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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0035, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
William Dallas Herring, longtime chair of the North Carolina State Board of Education, discusses some of the issues he encountered during his tenure. He speaks in detail about education issues at the time of the interview, and offers his opinions on the state of democracy in the United States. Herring believes strongly in representative democracy, and worries that institutions across the country and in the state are falling prey to complacency, entrenched incumbency, and flawed processes. On a more granular level, Herring shares his opinion on proposed changes to the election of superintendent of education, evaluation of teacher performance, and curricula.
William Dallas Herring, longtime chair of the North Carolina State Board of Education, discusses the ins and outs of education in his state.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Jay Jenkins with the second interview with Dallas Herring for the Oral History Program. It is being conducted in his home in Rose Hill on May 16, 1987.
Dallas, there was an interesting story in the newspaper this morning, the
News and Observer, about a Carnegie funded effort
to establish a national certification program for teachers. It is billed
as an effort to have uniform standards and give them recognition and get
higher pay and so forth and so on. I know that you participated in a
somewhat similar effort a number of years ago, and I wish you would just
talk about those two things.
Well, it is interesting. Jim Hunt is to head this board for the national
certification of teachers. When I was in the hospital for a cancer
operation in March a year ago, he was kind enough to call me. Bill
Friday did and several others, and I was very much appreciative of it.
Well, Jim told me what he was doing. He had just returned from a meeting
of this group that is mentioned in the paper today, and he was all
excited about it. He felt that it would lead to improved standards for
the profession of education. This is, of course, an area in which I had
experience for many years, and I was interested in what he had to say. I
told him that it brought back memories to me. I served on the Board of
Trustees of the old National Citizens Council for the Public Schools—or
for Better Schools, I believe we called it—which was founded by Dr.
Harry Ashmore?
No, it wasn't Harry. It was the owner, the publisher, of the Little Rock paper. What was his name?
Haskell?
No, I've got his name in my head somewhere. I'll have to go back to it.
But there were very few of us from the South. We would meet frequently
in New York. I remember I think I told you last time about the meeting
in San Francisco in May of 1954. Larson had asked me to sit next to him
at breakfast there in the Fairmont Hotel. That was completely out of my
element. I had no business being there The Wall and other books. Walter
Lippman had spoken to us the evening before. I used to read Walter
Lippman as though it were the Bible when I was at Davidson. I read the
Charlotte Observer everyday. He was a very
profound journalist and philosopher, and I cherish the memory of meeting
him and hearing him.
At any rate, on that memorable day, May 17, 1954, somebody walked in with
a San Francisco Examiner, I guess it was, with a big
headline announcing the Supreme Court's decision in the segregation
cases. Mr. Larson turned to me and said, "What is the South going to do
about this?"
Sorry for the interruption. I digressed to tell you that little incident, and I think I had mentioned it before, but it was a means of giving you a background of my interest in what Jim Hunt is doing. We had a very vibrant group of people. The staff were young and energetic and optimistic, and our desire was, after World War II, to awaken interest all over America in the public schools—how tragically the need had been neglected. We carefully avoided telling the people what to do about it. The philosophy was to get them to form democratic groups, lay and professional, to inquire into the status of education, and then to determine what the needs were, and thirdly, to see what could be done to get the kinds of schools we agreed we needed.
It was phenonemally successful. We had some thirty-eight thousand people
involved in citizens' committees all over the country. They urged me to
get Governor Hodges to appoint a state citizens' committee in North
Carolina, which he did. Holt McPherson, editor of the High
Point Enterprise, was chairman, and Raymond Stone became the
executive secretary. Marvin Yount, the retired superintendent from
Alamance, was the first one. We organized citizens' committees in every
county of the state as a result of that effort. We followed the
philosophy—which was highly acceptable to us, of course—of what kind of
schools do we have; what kind do we need; how do we get the kind of
schools we agree we need? That's when I first met you. Pete McKnight1 sent you to see me, and we made that
trip to Connecticut, later on. I was invited up to Charlotte by Hal
Tribble to tell the story of what we were doing in Duplin—and by Dr.
Garringer and Mr. Wilson, the county superintendent.
At the apex of that experience, Ben Fine, who as I recall was writing for
the New York Times, and Jim Cass, who was on the staff
(he later became the education editor for The Saturday
Review of Literature)… Gloria Dapper was his associate. The
names begin to slip away, but these two I remember especially. They were
pushing me to make a statement regarding the desegregation of the
schools. I said, "You make one about New York, and I'll make one about
North Carolina when the time comes." They wouldn't do it. I said, "When
I retire and look down here, we did the job, and they didn't." Ben Fine
was among
Carnegie forced a showdown. "The time has come for you people to tell America what kind of schools they need. The time has come for you to confront Congress with the idea that this has to be done." So we had a crisis, and Conant was not in favor of our doing that. We were just a group of self-appointed citizens—some of them were distinguished people in the group, as I pointed out. But this is not the Royal Academy of Science of the French Republic, that dictates things. This is an American citizens' committee, and we just advise. There were many people there from all over the country who did not believe that we needed a centrally controlled public school system.
Was that what Carnegie had in mind?
Carnegie wanted to do it, and do it now, and do it the simple way which
was a totalitarian way. We told him to go to hell and wouldn't do it.
They withdrew the money, and the organization collapsed because nobody
could afford to pay his way to San Francisco Saturday Review of Literature and hired part of
the staff—Jim Cass and Gloria Dapper especially I remember—and they
published a monthly education issue. Norman Cousins, I think, was
general editor. He was so overwhelmed with the idea
Did Carnegie underwrite that in the Saturday Review
with the idea of promoting their view?
They were doing it. They did do it. I finally quit taking the magazine because it was no longer the magazine I wanted. The last thing we need, in my humble opinion, is a very provincial, reactionary old gentleman in Duplin County…3
I disagree with your description, Dallas.
New England has distorted the picture of its folk heroes, Paul Revere for
example. The Britannica says there is no evidence he
ever made the celebrated ride that Longfellow wrote about. I know that
Cornelius Harnett made a ride, several of them, and it's well documented
but not celebrated. So I am not for any New England prejudice about what
constitutes excellence in education. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy and
like to believe everything that Washington Irving and Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Longfellow and all of these people wrote—James Fenimore
Cooper about New York. I read them in my grandfather's library when I
was a child, and I dearly love the stories. And I have a passle of first
cousins living in Connecticut that I grew up with, and I am not
prejudiced against them.
What I insist on is that Thomas Jefferson and others of his ilk found the
answer to excellence in education and excellence in government, and it
is pure democracy. We cannot tolerate totalitarianism in education
anymore than we can in politics. The only place that we can tolerate it
at all is in the military, and that has to be under civilian control.
You see how it has gotten out of hand here under Reagan and Mr. North,
Colonel North, or whatever he is, Admiral North. He decided that he had
the know-how to solve all of our international problems, misguided young
fellow. No doubt he had the best intentions in the world, and he had the
shortcut answers. The Carnegie Corporation is in the control of people
of ilk mind. So, I would say without any apology whatsoever, it's the
wrong idea. The genius of American education is that it is a grass roots
I don't know whether I'm telling what you need to know or not.
Exactly right, the way it is.
Do you think this latest Carnegie effort that Hunt is serving as chairman for is a reincarnation of that earlier idea?
Well, I thought about it when Jim called me a little over a year ago in
the hospital, and I didn't tell him. So he was kind enough to call me
again, and he was enthusiastic about it. He felt that it was an
opportunity to bring some quality into the picture, and it may be. I
don't have any doubt but that a benevolent monarch can solve a lot of
problems. King David and King Soloman worked wonders with the Jewish
people, and nobody has been able to manage them since then. But those
two
I noticed that in the story this morning in the paper that the president of the School Boards Association or something said this is an effort to turn it over to the teachers' union.
Well, there is some possibility of that. I think Albert Sanker, who
writes for the New York Times a good bit, the head of
the American Federation of Teachers, is an exponent of quality in
education. It's the old trade union idea. There's a lot going for it,
that the master craftsman is better than the journeyman, and the
journeyman is better than the apprentice, and they are all better than
the rest of us. You can't get to lay brick under that system until you
have served your apprenticeship and your journeyman experience, and
finally, reluctantly, when you're an old man, you can get to be a master
craftsman, and your wages are established that way. That philosophy has
been characteristic of AFT, and especially of Sanker as I read it, and I
don't know any more than anybody else who reads about him. I think
Sanker sees that the only way to get an elite corps of teachers with
high salaries, sixty and seventy thousand dollars a year, at present
scales, in the public school system, would be to create this master
craftsmen. So it's not at all at variance for the trade unionists to
agree with Carnegie that this short-cut to excellence is a desirable
thing. But it leaves out the masses of teachers, and it totally negates
the idea of democracy in American education.
Do you think anything like this can succeed without grass roots participation?
Well, you know, you can appoint the committees and create commissions and
get endowments, and the people are free to ignore them. They do as they
damn please which is what they should do. I am afraid somebody will say,
"Well, you're just mad with Jim Hunt because he didn't reappoint you."
The truth is Jim Hunt did me a tremendous favor, and I told him so. I am
not angry with him about it. I think he made a mistake in not
reappointing me, but I'm not angry with him.
Well, you've been talking about the Carnegie approach anyway. It hasn't been a personality thing.
I'm not sore with Jim, and I wish him well. It would be nice if they could succeed. I would like to see some change in it before I die, but I don't think I will, and I don't think he's going to succeed. They'll beat their brains out for the next five years establishing standards, and here and there across the country they will introduce the master Carnegie teachers and induce the legislatures to pay them more. But it's undemocratic, and the democratic majority will not have a part of it. They'll push him out the back door.
What a sad thing. They are trying to do the right thing in the wrong way.
That was the trouble with Hunt's administration anyway. I say this with
the greatest detachment from the personality. I told Jim personally—he
served with us on the Board of Education for his term as Lieutenant
Governor, and I got to know him very well… During the controversy with
Craig—
Let me give you a little experience here in Duplin County. We had some vocal critics of the public schools. We had the citizens' committee going, with harmony, very frank open discussions, black and white, before the Supreme Court ruling. Somebody said, "Well, you've just hand-picked your crowd, and you haven't got the critics on there. We made an effort to find our critics, and we got them involved, and they had an impact on what we were talking about and deciding. They influenced the judgments, and we came up with a better answer because we allowed the democratic process to function.
Louis Outlaw, an old bachelor, member of the general assembly, a Universalist—and they don't ever agree with anybody, not even God—and nothing suited him. Being an old bachelor myself, I can appreciate how he felt. We got him involved in that business and allowed him to get up, encouraged him to get up, and tell us where we were wrong, and to consider what he had to say. You cannot defeat the democratic procedure if you give it a chance, is what I'm saying. Carnegie is impatient of that. Jim is ignorant of it, and they are not going to succeed in the long run. They may have some initial success. What a tragedy because they are trying to do the right thing in the wrong way.
So your idea is that they should finance these things on a state by state basis, and let it come up from the bottom.
I'm saying they should reactivate the citizens' committees. They should go back to Triangle and Cherokee County and Coinjock in Currituck, and say, "What do you think we need to do about our schools." Walter Lippman made this point. He said every man is a philosopher. This man Adler, this brilliant scholar we have today, Mortimer Adler, makes the same point.
It's nothing more than Jeffersonian democracy. The amazing thing is that the American experiment has worked because we trusted the people, in large numbers, to make the right decisions, and you created a situation in which they could speak to the issues.
I went out politicking for one of the candidates for governor one time in
north Duplin. We came to a crossroads filling station-country store, and
the boys had been out setting out tobacco, and they were dirty and
barefooted, sprawled on the floor, glad to get a moment to relax. I was
with Hubert Philips, a lawyer over here in Kenansville, and we were
plugging the virtues of our candidate. We were not making much headway,
but Hubert spoke to one fellow sitting on the floor with his back
against the wall and his boots spread ajar, his overalls rolled up half
way his shank bone and his feet just as dirty as could be. He got to
talking to him about tobacco and got his interest. He said, "How about
voting for our man." He said, "Well, it don't matter how I'm going to
vote anyway. It's them people up there in Baltimore that's the ones that
elect the governor of North Carolina."
Walter Hines Page makes this point over and over and over again, and I
could cite you chapter and verse where it is that kind of philosophy
that helps build America. We can drift into the idea of totalitarianism
too easily, because it's simple. It's efficient. It's cost-effective. It
brings the judgment now. But it has taken two hundred or more years to
build what we've got, and we're not through with it yet.
Dallas, as you know, there's a movement afoot to submit a constitutional ammendment that would make the state superintendent of public instruction appointive instead of elective. How do you view that issue?
Well, I have many feelings about it and considerable experience with the
whole idea. First, let me say this. We are laboring under the fiction
that we have a democratic procedure for choosing a superintendent, which
is not true. The long ballot is not real democracy. It's a way for an
elite to decide who will be in these positions. I don't feel that my
dear old friend Jim Graham4 is a
typical North Carolinian, but I didn't choose Jim for that job. Did you?
Maybe he's doing the best that anybody can do, and I should think he's
doing very well.
Point number one, the system we have is not, really, de facto democratic though it probably could be argued to the jury that it is. What's more democratic than having a statewide election? But the system is not producing a democratic choice. People intend to keep the incumbents in, and that's the reason for having that system. If you will look at the superintendents that have been chosen since J.Y. Joyner, most of them have been appointed by governors. The most disastrous choice we've had was not appointed by a governor, but won when it was thrown open to a free election by Charlie Carroll's announcement that he would not run again.
You're speaking of the incumbent?
Yes.
Okay, point number one, we do not have a democratic system. How do we get a better system? You see, I follow my own advice. What kind of a system do we have? What kind do we need, and how do we get the kind we agree we need? All right, the system we have stinks. What kind do we need? I would say we need one that provides the democratic safeguards, that provides the people an opportunity to make a wise choice. That's complex. What are you going to do, have a precinct meeting and discuss the issues in over twenty-two hundred precincts? We believe, after all, in representative government. There's nothing undemocratic about the idea of representative government. As a Presbyterian elder I have stood on that ground for many years and so has the federal constitution and the state constitution.
We have tried to create the fiction in North Carolina, and the Council of
State members from Thad Eure on down have tried to create the fiction,
that representative government is most democratic—in insisting that the
public elect all these professional heads of departments. That's like
saying we can't choose the President of the United States to appoint the
Secretary of State. The system seems to work very well there. If he
doesn't do the job, he gets booted out in a hurry, and most of them have
turned out as failures, severely criticized. It takes years for their
reputation to take shape again. Dean Rusk is only now becoming somewhat
acceptable to the majority of people. Just as Truman went out of office
with a lot of enemies— he is now one of our elder statesmen, even though
he was one of the critics of Martin Luther King. Called him a
"rabble-rouser"
We just talked about Jim Hunt's innocent, and the Carnegie Corporation's not so innocent, desire to establish a hierarchy that will determine for all of us Catholics what kind of a religion we're going to have, in education. I don't want us to make that mistake in North Carolina. The trouble is, in practice, we have always made that mistake. We've had some great superintendents; we've had some mediocre ones; and we've had one disaster at least. I can document that, but I won't go into that now. So we need a different system. We need one where democracy can come to play, and my point is that representative government is democratic.
All right, having established the philosophical basis, let me give you my solution. In my last visit to the School of Dentistry to get this prothesis ground down and added to in places, I got the young fellow who was driving me to go by the Kenan Building. I didn't have any idea where it was but we found it. I went in to see Bill Friday since … I didn't like the way he was shoved out any more than I liked the way I was shoved out. I wanted to go by and shake his hand. He's a great person. He and I came into office about the same time and worked very closely together over those years, and I am deeply grateful to him for his friendship.
Going into the building, I saw someone across the parking lot going
towards the door a little ahead of me, and I knew I
You know, Bill served on the commission to rewrite the constitutional
ammendments. It must have been in the early seventies. I've forgotten
the year. He had charge of a subcommittee recommending changes in the
governance of education. The result was that he took the state
superintendent off the Board of Education. I talked with him about it at
the time, but I didn't realize he was going to do that. He had the idea
that the professional head should not be a voting member of the board.
Craig didn't realize it until it was all fixed and voted on.
Bill said, "I've just been to a meeting of the commission to recommend
changes in the way the state superintendent is chosen." It was a
legislative committee, I think, that appointed him. He wanted to know my
view of it. I said, "I'm on record favoring what we have and favoring
the change, I can teach that the world is flat or it is round."
Let me tell you this, if it had not been for the lay members of the State
Board of Education, we would not have a community college system in
North Carolina today. We would not have had the curriculum study that
you and Pete McKnight and I were concerned with when we went to New York
and Connecticut. We would not have had the citizens' committee movement.
All these things came about at the insistence of local non-professional
citizens taking part in policy making in education. The tendency of the
elected professional is to secure his political position. If he's an
activist, as Craig is, very shallow in his intellect, he follows every
nuance that comes along. He reads a new book on career education, and we
have a go with that. He gets everybody excited and nothing really
happens except turmoil. He overemphasizes one segment of education to
the detriment of the rest of them. Craig has a genuine and commendable
interest in early childhood education. He has done much to get the
kindergartens going and has improved the primary grade program. I cannot
in all truth say that he has done anything in the important areas of
high school English programs. Foreign languages programs are being
deemphasized. History was cutout of the curriculum—the history of North
Carolina. American history was watered down, depleted, as were the
social studies programs. The qualitative standards were obliterated. The
state
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Dallas, there has been a suggestion, I believe it was by the State School Board Association, that all local supplements be ended. That is, that the counties that can afford to do it and are willing to do it, should not be allowed to supplement the pay of teachers and so forth. What are your views on that kind of an issue?
I will have to ask the question: is it democratic to do that? Let's examine it and see if it is. What is the idea for doing that? Should we have a policy that, since I can't afford a Cadillac, nobody else should be permitted to have one? We're talking about individual and local initiative now. If I remember correctly, I was a student in high school in 1931 and 1933. So I am speaking from hindsight, and what I've learned, not from reading the history of it, but from serving with people who lived through that year. Old man Pritchett, for example, who was a member of our board for many years, was in the legislature when that legislation was enacted, and I've heard him speak about it many times.
If I recall correctly—it can easily be checked—it was in '31 or '33 that
they outlawed any local initiative or local tax to supplement the
salaries of teachers when the state took over the payment of the
salaries. I think I've heard Epps Reedy, who was superintendent of the
Roanoke Rapids schools, say a number of times, in effect, that they were
one of the leading school units in opposing the elimination of city
units and the right of the city unit to tax itself to supplement the
salaries of teachers
Having said that, I have another thought I think I need to get in there.
You take the case of Ocracoke, which does not have enough children, even
with the basic program, to have the versatility in its curriculum that
it needs. The only way to get it is to hire extra teachers to provide it
for the limited number
I am not making that very clear, but the thought is very clear to me. If
what you are looking for is bona fide qualitative equality of
opportunity, to live up to Aycock's idea, to every child there should be
reserved "the right to have the opportunity to burgeon out all that
there is within him." You can't do that if the school doesn't teach
Latin, and he needs to know Latin and wants to know Latin, and there is
no Latin teacher simply because the money that the state provides will
not afford employment of that teacher. There are dozens of them is
Charlotte, say, and dollar for dollar distribution will not get that
kind of equality. Then the state needs to take an extra
I met with Terry Sanford one time up on Wolf Mountain where a group of us
spent the weekend up there at Jamie Clark's invitation. Hyden Ramsey was
there and several others. We spent the night in that old cabin, and the
next day we went down that road, the Tuckasegee or something like
that—downhill and I was holding on so tight I couldn't see the scenery
A child goes back up into a mountain cove like that with all the beauty
of nature that surrounds him, but the basic idea that Aycock had was
that that child have an equal opportunity to burgeon out whatever
talents he had, academic, classical, artistic, vocational, whatever it
was. He didn't really name over them, but to have that kind of
opportunity. Charlotte and
No. What you mentioned earlier, and what I would characterize as a watering down of the curriculum in terms of American history and so forth and so on—it seems to me we have a lot of fads these days, and the basics seem to be overlooked. I remember a professor in Chapel Hill, who was a visiting professor over there, and he was teaching juniors, and he said he assigned a three hundred word theme to some university juniors, and this great sigh went up. He said, "How many of you up to this point have had to write a theme?" He said about a tenth of the hands in the room went up. Of course, I went to school a long time ago, but I find that a little hard to comprehend.
I have a solution to that. If I were the commissar of education, the
first thing I would do would be to overhaul the English curriculum in
the public schools. I would double the number of people teaching
English. I would give them assistants in grading the papers and
counseling students in how to express themselves. Listen to a
conversation of these beautiful young
Yes, of course.
It is the sin, not of that student, but of those who make school policy that allows that to happen in higher education or public education at any level, whatever level. So we do something about it. Communication, the ability to understand the language and to use it with facility, is the most basic thing that you've got in education unless arithmetic may be considered more basic. One is the language of mathematical ideas, quantitative ideas, and the other is the language of philosophy, history, the humanities, the way we communicate. These are the most basic things and are sadly neglected throughout schools. We waste a lot of time talking about the difficulties of teaching children to read. There isn't anything difficult about it. It's simple. You cannot learn it without committing some of it to memory, and if you are going to approach it with the idea that memorization is anathema to education, then you cannot teach them to read.
I went into a school in Gaston county at the invitation of the people. It
was a private school that had been pushed, shoved, out the back door of
the public schools with a group of
How do we correct it?
Do you mean how do we change to that or go away from it?
How do we get back to some basics?
We put a board of education in authority to choose a superintendent who
will support its philosophy. Then if you don't like the philosophy, you
turn them out by legislative and gubernatorial action. That's the way
you do that. What we do is elect a benevolent monarch, and he tells us
that he is doing
Let me ask you about another subject, merit pay. They have some programs in the Wake County schools that I'm familiar with, and it's caused a lot of dissention. The teachers take issue with the way they evaluate the teachers for the bonuses. They say they grade them too much on the mechanical end of it, and so forth and so on. Talk about that in theory and in practice.
Well, when I went into the state government, there was a commission,
around the Hodges administration, and Arthur Kirkman from High Point was
in charge of a commission to establish a merit pay system. Watts Hill,
Jr. served on it, and Watts got all excited about it. "Shorty" Spruill
was the executive director of it. I told Watts that it would never
amount to a row of beans and he was wasting his time that it would never
be adopted. I said I'm not going to oppose it, but you're not going to
get anywhere with it. Differentiated pay in a system with fifty thousand
employees has to be based on the subjective judgment of somebody. I
don't see how it can be done unless you can remove that subjective
judgment from the immediate scene. Now that's the genius of the idea
that Jim Hunt and the Carnegie people are dealing with—differentiated
pay based on an objective sliding scale, far removed from the people
that are involved. So that we can say, well, if she's a Carnegie
teacher, therefore she's entitled. You have the right to become a
Carnegie teacher if you do these things. You remove the personal
I've already pointed out the defect in the Carnegie proposal. It's not
democratic in the way it's achieved. That is not to say that we could
not have a national effort to achieve the same thing in a democratic
way, not just for the teachers to establish who's competent, but the lay
public. We make the analogy with the medical profession and say that
doctors are the best judges of what it takes to be a good doctor. I
quite agree with that. I don't know what it takes to be a good doctor. I
can measure the number of patients that he loses maybe and decide that,
but education is something else. We're all involved in that. It is a
mistake, I think, to say that it is like a science or an art that is
isolated and only the people involved can decide. I know who my best
teachers were. I had a lot of them. The one that was the best teacher,
and I would choose from all my experience, the one I detested the most,
he was a professor of Greek. He scared the living daylights out of me.
He motivated me to learn that language, and I didn't really have the
great ambition that I thought I had to master the civilization of the
Greeks and Romans
So I would say, what is it that made Socrates, recognized today all these
centuries afterwards, a great teacher? Nobody argues that he was a poor
teacher. It's sort of like the idea of pornography. Everybody knows when
a thing is pornographic. It is only the lawyers and the judges who can't
decide.
Well, even to a majority of people. So I don't know the answer to that, except this—I must have strayed from your question—I think there is a kernel of truth in the Carnegie idea that we could establish and have accepted by the profession and the public, a superior class of teachers to whom we are willing to pay more money and grant higher status. My only point about that is that there should be a standard, and these people should be arrived at through democratic rather than totalitarian procedures. The advantage is that it is removed from the pressures of the community where political influence can be very decisive.
Let me give you another case in point. We established a community college
in Martin County, Williamston. I always had a high opinion of that
county. I still do. There are some very fine people there. But I'll be
damned if it isn't run by a
The thing that bothers me about the evaluation of teachers and so forth is you can find somebody who's a master of the subject but can't convey it or inspire any enthusiasm. I suppose that's an immeasurable ability.
It is. It's like judging Picasso and Rembrandt and Michelangelo. What do
you think Rembrandt would say about Picasso if he could see him today?
Who is to decide who is good, and who is better, and who is best in
this? I have my ideas, but
I guess some problems are just not soluble.
Look at it this way. We haven't found the solution yet. A generation ago, when you and I were kids, nobody ever thought that we would ever walk on the moon, and it's being done.
What about the national teacher examination? That always comes in for periodic…
I had a part in that. I suppose you're familiar with the role I played there.
I wish you would talk about it.
Do you remember Grace Rodenbeau?
Stokes County.
You see, we have an advantage in long memory. Ed Wilson, Addison Hewlett, Hugh Johnson, Grace Rodenbeau, the sage of Stoneville, what was his name, Clarence Stone, people in that group—when the third house met in the Sir Walter, they cornered me there one day on the balcony. They were talking much as we have talked today about many things in education. It was not a reaction to desegregation. It was not what they were thinking about. They were about to put in a bill to establish a national teachers' examination, the score, as a condition to certification. I had some charts showing the discrepancies in the institutions. There were vast differences between St. Augustine's and Duke University's performance.
On teacher examinations?
Yes. And there were differences in the race also on the average. It was
overlapping but the majority showed a difference. It astonished me and
alarmed me, and I asked them if they would withhold that action and not
mandate the cutoff score until we could have some experience with it. I
said you don't know where the cutoff score, the minimum score, should
be. I said it occurs to me that it ought not to be below this point
where at least twenty-five percent of the teachers would be black
because they were twenty-five percent of the population. To be fair to
them we ought not have a score so high that we could not get twenty-five
percent of our teaching replacements with blacks.
A.C. Dawson, who was the head of the NCAE staff, got wind of it, and he, of course, was about ready to stir up the teachers about it. I said, "Well, there is no point in creating a battle here. You've got your budget to prosecute, and we were trying to get some more money for the teachers. If you go and have a knockdown, drag-out fight about the teachers examinations, it will jeapordize the budget. So let's not have a fuss about it. Let them go ahead and tell us by resolutionn that we've got to give the examination, and let's establish an experience with it. There's nothing wrong with it as a law. As people who give tests, teachers ought not to object to taking a test."
So we reached a gentlemen's agreement that we would do that. We told
Rodenbeau and Wilson and Johnson and all of them that we would give the
test. We would require it to be taken by all graduates of each of the
approved institutions. We would
Several years passed, I couldn't tell you now without going back to the
record what year it was, that we had finally established the entrance
level test score. It was while Dr. Carroll was there, and it was when we
adopted the so called approved program approach to teacher certification
which was advocated by the National Association of Colleges of Teacher
Education. It meant that we would send committees in to each one of the
institutions to look closely at the programs and evaluate them against
standards that were agreed upon. They would point out weaknesses and
would put some institutions on probation until these were corrected.
Essentially the program is still being followed. The time came for the
approval of the first institutions under that new approach. The
University in Chapel Hill and East Carolina were the first to come up.
Guy Phillips, the Dean of the School of Education at Chapel Hill was on
the board. We were meeting there, at night, and the issue came up. I
said, "Well, now, I will remind you that I've informed you of an
agreement we made with the legislature. I, as the chairman, made the
agreement and informed you of it. I heard no objection to it from the
board that eventually we would establish a cutoff score, and now is the
time to do it." And there was objection. News and
Observer not long ago where they have given a notice to have it
straightened out in a certain length of time, or they weren't going—same
old ball game. People at Barba Scotia know damn well they're not going
to shut them down. So they are taking their own good time in doing what
they want to do about it.
So we put it on individual acheivement. After all, a student at Barba
Scotia who has achieved well should not be penalized because his
instututin is not up to performance. You're getting at the wrong person.
So we approved a minimum score. I think it was 950, or something like
that, to establish where we would get twenty-five percent of the black
population.
Craig came to see me when he was running for re-election, and he gently
brought the issue up. He wanted to do away with it, and I opposed him in
the board at formal meetings. Craig is very skillful at getting away
from the press. We all know we had the rule that we couldn't have a
meeting without the press. I told him I would not attend any meeting
that the press was not notified of even if we will have them in your
office, in your home, at Carolina beach, or anywhere else. They may not
be there but they're going to know that we're meeting. We'd go out to
the Rebel Room—you know where Red Balentine had that special room—and we
would go for a social evening together. It was a very pleasant kind of
thing. After the press came and finally got tired of it and left, then
is when we'd raise critical issues.
The primary was approaching. Craig came down to see me one Saturday. We
sat in there in the library, and we talked about everything under the
sun. I wondered what was it he came down here for. Finally he brought it
up. He said, "Since you oppose the elimination of teachers'
examinations, I'm not going to advocate it anymore." Skipper Bowles was
running for governor and I was trying not to get too involved in it, but
of course Craig was running. It went along fine until after the primary,
and Skipper won that. Everybody assumed Skipper would get elected, I
included. I went up to see him and talk about his program for education.
Gerald James had gotten to him and sold him on the idea of a fifty
million dollar increase in vocational education in the public schools.
Gerald used to be head of the Division of Vocational Education in the
Department of Public Instruction. He had had his following at N. C.
State and throughout the state, and he was sincere in trying to get it
passed. I said that I felt it would not be politic at all for the board
to be caught asking for less than what the Governor was likely to be
proposing. So I asked Skipper, "What do you propose to do with the fifty
million dollars?" He said, "I haven't the slightest idea. I'm going to
leave that up to you all."
I came back by Raleigh and told Craig and A.C. Davis where I'd been and
what I'd learned. I said, "We've got to do something about that." I
didn't realize, but that's when Craig
We went down to Wilmington to the superintendents' conference, and I
found that they had not prepared any fifty million dollar proposals for
vacational education. Barton Hayes was chairman of the committee of the
board, and he was very much in favor of it. He was pushing me. We went
up to see Craig in his room, and he was having a cocktail party, a bunch
of women in there and we couldn't talk business. He had a couple of guys
playing the guitar. I don't go for that kind of stuff. I don't drink,
and I don't care for it. So Barton and I went on downstairs and called
Davis on the phone and told him to come down there. We cornered him and
told him that if he did not put the fifty million dollar proposal in the
budget that Skipper Bowles' proposed that we would do so ourselves and
we were going to make issue in the formal board meeting about it. So I
went on back to Rose Hill. I don't go to conventions of undertakers, and
I don't like to go to conventions of school people where they carry on
like that. Davis called me, and he was almost in tears and said, "We
want you to come back down here." I said, "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to see Craig. He's going to cause a lot of trouble about
this." I said, "Well, he's just going to have to cause it. I'm not going
down there anymore. I did leave a message." Then I got a call from Jerry
Melton wanting me to call Craig, same story. [I indicated to him that
The result was that Craig called me from Raleigh after the meeting was over and said he wanted to postpone the board meeting and move it to Greensboro instead of Raleigh. I said to myself he just doesn't want Ed Gill to be there because Gill was not going out of town. To make a long story short, we went to Greenboro and several of them were missing. Charlie Jordon was there from Duke, and Barton and I. He brought up his proposal, having button-holed all the members of the board that he could and gotten them to agree to delete the teachers' exam in the initial certification of the graduate with a master's degree, and to appoint a committee to report in December whether or not to abolish the requirement for the A certificate—that is the baccalaureate graduates. We were outvoted, Jordan, Hayes and I, by the rest of the board.
From then until December 7, Pearl Harbor Day we called it, Craig had
effective control of the board. He abolished the plan of accreditation
of local schools and substituted the American Management Association
idea which is not accreditation at all. He just abolished accreditation.
I chose to be quiet about it. They could have voted me out of office as
chairman any time they wanted to, and I felt it strategically wise to
let the issue settle down. The [laughter].News and Observer paid
no attention to it. The Greensboro Daily News had one
paragraph about the abolition of it, and it did not bother them at all,
no editorial comments. I
This was when Scott was governor?
Yes. He said he decided such things as that, News and Observer. I met her that day, Angela
Davis, a very competent reporter with a very keen intellect. She's a
UNC-G graduate—masters at Duke I believe. She came up after the
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
During the meeting on December 7, this was in '72, I guess—Holhouser came in in January of '73, didn't he, that we call Pearl Harbor Day—I didn't say anything against it in the discussion Craig brought up. I was presiding, and I tried usually not to be too forceful in the statements I made during meetings when I knew there was a division about it. Everybody on the board knew my opposition and expected me to vote against it, and they knew why. So it was really redundant for me to say anymore about it. I think, amazingly to us, Dr. Harold Trigg, the only black member of the board, voted with us. He voted to oppose the elimination of the test requirements. I don't know whether he knew what he was voting on or not. He had become somewhat senile, but I think he did. I think he was enough of an old scholar and philosopher of the old system that he felt it was a way to preserve excellence in the profession. That was his conversation to me.
At any rate, we were outvoted. I had prepared, the night before, a brief
statement, so there wouldn't be any misquotation and made some copies. I
said—a pretty terse statement, I guess—I said, "The blind cannot be
expected to lead the blind. There's no such thing as a school without
scholars, it's only a waiting room. I cannot in all conscience agree to
this thing which I consider to be a disaster for the cause of excellence
in education, and that's all." Angela was very much in favor of my view.
I don't know whether it was she who convinced Claude [laughter].News and Observer. I knew that Tom Inman and I agreed
on it. He and I had talked before. I was, nevertheless, greatly
surprised the next day to see the headline on the front page of the News and Observer alerting the state to the fact that
a disaster had occured on the previous day
Craig went to New Orleans, without realizing there was any problem, to
attend a meeting of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools,
the only remaining qualitative standard giver in the field of education.
Jerry Melton was fit to be tied. He called me back home and alerted me
to the fact that he was distressed. I said, "Well, you all took the
action." I voted against it, and I told him why, and that's all I'd done
about it. "I don't publish the News and Observer. I
don't write pieces for it. I'm not the editor of it, and I'm not a
reporter. But I stand by what I've said, and it's no more than I have
said to the board previously. I didn't make any public statement
yesterday except this one in writing." He called Craig, and the next day
the damn thing was worse. Then Ed Gill decided, "by damn this is a good
thing, and I want to get into this too."
Well, the News and Observer wouldn't turn it aloose. In
the Sunday edition, this was on a Thursday, by Sunday it was getting to
be a hot political potato. You know how they do that kind of thing. You
go interview Tom, Dick and Harry and see what they think about this.
My own senator, the distinguished gentleman from Lenoir, Harold Hardison,
had never seen fit to come by to make my aquaintance before that. But he
began reading the paper and decided it was time for him to know who I
was and what I stood for. Dixon Hall brought him over to see me, and we
had a good conversation. He said, "Frankly, I don't give a damn whether
you have the exam or not, but I am hearing from people all over my
district, and got to do something about that." I said, "Well, I'm
disappointed to hear you say you don't care, but you want to serve the
people's interests in what they want to do. You're going to hear more of
that because the other papers are going to be picking this thing up."
And sure enough they did. Out of all of the major dailies in the state,
the only two that did not oppose the action of the board were the Charlotte News and the Asheville Citizen
Times. That suprised me. Perry Morgan and Citizen Times
about it. Somebody in the crowd began taking sides and started making
photocopies of the News and Observer articles and
mailing them all out to the other newsapapers. News and
Observer that did it, and I do not know why because they later
opposed me on nearly everything I did. Well, they opposed Tom8, and they pushed him out, you know.
Well, Gill, finally, at our January meeting, decided this issue was too
great to be settled without public airing. He thought the board should
have a public hearing. I didn't want it but we had to have it. It was
over in the highway building, and we had it jam packed. There were
legislators there and people from all over the state, all the colleges.
NCAE were publicly opposing this but they were treading on thin ice, and
they were doing it with some considerable reservation. We provided
for—had to take an ad in the News and Observer to
submit your position paper in writing, and request a certain time
period, and the controller would handle it. You know, after that
hearing,
Well, I'll be dogged.
That suprised me because I thought that it would be overwhelmingly approved. This guy from Chapel Hill who teaches at N. C. State—I can't remember his name, had been on the environmental board, Jim Wallace, very outspoken, but very effective and persuasive—he came before that hearing. A lawyer there in Raleigh, who's name is hard for me to remember, really did tear into Craig. Barton was presiding and had to call him down. I'll say his name after a while.9
It became obvious that the legislature would have to overrule the board,
or the issue would never go away. So they got me to write a brief
ammendment to the statutes saying that the standards for certification
should not be less than they were on December 6, 1973
You know what happened then? This is critical, too. Bob Strother, who was
the assistant state superintendent for public instruction under Craig
Phillips, agreed with me and told Craig so. Bob was his liaison in
Washington. Bob told me that he was in the office of the deputy attorney
general—what was his name,
They turn over quite a bit.
I have his name in my file over there. He was on first name basis with the chief attorney general staff member in charge of the enforcement of desegregation. He had been liaison. He said this man showed him in a file a record of a telephome call when the legislature ruled against Craig on this issue. Craig called him and proposed that they bring suit against the state of North Carolina.
The federal government?
Yeah. And they did, alleging that the teachers' examination was racially discriminatory. The attorney general was to defend us, the state attorney general. Many, many sessions about that—I have a vast file of information on it. They sent their representatives down from the Justice Department to examine my personal files, three days on one occasion and two days, I believe it was, on another occasion. They went through every paper that I had, in these six hundred and eighty-five boxes, and I didn't withhold anything from them. In fact, I went and found some letters I thought they might be especially interested in. One in particular was one I wrote to Graham Barden, my congressman, who was a gentleman of the old school and opposed the idea of integration, who signed the Southern Manifesto. You remember that?
Yeah, I remember that.
I sort of followed the technique to agree with somebody—yes, but, so-and-so, you know, and not go into them belligerently. They used that letter, pulled it out, with a stack of other papers. They wanted to take them with them, but I wouldn't agree. I said, "You are free to copy them here. You can bring in the photocopier, but if you take them out of my files, I lose control of them. You have no right to do that without a court order, and I am not going to release them to you. You're free to copy them here. You're free to read them and take notes on them, but if they leave my place, I lose control of them. I don't know what you'll put in with them when they come back or what you take away. I don't have copies of them." Ed Spees, the deputy attorney general, persuaded me to let him have custody of them. He took them to Raleigh and made copies, and he sent them back. I was supposed to stuff them in my old boxes. I never did do it. I found that was sort of rough treatment because I hadn't done anything, from that point of view. I was…
Trying to be helpful.
You know that thing went to a three-judge District Court, and they ruled
against it to start with. Then there was a Supreme Court decision about
an examination for police that resulted in some racial discrimination in
the view of those who brought the case. The court ruled that it was not
discriminatory. Then the District Court changed its opinion and said
that our policy was legal if we would have the scores verified by an
independent professional group, which we did. We got all the schools of
education together and the national New and Observer carried a front
page article written by a kid who had never heard of the previous
controversy. It said Craig Phillips took credit for the decision of the
court which upheld the state's position. not
where I came in, but this is a most interesting end to this whole
controversy.
You see those sixty-odd ring binders up there on the shelf? They're a day
by day chronicle of newspaper clippings and records of all the phone
calls and the hairpulling and the lost hours of sleep on that particular
issue. It probably is the most well documented controversy in the
history of the state.
I'm sure somebody would like to have it.
Maybe the Southern Collection would like to have it.
I'm sure they would.
If I could be assured that no personal injury would come to anyone—I have nothing but the fondest attitude toward Craig. I understand his contribution has been substantial. I am not angry with him no matter how boyish he has been in his attitude toward me. I don't carry any grudges. I don't agree with him, but that doesn't mean I have to fall out with him. I have not found a place to put it where I thought that kind of detached scholarly study of it would be…
I'm sure they'd like to have it over in Chapel Hill.
I have told the University at Wilmington that they could have my general files but not that. I don't know what I'll do. We'll see. I hope I have a few more years. I'm planning to live to the year 2000. I don't know whether I'll make it or not.
You look like you'll make it, Dallas.
Well, when you have cancer you don't know.
Well, that's true. Dallas, there's one thing that I wish we could cover as we wind this up, and that is the curriculum study which is very important to the public schools in North Carolina.
Yes. Didn't we cover the fact that I went over to see Hodges after I'd
served a couple of years on the Board of Education—about a year, I
believe it was around? I wanted to resign. There was nothing going on
that I was interested in. I didn't feel we could get anything done
there. I wanted to come back to Duplin where we were consolidating
schools. I had been Charlotte Observer about what we were
doing down there. I've got the clipping." I told him, and he sat there
spellbound. He put his hands down on his desk and told me to go back
over there and make a proposal for what amounted to the Industrial
Education Centers. I told him I was interested in excellence in
education, the quality of education. I was tired of talking about
teachers' salaries. I was tired of talking about need for new school
buildings. Everybody knew we needed all of this. This is just the
quantitative side of education, and I wanted to get to grips with the
question of the quality of education. The idea of excellence is what
interests me in the whole process. The housekeeping, the fiscal, the
political part of it is necessary, but I don't care for it. I mean I'm
not excited about that. I'd rather be doing something that has some
result in the opportunity that people have to get an education of real
meaning.
He agreed with me. He didn't want it to cost too much, and he invited me
to make two proposals. One I've already discussed with you, the
Community College System. The other one was what to do about the
condition of public school education. After
This proposal was based on my experience with Conant's group that we discussed earlier. What kind of curriculum do we have, actually? Not just in a general statewide statement, but what kind do we have in the Rose Hill High School? What kind do we have in the Edward's High School in Asheville? What kind do we have in Central High School in Charlotte? What kind do we have in the Davidson High School in Davidson, North Carolina? By the way, my old Greek professor had been principal there, and I imagine it was a very good experience.
It's a very good question to ask. Then, who's to say what kind of curriculum we need? There's been all sorts of ideas about it. You have the strong advocacy of vocational education. They've felt themselves at war with people who taught English and taught history. There was a strong element in North Carolina, always has been, for the fine arts. A lot of talented people and a lot of people who appreciate talent even if they don't have it themselves—hold in high esteem that creative spark that every human being has of some kind—and just pray for them an opportunity to develop that talent, whatever it is.
So it's hard to agree about the answer to that question. What constitutes
the curriculum that we most desire? What is the kind that we agree we
need? Then the question that we most
Most people say either the state decides or we decide locally. It's state
versus local argument all the time, eitheror proprosition. I say there's
a third option. The state should
And that, essentially, is what we went after in answering these three
questions. We organized the citizens' committee movement in keeping with
what Conant had advocated, and Roy Larsen and the others, especially
John Hersey—whose friendship I value most highly and whose humanitarian
commitment was very touching to me, very influential in my judgment. I
found in reading Page—I tried to be a student of him all my life—that
these were the ideas that he held out for North Carolina. He was blatant
in his criticism of the state for failing to do it. He was so critical
in writing his so-called mummy-letter, saying the leaders of North
Carolina were mummies and satisfied to do nothing and be nothing, and
all this young talent left the state or they stayed home and became
alcoholics out of frustration. There was one who wrote him from
Goldsboro, a young lawyer, and told him that he agreed with him, and he
begged him to come back to North Carolina and join Josephus Daniels and
the News and Observer and create a renaissance. That
young man was Charles B. Aycock. I've not seen what Page wrote to Aycock
about that, but these were brilliant earlier thinkers in our state, and
they helped to bring about the renaissance. Our problem is to keep it on
course today and keep ourselves philosophically in agreement
Well, I convinced Hodges of that, and he got the money from old man Smith Richardson to hire Epps Reedy and one assistant, fifty thousand dollars, big money in those days.
What year was that? Do you remember?
'58 or '9. We set up the committee, the citizens' committee to work in conjuction with it. We employed Raymond Stone to go about canvassing the state, establishing citizens' committees. Well, we got a grass roots movement going there as a result of it. The time was right for it, Jay. The people were restive after the experience of the depression and the World War, and nothing happened for the improvement of education during that period. These young people had been all over the world. They had seen Europe and all of its greatness and all of its weakness. They'd seen the South Pacific. They'd seen the rise and fall of Japan. They were not willing to come back home to Rose Hill and do nothing. They were ready for some action.
By the time of the end of the Hodges' administration, we had that
movement going. People were going into the schoolhouses and looking at
the physical plant and examining the faculty. The faculty was sitting
there in the meetings with them. They were
The study showed up the deficiencies in the curriculum, and they realized they couldn't do it alone.
That's right. It covered the whole curriculum. It did not include just
the primary school—the lack of kindergardens, the neglect of the
humanities—it included all, also vocation. It was a well-rounded
comprehensive program that we reached a consensus about. We had a
central committee, and we had committees from the colleges and
universities as well as representatives from the public school system to
deal with the question of what constitutes a good curriculum in the
English language; what constitutes a good curriculum in French, Spanish,
German, foreign languages. Not whether we should have it
Now back to the point. This fervor created all over the state simply
because we opened the door for democratic participation. It was not the
united forces for education in Raleigh saying we need a fifteen percent
increase for teachers. We need more instructional material. We need
better school
Terry Sanford, who was in the 1953 session of the general assembly, did not lift his hand to help education or to hurt it. He was indifferent to it, according to his own account of it. I appeared before that session to present the united forces program during the Umstead administration. After I got on the board of education, I presented our findings. When Sanford began to run for governor and began to consider that, and he saw this awakening of the grass roots of North Carolina during the time when most of the south was involved with the struggle whether to close the schools rather than integrate or to integrate here. You know what this problem was.
They were closing the schools in the Farmville, Virginia, area, and we
were talking about improving the curriculum in the schools. I don't mean
we didn't have problems. We did have problems. But we were thinking
positively about it too. Not only the leadership, but the people at
large, dearly loved the schools and wanted the opportunities to be
preserved, black and white, whether it meant schools separately or
together. Terry was astute enough to see this. I don't mean that he
didn't have a sincere committment or that he was being—simply being
opportunistic. He was genuinely committed to the cause, but he did see,
being the good politician that he was also, that here was the ideal
issue. Look at the opposition that he had. He had
As a federal judge.
As a federal judge. I guess the justice department told him what he had
to say. I don't know.
It prepared the atmosphere.
Well, it was especially pertinent there in those times when there were so
many negative pressures going. There were a lot of people in North
Carolina who were so angry over the
It certainly could have.
I say it isn't. A lot of people expected that we would come up with a big report as most commissions usually do and put it on the shelf and let it gather dust. This is what we should do, and this is the kind of curriculum we ought to have. Well, we had some reports, but the main contribution of that effort was that it involved the people democratically and gave them an opportunity to have an effect on the quality of education, and they did do so. That essentially is the story.
In 1965 when Governor Moore came in, the legislature cut the money out of
the curriculum study altogether and it ended. He did not call us over to
say, "Look, is this doing anything good; has this resulted in any
improvement?" You know how these things happen in the sub-subcommittee,
and it just got cut out. I don't know who cut it out. I don't think
there's been any doctoral dissertations or interviews about it. It just
stopped. It was a severe blow to me but I couldn't do anything about it.
Governor Moore was not following through with the citizens' committee,
and it just died because this was a Sanford and Hodges' program. With
all due respect to Governor Moore, he was a judge. He was not an
executive. Judges don't do anything. They just flip the
Temperament.
Yeah, temperament, approach to things. Perfectly legitimate, I suppose, in his field, to have the antagonist and the protagonist, and then all he has to do is decide.
I think I ought to put into the record what Governor Sanford said about you. He said Dallas Herring is the most eloquent spokesman for education in North Carolina in the twentieth century.
I don't feel very eloquent. I feel inadequate for that statement about me.
Well, as I did before, I thank you again, when you aren't feeling very well, for submitting to a second interview.
Delighted to have you always, Jay. Wish you'd come by every Saturday.
Thank you very much. This is the end of part number two of the Dallas Herring interview.
END OF INTERVIEW
Charlotte Observer, a Davidson College classmate,
1938.