 Welcome to Alden Library. I am Scott Seaman, Dean of Libraries, and this is a very special evening tonight. We are celebrating the release of President Charles Ping's new book jointly published by Alden Library in the Ohio University Press. The book is titled A Conversation About Ohio University and the Presidency, 1975 to 1994. Now, some of you may not be aware, but the library has a tradition of publishing the memoirs of Ohio University's presidents. That tradition, interestingly enough, was begun by President Ping. It was later supported by President Glidden. It was called the Oral History Program. The first history published was that of John Baker, followed by Vernon Alden, Harry Crewson, Claude Sol, and now Ohio University's 18th president, Charlie Ping. Now, the title of the new book comes from its format. It's a conversation. It's a transcribed conversation between Dr. Ping and Professor Sam Crow. Sam Crow is trustee professor of English here at Ohio University and he's author of numerous works, including Shakespeare Observed, Studies in Performance on Screen, as well as many other publications. So, we're fortunate to have both Dr. Ping and Professor Crow here tonight to give a flavor of what's inside this book. So, please join me in welcoming them. Welcome. We did this before. Do you want me to just lower my voice? We okay on the sound now? We're each going to make a little prefatory remark or statement and then we're going to try to give you some of the flavor of the book by my re-asking and perhaps not the identical form, but in the general form. Some of the questions that propelled the conversation that President Ping and I had in one of the studios up on the third or fourth floor of WUB TV in May of 1911. I want to add that there, while the main body of interviews in the book were conducted between the two of us, that after I had worn out asking Charlie questions, Doug McCabe, who is the very fine curator of manuscripts in the library, did the last interview in the book and to my way of thinking, it's the best because he was not quite as close to the action as I was and so he stands back a bit from the lived experience of the Ping administration and asks I think some wonderful broader questions and elicits from Charlie some I think particularly potent answers that I hadn't gotten to. I make this plug because I think he does did wonderful work but it's also Doug is a former student back from the early 1970s when I was just a young puppy here and then he went off in the world, married, started to raise a family, came back for alumni college and said I should never have left and so he came back to school and got a master's in history with a specialty in archival work, got a job at the library and has been here ever since so I'm delighted that he's a part of this family. Okay Charlie, go ahead and tell us about the troubles with memoirs. Well this is an author's night so I want to make a confession at the start. I published a number of books and many articles, this was the easiest book I ever did. Sam just got me talking and anyone my age wants to talk about the past and that's what I did. The past has far more reality than the future at this point in life. I expressed to Sam as we were starting a certain reservation and frankly Scott I forgot that I had started the whole process. My reservation is about memoirs and the sense that they are frequently self-serving because you remember the past through the prism of the present and that tends to distort and change and what you may well have thought you had planned carefully was actually a product of the whole variety of other circumstances. Having said that, much to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed this. Sam had been after me to do it and I kept saying no and finally I had a serious accident and I think everybody got concerned about mortality and so it had an urgency and I agreed to do it and much to my surprise the nine taping sessions we had nine two-hour sessions proved to be fun and I think Sam you made it that way but it was an easy book in part because of the exceptional work of the library staff Scott and all who work with him and Doug's work as producer and Sam your questioning and commenting is always provocative. I have sat through one of your Shakespeare classes and watched you do it with your students and it was fun to have it in person. All right I think I've finished my introductory statement. Where do you want to go? Okay I want to ask you the first question but before that one of the things that the book doesn't tell you that you should all know which is one of the remarkable things about Charlie is that after he didn't retire after he stepped down as president and went on to run a number of other programs and national institutions he came back and took my Shakespeare class with his grandson and they took Shakespeare's tragedies from me sometime in the mid 1990s and the thing I remember best is Sam his grandson it was a wonderful student a very bright lad but he never said much in class until the one day his grandfather cut and he talked a lot that day and I was happy that had he had a chance to open up when grandfather wasn't there. Charlie in 1975 Ohio University was in crisis we'd lost something like 6,000 students in three or four years the 1960s hadn't really ended here the students were still up in arms the faculty were threatening to unionize in fact had taken a boat quasi unofficial straw pole that indicated a strong preference for unionizing a great number of the classified staff had been laid off most of the untenured professors had been laid off and there were even plans to maybe get rid of some tenured professors the university just sort of just stumbled from one bad moment to another and because we had this wonderful school of journalism here anything bad that happened on campus was immediately known all around the country because they were all stringers for somebody and it was all topped off for me by in the summer of 75 one of the two great summers of the big red machine over in Cincinnati one of our students took off his clothes and streaked across the outfield at riverfront stadium and when he was arrested by the cops was asked why did you do that he said it was on an assignment from his art class at Ohio University I know who the professor was Charlie why in the world were you interested in Ohio University in 1975 some of you have heard me tell a couple of the stories but they're worth repeating when I my first contact was the sort of informal letter you've been nominated are you interested and I wrote back no some time passed and Alan Booth who was a history professor at the time and chair of the faculty senate called me I was now on leave in the uh advanced management program of the business school at Harvard at Harvard yeah it's a three month cloistered program and uh very high powered in anyway this call from Alan came and he said if some of the committee flew up to Boston would you meet with them and I said well that's very flattering of course I would and a number of the members of the committee flew up to Boston and we met in Bern Alden's office he was then CEO chairman of the first Boston company I think and we had two hours of very warm and cordial conversation and I enjoyed the conversation and they seemed to respond and the time came when they had to leave and go back to the airport and Vern said to me please stay for a minute and I did and he said I want to show you something he took me into his dressing room and there on the wall was a large plaque and mounted on the plaque were portions of bricks and rock and pipe and two by fours and uh I'm looking at I think what the world is this and he said those are all the things that were thrown through my window that during my years as president and then there was a pause it said Marion and I regard those years as the best years of our lives anyway I went back to the business school and decided that the intense commitment of this group had caught my interest interest enough I went around talking and I talked to some of the corporate officials from Ohio and without exception I got a response from them the response was don't touch it I sure wouldn't send my daughter there and then I went around the faculty who were friends and I got just the opposite response oh this is a gem do look at it well that's an intriguing kind of contrast and uh little time went by Alan called and said would you be willing to come out and meet with the full committee and perhaps visit the campus and I said yes but one condition it's to be understood that I am not a candidate until I have been out there and talk to people and then I'll decide whether I'm going to be a candidate I don't want anything coming back to the campus that had given me this leave and well Alan Booth collected all the chits he had with the post and though they knew about it it didn't get published until later and and we came into town and were taken directly to the home of a faculty member who had children our age of our children and the whole thing was planned so beautifully because we were concerned about the public schools we had two children in high school at the time and anyway to make a long story shorter I met enough faculty that I really had a sense of the kind of people that I'd be working with and their intense commitment to the institution and I've been on lots of campuses is unusual and very important so I agreed to become a candidate and from that things progressed now Sam I understood the problems I had read all the financial reports and they were alarming but we had a couple of things going for us the legislature had appropriated three million in special funding to bail us out we were tottering on the edge of default of millions of dollars in bonded indebtedness and they had also passed legislation establishing a college of osteopathic medicine I thought both were indications of promise for the future we'll see however it was the place and the people like so many my first visit here just to walk a campus in the Midwest that has a sense of history is a wonderful thing what were some of the early challenges you've already mentioned the the legislature approving the creation of a college of osteopathic medicine here but they had a timetable that is rather astounding you want to talk about that those faculty senate hadn't approved it yet and to my surprise there was some opposition within that group anyway John Baker has a wonderful line in his oral history said he arrived on the scene in 1945 and he got a number of surprises he found out the college of business was not accredited the engineering college was not accredited there were no phd programs and there was no arm for raising private funding all of which he thought well I got some surprises too one of which was reading the bill establishing the medical school and finding the provision there that said if we failed to admit our first class of at least 16 students within one year there would be no further funding now that's unheard of you don't open a medical school in one year you have to recruit a faculty you have to put in place an admissions process you have to develop a curriculum but somehow we did it then on the bonded indebtedness I read the instruments with some care and discovered to my surprise an alarm that there was a provision in there that the bond holders had first claim on any income other than appropriations you see what that meant if we had in fact been unable to pay him then tuition would have gone to bond payments and I discovered the convocation center was still on a construction loan which means this is 1975 76 means it turns over each year at the current interest rate and we were right on the cusp of the period when interest rate went out of sight there were that's enough many challenges for the students in the audience that the bonded indebtedness was a major issue because we had built dorms that had a capacity for holding about 9,000 students and those dorms have been built on bonds when we lost the great decline in undergraduate enrollment we suddenly had 3,000 less students filling those beds but they still had to be paid for so that was why the system was teetering on financial disaster but interestingly enough you were able to turn that to an advantage well we took many of the buildings and turned them to all the purposes the first building in the medical school was grovener hall and it was the funds were appropriated uh bill drum doski he was in the audience will appreciate the funds were appropriated we went out to bid and contracts were awarded in 30 days now that's really quite usually it takes seven years from the time the buildings are appropriated and when the first class came in that fall they were still nailing and working in the grovener and then we took another complex off for the engineering college and we did that for a number of the units and went to the legislature and said all right we're turning these to academic purposes but we still have the bonded indebtedness you buy out the buildings that we're converting and they agreed uh including one that stood on the college on the across from the college green uh the corner of college street and union somebody just called it Howard Hall Howard Hall was built originally as a hotel and the university took it on it had wooden struts and you couldn't buy code use it as a residence hall so we tore it down now it was still part of the pool of places whose income was supposed to retire the death so the legislature bought Howard Hall and it was not uncommon when I testified a budget hearing have a legislator look at me quizzically and say aren't you the fellow that sold us a building you'd already torn torn down and I was but we lowered the annual debt service by more than a half million dollars that then we did a lot of other things to address the problem by inclination by training by I think all a sense of who you are as a man you're a philosopher and you were most struck in your studies by Plato and Hegel who were too idealist idealists tend not to be people who sell buildings to the legislature that they've torn down but somehow you took what you had learned in graduate school and as a professor from Plato and Hegel and merged it with some ideas that you picked up at the Harvard School for management to create a sort of unique management system and style here and I'd like you to talk a bit about putting in place the planning process which you did in those early years well it took a few years mostly because people were sick and tired of planning they'd planned and planned and planned and all they got were problems and we went through a series of steps trying to identify the basic understanding of what the university was here to do and how was it to do it now that's idealism you first start with the ideal model then you try to speak to the ways the actual relates to the ideal uh so the first part of it was to begin to get the campus really thinking coherently rather than defensively about basic goals then we needed a process where the people involved could take ownership so we divided all the campus into a series of planning units so the library was a planning unit each of the colleges were a planning unit physical plant was a planning unit and so on and uh we had this group describe what changes that they would bring over time and we organized a what we call UPAC university planning advisory committee it was basically advisory to me and through me to the trustees and the committee was made up largely of faculty deans and students and a handful of administrators and each of the units would submit and it would be reviewed so that we were weighing the issue of the need for the bulldozer to move cold as opposed to increasing the library budget for books everything was in a real sense intention with everything else and to my delight and surprise it worked there was a sense of ownership and UPAC did in fact put on their university hat rather than their particular college or department or organization within the university one of the things oh sorry didn't mean to interrupt you one of the uh elements that came out of that early um planning uh was something that you were vitally interested in which was the core curriculum liberal studies general education those um sets of courses or academic experiences that the faculty determines is unique and important to define what an Ohio university education is or a Ohio Wesleyan education on that campus etc and it's often difficult to do because faculty we are all trained in our disciplines and often our first loyalty is not often always almost our first loyalties uh intellectually are to our disciplines and it's hard to get us out of thinking just in those terms to think in broader terms about the the shape of the curriculum that all the students are going to take some of we um and many universities across the country part of the student revolt in the 60s had been to get away from common requirements because in large part they'd probably been in place for 30 or 40 years and that's about the life cycle of these things and the faculty were happy to give them up it was one less thing that they had to worry about community I think the faculty here discovered after three or four years but maybe that had been a mistake whether they were ready to really um get down to the hard work of imagining something new rather than just re-establishing what had been old um I'm not sure but you took an active role as the president in that discussion and I I think that's um unique in many ways and I want you to talk about it a bit well first of all it was one of the things that attracted me here I found a underlying faculty interest in the concept that there ought to be a common core and I found the a genuine commitment to international education and I found a genuine commitment to undergraduate experience well uh one of the things I keep on my bookshelf and cherish is the university bulletin for the 1975-76 academic year it's uh it's fun to go back and read it it's very empty of any sense of common learning or common core and I understand the resistance that you talked about and so we put together a committee we are we're able to win a grant and we went out to Colorado Springs and this faculty group spent weeks talking to each other and they came back with a report to the faculty uh Professor Nick Dinas of the engineering college uh was the first to speak to the report in the fall convocation uh and there was a balance in the committee that helped win uh two years later the faculty senate had adopted it now that was a surprising and painful process uh and the concept of tears was put in the concept was put in place as a core for all undergraduate education that there were certain basic fundamental skills that there were certain basic areas of study and that there needed to be uh at the end of their experience some conscious effort to tie things together crossing disciplines and I think this core curriculum was the only undergraduate program to be awarded a program excellence award during the brief period that the state of Ohio funded excellence award and it was in that response you mentioned two things that were also important to you and were important to the campus as you said that was one of the things that attracted you here was the already the international posture of Ohio University is remarkable fact that this school and the the sort of out of the way 13 little counties in southwest southeastern Ohio had this international connection you want to talk a bit about that and how you then went about to work to build on it well it really goes back to john baker's day or even much earlier uh it was partially a product of projects so that we worked in Nigeria to help them establish what is essentially a land grant college we worked in Malaysia to try to bring the daily malaise into the business life of the country and so on uh we had a long history of involvement in Botswana and Swaziland and a lesser involvement in Lesotho and Namibia all part of the Saabic countries of uh that is we had faculty who were spending portions of their career working on the campuses in these countries uh we really assisted the government of Botswana to implement the national policy of universal primary education and I think the people involved in it took great pride in it and I think the leadership of Botswana recognized their contribution anyway then when we did this it was a conscious effort to get our faculty not the higher people uh to do the jobs which is frequently what is done in project but to send our faculty so they would come back to campus and teach with new understanding we built links to the library so we have a marvelous Malay collection uh and this is a direct product of the involvement and most of all we had a large pool of international students interestingly when I came in 75 the largest number were from Nigeria why because we'd had a faculty group there for many years and after Nigeria's economy went on in the doldrums uh our largest student group was Malaysian and at one time we had some 350 Malaysian students on campus and when the ambassador came to visit I said I think this is a mistake because they're creating their own village uh and we want them interacting with the students from Cleveland or the students from Cincinnati or the students from Gloucester uh and I think it was two things summed up in 1978 when China made an opening to the west the first real contact between Chinese higher education and the U.S. was a delegation that came to a number of campuses in the U.S. and we were the only campus in the Midwest that they visited uh and we were among the first campuses of next year to receive students under this opening to the west now they weren't students at all they were faculty who have been displaced by the cultural revolution and needed to get back in touch with their discipline uh and only later did the Chinese population turn out to be students and China succeeded Malaysia as the largest source of students uh and I think there are people like John Katie a name that will mean something to the old timers in the group and his work with the Southeast Asia program which was uh very very early for this sort of effort I once um spent an evening uh with a new faculty member here who would actually come from being on the faculty at Penn State and talking about the two schools I asked him what he thought the major difference was between Ohio University and Penn State and he said well in many ways they're very similar they're located in rural beautiful areas and they're bustling universities on the go and on the move he said what struck him was that there were about the same number of international students on both campuses but at Penn State you'd never know the international students were there while here we celebrated them and we had international week and that wonderful Saturday on court street when all the international students put out their booze of local cuisine and and local dancing and whatever the I should never have done this when we did something similar to this a month ago or three weeks ago I talked about the flags in the convo those wonderful flags from all the countries of the students that attend school here and it makes me proud every time I'm in there because it's that visible sign in an athletic arena uh of our international presence when I walked in a week later they were gone they're down and I was told oh something so much better is going to take their place I'm too old for something better at this point but anyway I always I like that that was a signal and not you know you and your administration and you later gave Joel Roody the credit for that idea and rightly so but I like the the way in which we tried to to make the presence of the international students on campus in southeastern Ohio a part of this university and a part of what it meant to go to school here and indeed and it worked um one of the things that a president has to do that most of us is a part of his or her life that most of us don't see is having to deal with the external communities and we've talked a little bit about your having to deal with the legislature I know that in Ohio it isn't quite as onerous as in other states where there's a a pecking order and every university has to go and lobby every year for its budget that in Ohio there's a formula that drives the that basic need but nevertheless you have to deal with legislators and with governors in particular and you get to know them and you get to know their flavor and I wish that you'd tell us a tale or two about some of the governors of Ohio that you had to deal with and what that was like well uh when I came Governor Rhodes was the governor and then he came back after a term out of office and Governor Rhodes had about a five second attention span and we went we needed to replace the old auditorium it was the most energy inefficient building on campus it would be uh sweating hot upstairs and there'd be ice on the floor in the dressing room it really had a lot of problems and so we were given a grant by nationwide and we launched a architectural competition which is how in the best of all possible worlds all buildings off the review bill and uh we didn't have any funding for it it did not make the capital bill that emerged from the board of regents now the operating budget is not very political in Ohio it's very formalized as you said the capital budget is a political free for all so uh a couple of trustees uh Kenner Bush who was the third generation of his family to be a trustee editor and publisher of the messenger local paper and uh had been state president of the chamber commerce uh Kenner was a trustee and Dean Jeffers who was the president and CEO of nationwide a very large and important insurance company Kenner and Dean Jeffers went with me to meet with Governor Rhodes and I had been in his office three or four times and the whole time you're trying to talk to him he's taking phone calls he's talking to three assistants and he's doing about a half dozen things simultaneously and this is not multitasking this is and uh we find the we let our case we got up to leave and Kenner turned turned to Dean and said Dean I don't think the governor heard us at all and Rhodes heard the comment as we were going out the door and he said Dean I I'll get your old swimming hole in and sure enough it was in the capital budget uh Rhodes did not like to come on college campuses I guess the the the pain of Kent State was still with him and uh one of the things I cherish about Dick Saless as governor one he was a very bright and able person and he loved college campuses and he made it a practice while he was a sitting governor to come to each public university campus in the state and he would spend two days and he would teach some classes and he would spend the night in the residence hall and uh generally get some flavor of the campus he'd been a Rhodes scholar and uh ended up uh interesting enough as the president of a liberal arts college Colorado college anyway uh Dick Saless came to campus and uh we had planned a reception at the end of his visit and someone was to bring him to my office and we were to go over to the old Baker Center for the reception and he came into my office and said Charlie may I close the door for a moment I said of course close the door and he sat down and he said now what I want to know is how you can deceive all these students and I was sort of taken back and I said what do you mean deceive he said they think they're on a small liberal arts campus and they're not a hundred universities the size of this one in the country now that's the nicest compliment you could possibly pay us uh Dick Saless was good to work with because he could take an idea accept it uh take her with it and then run with it and the program excellence was a good illustration of his running with an idea uh and George Vonovich of course is one of our graduates very loyal and quite ready to acknowledge his debt to Ohio University and to John C Baker uh but George is his own man and he would listen to you as he did uh but in the end he made up his own mind it was influenced only by what he thought he ought to do and that's a good definition of a public service they have three very different people uh each of them in turn I enjoyed I remember traveling one of the things that came with the medical school is that we had a series of regional teaching centers for the clinical experience and we got one that we really hadn't asked for because of some political maneuvering of the president of the senate and when the building was done uh the governor went over with me to dedicate the building and I had just gotten back from a trip to china and uh we were talking on the plane and I said well the students coming to campus now are in fact faculty who've been sent off to work in the coal mines and the rice fields during their re-education and I thought to myself that was a dumb thing to say I could see the wheels turning in his mind ah what a good idea well I cherish many memories of the group well we're into storytelling one of my favorite stories that you tell in the book it's completely non-related to governors and politicians but back home and back to the convo is that uh for the once again for the youngsters in the audience the students in the mid 80s we had as we have had uh now again for the last five or six years a very fine basketball team and there were several players in that generation who went on to at least brief careers in the pros and uh charlie tells a wonderful story about the two of them dave jamerson and snoopy ram because he'd be over working out in the in the weight room and over and overheard this following exchange uh tell him about jamerson and snoopy dave jamerson was uh set an ncda record for three-point shots uh he played I don't remember who but he only missed two shots the whole night and in both cases it was because the defensive player was so frustrated he knocked him on his rear now he could shoot uh just with a grace and a beauty uh I'm wondering but I'll go ahead with we had Malaysian guests and we decided to take them to a basketball game and it happened to be the night when he sent dave jamerson a ncda record 16 three points three pointers it's no longer the record it's a bit about 16 not bad huh anyway the Malaysian guests had never seen a basketball game so we took them after dinner to the game and after the game making conversation I said did you enjoy the game and the wife said well they really didn't seem very much to it so you just throw the ball up and it goes to the anyway to get back to the jamerson dave uh severely injured his knee and I've had chronic knee problems since my college days and I had had some surgery and was rehabbing in the convo room that the team used and dave was rehabbing his knee and so we fell into conversation and uh sometime later when his knee had improved dave is out shooting baskets uh trying to get his form back snoopy graham his teammate probably had more natural athletic ability than anyone I've seen play basketball here he was a wonder uh and snoopy says dave jamerson oh I wish I could shoot like you and jamerson says to snoopy snoopy you start about a million shots behind one of the things I felt badly about or you know it bothered me um when we did this before was that I didn't ask you to talk about the person that you shared the presidency with and without uh whose um help and um and guidance and getting you out of town and and uh entertaining a zillion people and that's clear I mean these jobs are at least um a job for a team and you had a good one and um and I wish that you'd talk a bit about that and also you know the the burden that comes with the job to the family to the to that part of your life we have been married 62 years now and it is terribly important to have someone in your life who will always accept you so if you spend a day as presidents do from time to time getting meet up the post rights and editorial and there's a student demonstration at a faculty group comes in to raise cane about something and you sit at the end of the day and you go home and somebody says oh you're not so bad and she was always uh my sanity base and had a regular practice of periodically she would call Marie White and say all right next weekend the calendar is to be clear and we would go off on a trip uh dictated by the book backroads and country ends now she liked country ends I thought they were a pill because the beds were all too short but and uh without her help I don't think we would have built the core of friends for the university over the course of our 19 years she entertained over 50 000 people in that home entertained them with style and grace and that made a big difference in the the efforts of the university to build private support Charlie I think I'm getting signs from Scott that uh the evening is coming to a close and so we'll let Scott into the Charlie I'm wondering in the last few minutes of the program if you might be willing to take some questions from the audience I would be overjoyed to take questions well I'll do all the answering so I'll start since I'm dean of the library um and get to do these things occasionally so I was in I was in Japan at Chubu University about three years ago and heard an extraordinary story that I found hard to believe and it was about squirrels oh I'm wondering if you could tell a bit of that well we were actively being courted by a Japanese city to open a campus and this is sometime in the 80s they had set aside 25 acres of land they had raised 25 million dollars to build the first buildings and all they wanted was us to say yes and so I visited the campus and talked with the city council and we entertained the city council in our home and the marching band came up and serenaded to them and oh they thought that was wonderful and they went home and after working with the numbers I came to the painful conclusion it just wouldn't work so I had to write a note saying no uh they accepted this with grace and some time went by and the mayor of Kabaki City wrote me and said we are opening a new subway line in in the fall and we have a park at the terminus for it and we were all so impressed with those squirrels that ran all over your campus would you please send us a dozen squirrels six males six female and maybe they'll people the park with squirrels well you can't believe how complicated it is to send uh critters like that overseas Jim Bryant the vice president for regional higher education was a man who could do the impossible and so I said okay figure out how to do it and sure enough he did and I have no idea what the squirrels are running wild in that park or not but I've always wanted to go back and see any other questions yeah whoa whoa thank you very much as just a little addendum our daughter was in the Peace Corps in Botswana and reported that uh you could mention Harvard Yale Stanford and you got blank stares mentioned Ohio University oh yes we know Ohio University actually the largest alumni dinner I ever went to was in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia no thank you you're very kind well I thought surely somebody would have had a grudge coming out of the past some decision that we made that they found troubling and puzzling something that we did or failed to do or yes please what was I do I'm not sure what you're talking about is this did our summer programs Clayton Pell is who you're thinking of these were summer Ohio program in the humanities just it did did Lois was stalwart part of it well thank you Scott thank you very much for coming out on a damn we thank our presenters I want to put a plug in for this book it is a wonderful read it really gives a glimpse into Ohio University's history there were so many things that I found out that I just didn't know and what's special for you tonight is that this book is on sale right over there from the Ohio University Press normally it's 49.95 but for you it's on sale at 30 discount for $34.96 now for those on our web audience you can go to your local bookseller and buy a copy of that you'll have to pay full price though similarly you can also buy this from Amazon and you can even check it out of a library if you so choose so please join me in thanking President Ping and Professor Kraus