The retirement of Dr. Ready half-way through the Scott administration
made it necessary to bring a new director in. The president he's called.
Ben Fountain was the choice. We had a period there for two or three
years when we got all the money we could use, and probably a little more
than we could use judicially for the expansion and growth of the system.
So that it reached some fifty-seven, and now fifty-eight institutions.
The staff began to multiply. It's almost impossible to keep it from
growing to a size that we really did not need because as institutions became living, active, growing institutions,
they developed a leadership ability, and they didn't need the kind of
depth of support from the various sections of the department in Raleigh.
You might say that as institutions grew we needed only minimal staff in
Raleigh, but as all bureaucracies do this one continued to multiply. In
the other federal programs, federal money, you had to have somebody to
supervise each one of them. I have never yet seen an administrator who
had enough help. That's true of all the institutions I know anything
about. That still doesn't say its right.
There were political developments—the conflict that arose between the
minority of the state board of education and Dr. Craig Phillips after
his first four year term. He came in with Bob Scott—it was during the
Holshouser administration, right at the last of the Scott
administration— when that broke down. It broke down about the teachers'
examination. Craig came to see me, and after many discussions on the
board, he had made a political commitment to the teaching profession
that he would abolish the teachers' examination requirements. Well, you
will recall, back in the days of Grace Rodenbaugh and Sam Worthington
and others in the legislature who were about to force the issue back in
'57. (I'm sure it was that far back). I told them that if they would not
mandate it but allow us to get some experience to see what the scores
were and what the cutoff should be, that I would assure them that the
board would establish a minimum that we could defend if we were ever
contested about it. That minimum would be where we would maintain a
black teaching group in proportion to their
percentage of the population. If a population is 25% of the total, then
we would at least get that many blacks. I thought that was a fair base.
Well, we did that. We established the rule while Dr. Carroll was
there—unanimously done. Dr. Trigg was there. We were following that
practice. And we began to see—we had an improvement on the average, 16
percentage points on the scores. It was worth doing for that reason only
if that was the only reason. Craig was the—he made his political
commitment without consulting any of us. I didn't feel that I was a part
of his political commitment. He recognized that we disagreed about it.
He came down to see me, and we sat in the library in there. He told me
that—this was preceding the primary in 1972—that he would not pursue the
matter any further.
There was a gubernatorial race going on. Pat Taylor and Skipper Bowles
were vying for the Democratic nomination. I supported Skipper Bowles. He
was a colleauge from the Sanford administration, more liberal than Pat.
Pat had served as lieutenant governor and as a member of the board of
education. He gave me the impression that he couldn't remember what his
position was the day before. He had his mind on too many other things
[laughter] . He's a nice boy and a good
friend, but I just felt that Skipper could do a better job. Not that I
was very active in it at all.
Skipper came out, if you recall, with a fifty million dollar proposal for
improvement in vocational education and the public schools. This was one
of his primary platforms. I went up to see him
about it and asked him what he wanted done. His answer was similar to
what Sanford had told me about the 1961 budget, "Whatever it is that
you've got in your budget." We didn't have 50 million dollars in our
budget for vocational education. Craig had brought it to us, and it
didn't have anything for substantial improvement in vocational
education. Craig's interest is in early childhood education. He very
rarely ever thinks about or talks about high schools. And I called it to
his attention. I stopped by Raleigh and asked to meet with him and A. C.
Davis° and told him what Skipper
had said. We can't afford not to ask for what the candidate for
governor, that everybody assumed would be elected, has proposed. Are we
going to oppose that, be lukewarm about it? It will be up to us to
administer. Craig wouldn't agree to it. I rather got the impression that
he was going to tell Skipper what it should be rather than have Skipper
tell him.
We went down to the superintendents' meeting in Wilmington, and the time
had come for a showdown. We had to go before the budget commission with
our proposals, and it was not in the budget. So I called—I couldn't get
Craig's attention except in the social setting, people drinking
cocktails and carrying on—I called Davis aside and told him to tell
Phillips that Barton Hayes was with me, the chairman of the committee,
and that we were going to propose a 50 million dollar increase in the
budget. If the staff did not put it in there, then we would come up with
our own proposals to put in. It's the board's budget not the staff budget. Well, I didn't realize that that
would shock anybody. I didn't see why it would. But it angered Craig, it
turned out.
Davis called me from Wilmington and wanted me to meet with him. I said
that I had just been down to meet with him, "What is the trouble?" He
said, "He's not buying your proposal." I said, "It's not my proposal.
It's Skipper Bowles's proposal." He was angry about it. Craig called
me—he wanted me to call Craig. I said, "I'm not going to call him. I've
already said what I thought about it. It's up to him if he doesn't
approve. I don't have to have his permission as a member of the board to
propose anything."
Craig called a day or two later and said that he wanted to cancel the
meeting in Raleigh and move it to Greensboro a couple or so weeks later.
I readily agreed to it. I didn't know what his purpose was. I expected
it was to keep Edwin Gill from going to it so he could pull something
off. Gill wouldn't go to an out of town meeting. And that was right. We
went up there—I think it was in August of '72 and without any
forewarning—I kept telling myself here in my own library that he would
not bring up the teachers' exam again. The primary had passed by that
time. And he said—well, he distributed two papers. They're in my files.
One was a proposal to abolish the requirement for a minimum score on the
teachers' examination for a graduate certificate for those who have
their Master's degree. The other was the appointment of a task force to
study the question of what to do about the minimum requirement for the A
certificate, beginning teaching. Well, we had the
meeting, and I was presiding, of course. Dr. Charlie Jordan, Barton
Hayes, and I voted against the proposal. Under the rules of the board,
the chairman has a right to vote if he desires to do so and expresses
it. The others had been buttonholed privately ahead of time and had been
lined up in support of the proposal. I came on back by Chapel Hill. I
had a state seal plaque that I had carved to give to Bill Friday, and I
gave it to him and came on home. From that August meeting until
December—see the general election was to come in the interim…