 So the date is February 10th at 10 11 a.m. I'm Catherine Ducey and the other people in the room are Rachel Lane and Dr. Carl Heuther. And Dr. Fritz Casey Leininger. Okay so our first question is can you describe the main teaching methods you've used and how you felt about them as well as how your teaching changed over time and then I guess a follow-up is you mentioned the horrible teaching model of the professor just being a lecturer who knows like who knows everything and then how do you see that how do you feel the teaching model affected the students. I think the teaching models affected the students by large pretty negatively and I think it probably still does. The lecture model has been around for an awful lot of ever since the Institute's fire education came into existence but I think it was particularly valid in the 60s and 70s. Certainly the training that I had as a grad student for preparation for being an assistant professor was essentially zero in terms of teaching. The entire emphasis for my five years of graduate work was on research. I did master's degree at the DNC State on quantitative genetics. I did not teach five minutes for that two-year masters. I was out on a fellowship for my PhD at Davis California and only the last quarter that I was there I volunteered to be a TA in a genetics class just to have some sense and so with nothing more than that I came to the institution and was teaching three classes the first quarter just unbelievably crazy and it's still amazing to me today that we do so little in preparing students for a faculty position. We have a program called preparing future faculty here that's been in existence at UC for about 20 years. Most institutions don't have one but we do and it's a fantastic program except that very few relatively speaking baritone graduate students take advantage. There might be 20 certificates per year that are provided through the training of that program and we graduate maybe I don't know hundreds of graduate students so the percentage is quite small. So I would say in the last 20 years we've done a lot better in many classes and we are doing that because we have a organization called the Academy of Fellows for Teaching and Learning which is dedicated to improving teaching. We have the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and that too is committed to improving teaching and there are more and more models where it's an exchange of ideas among the students and faculty members rather than what we're doing now which is just you know the equivalent of election so I'll stop. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for me can we dialogue or you're just gonna sit and listen. We'll ask you you mentioned the PRS system and you said that it was brought in a decade before you retired and it fundamentally changed how you taught so it was like a mini lecture like he said I was it sort of like an exchange of ideas between students and I think that's interesting because we like still use it now and in my freshman bio class we used that we like created groups so did you feel that that like definitely helped change the dynamic of the classrooms. Absolutely changed the dynamics enormously because it got the students actively involved. Some students don't like it yet to this day but it's a wonderful opportunity for student engagement. Did you have Dr. Brian Kinkel? Yes you did. And he used it pretty regularly and he got you into small groups so I think this is a wonderful model I don't know whether history does it. We do that a lot also. Do you? Yeah. That's great. Well have you had it too Kate? I don't have any experience with it but my friend is a nursing major and she always talked about it. So it's developed the idea that I created out of it was a mini model of lecturing maybe 10 minutes or so where try to get a one or two major points across and then ask a couple of questions through the personal response system and if the students got 75-80 percent of them were we're on board then we simply went on if 40 percent of it didn't understand it then I'd say okay break into your groups talk about it and come up with the right answer and that was students teaching other students and it wasn't just a matter that one student would say listen you dummies the answer is D forget it and I'll tell them but it really was a matter of what what what does this mean and someone would explain it and maybe sometimes they'd get it wrong some groups would would be clueless at the end but then we would have someone explain what what the answer was so I think it's a terrific model do you have any idea what percentage of classes use it today I think most of us in the history department use some version of you know combining lecture and small group small group work I think very few history faculty do a straight ahead just straight lectures anymore but you're right that's how I was I you know I came to graduate school my first teaching experience was a summer course three and a third weeks cram everything that you'd usually teach in a quarter into three and a third weeks and no one gave me any training it's like throwing off the deep end swim good luck you know it's that old model that as long as you know your subject you should be able to convey all of the appropriate information to students and and it's a model that by and large has not worked and I I'm really appalled that institutes of higher haven't understood the value of a different kind of teaching model getting a much better handle on how students learn um so besides the prs what were other things that changed while you were at the university so like the by the student body the faculty the community relationships the physical changes well um I guess one thing is that we went from a municipal institution of maybe 15 or 20,000 to a state institution of now 45,000 so that was a substantial difference our classes got much bigger uh I did not feel nearly as good about the relationships I had with students over the last 20 years compared to my first 20 years we had class sizes of 25, 35, maybe 40 which were certainly reasonable and and I could get the chance to really interact students were coming in much more regularly to see me to talk with me to ask questions about the materials and genuinely trying to understand the material the last 20 years I felt that was much much less now one problem was I was teaching classes of 50 60 70 200 300 so my my I was in different classes but the size I think had a tremendously negative impact and I could you know hours but I would be in my my office hours week after week after week and not see a single suit did you go in to see Brian Kinko I did go into see him a few times a couple of times during the during the semester yes and of course we were a 10 week quarter versus a 15 week semester thing and you went in primarily to understand something or because there was some technical issue I went in actually there was a question that we were doing a biology lab and I needed help with it so I went in and asked him about it and then there was another time where I didn't understand something in the lecture so I had to talk about it good other classes did you go in as well for my chemistry classes I've been in the office hours but that's pretty much it my the classes I've been have been like smaller classes so I didn't like go to a lot of office hours just because I could ask my teacher before or after class just because like due to the class okay all right so do we need to say more about that aspect I don't know whether I'm answering your questions at all but I'm trying to get you guys to participate I will say that I think it's a lot easier for us to communicate with our teachers outside of office hours because we can quickly shoot them an email or sometimes a text message so we don't always need to go to the office hours especially when it's nasty cold outside like this and you don't want to get out of your room yeah that's a good point Rachel I have to say I don't really remember getting that many emails from students either once we we've even to the new modern era but then you know I would say that the fundamental change was blackboard blackboard allowed just a totally different concept the idea that you could present your PowerPoint presentations to the students via blackboard before class and that at least the reasonable number of students came into the class either with a copy of it or with the computer where they got it I think that was another fundamental change so you could really get a lot of that information without having to write everything down do you remember what blackboard came into play what you see oh gosh really at least relative to when you retired what would you guess 1990 something like that no it was I so I was in graduate school I got my doctorate in 93 the first email system we had was the first time I remember using an email system here was 1995 and it was a very primitive mainframe kind of email the you all wouldn't have ever had to deal with it it was awful blackboard probably not until the late 90s late 90s remember that makes sense one year teaching once a week in a winter quarter and I had we had it was on Monday and so I missed we didn't have Martin Luther King Day so we missed and then the next week there was a snowstorm at school was called off so I didn't meet with the students for two weeks and we didn't have email so I think we I met with the students I might have met with the students twice we had two weeks off because of the holiday and the snow and then we picked up again so it would have been the fifth week of class halfway almost halfway through the quarter and there was no way for me to contact the students so you're probably right maybe the late 90s and obviously prs came in after that although probably not a long time after so the two fundamental technologic changes in in my view the ability to give the students the information outside of class and prs and we had a faculty member in the English department named Barbara Wolver she eventually left went to Notre Dame but her model was to get the students to most of the content outside of the classroom and then just get into a conversation about material she would happen to be teaching Shakespeare so they would listen to all their videos etc outside of class and that was a model that that really I think is one that we should try to emulate and we try to do it now because after all getting the students to clarify their understanding of material in the classroom makes a whole lot more sense than sitting there and looking at a video and so another thing we could do through Blackboard was to give not only our PowerPoints but I would show video provide videos for them as well through there so those those were transformational I think and fundamentally different than the 60s 70s and 80s I remember I got my first Mac computer in 82 or 83 little se2 that wasn't worth a damn but that was the beginning of the and then as Fritz says we didn't get in there for another 15 years or so at least so how did like you see in the area around Cincinnati compared to where you were living in California so what were some of the similarities differences like racism gender roles and class commitments say that again Rachel like the differences between you see and where you lived around Cincinnati compared to where you were living in California okay so Davis California was a town of about 30,000 compared to 450 at that time here in Cincinnati Cincinnati is now less than 300 but at that time it was 450 to 500 and Davis California is now and was then a university school with an enormous amount of biking so we lived in the town of Davis but that was still only 10 minutes away and my standard routine would be to bike whereas here in Cincinnati the first few years anyway we lived 15 miles from campus and so very different circumstances well Davis California all of California compared to Ohio you probably know California has so much progress progressive thinking and 10 years later it will come to Ohio and to Cincinnati what was it Will Rogers saying that he wanted to be in Cincinnati when the earth came to an end because they were always 10 years later than any place else and I think that was true then and unfortunately by and large it's true now even though Democrats control the council a lot more there's still so much conservatism so um sorry so when you returned to so when you returned to Cincinnati after being in California for the 11 years was there any reason that like was there any reason that stuck out in your mind that made you glad to be back in Cincinnati uh family relationships almost exclusively that's what brought us back our four parents were here and uh we have been away for that 11 years not all in California just three years in California but um sure that was the biggest thing by far although I thought the University of Cincinnati was an exciting place it was so much fun to be in a department of faculty with 11 or 12 colleagues who fundamentally respected each other work together we used to have a little thing where if you had your door closed you were working on your researcher teaching um a colleague could take his key and just tap on the door and that would immediately say come on in because that's the kind of relationship that was developed uh I don't the last 20 or 30 years was fundamentally different than that as we grew to a department of 25 members rather than 11 or 12 uh all of that closeness and camaraderie dissipated sadly in my opinion I don't know if that got pretty to your question that yeah that is a really much okay um what is your favorite part place of your memory of Cincinnati or UC the idea I know I answered these questions before um well I again I think relationships faculty relationships students relationship I still keep in touch with a surprising number of grad students I'm sure Fritzen most faculty members do the same way so singularly I would answer that is faculty camaraderie social interactions I mean after all that's an awful lot of what education is about what university is about what life is about oh can you talk more about your involvement with like the programs that you see I know you mentioned that you were sorry you mentioned like you were um the acting vice provost the associate dean and the director of honors in the making college sure and it's nice because you're both in the honors program now when I was the director and let me go back and tell you that my recollection is the honors program started I was at 74 to 77 a guy named Hal Fishman I ran it 71 to 74 he was a faculty member in psychology and then it was created with a fellow in physics named Bill Joiner so I think he took it over about he created or it was it was created in 1968 I think that's correct um and um at that time it was strictly an arts and sciences honors program not a university wide and there might have been 60 to 80 members of the honors program and when I was there from 74 to 77 I really wanted to expand into a university base and I'm happy to say I think we clearly moved it in that direction but it was still small enough that we would have the honor students down to our home we lived in clifton at that point and uh it was a terrific opportunity to get a chance to know the students and we went away there were other honors programs in the state of Ohio so we would typically go to state parks and we would spend a weekend we're getting to know the other honor students and the other universities do you do that now there is like an honors retreat at the beginning of the year as well as like there's like different opportunities to like meet other people but it's like specifically in the university of Cincinnati and there's not like drop it okay um and tell me how you participate in honors today so with the honors program for the university you have to meet certain requirements like every year you have to have an honors experience and that can be anything from like creating your own to like so if you want a mission trip and you want to make it an honors experience like it's mainly about reflection I would say and so like you experience it and then you reflect on it and then you present it and there are some that are some of the other ones I know like specifically for I went on like it's called leadership and it's like an honors retreat in the first week of winter break so that was in a way and that was also a way to like meet other students in the honors program and there's also like I guess I recently got accepted into the honors ambassadors so you can go to like the gateway oh you have to take a class called gateway to university honors and that's like where you just learn more about the honors program as a whole as well as you develop your learning portfolio so we have like a website where we like showcase everything what it's honors ambassador um it's kind of like I guess just like a regular school ambassador but specifically for the honors program so like we help out at like the gateway classes the different events so we would like help the honors retreat in the summer or like in the fall and then we also help out just like the different honors events like throughout the year do you go to high schools as an ambassador I don't believe we do um how many honor students are there today gosh I have no idea that's a good question I'm I'm betting that there's close to a thousand I would guess that there is I mean it's we can't say to that you can look that up that's a major technological change right there and then you think that you can just get those answers right away yeah well while you're doing that that's that's one of the things that come up in all classes I hope now certainly before I retired I remember there were some questions the student asked that I couldn't answer and somebody would look it up while we were sitting in class so I think that's a tremendous aspect and you guys are so good at that now to go back when you asked me about um going to like office hours I feel like a lot of my questions I can find like the answers on blackboard or I can like easily email one of my professors so like just the whole like technology but do you miss the fact that you're not interacting with them I mean one of the reasons that the students early on particularly would come in what some I think unfairly called brown dosing was that they were looking for a capacity to get letters of recommendation because an awful lot of biology majors in the first 20 years or so the standard way to get in the med school was to be a biology major that's changed dramatically now you can be an english major just as well as a biology but at that point everybody caduceia was a big pre-med society and people understood early on that you had to have the right kind of recommendations so I don't know whether you guys worry about that now for my major specific classes I feel like my biggest class has only been like maybe like 30 to 40 people so it's like I feel like I still get to know the professor just because of like the class sizes like being I mean that's 30 40 is kind of big but like they're kind of like smaller and like since I'm a communication major often the classes are very interactive so like the teachers will ask us questions or the professors will ask us questions and like we share like personal experiences and I feel like I get to know the professors better and I get to know them better yeah things like public speaking you know public speaking or like that interpersonal communication you have to like talk about like your relationships so you kind of like you learn more about professor as well as they go well and you both take special topics honors special topics classes like this one this is exactly right I'm happy to say that we were the originators of that special topics honors class during the 74 to 77 period and I think it's been a wonderful model at that point when we originated it there was no money available to give to departments in order to encourage them to do it but now it's not a minor amount of money that is encouraging students anyway you have to take x number of honors classes x number of experiences and it would be fun to figure out what percentage of students who are in the honors program actually graduate with honors and and I suspect it's substantially less than the number of students who are actually in the program well you have to get five experiences while you're in in college and it's like but some like if you study abroad that's like two experiences so I think it kind of like depends what you do because I feel like they are easier to get than you would think of you like because a lot of the things that like like I guess a lot of different things that people are already doing can count as honors experiences they just need to fill out the like form in order to like or like just I know that like I have to take like two years of English so like my second year of English counted they offered it in like the honors program so it's like easier to get experience so I'm wondering actually how many people graduate with honors you have any idea how many special topics courses are being offered or any given semester I have an idea I think it's probably around like maybe I'm just guessing obviously but like maybe 10 because there's like different um like the study abroad ones you like take a class for a semester and then you go like so one was like to Cuba I know my friends have gone to like Iceland so I think they offer at least five of those yeah a semester study tour a month so yeah a study tour so they go over like the first week of winter break or over spring break they go to a spring break yeah oh I see so it's not for an entire semester no it's only for a week and you take the semester course beforehand yeah about Iceland presumably and then you go for a week well that's pretty terrific sounds like a nice idea are you both going to do it hopefully I don't know though because you have to pick like it's a certain amount of money so I know the honors program does like offer like grants so but it's like you might have to figure out so just finding it I did find a number for the honors program for the 15-16 process they had 172 applications and 102 students were admitted so about 100 for each incoming class I guess wow so that's much lower than I thought that means there's only maybe 400 in the uh in the program probably the last one people like drop it once they get older yeah yes there there's certainly there was a dropout rate that many years ago and probably drop out right now but we didn't mind the it was you could be in the honors program even if you didn't graduate with the accolade of honors it was okay as long as you took advantage of what what you felt was important for you but it sounds like there's an awful lot of good opportunity you wonder why only 172 my gosh uh how many students aren't there something like four thousand freshmen it uh or at least five or six thousand freshmen that you see that sounds about right so why only 172 of them I mean the the uh requirements for getting in are not that uh difficult what what what are they 200 SAT or 30 that's a 3.2 GPA well heck these days who doesn't have a 3.2 GPA in high school probably graduating from college even well I'm wondering if like the numbers are because you can be like well I guess was like I'm a transition student so I wasn't admitted my first semester freshman year but I like applied and like got accepted my second semester freshman year so I'm wondering if the number is higher like just if you include the transition students instead of just like people who got accepted directly yeah so we don't know uh ratio of your 172 how many of those might have been transition students yeah well it's interesting I mean that says that there's a fair amount of competition if they if they only take more or less one out of two good all right so so we're changing gears but what interested you about botany and then what made you go into genetics afterwards um I was interested in botany mostly because my parents my dad was a horticultural buff he he sold printing ink it's as a business but he loved the orchard kind of work we had a two acre piece of property in clifton and we had many fruit trees and grew a lot of vegetables so I grew up in that atmosphere and I went to Ohio State in the College of Agriculture to be a horticulturalist and it wasn't until my junior year that I took a course in genetics and general genetics just like that I changed completely what I was interested in and took every single course in genetics that I could take in Ohio State but remember now this is 55 to 59 and in 1953 we learned from Watson and Crick that DNA was the basis of of heredity and you know now you think of that you learned this this in the fifth grade but um it was only in my years in genetics I took in 57 but um it was not known that much anything about DNA and we were just really trying to find out about the replication of it the structure of it and that kind of thing uh so uh I was committed to genetics and and at least an example then of how my undergraduate career fundamentally changed my life fundamentally and one course did it I couldn't get enough of genetics and I loved the the fact that it was strictly lecture then of course but the instructor would give us all kinds of problem sets to take home and and get the answers to and then he would put the answers in the library now of course you get them online uh as I did but um when I was teaching but it was just a thrill for me to go into the library and look at all of the questions that I would answer and get my answers compare and when I it was almost more fun to miss it rather than to get it correct because I pretty oh what is this that I didn't understand and again at that time it was the the faculty member was readily available at and so I went often hey this is the number 14 I just don't understand how you got it and what an excitement it was I it was learning it as best as far and to this to my entire 40 years I wanted to do exactly the same thing with my biology classes so putting problem sets uh into uh the system was a fundamental for me it really was exciting and do you have that in biology does does Brian do that now um I'm not in biology anymore I only took one semester yeah you took the one semester um did the PRS questions but he didn't do anything outside of class problem sets yeah not really interesting but you really like the way he taught his class and why don't you describe a little bit of how do you locate how how Kinko teaches biology one of one two and three so what he does is he gives you a few sections of the textbook to read and then he did these things called learning outcomes so he has like his goals for what he wants to teach you for the day or for the class period and so you would go through your textbook and it wasn't mandatory to write them down or anything but it really helps because when you went to class you already knew you had notes then you like had the information in front of you already in your own words so as soon as you would walk in you'd sit down with your group so you take out your little PRS clicker you would put up like five questions on the board and you would do those individually without your notes and then he would go over the answers and you could ask questions if you needed to and then he like went through some slides and then he would occasionally throw in a question where we could do it with our groups but you would still have to answer individually and then he had these little Scantron sheets and he would give you a question to do with your group and then you would like scratch off the answers like A, B, C, D or E and if you like scratched it off and it wasn't the right answer then you just had to keep on scratching it off until you found the right one but that would be like a group score but you would get like individual work and group work and a combination of both of them and it was it was just a lot of interaction between people and it was a lot of fun honestly. Probably more so than any other class you've dated. Biology wasn't my favorite subject but it definitely made it fun for you too. So it's a great example of an interactive model and I think he's using the technological capabilities very nicely. He's giving you the assignments beforehand I showed Blackboard as a partner, that BRS an important part of it and so he's lecturing a very small amount of time during any given class period. Yeah and I think that helps them because a lot of people zone out very easily so when you're interacting more it makes it easier to focus. Do you get a sense Rachel that most students like it or would they just assume sit back be passive, listen to a lecture? I think some people would rather just have a lecture because it makes it easier to skip class but for the people who are in majors that are like especially like competitive like med school majors and people who want to go to a pharmacy school or grad school in those places I think they're more they like it a lot more because they can learn more. I think that seems to be what. So you're suggesting that maybe the obviously the more motivated to learn the one that's more interested in learning would like it the one that's less interested in learning would just soon sit back but to that degree to I would hope that it would encourage the who less are motivated to really get excited about that enough to where they might participate. I think it also helps you remember if you're done the class you know just like completely forget it. Yeah it sticks in here. And then the learning outcomes help too because it wasn't just like you lecture you get lectured in class and then you have homework and then you're done with it you have to like go through the textbook yourself like learning the materials outside of class put it in your own words. Well you see that's very much the models that I was suggesting Barbara Wolver with her Shakespeare he's wanting you to learn the material outside of class through a very variety of ways Blackboard is notes your textbook and then using the interactive model involved in class. I took a couple education classes last semester and that was actually one of our biggest focuses was we I'm blinking on the name right now but like that's like one of the things we learned was like it works as if you give the students the material outside of classes have them learn on their own and then in class you do the activities. Is it the flipped classroom? Yeah. Okay I did something like that in my high school classes too they would post videos online and then you learn it outside and then go back in and talk about it. It's called the flipped classroom yeah that's right. Well is it a model that the historians are using one more? To some extent I stopped lecturing in 2012 I was a good lecturer and it worked well for me for those five students who were paying attention. Yeah but I was teaching a intro to US history class and so those five students who were always in a class who were paying attention did well and the rest of them looked bored to tears and I was getting bored you know this is like I don't know how many times I've given some version of that lecture and I you know and there was beginning to be much more emphasis on interactive learning and I took one of the you know I went to a seminar after the end of the after the end of that school year where we talked about how to do more interactive teaching. I had already done some interactive teaching in some upper level classes that worked really well. You know I had students assigned to come to class prepared to their group would do the presentation or I would we would interact and I would ask that group questions that they should know from having done the readings and that seemed to work pretty well especially for the upper level classes you know I experimented with it a lot and you know sometimes it seemed to work really well and other times you know larger classes sometimes didn't work as well. But I think we're certainly learning that that's a much better model for student learning than the old model. I remember back in the 60s and 70s we would use the old acetate where you would roll it on on you have a overhead protector and the acetate's there and you write down the information that you're trying to get across and the student would record it in the in their notebook and that's the way the lecture went week after week quarter after quarter and such a tremendously different model now I think we have progressed enormously. I changed most of my my lectures so I usually wrote out a narrative didn't necessarily follow it exactly and so when I switched to a more interactive model I went in and re-edited those narratives and then started posting them on Blackboard ahead of the class along with the you know reading assignments and the textbooks and I think that worked pretty well so I you know I had moved pretty much to flipping the classroom. Yeah that's good and you're suggesting that a number of your colleagues in history which I would have thought was probably one of the the last places that might Well there's still some of us I think who do at least part of their classes as straight-ahead lectures but we I think especially the younger faculty have I think just yeah our sort of interacting doing interactive classrooms is native to them that's how they learned they understand the technology and feel really comfortable with it so I think there's you know as more and more of we have more and more newer faculty I think that's just really changing. So is this interactive model now the rule or the exception in your classes? I feel like it depends because some of my classes seem to be more like a flipped classroom and others have been more just like actual lecture. I have a marketing minor so my two business classes I've taken just because of like the sheer size of the class I think it's like 275 to 400. It's been just like lecture because I think with like that amount of people it would be hard to do like a flipped classroom but it sounds like you're biology professor. Yeah and Ginkgo's classes a couple hundred isn't it? Yeah it's in Simronitorium the big one so it's at least 150 and the same with my chemistry class that one's a pretty good one too. Why don't you take only one biology semester? I only needed one credit I wanted to go to pharmacy school after I graduated with my undergrad in chemistry and I only need one credit of biology so I just didn't want to. Okay good you know so you're going for a a PharmD. Terrific well you'll you'll make a lot more money than faculty that we don't do anyway. Okay good thanks for your interactions on that. I have one more question. So we have like LA's and SI's so like supplemental instruction and learning assistance I guess and in biology my freshman bio class we had LA's that like walked around and helped us they would help us answer questions or we could ask them stuff if we needed to and then our SI tutors they I don't know if any of your classes have them but they don't but I know you're talking about so they create like worksheets and stuff outside of the classroom so my chemistry class does it a lot and there are like three or four of them and they each have their individual sessions so if you have a class during one of those sessions you can go to a different one and they just like go over the material that we went over in class they have them like two times a week was there anything like that? These are not connected with the lab just with the lecture. Just with the lecture. No had nothing like that in fact we we didn't have TAs in our lecture classes at all one of the negative aspects of teaching in my opinion at that point particularly was all of the hours you spend grading exams and without TAs that's a that's a real challenge particularly in classes of 50 or 60 but no we didn't have that Rachel and I that sounds like an excellent addition but you haven't seen that in your classes no but I also haven't taken any science classes so I haven't like we haven't had anything well yeah I mean I in theory you could use that model outside of science I haven't had anything like that for any of my classes but I know a lot of my friends who have taken science classes like constantly like talk about how helpful it is to have that side session. It's just like an extra little like reinforcement of the material outside of class for large history intro courses the model now is pretty much the the faculty member lectures twice a week and then there are then there are I think they call them recitation sessions but with a graduate student and and that's intended to do what sounds like what you're you're describing so there's you know a small group with the graduate student and a place to you know interact and ask questions and get a better idea. In our chat classes have recitation sections too that we have to go to so we get even more. Again though well not with the lab component with the now with just the just the lecture. Yeah well that's terrific and and these SIs and LA's are presumably undergraduates as well as graduates. Yeah so our recitation instructors are normally graduate students that have taken the classes before from our professors but the LA's and SIs they can be undergraduate students and they normally have taken the class like the previous year. Yeah I shouldn't have so cavalierly said no to your point about did we do that before because I actually remember a number of years where I had undergraduate students who had received A's in the course the previous year and and asked them to be assistant TAs is what I called them and what we did was give them one or two academic credits for being involved and it worked out beautifully so that yeah I mean I didn't do that in all classes I only did it in my genetics class but it worked quite well then. Well I guess to go back I guess backtracking to just like your more involvement that you see could you um touch more on your like what you did as the associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. Most of my role as associate dean was to be the director of honors. I had an unbelievable title that I'm not sure I can repeat but I think it was associate dean for educational innovations associate dean for educational innovations and director of honors um the innovation and teeth in education never got off the ground. I spent practically all of my time with the Honors program. At that time we had only one associate dean and at that I was the one and others before me and after me. Now of course the director of honors is a is a provostial position not a college of arts and sciences position and there are many more associate deans in arts and sciences now and there were then there's one for undergraduate education one for graduate education one for research but but it wasn't at that point. When I was the active um in the interim vice provost it was with one of your colleagues here in history Jean Willis Dr. Willis was a provost at the university and there was an interim time for five months when I was his singular associate or interim vice provost there was only one uh right now I would bet there's probably eight or ten vice provost within the office and I happened to be on the website for the provost a few weeks ago and I counted the number of staff that report to the provost and there are 35 30 if you go out on the provost you'll list now and you go under staff you can count 35 individuals that are part of the provost provost your office and at that time and that's not including Peter Langford and if we don't include uh Jean Lewis uh myself and a business person were the only two that were in the provost office at that time and that was in the seventies so this is just talk about proliferation and some of that has to do with being a state university some of it has to do with a much larger size and I don't know what the rest of it is in terms of why we have 35 instead of two but the faculty often lament that there's been a lot more I mean the faculty did not go from the equivalent of two to 35 that's whatever you know a 17 percent 17 times increase it would be interesting to see the number of faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1970 versus 2016 I'll bet you that there's it's it's not even double at that time I would bet we had maybe 350 and any guesses to how many A&S faculty there are now I have no idea our department has fluctuated significantly um when Jean Lewis came in the late 50s I think he said there were six history faculty by 1970 I think we were into into the mid 20s and when I was here in graduate school I think it was about the same and then it dropped off substantially I think it dropped to as low as 15 full time and when Valerie Hartcastle became dean she boosted our numbers back up to the low 20s that was around 2000 um I think so well but no I'm not sure I think she was left the deanship around 2012 I think she'd only been in that position for maybe five or six years right now what's happened is that every you know for instance I'm retiring at the end of this year I'm not being replaced by a full-time faculty member they're going to patch my area together with adjuncts with some vague promises that sometime in the future they will you know the dean and the provost will replace me full time but it's been very difficult in the last five years or so to get a new to replace a full-time faculty member or to even get a you know a new budget line and it depends on the priorities of the dean and the provost office yeah sure well so it sounds like there's some commonality here as I said in 66 we had 11 or 12 faculty in biology by early to mid 70s partly because we were gearing up to be a state institution and getting state substantial increase in funding we went to probably a couple of dozen and I'll bet now they're maybe 28 or 29 so we have been a very steady and you're indicating fluctuations yeah you're not that much larger now with 45,000 students instead of 20,000 so there's just no question that the number of faculty have not kept up with the dramatic increase in administrative positions and some of that's good now there's a whole division in arts and sciences for advising I don't know how many there are but there must be four or five people maybe maybe full-time advice students and probably for the for the good but I mentioned earlier that when I came in 66 for the for the next 10 years it was a model that faculty could be paid three or four hundred bucks a year more if they were willing to be the faculty advisor to 30 or 40 students and the nicest part of that was that every student was required every quarter to come in and get the signature of the faculty member on what they were taking next quarter well that was a great opportunity for interaction with the students but that went by the board and and I probably rightly so because some faculty were quite happy to take a few hundred more bucks but they didn't give a damn about knowing the details of what what were all the requirements so students would come in you say ah yeah Joe okay oh it looks good to me get out of here and and then Joe would come you know in the senior year and say I didn't take these three or four classes that are required for me to graduate and it was a heck of a mess but now we've got really professional advisors so that was another dramatic change and I think over the time the administration did understand hey the faculty just aren't doing it in terms of of advising a few advisors because I have my big begin like arts and sciences chemistry advisor I have my honors advisor and I have my pre-professional advisor so I've got a bunch of pre-professional pre-farm advisor and you have yeah okay you have a chemistry advisor kind of a randomly chosen faculty member or someone who's dedicated to that it's like in the we begin advising offices I guess but it's just a randomly chosen one from that okay well in biology I'm happy to say that maybe 15 years ago now we went to a model where we hired a faculty member who also taught but her job was to be the biology major advisor so she would see the hundred or so majors every year and work with them making sure that they do what they needed to do and I think we do have his name was dr bruce all yeah bruce all sure he did that he was involved with the chemistry program and I think he was like the advisor for the whole chemistry program maybe which might be similar to what you were talking about but yeah but bruce is a much more accomplished faculty member you know he's a fellow of the graduate school and all kinds of things so this he doesn't spend anywhere near the time that Mary Fox spent as an advisor for students because I did go to him a few times and just make sure asked him about my courses and what I should be taking for like the rest of my few years and he said it looked all good but he did tell us that we could come in and ask him about advising questions if we needed to along with our other big big advisors okay good I also have like I think three or four I like my honors advisor I make make an advisor communication advisor and then like a co-op advisor so and what do you guys do with the honors advisor what how do they advise what my experience with my honors advisor is I read to me with them our freshman year and just kind of like I think they just wanted to like get to know us more so I talked about like the courses I'm taking like what brought me to UC kind of like basic questions and I think now they're there for like if we have questions about like or a learning portfolio like the just general questions about the honors program I think like the different experiences we have to get so I think they're like but I don't think we're required to meet with them no we're not my students were the same thing and she also like offered me she said well what kind of like where are you interested in what kind of experiences do you want to have and I told her what I was like what I wanted to do and she said and she wrote me down a list and said here are some of the things that you could possibly do that's and then I like said like the different things I was involved and then my honors advisor was like oh you could turn this into an honors experience if you wanted to so I think they're kind of just like helping you I think they're probably just helping us make sure that like we do graduate with honors and we're not just like are these honors staff that are so how many are there now I mean do you know how many staff people are in the say like I'm just probably like at least 10 because I know they also they're not not only advisors but also teach the gateway classes and some of them I think teach like actual like classes to the honors program and I know like specifically like Ashley Webber is in charge of like the leadership program and I think but they're they're they are members of the honors program they're not faculty member in another department yeah they're just like specifically in honors well that's terrific and again honors in the 70s was the director and a part-time administrative assistant and that was it we didn't have any so all of the advising was done by the director of the program but but you have 60 or 80 compared to 400 well that's great you so you both feel very good about your opportunities through the honors program yeah I really I enjoy it I wasn't I mean yeah like by the way do we did either of you go to turners or snipers to be in the honors door I see it's turners turners is the honors door I lived in Turner just because like I post on the Facebook page and I found roommates that way which is the other way of how technology is kind of like changed the university experience but I lived in the honors door but I wasn't in honors when I started but then I so you got into the honors dorm a lot being I didn't realize that was possible well two of my three roommates are in the honors program so I think that's now did you stay for your second are you now in turners no I live in an apartment but um yeah but I don't feel like because I wasn't in honors my first semester I like felt like it like affected me at all in the dorm you just have like a SMA circle you know okay uh so that's another nice opportunity you you live at home I lived in morgan's hall last year I lived on the 12th floor last year and then this year I live on the 9th floor morgan oh yeah yeah oh morgan's oh that's a wonderful new facility yeah one of the great things that you see most other institutions I guessed it as well 25 years ago we started this concept of helping hands helping hands you had it when you moved in to morgan's or to turners faculty and staff volunteer during the couple of days three days that you're allowed to move in in the fall semester and so we get to help move you in so we all have our t-shirts on and we stand out there with our carts and your parents drive you up you guys don't you never heard of this we actually we have like um I guess just students who like uh there's students do it as well you can move in I think like two or three days early and then you help like move the other students oh so it sounds like what you guys did is just like what yeah yeah yeah our students were always around as well but it was a great opportunity to get to meet some faculty members and the provost would be out there doing it a lot of the administrative personnel so it and it still they do it every year and anyway the nice part is I got over the years I got to be a helping hand in every single uh dorm in in uh UC and I would have said that well the ones morgan's and sayota are only a couple of years old but I I thought those were probably number one uh but then turner and shinier shinier I guess is the is the one for athletes but they're they are very nice modular units of me and then you go to calhoun and oh my god calhoun is just a mess to get into yeah no dap me I think still has like um they don't have like air conditioning they have like this space yeah the unit so well my mom was she looked in calhoun and during the orientation when we stayed and either sit on the calhoun she showed me her room in calhoun and didn't change spent one night there and she said it's literally the same thing and I was like I'm out of here so um I actually spent a lot of time in turner because a lot of my friends through the honors program looked in turner so I was over there a lot and they came to morgan's a lot um did you consider staying there as a sophomore or wanted to get out um I don't know I liked turner but morgan's has the kitchen and um I actually brought two of my friends that looked in turner last year over to morgan's to live with me this year um and they like it too but I like morgan's a lot and that's why I looked there for the second year yeah that's good I know that there are some honors students who say the second year in turners as well because it's such a good program or such a good place to live yeah one of my roommates from last year when we looked at turner is now like an r.a. in turner because like she really liked oh really huh good good by the way do either of you work for pay um I work at a movie theater but not like you work at a movie theater in blue ash a movie theater in blue ash and just take a kind of thing um I'm a server there they like serve food so that's what I do um and you one of you is at void yep yeah you're at void yeah and so how often do you work um well last semester I worked Tuesday Thursday and Friday but this semester my classes changed so I just work on friday but I also work at skyline chili in mason so how many hours a week do you work typically um it kind of depends on the week but normally I probably I think I work like like six to ten hours a week okay six to ten no more than that for you um it depends if I work I normally work friday saturday sunday and monday if I do like all four of the days but I just cut it back to two so it's normally like 10 hours maybe 12 per weekend okay well I would say that that's another big difference then versus now I don't think the students had near the commitment to outside jobs that they do now I would guess the typical student today might be working 20 to 30 hours a week and I don't recall students working anywhere near that in the 60s and 70s I know some of my friends work like 40 hours a week and while also going to school it's crazy and it clearly impacts on the education they can see so I would encourage you both don't work more than 10 hours a week that 10 hours you can absorb but more than that it begins to really affect you're going to get the chance to work all the rest of your life you don't have to push it now so how are we doing um pretty well check in do you guys have some more questions are okay other things you want to add like well I want to ask you what are you what are the next steps what what do you now do with this and how are you kind of summarizing all of this good stuff well hopefully good stuff uh for uh for the course what what what's down the road we've got 10 more weeks eight more weeks so what what will you be doing next have you finished all of your have your fellow students finished all of your um David Lee Smith is out of town so there that group is going to um interview him I think next Thursday or Friday and then the following Wednesday class we'll discuss the interviews I've assigned them to each of the students to at least index the interview so at you know three minutes and 30 seconds for a doctor who there's talked about you know if the class was larger I would require an actual transcript of the interview but there's just we don't that's very time consuming and absolutely we don't have you know the the the number of students in each team to do that right um what do you tell them about what we did last week um not the genealogy okay we went to the Cincinnati Public Library and we did I guess we've researched you on ancestry.com really yeah oh good what you find um we found your junior and senior yearbooks from Ohio State we found both of your parents gravestones we found your father's draft registration card really wow good for you you should send him what you did it's very I think all of the groups did a wonderful job I did and actually exceeded my expectations and you used ancestry.com good we found your uh from the 1940 census in the 1931 uh when your parents lived on Ohio Avenue and then we found that you have the sister and that your mom's mom or your grandma lived with you yes did you find out that my grandfather was a tailor he did not okay it was kind of hard because your father's name was the same one as yours yeah so it was like difficult to distinguish like who was here so we had to look at dates make sure that we were looking at the right things yeah well it did kind of mess things up my parents called me junior I mean I was Carly Huthard Jr but they didn't like this little carl big carl kind of thing you know when someone is carl there well which one do you want so they nicknamed me through my middle name of Albert they that's how I got the name burnt so next week we're going to go to a downtown firm called Gray and Pape that does it's their cultural resource managers which means that they probably their biggest business is when there is a construction project that's funded with federal money they have to go they have to look at what kind of historic cultural resources may be impacted so for instance with plans for the new i-75 bridge they have had to study the corridor where that bridge is going to go what are the historic buildings are there any graveyards that are going to be disturbed they did the analysis of washington park before washington park was completely rehab and i think one of the things they're going to talk about they've also done a lot of work on music hall and they'll talk about how they did that work but this so partly to introduce them to that kind of work in general but also i want them to learn how to research the history of the building so for instance you know the the place that you live with your parents on Ohio Avenue what did that building look like what can we learn about that building what can we learn about the neighborhood around it sort of so the idea would be to place you in this you and your family in this neighborhood and maybe follow you know follow you you know your parents lived on Ohio Avenue one point and then they lived somewhere else and then you came back after being away in college where did you where did you and your wife live what does that say about you know what were the demographics of that neighborhood what did that house look like so partly to to teach the technique and also to put you in a wider perspective not just who you are and what you did but who who would you have interacted in your within your neighborhoods and did that change over time or you know we're you know we learned that Jean Lewis at one point lived on Woodside Place which is you know in a building that's no longer there he lived in Amberley Village for a while when he was a brand new assistant professor he shared an apartment out in the west side of town and so this all tells us something about who you are and what the environment was that you lived in so partly partly to build a more robust biography of each of you but also to teach that technique you know may i ask them will these students potentially become interviewers for the legacy project that we've envisioned i haven't talked about that that much but the the the plan is to this course is kind of a pilot for developing a you know an oral history project with retired faculty in general we're figuring out you know we're using you as guinea pigs to try to figure out how best to do that but the idea would be that sometime in the very near future we would have students who are trained in doing oral histories and would assign them to additional retired faculty we need to talk about how we're going to you know make that happen but that's you know one of the options might be that students from this class because you've had the training we might you know if we can find funding we might hire you you know for a few hours a semester to do additional oral histories with with additional faculty so to put that in the in the perspective that's how this course came about the emeriti association board was interested in the oral history concept there are a number of other institutions of higher ed around the country that are having these kinds of oral histories and i think it's increasingly clear that they have something to offer our College of Medicine to its credit has been doing it for a number of years and in fact they have in the archives some of their work i i looked at one with Dean Daniels and they interviewed him regarding the kinds of changes that occurred during his deanship well this is a good part of history and it's increasingly obvious to professional organizations by own human genetics society understood that we are we were losing some of the really big names in human genetics because they were they were old and they were dying and we wanted to have oral histories from them as to how they saw the perspective to change over a 20 or 30 or 40 year period so it was on that basis that we all got together and started talking about it and came up you came up with this great idea of having this course but but it is ultimately with the intent of being able to use you because we we didn't know how to get interviewers and how to have them be good interviewers what College of Medicine does is just go to Daniels and says hey who would you like to be your interviewer and so it's another colleague with whom he's comfortable and that guy just kind of dialogues with him well i think probably this kind of thing is that your training is a lot better than what a colleague would do so we're still trying to figure out how to do all of this but you know hopefully you know we will we'll figure out the next steps and then we'll you know we'll be contacting you all and if you know if you're interested in continuing to do so the oral histories and i think we would probably try to match the faculty member with a student who had perhaps similar interests so you know you know someone you might interview someone from communications or english at least some connection and you know perhaps we would have someone who had gone through the pharmacy school you know had been you know pharmacy faculty and had to interview them yeah or frankly russell would be an excellent example this guy has been a significant doer at the University of Cincinnati he's been involved in an awful lot of good things and it would be great to get some good oral history and he's a nice guy yeah he is a nice guy in fact if you continue the course next year alt would be one to encourage interviewing well um what do we stop here and uh