The View from Below

I joined the fledgling EBB Department as a newly minted B.S. degree holder in 1969, amazed by the notion that I might be able to fashion a career out of my nascent interest in behavior and birds. As others have noted, the "Department" at that point was a hodgepodge affair composed of borrowed and refugee faculty with no clear sense of direction. This did not concern me in the slightest, as the only reason I came to Minnesota was Frank McKinney, a man I'd met only once when some NSF-related business (a site visit, as I recall) had brought him to me at Cornell. That interview consisted of Frank asking me where we could get some beer and me trying to impress him with the kind of faux sophistication that 22 year olds hope will be noted.

During that first year, I was distracted by some personal stuff (having to do with not wishing to be shot in Vietnam), and had no premonition that EBB was about to metamorphose. I recall meeting Bud Tordoff briefly during what must have been his job interview visit, but it would be another year or so before his impact would start to shake things up. Basically, from where we lowly graduate students sat, it appeared that Bud wanted to convert EBB into a first-rate program and we made snide conjectures about his wishing to recreate Michigan's program. I think Bud quickly became director of the graduate program and started tightening standards. Dramatically! He had an ambitious group of new faculty ready for revolution (Phil Regal, Kendall Corbin, Elmer Birney) and some senior faculty allies as well (McKinney, David Parmelee, etc.) and several new rules were passed quickly.

For example, admissions had previously been done quite casually, with each potential advisor pretty much deciding whether he (and they were ALL "hes" at that time) was willing to take on a given applicant. By the new rule, all applications would be collected and evaluated on a comparative basis by a committee, which encouraged a keener level of competition and attention to how the overall program's quality would be affected. (It has occurred to me more than once that I might well not have been admitted under the new system.) But by far the most sobering change concerned the Ph.D. qualifying exams, which were oddly called "Prelims", considering that they were, in practice, preliminary only in the sense that they had to come before the final thesis defense! Bud argued -- in my presence! -- that this was not in the program's best interest. Senior graduate students could hang around in the program for many, many years as they collected their dissertation data and essentially became a quantity that the program could ill afford to flunk. (In behavioral ecology, this logic was later made famous by Richard Dawkins who called it the "Concorde Fallacy," viz. that one should base future investment on cumulative past investment.) The new system required that all new Ph.D. candidates take their prelims within two years (one year if they arrived with M.S. in hand) and could re-take them only once before being culled. As well, the subject areas would be written by a committee of faculty experts, the better to avoid softball questions being lobbed in by folks being "nice." And everyone would take their prelims in unison, one or two sittings per year.

Bud conned me into taking the New Prelims in their inaugural offering, despite the fact that I was still writing my M.S. thesis and was grandfathered into the old rules. He used the simplest charm offensive possible to get my neck stretched out on the chopping block, saying that this would be good to get done with (that seemed clear) and that "I wouldn't ask this of you if I had any doubts that you'll pass" (that seemed irresistible!). My head swelled grotesquely and I was halfway down the hallway before the sucker light went on, flashing "It's your ass, not his!" What followed was the most stressful six weeks of my life, wherein I crammed 16-18 hours a day, reading and re-reading everything I thought might show up on the exams. Mercifully, I did well but the Angel of Death had breathed on my neck. Of the six students who took that first batch, only two of us passed on the first try (and the other lucky fellow, Rudy Darling, later quit grad school to build fiddles!)

My point in recounting this drama is simply to note the transformation in EBB, not my survival per se. From that moment forward, students could not just postpone the exams until 7 or 9 years had passed. Incoming students knew that heads could roll. The program got a lot less casual in a hurry! And the quality of new students went up about five notches, such that one's peers (or younger academic siblings) were sharper and more challenging.

Of course, I was long gone by the time the second EBB (EEB) revolution occurred. It's been fun to watch the program rise in stature to its current elite level, and fun to think back on the before-and-after comparison I got to see. But it would be a serious historical mistake not to recognize what Tordoff contributed (call it the Vision Thing). When he started overhauling the graduate program, student aspirations were generally limited to careers in smallish institutions with heavy teaching loads and little time for research. There's nothing inherently wrong with that niche, but the array of possibilities is bigger than that and it was Bud who first challenged us to raise our sights.

I could go on and on with various pearls of wisdom that Bud dropped into my psyche, some of which he did not follow in his own life. For example, "The object of the game in academia is to become a Full Professor as soon as possible and then refuse all additional offers of promotion!" Bud saw the scholarly life of a research-and-teaching faculty member as the best compromise between intellectual freedom and institutional perks, but he spent nearly all his own career with administration! I'll grant that he was by far the most creative administrator I've ever known (in the sense that he accomplished things that really did make it possible for others to do research) and all those I worked under later in my own career suffered unknowingly from the comparison. But when I read in the various obituaries that his life was most notable for his war experiences and his work with peregrines, I agree with Phil Regal, feeling as if these accounts are talking about someone I barely met. In between those worthy chapters, he also laid the groundwork for a truly great department!

Doug Mock
University of Oklahoma
29 July, 2008