Interview with Howard Erickson

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. Howard, you grew up in rural Pennsylvania during the first

half of the last century. Did your childhood experiences foster your interest in the natural sciences, or did that come later when you attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania?

It started probably when I was in high school and I began to, in the Boy Scouts and other activities early on, get interested in the out of doors, so to speak. Canoeing was something I was quite interested in and I had an

interesting experience in 11th grade, after 11th grade, taking a rather extended 8-day, 125-mile canoe trip, which really got me into the biological end of things rather clearly. I hope that went well.

I guess it did go well since... I survived it. But it was challenging, but it was just a really maturing experience for the three of us and we just had a really good time.

A few challenges, but it was really communing with nature in the real sense. Well, after graduating from IUP, you actually went into the military for two years.

Was that the Air Force? No, that was the Army. You served in Korea. Korea for almost two years. Right. And it was an interesting tour.

I got to work with correspondents, taking them in and out of the demilitarized zone, the peace talks and interviewing returning GIs who had been in prison and in the death marches and so forth.

So it was... It was a fascinating experience if you had to be in the army, which I had to be. Yes, but fortunately as an officer,

I had a few perks and was able to build up a little cash reserve for my later graduate study. You went on to get a master's degree in biology at Penn State and then a PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca

in basically wildlife biology. Very environmentally oriented in my work as I got more and more involved. And I like the environmental, the whole-animal approach, the community, rather than getting heavily, although I

of course had in my background the cellular and molecular end of things. I was an organismic level kind of biologist and interest.

What stimulated you to pursue a career in higher education? That's a rather convoluted story that I really didn't go to college with any specific goal in mind. I figured I'd probably figure out what career would happen

coming out of that by simply immersing myself. So I ended up double majoring in biology and in psychology, and as a student pursuing more and more specialized courses, I began to tie it down a little bit more to zoology and

particularly to vertebrate zoology. And then I got involved in the wildlife conservation end of it as well. So that's what triggered my initial training.

What circumstances led you to accept an appointment to Maryland State Teachers College at Towson? OK. My department chairman told me I was committing academic suicide,

I think it was the way he put it, because I had a very good job acceptance at Colgate and another one at the University of Maine. But my teaching assignment there would have been largely pre-

med oriented. It was much more into the basic nuts and bolts of zoology and anatomy and physiology and cell biology and things like that. I wanted to get into the environmental field and the

whole-animal approach. So as I checked into Towson State Teachers College at the time, it was refreshing to see that I would be able to develop a few of my own interests, my own courses.

And it was also ironic that I found out rather quickly that there were two relatively recent Cornell PhD graduates that I would be colleagues with. So that didn't hurt it.

That helped a bit to make my decision. So in addition to the name change, which the year you came changed to Towson State College, the college at that time also did in fact expand its Arts and Sciences curriculum.

So I guess you were happy to see that and got away from teaching. Although we should point out there were about 1,500 students here when you came in 1959. It was a small university or college actually

at the time. And we went through the transition of growth with numbers and then expansion of curriculum and of course from a science department of about I think it was probably 15 or 18

people on the bottom of Stephens Hall. We graduated by '65 into a brand new spanking building called Smith Hall. And of course the enrollment had raised its pace and in a fine

way to about 15,000 and I think it was well. So there have been a lot of name changes to this place over the years. You came when it was Maryland State Teachers College

at Towson, right? Then it became Towson State College your first year, and then Towson State University and now of course, Towson University.

And you were here for all that. Who knows what they'll call it in the next session. It keeps getting shorter, which maybe is good. How many years did you teach here?

Well, I've actually taught a little over 40 years, totally, but primarily 39 years here at Towson University. Was your service always in the same department? Yes, well, yes and no.

I guess initially we were simply the Science Department, then we became the Department of Biological Sciences and then Department of Biology more specifically as we grew from the 1,500 to 15,000, as we went into the mid and later

'60s. What courses, both undergraduate and graduate, did you teach? I know the graduate program was relatively small in those days. It's much larger now.

But what did you teach? Yeah, as a matter of fact, that's a very interesting point you make because we had to compete a little bit for the graduate program to get a master's in biology started.

And that worked out well. Thank goodness the board approved that. But the primary courses were required of all the biology faculty.

We teach the introductory, a general biology course, then functional anatomy was a big course initially because we had a lot of pre-med, pre-nursing students. But the ones that I was particularly interested in and

developed myself were field systematic, vertebrate zoology, environmental conservation, wildlife biology and mammalogy. I think that's the group.

Do you have a favorite? I enjoyed the wildlife course that I taught very much. And it's a toss up between that and a more general environmental course because I've got a lot of really

interested students in the environmental course. Did you, I recall that you used to have students do projects, for example, out on your farm there in Pylesville. What kinds of things did they do? Right.

Well, they were either... Almost always they were either in the environmental conservation course or the wildlife biology course. And depending on which, the project would be more specific

to just wildlife management, wildlife species. Or in the case of environmental conservation, I had a lot of students that did a fisheries related project. I have two farm ponds, one that's an acre and a half,

another is 3/4 of an acre. And they did projects related to populations there and in the Harford County and Baltimore County streams. But it was a little bit of awkward situation.

You had to have at least a three hour lab period to work to get out there and back and get something done. So we worked a bit on the, let's say, encouragement side to get people to go out, students to go out on the weekends and during

holidays to do some of the more intense projects. It's ironic now that you are retired. We have a field station, right? There's nobody to use it.

Is that right? Yeah. So you came to Towson from Cornell University, where you were trained as a research scientist in those days, TU was a

teacher's college, transitioning into a liberal arts college. Did you engage in research when you got here? Well, I was rather surprised at the opportunity that came along. Not immediately, but about, I guess, four or five years after

I arrived. I had done quite a bit of work encouraging my students to be proactive with the Maryland Academy of Science and Natural History Society.

Established a nice working relationship with Dr. Stein, Charlie Stein, who is a herpetologist, related primarily to the Natural History Society and to Nigel Wolf and some others at the Baltimore Zoo.

And as a result of those activities, we eventually were able to get some positions for our students there and of course was able to carry out some research projects that eventually, the opportunity to go to Liberia, West Africa and earn

some money for the zoo was the was the primary goal of the expedition. But it was advertised, of course, as a scientific expedition.

I was a chief scientist and we were there primarily to try and bring back a pygmy hippopotamus for the zoo and to establish a breeding population here in the United States of this rare and endangered species.

So believe it or not, it worked out well. They figured I could do it because I had had some experience in New York State trapping black bears. And that imagination on their part fortunately turned out

well. And with the help, of course, of local trappers and people of knowledge in Liberia, we were successful in bringing back not only the hippo, but the rare and endangered Picathartes

Bald Crow, established a bit of a population there, cooperation with the National Zoo. And it was just a fun time. I started doing a little research, that is literature

research, when we got ready for this interview, and I started looking for pictures and stories in the newspapers and in the archives of various institutions.

Academy of Sciences and the Baltimore Zoo, or now the Maryland Zoo at Baltimore, in Baltimore. And you and and Charlie and the chairman of the Maryland Academy of Sciences loading your rifles and clearly a staged picture.

Incedentally the rifles were tranquilizers. Yeah. Not bullets. Well, so when I talked to the Baltimore Zoo or the Maryland

Zoo made these pictures available to me from their archives, and the first thing they they wanted me to be sure to say is that basically the Maryland Zoo no longer takes

animals from the wild. They were concerned that if we showed those pictures that people are going to get the wrong... And I agree totally with that.

And again, it was the effort to establish a breeding population in case the native population in Liberia was wiped out. And there were very few of those animals left in West Africa in general, at least in that time.

Well, as I recall, you actually may have been responsible for the building a hippopotamus house at the Baltimore Zoo to house those animals once they came back. I know they have a hippo house.

I don't know if the ancestors of those, are they the same animals? Oh, yes. They're, well, they're not the same.

They're the ancestors. And give credit to the Baltimore Zoo, not to me. John Moore was the associate director and went on our second trip in 1969.

And the design of the hippo house and and so forth was not perfect, but it did the job. And over the years of the zoo, as I understand, has sold quite a few of them and that's helped the zoo maintain its, you know,

financial wherewithal. And the so-called Baltimore Zoological Society was the result of this brainstorm of Nigel Wolf and Ray Thompson, who is a private citizen in the public relations field.

The reason I got invited to go on this trip was that I had made the acquaintance, particularly of Nigel Wolf, and he knew I'd done some black bear trapping, so he thought, well, I'd be a likely candidate to help with this particular

enterprise. And as I say, it was amazing it worked out as well. It was about a month long each time in 1967 and 1969. And we had some talent with us in the way of others.

John Moore was really a good snake man, so to speak, and we collected some mambas and some Gaboon vipers and we had a really successful opportunity from the fishes on through rare amphibians, caecilians of all things that I'd never seen.

And they were just these little guys, but I was more interested in them than I was almost in the hippo itself. Well, they said in the Evening Sun article that I reviewed that said that you all brought back 2,000 specimens.

That's quite a few. I never counted them, but there were quite a few. And we had a nice, so to speak, dry museum and wet museum at Towson.

And we shared, of course, those materials from time to time with others including some people at the Smithsonian. So we talked about research initially and you got into, you know, some of these activities you've done in West Africa. Were

both trips to West Africa, to Liberia? Yes, both of them were to there. What was the research atmosphere at the university or the college in those days like?

We'd have to say it was modest at the time. There was a portion on the part of faculty, and obviously some faculty more interested than others in pursuing the option of having a really strong master's program and the undergraduate

program expanding so that we can encourage student research projects. And the trips to Liberia were actually the result of my applying for a grant from the Faculty Research Committee, as

it was called at the time. So that's where the modest monies that I needed to contribute to the the whole effort, that's where they came from.

And that committee's still around. That committee's still good and strong. Yeah. Well, let me change subjects a little bit.

Was there an academic rank system when you came here? Rather interestingly, I was astounded when I became interested in Towson that there was no rank. And initially I not only thought it was strange, I wasn't too

sure I'd be comfortable because it appeared that it was just so wide open that, you know, you would just have no idea how you would fare under that condition. But I was assured by the powers that be when I interviewed and

particularly with the doctors Hathaway and Odell, who were, you know, they sort of took me under their wing initially because of our commonality at Cornell. But anyway, it was very comfortable.

But the State Board of Trustees, I guess it was probably decided that wasn't too good an idea and they wanted us to go. So we had this rather extensive and somewhat, let's say replete with challenges change from no rank because

suddenly, you know, rank had to be assigned to everyone. And you can imagine what kind of... How long did it take you to become a full professor? Well, I fortunately was, I started out as an associate

professor. So that's a couple steps up because of the original assigning of rank related to PhD and number of years of service. And then, of course, it became a meritorious related merit system

where you earned your stripes, so to speak, in the military sense. Well, today TU is a diverse student body of about 23,000 students.

When you join the faculty, as you mentioned, about 1,500 students, most of whom were prospective teachers. The science facility was not differentiated into its.. Faculty was not differentiated into its various components, and the entire

department was housed, as you mentioned, in the old main building, Stephens Hall. What was it like in those days? I mean, was there a lot of interdepartmental camaraderie?

Yes. As a matter of fact, the whole experience is one that I think any faculty member would really enjoy today if they had the option, because you knew the guys in geography and

in English and in art and in all the departments. And we had a college Senate and I had the privilege of being vice chair for a couple years. And the responsibility that that entailed was a growth-

stimulating kind of thing for me. The diversity in the faculty lounge was quite obvious from the standpoint of some of us are neophytes, others that have been here for, you know, 20, 25 years.

And again, the interdepartmental disciplines were represented quite broadly and and you got to know a diversity of faculty. It was very healthy, I thought.

Well, in 1965, I believe, and I think you confirmed this earlier, the natural and physical sciences department cleaved into the biological sciences department and the physical sciences department.

You were selected as the first chairman. You were elected the first chairman in 1965. You served ten years, which is longer than anybody's ever served before or since.

Well, it was an elected, appointed arrangement, which Doctor Hawkins and then his predecessor, Doctor Fisher encouraged, I guess would be the word. And as the faculty grew larger, it became obvious that

it was necessary to move in that direction, to have the faculty able to grow and yet prosper with within the disciplines. What were your duties as chairman of the Department of

Biological Sciences in those days? Well, broadly, it was to serve my fellow biologists, as they looked at it from the administrative viewpoint it was to, of course, make sure that we were acting responsibly

and that we were encouraging growth. And the problem there, it was never a problem, actually, it was a nature of the department itself. The department wanted to grow, the department wanted to expand.

Fortunately, in my own background, I was, of course, prejudiced. I was a little unsure of the growth of the, what you would call them today, I guess, the medical oriented sciences

because I could see they were just going to grow like Topsy. Whereas the environmental idea was still pretty young in those days. And so when we were able to choose faculty, quite a number

of us wanted to make sure we retained a good diversity and we didn't get too heavily involved in what you might call a more medically oriented sense because we did service a lot of nursing students and other students that

made that a tendency. Well, American colleges, the enrollment in American colleges exploded during the 1960s. When the science building Smith Hall opened in 1965,

Towson University enrolled, or State College, actually, enrolled just under 5,000 students. When Smith Hall addition was added in 1975, the student population was more than 13,000 and the enrollment today is

23,000. We'll break ground next month on a new science facility, and when it's completed in 2020, it'll be the largest academic building on campus, which is quite a change.

I hope you'll be able to attend that opening. I hope so. What impact did the exponential growth of the enrollment have on departments like biology?

I think it gave us a lot of opportunity to accept and benefit from diversity and diversity in the student population as well as the faculty. Faculty became more diverse ethnically.

That didn't hurt anything, to say the least. And of course, as far as student population, it was a challenge at the time because we were receiving students in some cases that weren't that well prepared.

And there was a, I guess you would call it a tug of war between the attitude of faculty and student alike that we are being flooded with a lot of students who weren't really prepared as well as we'd like them to be.

But there was a definite mandate that we serviced the community. And so we did well to adhere to that. And I think the university definitely was challenged for a little while, but we profited from that heavily.

I saw something reported on the Towson University website suggesting the first first year students at Towson have a 3.7 grade point average. I don't think it was quite like that when when you were

teaching. No, I don't think it was quite that, no. What careers... I'll say this knowing I might be slightly redundant with

some things we said earlier, but what careers were your students preparing for when you started teaching and how did that focus change perhaps over the course of your career? That's a good question because initially we were very teacher-

oriented and it didn't hurt us at all because our program was, I think you'd call it user- friendly, particularly for high school teachers and of course high school biology teachers. Science teachers maybe not so much in the broad sense,

although we still try to accommodate those ones as well. But the the outreach to high schools made it, if you will, an encouragement for those teachers to have their students come to Towson.

And so we tended to refuel the enrollment in a, what you might call automatic way by reaching out to the high schools, placing our student graduates there, and then accepting their high school graduates as they came of college age.

Well, let me go back to some sort of, something you intimated a couple of questions ago. In the mid 1970's, the biology department had distinct organismal emphasis.

With the advent of the molecular revolution, the emphasis shifted. How did the department deal with that transition? I guess the answer would be primarily through hiring and

expanding our curriculum to include, of course... And actually the whole curriculum thing became obvious to me as an EFI because I arrived, as you know, as you said in '59, '60, the Scientific American authored the cell and the word

or the the initials DNA suddenly became an important awareness factor for all biologists and of course, non-biologists as well as time went by. But the electron microscope and the advent of molecular biology

changed things forever for the good. But in the same breath, it didn't in any way detract from the organismic end of things as well, because that was still a specialty.

But it became more and more obvious that we needed to have some new members of the department who were skilled in those areas that were oncoming. And of course, that helped also with the the eventual graduate

school development and with pre- med and pre-vet, the pre-vet program became important as well. Did President Hawkins live on campus in Glen Esk? Oh yeah.

Yeah. And that was... And he had teas, I understand, periodically.

Yeah. Did you ever go to one? Oh yeah. We had teas. And he was described as not wearing the

pants of the administration. This is not for recording maybe, but the Dean of Students, you probably, you ever hear her name? It's an unusual name.

Orielle Murphy. Orielle was the Dean of Students. And in many ways, I think she was more influential than he was in everything.

I mean, she was single and therefore her whole life was the university. And as the Dean of Students, she was totally protective, particularly of the students who are here on campus.

But it was interesting to see them together when they had these teas. And so for the president, I think there's a picture over there,

I just saw, he and his wife are somewhere in there. And they held these formal teas over at Glen Esk, and... Did the ladies wear gloves? Oh, yeah, it was barely 1959.

Wow, '60. He sat in on my early, you know, tenure, sat in on my class as an observer, the president, in those days, and it was a little intimidating, but he and the Dean both were there.

And afterward, the only comment he made is he said, after he complimented me and, you know, what you'd expect unless you really screwed up.

He said, you know, I was a little surprised, though. You're still teaching the amoeba. And my jaw dropped. I don't know.

I was speechless, you know, like, well, that's changed. Yeah, I mean, amoebas.... But the introductory course, it was introductory biology and happened to be we were teaching the protozoans or whatever.

At any rate, I digress. Well, no, that's fine. That's actually very interesting. So back to governance.

Did governance change? I mean, this place has always prided itself on faculty governance. Right. Yeah.

The faculty was very strong. We had, of course, a Senate and the faculty was very jealous of rights. We had, of course, the competition of departments with

each other and so we had a committee on committees, which is the strangest name, but it was probably the most important committee we ever had on campus. And we get into this some really interesting... Particularly

as some of the Health Science began to grow. We found that they were inclined to take a lot of the monies. And so we were very protective of our interest.

So there was... You were on Senate? Yeah, I was. Yeah. I got myself into a lot of nooks and

crannies. Well, if you were entering the field of higher education today for the first time, what changes, if any, would you make in your career?

That's a tough one. I really, I had such a really, I guess I describe it as satisfying and challenging time of it. Things were, let's say there was plenty of space for growth and

fitting in and I was able to develop my courses of interest as I mentioned before in environmental conservation, wildlife and things like that. We were able to collectively to, some of, us pursue the

environmental area of biology and open doors for our students that way as well. So there was a lot of opportunity and frankly, I would of course find things a lot different, and different

challenges today, but for the time that I was in, it worked out to my experience very beneficially. In wrapping up this interview, I have a tangential question for you.

Your 40-year career, 39-year career here included the transformative 1960s, perhaps one of the most socially volatile decades of the past half century. It was a time of social unrest, the Vietnam War, the women's

movement and the sexual revolution. Life as we know it changed. What was it like at Towson State College here in Towson, Maryland, during that period?

Let's say it was a challenge in the administrative sense more perhaps than on the working level for most of us in the biological sciences. In the social sciences,

I'm sure they were much more involved than we were. As I look back on it, I know they were. We had the vice president here on campus and we had Students for a Democratic Action, or... SDS.

Yeah, they they were here and there were protests and there were disruptions, but it was, as we looked at it probably collectively as a faculty, it was healthy. That was a challenge, but it was not as disruptive as it could

have been or as it was in some places. The number of minority students on campus has always been small. I don't know if Towson has ever actually reached their projection of I don't know what it was now, maybe 15, 20%.

But during that period, we actually had race riots in downtown Towson. When I got here in the 70s, some of the remnants of that were still present.

Was that noticeable on campus? It was, but it was, the attitude was so positive among the faculty and so open to, let's open these doors. Let's get this diversity thing moving.

There was a very strong feeling among the faculty and students alike that, I hate to say it, but I think we were in many cases largely shielded from it. Not on purpose necessarily, but just because of where we were and

we were busy growing and the growth was probably the biggest thing that kept us from having a, what you might have referred to as a negative impact. Anything else you want to add?

I've just enjoyed my time so much at Towson. I had the opportunity to do many things and one of the things that we didn't get into that I enjoyed and still I'm enjoying in retirement is is taking victims to primarily East

Africa, to Tanzania and Kenya, occasionally to Rwanda to see the gorillas. We did some strange things. The students talked me into a number of activities on the spur of the moment a couple times, like the

first time we ever climbed Mount Kenya. We did that, the students and I, five different times. We had no equipment, nothing except, can we do it? My facilitator who was unfortunately almost more, let's

say, open than I, we rented equipment and I think twelve of us did Kenya back in the 1980s for the first time. Then later on we had the opportunity to do a really rather challenging but interesting climb again with a

number of students and a couple of faculty actually did the the safari and then we did Kilimanjaro. So we had fun, we enjoyed it. Well, it sounds like you're having a good time, right?

Still, still am. Howard, I want to thank you for coming in to talk with us today. And on behalf of your friends and colleagues in TURFA, I want to wish you continued good health and prosperity.

Well, thank you and I appreciate the opportunity to share some things. I hope most of them are reflective of the fact that I really appreciate the opportunities I've had over

these years.