Interview with Raymond Castaldi

This interview is being conducted in the Towson Room of the Towson University Archives. The archives are located on the 5th floor of the Cooke 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. Welcome to Ray Castaldi, who is the Treasurer of TURFA and a

retired faculty member from the Department of Accounting. Good to see you here today, Ray. Thanks, and nice to see you too. Why don't you start by telling us why you came to Towson

University when you were already in a job as an accountant? What brought you to an academic career? Well, I did, I was probably eight or nine years in public accounting.

I'd done that beforehand. And I had heard that Towson was looking for some faculty members in a new department, a new program of business. And I applied and I thought that it might be an

interesting different career that I would have. I was also beginning my own accounting practice at the time and I thought that we could probably balance the two in some way.

So I was hoping that Towson would provide me with some additional income and so forth that I needed actually starting my own firm, actually starting my firm from scratch.

And I ran into Ria Frijters and she was the first one that interviewed me. She was the first, I guess you could call it, chairman of the program in business, which was part of the economics department

at the time. And I was actually the fourth member hired. So we had four people in business. She taught, I think management and Bart Mckenney taught

marketing and Jack Hampton taught finance and Mike Seganish taught business law. I guess he taught marketing before Mceddy came. I'm sorry.

And I taught the accounting courses. So it was my job to not only teach them, but to plan for the eventual growth of the different courses in accounting. So that's what started me off and over the years I did

more teaching than I did accounting work on the outside and eventually just devoted it all to the academic career after that. Probably in, I would guess '75 or '76 is when I applied for and got tenure here and finished my master's degree and

so forth. So from that point on it was pretty much all academics. So you came here in 1970. How big was the university at that time?

Oh my goodness. It was probably only 6,000 in total, I guess. And it was primarily teacher education at the time. I think it was still called Towson State Teachers College.

And... No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. It was already called Towson State College, but only recently

had been changed. All right, that's... OK, so it's Towson State College. Yeah.

OK, good. Yeah. It wasn't a university yet. No, it wasn't a university yet.

Yeah, but... And it was a very collegial community, you might say. I remember playing basketball at lunchtime with Buzz Shaw and President Fisher and a number of other basketball types

who, we just went down to the gym, played basketball, took a shower and back to work. It was interesting, but it was like I said, the four of us met in one room in the economics department that

they saved for their adjunct faculty. And that's where we had our department meetings and the four of us at the time. So as it grew, it became its own department, a unitary Department

of Business administration. Right. Was that in about the mid 70s? Yes, I believe it was, it was about '73 or '74 that we became a separate department.

And Ria Frijters was the initial chairman and I think soon after that she was made an Associate Dean, I think, or I think it was an Associate Dean at the time of Division One. And that included the College of Liberal Arts and, of course,

our department and so forth. We were in Division One at that particular time. And then when she became Dean, she turned the chairmanship over to Jack Hampton.

And Jack served as chairman for probably a year or so. And when he left, Bill Brown took over from... Bill Brown at that time was head of the Institute of Management at the university.

And he became the chairman of the business department. And he led the business department for about, I guess, ten or twelve years, something like that. And during that time, accounting split off into a separate

department within the Business School, although it wasn't a Business School. We were just separate school, separate department in business before the university split up into separate colleges and so

forth. And that was in 1980 or something like that. Was that the... I'm remembering that the separation into actual colleges was in '82. '82, is that right?

OK, yes, we were a separate accounting department and we were, I remember we did a couple of searches for a permanent Dean before the colleges were separated and we went through two initial searches which were unsuccessful basically.

So we had to settle for the first day of the new college with an interim Dean. And Andy Luff was the was the interim Dean at the time and he served for a couple of years as interim Dean while we we went

through another search for a permanent Dean. But it was difficult because everything was sort of brand new and we're trying to establish rules of procedure for not only our department, but also for the college.

At that time it was actually called the School of Business and Economics. And as I recall, the economics department was sort of added on

by the administration. I don't think they were fond of coming over from liberal arts, but they were stuck with the School of Business and Economics. At least they got us out of their department

as tenants and so forth. But it was interesting. Well, the economics department felt at that time that they had so many affinities with political science and sociology

in particular, that I think they were really torn as to whether they should... Oh, is that right? ...go into the School of Business. School of Business. Yes. In fact, there was...

Well, there was some faculty, I think that favored that, but there was probably a split among them, because weren't they also part of political science at the time? They had... Earlier they had been part of political science and then

had become a separate department and.... So it was all very evolutionary during the 70s and early 80s. Yes.

Yes. Because the university was growing so fast. And identifying a sort of a business orientation. And how fast was the School of Business growing?

Oh my goodness. It was... We went from four in the initial year or two to about 35 in two or three years. Yeah.

In fact, the initial faculty were people who were initially in areas of business within the Baltimore area. Joe Shane and Art Hold and Cleve Chandler and Spiros Fanos,

all were people who had had careers in business at one point in time or another and that came to our faculty, and most of our initial accounting faculty were people that were in practice at

one time in the public accounting field. And I think that was one of the attractions that made our program sort of unique at the time, people who had business experience, had accounting experience, and they

brought that into the classroom, which was really vital. We had very, very good success as far as our graduates sitting for the CPA exam, passing CPA exam, and later on that proved to be very beneficial for the accounting

program because they were very instrumental in keeping their ties with the university and with the accounting as far as establishing, excuse me, an accounting Advisory Board and so forth.

And I've still been active in doing that since I left. But in the mid 70s we, as I said before, we were searching for an additional, for a permanent Dean.

And I was on that search committee as well as others. And we eventually hired Sam Barone as the permanent Dean. He was the first permanent Dean of the Business School and he

was Pat Plante's choice. She says, I knew he was the guy I wanted when I first met him because he he had been a Dean before at Saint Louis University, I believe, and Detroit University in Michigan.

And he came to us with some knowledge of what should be done, what we had to do in order to eventually become accredited by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, AACSB.

So she knew that he was the one that we really needed. And he was quite a guy. One of the first things he did was at that particular time, I

was chairman of the accounting department and he called me in his office. One of these things you never forget. He said, Ray, he said, you know, there's been talk about us having an Associate

Dean. I said, well, I've heard talk about that, you know, and I didn't right think too much about it. He said, well I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse, just like the godfather, you know. I said, what's that?

And he says, I want you to be Associate Dean for the school. I said, well, I don't... Let me, can I think about that? He says, yeah, tell me tomorrow, give me your answer tomorrow. So that's how it started.

We were over in the lecture hall using that as our temporary office as well. Stevens Hall was being renovated. So that's how I became Associate Dean and served for ten

years, I guess it was, as associate Dean. I had been accounting chair for I think about ten years before that.

Seems like things happened in ten year increments, you know, about almost ten years of accounting practice and ten years as a faculty member and ten years as as a chairman and ten years as Associate Dean.

Then it was out the door in retirement. Well, you get a chance to reinvent yourself every ten years. Yeah, that's right.

You're right. And there were some experiences, as you and I know, in those interim periods, in the growth periods, it's really something. Some of the faculty that we came across

in those years were... Well, particularly I think in the 70s and early 80s when the School of Business was growing so quickly, you were using a lot of adjunct faculty. Oh, yes.

And many of those perhaps were a little dicey in some way. They they made it into the newspapers quite a bit. Yeah, they were some unsavory characters that we had to deal with, and they weren't all in accounting, but there

were some that I remember were in accounting, the fellow that was rescued from jumping off the Key Bridge at an appropriate time. We got a call as to why he wasn't in class and they

happened to find him down there. Parked his car just beyond the toll booth and walked out on the bridge and somebody rescued him from jumping off. We didn't have him return to class obviously after that.

Then the the one fellow that, he gave me a scare because he was he was also... For some reason he was doing something at Hechinger's at the time and

golden ring. We probably need to explain for the younger audience that Hechinger's was a very large home improvement store. in the olden days.

Home Depot. Yeah, it was like an early version of Home Depot. That's right. And he had some disagreement with the manager there and

stuffed him in the trunk of his car and hauled him out somewhere in Baltimore County and was going to do him no good. But they happened to catch up with him and he eventually went to jail.

And sent us all postcards from Jessup Prison one one day, which I decided I wasn't going to open until I had the bomb squad from Aberdeen Proving Grounds come out and take a look and make sure it was safe to open, which they did.

And it was OK. But those are memories. But the one you and I remember the most was our mystery professor.

Why don't you tell us a little more about the mystery professor? Well, you're being interviewed, not me, right? You know as much about it as I do because you and I had to fire him when we found out that he was an imposter.

He was an imposter. The name he went by here was not his real name. And in fact, when we finally caught up with him, he was apparently teaching at four other universities at the time,

not necessarily in this area. I think Wagner University was one and Shippensburg was another and Millersville may have been a third as well as Towson. And he was apparently in terrible need

of money. He would come here and teach accounting on Monday and cancel Wednesday and Friday class so he could go to the other places

the rest of the week. And he was doing that for about a month or so into the school year. And then we finally caught up with him.

The students finally complained enough that they said, where is he? And you and I got together and you had to lower the boom on him, so, but he went peacefully.

You know what I mean? It was one of those things that nothing else really happened after that. And some of the other things that marked our

careers were, I guess, less eventful, but it was a nice growth period. Well, your career spanned what, over 30 years here. 36 to be exact. 36 years.

So in that time, how do you think the students have changed? I noticed that there was a significant difference after I was in the administration and as associate Dean because we had to deal a lot,

I had to deal a lot with the, you know, complaints from the students about this professor, that professor, and then address that with the instructor or with the professor, whoever it was, and let them know, you know, there was something going wrong

in the classroom. We needed to take some corrective action and so forth, which didn't always, you know, go down well. And at the same time, we're trying to hire faculty members

who are internally qualified and so forth. And it was a different experience completely, But the students were, I guess, knowledgeable about all of that. And I think they took that into consideration and

it was a type of thing where they were confident that their legitimate complaints were going to be adhered and listened to and acted upon. But then, you know, you get, as a carry on to all of that,

you get other complaints that we found out were less legitimate. And that seemed to be one of the things that was distasteful to me, especially, you know. But change in students was something that I observed from that particular

aspect as opposed to being in the classroom. In the classroom it was somewhat different, but not quite that same way. And I went back to teaching after I had resigned from

being Associate Dean. So I saw what that change was like in in the classroom again. And they were more goal oriented, I think at the end, because they could see at that particular time what

it was like to graduate with an accounting major and have that increase their chances for getting a position in or in some related field to accounting also. That's the way I, and in the beginning we really had

students who were looking for some sort of a business degree and accounting was really not so much of a desired major at in the very early stages. It was only after we had a full complement of accounting courses

that would satisfy the requirements to sit for the CPA exam that they became more focused accounting majors, so to speak. You and Sam Barone shepherded the School of

Business through the accreditation process. What was that like? How did it affect you and your colleagues to be going through that process?

Well, he primarily focused on hiring the the right faculty with terminal degrees and with appropriate experience and publications and so forth. That was his main objective.

And from my side, it was to organize the effort for the self study. There's a self study process that goes before the visitation and we had to get our courses lined up with the right,

covering the right materials and so forth and subject matter. And we had to make sure that the faculty who were qualified to teach in certain areas were in fact teaching in

those areas. And we had some adjustments to the curriculum that we had to make to meet the ACSB standards. So that was pretty much my job to see that the curriculum

was aligned properly both in accounting and in the other fields of business and management and so forth. So was working with the department chairs who were then working with their faculty to make those adjustments.

So, and we had some internal requirements that especially in business and accounting, because there were at that time newly designed admission requirements or entrance requirements.

You just couldn't come in and major in the Business School right from the freshman year. So we initiated a pre- business and pre-accounting functions to the curriculum where they would take

preliminary general education courses and their introductory courses in business and accounting before they were admitted to the Business School as majors. And in accounting we had, you know, I guess really

stringent requirements, looking back, grade point average and in overall grade point average was one of the requirements and also a separate grade point average in accounting.

They had to have accounting courses that were above a certain grade point average. And in accounting, they also had to pass the initial entrance exam.

It was called the entry level accounting courses for accounting, entry level accounting course. I think that's what it called.

And they had to pass, that was an exam supervised by the American Institute of CPAs. And they administered the test and we had them take it and we had made arrangements for them to take it here on campus

for the most part, but they would have to pass that test with a certain score level before they could go on and become accounting majors. There was, you know, looking back on that was a lot of

headaches because a lot of complaints about all that stuff. And why can't I just major in accounting because I want to take the courses? Well, we have these requirements and we had to make sure that the

students were properly classified as pre-accounting majors so that they get into the pre-accounting courses and so forth. So that was all stuff that I had to monitor and

engineer from the beginning. Not a popular position to be in, believe me. Well, that was the tag end of the anything goes era in higher education where students just thought I can do what I

want to do. And to find that there were actually entrance requirements and standards for moving forward in a degree program was probably a little offputting for some of the students.

Yeah, in some respects it was more revolutionary than evolutionary, if you might want to say that, because the other schools in the area didn't have these requirements and strictures, you might say.

And I think the faculty and the accounting faculty, really, as separate, the distinct unit wanted put this into effect now. As chairman, I guess I was leading the charge, so to speak, but I feel that I had a lot of support

and impetus from the members of the faculty who wanted to do this. I think we needed, we saw the need to sort of put accounting at Towson separate and distinct and quite different

from accounting at any of the other area colleges and make it something special. And that's what we tried to tried to do and it was successful, I think.

Yeah. Now after Sam Barone, then Alan Liebernight was the next Dean. Is that right? Yes.

There was an interim period where I was acting Dean and we were in the process of searching for another Dean and that coincided with the interesting development, I guess it was nationwide.

There were... At that particular time, the AACSB, which is our accrediting agency, and a number of other schools, bigger schools than Towson and more prestigious than Towson were searching and hiring Deans from the areas of private business, private

industry. And we happened to come across Alan Lieberman, who was the president of one of the banks, First Mariner Bank, I think it was, and he was looking for

something else, he had retired from that. That's right. And someone from Towson knew him and suggested that he come and apply for the job.

And he did. And it was, from then on it was just a perfect match because we were at that time going for re- accreditation for the Business School and for initial

accreditation in accounting. And he, one of the first things he did was to organize a summer symposium you might say among all the the faculty in the College of Business at the time who came

voluntarily during the summer months to discuss and organize revamping of not just the... The curriculum needed to be just slightly modified, but he revamped the entire approach to the way the College of Business operated and initiated

some other things that were very advantageous in us getting accreditation. And he really did supervise quite the closely the accreditation process from that point on.

But he and I, we attended our first ACSB meeting together in Minneapolis. I'll never forget that because he said, what's going on here? What do we do here?

What do we do there? I said, well, it just, you know, I tried to explain to him what we had done in the past, you know, and I had a year and a half experience in ACSB at the time.

So I was a real old timer you might say. But it was an interesting process. It really was. And from that point we got our reaccreditation in

business and our initial accreditation in accounting. So that was interesting, interesting thing then. And all those times I was his Associate Dean, as he said, I'm really glad that you decided to stay on as Associate Dean, he

says, because I wouldn't have had any idea, you know, about different things. And he was asking me different questions about, can we do this? I'd say, yeah, I think we could do that probably.

And can we do that? No, I don't think we can do that. He didn't quite understand why, but being from the business area, he was completely new to this environment, so to

speak. But he caught on pretty well. He really did. And he was here for how long?

'85 to... He was here when I retired, which is 2006, but not long after that, I think it was probably '07 or '08, something like that. And I know I retired and there were a couple of other

faculty members who replaced me as Associate Dean, but I think it was only probably a year or two after that that he retired also. And then we hired Shohreh Kaynama as our current and I

guess third Dean of the College of Business. And she's been doing a great job ever since. She is home grown. Home grown. That's right.

She started here as she was getting her bachelor's degree from Towson and finished her bachelor's and then she stayed on teaching marketing and getting her master's and PhD at George Washington at the same time.

So she's a home grown talent. Exactly right. And in her term, and actually started a little bit before her,

we were beginning the advising process and the advising center was started in Allen's, I think it was Allen. It might have been Allen's or right at the end of Sam's tenure

by a number of different people. But eventually Pat Atkinson was the one who really put it together as a really well qualified and active advising center in College of Business.

And at that particular time, a lot of emphasis was also changing toward faculty advising and throughout the university. But I was happy to see that, you know, we were on the

leadership side of that in developing the advising center in the college. So it was one of the things that I think both Allen and Sam and Shoreh have have fostered in their

tenures as Deans. So you were in on the actual beginnings and development all the way through to a fully accredited and highly regarded College of Business and Bconomics.

Literally one of the old-timers. Are one of the old- timers. But I think I'm the only one left who's still around and still alive, so to speak.

But if you were just starting a teaching career in higher education today, what would you do differently? Oh, I'd probably, I would probably initially go and finish my graduate work and PhD in accounting because I had

a discussion with an AACSB member before we were accredited and everything like that. We used to attend AACSB meetings to find out what the rules and regulations were and get some of the

ideas about what we can do. And I can remember one of the Deans was from the University of Oklahoma and he asked me about different places to hire faculty.

I said, well, we're trying to get some faculty who aren't nearing the end of their or beginning their PhD program, but there really aren't any local PhD programs that we could, that we could recommend to them.

And he mentioned a few and I mentioned a few. None of the ones that I mentioned he thought very highly of. And I said, well, I said, where do you think we could

send some people or try to attract some people? He said, well, he says University of Oklahoma is good. He was from Oklahoma. Oklahoma State, I'm sorry, Oklahoma State. And some other places in the Midwest and West.

And I said, well, it's kind of hard to get somebody to go there to finish their PhD program and be able to come back here to teach and so forth. So it was a difficult thing. When when Sam became the

Dean, he saw to it that that we weren't doing those kinds of things. We were looking for people who already had their doctorates. And I think that's probably what I've would have done if I had

done it differently in from the beginning, because at the time I was hired, there was a theory that AACSB would be accepting, as far as accounting was concerned, people with a master's degree in business or accounting and combined with

a CPA certificate, an active CPA certificate. And that's what I had at the time. So we thought in the initial stages that that was probably going to be satisfactory for accreditation purposes.

And that's what we were in the initial market for, people who had finished their master's program, had a certificate in accounting, and hopefully had some experience in practical accounting.

And that soon changed after afterwards. But there was a time that we thought that was probably terminal status, so to speak. And it's probably why I achieved terminal status in the

early years. But that changed obviously. Well, other things have changed too in your time here. You started out in Linthicum Hall, lovely Linthicum, as we

called it. Yes. And we graduated to the unrenovated Stephens Hall. And when we finally decided that they were going to renovate Stephens Hall, we had to move out of Stephens Hall.

And one of the legacies of the College of Business is that we had to move out of Stephens Hall as a faculty and the entire business areas, marketing, management, and the economics... Well, economics stayed where they were in Linthicum. Marketing and

management relocated into the so-called annex buildings that are still here. Yes, the temporary buildings from the 1960s. They are still here. But Sam, Sam Barone said, we're not going there.

He says, look around and see where we can find some other space on campus. We looked all over campus for some space for the business departments and for the accounting department.

Even looked at the, there's a school, is it Towson High School that's east of here on... Yeah, it's just east of here. We looked at that as a temporary quarters also, he said, no, we weren't going to go there.

So they got the temporary buildings, the annex for the management and marketing departments and we relocated into the lecture hall, the breakout rooms for the lecture hall.

We walked through there and Sam says here's what I want, I want to be here. He says, this is for me. So he decided that's where his office was going to be and and he

wanted me right next to him. So the accounting department was in the lecture hall classroom, so to speak, afterwards. And that was nice.

It was a great place. And we stayed there until Stephens Hall was renovated. And that was another one of my duties as Associate Dean was to make sure that the renovation was done and

relocation back into Stephens was in appropriate areas and so forth. So certain rooms were supposed to be classrooms and certain rooms were faculty offices and so forth.

So we went through that process. It was interesting, so to speak. OK. And so the school of the College of Business and Economics is

still in Stephens Hall. Yes. Taking up more and more room. Yeah, they moved everybody else out. I don't know what happened to... Well, mathematics moved to 7800

During the renovation? Oh, I don't know if that was during the renovation or later, but yeah, there never was any surge space on campus for when their renovation was going to happen.

Yeah, I don't know where they went. There was always a lot of squeeze. When we first moved in here, the computer science, the computer room was in the basement and they eventually moved into the library.

I know that, but I don't remember where math went. And computer science at that time was along with math, so, but we all moved back in and and they were up on the second floor at the time.

But I think that's all. That's all business now. Yeah, I think we had the entire building at the time. So.

So the campus has changed a great deal physically as well as academically. Oh my goodness, yes. Yeah, it was, we used to have lunch over

in the Newell dining room. But I don't know, does Newell still have a dining room over there? Is it still over there?

Well, you remember the old faculty dining room? Yes. In Newell Hall. Where...

Yes. Where we could run a tab and only had to pay once a month. And then when that disappeared...

Yeah, everything. Then we had to go down... To the union. To the union. Yeah.

There was a faculty dining room in there too, right? At one point. There was, but it wasn't the same because you couldn't run a tab. No, that's right.

But and then was all that time to walk down there, you know, it was in the middle of campus. But yeah, it was a lot different in those days because in those days you'd be able to walk across and play

basketball during the lunch period in in Burdick Hall. And we did that for a while too. But things have changed. Really have. I think for the better though.

Well, which brings up kind of a final question. And that is what is it that makes you, and by extension a lot of other people, so interested in being part of the Towson University Retired Faculty Association.

Well, I didn't really have too much information about it until my daughter who worked at the time in the Provost's office said that I would... And she volunteered me to be part of the formation committee.

And I think I was on the initial planning stages for this thing back when we were sort of putting it together. And so that was interesting to do that from from the start, it was.

So you've been in on the ground floor... Ground floor. A lot of things . Starting over kind of thing. You do that all the time, don't you, Ray? Right, start things up, you know, stir up the pot a little bit and then get out.

Right. But it's been enjoyable. It really has. I've enjoyed, I said I'll do that if I can only do the

treasurer thing. So I've been the treasurer since the beginning of TURFA and it's been, I'll be able to apply my limited knowledge in that area.

So we're battling with the administration and with the foundation nowadays on a regular basis. Of course, of course, that's what we always did as faculty members, right?

Exactly, but it's enjoyable and glad to be able to to do this here today for the association. Well, I want to thank you for your willingness to be here today and participate in the oral history project.

And I look forward to seeing the final product that comes out of it. Thank you Ray. Thank you.

Thank you very much.