Interview with Gilbert Kushner, November 5, 2001

BROWN: This is an interview with Dr. Gilbert Kushner, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida on November 5, 2001 at Dr. Kushner's home in Tampa, Florida. The interviewer is C.J. Brown, Student in MA Applied Anthropology Program at USF. Dr. Kushner, we're going to be talking today a little bit about the inception of the masters program and the PhD program at USF since it was one of the first ones, and you were the department head at that time as I understand?

KUSHNER: Yes. I was chair. I must point out the MA was the first one and so was the PhD.

BROWN: Good. Good.

KUSHNER: And so was the BA, but the BA is dead in the water, but it was when it was started.

BROWN: Really?

KUSHNER: 76 [1976] for the BA, 74 [1974] for the MA, 84 [1984] for the PhD.

BROWN: Wow. I didn't realize we had that BA as also the first one at USF.

KUSHNER: It didn't last very long. A couple or three years maybe.

BROWN: And do we have a reason for its demise? Was it replaced?

KUSHNER: Students didn't come in and sign up for it.

BROWN: They just wanted a straight anthropology degree?

KUSHNER: Yeah. Yeah. The first couple of years we had a few, not to many and they did just fine.

BROWN: Uh-hm. Could you describe for me your motives in creating the program in Applied Anthropology at USF, the masters.

KUSHNER: Motives. I'm not sure we had any [Kushner laughs]. There's a history. Therefore, here it comes. In early academic 1972-73, the Board of Regents notified my Dean and me as Chair that the department was eligible to propose an 00:02:00M.A. program. We had previously as a faculty talked really very informally, but sufficiently, so that we all came to consensus that even if there was not the current moratorium on PhD programs in the system, we wouldn't be interested because we saw that people weren't getting jobs at the time. Academic employment was really, really down and there weren't very many jobs for professors. That's all we were thinking about at the time. So when we had the opportunity, now, for the M.A. supported by the very explicit desire of our Dean and Vice President 00:03:00for Academic Affairs that we have a master's degree since the academic administrators count coup by counting the number of graduate programs and we are always engaged in a competition in South Florida with regard of Florida State and the University of Florida and we had fewer graduate programs, especially at that time. They clearly wanted us to have a master's program. So we sat down. We were 10 faculty, two of whom were leaving at the end of the 1972-73 year. And talked about it and we immediately agreed none of us wanted a regular traditional master's program. We didn't think there was any need for it whatsoever. Particularly in that period. And so I reported to the Board of 00:04:00Regents, the governing body of the State University System in Florida that we really weren't interested in a traditional MA program. I say they, was that a person responsible for that sort of thing responded "Good, because we wouldn't approve it anyway. It's clearly unneeded." So think about it not a traditional masters program but you have the opportunity, nevertheless, to propose an M.A. I remember I hung up the phone and thought "What is he talking about? If not a traditional MA, then what?" So I called another meeting of the faculty. We used to meet always as a committee of the whole. We had little subcommittees, but 00:05:00anything important was all of us at the same time. So I told them what they said and I asked if there might be some other sort of a master's program. They didn't have anything in mind. I just wanted to make sure that we thoroughly discussed it and we started to talk and uh--at the end of that first meeting, it was very clear that we did want another kind of master's program and that it would be a program aimed at training people for employment not professing anthropology at the MA level. I remember asking people who said what. How did this happen? [Kushner laughs]. I mean we're all anthropologists right? How did this event 00:06:00occur and nobody remembered really who said what or who was responsible. It was a joint effort that, if you'll pardon the expression, nowadays I don't guess people even know what that means. We also determined very quickly that there would be an internship as a requirement of the program. But in response to your question, that's what happened as best as I can remember it, as best I inquired about it, to make sure and I've written about this a fair number of times and that's how it came about.

BROWN: Well what differences in philosophy and practice is there between the traditional anthropology program and the applied. I mean obviously you were going through something very different here. It must have also included some 00:07:00differences in philosophy.

KUSHNER: Lots of differences. Lots of differences. All of which I wrote up [Kushner laughs] at least once. Actually several times in a chapter called Administrative Considerations in a book edited by Bob Trotter called Anthropology for Tomorrow. Publication of the AAA and NAPA published in 1988. Lots and lots of differences. Initially the notion that we were training people very explicitly for employment in public and private, profit-making and non-profit making agencies. We were training people to make use of their 00:08:00anthropological knowledge in the definition and resolution of practical human problems. That is to say in another way, we were aiming at training people to pursue the second part of the two-part SFAA credo statement that the SFAA is organized in order to number one, and I think this remains number one in terms of the individual choice of most of applied anthropologists in SFAA and elsewhere, was the first purpose of SFAA was to encourage the discovery of the principles governing the relations of human beings to one another. I think we have seen and continue to see the publications in Human Organization describing 00:09:00the result of such efforts on the part of the authors. Papers which, it seems to me, in some ultimate essence cannot be distinguished from papers published in the American Anthropologist. The second purpose of the SFAA, however, in that credo statement is to make use of these principles governing the relations of human beings to one another and the--something like, I don't know the exact words, the identification of and resolution of practical problems of human beings in human organizations. So our entire focus on the second part makes for all sorts of differences in the internship, the curriculum, the kind of thesis, 00:10:00the courses, the sequence of courses and so on and so on.

BROWN: We obviously, I'm guessing, had support from some people in the fields and you had to set on other. Is the SFAA older than the applied program at USF.

KUSHNER: Oh yeah. Yeah. It started in 1941.

BROWN: So we've always had applied anthropologists or for a long time.

KUSHNER: Yes, but not practitioners.

BROWN: Ah.

KUSHNER: I distinguish between the two applied and practice by thinking of applied people as aiming at the first of those, of the two-parts of the SFAA creed and I don't at all that uh--what I think is not controversial I suspect, I know it is. I know it is. But that's how I think of it. So these are the folks 00:11:00who publish an HO. I even publish in HO, but that's what I was doing at the time.

BROWN: Right. Did you think of yourself as an applied anthropologist?

KUSHNER: I thought of myself as a fairly--the first article I think I was a doctoral student. I thought of myself as somebody [Kushner laughs]. I mean I'm trying very hard to get a publication before I finish the PhD. It turned out though hindsight that what I was writing about, what I did for doctoral field work was I would now say a program evaluation. I don't remember that phrase in anthropology at the time I did that. This was in 1968. I did field work in Israel. I was studying immigrants from India who lived in a village. One of 300 00:12:00some odd villages like that. And what I did essentially was talk about what happened to these people as a consequence of life in that village. And even more specifically, I talked about the nature of cultural process in that community which was one of 300 or so. I ended up making use of somebody else's research as we're supposed to do. Who called this sort of community as an administered community administered by external agencies and I expanded this fellow's notion of what an administered community was. So I presented a model of the administered community and argued that that kind of community in Israel, 300 or 00:13:00so, was much like an American Indian reservations, Japanese American relocation centers in that the daily lives, much of the daily lives of the people in their future was directed by external agencies who meant only good. It really meant the best that they could conceive for these people. And in Israel's situation was even far more desperate than the United States with reservations and relocation centers because there's more than a million people came in after 1948 to Israel and with hardly anything. Little backpacks maybe containing their goods. Everything had to be provided for these folks by and large--especially 00:14:00the ones [inaudible], tableware, clothes, linens. They had to be given something by means of which to make a living. It turned out that this had nothing to do with the way they're making livings in their country's of origin. So it was desperate circumstances. It was immediately after the 1948 War.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: There weren't any resources hardly in the country. I agree, I think it was the best thing that they could do, but it was not the sort of thing that any applied anthropologist or practicing anthropologist would like because it turned out that they had very little control over their lives. As we used to say in the old days, there was very little power to the people under those circumstances.

BROWN: Right. Right.

KUSHNER: But again, I think it was the best they could do. In any case, I would 00:15:00now call that a program evaluation.

BROWN: Did you come to think of yourself slowly through the progression of this department and the progression of these programs as more and more as an applied anthropologist?

KUSHNER: I came, but quickly, to think of myself that way. Once we proposed the MA in applied anthropology, all of us in fact got up the next morning and we were applied anthropologists. None of us thought of ourselves as applied anthropologists. The closest I think to that notion probably were the archeologists who was researched always--well not always, but most of the time, tended to be on contract rather than grants. The contracts would--some state or local agency--regional agency to study some site before construction is going to 00:16:00occur. So they were practitioners, very much more than the rest of us.

BROWN: Okay. Um--who were some of your best supporters during that time for the program. Who was right there behind you?

KUSHNER: In the department?

BROWN: Both in the department and on a larger scale.

KUSHNER: Well, in the department there were Mike Angrosino, Roger Grange, Jerry Smith, Pat Waterman, Curt Winker, Ray Williams. Those were the people who were around as we were developing the proposal and then immediately thereafter Elon Shelo joined us Graduate Director in 1973 and helped us put together courses, 00:17:00curricula, and a graduate administration. None of us had any idea about how to do that. Bob Wulff joined. Bob Wulff of the Praxis Awards. It was Bob of WAPA who created the Praxis Awards. The Wulff of Wulff and Fiske. A wonderful collection of stuff that was in text. I taught the course.

BROWN: They're still using that course, or the text by the way.

KUSHNER: Well there's nothing else. It's old, but he's not interested in writing or putting together a new one. But it's great. The illustrations are wonderful I think. The format of his chapters were critical. A fair number of theses written under my direction follow that format. The critical thing is the anthropological 00:18:00difference. What is the anthropological difference? We say if a student can address that question sensibly, the student richly merits a masters degree. Bob stayed with us about four years I think. Three or four years. He didn't have a PhD and a condition of his employment was that he would get one and he wasn't interested because he didn't need it to do what he did and does which is to practice anthropology. Bob was and joined us and since practitioner. He's Executive Vice President of a huge development firm in uh--Washington, Virginia. I think their offices are in Fairfax [Virginia]. In any case, he doesn't need a PhD, so we hired them to replace Bob. Erv Chambers, who became the first editor 00:19:00of Practicing Anthropology which I'm delighted to say was created at this department in 1978 as a consequence of the visit from Sol Tax in which he suggested that we put together something to facilitate the communication of BA anthropologists to each other. The essential idea being that BA's were not professing anthropology. Chances are they were employed and they were doing something or other useful. So what was it that they were doing based on their BA in anthropology majors? We contacted a fair number of schools. We got alumni 00:20:00lists, but it didn't seem to work out that way and as I recall, Bob Wulff created a title for the thing which hadn't been published yet called Practicing Anthropology at Work. And then I guess we dropped the "At Work" from the title and talked about the thing as Practicing Anthropology and uh--communications with SFAA and Art Gallaher who was then the President resulted in SFAA providing some cash to us in our publication of the newsletter which was created in an effort to let practitioners communicate with each other. Practitioners who were by and large treated like dirt by AAA and even though there's a NAPA now in AAA 00:21:00and there's a lot of talk, it seems to me most AAA people and a fair number of SFAA people think that practice is far less honorable than professing whereas my view of course is that practice is the best way to demonstrate the uh-utility of anthropology in the world, to demonstrate the sensibility of anthropology in the world--far much more than professing. I mean anybody could profess.

BROWN: What I hear you saying, if I'm correct, is that where many of us believe before anthro--you weren't an anthropologist unless you had a PhD. At this point, applied anthropologists were people just practicing anthropology even 00:22:00with only BA's. How would you classify an anthropologist?

KUSHNER: Anthropologist is anybody at any degree level who has a major an anthropology. I was uh--I spent a fair number of years doing battle, politely and otherwise with -- which accounts my current rep I guess, with people at AAA, in particular, because AAA used to publish from time-to-time surveys based on interviews with recently graduated anthropologists whose only PhD and I use to sit on committees and such--I was sort of active at AAA and some AAA organizations, the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, for example, and I use to argue with Ed Lehman who was then the Executive Director of AAA and that they 00:23:00ought to count MA's at least and use the people out there. Not just PhD's. Particularly at a time when not too many PhD's were employed professing anthropology but there all doing something out there. They just weren't included in hardly anything. In fact, it wasn't uh-- [BREAK IN AUDIO] Much more recently, when of course I don't remember, but not too long ago, it seems to me a few years maybe before I retired in 1999, Meta Baba and I had articles published in Human Organization and uh--Meta sent me her paper before it was published and 00:24:00she spoke only of PhD's and I remember saying "Meta, why only PhD's?" And this wasn't that long ago. So she changed it for publication, but uh--uh--it seems to me still there's lots of colleagues--AAA and SFAA who think only PhD and who think only professing anthropology and anything else is second class.

BROWN: I see. So in the greater scheme of things when you were working toward the MA in applied program here, did you have any support from people at AAA or SFAA?

KUSHNER: Good for you! You asked that earlier and I forgot to respond. [Brown laughs]. Yes. Lots--lots actually. What does that mean? It means 5, 6 people at least from each of those outfits. Officers, former officers. My mentor at 00:25:00Arizona, Ned Spicer, had been--was President of the AAA at the time the proposal went in, our proposal went in, and I sent him a copy as I recall. He was so excited by it that he invited me to a meeting in Washington of mainly AAA former Presidents. They were meeting to discuss the situation which was really scary. No PhD's hardly get employed, very few advertisements. In the newsletter uh--and me. And I was there trembling the while in the face of all of these people to tell them what we were hoping to do at South Florida and that was very exciting 00:26:00to them because it meant the employment of anthropologists, but not at the PhD level. This was 73 [1973]. Sometime during 73 [1973] when the proposal--it must have been the Spring of academic year 72-73 when that meeting occurred because I had in the package a wonderful letter from Spicer saying "At last somebody's going to try to do this and see what happens." I had a letter from Bill Whyte who was then the President of the American Sociological Association. Just beginning his term and he said "I am so pleased to see this. I'm going to devote my time as President of ASA to encourage the development of such programs in sociology." A fair number of "bigs" from AAA, from SFAA, and then we struggled 00:27:00to find practitioners out there and uh--I asked them what they thought and of course they were thrilled. And so I had letters from such people. I had a letter from one guy, kind of a funny story, who had a pretty fancy job in Washington at some federal agency and told a story--he told me a story that he said uh--he'd been going to lunch with a colleague at the agency for some twenty years and they'd chat about their families and their interests and so on and once one of them, by accident, said something about being an anthropologist and the other guy said "Are you an anthropologist? He said "Yeah." He said "I am too!" [Kushner laughs]. I mean that's how life was for those people. There was nobody 00:28:00to talk to. To say anthropology from their points of view then was irrelevant because obviously they thought at the time really that they got their jobs in spite of anthropology, but once they thought about it, then I think--I talked to numbers of the them anyway who realized not so much in spite of, but their efficiency at work was directly related to their knowledge of anthropology and most of all I think uh--I would conclude after all this, then and in the intervening years, what Spicer calls the anthropological perspective. If we 00:29:00think of any problem from this perspective then we are doing anthropology and we are using anthropology by calling it "ECHH" as an acronym so I can remember what the components are. The etic/emic perspectives, comparative cross-cultural prospective, historical and holistic perspective and we put all that together and that's anthropology and there's nobody else. No other trade thinks about the world the way we do--still, in this era of globalization.

BROWN: Well taking all of that as the background, obviously it was important how you were going to shape this applied program as far as the curriculum. You said earlier that the internship was important. How was that first class coming in. 00:30:00Were they specific fields? Were they encouraged? Did you have a hard time getting that first set of students to sign up?

KUSHNER: As I recall, Al Wolf didn't join us until 1974--I think, which was the first year. I would uh--maybe Curt Winker, maybe Mike [Angrosino] would remember better than I do. Most anybody can remember better than I do. But as I recall, we had--I don't remember now--enough students applying that first year 'cause I got the word out. We all got the word out. So a lot of people knew about it. Some were very, very excited about it and sent us students--their students 00:31:00applied. As I recall we had enough students apply. Our students were and are self-selective. All graduate students are self-selective but in our case, I think right at the start, we got students who wanted to make use of anthropology in the world rather than teach it.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Or teach it as it were by demonstrating its utility. People who are not afraid of bureaucracy. Lot of people continue to be I suppose. Professors maybe especially and this was in the early mid-70s. It was a time when bureaucracy 00:32:00really was a code word for hell and mean people who didn't want to give people power. But I think our students saw that the whole world is bureaucratically organized. We certainly on the faculty side knew that there is nothing more bureaucratized than a university campus than a department. Faculty had to fill out so many pieces of paper and they're supposed to go to so many meetings and someone chairs a million more times than deans--millions of more times. I mean we live in bureaucracy--all of us--all of us. Kids in first grade are 00:33:00participants in a bureaucratic system. They take exams and so and so. The world is bureaucratized and I think our incoming people saw that and welcomed the opportunity to get into a bureaucracy, get a job with some power and change the world. It's far much more efficient than standing on a corner with a clinched fist saying "Power to the People" which I spent a fair number of years doing myself. [Both laugh]. But if you're in an organization and you get some power in that organization then you can affect what goes on in that organization. Whether it's a Department of Anthropology or a university or the Congress or the Senate or whatever it is. You can do something if you want to and if you apply yourself 00:34:00and if you apply anthropology -- it seems to me. So, we had that kind of person right away.

BROWN: How long did it take you to develop the curriculum and how did you develop it differently?

KUSHNER: Oh my God. Yeah. Well uh--we told the Board in 72 [1972]--the Fall of 72 [1972]. We want to create--propose this for a program and the person at the board said "Whoa! I don't know what that is, but it sounds--it's a first, right?" We said "Yeah. It's great." He was thrilled. The Dean was thrilled. The Vice President--the President was excited--everybody--knowing that it was going to be a first. I mean what better for academic administrators on the campus and in Tallahassee to turn to their bosses and say "Hey, here's the first and it's 00:35:00at South Florida, not FSU and not Florida." So we started to fill out the proposal. The proposal is, was--I think when we were done 4, 5, 6 inches high and it had to include among other things, a need and demand for the program which required us to go and get statements from potential employers from potential students and potential employers in the locality in our part of the state in the state, in the region, in the United States and elsewhere. That required quite a lot of labor. Eight of us took pieces of the--well, the Chair 00:36:00assigned individual faculty pieces in the proposal and then coordinated the whole thing--edited and so on. So everybody is working beginning in the Fall through the Spring because it took us that much time to get the proposal together and then submitting it to the Board of Regents the end of the Spring and they considered it in the Summer and approved. Uh--part of the proposal is curriculum and we talked about that. [Kushner laughs]. What courses are going to be appropriate for this kind of thing? I mean, we didn't know. Nobody knew because it hadn't been done. Well, one thing we decided on quickly was that we would not require a bachelors degree in anthropology for admission for several 00:37:00reasons: 1) we weren't at all sure what a bachelor's degree for "Wooshkahoopa Tech" relative to "Wooshkahoopa State" meant.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: If we had 15 people with BA majors and most of us were--BA majors, what did that mean, except that we could all spell anthropology. Our visions of anthropology were so different and so we thought well, getting BA majors wouldn't really mean much. Besides that SFAA is multidisciplinary in character right at the start. More at the start in fact than now. There were psychiatrists and social workers for example regularly publishing in Human Organization in the early years. Political scientists, economists, sociologists. Getting people 00:38:00outside of anthropology--finding people outside of anthropology publishing in HO these days is relatively rare. Far more rare than it was then and there were more, it seems to me, in the early years, more of the others than anthropologists. In any case, so we knew that and we respected it and loved it and thought it made good sense. So we thought "Well"-- and we wanted different points of view. Different ways of looking at the world and we thought getting all that variability in would lead to great class discussion. [Kushner laughs].

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Would make it easier for us standing in front of classes or sitting on chairs and would lead to really interesting combinations of stuff. The American 00:39:00dream, right? All this diversity coming together and in a classroom.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: It was very exciting. So I said "What do we do with all of these different people? We've got to make sure they think of something sort of alike." And so we came up with a notion of a core course in each of the four branches although I guess increasingly we speak of a fifth. The fifth being Applied, but that's where we were. So, one in each branch. I, some years thereafter unsuccessfully for a number of times tried to convince the faculty to go for one course and to teach in that course a number of key concepts.

BROWN: Uh-hm.

KUSHNER: And then have a huge reading list, which we have never even discussed, 00:40:00but require of the students. But we all experienced that as graduate students ourselves.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: But I don't imagine that's how it is now, but it was then. We'd come in to a department, as a graduate student and get a reading list and we were told "Read." And that sometimes had something to do with stuff in class--more often it didn't. Meaning it was context.

BROWN: Right--right.

KUSHNER: And uh--exams, MA exams would include questions from that reading list. So you'd really have to read that reading list on top of everything else. It was exciting and it made for relatively thin graduate students at the time [Kushner laughs] because we didn't sleep a whole lot.

BROWN: But you didn't require that at that first class.

KUSHNER: Not the reading list.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Although we distributed one. Yeah, we were old timers right? So we 00:41:00distributed a list, but by the time we got to exams, we decided not to ask questions based on that list. But we told people "This is good stuff you really ought to know it. We don't have time for all this in the curriculum." I can't remember now exactly how many years we did that. Providing the list. A good number of years. Jeez, I hadn't thought of that in a very long time. I'm so grateful for this opportunity to find neurons that I thought were out long since. The four core courses and then we came up with the tracks -- urban, medical, public archeology -- because we tried to figure out what was special 00:42:00about our situation and what was needed in our situation and what would be desirable in our situation. All the university always claimed in particular an urban mission.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Because we were the only urban university at the time. There was FIU [Florida International University] that was just expanded by leaps and bounds but then they were hardly the size of a community college so we were the serious urban institution. We had branches in Lakeland, Sarasota, Ft. Myers, St. Pete and we were served in an urban community unlike any other university in the system. So we said, "Well, how can we best serve the urban community?" And we 00:43:00were clearly not going to focus on overseas exotic stones, bones, and savages.

BROWN: Right

KUSHNER: And so the notions of an urban track focusing on urban issues and then medical track also focusing on urban issues [Kushner laughs] but it turned out we thought it would be politically advisable to call another track medical anthropology so as to stake out an area of interest and expertise which would link us with the medical school later when it was created -- public health, with the Florida Mental Health Institute and would potentially protect us from sniping from Florida State and the University of Florida.

BROWN: It was also a rather far thought if you think about the demographics and 00:44:00how our aging population has increased the interest in health. Were you -- did you have that in mind also? That this was going to be a large area?

KUSHNER: Oh yeah. Besides that, uh--the department at our college, we were the College then of Social and Behavioral Sciences. We became later Arts and Sciences in a traditional sense but that returned the situation to where we were before it became Social and Behavioral Sciences, it was a mélange of everything.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: And then uh--the powers that be determined if they split the college up into smaller pieces things could be done more neatly and efficiently and I think they were. But then some other administrator came in [Kushner laughs] and wanted 00:45:00to make a name and put it altogether and called it Arts and Sciences again. I don't think it's as efficient nor do I think it's as useful for departments in the social sciences because if you're right on top of natural sciences, administrators always go crazy about those and think that we just make up what we say and that we're not real scientists, they are. In any case--where was I? I've forgotten.

BROWN: Medical anthropology track.

KUSHNER: Good for you. Medical track, urban track, public archeology. We had archeologists doing what -- around that time was beginning to be called public archeology. SCOPA [Sun Coast Organization of Practicing Anthropologists?] wasn't around then. The archeology outfit of people who did this kind of work -- with this also was very [inaudible] to labels for public archeology, but we had two 00:46:00archeologists who did that and there were people interested. Undergraduates and graduate students. We had then a number of people -- Angrosino for one who was interested in medical issues and we had people interested in urban issues, particularly in Bob Wulff's case, he had spent time in architecture at UCLA when he was a graduate student so he was much interested in urban planning and urban design and started a whole thing in that direction which was pursued by Erv Chambers who shared those interests. So we have people now as you know all over the area and beyond, maybe beyond state, --

BROWN: --Right--

KUSHNER: --whose employment is in agencies, public and private, that have to do 00:47:00with urban planning and urban design and uh--from the medical track, the same is true with regard to employment in agencies that have interests in things medical. Another thing, we knew that what was then, I forget what it was called, it wasn't gerontology. It had another name.

BROWN: Aging studies maybe?

KUSHNER: Maybe. Maybe the department then clearly wasn't uh--capable of dealing with all of the uh--problems of aging in the area, although my God, here we were right in the middle of it and uh--it seemed to us a whole lot more could be done. We had Maria Vesperi who is now at a New College as an adjunct instructor 00:48:00for some years. They're degree is out of Princeton. The PhD is out of Princeton and her dissertation was on St. Pete. It called The City of Green Benches. There used to be green benches on the main streets of St. Pete, but then the newer city administration decided they were unsightly, particularly the elder people sitting on the benches were unsightly. There were movie shorts, there were magazine articles around the United States for years and years showing the green benches and they talk about St. Pete as a city of green benches and show people sunning themselves in the winter. Brilliant dissertation. It was then published 00:49:00in paper and then republished in paper but with the old introduction at least once. At least once. I wish we had her. She knew everything about the elderly in St. Pete and the area at large. So anyhow we thought we could do a lot. This is even before the glory days of AIDS research. All of that money available for AIDS which seems how somehow to be consistent with a lot of people's interests. There's money. There's always money. Much more money for medical stuff than other stuff. That was another reason to identify an area like that.

BROWN: So you could be funded?

KUSHNER: I knew it would be useful.

BROWN: So you said early on something about the one thing you absolutely all agreed on was the need for an internship.

KUSHNER: Yes. How we came up with that is another one of these questions. Maybe 00:50:00when we find Atlantis, we'll find the reason for the internships. [Brown laughs]. And internships it was too. It wasn't practica. Came up with practica later to distinguish between the BA and MA. We called the BA part-time work in agencies. Practica meant full-time work internship. I think maybe we must have had something in mind. Well, two things at least in mind. One to use the same label existing departments used. Public administration students for example did internships. Social work students did internships. Clinical psych students at the PhD level did internships. Medical students did internships. Everybody knew 00:51:00internship that was glorious was important and vital in saying "Our students do internships." People say "Whoa!" They'd understand that. We thought the internship was a good thing to do in a practical program such as ours because it would build on classroom learning and expand classroom learning, it would give the students experience in a particular problem area. So by the conclusion of the internship and the writing of the thesis, the student could say I'm your person for this problem area, here's what I did my internship on and where. This is my thesis. So that's two, right?

BROWN: So strictly an employable tack was part of the reason for the internship?

KUSHNER: Well, and training of students. It would give the opportunity to the student to make use of what the student had ostensibly learned. It would be wonderful real experience in the real world and on that basis of thesis which we decided we had to do because you get extra funding. The department gets more funding for thesis credit than for other graduate course credit, or at least it used to be like that. So for departments "Oh, we don't require that academic work," they hurt. They don't get those budgetary units which we needed desperately because we had so many things we needed to spend money on [Kushner laughs].\

BROWN: Right. Right.

KUSHNER: And we had to compete with other departments who got thesis credits and we had to show "Look at us. We're just starting and we produced all of this. 00:53:00They had produced that and we're holding our own."

BROWN: How were those first internships in the terms of success?

KUSHNER: They were so stupendous. They were so successful that I think as I remember now for a few years almost all of our students were employed--were offered employment and accepted employment in the agencies at which they were interning because they were so impressive. See unlike some departments, our internships were real. That is they were not problems created for the student and they were not go-fer positions. I'm thinking of an article by Mike Trend in HO years and years ago. He wrote about go-fers in anthropology. [Kushner spells out] GO-FERS. No, we made certain that the internship problem was one that the 00:54:00agency was working on and needing resolved. So we also, very early, decided that the internship would require a contract. Not necessarily signed by, but agreed to by the agency supervisor, the faculty supervisor, and the student. So there were three parties involved. Um--and all three would have to be content with what was written up in a document and that document was to provide, and it did, at least in the early years. I know that later on faculty would discombobulate with their own private interests and frequently the contracts were honored in 00:55:00the breach and students would find themselves wondering what to do, when it would end, and so on and so on. The contract was to specify not only what they would do--when, so that there was--there used to be a fancy name which I've forgotten for a time line. This task, at this time, was something we would show a calendar leaving the last two weeks free during which time the student was to write a report to the agency to the faculty supervisor, and usually on the basis of that report, the thesis would be created. The idea for the thesis was to put that report in context--to put the items in the report in anthropological context.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: And show that the student understood some anthropology. Sometimes however, the report expanded somewhat in more detail would be the thesis by itself. It depended on what made sense.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: A lot of that about it, at least in the beginning. The critical [Kushner laughs] question was "What made sense?" In the case of the internship, the faculty adviser, the student, and the agency supervisor determined what made sense. They were the ones that know. But as I say, so many of the students were hired while they were interning to pursue that job at that agency and get paid for it. There were delays in the preparation of the thesis, because once you get out in the world and make car payments and so on, it was a different situation. Al Wolf said that "a student was hired by an agency discussant during the coffee 00:57:00break at the annual colloquium [Kushner laughs]. The agency discussant was so impressed with what the student said and how the student said it, the student was offered a job during the coffee break at the colloquium and they accepted it. Those are good years. Those are good years. Um--we, by the way, did not require that the intern be paid although in some cases, the intern was paid. Not a lot, but something or other because I guess for one thing our own experience doing field work was that often enough nobody paid us. We didn't have any cash. 00:58:00Unless we hustled a grant from somewhere or other.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: And we thought the student was getting paid off by the experience and by the ability to make the opportunity to make contacts.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: During the internship, you're not just going into the agency and doing your job, you're hustling. You're having lunch with people. You're calling people. You're talking to people. Who else is there? Where else might I go? And so on and so on.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: So that a whole opportunity as it were to prepare for employment in the world.

BROWN: So was it difficult then to find internships for the students?

KUSHNER: Uh-I wouldn't say it was difficult. It was a task initially because there weren't any. So we had to go out--faculty had to go out and convince -- 00:59:00[PHONE RINGING] Oh, excuse me. [BREAK IN AUDIO]

BROWN: Okay we were saying that it was a chore at first. The faculty had to go out.

KUSHNER: Thank you so much for reminding me I completely forgot. Yes. We had to go out in the process of preparing the proposal because we had to have letters from people who were potential employers of our graduates. So, in that effort we contacted agency representatives--local and otherwise.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: And then public service became a significant component of faculty activity given the nature of the program. What faculty did--faculty roles are 01:00:00different in this kind of program. In response to your second or third question, a lot of differences. We required community service. I know in sitting in various committees at the college and then as Associate Dean for a number of years, I discovered that people in other places on the campus didn't do any community service and they were not required and were not even asked to. They weren't asked to do public service either. No private, professional service either. But in our department, all faculty members were encouraged to do professional and public service as well as teaching and research because for one thing, public and professional service would enhance the reputation of the 01:01:00department. If more of us were upfront as presidents and secretaries of professional outfits more people heard of South Florida. Who knew about South Florida? I never heard of South Florida before I got here. [Kushner laughs]. That's one thing. In addition, one could learn stuff in those positions--professional service positions that one could bring back to the program. Uh--community service would help enhance the university's urban mission and various administrators on campus were delighted to see faculty out there working with the town, so town and gown.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: We really care about it. Hardly anybody did. None of the professors. Few of them were interested in serving the community. We were. The 01:02:00administrators liked it and that helped the department. The whole thing really was -- the focus was the program. Programmaticals, the achievement of which would result in the individual faculty doing very well indeed. The usual situation in academe was for individual professors to do what they do for their own well-being and promotions and raises and-- [BREAK IN AUDIO]

BROWN: Okay, I think we're taping now.

KUSHNER: But in our case, given the focus on the program, everything's a program and everybody had to contribute to the program to the extent that the program did well then each of us individually did well. You're interviewing me here. I 01:03:00mentioned earlier some chapters in this book, my presence at this fancy AAA meeting, I've consulted in -- I did consulting in a lot of places that were thinking about applied programs. I mean I became an expert on training programs in applied anthropology. People, you, me, and some of them probably still remember me because of that. The point is that individually I think we all did a whole lot better than we might have otherwise had we not been engaged in this community effort to enhance the program. Public service--we needed to go out in the community and also research and do local contract search. That was one of 01:04:00the tasks of the guy we hired to be Graduate Director was also suppose to hustle contracts and he did--$300,000, $400,000 bucks as I recall his first year in contracts. [Kushner laughs]. He didn't follow through on them, but he got them. Other people followed through. My God, but he hustled that money and in doing so he contacted lots of agencies and individuals and then got the money from the few. But a number of them--discovered the USF was there in the first place. It took many years for this community to pay attention to what was going on north of Kennedy Boulevard.

BROWN: Why?

KUSHNER: Because most of the community was south and they didn't pay attention. South Florida was nothing and Florida State and UF was important. So a number of 01:05:00agencies got to know about the university and our department through this contract hustling. Other faculty started to hustle local contracts and contributed. All of us volunteered to serve on boards and directors of community agencies so that we could make nice to the civilians and suggest to the them that we were not so strange. Professors were just ordinary folks, but we were more than that because we made use of anthropology to do our work on the board and help the agency do better and become more efficient and so on and so on.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: So we'd chair committees of the board and I sat, for example, on one 01:06:00board of--oh, I shouldn't name it, uh-a public housing facility and part of the federal funding for such public housing sets aside some percentage of the budget for the resident's recreational something or other fund. And some significant amount of monies and thousands and thousands I think tens of thousands which when given the situation of the people in this building, it was very significant. So the President of the Board at one meeting said "Well, what should we do with this money?" A board member said "Well, how about this and this and this." I couldn't believe it. I'm waving my hand and finally was recognized and I said "How old are the people? What's the average age of the 01:07:00people?" "Well, 66-67." I said "They're all adults, you would agree?" "Yes." "Then why can't they manage their own damn money?" I suggested. Not very politely for a change. [Brown laughs]. And they said "Well, what do you mean?" I said "Why don't we tell them." We had already a resident's board or something another. I said "Why don't we let them know about this? That there is this money. That the purpose of the money is to be used for recreational endeavors and why didn't they appoint or elect the committee or something and take care of this money? And they'd have to know that once it was gone, it was gone. It's their money and they're adults, why can't they do it themselves?" People around the table said "Oh, gee, wow." Honest to God. "What an unusual idea." I said 01:08:00"Well, we call this participation where I come from." [Both laugh]. Stuff even as simple as that, let alone people conducting research on behalf of an agency and so on. So we got to be known downtown. Unlike, a fair number of programs at the university.

BROWN: So this was obviously successful right from the beginning.

KUSHNER: Um.

BROWN: Did you feel that it was going to be a success after the first year -- the second year?

KUSHNER: During the first year--yeah, I must say I did.

BROWN: The other thing I hear repeated in our conversation is you don't take any personal credit for this. You feel very much it was definitely--

KUSHNER: No, I'm a good American, I know it's not polite to do that.

BROWN: No, but you've indicated repeatedly that it had to be a team effort.

KUSHNER: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

BROWN: Were there any dissenters in the department or the school?

KUSHNER: Oh yeah. A lot of colleagues in other departments were very upset because they had competition now, not only from the usual sources but from us as well because uh--it wasn't, I don't think, that difficult really as task that kind of competition because most of the chairs I found them I must say were--I talk about it in the chapter I signed it "Academics tend not to be interested in chairing a department except for the 12-month contract." [Kushner laughs]. 01:10:00Anyway, they the academic paper pushing and bureaucratic piddling here and there. It's not that difficult to uh--do the sort of chairing I always thought one was supposed to do in that context.

BROWN: Right. So was this a good setup? Was the success of the masters directly related to the PhD program that was also started 10 years later?

KUSHNER: No. I would say the success of the PhD program was related to the masters. See, again for the PhD, the board notified us, the Dean and I, that we were eligible to propose a PhD program and eligibility in both regards the MA and PhD is based on the number of graduates of the preceding level. So we had 01:11:00produced a N number of BA's and therefore were eligible for an MA. We produced so many MA's who were eligible for the PhD. Now for the PhD, our Dean and the central administration were even more excited because a PhD is the apogee and they really count coup for PhD programs and the Deans go to Dean meetings and say "How many PhD's do you got?" And then again, it enables the university to do battle with Florida, Florida State. So it was the success of the MA that really led to the PhD or that made the PhD of interest in the discipline. And since it 01:12:00was a PhD, we decided right away we'd be going for practitioners and professors. At first there were, as I remember, I think I'm accurate--maybe not. There were relatively few who wanted to be professors.

BROWN: Was this due to the employment climate at the time?

KUSHNER: No. By 1984 things were looking up, particularly we thought for professors of applied anthropology because people were real hot about applied by that time and we realized that people coming out of our place would be desirable.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: But as I recall, there were not that many people who wanted to be professors. Instead they were PhD practitioners and I thought about PhD's as 01:13:00necessary for people who wanted to work in medical institutions with physicians with PhD's in public health with overseas development situations with PhD's in economics and political science and agriculture so the anthropologist with these circumstances could also be called Doctor. [Kushner laughs].

BROWN: Carry a little more credentialing.

KUSHNER: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean there was--really the only thought I had that the PhD was necessary for some kinds of employment--

BROWN: --Right--

KUSHNER: --but not for lots and lots of other sorts of employment situations.

BROWN: Did you get the same dissension for the same reasons over the masters from the organizations, etc. [PHONE RINGS -- BREAK IN AUDIO] Are there any 01:14:00students from the early programs in either the masters PhD that particularly come to mind after all these years?

KUSHNER: Oh sure. Sure. I have lunch with a numbers of students still from early, early in the masters. Yeah--yeah. I think one of our--well I think he may have been the first distinguished alumnus awardee. Mike English--

BROWN: --Uh-hm--

KUSHNER: --who has--who chaired the County Planning Commission two or three times, served as a member for many years. He was the guy behind the trolley that's suppose to link of number of sites downtown and then into the aquarium channelside.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Mike has been very successful planning and design--urban planning and design consultant since he graduated. His son is our God son [both laugh], so 01:15:00you know we're real close to Mike and Jane. We see them a lot and others as well. Uh--I don't see--I don't think I see any of the doctoral graduates because for one thing I saw them, I would see them only in one course--the doctoral people. I've sat on committees, but I've never chaired--I don't think I've ever chaired a doctoral committee. There's always tension between MA and PhD students and between faculty, those who want doctoral students and value them more than 01:16:00MA students and we all knew about this and we were warned about it and we felt like we could handle it because we knew about it before. Um--but I don't know. It seems to me I saw even by the time I graduated that the warnings probably made more than less sense. I mean to be brutally truthful.

BROWN: But is it inevitable, or is there--would there be--I mean you knew about it, so evidently there isn't really a way around it.

KUSHNER: No I think not. I think not.

BROWN: And the field can benefit from both masters and PhD students.

KUSHNER: Oh absolutely, but within the department there comes to be a division in attention that wasn't there before when there was only the MA and everybody 01:17:00was focused on the MA or the BA and everybody was focused on them [Brown clears throat].

BROWN: I see. Um--so what percentage of those first graduates in your masters and PhD program do you think got jobs in applied anthropology?

KUSHNER: All.

BROWN: Even 10 years later when we were turning out PhD's they all ended up going into anthropology programs, anthropology projects?

KUSHNER: Oh yeah. Yeah. Whatever they did--I get a newsletter for example sent to me from a graduate, I can't even remember when, who is Watershed Coordinator in a county in Northern California and what he, his task essentially is, is to protect and preserve the physical environment in that county. Not all of it, but 01:18:00water resources in particular and uh--trees and grassy areas, the public lands. Because in preserving those, then the private holdings of ranchers particularly are enhanced. So he publishes a newsletter every couple of months. He hustles contracts, grants, grants for his office. He uh--meets with all of the stakeholders in the area so as to ensure that they participate and are aware that they participate in what goes on.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: He doesn't sit there and make up what happens. Um--and you know, we correspond in email. He's always telling me he's making use of "ECHH" all the 01:19:00time--all the time.

BROWN: Well what's the history of the mentor program in the department? I understand from some of the students I've talked to, the mentoring program that is so prevalent in the department, was that part of--did that grow out of the masters program or the PhD program?

KUSHNER: You're going to have to tell me what you mean.

BROWN: Well, just the mentoring that goes on between students and faculty, etc. It seems to be a little more uh--pronounced in our anthropology program. Is that because of all passion that was brought to creating these?

KUSHNER: Well I think there is, even in a straight program, that relationship between a student and faculty adviser.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Uh--and if you're lucky, that can be a wonderful experience on both sides and you can take that experience away with you forever.

BROWN: Do you remember some of the students you mentored?

KUSHNER: Sure. All of them. Oh yes, and I have lunch with a number of them now and have email contact with others who are around the country. Uh--yes, it can be a wonderful thing and I guess, especially early on when we were all aware of the students and the faculty, that we were engaged in a glorious experiment and we were hoping that the experiment would work. It added even to the passion and excitement that was already there so we all felt like we were a blazing a trail which in fact is what we were doing. And so as the years went on, initially we'd 01:21:00go to meetings usually SFAA, AAA--where the people would say "Oh, you're at that place they're trying/doing something or other. What is that? I've heard about it." And then uh--a few years later, people used to come up and say "Oh, you're at the place that has that MA in applied anthropology."

BROWN: So you feel you got a lot of support from the other schools too? Other universities?

KUSHNER: Uh-hm.

BROWN: In state, out-of-state? You said earlier that they actually would--

KUSHNER: Mainly out-of-state. No, but there were people. A very good friend of mine came to Florida. I mean we were good friends before as chair and uh--he was wonderful. I have a plant in the backyard which he gave to us personally when we 01:22:00got the PhD. I know people at Florida State as really good friends. It's the institutional competition one has to separate from--individual.

BROWN: Right--right, but we do have support across the United States for the program, right?

KUSHNER: When I last heard. [Both laugh]. Oh yeah.

BROWN: Well what do you think is the future for applied anthropology?

KUSHNER: I don't know. I don't know. I must say since my retirement I have really, really retired. I don't pay attention to a lot of stuff now like that.

BROWN: Right. It must be wonderful.

KUSHNER: You know when people ask about it I tell them the truth. If I had known how wonderful retirement was, I would never have gone to work in the first place. [Brown laughs]. I go to meetings still.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: To see friends. And yet I really don't pay attention to what's going on in the trade now.

BROWN: Okay. What advice would you give to graduate students and would it be the same advice for the master's student and it would be for the PhD student?

KUSHNER: My advice with regard to?

BROWN: Well you know, here I am a graduate student going into the program, what pearls of wisdom could you share with such as me?

KUSHNER: None, but I could make some suggestions.

BROWN: Oh okay.

KUSHNER: I wouldn't call them pearls of wisdom. One, try to figure out what you're interested in. If you presently at any point in this don't know what you're interested in--wonderful. Take more courses where the requirements are minimal. Take reading courses. You can get credit for that.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: There are reading courses in the catalog. Go to some faculty member who knows something about something and say "I'd like to find out about that. What might I do." I took a reading course for example when I returned to Arizona because I had heard--well, I was an instructor for four years teaching mainly introductory and a number of courses in sociology and uh--I knew that there was something called the new archeology or processional archeology going on, but I didn't know very much about it.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: So when I returned to Arizona to be a doctoral student, I realized that one of the archeologists there was a distinguished junior but a brilliant junior 01:25:00in the new archeology movement, he was a first or second PhD out of the guy who created it.

BROWN: Wow.

KUSHNER: In Chicago. And so I ran to him my first term. I said "Please, I want a reading course and I want to find out what all of this is about." Uh--so he assigned [Kushner laughs] readings and toward the end of the term, I had to give him a paper, and he read the paper. Oh no-no-no, I'd meet him once a week and we'd talk about what I read and we argue because I had a lot of criticism. I loved it, but I thought they really need to improve in a number of ways and I told him. So after one of these "shouting" matches [Kushner laughs] in his office, he said "God dammit, put it in writing." Really. And I did. The following week I gave him 25-26 pages. Something like that, and he said "Would 01:26:00you mind if I send it to the guy Binford--Louie Binford, who started it all?" I said "Oh my God, I'd be delighted." So he did and Binford didn't respond so he gave me back the paper and said "Listen, clean it up a little bit and send it out to American Antiquity which is the journal for American archeology. I did, and it was published. I was still a graduate student and uh--it was the first published critique of the new archeology ever and it was in American Antiquity which is the number one American archeology journal and that was consequent to a reading course. Of course I wanted to be a professor. So publication was important.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: And that go so much attention.

BROWN: Right. [VACUUM STARTED -- BREAK IN AUDIO]

KUSHNER: In any case, that was really I guess, in terms of my career goals, and that's what we're talking about, it was wildly successful--that reading course. I took others in areas that I wanted to learn about but were not covered in class.

BROWN: Right-right.

KUSHNER: So also, should students do I think the MA program to learn something about some material that isn't covered in class, to learn more about something that maybe is covered in class, but not sufficiently.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: But a student has to take that responsibility upon their self. That's one thing. So these two suggestions are aimed at enhancing one's knowledge. Very 01:28:00importantly I would say given my experience in the later years of the program. Students increasingly felt that they wanted an internship that would pay and would take internships I saw any number of students, not my advisees but others, taking internships that paid but in which they were not real interested and that was not what they wanted to do. They didn't want to work in that area. They took the internship because they got money. I would point out at every opportunity I had because they were not my students directly, that I spent two years in Arizona working on my masters degree eating horse meat, tortillas and beans. That was it. [Brown laughs]. I didn't have any money. Horse meat then was I 01:29:00think twenty cents a pound. It was wonderful. There's no fat. French gourmets eat horse meat after all. So I would suggest to people take out more loans. You're already burdened by loans. All of us were. I don't know hardly any anthropologist who had independent means as a student. We all took out loans. We all didn't eat a whole lot. We all were very skinny. Years before being skinny was nice [Kushner laughs], right? We were skinny because we were hungry. So now is your chance for that experience. My God, don't take an internship someplace unless you're really interested in it because this is the basis. . .your first 01:30:00experience in the world off campus. You want it to be a good one. You want to make use of it. Don't be wasteful. I would say that.

BROWN: I also hear in you recounting your own experience that perhaps graduate students didn't use to be quite as timid as holding themselves out for what they knew in their expertise. I mean here you took on Louie Binford in your opinions. When do you think it begins to sink in to people that they are anthropologists once they're in the graduate programs?

KUSHNER: Oh God, I don't know. My situation was different I think because I had taught for four years at the University of Houston. That was my first job. I had been a graduate student at North Carolina at Chapel Hill for three years after 01:31:00my masters at Arizona and then while I was teaching Houston, Chapel Hill threw me out. Long bloody story, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I stayed at Houston a little longer and then went back to Arizona for the PhD and Spicer was there and again we were mentor and student and it was wonderful, wonderful. I was real close to Spicer until he died. But the point I'm making is that I was kind of a semi-pro by the time I was a doctoral student at Arizona.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: I came in as a matter of fact, my first term I taught a course, a huge lecture course for a guy who was overseas or something and I had a faculty 01:32:00office. I had access to secretaries. The head of the department told me to attend faculty meetings and I did. I went to the first meeting and I said I'm not going to come back anymore. [Brown laughs]. But it was very nice. It was a nice transition back into being a graduate student after four years on the faculty.

BROWN: Yeah. That's right.

KUSHNER: So it didn't faze me in the least to argue with a guy in his office or to uh--write that paper about the new archeology. I knew some of that stuff anyway, philosophy of science anyway.

BROWN: So what particular pitfalls besides the internship would you caution us to be conscious of, and are there different pitfalls or different advice for the masters students than the PhD or are they still pretty much the same?

KUSHNER: I would say in terms of being a student, it is essentially the same. 01:33:00You have got to be responsible for yourself. Uh--it seems to me the relationship between adviser and graduate student is one in which the student is an equal participant in the process. The difference is knowledge and I suppose worldliness too, [Kushner laughs], but that varies. That varies so much. Sometimes you get a kid who has just finished college and other times you get more mature people. So the difference is knowledge of the field, but the adviser can't advise you to be a different person. The student has to be responsible. The student has to read the catalog and be aware of the requirements. The student has to know that if you get a serious contract written before the 01:34:00internship and all three parties know what's going on, and if you get a schedule --what was it called then? [Break in audio] If you make sure as a student that the contract contains this time line and tasks are laid out month by month and if the contract includes a provision that there is time at the end during which your only task is to prepare the final agency report, and if all three parties understand that and you know that all of that has to be done before registration. We used to require the contract to be shown before we could register, but then that went by the board in later years with a less-rigid chair I suppose and others, and students would begin their internship and not have a 01:35:00clue as to what they were doing and have to scramble and the internship is nowhere near as productive and the thesis was messy. So the student has got to take responsibility and use what's available here in ways that makes the most sense for the student. Not for the faculty. You've got to realize everything is minimal. Requirements are minimal so you can always take more hours and in the good old days we all did because we knew that we couldn't get everything wanted in the required minimal curriculum.

BROWN: Excellent advice.

KUSHNER: Well, I think of it as practical stuff for a student in a practical 01:36:00program to do. If this program is approached as if it were any other where you do the minimal stuff and you get out, it's not going to be anywhere, anywhere near as useful with a student and that's the name of the game.

BROWN: Is there anything else that you would really like to have on tape as far as your experience with the people you dealt with or your vision for the program or what you feel like the legacy was that was left here?

KUSHNER: I'm very pleased that it worked out. It gave me something to do. [Both laugh] It gave me something to do for a very long time. I had 14 years as chair which is more time than anybody I've ever known. Seven of those years, I was associate dean and that was a lot of fun because both of those jobs made me 01:37:00aware of the world in which I lived as a professor and I'd been. . . stayed a professor the whole time I wouldn't have been aware of all of this and I found it as fascinating as any other field work I had done. More actually, because I had power as chair, as associate dean, and uh--to the extent that I found out more and more about how things worked which is what we wish to do as anthropologists and as practicing anthropologists, we want to know how best to intervene. Planned intervention Spicer said "Was the essence of applied anthropology." So as I learned how to intervene in this whole system of stuff to 01:38:00make things work the way I wanted them to work for my department for which I was responsible--it was my job, it was just--I found it--I found all those 14 years just fascinating. Fascinating. Trying to figure out this bureaucracy and trying to make it do what I wanted it to do not what it wanted to do to me. I uh--I organized a symposium at a SFAA meeting on practicing anthropology in academic administration--I think was the title, and uh--two of the papers presented were published. Ray Thompson's who was head of anthropology and director of the Arizona State Museum for many years and mine in Practicing Anthropology. Art 01:39:00Gallaher who went from professor to chair of the department at Kentucky to dean to chancellor to president or chancellor--all of Kentucky, had a wonderful paper, but he didn't want to write it all down. Erv Chambers wrote a great paper on what he did in Maryland. Maryland--I think I told you the first time, but not this time around, offered him twice the salary to leave USF and go to Maryland and create a masters like ours, but he over-raised us and called it a masters of applied anthropology which made it more professional sounding. But Erv was aware of doing that sort of thing.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Irv is wonderful. Wonderful guy. Brilliant. Brilliant guy. Elegant writer. So you know, my life was surrounded by such people as Erv and Bob Wulff, whom I still see and am in touch with--a whole bunch of other people, has just been very very rewarding. Very rewarding. Particularly I think in an environment, an academic environment in which most professors think that doing the job of chair is something to be avoided at all costs and because its just pushing paper around. I never thought that was the case. I was amazed in fact to discover it was not the case [Kushner laughs] because I thought it was pushing 01:41:00paper around. I got here in 1970, late August. In October, the chair and senior faculty member told me I was going to be chair the following year--71 [1971]. That would have been 4, 5, 6, 7--in my eighth year of academe and I said "No, I wasn't--" They said "Yes you are." "No, I'm gonna push papers." And then one of them said it's a twelve month contract instead of nine and you know I said "I'll be chair." But then I found happily that it was much more than that.

BROWN: So you actually started being chair of the department several years before this program came up?

KUSHNER: Oh yes, 71 [1971].

BROWN: Oh okay. All right.

KUSHNER: And I must say uh--during 1971, I, I can say I because I did it myself, 01:42:00re-did the BA program and uh--made an introductory and then courses at the junior level in each branch and then the electives in each branch.

BROWN: So it became a real four-fold program.

KUSHNER: Yeah--and hired a physical anthropologist and a linguist--Jerry Smith, the linguist-- Winker, who is no longer in the department.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: So I did that and that was such fun. To make something I thought made sense. [Both laugh]. I had the power to do it so when the MA thing came up and we all were involved with that, that was even better. It was much better.

BROWN: I read a certain amount of passion each time you speak of the group of you performing this--

KUSHNER: I felt that certainly. I think others did too, but I probably more because I was the one who coordinated the whole thing and I could see all of this going on in front of me whereas maybe the others not having that angle didn't see it altogether that way, but I view it and I publish about it as a dream time. A la Australian Aborigines. A wonderful time in the past.

BROWN: Right.

KUSHNER: Very exciting. During the day, at night, various of us would meet and talk about it and we knew that it was going to be wildly innovative in anthropology and it was just exciting as hell. I mean it's one thing to publish 01:44:00something the first couple of times [PHONE RINGING].

BROWN: Dr. Kushner it's been a delight to spend this time with you and get some of the history of the department and history of the applied program here at USF and how its fit into the whole scheme of applied anthropology. I can say that on behalf of the oral history project, we appreciate the time you've given us. Is there anything final you'd like to add?

BROWN: Yes, hello Mike. I hope your well and that you see fit to retire soon while you're healthy. John van Willigen stay well. Why don't you contemplate coming down in the winter? Not you actually by yourself but with Jackie.

[END OF AUDIO]