F. Robert Treichler, Oral History

Recorded on September 21, 2007
Interviewed by Craig Simpson
Transcribed by Robin Katz

Note: This transcript includes geo-references to locations that are discussed in the oral history. Geographical names linked in the transcript will open in a new window or tab that takes you to that location information and map in the Mapping May 4 project. To request a transcript without geo-reference links included, please contact Kent State University Special Collections & Archives.

[Interviewer]: Good morning, my name is Craig Simpson and the date is September 21, 2007. I am conducting a May 4 Oral History interview today and could you please state your name?

[Robert Treichler]: F. Robert Treichler.

[Interviewer]: Dr. Treichler, where were you born?

[Robert Treichler]: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

[Interviewer]: Okay, and how did you first arrive to Kent State?

[Robert Treichler]: I was hired in as an assistant professor in psychology in 1962.

[Interviewer]: And you've been at Kent State uninterrupted since 1962?

[Robert Treichler]: Ever since. Yes, a few sabbaticals, but, yes, otherwise, my whole term of employment has been at Kent State.

[Interviewer]: Okay, in what department?

[Robert Treichler]: The Department of Psychology.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the university prior to the events of 1970? Just give a little feel for the atmosphere.

[Robert Treichler]: I don't know exactly what you mean by "atmosphere" but I can tell you that in psychology, our primary interest in those days prior to 1970 and immediately prior to that date was the development of a PhD program here. And in part that's why I was hired here, to be a part of an expansion and, like, whole upgrade of the department in which we were trying to get people with some recognized--some sort of reputation in the discipline at least nationwide, maybe not internationally. But the department was on a program of enhancement that probably began with a decision to offer the PhD in--I think the decision was made around '60. They hired a new chair in '61; he began to institute policies relative to that, and I was among those who were early on brought in to do that. There were four of us hired in '62. I believe in '68, we hired eight people, and that was just when we began to--our first PhD was awarded in '67 and thereafter we were trying, you know--that was the aim of the department at that time.

I'd characterize the institution as what it was--a developing a kind of place. There were certain PhD programs in other disciplines and some were established prior to psychology, or [unintelligible], but everybody was on the make, I think. We were trying to enhance the institution and that was a part of its general growth.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember how many students you had in the program during those years, just in general?

[Robert Treichler]: Yeah, sure. Actually, I wrote a history of the department and I have some figures on that. I can't--I don't have them off the top of my head but we were routinely bringing in something on the order of twenty graduate students a year, split half-and-half between experimental and clinical and actually, probably by 1970, we had something on the order of, oh, I would suspect ninety to a hundred students, something like that in the graduate program. And of course, undergraduate enrollment in psychology has always been large. It's one of the largest enrollments in the institution.

[Interviewer]: And how many faculty were in the department by 1970?

[Robert Treichler]: By 1970, I suspect there were something like twenty-seven, twenty-eight, maybe. Could be--I don't know, I would have to go back and really check the numbers, but we were trying to get broad representation of different disciplinary areas within psychology and with a generally equal balance between sort of traditional academic and applied psychology, mostly from the clinical perspective. We've never done anything industrial or things like that.

[Interviewer]: Take us through the steps of how the department responded to the events of May 4.

[Robert Treichler]: Well, there were a variety of responses in many different areas, I would think. One of the first and immediate concerns we had was we had a fairly substantial animal lab and there was great concern for how are these animals going to be maintained when, in essence, the governor and the National Guard shut the place down. And I was able to get back in on the 5th, and I had hired--rather recently--within, I tell you, two months of that time--I had just hired an animal caretaker who was really a retired master sergeant [laughs] from the army who had done a very similar job--who had been a support member at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, [D.C.]. And he sort of carried the full aura of a stern NCO, an old master sergeant, and I don't know how he did it, but he went by the National Guard troops and was never stopped when he came in. So I voiced our concern to the National Guard people, and they took me down to see General Del Corso down in the administration building. He had an office set up down there, I think it was down in the president's office. Took me down there and I explained to him the problem and his response was, "Well, you know, we want to get things back to normal just as soon as possible," and, "Yes, we do understand that this will be a problem, but certainly you"--uh, you know--"can come in, but we won't be allowing the employees or the students."

Well, of course, the major source of animal care at least for our flock of rats, which was something on the order of--I suspect we had something like 7[00]-800 rats here. I know that sounds like a lot, but when you add breeding colonies and things like that, its really not all that many. But somebody had to come in and take care of that, so actually Frank Garrow, my employee, and I for several days--I think for about a week--he and I were the only people doing animal care, so it was quite a job for us to just to feed, water, and change the pans under the rats. But we also had monkeys at that time, too. We had something on the order--I would guess fifteen to twenty monkeys, and two of the same kind. So there was a reasonable amount of work to be done. We did--I think it was probably within a week--we began to get some other people back in. Employees. Mrs. Hines who worked for us, she was there, a careworker. I'm pretty sure we got her back in. But student help was a long time coming.

Now, that was only one component of what we did. Then the other thing that was particularly concerning was, What do you do with graduate students? So, graduate students--some of them in the middle of dissertations, master's theses, whatever it might be--they're, certainly--if they were doing animal work, their data collection was interrupted, there was just nothing we could do about that. There were ongoing classes that were a part of this issue and we wanted to try to establish some contact with graduate students because they're not--you can send undergraduates home, but what do you do you with grad students? Most of them live here, they're not--their parents are not typically--because our grad student population really draws from all over the country and some were foreign students, too. So one of the first things we tried to do was estabilsh some way to keep in touch with grad students, and so the department's response was to try to make a place off-campus, or find a place off-campus, where we could still be in touch with them. And the Methodist church offered to us the use of the second floor of a house--yeah, I think it was a Methodist church--that they were not using. And it was a house that they owned that was adjacent to a property they owned right across from the campus here.

[Interviewer]: Do you remember where it was located since this was just--?

[Robert Treichler]: Oh, yeah, yeah. It's right next to this church that's, you know, across from the library here.

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay. Was it Methodist or Presbyterian?

[Robert Treichler]: You know, I forget the denomination. It might--I guess it was the Presbyterians. I'm pretty sure. Okay, but they offered us the use of this place, and what the department did was we had a phone line installed there and had one of our employees be there so there would be someone who could contact anybody. If a grad student needed to contact people in the department, they could do it at this place. We also moved a set of mailboxes over there for grad students, so if we needed to distribute information to them it could be done at this place and they didn't have to come on the campus.

With respect to classes, people arranged all kinds of different--certainly, you're aware of all of the mail-order things, about we had mailing addresses and such things but we also had local ways to get information out of people that could do that. In a few cases, we held classes at locations off the campus. I know I was teaching a course in--it was part of the graduate physiological psychology course. And I had meetings at my home, which was not in Kent; it's in Tallmadge, down Route 261. And it was nice spring days and stuff, so I put out word that the class would meet at my house. And on one occasion when we were doing that, we were outside--there's kind of an almost natural amphitheater in the area next to my home out there--and a Tallmadge police car came up the driveway and I went over and talked to the guy. He inquired and said, "What is this gathering?" and, "Why are these people here?" Told him, I said, "a graduate class in physiological psychology," and he said, "Well, we have recorded the license numbers of all these cars parked down here on the street" [laughs]. You know, but that was the general, I think, level of paranoia that was kind of running around here at the time.

[Interviewer]: Did that happen often?

[Robert Treichler]: I only--it only happened on one occassion that I know of. And people did meet at my house several times. The "We have recorded the license numbers"--that only happened once. But there were some other frightening components, especially the day. Now this is not relative to the department or anything about the department's response.

[Interviewer]: That's okay [overlapping].

[Robert Treichler]: But on the actual day of May 4th, there was another faculty [member]'s wife that was out at my house visiting with my wife and they heard the news and heard that the campus was being shut down. And this lady was a Kent resident, the wife of a biology faculty member, and her children were still in public school and so she became concerned when she heard this and she tried to come in town. She was going to go to school and pick up the children, and she said she got down to, I think it was the extension of Cherry Street and whatever it is, and there were either National Guard or state police or somebody there said, No, no one can go in. Well, she got kind of panicky about, you know, "My God, my kids are going to be coming home from school, I'm not there." So she actually, quite fortunately, found another back road--she came in on Middlebury Road. I think everybody knows where that is now [laughs]. In those days apparently the police or whoever had not yet closed off Middlebury Road. She did live on the West side of Kent, so she got home in time. But that's the kind of thing that really panicked people here under the circumstances.

I don't know about recovery. It was really quite gradual and it was--we did maintain the contact with graduate students and certainly tried to give people opportunity and of course the faculty came back within about a week. And the department did facilitate this business of contacting graduate students, so that was most helpful. I don't know whether in psychology the response was better or worse, more effective or whatever but it was something that you had to try to work through. And it was shocking, you know. You come in and the parking lot where you usually put your car has an armored personnel carrier in the driveway and [somebody] says, No, you're not going in there.

I was never severely tested for credentials or anything like that, but you could usually explain to whoever was at these places--the Guards--that, No, I have permission to go in, and that, Yeah, I have such-and-such. Sometimes they asked for some kind of ID--it wasn't anything spectacular, it was just like a faculty ID but other than that, it was a nasty week of work. I don't think I had taken rat crap from out under cages since my graduate school days [laughs]. Of course, the real loss was that many people had their research interrupted at sometimes very crucial times. There may be other people who can give you better--I was trying to remember whether I had anything where a grad student was really, so totally interrupted that they blew a term or two terms of data collection when this happened. I frankly don't remember that. I don't remember that there was an occassion for my students, but I know that it happened for other students. I know for Dave Riccio and [his] students, I know that some of them really were severely curtailed in what they could do and really had to spend extra time here because of that.

[Interviewer]: How would you describe the atmosphere of the university when school reopened in the fall?

[Robert Treichler]: Oh, in the fall? Well, I think there was just great apprehension and everybody had some kind of opinion about, Oh my God, should I be sending my children back to this place, or--I think there's just a wide range of opinions about that. I know of at least in terms of my faculty colleagues the issue was, Hey we gotta keep going here. And there were some people who actually were--as you might imagine, among social psychologists--were extremely interested in the phenomenon and gathered data relative to what might have transpired and people's attitudes and they published on this issue.

[Interviewer]: There's a lot of academic research then that developed as a result of the event?

[Robert Treichler]: There was certainly some in our department, yes. Stu Taylor--I think that most people know about Stu Taylor's book on this issue, and that he generated from response to the event. Tom Hensley's book. There were a bunch of people who were responsive. I think Jerry Lewis, too.

[Interviewer]: Was the department put in charge by the university of dealing with issues of trauma or any phenomena?

[Robert Treichler]: Certainly they made themselves available to the psychological clinic for people to avail themselves of those services. I don't know specifically what, in fact, the response might have been. You could talk with people who were associated with the clinic in those days if there are still some around--yeah, well, Ed Bixenstine. There's a big article about the Bixenstines in today's Record-Courier, about the family [see "Around Kent" in the Kent Record-Courier, September 21, 2007]. But, yeah, I'm sure he potentially could talk to you about things that occured with respect to the clinic. Plus he was still a faculty member in clinical psychology in those days. Sadly, the person who would be most germane to that issue, Hal [Horace] Page, is no longer with us, but he was the clinic director in those days.

[Interviewer]: Did the department have any responsibilities in helping reconcile the university with the Kent community?

[Interviewer]: There were people who took that on as an issue, but that, once again, I think was the prospect of individuals, particularly social and clinical people being concerned with that as an issue. I heard of that, but I don't know from a firsthand basis--I don't know that what they did.

[Interviewer]: Did you take on anything personally, then, in your--?

[Robert Treichler]: Well, only insofar as we had been very active in the nearby communities. My wife was particularly concerned with this, and in fact, it in some ways meant something of a career change for her.

[Interviewer]: What was her career initially?

[Robert Treichler]: Well, she's trained as a social worker. She had an MSW out at Case [Western Reserve University], that program--School of Applied Social Sciences at Case, and she was a trained social worker and was working in the area. But she got very interested in politics as a consequence of this and said that her reaction was--there was a very strong political component in this. And actually she sort of changed over and became sufficiently interested in politics, and she ran for public office, was elected to City Council in Tallmadge, and then took on evern more political concerns and became the Chair of the Democratic Party in Summit County. And she also, in her own career path, sort of made some changes that I guess were all resultant from--maybe not a direct consequence, but her concern was sufficient that she came back and got a master's degree here in political science and campaign management, and has since had time done campaign management. Not so much with an eye to individual candidates but to issues. She's managed campaigns in Summit County for, well, her area of social work was child welfare, and so she has worked on and managed campaigns for levies there, she's also managed the library campaign there for support for the Summity County Library. And she has done some judicial campaigns. Essentially, these things are usually nonpartisan [laughs]. Nonpartisan is [unintelligible]. They are actually partisan, but they are nonpartisan on the ballot.

[Interviewer]: Right.

[Robert Treichler]: So she's managed several of those kinds of campaigns. Especially ones for women.

[Interviewer]: And you had mentioned that she was at home on May 4?

[Robert Treichler]: Yeah.

[Interviewer]: Where were you on May 4?

[Robert Treichler]: Well, I was here.

[Interviewer]: You were on campus?

[Robert Treichler]: Yeah, I was here on campus and I--as I remember it, I had gone to lunch. There were several of us who had gone to lunch at what used to be the former Student Center, which is now the building that's being renovated over here. We had gone there and we had come out, and we knew of the events that were going on, the call for the rally. And after we came out from lunch we watched from over at that location, but whatever events transpired there, we watched as the Guard moved out and went up over the hill and then came back and then fired. And, I know it sounds kind of bizarre to say, but the people where we were laughed and said, Oh my God, isn't that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of? These guys are out there firing blanks in reaction to a couple of students that they chased over the hill. And we had no idea that live rounds were involved.

We went back to our offices and whatever we were doing that afternoon, and it was only by about four o'clock or so that somebody said, "Hey, they actually shot people over there." I said, "You got to be kidding me. They weren't firing blanks?" So yeah, by that time, then a lot of, oh, activity, started around the place. And then somebody said, "Oh my God, they're closing the place down. There's all kinds of troops here." We went out--we had access to the roof of Kent Hall from my labs and my sort-of office was on the third floor of Kent [Hall] and there's a stairway that goes up there. Actually, it went up to a place that had during World War II used to be an airplane spotting station on the roof of Kent Hall. So we went up to the roof of Kent Hall and there were helicopters running around. It was--we of course didn't know the total gravity of the situation. As you might imagine, there were all kinds of rumors: "Yeah, two students and two Guardsmen were shot, oh my God." Took a while for that all to get sorted out too. But, yes.

[Interviewer]: So you had gone this whole afternoon without--

[Robert Treichler]: Yeah, we were really sort of out of the loop, I think, there. If you really considered it because whatever those events were that took place, we didn't know about it, and we went back to our usual occupations and preoccupations.

[Interviewer]: The fact that you lived in Tallmadge, were you aware of what had happened over that weekend prior to May 4?

[Robert Treichler]: To some extent, although we were out of town. There had been a meeting of psychologists in Cincinnati, and so we were down at that and didn't get back until Sunday. And then we saw, of course, reports in the paper of the burning of the ROTC building. So, didn't really think that much of it, and then with the call for the rally on Monday--it seemed like that's what students would do. All you have to do is confront them with some kind of authoritative thing that they know you can't have a rally. [They thought,] Well, it's a beautiful spring day and let's have a rally.

Yeah, so, the issue of conspiracy and, "Oh, all these outside agitators that were here": I never had any evidence of outside agitators. I'm sure there may have been people drawn to this by virtue of their zeal. There are people drawn to all kinds of rallies out of conviction.

[Interviewer]: Did you see any differences personally in the student body between 1962 and 1970, just in terms of the effects of the Vietnam War and their attitudes?

[Robert Treichler]: Oh, yeah, well [coughs], nothing that was terribly striking. I mean, we were teaching regular undergraduate classes and most of them were requirements and people were more attuned to what their career goals might be. With respect to graduate students, they were much more locked into what was required of them. I saw no great social upheaval or searing personal questions that were a part of this thing. Yeah, people wanted to avoid Vietnam service, a common theme among students. I didn't see too many patriots out there screaming, "Don't fight the VC."

[Interviewer]: Nothing out of a John Wayne movie?

[Robert Treichler]: [laughs] Certainly not.

[Interviewer]: What do you think the consequences were for the city of Kent or for the university?

[Robert Treichler]: Well, I think the most terrible thing was this kind of strange, for me, rift between the local folks who--I was involved in this noontime exercise program that had both local folks and faculty in it. And I got involved in that immediately upon coming here and it always seemed like such a friendly interaction. And the interesting thing that occured was many of those people became terribly polarized against whatever was represented by the reaction on the campus that they--or they would still come to the exercise program at Kent but some of them voiced their concern about these terrible people who were here and the outside agitators and essentially communists who--it was very polarizing from that point of view, I thought. And I still remained friendly with these people but, boy, it took on a whole different perspective.

[Interviewer]: Are there any other thoughts you'd like to share?

[Robert Treichler]: Oh, I'm sure I've probably forgotten--you get to be as old as me, you forget all kinds of stuff. But, no, that's generally the reaction that we had. I think it did take a while to recover, and it was clear that the student population that we serve was indeed much influenced by these events. And I mean, I can understand parents being concerned about, Oh my God, what kind of a place is this? And I'm sure it's going to happen with regard to any institution--I think Virginia Tech is going to suffer it, and as of today Delaware State is suffering it. But the repercussions were there.

There were, particularly if you are in the situation where the funding of an institution is based on its enrollment--which I think is just a goofy thing to do, but hey [laughs]--that's why it's nice to see people like my wife getting into politics, that they understand that education is politically-driven, in this state at least. It certainly was very much so and I think James Rhodes is very responsible for that in a lot of ways. It's a terrible impediment to higher education in Ohio, it's just that he established a very bad system and maintained it for a long time. And people kept electing it. Okay.

[Interviewer]: Alright. Dr. Treichler, thank you very much for speaking with us.

[Robert Treichler]: Sure, you bet.

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