Raj Aggarwal, Oral History

 

Recorded: November 12, 2019

Interviewed by Kathleen Siebert Medicus

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

 

[Interviewer]: This is Kathleen Siebert Medicus speaking on Tuesday November 12, 2019, at the Mayfield Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Mayfield Village, Ohio, as part of the May 4 Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yes, Raj Aggarwal.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you. Do you mind if I call you Raj?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: No, that’s fine. That’s great.

 

[Interviewer]: [00.29:5] Raj, I’d like to begin with some brief information about your background so we can get to know you just a little better. Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: I was born in the Northern Region of India, called Punjab. And I grew up all over India because my father used to be a telecommunication engineer and they would give him a newly-built telephone exchange to run and get the bugs out and hand it over to somebody less technical. He did that every two, three years in a new town. So, I got to see huge parts of India. A lot of those parts, we didn’t speak the local language, so I had—my sister and I had to be homeschooled because we couldn’t go to the local schools. So, it was an interesting growing up. We had to develop a new set of friends every couple of years. You had to get used to a new schooling system. Some of those towns were large enough that they had a school that was of maybe British origin and taught in English, so we could attend those. But, a lot of those places, there wasn’t any place we could attend.

 

So, we were homeschooled a lot of times and, in the end, when we settled down in New Delhi, I skipped, I guess two grades or three grades. I forget how many grades. I skipped a few grades because they tested me as to what grade level I would go in and my sister skipped one grade less than me. I forget, you know. So, that was, I think, an event that, looking back on it, changed my environment completely because I grew up with older kids. All through the rest of my schooling cycle. All my high school and part of the grade school. But I didn’t realize at that time but looking back on it, it accounts for some of my characteristics.

 

But anyway, so then I went to a college that was, looking back on it again, was quite difficult to get in. In fact, it’s considered the most difficult place to get in in the world, actually, and some people, some really wealthy people in India, they want their sons to go to that school, called Indian Institute of Technology. And they apply but they are not sure if they’ll get in so they also apply to a place like Cornell or some place, which would be like a safety school. If they can’t get into IIT, they’ll get into Cornell or something. So, I didn’t realize all of that. You know, I just thought the school was challenging but not that bad. I did get in and I was really the—there was a national exam and I was ranked I think twelfth in the country. They rank you one through 4,000 or whatever, how many people took the exam.

 

[After college, I] went to work for my father. We had a manufacturing company. And I found out it’s kind of difficult to work for your father, at least sometimes. And so, I wanted to get out of there and I really couldn’t do much else because they would have really frowned upon me going and working for some competition or something else. So, I thought that, Hey, you know, I’ve been working here. I really don’t understand business too much so I need to get a graduate degree in business. I convinced my dad about it and my mother about it and they said, “Okay. Get the best business degree you can. You already have the best engineering degree.” So, I said, “The best business degrees are not in India, they’re in the U.S.” They were really reluctant to let me go to the U.S., but I convinced them and so I applied for—this is back in the late Sixties and you don’t really know—there’s no internet. There’s no—hardly any information. I had heard about the Ivy League schools. So, applied to about four or five of them. Harvard and Wharton and I forget which others. Columbia, yes, I remember that quite well. Couple of others but then I also knew that I may not get in those Ivy Leagues.

 

So, I applied to what I call four other schools. I got into all of the Ivy League schools, in spite of my concern that I may not. But the trouble is, they didn’t give me any money. And they said—some of them said, at least spend—pay for one semester and then we’ll see what we can do. No promise. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have money even for one semester. So, four schools that gave me money—and I still remember to this day, that was fifty years ago, was Rensselaer Polytechnic, Georgia Tech, Indiana University in Bloomington, and Kent State. Those were my four choices. All four gave me money. A little bit of money, you know. I was looking for information on these four schools. Any more information than just the address where you apply and all that. So I went to the U.S. Embassy. In the basement they had a little library of some kind. And I found the Kent State brochure—the undergraduate catalog. And I saw the beautiful pictures and it said, “It’s a beautiful campus located on the banks on the wonderful Cuyahoga River.” I said, “Wow, that sounds great.” Because New Delhi’s on the edge of a desert just like Phoenix. So, I said, “I’m going to go to Kent State.” And so that’s how I ended up in Kent and, as you know, a few months after I got here the Cuyahoga River caught fire. That’s my story of getting to Kent; that’s really the true story.

 

[Interviewer]: [06:33:6] So, you arrived at Kent State in 1969?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: ‘68. 1968. Fall of ‘68.

 

[Interviewer]: [06:41:1] As a graduate student in the School of Business?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yes. The MBA program. The initial plan was to get an MBA and go back and join the family business. But then, you know, things happen. I got attracted into—I said, “Yeah, I’m going to take these two courses before I go back, and these two.” And I got sucked into the doctoral program. Due to the doctoral program, a lot of things happened. I met my wife-to-be, who’s still my wife, so that changed the equation a little bit along with some other things. After Kent State, I went to the University of Chicago. I was going on into their doctoral program. And the professor that invited to me to that program, and was going to supervise my work, died. And there weren’t any professors that had room for another doctoral student and not for the topic I was going to be working in.

 

At that time, the exchange rates were fixed. My topic was, what do you do when the exchange rates float or are not fixed? There was not much interest except this one guy that really wanted to explore that topic and I wanted to explore that topic. So, I did that for a couple of years but he died. I went back to Kent and finished my doctorate at Kent.

 

And after that, I worked for a couple of businesses: Dana Corporation and Owens-Illinois. Then I taught at University of Michigan Ann Arbor in the finance department, their business school there. My wife was working at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was commuting up to Ann Arbor that really became hard in the wintertime. But the University of Toledo offered me a job, I accepted it, and they gave me a nice promotion and nice increase in salary and all that to go with it. So, I taught there for a while and then I was consulting with businesses during that time also. And I continued to do that. I had some fairly good early academic success that helped me a lot in terms of being invited to other universities to give lectures and things like that and I got a full ride because of my early success and spent a year in Singapore on Uncle Sam’s dime [as a Fulbright Research Scholar], which was great.

 

Anyway, after that, I came to John Carroll here in Cleveland. I got a chaired professorship and it also helped with my wife’s parents at that time. Her father really—her mother had passed away—was not in good health. And he was in Canton, Ohio, so the John Carroll route seemed wonderful in terms of location. We moved to John Carroll, I was there for thirteen years, and then Kent State invited me to redo their doctoral program. So, I moved to Kent and did that and taught. Took me few years to convince my fellow colleagues to go along with the changes we wanted to make. And after that was done, I was just teaching and doing my scholarly work.

 

And then, Akron had been looking for a dean and I did not apply because I didn’t really want to be dean. But I was still doing a lot stuff with business and I was on some corporate boards. Then Akron—I had a friend of mine from business who was retired and now working for the president of Akron and he said, “We haven’t lunch for a while. Why don’t we have lunch to catch up.” I said, “Fine. Yeah, that sounds good.” We used to have lunch occasionally to get caught up and all that. So, he asked me if I’d be interested in being dean of the business school. I said, “I know you’ve been looking. I thought you found somebody. And I’m really not interested. As you know, I didn’t apply or anything.” He said, “Yeah, we noticed that, but the three finalist we have are not quite what we want. So, I’d like you to think about applying for dean because I think, if you apply, you’d clearly be the top candidate.” So, I said, “Well, these guys seem pretty good. They have a good administrative experience. They have been associate deans and department chairs and I’ve only been a department chair a long time ago.”

 

He said, “No, just having known your resume, I think you’ll do well. You’ll improve our relationships with the business community and you’re a good scholar with the faculties’ respect.” So, I said, “Nah, I’m fine, really.” Then he said, “Well, listen. Why don’t you at least have lunch with the president and let him tell you about it because I think you’d do a good job of it.” I said, “Okay.” And I had lunch with the president and he convinced me that it’s a good position to take and he made all kinds of interesting promises. So, I joined, I applied, the faculty loved me, and I became dean at Akron. But then, I found out how these things work or not—don’t work because, the president, I never saw him again. He gives me the impression that I could talk to him anytime and come over and you know, whatever the issue is. He did everything through the provost. I can understand that a little bit but that was contrary to his promises. I discovered couple of huge problems when I joined as dean. No wonder they didn’t get really great applications, I guess. People who are work with the “deaning” business knew they should—I didn’t, I wasn’t in the “deaning” business. So, I had to fix those two big problems and which is fine. I mean I did that. I’m glad I did it, but I’m also glad that I did it only for one term.

 

Then I retired from Akron as an academic and wanted something different which is spend my time on corporate boards and on nonprofit boards. As you said, the service thing. And I’ve been doing that all my life, being involved in nonprofits like Goodwill Industries. Most of the time, I was involved with some nonprofit. Helping a group called Health Clinic International that had medical clinics all over the world in impoverished countries. So, I think it’s—whatever the reason, that’s how it turned out. And so, now I just do couple of corporate boards and mostly nonprofit work.

 

[Interviewer]: [14:28:2] Including the Kent State Board of Trustees?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Including the Kent State—the Foundation Board. And some of others like Cleveland Council on World Affairs and I’m still in Goodwill.

 

[Interviewer]: [14:47:7] If we could go back to Fall of 1968. I’m curious when you arrived on campus maybe you didn’t know much about the Vietnam War that the United States was involved in? Were you aware of the protests on campus right away?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: I was aware of the protests on campus. I had a lot of friends that were not business students—unlike some of my business colleagues had only business friends, but I had a wide range of friends. To answer your question, before I go further, I was aware of the Vietnam War, but I didn’t know how it affected people in the U.S. I didn’t have much understanding of the draft before I got here. When I got here, all the kids around me were talking about the draft. I said, “What’s the draft?” And so, they explained to me that here you’re one day being a student, going to classes, and the next day you’re facing bullets from the Viet Cong. So, I said, “Boy, that’s pretty disturbing.” That would be very upsetting, especially if you were yanked out against your will. So, I kind of understood how—what these young people faced, you know. And it was frightening, to be honest. I wouldn’t want that.

 

So, I understood their anger, but then some of this anger boiled over into destruction of buildings and things like that and I had trouble understanding that. I thought you can protest peacefully and do whatever you want and that’s the way to go and you should convince other people about your correctness or belief. But I guess I hadn’t been through that process. I had not been frustrated by peacefully trying to explain why they’re against it because I think the government didn’t change its viewpoint. They kept the draft and that didn’t change and the war kept going. A lot of their friends got killed and they were afraid themselves of being shot at and killed. It was clearly a difficult situation.

 

The other thing that was very new to me and I had really little inkling of the actual situation is race relations. I knew that there were some issues with race relations in the U.S., but I didn’t know any practical side to it. So, the summer before I got here was the Hough riots in Cleveland. And boy, that—my friend and I drove up there to see what was happening, which was stupid to do. And we saw all kinds of destruction and all that. One of my friends who drove up there—drove through there going somewhere else—he was stopped at a red light and some Black kids shot him. Wasn’t doing anything, he’s just sitting there at a red light, just because he was white. So, that really made a huge impression. Man, there’s a lot of anger here. A lot of anger against the government for the draft. There’s a lot of anger against white folks, for whatever reason. Obviously, if you had these—if you see these things, don’t understand them, you read. My answer is try to read as much as I can on it, you know. So, I got a better appreciation of that, a few years before Kent May 4th happened. Even then, it was a bit surprising.

 

At the same time, most people I ran into on campus and off campus in Kent were very nice. I had—I didn’t say I had any personal experience with that. I had some personal experiences afterwards, when I was working but, while at Kent, I didn’t have any.

 

[Interviewer]: [18:49:6] As an international student you felt welcomed and—?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yeah, exactly. People were very nice and they welcomed us. It was a kind of dichotomous experience in the sense that I personally didn’t understand how this was happening but clearly something was happening. I used to try and talk to whoever I could, whenever the issue came up about how, you know, the different ways of communicating and dissenting from what’s happening. Like my model of that was Gandhi because that’s what’s the latest—happened just when I was a young kid. What he did, these things that he did, were still fresh in everybody’s mind. My father and my grandfather could talk about it. You sort of come from that situation where you know that nonviolent protests can succeed. What I didn’t realize is how long it took the guy to succeed. It was like half to a three-quarter century maybe. It just was a long, long time.

 

[Interviewer]: Of Gandhi’s lifetime.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Gandhi’s lifetime doing these nonviolent protests before he succeeded. And I don’t know if he’d ever have succeeded but the external situation became such that the British wanted to give up their empire. They couldn’t manage it. I think that was definitely a part of it. But I didn’t quite have that good of understanding of that. All I knew was that’s the way we got our independence from Britain, and I did hear about how the British used to mistreat the Indians and things like that. They can’t be too terrible to us because we were the majority, so they had to restrain themselves. But not here in the U.S., the whites are the majority and I guess they didn’t have to restrain themselves. So, that was the state of mind when May 4^th happened.

 

[Interviewer]: [21:01:1] I don’t know where you want to start in terms of you May 4 memories. I don’t know if you were with other students when Nixon announced the invasion into Cambodia and the escalation of the war, or if you have any memories from downtown the next day. That would have been Friday, May 1^st, when there was unrest downtown.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: No, I didn’t go downtown. I wasn’t there in the unrest. I was not active in the protest movement. I just knew a lot of people who were. All the people around me were downtown May 1^st and things like that. So, I got secondhand reports.

 

[Interviewer]: You heard stories.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Heard stories and, as they say, hearsay.

 

[Interviewer]: [21:43:0] Like a lot of graduate students, you were probably too busy.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yeah, I had to do my stuff. So then, I also followed along with all of the unrest. The escalation in Cambodia and Laos and there was already—we were already in Laos, although that was being denied. All of us knew we were there, it was like an open secret, basically. I knew the war was not ending. They were saying it’s ending, that it ended, but I knew it wasn’t. Even me, I mean I knew it wasn’t ending, so a lot of people knew that. It was, in fact, escalating. I figured that’s what the May 1^st stuff is but I still was a little perplexed about the destruction. I didn’t quite get it.

 

That’s what happened and then, on May 4^th, I was studying for an exam, I think, if I remember correctly, in the basement of Franklin Hall when somebody said, “There’s been a shooting on campus.” I knew there were troops on campus, the previous few days I had seen that, the weekend, I had seen that. There were actually troops and I had also heard that these—some of these troops had just come from subduing the Teamsters or somebody in Akron. Some kind of strike by dangerous people, that’s all I knew at the time. I didn’t know exactly what and that those guys were quite dangerous and so they needed the troops to keep order.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, there were shootings there.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yeah. There were shootings there. Yeah. Then all this—the whole weekend was like really strange in a lot of ways for me. But I still didn’t think I was that much involved personally. But then on May 4^th, as I said, I was studying in the basement of Franklin Hall for an exam and somebody said there’s been a shooting of students—. I said, “Shooting? What kind of shooting?” “Shooting of students.” And so, I said, “Oh my gosh.” And they all told us not to go there, but what did I do? I went there to rubberneck, as they say, to see what’s happening.

 

I was near the power plant and the original Student Union—that corner there. And I went down towards that field where the ROTC buildings were and they were—some of them were burning and, you know, they were set on fire. And I could see students on that field and somebody pointed out the troops under the pagoda because you could see the pagoda from that end near the architecture building at that time—Taylor Hall, I think. And so, I could see them. They were still there. But clearly the shooting had been over. And so, I took that scene in, I heard more details about who died and who got shot and most of the students that got shot were not involved in the protest, you know, which is a big irony, actually. And that makes a lot of people—I think that fact made a lot of people on campus think about, There, but for the grace of God, go I. Or thoughts to that effect. I mean that could have been me, I thought. And a lot of people thought that way, at least the people I talked to. If only the protestors had been shot, the reaction may have been different. I don’t know, maybe not. But that certainly had a big impact on the student body. It can be an innocent student that gets shot and killed. That was really a difficult thing to process.

 

Then afterwards—I’m trying to think—and I talked to a lot of people the next three or four days until they sent everybody home. People had just—at least the people I talked to were, eighty percent, “My gosh. They shouldn’t have done it. They should have had rubber bullets or something. Or fake bullets, or just no bullets at all and just shot—made some shots to scare people away.” And I—we discussed why would these troops feel threatened because the students didn’t have any guns or anything. A lot of us thought these are not very grown up, they’re not college students, but they’re kids basically. And they got scared and shot. That’s what most people thought at that time. That they got scared and they shot. We couldn’t understand what they were scared of. So, there were a lot of unanswered questions when the students were sent home. Us foreign students didn’t have any place to go, so we were on campus.

 

[Interviewer]: [27:00:0] Well, that was my next question. Where did you go?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: We stayed on campus. We came to the School of Business and continued doing what doctoral students do. For us, it never ends. I mean, it’s not just class—I had finished all my classes for the doctoral work, anyway. So, it was in my research phase and we can do that all the time. The library and—

 

[Interviewer]: Were you living on campus in a dormitory?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: I’m trying to think. I think I was off campus at that time. I started out in Musselman Hall. No, no, I started in Moulton Hall, then moved to Musselman for a short time, then I moved off campus. I forget where I was, I think I was on Lincoln [Street]. But any case—

 

[Interviewer]: [27:47:1] Did you have any difficulty going back and forth from where you lived to your work?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Not really, I don’t remember any difficulty. I mean, I had my student ID, I’d just explain I’m a doctoral student, I’ve got to do my work, do my studying. I guess I look innocuous enough that they let me go. I don’t remember any difficulty. I thought about it, really, the next few months, and then I said, “I’m going to do something about it. This is not right. What can I do?” I didn’t even know what I could do. I couldn’t change the pattern of war.

 

One thing I did was, I was a doctoral student and instructor in the College of Business, so I could instruct. And I had this experience of nonviolent protest. Because, in India they used to do that, even labor used to do that. They’d do a nonviolent protest against employers. It was pretty common all around you, in India, when I was growing up there. It’s probably not that common now, it’s a very different country. But any case, so I decided to find out if I could teach classes to influence that lack of understanding. Because I concluded: I think both sides had legitimate concerns. The administration was worried about property destruction and all that and the students were upset about the way they were being yanked out of their lives and totally changed and killed and all that. So, I understood both sides had good reasons to be angry. But I said even if you’re angry, you should calm down enough to communicate with each other and try to understand each other’s viewpoint. And I realized that maybe that’s not the tradition or maybe they don’t have somebody like Gandhi to look up to.

 

So, I decided to design a course and then I—as I was designing it, I learned about Martin Luther King and all the things he did. So, I taught two classes actually, in the Honors College, I remember now, in the fall. One was on communication and dissent, the other one was on peace and something. I can’t remember the title even, now. There were two sections and then, in the spring, I got only one, the Communication and Dissent. But the peace one I taught also. So, there were three sections total. I wonder if—there were printed catalogs and all that, so I wonder if there’s a record somewhere. [Editor’s note: these courses were offered by the Experimental Programs Division of the Honors and Experimental College in 1970-1971. The full titles of the courses the narrator taught were “War and Peace” and “Individualism, Dissent and Communication.” The staff and faculty who lead these courses were volunteers who accepted this responsibility in addition to their regularly scheduled classes and job duties.]

 

[Interviewer]: We can look that up in the archives.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yeah, that would be good if I can find out. That’d be nice. I mean, I like to know, What did I teach?

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah, I’ll send you a copy of the description.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Oh, that’d be great, if you find one, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: [30:52:7] These were undergraduate students?

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yes.

 

[Interviewer]: [30:58:5] That must have been a real interesting experience.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: It was. It was. In a lot of ways because, in the Business building, we were teaching business and that was fine. I had no problem with that, but this was sort of challenging for me. And especially wanted to engage the students in dialogue and, when that happens, you really see sides of yourself that you probably didn’t. Yeah, because you haven’t really discussed it with too many people, what you feel about these things. A few friends but, you know, that’s not the same as going in class and discussing it with the whole classroom. And some—I remember, as in every class since, there’s always one or two students or maybe three, four that are hostile for whatever reason. Dealing with those people in these classes was different from dealing with hostile students in business classes. So, it was very interesting for me. I hope I did some good, I don’t know. I have no idea.

 

[Interviewer]: You must have done quite a bit of good.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Well, I don’t know, it’s good but there were only about what, ten, fifteen students in each section?

 

[Interviewer]: Sure.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Maybe. Maybe more. Maybe twenty, I don’t know.

 

[Interviewer]: And if they were students who had been here the previous May, they really needed a venue for—

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: I think that was probably the main thing.

 

[Interviewer]: —talking through these things.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: It gave people a venue to talk about it, I think.

 

[Interviewer]: And to understand more of what happened.

 

[Raj Aggarwal]: Yeah. Right.

 

[Interviewer]: Let’s take a quick pause there.

 

 

[Editor’s note: Narrator needed to leave for another appointment]

 

 

[End of interview]

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