basically undergraduate physics courses and one or two

graduate physics courses that I never had when I went to Hopkins. And so I asked for a leave of absence from the department and they gave me one for the first year, and then I asked for it

for the second year. They renewed it for the third year because I was working on a... Oh, this is now the three years, yes. And I had decided by then that I could not do a PhD in education.

OK, I have stories, but you know. That because my committee would consist of a test and measurements person, a psych person, an educational administration person, a physics education person and a physicist.

And I had been around enough now at Towson to realize that each one of these people would have their own axe to grind, right, in the way that the dissertation should be written. And I wrote very well.

And I realized I wasn't... I'll be damned if I was going to let people tell me how to write these things. And so I realized there's no way that I can do that. And so I asked a teacher who had taught me mechanics and ENM in

my sabbatical whether he could give me a research assistantship. And he knew I was on Towson faculty and he thought, I mean, he told me afterwards, well, and it wouldn't be bad to have a PhD

in physics at Towson because he could send us a couple of graduate students every now and then, which we did subsequently. And so he gave me a research assistantship, you know, so that's when I took my three-year leave of absence.

I took graduate courses. I was lucky to pass qualifiers the first time around and then I worked on the research assistantship at the cyclotron doing various things, participating in research, trying to get my own

research done. And so that was what was occupying me in those three years. So I commuted to College Park from Baltimore for three years

and it was easy back then because it only took 50 minutes. Well, I should mention that you received your PhD in experimental nuclear physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1983.

Did you have any intentions of continuing your research in that area? Not really, no. I love teaching.

I can do research. I mean, I did research in biochemistry and biophysics, but I realized I enjoy dealing with people more. I would plug in every once in a while so that in '93 or

something, I went to a place in Switzerland and plugged into the University of Maryland group and was engaged in some research. But research at that level involves a team, you know? I mean, one person can't do squat.

You know, it's got to be, the facilities are run by a full time group there. And then, you know, it takes at least 10, 12 people in the group to run the experiment.

And so, you know, it's not the type of thing that we would have enjoyed, you know, working in a lab with with your hands and doing things like that. And I was happy to get the PhD in nuclear physics.

I love the field, but I think you have to spend five years in nuclear physics doing research before you really get a good sense of what small, you know, sub-specialty. And I just had no will.

What was the general research atmosphere at Towson when you came and how did it change? Oh God, it changed tremendously. Nobody...

Well, see, if you taught 12 hours, you know, how are you going to do research? I mean, but people like you, I'm sort of amazed that you were able to sort of keep doing research all the time.

I mean, you had to take it out of somewhere and it's, you know, out of your hide, at some point. I was... In 1964, I started to play piano at a church in East

Baltimore. And that started my sort of sideline doing church music, and everywhere where I had to make a decision, you know, are you going to try to do research, you know, or do you want to do

church music? I decided for church music. I mean, the decision essentially made itself. After a while, I realized that, you know, promotions would come

much less quickly. And, you know, if you don't do research you're to some extent a second class citizen. But I was willing to, you know, I always felt that's what I want

to do, or that's what has been decided for me. But the research I find amazing. I mean, we have people in the department that just do marvellous research and they still teach, you know, they're

good teachers. I don't know how they do it. You know, it's much harder now than it was. Every incoming family member that we have looks just

marvellous. And they, you know, they can walk on water. It's just, I find it absolutely amazing. Henry, you're multilingual, a surprising anomaly in 21st

century America. Do you feel that your multilingualism has been valuable? For me, it has, yes.

When I was in China, I could speak Shanghai dialect and and Suzhou dialect and Fuzhou dialect and I could write. But my parents decided that we really ought to, you know, they didn't understand that children can be raised with two languages

fairly easily. And so they stopped speaking Chinese at home. And so I lost almost all my Chinese. I can write three things in Chinese. Oh, four things. "One,"

which is a line like this, "two," which is two horizontal lines, "three," which is three horizontal lines, and my last name. And that's all I can write. So.

But English is clearly my first language. German is my second because I was an exchange student there. And German has helped me quite a bit. I mean, both in science and music.

French is my third language because I took it in college. And then I know a spattering of Spanish and Italian, you know, enough to get my way through restaurants. It makes...

I mean, languages make life richer, OK, just like music does and so on. But I can see why most people don't want to learn something as complicated as German.

I mean, it's a, you know, the structure is pretty complicated. But well, see, it's interesting. German was marginally useful when I was starting out.

OK, Hopkins' PhD program required two languages for a PhD, so I took it in German and French. By the time I got the college part, most of the stuff is coming out in English.

I mean, the lingua franca of physics is really English. Oh, no, the lingua franca of physics is broken English because you have all these people from Korea, you know, and Japan and China.

So it's broke. But all the Europeans speak English at any facility that you work at. A big nuclear facility, everything's in English.

Well, enrollment in American colleges literally exploded during the 1960s. Boy, did it ever. When the science building, excuse me, dedicated science building was built,

Smith Hall in 1966, Towson enrolled just under 5,000 students. And interestingly, there's almost that many science majors here today in the Fisher College. I'm sure.

Yeah. When Smith Hall addition was added in 1975, the student population was more than 13,000. What impact did this exponential growth have on your department?

Lectures now, I mean, I can't speak for them. Well, I can to some extent, because towards the end I actually had a lecture section of about 100 and that's pretty

large. That was very large for our department. The other thing is that more lab courses are taught by adjuncts, And more, the 100 level, 200 level courses are being taught

by adjuncts. And I think that's a real loss. That's a real loss because general physics is not easy. And it takes a lot of experience, I think, to be able

to pose things in such a way to work on people's intuitions so that they can really understand what's going on as opposed to just plugging things into equations. And it took me a fairly long time because it's not

the conventional way, you know? And so I'm just afraid that if you have a lecture section of like 100 to 20 people, I mean, more people are going to get lost.

I have a friend at College Park, the guy who I worked with on my dissertation and he taught the course for engineering majors. And he said, you know, he hated it because they were in this

great big hall. They would take away the partitions. So at 9:00 in the morning, he had like 500 students. OK.

And he said at any one time, 20% of them aren't there because it's too early in the morning. At any one time, of those who were there, 20% are sleeping, You know, those who are awake, 20% are talking.

And so every couple of weeks, he's got to yell at him. And so the sound goes down because it's just this huge... And he had nine... No, he had at one time eleven graduate students.

So when they had an exam, they'd all get to this big room and they'd say, I will grade question one part one. And so these poor people, I was going to say poor bastards. They'd sit there and they would be grading for hours and

hours, just one little part because, like, class is, you know, 500 people. It's just... Towson hasn't gotten that bad yet. But our sections, our lectures are larger than they should be,

I think, for really good teaching. But now you really would have to go and talk to somebody who, well, I know that this is true. People are sorry about it.

And it all depends, you know, are you going to hire more line item people positions so they can teach general physics? And I think they should. But the question is, you know, does the university writ large

care enough about teaching general physics well? During your career at Towson, you served under six university presidents. Earl Hawkins, James Fisher, Hoke Smith, Mark Perkins, Bob Caret and

Maravene Loeschke. And now... Oh, no. That's right, she came after, I didn't serve.

Yeah. Did you have a favorite? Hoke Smith. And why was that? Well, Hoke was a real faculty member who cared about faculty.

OK. I mean, Earl Hawkins was not bad at all. I think Earl Hawkins was just right. You know, he was very supportive,

for instance, when Agnew came after my job, as was everybody. I thought Hoke Smith really cared about people. I mean, he was not one of these look at me people, right? And so he really saw the college turn to university.

He really cared about faculty opinion. He would listen to faculty opinion. He wanted a cohesive faculty. And one of the indications of that is that the faculty-staff

dining room had been ditched by the previous administration. And I really wanted to get that back. And so I worked very hard. And I think it happened only because Hoke wanted it back.

OK. Because I heard the story that this was a couple of days before the start of the semester. Hoke knew the committee had been working on it. And Hoke evidently went down there and said, where's the

faculty-staff dining room? And they say, well, we haven't gotten it together. And Hoke said, let's have that ready when the semester starts. And it was.

Whereas I understand, again, this is scuttlebutt, but the Fisher administration thought it was just as well that the faculty didn't have a chance to get together and, you know, talk. Rabble-rouse.

That's right, rabble-rouse. And, you know, I mean, it's a completely different view of what a university is, which is that it is a community, OK, of people who have the same goal in mind, which is education

and the society. And it's not me and me. And, you know, it's, and I know it's a very strange view these days. Well, you've always had a reputation for being liberal

and outspoken. Comes from my father. And also the fact that I think when I first came here, I wasn't going to stay, right? I was a couple of years.

I would teach a couple of years, go back to graduate school to be a neurophysiologist. And so I had no anxiety about speaking out. Did you get in faculty governance while you were here?

Yeah. For some reason, my department decided that I should be pushed into it. And so they made me the departmental representative to

the Towson State College Senate. And I was very surprised. But, you know, it's one of these things where one of the old people said, you know, Henry, we think it's time that you ought

to get involved in this, say. And so why don't you... Say, OK. I have to put some of this in writing because there's nobody here now that remembers some of this stuff, right?

How Erickson was involved in governance when I came, but after, you know, some personal things he essentially dropped out of... And then Vic Fisher was never involved in governance,

and Howard Kaplan came the same year I did, but he wasn't involved much in governance until relatively recently in Fisher. Well, I distinctly remember you lobbying for an increase in pay

scale for adjunct faculty during a presidential State of the University speech one time. Really? Yeah. I mentioned this, though, just to point out that you've always

stood up against what you perceived to be injustice, and I wanted to use that as a segue to something that happened in 1991. In 1991, in an attempt to cut overhead and to reduce the duplicity across the University of Maryland system, newly

appointed Chancellor Donald N. Langenberg proposed cutting the physics and chemistry majors at a number of the systems, the regional state colleges, including Towson. What was your response to that, and also your department's?

OK, just a little bit of background. I think he was being pushed by the board and... He was a physicist. He was a physicist, and that actually helped us, I think.

So this came down and every, I mean, you know, we couldn't believe it. How the hell can you have a liberal arts college that has no physics major, no chemistry major?

It was just... And what I understood, I mean, what we gradually inferred was that the bean counters in the board's office said, well, we need to cut off, you know, how many majors is a decent number?

Well, ten, we'll pick ten. So any major that has less than ten per year, we're going to put on a potential chopping block. I mean, it took some weeks for us to understand what was

happening because it seems so ridiculous. And so it turned out that because of various things, I ended up being the point person in our department because I could write and I could speak English.

And that was useful because we're going to have to talk with legislators and we would have to go to meetings and all this. And I did go to, you know, we went to the legislature and had meetings.

And then I began to realize gradually what was going on. And the university was very good. I mean, Hoke and Bob Caret were involved. We had meetings once a week just to figure out what to do.

And one of the things that we learned we had to do was you had to defend the major, you know, no matter what. And so because I was a point person, I was, well, I went to these meetings, but then I was charged with writing the report,

which turned out to be a massive... I was just looking at it the other day. God, you know, 2:00 in the morning before the Friday it was due, Linda and I were in my office.

We were photocopying things and collating them and so on. But what we did was to survey, first of all, physics programs around the country, OK? And then we surveyed all our physics majors and former

graduates to find out why they became physics majors, why they came to Towson and so on. And I think we sent out 120 questionnaires and we had better than 60% response.

And what we found out was that a lot of the people came to Towson because the price is right, but because also they were commuters. I mean, Towson was still a primarily commuter college and

they all came within those twenty miles. A lot of them came from Harford County and towards the north and the east. And the theory was supposed to be that we could have, that

somehow the major would be taken to UMBC because that was a research institution designated for the sciences, whereas we were the flagship for arts and the theatre and for things like that.

And so we didn't really need physics, but it turned out that in our doing and in getting information from the American Association of University Professors and the, oh, the American Physical Society, that the average major

size for a graduating class of physics majors was 4.4, OK? Because it's just not a very popular major. It's not like biology. You have hundreds.

The average was 4.4. Many of these small departments sent students to Graduate School a lot of... Because they got really good undergraduate training in these small departments.

Well, at that time, our department was graduating about 9 1/2 per year. So we were twice as large as the average, OK. And we had all these data on, you know, what these people had

done. And so, and in the course of this, you know, I mean Langenberg, I have to say, I thought he was a very decent stand-up guy.

He said, you know, I'm willing to defend this anywhere, OK, because physicists are used to getting up and defending whatever in front of their... And so I invited him to come.

I said come to Towson. I want you to come and defend this action at Towson. And sure enough, he was willing to come and we had a meeting and he, you know, took as well as he gave.

And he was really, you know, and we talked like colleagues would, which is, you know, OK. You're really sort of, you know, you're, you know, he had said some things about, well, you don't really need, I don't know,

you don't really need a major to have a good program or something. He was talking about, you know, there are places there are no music major, but they have good choruses.

Since this is right up my field, I got him on that one. You know, that's a completely useless analogy. Well, I think the upshot of it was that our administration had read it correctly.

You know, the hundreds of hours that we spent or I spent on the thing didn't really make a damn bit of different, right? I mean, I had this full report with lots of dependencies on this and then I had a two-page, you know, a three-page executive

summary. And then, in case they didn't want to read three pages, a one- page executive summary, you know, I mean everything just so that, you know, and formatted and all this stuff.

But my sense is that we had to go, we had to do it because we had to do it. OK. And that what happened was those universities that fought

programs enough got to keep them. And if they were willing to give it up... Thank God we got to keep our majors because Towson would be nothing. I mean... You're preaching to the choir here.

I mean, you know, how can you... But it was just something that surprised the hell out of everybody, that somebody would, you know, think this way. But it is indicative of how bureaucracies work, right?

Ten is the cutoff. If you were entering the field of higher education today, what changes, if any, would you make in your career? Well, see, I'm one of these people we were talking about

that... I didn't plan my life, OK. Life has been extremely good to me. I don't think you can do that anymore. I mean, you really have to...

No, we have some people who have fallen into Towson and they're doing marvellously. But you cannot survive these days if you don't do research, right?

At least I don't think you can. If you're in science ed, you've got to do research in science ed, right? And so you teach nine hours or you teach six hours, and you do

research and you advise students and... I don't know, because I cannot conceive of being a faculty member here now. I wouldn't like it,

I don't think. That's interesting. I mean, I love spending time with students and always feeling that I can spend time with students. I love doing faculty governance, OK, writing reports.

I finally learned to write after being terrible at it in college. You need people like that around to make the institution work. You were at TU during a transformational time in

American history, the mid 60s to the 1980s, where time of social unrest exacerbated by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women's liberation movement, as well as the sexual revolution.

What was it like at Towson State College during that period? OK, I wouldn't quite use the verb exacerbate. OK. I think these things had to come.

I mean, they were coming. I... OK, I got, when I came here, I was only 25, so I was barely older than these students I was teaching.

We... There wasn't that much drugs. I mean, the drugs really were on the margins. As I said, these were people who came from, you know, basically working class backgrounds.

They wanted to be teachers. They really were earnest, good, hardworking people. They didn't feel entitled to this or to be able to take time off and do drugs.

They all worked, practically. I would go to any store around here in those days and I'd run into some Towson student, you know, or more than one, you know, I mean, all these stores around here, hard-

working. But I think the war was the first start. Were there protests on campus? Yes, but only about '68.

When I came here in '65, the Young Democrats on campus, who you would expect to be maybe a little more liberal, were still pro war, OK. Because I had gone to a Quaker boarding school and had sort of

kept in touch with what was going on. I realized fairly earlier. I thought fairly earlier that the Vietnam War was really, I mean, Vietnam was clearly a civil war of people who

had gotten out from under the French colonialism and they had different ways of dealing with it. In the American climate, however, the thing that was... The standard was that this was a communist...

This is going to let communism spread. Right. Domino theory. Exactly. I was going to say, you know, if Vietnam falls and Thailand's going to fall and Cambodia's going to fall and of course no

such thing happened. But of course you can't do experiments in history. So you don't know. You were of course the co-sponsor of the... I wanted to get this on record, co-sponsor of the

Students for a Democratic Society. That's the wrong term. I was co-faculty advisor. There's a real big difference.

I understand that. Because, and I don't know whether it's still true, but every campus student organization had to have faculty advisors. Now, I was certainly against the war, and so people coalesced

around me and Phil Marcus, who was the other one. But in our department, Bill Pelham was also anti war, Blair... John Mitchell in art was also anti war. So there were three faculty and then Marcus so that would be four,

and some students that that were sort of actively anti war. The candidate for vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, who had been governor of Maryland, came after your job.

Yes. He had been in a political rally in Chicago and he had been previously here at Towson for what they called a homecoming rally.

OK. Now he said some things that got people so angry they marched out and he immediately blamed the anti-war group. It turned out the interesting thing was that people like Jack

Matthews, you remember Jack Matthews? In history. He was president of the faculty association at that time. And the day before the rally, representatives of our faculty had been talking with Agnew about pay for faculty and

various things. And they had been led to believe that, you know, he was very sympathetic because Towson was in his home turf. You know, Jack Matthews and Art Madden, a few of the really

elders of the faculty had gone to see him about these various things and they had met with him, OK? Well, the next day he comes here and starts to talk about how faculty members only teach 12 hours when everybody else

works 40 and so on. And so people like Jack Matthews were so incensed, a whole bunch of old faculty members of the faculty association marched out, OK.

And he immediately said that was the anti-war group. OK. And so when he went to Chicago, he made a speech saying, you know, we really should think about letting people like these

faculty members who support anti war groups. We should really think about letting them teach in our university. And I have two names and I have this folder.

And I'm going to send this folder to the president of Towson State College. And, well, some people, of course, remember the days of Joe McCarthy when, you know, "I have a list of 13 communists in the

Army," and so on. And so people were fit to be tied. Some people were fit to be tied. Well, the dossier that he sent to Hawkins, Earl Hawkins, whose

bust is right over there, were just some national articles about SDS. Nothing specific about me, nothing specific about Marcus, but it got the stuff rolling, you know?

And so one of our members went to one of the talk radio shows and he was... They were asking him about, you know, Mr. Chen and Mr. Marcus.

And he was asked a question. This is on talk radio. Is it true that Mr. Chen was at a anti war March against the United States where the Vietcong flag was flown?

John Ward had no idea. And the fact of the matter is that I had, that was a '62 march I was talking about and I had completely forgotten that, you know, there were only about 80 of us, right?

But yes, it turned out, I remember there were about six people who had worn army fatigues or combat boots or any other sort of anarchist, and they were waving the Vietcong flag. But that was in '62.

This was on the radio in '68. So what that meant to me was that I had a dossier. There was a dossier on me, and somehow it had been leaked to somebody so they could ask this question on talk radio.

I wasn't afraid of anything because I was a liberal. I mean, I work for Jim McCarthy, you know. I mean, but the thing is, the next thing I know, I get a summons. I had been called to testify before the Baltimore County

grand jury. Marcus was too, I guess. But again, you know, because I was afraid of nothing, you know. So I was called before the grand jury. And it turned out that the

guy Green, he was some guy named Green, who essentially, I mean, who incidentally was a few years later disbarred because of carnal knowledge with a minor. He was the one running the grand jury.

And he said to me, you don't have to answer that question. I said, I want to answer that question. You know, I mean, I took civics and I know exactly what I'm doing here.

I mean, I'm not working against the United States. And so, yeah, there was this one, it was a runaway grand jury. There was this one man who wanted to ask me, you know, why

I was working against the United States and why, you know, all these... And so I sort of used it as a civics lesson to, you know, I would talk to the grand jury and say, can you see what he's

doing? You know, and at the end of it, you know, somebody asked me, well, do you know whether you're doing any good by being an advisor?

I said, well, no, I can't really know. I, you know, I think is it better that there are faculty advisors there than there aren't? Because every once in a while you would get a...

You know, I still remember this one guy who said, well, you know, if it takes a bullet in somebody's head to end the war, let's use a bullet, you know. And then there's let's kill somebody or Dixon or whatever.

I say, you know, that's pretty crazy. But it turned out Baltimore County had a subversive... anti- subversive squad and they had infiltrators in the anti-war movement.

And they evidently, I was told later by Jack Matthews, because Jack Matthews seemed to know all sorts of people. He knew people on the grand jury. He knew people in the Baltimore subversives.

And they told him that they knew the difference between me and Marcus and they knew what happened in the grand jury. And they said, you know, things were fine in the grand jury. But it is a little, it's a little scary.

So Henry, you retired in 2009. What have you been doing with your time in retirement? Well, I've continued in music. In 2010, I stopped being a full time music...

I mean, not full time, but a permanent music director. I've substituted a lot. I've done some singing. I actually conducted a community orchestra for nine months, which

was a, you know, a great thing that I would have never expected in my life. What orchestra was that? It's called the Baltimore Philharmonia Orchestra, and it's run

by all Towson graduates except for me. And it's the only independent orchestra, it's a community orchestra, independent of any academic institution. It's the only one in the area.

And I think I got to conduct some great choral work. I mean, great orchestral works, things that I'd love forever. So that was good. And we're trying to work on the house.

We've been working on the house forever. Because we really have to sell, it's just getting too big and we have to sell it. And, but we can't decide where to go because I've been in

Baltimore since '63. Hard to go to somewhere warm. Harder, I mean, to leave this life to just to go somewhere warm, especially if it involves going to the South, where mixed

marriages aren't so looked upon such great favor. And I've been, you know, participating somewhat at Towson because I come here with seminars occasionally and concerts and plays and, you know, things like this and

seeing people. It really is, you know, I mean, it's an institution which I love. Well, Henry, I want to thank you for coming in and talking with

us today. And on behalf of your friends and colleagues in TURFA, I want to wish you good health and continued productivity. Thank you, and thank you for what you're doing.

I think part of what makes TURFA work, of course, is that all these people who love Towson are involved. I mean, we want to keep this there for other people. Thank you very much.

Thank you.