Youth and education 1 
born in England - Methodist family 
came to South Dakota, 1927 I 
education 3 
Yankton College, 1935 4 
debate team 5-6 
Turner - high school teacher, 1938 6 
Military service, Army 7 
Japanese language 8 
John Turner (1984) 
Turner comes to the University of Minnesota, Political Science, 1945 9-
Quigley, Harold to 
Levi, Werner 10 
Anderson, William to 
McCloskey, Herbert 11 
comparative focus II 
Holt, Robert 11-12 
joint work in comparative political science 13 
behavioral emphasis of department 15 
recruitment and award of merit 16-18 
reorganization of department governance, 1961-62 19-27 
McLaughlin, Charles - as chair 20-21 
expansion of staff 23 
selection of graduate students 26 
Public Administration Center 27 
Honors program 29 
Central Administration of University of Minnesota 29 
University of Minnesota - Duluth, Waseca, Crookston 31-32 
Sibley, Mulford 32 
Interdisciplinary research 35 
Shift in Graduate School minors 38 
Trips to Soviet Union 39-46 
1958, 1968. 1978 40-41 
community seminars 41 
cross-disciplinary learning 44 
Graduate deans 47-51 
Blegen, Theodore 47 
Darley, Jack 47 
Crawford, Bryce 47 
overload, 1960s-1970s 48-49 
Brodbeck, May 50 
lbele, Warren 51 
CLA deans 51-
teaching and research 53 
faculty growth 54 
Sorauf, Frank 56 
John Turner 
Clarke A. Chambers 
Interview with John Turner 
Interviewed by Professor Clarke A. Chambers 
University of Minnesota 
Interviewed on April 15 and May 27, 1984 
University of Minnesota Campus 
- JT 
- CAC 
CAC: Here we are on Sunday, April 15, 1984. I'm Clarke Chambers and I am interviewing 
Regents' Professor John Turner of the Department of Political Science. He's been here on 
campus for a long time and in the department as a member of the faculty for thirty-two or thirty-
three years. It is a lovely spring afternoon and we are in my own study in 2285 Folwell. John 
lives just around the comer. 
John, I'd like to start with a few comments of autobiography, having in mind that these tapes will 
be here for twenty, forty, fifty years. Where professors came from and how they got committed 
to their discipline is always a matter of interest to historians down the line. I hadn't realized until 
I did a little research on your career that you were born at Amble, England. What a lovely name 
for a town. Maybe you could start by saying something about your family and how you got to 
America. 
JT: I always list myself as having been born in Amble but in reality, I was born two miles from 
Amble in a little coal mining village called Togston Terrace. I was born in England in the coal 
mining areas of Northumberland on September 25, 1917. I came from a line of ministers and 
lay ministers. My mother's father and brothers were all coal miners; but, they were all lay 
ministers in the primitive Methodist church. My father was a minister and his brother was a 
minister, a missionary as a matter of fact, to the Gold Coast of Africa. It was always assumed 
that I would enter the ministry as well; but, I didn't really take to that so easily. We emigrated 
to the United States to South Dakota in 1927, which is a year after the general strike. We had 
a chance to come in 1924. The reason why we came to South Dakota is this: Dr. David Parrin, 
who was the head of the Congregational churches in South Dakota had an arrangement with my 
father's theological seminary and a whole group of English ministers came over to South Dakota 
to fill vacant churches. It was a very imaginative and innovative program run by Dr. Parrino We 
would have come earlier in 1924 except that we got stuck by the newly enacted nationality act 
John Turner Interview 
of that year and we had to wait a long time for a visa. We came to the Rosebud Indian 
Reservation to a town by the name Carter, which is seventeen miles from Winner. It was quite 
an adjustment. My father had, at various times, five churches and one of them was an all Indian 
church. His sermons and so on were translated. 
CAC: You were eight or nine years old then? 
JT: Yes. Carter was an interesting place. All of us cried when we woke up that morning. They 
brought us there in the dead of night otherwise we'd have gone right back home. 
CAC: Daughter] 
JT: We cried the next morning; but, after two and a half years, we all cried when we left it. 
I forgot to tell you that I was sent to Ellis Island. The whole family went; but, I was the one that 
was the cause of it all. We were there for a week. The reason is that I have a weak left eye and 
although I was examined by the American consul on the British side, they got me on the boat 
and I didn't pass the examination there. They told my father that the rest of the family could go 
on to South Dakota if they wanted to but I would have to go to Ellis Island; so, we all went to 
Ellis Island. Finally, we got out of Ellis Island because Dr. Parrin intervened through the 
medium of Senator William H. McMaster of South Dakota. He immediately complained, of 
course, to the immigration service. We got off Ellis Island-we were dismissed-without my 
being examined again or anything done to me; but, the point is that when we came riding into 
Winner, which is the nearest railroad to Carter, about ten o'clock at night, we had sixty seven 
cents left. [laughter] 
CAC: Daughter] 
JT: So, we had no option but to stay in Rosebud on the reservation. Carter was an interesting 
town. The church was the center of all social activity. From a sociological sense, it was quite 
an interesting thing. It remained a very viable town of about 300 people until it burned down 
one night and there wasn't a cream can of water to help fight the blaze. We had to carry our 
drinking water for three or four miles. Then, we moved to a place called White River and stayed 
there about three or four years. Then, we moved from there to New Underwood near Rapid City. 
CAC: Were these places on reservations? 
JT: White River is on the border of the reservation and Carter is on it. 
CAC: The schools you went to elementary school then were mixed Indian and white? 
JT: Yes. I'd say about a third of my class in White River was Indian. My best friend was a 
half-breed. 
JohD Turner Interview 2 
CAC: Dakota? 
JT: No, Sioux. It was at White River that I won my first speech contest and got to go to a state 
contest when I was in the fourth grade and perform in front of the governor, William 1. Bulow. 
CAC: Do you remember what the subject was? 
JT: The conservation of natural resources. 
CAC: Bravo! 
JT: I think I would have won first in the state except I was the only one there that didn't have 
a suit on. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: I had a sweater. We moved from there to New Underwood where I was active in academic 
subjects and debate. I got to the state tournament my senior year. I won a lot of speech 
contests. I wanted to travel and the only way you could travel, basically, was to be on the debate 
squad. It gave intellectual satisfaction. In order to get our debate materials, I used to have to 
hitch hike to spend some time in the library there because our library was not adequate. 
CAC: This is in secondary, junior high and high school? 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: You must have had some remarkable teachers to permit that, to encourage it, to spot your 
potential? 
JT: I had an English teacher by the name of Miss Peterson. I've forgotten her first name. I 
didn't like her at all; but, she instilled within me a respect for literature, made me learn grammar 
so that when I went to college my freshman year, I got a perfect score on the entrance English 
test. She helped me learn to write. The result was that after my sophomore year in college when 
I realized what she had done for me and I realized I had been a thorn in her side on many 
occasions ... 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: ... I wrote her a lovely letter and thanked her for what she'd done. I also, in my senior 
year particularly, had a very strong, vital, intellectually oriented debate coach who was the social 
science person. He was also the superintendent of schools. It was under him that we got to the 
state tournament by defeating Rapid City, as a matter of fact. New Underwood was an 
interesting town because the Congregational Church was pretty much under the domination of 
Johil Turner Interview 3 
the fundamentalists. My father finally resigned because there was so much criticism from the 
congregation. 
CAC: He was too moderate in theology? 
JT: Yes. He left New Underwood at the end of my junior year; but, I stayed on in New 
Underwood by myself in senior year when I was sixteen in order to graduate, and be able to play 
basketball, and that sort of thing. 
CAC: Did you have brothers and sisters? 
JT: Yes, one brother and one sister, both younger than I. 
CAC: Were either of them attracted to the academic world? 
JT: Oh, yes. My sister taught high school for quite some time. My brother went on and got 
some advanced degrees, taught at South Dakota State, Doane College in Nebraska, the University 
of Hawaii, and then finally decided he needed more money so he left academia and worked for 
a time in Land O'Lakes. 
After being graduated from high school, I faced a crisis in my life because I didn't know that I 
would be able to go on to college. 
CAC: This was in the midst of the Depression? 
JT: It was 1935. I didn't have any money except for $100 which I'd earned one summer hoeing 
beets in Nisland, South Dakota, with the Mexicans. That, I kept. But no one from our little 
town-New Underwood only had 280 people-had ever gone to college. I was finally persuaded 
to go to college. I lacked confidence. I thought I could make it academically; but, I wasn't sure 
I could make it financially. I applied for a scholarship to the University of Denver and I got it. 
I suddenly realized that I had to pay room and other kinds of expenses, and I had no money for 
that, and I was rather terrified of the big city; so, I didn't take it. I went out to Placerville, South 
Dakota, in the Black Hills near Pactola. I was president of the Congregational youth group and 
one of the recruiters from Yankton College came. His name was Alison Dunham, the father of 
Steve Dunham in our legal department. 
CAC: Heavens. 
JT: Alison was going to be a senior at Yankton. I remember our sitting on a rock and his 
answering all sorts of questions for me. I had thought Yankton College was a theological 
seminary. This was part of a plot on the part of my parents to get me into theology. When he 
assured me that that wasn't the case and he assured me that I could probably at least start out 
with $100, I enrolled and went to Yankton College. 
John Turner Interview 4 
CAC: Now, that was living away from college, too. You had to pay room and board there as 
you would have at Denver? 
JT: Yes. I managed to do it though. I had a job for awhile working on buildings and grounds. 
That spring, I had a job as a night watchman and I made $75 one week during the pageant of 
Dakota Land, which was the centenary of the Dakota. Then, I did some work as a secretary. 
I had learned shorthand in high school and I got a secretarial job. I never had much trouble 
except my senior year when I ran out of money. 
CAC: You didn't have an athletic scholarship? You had a reputation of playing basketball there? 
JT: I got a scholarship for being a minister's son at half tuition. 
CAC: But not for playing basketball? 
JT: [pause] We'll skip that one. 
CAC: [laughter] You did play basketball for Yankton though, right? 
JT: Not really, no. I played a lot of basketball but not welL 
CAC: All right. Did you major in political science, social sciences? 
JT: Yes. Let me wind up this Al Dunham thing. I didn't see Al Dunham after he was graduated 
in 1939 until the year before last when he came to the University of Minnesota as a visiting 
professor. We had lunch on several occasions and then one Sunday during Christmas vacation, 
we had the whole Dunham tribe over at our house for brunch. It was a lovely occasion. 
CAC: He remembered the original occasion? 
JT: Oh, yes, he remembered it. I was on the debate team at yankton College with his brother, 
Steve's uncle; so, our ties with the Dunham were quite close. 
Did I major in political science? I took all the political science courses there were; but, mostly 
my major was in English, English literature, and American literature, and some speech work. 
I took a broad program. I was graduated magna cum laude. I missed summa by getting a B in 
education when I should have gotten an A. The reason I got a B ... I always had an 
arrangement with education. I didn't like those classes. I knew I had to take it because I had 
to teach in high school. I had a minor in education. I used to go to class the first day, and find 
out what the lay of the land was, and then read all the books, and read all the assignments but 
never come to class. I always got the highest grade in the class. I always got a B. I had figured 
it out that I was going to be right on the border but I could make a summa. I miscalculated and 
missed it. 
John Turner Interview 5 
CAC: [laughter] That wasn't a major catastrophe. 
JT: I still had the highest honor points of anybody in our class. 
CAC: Was this the class of 1939? 
JT: Yes. My biggest contribution to Yankton College was in the realm of speech and debate. 
We won many tournaments, many cups. I won the tri-state in original oratory in various 
categories, also extemporaneous speaking, and then I went to Northwestern University for a 
national oratory contest and I think I got third. 
CAC: That kind of talent and performance could have led to law and politics as well as into the 
academic world. 
JT: Yes. I was fiddling around with the possibility of law. Several things occurred. I could 
have probably gone on to law school after being graduated from yankton. I did have a teaching 
assistantship offered to me by Bill Farber at the University of South Dakota; but, lowed a little 
bit of money, like $400, to the college and I felt I was a little bit immature; so, I got avery, very 
good teaching position in a high school at Tripp, South Dakota, which is near Mitchell. It was 
the highest paid teaching job that was awarded that year, $1050. I had to start a speech program 
and teach some English and a little social science. They had a very good superintendent. I 
started out one young person in speech and debate-he made my debate team-who later ran for 
the senate seat held by Karl Mundt when Karl Mundt died. He's a very respected attorney now 
in Yankton, South Dakota and has avery, very high record of wins. 
CAC: There was a young man from Huron by the name of Hubert Humphrey that was there just 
a bit before you and had the same kind of career profile. 
JT: Somewhat. 
CAC: Methodist. Lots of speaking ... 
JT: My father switched to the Congregational when he came to this country. I taught at Tripp 
for two years and then the last week I was there, I met the girl who was later to become my 
wife. Her home was Tripp; but, I never met while I was there. She was teaching in another 
town. I got a job at Madison, South Dakota, which was a larger city, bigger salary. I was the 
second highest paid debate coach and speech teacher in South Dakota at that time. 
CAC: For a young man that was very good. 
JT: My debate teams, both in Tripp and Madison, were very successful ... my speech teams 
as well. The kids did very well. They respected me, and they liked me, and they were 
disciplined. They were willing to learn and I think they benefitted from it. As a matter of fact, 
John Turner Interview 6 
I liked high school teaching. I would have been perfectly willing to be a high school teacher 
because I was satisfied. I thought I was a good one-I was. But then, the war came and I went 
in the Army for four years. 
CAC: That war experience was in Japanese intelligence? 
JT: Toward the end, yes. What happened was I went in rather early when there weren't all that 
any college graduates going in and I got to a reception center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 
CAC: This is 1942? 
JT: Yes... and they kept me there in classification, interviewing incoming people. I did that 
for about a year and then I got kind of tired of it. I was in limited service because of my eye 
and I had to get out of limited service, which I did by ruse. Then, eventually, I ended up in a 
place at the University of lllinois called a star unit, and they gave me some language aptitude 
tests, and I did quite well on that. Then, they sent me to the University of Minnesota ... 
CAC: Ah, that's the connection. 
JT: ... presumably to learn German. I knew a little bit of it. We had a week off before school 
started and my wife called up and said, "Maybe, during that week we could get married." 
CAC: Many of us were on such a spur of the moment. 
JT: I said, " Okay , I'll see if! can get a leave." I got a leave; but, the company commander said, 
"y ou can"-this is kind of funny-"have it; but, it means if we don't have enough people for 
Japanese, we'll just put you in." 
CAC: Daughter] 
JT: I said, "That's all right with me. I'd just as soon learn Japanese as German." Then, I got 
interested in the Far East and went from my Japanese training to a place called Mint Hill Farm 
Station near Warrenton, Virginia. I was in Japanese intelligence there for quite some time. 
During that Army experience-you asked me why I came into political science-I did a lot of 
reading on law. I was never too much interested in it anyway; but, I decided that maybe I 
shouldn't stay in high school teaching, that maybe I should go on and I should certainly get some 
advanced degrees even if I stayed in high school teaching. But, the question was what should 
I take it in? I was quite convinced, at that point, that it shouldn't be English; although, I liked 
English a lot. I liked to write. I was interested in sociology, and economics, and political 
science. During my Army experience, I didn't run around an awful lot. I did a lot of reading 
in those three fields and I finally narrowed on political science. I had always been interested in 
political meetings. I remember Milo Reno and the Farmers' Holiday Movement. I hitchhiked 
John Turner Interview 7 
to Rapid City to hear him speak in the Minneapolis Auditorium. I saw him hold 10,000 farmers 
in the palm of his hand that night. I was very interested in some of the radical movements and 
agrarian movements of the 1930s; so, I'd always been interested in politics. I decided on political 
science. 
CAC: Excuse for interrupting. Was Japanese government part of the Japanese language program 
you were in with the Army? 
JT: Yes, we got language but we also got government and geography and I sat in on some 
political science courses on the side ... Evron Kirkpatrick, for example. He didn't know I sat 
in the back row . . . not for credit; I just sat in on it. 
CAC: That's a pretty heavy schedule. 
JT: Oh, it was. I got all As and one D. I got a D in military. I don't know why I got it. I took 
all the tests and I passed them all; but, they gave me a D. I didn't care. That was only one 
quarter. The next quarter, I didn't go so regularly and I got a B and the third quarter, I didn't go 
at all and I got an A; so, I was learning rather rapidly how to handle that one. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: I've got my transcripts if, sometime, you want to look at them. So, I decided on political 
science and I sent away for all kinds of catalogs ... Michigan, Harvard ... 
CAC: It's the end of the war now, right? 
JT: No, this was during the war. I was going to make up my mind where to go. I wrote to a 
friend of mine in Washington, and told him to go over to somebody in the Office of Education 
and get an idea what the ten best were, and I decided on Minnesota. One of the reasons was that 
William Anderson was president of the American Political Science Association at the time. That 
rather impressed me; so, I wrote to the department here. Harold Quigley, I think, was chair 
... either he or Anderson. I asked if I could get a teaching assistantship to start the quarter after 
I got out of the Army; this was a rather peculiar kind of request. They wrote to me and said, 
"Yes." I had pulled together a dossier, my transcript, some letters from previous superintendents 
where I had taught school and some of my company commanders. I had some responsible 
positions in the Army. 
CAC: Toward the end, were you in occupation, John? 
JT: No. 
CAC: You never went to Japan? 
John Turner Interview 8 
JT: No, I was supposed to go to Okinawa in November. The war came to an end in August. 
I never made it overseas. 
CAC: I was in Okinawa in August of 1945. 
JT: You were? 
CAC: Yes, July, August, September. Now, you see, we might have met. 
JT: I'd rather meet you, Clarke, here. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: That's how I got into political science. 
CAC: Bill Anderson was chairman ... 1935 to 1948; so, he must have been the person. 
Quigley followed him for four or five years. You came here in 1945 after the war? 
JT: In 1946. 
CAC: And started right in? 
JT: When I got of the Army in February of 1946, my wife had been teaching school in 
Bethesda. She was under contract. I said to myself, "What kind of a job can I get"-because 
I didn't have very much money-"that would fit her schedule?" I got a job teaching high school 
for one semester in Arlington, Virginia. That way, our things jibed. 
CAC: Happily, we all had the GI Bill. Once you got started, that was a lifesaver. 
JT: Yes. I needed money at that time to live in Washington. 
CAC: Yes. You came here in 1946 and found yourself immediately at home with a good 
department? 
JT: Yes. I think I got good training. 
CAC: Who was your advisor in those years? 
JT: Harold Quigley. 
CAC: Was that because of your Japanese background that you got him? 
John Turner Interview 9 
JT: I was interested in the Far East at that point. I did my dissertation in the Japanese political 
party. Werner Levi was my advisor part of the time because Harold Quigley was, for a year, in 
the occupation of Japan. I think it was 1947 when Werner took over for me for part of the time. 
William Anderson was a grand old man of Political Science. I had a great deal of respect for 
him. Those of us who respected him never called him Bill as his colleagues did. Even years 
later when I became a colleague, I never called him Bill. People much younger than I called him 
Bill; but, I just did it from force of habit. He didn't like to be called Dr. Anderson. He used to 
say, "Call me mister; that's enough." So, we used to call him, "Mr. Anderson." 
CAC: You say, "We." Does that mean that more than you shared that disposition? 
JT: Y es, [unclear] and teaching assistants, T As. 
CAC: I wonder ... that's partly generational. When I came here, my senior colleagues ... I 
called them all mister so and so, Mister Krey, Mister Wilson, Mister Deutsch for five, or eight, 
or ten years. I never called Mr. Krey anything but Mister Krey. Boy! how times change. 
JT: Yes, they do. William Anderson ... I took Scope and Methods from him. He was not a 
flamboyant teacher but a great teacher. I learned a great deal from him. He had a broad outlook 
on the field, a broad perspective. He anticipated the so-called behavioral movement and did what 
he could to encourage it, sometimes against the opposition of some others in the department who 
were not quite so much inclined that way. I look back on it now and I don't think it was quite 
right for a different reason; but, he looked upon this upsurge of students into the Political Science 
Department and into Political Science classes as a great challenge. Enrollments were no longer 
a problem. It was a great challenge for him. He did a great job of administering the department. 
I felt very insecure; but, in 1947, he asked me teach a class. I didn't think I was ready to teach 
a class but he said, "Yes, you are." By golly, I taught my first class. 
CAC: What was it? 
JT: It was Elements of Political Science and then, later on, I got another one ... Elementary 
Comparative Government. I got my feet wet the hard way while I was still a graduate student. 
CAC: That's the first time you've said "comparative government" and that's where you've made 
much of your reputation. 
JT: Yes. Yes. I want to explain how I got into that, too, because that's kind of interesting. I 
had a double role when I came into Political Science because I took political science in a very 
small school and I wasn't a political science major. I was an English major. So, my first year 
and a half were kind of rough because I had to do on my own an awful lot of shoveling in and 
building up. That's why I didn't really want to start teaching when I did; but, Werner Levi 
pointed out to me that, in effect, when I'd been asked, I had better do it-so I did. 
JOM Turner IntervIew 10 
CAC: There's no better way to learn than to teach. 
JT: In my graduate work, I, early, came under, what you might call, the behavioral kind of 
influence through a man by the name of Herbert McCloskey. He and I were very close friends. 
Then, I began to work in my dissertation area and I began to ask certain kinds of questions that 
I was rather powerless to answer. Our program, at that time, was rather traditional. 
[End of Tape 1, Side 1] 
[Tape 1, Side 2] 
JT: We didn't have tools like statistics and that sort of thing. We still took the prerequisites, 
ordinarily the French and German language. I got by the French okay; but, I had to petition in 
order to be allowed to use Japanese for that requirement. I began to feel that maybe I should 
broaden myself out; so, I started taking lots of European government as well as the Far East. 
When I was studying Chinese Communism, I really felt that I couldn't understand it unless I 
knew more about the Soviet [unclear]; so, I started taking Herb's Soviet course and I took a 
course under Wa1demir Gurion from Notre Dame. Then, I began to get more and more into the 
field of comparative politics and concluded that I didn't want to be a Far Eastern major ... that 
I wanted to do was to orient myself more in a problem direction and then use particular research 
sites to get answers to particular problems. I think that served us in pretty good stead because 
when Herb went into the behavioral program, I stayed on and became the member of the 
Comparative [Government] section. I remember we were trying to get another person in 
Comparative and they me put on a personnel committee to serve without vote because I 
represented the comparative field. We had two candidates. One was a man by the name of Curt 
Shell, who was a former student of Ben Lippincott and pretty much in the traditional mould, and 
the other one was Bob Holt, whom I did not know, who at that time, as a matter of fact, was in 
the Army in Germany. I read his stuff and it impressed me. I made the point to my colleagues 
on the committee that comparative politics was going to go in a particular direction because there 
was a scientific movement afoot and the essence of science is comparative. I said, "This will 
be the way it will go. We have nothing to loose by bringing Holt over here for one year. We 
can give him a one year contract and if we don't like him, we can dismiss him then." 
CAC: Was he already degreed by that time? 
JT: He was already degreed from Princeton or else working on his thesis. He may have been 
working on his thesis at Radio Free Europe; but, when he came to us, he had his dissertation 
done. 
CAC: He came in 1956, it says here. 
JT: That's how our comparative mould got started; it was Bob coming and we saw eye to eye. 
We had an image of what we'd like our section of the department to be in the years ahead; so, 
John Turner Interview 11 
we sort of got it set that we would hire people in the comparative area who were interested in 
the broad comparative approach but who also had an area in which they were willing to do 
research and willing to teach. That's been the format of that ever since. At it's peak, our 
Comparative section was the strongest in the nation and it brought a great deal of national 
prestige to the department. 
CAC: Does this speak to the fact that your early publications, at least your book publications, 
were joint authored and with the three persons whose names you've mentioned: Quigley, 
McCloskey, and Holt? 
JT: No, that's got nothing to do with that. 
CAC: That's not the comparative angle? 
JT: No. I'll tell you how I got involved with that. Harold Quigley became ill. I had come on 
the department for one year in 1950-1951 and he became ill around 1952 or 1953. He was 
working on the book, The New Japan [:Government & Politics]. He had it about half done. I 
used to go over to see him because I used to work with him a little bit on therapy. I had a lot 
of respect for Harold Quigley. He was a very, very bright man. We didn't have the same 
approach; but, he was a great intellect and a wonderful man with the pen. He had a much more 
graceful writing style, for example, than William Anderson. I had a lot of respect for Harold 
Quigley and he was very good to me. He was a hard taskmaster. He wasn't sure that I was 
doing the right thing moving in this comparative direction. He asked me if I would help him 
finish his book and I wasn't sure, at that time, that I could handle it because I had other things 
to do-I was teaching and so on-but, I said, "Yes." I worked very hard on it and it was good 
experience because my script had to go by him and I learned how to write a book under a 
master, in effect, in an apprenticeship situation. 
CAC: Although he was unwell, he still had his [unclear]? 
JT: Oh, yes, yes. Even after he retired in 1954-they moved to California-he continued to 
write. He was still writing at the time of his death. 
Herb McCloskey had been working on that Soviet book for I don't know how many years and 
he'd heard that the experience that Quigley had with me wasn't too bad; so, he asked me if I 
would help him finish his Soviet book, which I did because I relished the opportunity at that time 
of delving more deeply into the Soviet field. I'd just had course work and I wanted to become 
more deeply immersed in the area. Then, I was able to use some more behavioral kinds of stuff 
in that book. I wrote two or three chapters more for The New Japan, the Quigley book; but, Mr. 
Quigley thought they didn't exactly fit. I still have those. Daughter] 
JoOO Turner Interview 12 
CAC: But default you're moving into confirming the comparative field. You start out with 
Japan. Then, you move to Soviet Union and it's through Bob Holt that you open up Europe? 
Or is that not the progression? 
JT: Yes, pretty much so. Then, Bob and I got interested in the general problems of 
conceptualization. We did a lot of things together and we did our own things individually as 
well. 
CAC: Sure. 
JT: Bob and I used to argue a lot; but, we never had pride of authorship. We were interested 
in a good final product and that was what was important. 
CAC: That's a rare relationship [unclear] authors. 
JT: We carried through some very good ideas. There was one book that we did entitled The 
Political Basis of Economic Development which involves a study of France, Britain, Japan, China 
and, in the appendix, the Soviet Union. That book is still considered to be a classic in its field 
in the comparative approach. As a matter of fact, we ended up in second place for the Woodrow 
Wilson prize of the American Political Science Association . . . the prize going to Barrington 
Moore of Harvard by one vote of the committee. We almost made it. That was such a far-out 
book that Bob and I did that we couldn't get any foundation support. I typed that manuscript 
myself. 
CAC: Who took the risk on the publication then? 
JT: Daughter] That was kind of interesting. The bookmen would stop by and talk to us during 
the course of the year. Then, they'd say, "Would you send us a manuscript and let us look it 
over when you get it done?" I didn't want a contract done until we got it finished. I handled 
all of this; Bob didn't mess around much with the contract. I said, "I'm going to send it to a 
group of other publishers at the same time, if you have no objection to that?" They said, "No." 
So, I sent it to six people at the same time and we got five contracts. 
CA C: Then, you had to choose among them? 
JT: Yes. I chose the worst. 
CAC: Who did you go with? 
JT: Van Nostrand. I chose the worst. That's the story of my life. 
CAC: Say something else about the strength of Comparative Government then. Once Bob Holt 
came in 1956, there were the two of you. Did it extend beyond that? 
Johl1 Turner IntervIew 13 
JT: No, not for quite some time. 
CAC: Later on, who came in? 
JT: Dick Blue, August Nimtz, Roger Benjamin. 
CAC: They would all think of themselves explicitly as being comparative persons? 
JT: [unclear], yes. 
CAC: They were attracted to Minnesota in part because the two of you had established that? 
JT: Partly that, yes. Phil Shively bridges the comparative and the American. We had a strong 
group. You might be interested in having me chat a little bit about the behavioral approach in 
Political Science. 
CAC: Please do. 
JT: I mentioned earlier on that our department was quite a traditional department and it was. 
I felt, for example-if you'll forgive me for saying so-that while I was doing my dissertation, 
I needed to do certain things and I wasn't trained to do them. That makes you feel as though 
you're trying to write with your hands behind your back. So, I supported a broadening of the 
curriculum. This was resisted in certain kinds of ways; but, I want to point out that the 
behavioral traditional split never became as serious in our department as it was in most 
departments. I think that's to the credit of all concerned. The traditionalists were in the majority 
for quite some time. Part of the problem with us was that Herb McCloskey was not popular. 
He was the symbol of behavioralism and he was considered to be abrasive. That was unfortunate 
because they never let themselves see Herb McCloskey's soul. I remember when he had a job 
offer from Northwestern. That's the biggest hoop-de-doo I think our department ever had. I led 
the forces for Herb and Charles McLaughlin led the forces against Herb. Anderson was on my 
side. We ended up losing. They ended up offering Herb, as a matter of fact, a raise. It wasn't 
as big as the one that he would have gotten if the normal course of events had moved on. 
CAC: But, he didn't leave to go to Northwestern. He left to go to California. 
JT: That's right. He later on had an offer from ... 
CAC: So, he stayed anyhow? 
JT: He stayed on anyhow. One of the reasons why he stayed was that Jack Darley got him 
some extra money through a social relations program they had at that time and some summer 
support so that his overall salary was a little higher; but, it wasn't anything the department did. 
John Turner Interview 14 
CAC: In 1960, he did leave? 
JT: In 1959 or 1960, yes. He went to Berkeley. It was a big loss from our point of view. 
CAC: Charles McLaughlin wrote much later that the "predominate orientation in the Political 
Science Department is broadly behavioral but with no major split." That's what you're saying? 
JT: That's right. It ended up being broadly behavioral. Do you want to know ... ? 
CAC: Oh, I want to know everything! 
JT: When I first came to the department, most of the decisions were made by three people: 
Harold Quigley, Lloyd Short, and William Anderson Mattison. We had department meetings; 
but, the basic decisions were ... certainly they had a chief consensus among those three before 
they ever came to the meeting. 
CAC: Now, Quigley was ill in the early 1950s and retired in 1952 ... 
JT: He retired in 1954. 
CAC: So, you're describing something that happens into the early 1950s? 
JT: Yes. Then, Lloyd Short became chairman and we used to have some department meetings 
and discuss certain kinds of things. I remember we wrote a new constitution. Ben Lippincott 
was largely in charge of this and we proceeded to democratize. 
CAC: This was during Short's administration that you moved toward the opening up? 
JT: It opened up a little bit more, yes; but, a lot of it came in 1958, 1959, which I'll explain. 
There were two things wrong, I think, with our department in those early years from, say, about 
1950 when I came aboard. I had a one year contract ... Werner Levi's half salary, $2500. Then 
that following spring-I had no intentions of staying in Minnesota-they came and asked me if 
I would stay on another year at $3600. I was working with Harold Quigley on the book; so, I 
said, "Yes." Then, I got a job offer at Penn State and I was going to go. I was packing my 
books one night over here on University A venue when Lloyd Short came up the back steps. He 
said the department had met and wanted to know if I would consider a tenured track. I didn't 
have the vaguest notion they were even thinking about that. I said, "Did they consider the 
business of inbreeding?" because I was always very sensitive about that. He said, "Yes, we 
discussed that at great length and we concluded that you weren't inbred with anybody." I was 
always sensitive about that inbreeding because I never wanted that hurled at me and it never has 
been. It never has been. 
CAC: Did the department hire very many other of its own? 
1000 Turner Interview 15 
JT: I was saying that there were two things that I think afflicted the department at that time. 
One was the tendency to not set sights very high on recruitment. 
CAC: Recruitment of faculty? 
JT: Faculty, yes. There was a tendency to take people whom they knew and in some cases, their 
own advisees. I remember one time, for example, in the realm of local government, they brought 
in a guy from Berkeley, an assistant professor. He'd been an assistant professor there for about 
ten years. His name was George Dugger. He'd only written one article. When he came here, 
all he did was read that article to us. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: Our group ... the group of people who wanted to forge ahead a little bit faster voted against 
him; but, we lost. Later on, he didn't come. But, whoever heard of George Dugger since? That 
happened in a lot of cases. Floyd Pflaum, for example, was a local product. We had to vote 
against him twice and then he finally made the decision not to stay. There was a tendency that 
way, a tendency to get people that I didn't think were very exciting and Bob Holt didn't think 
they were very exciting, and Herb McCloskey, and Werner Levi. We were the group. 
The second thing is that there was a natural tendency for merit to be distributed rather broadly. 
Consequently, there was a great emphasis upon seniority. We had a great big study at one 
time-Mac [Charles McLaughlin] did one section of the report and I did the other-on merit and 
the rewarding of merit. I remember that we met at Lloyd's house one night-the whole 
department-and we voted down everything in the report except one thing, which I had suggested, 
and that is the preparation of an activities report every year so that the chairman, when he 
brought in the recommendations, would have an empirical base upon which to judge. 
CAC: About what year was this, John? 
JT: About 1956. 
CAC: Oh, that early? 
JT: Yes, maybe 1958. Lloyd suddenly began to realize that there was a difference in 
performance. He used to say, "Everyone is equally meritorious, each in his own way." He began 
to see that that wasn't quite the case. I remember on a number of occasions, he would come in 
and say, "John Turner's had a very good year this year. I'm going to recommend him for an 
increase of $1000." Then, he'd recommend to the person directly above me $900 in order to 
rectify the imbalance . . . or it would be with Bob Holt. 
CAC: Was he saying things to the full department of this sort? 
John Turner Interview 16 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: So, that you had an open budget in that sense? 
JT: We had an open budget in that sense and we knew what everybody's salary was. 
CAC: That was early on? 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: When was it that you put in place then the selected three-person committee to confer on 
these matters? 
JT: We broke the logjam in the department in the sense of moving into what I would consider 
to be the mainstream around about 1959 and 1960. Here's how it came to be. In 1955, a former 
T A of mine by the name of Jim Christoph-now of Indiana-and his friend Frank Sorauf from 
Penn State, and Elsie [Mrs. John Turner], and I decided to drive to Colorado to attend the 
American Political Science Association meetings and to take about a month doing it, driving all 
around Colorado ... a beautiful state. I became quite attracted to Frank Sorauf, intellectually 
and otherwise. For one month, I was very close with him. I got a hold of his vita somehow and 
I put it into the department file. We were looking for someone to teach Scope and Methods. 
That was the sensitive thing because that's where the behavioral bit was all symbolized. They 
were afraid that some wild man would be given that position. Herb McCloskey was on the 
recruitment committee and he kept introducing Frank's name. That was the kiss of death. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: So, when Herb left, I was placed on the recruitment committee. I went to the Scope and 
Methods file and I saw Frank's was the only one in there. I didn't know much about the 
recruitment committee. I just kind of sat there and they talked about Scope and Methods and 
some body said ... 
CAC: Who had been teaching it up until that time? 
JT: William Anderson Mattison. 
CAC: Oh, my. When did he retire? 
JT: In 1957. 
CAC: He held that all the way through. All right. 
John Turner Interview 17 
JT: Yes. Somebody said, "John, what do you think about this?" I said, "I don't know much 
about it. Who do you have in the file?" I knew Frank's was in there. They brought it out and 
they said, "Do you know Frank?" I said, "Yes." They asked me what kind of a person he was 
and I said, "He's a very traditional, open-minded person who asks interesting kinds of questions, 
often uses an historical approach,"-which is true. I said, "He's a cultured gentleman, quiet, 
nice." 
CAC: Likes the opera. 
JT: Finally, I said, "We've got nothing to lose by inviting him out." When they invited him out, 
he won their hearts right away. We had our final meeting to decide this in the Union at lunch 
at the Campus Club. I walked back to Ford Hall with Charles McLaughlin and I said, "Mac, 
today, we took an important step"-I think it was 1959-"but, I put his vita in in 1955. Why did 
it take so long?" He put his arm around me and said, "John Turner, you know why." [laughter] 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: Frank broke the logjam. 
CAC: In the meantime, there had been other changes in the department. [Mulford] Sibley comes 
on in 1948, and Holt in 1956, [Hal] Chase in 1957. 
JT: Chase was on our side. 
CAC: Hal Chase must have been a major kind of appointment? He was a younger man then; 
but, he must have been recognized as a comer and then [Charles] Backstrom in 1959; so, you 
had a lot of changes before Sorauf came on. 
JT: Yes. Backstrom eventually came on our side. Backstrom was never voted on really by the 
department except for a one year job. He was appointed in August. 
CAC: Departments used to do that regularly in the 1950s. 
JT: Yes. Hal was interesting. He came from Princeton or Delaware ... I'm not sure which. 
There were six people we were looking over. We wanted to look at all six. There was an 
agreement that we'd look at all six and Hal was number three in the chronological order; but, he 
won the hearts of everybody. He won the heart of Mulford because he was attacking the 
Supreme Court ... 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: ... and then because he was in the military. The fact of the matter is-I told Hal this 
because he and I were the closest of friends . . . I just talked with his wife for a half hour 
Johll Turner Interview 18 
today-that Bob Holt and the rest of us voted against Hal, not because we didn't think he was any 
good but because they violated the rules. They didn't go to the other three; we never saw the 
whole sweep of the field. When Hal came, we were delighted. He was a great teacher, a very 
good scholar, and a wonderful colleague. He and I were very close. I went to his funeral in 
Washington, D.C. by myself. 
CAC: Were there not others there for that funeral? 
JT: Yes, a great number, as a matter of fact. Roger, Sam Krislov, and Frank Sorauf went, I 
think; but, I still went by myself. 
CAC: Let's inquire a bit more about the changes in the late 1950s and late 1960s. Short was 
chair from 1952 to 1961. You're suggesting that he became open to annual reports of activities 
but not sharing the recommendations except after he had made them? 
JT: We began to [unclear] a little bit more after the new constitution. I'm not sure when that 
went into effect. 
CAC: I can tell you one thing ... the records don't show that. I've done the archival work and 
I can't find when that constitution is dated. 
JT: Ben Lippincott could tell you because he was chair. 
CAC: I'll talk with him. 
JT: Ben got that constitution instituted even when we didn't have the votes because he said he 
was merely codifying existing procedure. The thing that you're looking for came around about 
1961, 1962. 
[End of Tape 1, Side 2] 
[Tape 2, Side 1] 
CAC: We're in 1961 and 1962 and working toward new processes of internal governance. 
JT: In 1961 and 1962 I was unhappy, and I went to Britain on a Fulbright, and I was rather 
determined to come back and serve out my year of indentured servitude and leave. The reason 
for that was that I didn't see much future in the college given the leadership at that point. 
Malcolm Willey was our academic vice-president. 
CAC: Yes, he was. 
John Turner Interview 19 
JT: I thought he was not very good and I wasn't sure that our department really could make it. 
In the fall of 1962, Bob Holt and I were having lunch one day and I shared with him my views. 
He said, "Why don't we get a group of our people out at the lake home of my parents-in-law on 
Lake Minnetonka and we'll discuss some of these things." So, we went out there for a whole day 
and we boated and fished. 
CAC: How many of you ... or just the two of you? 
JT: No. Holt, Turner, Chase, [William] Flanigan, Sorauf ... I'm not sure that Backstrom was 
there. We didn't invite [Thomas] Scott because he had just come and we didn't want to 
compromise him. 
CAC: Both Flanigan and Scott came in 1962; so, they must have been ... 
JT: They were [unclear]. I remember I vetoed Scott. I said, "Don't put him on the spot. He's 
got to get his bearings first before we make choose." We sat around and talked about what the 
department could be, what it should be. We decided, at that time, that we would make a major 
push toward reorganizing the curriculum, instituting a seminar system under which our graduate 
students could not get credit for five-level courses in the major, and that I would become director 
of Graduate Studies-and we pushed this through. It was the smartest thing we ever did because 
we began then to reorganize the curriculum while still protecting the rights and the turf of those 
who did not share our views and proceed to set up, what I considered to be, a first -class graduate 
curriculum and seminar format, which still [unclear]. It was at that time that we began, in 1962-
1963, to implement a process by which we only admitted fifteen or sixteen graduate students a 
year. 
CAC: McLaughlin was chair by then? 
JT: McLaughlin was chair. 
CAC: Was he sympathetic, and supportive, and assertive? 
IT: He was ... very. Mac was appointed in 1961. I should, in all fairness, say that when Dean 
McDiarmid [Errett W.] called me in and asked me for my recommendation, I did not support 
Mac. I supported Werner Levi or else bringing someone in from the outside. The reason for that 
was Mac had been pretty much on the other side during all of the other hassles. When people 
wrote to me England saying that Mac was doing a good job as chair, I was a little skeptical; but, 
at the end of my first year back, 1962-1963, I went in to Mac and said, "Mac, I want to 
congratulate you on doing a first-class job as chair and leading us into a new world. I'm deeply 
appreciative." He looked at me with his wry grin and said, "lohn Turner, coming from you, 
that's a compliment." 
John Turner Interview 20 
CAC: Daughter] Was he a surprise to other people or did he grow with the office, which 
sometimes happens? 
JT: He grew with the office and he began to sense what we were after. 
CAC: By the time I and many other persons in college affairs, knew him, the integrity and the 
wisdom of that man in college affairs was just something by the mid 1960s and late 1960s. 
JT: Yes. The contribution he made to the University of Minnesota can never be measured in 
so many respects. On the McCloskey deal, whether McCloskey should stay or go, I told you 
Mac was leaning the other side. It was Mac versus me. He just completely changed. 
CAC: How do you account for that because Mac's name has shown up and will show up again 
in many places because he was so active? When there was a crisis in the college, frequently 
people called on Mac; although he never became himself an associate dean, or a dean, or 
anything else. 
JT: He was a very wise man, perspicacious, a very sympathetic man who would listen and who 
could be persuaded. I really think that when we were on the opposite side, he hadn't become 
involved enough really to understand-and he didn't like Herb. 
CAC: That was widely shared, as you suggested. 
JT: Yes. But, the point is he became a statesman, a great statesman. There was something else 
that happened during this period. I became director of Graduate Studies and I didn't like it. I 
performed well. I performed efficiently. I performed effectively. The reason I did it so well 
is that I hated every minute of it and I got down to get the job done so that I could get back to 
what I wanted to do. All right? I was shocked at our department when I came back from leave. 
We were teaching nine hours . . . each of us. We had graduate students on top of that. 
CAC: Nine hours a quarter? 
JT: A quarter. 
CAC: Three courses ... three units each? 
JT: Yes. On top of that we had a ratio of faculty to graduate students of one to ten in addition 
to our teaching. Those who were publishing were doing it at great personal cost. We weren't 
doing enough of it; so, I decided to make a study of our department in relationship to other 
institutions. My colleagues knew I was doing it; but, I decided to do it alone and attach only my 
name to it-I'll show you the document; I have it in my office-because I thought somebody 
might get in trouble. I was willing to get in trouble because I thought I was going to leave 
anyway. I made a comparative study of our Minnesota department in relationship to the Ivy 
John Turner IntervIew 21 
League, in relationship to the Big Ten, and in relationship to twenty-six other institutions 
scattered indiscriminately and randomly throughout the country. I compared us on the basis of 
salary by rank, ratio of graduate students, and in every category, we were at the bottom. 
CAC: You mean your rewards were at the bottom? 
JT: We were at the bottom in terms of faculty load with respect to graduate students as well and 
teaching load in [unclear]. 
CAC: But not in regard to performance, and reputation, and publication [unclear]. 
JT: Our publications at that point weren't all that much. We had lost Quigley. We had lost 
Anderson. In 1960, Asher Christianson died. 
CAC: Ah. 
JT: Earl Latham ... we lost all of our stars. Any reputation we had ... 
CAC: You had to build. 
JT: ... was a lag. We had to build it ourselves. I remember saying several times to my 
friends, "We've got to, at some point within the next twenty years, get ourselves in the top ten." 
I prepared this document and I brought it in to the department. I called it "The Fast of the 
Passover. " In terms of resources, we had been passed over. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: I told the department that I had already sent the copies to all members of the board of 
regents, the academic vice-president, the deans, the whole lot, that the soup was already scattered. 
CAC: Good for you. Was McDiarmid dean then or was [E.W.- "Easy"] Ziebarth? The cut there 
is 1963. 
JT: I think ... the cut was in 1963 during the summer. 
CAC: So, you were just on the cusp of change. 
JT: Yes, yes. If you go back to the department minutes, you'll find this. 
CAC: The minutes aren't a very good source. 
Jolll1 Turner Interview 22 
JT: Okay. Everybody looked at that and then Mac said, "We have to recommend increases in 
personnel. Maybe we should ask for one more slot." I couldn't believe my ears. So, I raised 
my hand and, right of the blue, I made a motion that we ask for eight slots. 
CAC: Daughter] 
JT: And it passed and Gerry Shepherd gave us eight slots. In one fell swoop, we got eight slots. 
That's how we started to build the department. 
CAC: Did you do this through "Easy" or directly with the vice-president. 
JT: Gerry's the one that did it. He was shocked by my report. 
CAC: That's a story that's not recorded anywhere; so, oral history has its virtues. 
JT: I'll give you a copy of the document. 
CAC: I'm not doubting. I'm just saying that the records in the university archives and in your 
own office, that is Political Science, show none of this. 
JT: Just take a look at the number of slots we got. That's when we started to recruit. 
CAC: [Edwin] Fogelman, [Sam] Krislov, [Robert E.] Riggs, [Burton M.] Sapin, Blue, Benjamin, 
[Earl] Shaw all in three or four years. Right? 
JT: Yes, we got the permission not to have to fill them all at once. 
CAC: Phase them in. 
JT: That's death when you have to fill them all at once. 
CAC: Sure. 
JT: Because then you make lousy appointments. 
CAC: Right. This expansion was going on in other departments but a bit later; so, you kind of 
got the jump on new recruitment in the 1960s. 
JT: We needed it. I would have left. They knew I would have left. 
CAC: Others would have perhaps, too? 
John Turner Interview 23 
JT: I don't think the administration knew I would have left; but, my colleagues knew I was 
going to. If I had left, Holt would have left. 
CAC: Sure. You're enlarging the number and the quality of the staff and you're having proper 
conscientious searches. 
JT: [unclear] recruiting. 
CAC: You're changing the internal governance toward being more open and you're also changing 
the graduate program to emphasize the seminar and to support all the people that you accept and 
admit into the program. That all happens in three or four years is what you're telling me? 
JT: That's right, that's right. 
CAC: That's a remarkable set of changes and it happens from 1963 to 1967, roughly, plus or 
minus. 
JT: Except that we keep on making [ unclear]. 
CAC: Oh, sure. 
JT: I have to point out to you that when we started that recruiting, that's when we started being 
open about everything. We started before ... 
CAC: Do you think the recruitment poured back into the openness within the department then? 
JT: Yes. I'll tell you why. We had people like Bill Flanigan already here; but, we had to pay 
bigger salaries to attract the better people coming in and we could not have done that if they 
hadn't understood what we were doing and why it was. There were times when the full 
professors in our department held their salaries constant in order to put the money into the 
assistant professors who had come earlier before this big recruitment started because we had too 
many inequities. 
CAC: Of course, there wasn't the pressure of inflation at that time. That would come later in 
1969 and 1970. 
JT: Yes. We started being open about salaries and things at that time so that everybody knew 
what we were doing for morale reasons. 
CAC: Sure. Now, is it at that point that you get into the three-person elected committee on 
merit? 
JT: I don't exactly know when we did that. Lloyd, as chair, used to do that by himself. 
Johi1 Turner Interview 24 
CAC: That was the pattern around the college. 
JT: Yes, I can understand that; but, I used to argue that recommendations like that are better if 
you have the judgments of three or four rather than one. I think it was in the mid 1960s, around 
1965 or 1966, that we began to set up the merit committee. One of the big questions at that time 
was this: shall the assistant professors vote only for the assistant professor representative and so 
on? I remember there was a little departmental division on this because they wanted to pick their 
own. We said, "It's better to view it from a departmental perspective and let every person vote 
on every representative." After we won the initial go-around on that, that's the way it became. 
That's a respected committee. That's been in place all along. The chair is elected ... 
CAC: Is elected by secret ballot. You had no model for doing that? You didn't borrow this or 
adopt it from other departments or programs? 
JT: I can't answer that question. I don't know. I don't remember. 
CAC: I know that in the reverse, that that model had some influence on other departments such 
as History. 
JT: Yes. It's a good way to do it. It's worked well for us. Over the years, that merit committee 
has taken on more power. It's been given more power because the department trusts it. They 
recommend on leaves. They recommend on retention. 
CAC: It really becomes a personnel committee? 
JT: It becomes a personnel committee rather than just a merit committee. It's the important 
committee now. 
CAC: I've got a question there that comes out of my own observation and experience looking 
at many departments ... History's, of course, I know best. It's been my observation that when 
departments move in that direction, frequently, it's accompanied by a certain trauma, a certain 
crankiness, a certain prickliness. I've had people in Political Science tell me that there was a 
civility in how it was conducted. I say, "Where did that civility come from?" I don't get a very, 
to me, satisfactory answer. Is my observation accurate in your perception? Of course, there are 
differences of opinion but it was done without argumentation and haranguing. 
JT: There were times when they could see that the full professors were giving up and that 
created a good feeling. I think sometimes there has been, under the surface, some resentment, 
particularly on the part of those who haven't been socialized into the system properly. Then, of 
course, over the years, when some people are passed over several times on the merit business, 
they become a little resentful and some of them don't come. That happens. That's kind of a 
recent development. But, on the whole, it's worked well. On the whole, I think our department 
has good morale and respects each other. 
John Turner Interview 25 
CAC: Where does that come from? Where did it come from in the 1960s? 
JT: We used to do something we don't do anymore and I think we suffer from not having done 
it. Usually, we met at my house. Elsie would give us a meal. We'd all sit around on the floor 
and we'd talk about our norms. This was to introduce the young people that had just come into 
how we operated and what our expectations were. We haven't done that in ten years. 
CAC: You haven't had many new people to socialize. 
JT: We've had enough so we could ... we haven't done it. I used to do it when I was director 
of Graduate Studies. Another thing I used to do when I was director of Graduate Studies is have 
a meeting with all the graduate students going out looking for jobs to give them an idea what 
their area was going to look like and what kinds of things to expect. The activities report, which 
usually includes a five-year summary so that we don't lose anybody in the cracks-that sometimes 
happens-stayed on. It's been important. The merit committee has been important. The small 
graduate intake each year of graduate students is important. 
CAC: Let me interrupt here. Were there pressures, when there were a lot of expansion graduate 
programs, to admit more; and if so, how did your department handle that? 
JT: I can remember pressure coming only once and, at that point, In order to increase the 
numbers, we set up a special master's program under which individuals coming in, like a 
journalist who wanted some work in Political Science for example, wouldn't be subsidized, would 
not be permitted to go for the Ph.D.; but, would have special opportunities to go on for that kind 
of training. We used to get about four or five people that that helped. I'll tell you how I used 
to use the argument with the graduate [unclear]. I used to say, /I Are we interested in quality? /I 
Because once you get them interested to that-I really believe it-then they've got to go down the 
route we took. 
CAC: But, very few departments did in the 1960s. 
JT: Maybe the university suffered from that, from more not having taken our position. 
CAC: These subjects lead us into. " Let me ask you about some of the autonomous programs 
in Political Science. The Quigley Center-we talked about Harold Quigley earlier-at some point 
comes to be an international program and carries his name. It's within Political Science but it's 
kind of autonomous? Again, the printed records don't show that very clearly. 
JT: What happened was that we used to have an International Relations Bureau and Mac added 
it. It was a part of the Political Science Department. We sort of financed it. Then, it began to 
grow. I remember when Mac went to Berkeley for a year, he was having trouble somebody to 
do it; so, I just did it out of my hind pocket for a whole year ... supervising, no reintroduction 
to teaching like they get now. It used to run conferences and things like that, giving symposia. 
Johll Turner IntervIew 26 
I think it became a little more autonomous with the infusion of money from the dean when Davis 
Bobrow came here. Davis Bobrow was in Political Science but he also headed the center. It was 
an International Relations Center at that point. Under him, it was dedicated to Harold Quigley. 
I remember that I spoke at the dedication. I don't know what year that was. It must have been 
the early 1970s. Then, they had an associate director, Bob Kudrle took over and then Terry 
Hopman and so on. It must have become the Quigley Center around about 1972 or 1973 because 
I remember I was considered for the position and I was toying with the idea of taking it. I had 
an interview with Dean Sorauf in 1975; but, I was going on leave in 1975-1976. They thought 
they ought to have somebody right away and they gave it to Terry. It's been kind of an 
evolutionary growth. For example, the International Studies Quarterly, which is an organ of the 
International Studies Association, is tied with that-or was. We had four people who were acting 
as editors of that. 
CAC: Most of its members are in Political Science? 
JT: Kudrie is in Economics in the Humphrey Institute. Yes, that's true. 
CAC: Historically most of them would come from there. 
JT: And Frank Miller is Anthropology. It's kind of natural. I'll tell you why it's a natural. One 
of our sub-fields in Political Science is International Relations. 
CAC: The Public Administration Center. That's another one that historically, at least, evolves 
into the School of Public Affairs? 
JT: Yes. Do you want me to tell you about this? 
CAC: Oh, yes. Daughter] 
JT: To get a corroborating report on this, you should talk with Charles Backstrom. The Public 
Administration Center was a great administration center in its day started by William Anderson, 
carried forward by Lloyd Short in order to train interns, train people to enter the government. 
Its graduates include many prestigious people, like a lady by the name of Henderson who is high 
up in the U.N. [United Nations] and the former director of the U.S. budget, people who were 
graduated with master's degrees in Public Administration under the Anderson/Short regime. In 
the early 1950s, they brought in a man, whom Harold Quigley had met during the occupation of 
Japan, by the name of George Warp. He was eventually made associate director of the center. 
Several of us opposed that appointment in an open meeting. We lost. We opposed it because 
we didn't really believe that Professor Warp had the kinds of qualities that would be needed to 
give the academic and intellectual leadership to keep the thing at its present level. Later on, he 
became director of it-again over our opposition. The Graduate School will tell you and Andrew 
Hein will tell you, as he told me, that no one was ever denied admission to that program under 
George. That meant that the quality went down. The quality of publications went down. It got 
JohD Turner Interview 27 
to be a mill. It had the lowest requirements of any unit, any respectable unit in the country. 
[sigh] Instead of turning out good people, we began to tum out some city managers and clerks, 
people like that. Things began to come to a bit of a boil when Lloyd was no longer chair and 
I became director of Graduate Studies. Mac asked me who should serve on the Graduate Work 
Committee and I insisted that George be a member so that his point of view would be 
represented. It turned out to be a big mistake. I spent just a lot of time making cases for 
termination or recommending that some M.A. not go on to a Ph.D. here. Finally, George 
proposed that the center be made autonomous, separated from the department. In this request, 
he did not receive a lot of opposition. What happened was that once he came out from under 
the umbrella of Political Science, he moved into visible view. There became some unhappiness 
in Central Administration with the center and the way it was run; so, they set up a committee 
to handle it. I don't think I'm over simplifying but before you accept my word as being pure 
gospel, you better check with Charlie Backstrom. They couldn't dismiss George's chair; so, what 
they did was to build a whole Public Affairs Center around that program and make George a full 
professor in the program and get somebody else as director. That's how we got the Public 
Affairs Center, which ultimately became the Humphrey Institute. The person responsible for this 
decision was Bryce Crawford, the Graduate dean. I respectfully request that you get 
corroboration. 
CAC: Oh, I would talk to lots of people. Historians are used, like lawyers, to independent 
witnesses to the same set of events. You speak here of success breeding conservatism? 
IT: Sure. In the halcyon days of the early 1960s, we were in pursuit of a great cause: to take 
over the department ... to paint a vision of what we wanted to become. I used to say, "Let's 
get a rough idea where we think Political Science is going to be twenty years from now and let's 
mold our curriculum to fit that." We had no problem setting up our first curriculum. Everybody 
was happy. Nobody wanted to become director of Graduate Studies; I was forced into it. Then, 
when Mac quit his chair, I went to Frank Sorauf and I said, "My term is up, too. I don't think 
you can have changes in both front offices the same year." 
CAC: Yes. 
IT: I said, "I'm not going to be chair of this place ever. You be chair and I'll stay on." So, we 
agreed on that. But, you know, after while, younger people begin to have tinges of gray hair. 
They develop specialties of their own. They have turfs to protect. As a consequence, it is 
sometimes harder to get curricular changes. My very good friend, Robert Holt, was chair of the 
Political Science Department, and he came in one day, and he said, "lohn Turner, I would like 
to ask you a great favor." I said, "What?" He said, "I'd like to have you become director of 
Undergraduate Studies. We haven't really changed that undergraduate curriculum in about twenty 
years. Let's take a look at it and really go at it." I said, "Let me think about it a little bit 
because I've got a few pressures." But, the next day I said, "Yes." He said, "You're going to 
be the only Regents' professor in history ... 
JohD Turner Interview 28 
[End of Tape 2, Side 1] 
[Tape 2, Side 2] 
CAC: You were a Regents' professor by then? 
JT: Yes. I became Regents' professor in 1974. Since I've been Regents' professor, I've been 
director of Undergraduate Studies and also director of Honors. 
CAC: Bravo! 
JT: We've got a first-class Honors Program. 
That was the greatest intellectual experience of my professional life. I had a good committee. 
We came in with a great big thick report with lots and lots of suggested changes. We had, in 
typical Political Science fashion, three sessions, each lasting two hours in which we went around 
and around and discussed and everything was adopted in principle. The International Relations 
people and the Comparative people went along; but, the American Government people were very 
reluctant to change. That's what I mean. Success brings conservatism. There's nothing more 
conservative than a bunch of ex-young Turks. 
CAC: [laughter] Are you going to make that a rule of political development? 
JT: [laughter] 
CAC: You've been here under a good number of presidents: Presidents [James Lewis] Morrill, 
President Wilson, President [Malcolm] Moos. Do you have any sense-leap to the global 
now-of how important presidents are in shaping the institution? We haven't talked about any 
of these people at all. You've just been talking about Political Science. 
JT: Those are the only questions you asked me. 
CAC: Okay. I have kind of a sense that when good departments have momentum and they're 
well-governed, they can go on a long time regardless of what's going on upstairs. Yet, finally, 
I'm also sensitive to the fact that leadership at the top is very crucial. That's really where I'm 
coming from in these questions. 
JT: I don't think the vice-president for Finance is very important. I think the vice-president for 
Finance should just pour in the bucks in order to support the decisions that the president and the 
academic vice-president have made after considerable consultation with their faculty. I think the 
presidency is just enormously important in a university of this size; but, it's a job that's difficult 
and it's a job of many dimensions. There is, of course, the external dimension. The president 
of the university represents the university to the outside. If he does his job thoroughly, the 
John Turner Interview 29 
outside community will get a sense of academic values ... how important the university is to 
the quality of life in this state, to the economic development of this state, to the cultural 
development of this state, to the elevation of students and future citizens to a higher kind of level 
where they can contribute to life and engage in rational processes, and of the value of academic 
freedom and how important it is for a university. If one articulates these kinds of values, then 
you build up a reservoir of strength against the pressures of outside forces that can impinge upon 
the university, generated by people who have their own agendas. It's very, very important that 
that external dimension be built up quite apart from getting money from the outside. 
Internally ... here you've a got university made up of disparate elements and the person who 
can articulate the integrated institution is the president. There's an important sense in which the 
president ought to articulate to his faculty and to students the academic values to which he 
subscribes. They ought to be able to be aware of his philosophical outlook, his system of 
educational values so that when a crisis comes, they can predict the kind action he's going to 
take. When a crisis comes, as for example a financial crisis, he ought to be able to give to the 
faculty an awareness of what's going to happen, a sense of direction for the institution. For 
example, when we have retrenchment and reallocation, if you have a president who says to his 
faculty, "This is why we have to do this ... it's crucial that we do it; otherwise, we can't survive. 
It's crucial that we do it across the board. Here is where we as an institution are going to try to 
be in the next ten years and in order to do this, we're going have to slop off a program here; but, 
we're going to retrench and pull up with a little bit of strength here. We can't be all things to 
everybody" ... I think if a person does this properly, you can carry the faculty along with you 
and you can carry the students along with you; and as a consequence, even from a crisis, the 
university can emerge a stronger institution than it was when it started. 
One of the problems that we have faced at Minnesota-it's also a problem at Ohio State-is that 
after the war, our institution took on an enormous number of added responsibilities, added 
enrollments and that sort of thing, and the state never gave us adequate resources to handle them. 
When that kind of thing happens, there's only one way that an institution can go-and that's 
down. Let me point out to you, the afterglow of this. We have at Minnesota in our Political 
Science Department one of the smallest departments in the Big Ten. It's only half the size of 
Michigan. Wisconsin is approximately half again as big as ours; but, we have twice as many 
majors as those institutions. That means that we're going to have a harder time making any 
ratings because of the lack of resources. Once you start down that route, it's very, very hard to 
get out of it. I'll tell you what I suggested the other day. We came [unclear] buying a report; 
but, I didn't think it was very good. I went in there to the department. I haven't been attending 
these for a year; but, I went into this one. I told them I didn't have time to write it out; but, I 
wanted to give it to them orally. They became enthusiastic about it. I said that because of our 
responsibilities in relationship to our resources, we were going to have a harder time getting 
national visibility through publications than most schools would and also because of our 
commitment to undergraduate teaching, which we're not about to give up. I said, "We have to 
get our national visibility some other way." I mentioned something that Bob Holt and I did; I 
think it must have been in the mid 1960s. We got some money and we ran a symposium on the 
John Turner Interview 30 
methodology of comparative research and we commissioned, at that time, a bunch of papers from 
outstanding leaders. They would send the papers in advance. Graduate students and faculty 
would critique it. Then, the person would come in for two days, and they would rework their 
paper, and Bob and I reworked the whole thing and wrote some chapters ourselves, and we 
published a book. This, you know, is translated into Japanese and got us a lot of visibility. I 
said, "Why don't we plan to run one of those in a particular field, every other year? We'll get 
a continuing publication commitment from some company that those things always be published, 
that they always be absolutely first-class. This will bring a project to give us national visibility 
and enable us to do a great deal with relatively few resources and in the process, we'll be helping 
ourselves and our graduate students." They just picked it up and we're going to go through with 
it. 
CAC: It would be nice if you had University Press that would be interested so it would carry 
a double Minnesota label. 
JT: I'm not through talking about presidents yet. 
CAC: All right. I was going to bring us back to that. 
JT: I want to come back to that. It's of crucial importance. I think that one of the things that 
bothers me about presidents is that there's a natural tendency for them to become very much 
involved with the political situation with the legislature at a particular point in time and, as a 
result, make a poor decision on the basis of political grounds and then oncoming generations 
have to live that decision thereafter. Let me give you a few for instances. Take for example 
... it must have happened around 1948 or 1949, we decide to take Duluth into the university 
system. To my knowledge, the faculty was never consulted on this. They may have been in an 
informal way or some leaders of the faculty might have been; but, the fact of the matter is that 
it wasn't in the senate or anybody like that. Why do they do it? They do it because they want 
to get the support of the Eighth District legislators for the overall university budget. What do 
they do? They bring into the university system an institution that used to be a teacher's college. 
There's a small group of them that could probably take their place in the university system and 
a little larger group that could probably take their place in a four-year college system; but, most 
of them ... community college types. Then, of course, what do we expect? We expect them 
to meet our standards when it comes to tenure and promotion and you've got oil and water 
jiggling around and not congealing at all. Then, for political reasons, in order to thwart the 
setting up of a medical school up in St. Paul, which the doctors did not want, they consent to 
setting one up in Duluth-$3 million a year, duplicated programs. One of the important people 
in the Medical School told me just the other day that he and his colleagues could assimilate all 
of those people in their classes without feeling the pinch at all. If you want to retrench real fast, 
you could get it there. Do we have the support of the Eighth District legislators? No. They're 
always bucking for one thing and that's more money for Duluth, a level of equality. There's no 
way in the world in which we can bring the standards of the Duluth campus up to the level of 
the Twin Cities campus where it should be if it is to be a viable part of the system. We must 
John Turner Interview 31 
have done the same thing for Crookston. In any event, we've got a technical school attached to 
the university, which has no business being related to the university mission at all, as I can see. 
It's really a vo-tech and the same thing with Waseca. We brought Waseca into the system in 
order to get the political support of Rod Searle. What I'm saying is that the amount of time and 
staff resources that are spent now ironing out those problems as a result of political mistakes 
made at an earlier time are fantastic. 
Mr. Morrill, I think, did a lot of good for this university and I think the university advanced 
somewhat under his direction; but, I can think of several things that hurt the university a bit. 
One is the thing I've just mentioned, that political move on the question of Duluth. We opened 
up Morris, I think, without any faculty consultation. We went to the West Bank without any 
faculty consultation. The second thing is under his administration, we had a retirement system 
under which-if I'm informed correctly-we took out blocks of $1000 insurance policies and they 
paid 3 percent and the university took 1112 percent because they were contributing half so that 
some people in this university are really suffering now from retirement. 
CAC: Ohhh, don't I know it. Yes, it's just scandalous. 
JT: I think one of the things that has influenced my attitude toward the university more than 
anything else was what happened to Harold Quigley. When he retired, he was receiving a salary 
of $11,000, which was pretty good in those days; but, he wasn't under Social Security. He went 
down from $11,000 to about $2800 overnight. I know about this because he had me go over to 
take his policies over to Ray Archer and to bring back the news. He cried ... a man of great 
dignity who had given forty years of his life to this institution and he cried. 
CAC: And by that time he's unwell. 
JT: Yes, it was a tragic thing. The other thing, of course, is going to the legislature and playing 
it by the numbers, asking for increased appropriations because of increased enrollment. That's 
all right. It's necessary. But, boy! you can get dug into that so that ultimately when your 
enrollments diminish, your appropriations diminish. The role of the university can be portrayed 
in a much different light than that. It can be portrayed in that light; but, it has to be 
supplemented, I think, by another kind of portrayal so that they can see that certain kinds of 
things are not related to enrollment at all. 
I thought that Meredith Wilson was a strong president. In many respects, he was my ideal. He 
was an academician himself who certainly understood academic values. I don't know whether 
he knuckled under to political things or not. I do know this that at one point when Mulford 
Sibley was in difficulty . .. Incidentally, when Mulford was in difficulty, it was the behavior 
of us in our department who always came to his defense ... 
CAC: [laughter] Did he know that? 
John Turner Interview 32 
JT: He didn't know it until he retired. The fact of the matter is that we sent forward a 
recommendation to the regents that Mulford be given a certain salary. Some of the regents at 
this crisis period objected to that. Gerry Shepherd and o. Meredith Wilson put their jobs on the 
line that afternoon saying, "If you do this to Mulford Sibley, you're going to have to look for a 
new academic vice-president and a new president." You only have to do that once to the regents 
in order to get them squared around to see what their role is. That was a very important thing. 
Then, at one point, when it was about to happen again, we in Political Science took an oath that 
if Mulford's salary-I think it was an outside job offer-was not met, we would all resign and we 
would have. We had made up our minds that we would all resign, the whole department of ours. 
That's what we thought of Mulford; although, Mulford didn't like what we were doing in a 
behavioral sense. We had respect for him and what he was doing. 
CAC: Let's come back to Met Wilson and the double criteria that you had there regarding Mr. 
Outside and Mr. Inside. You were saying that Met had an intuition and sound understanding of 
the academic world but also of public life. 
JT: Yes, he had dignity. 
CAC: He also addressed the retirement problem. 
JT: Yes. Yes. If it hadn't been for that, I don't know what we would have done. Some of us 
who are under the older retirement system aren't going to do so well; but, certainly the people 
that are younger than we are going to do all right. I've always felt that it was a deficiency of 
academic governance that we didn't go to the legislature during a period of affluence and ask that 
the retirement of those people be rectified a bit. 
CAC: Yes. That opportunity was lost. 
JT: I know one Regents' professor-according to Hal Chase-a very dignified fellow who ran 
into financial difficulties and wrote and said, "I'm retired but I'm just not making it. Can you 
somehow or other get me some extra funds?" which they did; but, it must have been a traumatic 
experience for that dedicated scholarly gentleman to have to, in effect, hold out his hand. 
CAC: Terrible. 
JT: This is a corporation sometimes without a soul. 
CAC: Yes. You've been concerned earlier about the university taking on too many projects, 
squandering its resources. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was certainly done. Do you 
want to say something about that? 
JT: As you know, beginning around about the mid 1950s or late 1950s, some of our departments 
began to sag-at least if these ratings have any validity and I think they do-and I think that's 
John Turner Interview 33 
regrettable. I think that we began to take on too many teaching responsibilities, when we 
shouldn't have, that required, to some extent, additions of staff. Sometimes during that period 
in the 1960s when it was hard to attract people, we sometimes set up special curricula to attract 
those people. I know some departments where this was the case. You set up certain courses in 
order to entice the people that you're trying to get to come. Then, they leave eventually and you 
still have those courses, which may or may not be relevant to the main curriculum that you're 
trying to involve. Then, I think some departments didn't do a good job of recruiting. This is 
another way of saying that they may have wasted their resources or substance in riotous living. 
That can playa role. 
Eventually, you get down to a ridiculous situation, which really tore my heart out. We have a 
very respected committee known as the Chambers Committee on Liberal Education that comes 
in with a good report and makes us realize that at the undergraduate level, we're not doing the 
job that we should. You take Political Science, which is very, very sensitive to its role at the 
undergraduate level and takes its undergraduate teaching responsibility very seriously and we 
have to say that we think this report is great; but, we can't implement it because we don't have 
the resources. That's where the role of a president can be important. That undergraduate mission 
is of extreme importance. We should have been able to get a sense of direction and say, "This 
is a priority. We've got to do this." I didn't hear very many people saying that. I don't hear 
much about the Chambers report anymore. 
CAC: Oh, I think it's implemented in most regards and with enormous quiet success in most 
departments, including Political Science. 
JT: Maybe I'm an absolutist and one that had always completely done it. I know this much 
that there are parts of Political Science in which it is not implemented with respect to ... 
CAC: That may be right. There are three or four departments that have had real trouble 
implementing the CU project, yes. 
JT: We don't have on in Political Science so we're not, in effect, implementing it. The reason 
is that we are too overloaded and . . . 
CAC: Overextended. 
JT: Yes. We do a good job on the Honors Program ... first-class, first-class. 
CAC: As you look at the sister departments in the college, it would have been traditional for 
Political Science and History to be very close with their graduate students taking minors one and 
the other and, perhaps, in the Political Science case, also with Economics, Area Studies Programs 
for supporting fields. Having that in mind and your own experience here for thirty-five years, 
where has Political Science felt at home and felt it had strong partners in the graduate teaching 
enterprise? 
John Turner Interview 34 
JT: Let me go at it a little differently because this is a very complex thing and you're asking me 
to trace out trends. I haven't thought about it in this sense. When people from different 
departments work together in a classroom or wherever, it's because they share an interest and 
they search each other out. It doesn't come through any impositions from above. 
CAC: Sure. 
JT: It doesn't even come from an imposition from above when you make resources available. 
It doesn't work that way. I remember when Bob Holt and I were doing the Political Basis of 
Economic Development and we needed some help in economics. We went to Jake Schmookler, 
who had done work in this area, and to Leo[nid] Hurwicz. I remember Leo Hurwicz giving us 
in several sessions, what amounted to, an elementary course in a specialized aspect of economics. 
I'm a better person as a result of having taking that. Then, I sat in and worked with Anne 
Krueger on a seminar on development for a whole year. Bob Holt and Anne Krueger ran all 
kinds of development symposia for the National Science Foundation. I'm sure that there is a lot 
of other of that kind in Economics and Political Science that I'm not aware of. I would anticipate 
in the future that more and more political scientists and economists will be working together 
because the whole subject of political economy, particularly as it relates to the international field, 
is beginning to become a kind of sub-field in a discipline. That, I think, is important. A lot of 
that, I may not be aware of because I've only worked with Anne and with those development 
people. I've done a lot of work with Vern Ruttan in applied Agricultural Economics and with 
Phil Raup. People search each other out. I've appeared in several Ag Econ symposia at their 
request because of some interest they had that they thought I might be able to fill-and probably 
didn't. When it comes to History, we get quite a few History students who take Political Science 
courses at the 5000-leve1 and sometimes in our seminars. Theo[fanis] Stavrou and I are very 
close friends and I've sent some students of mine into his classes and he's sent some of his into 
mine. We've talked ... 
[End of Tape 2, Side 2] 
[Tape 3, Side 1] 
CAC: We're picking up now the interview with John Turner in Political Science that we recessed 
several weeks ago. It is now May 27, 1984, Memorial Day weekend, a Sunday afternoon. It's 
cold, and cloudy, and dismal. We had some items on our agenda still to pick up before we close, 
at least for this round, your observations on the history of the University of Minnesota. One of 
the things that we left for this discussion was the relationship of the Department of Political 
Science to other departments in the college and the university. I know that Political Science has 
been an outreach department in many ways. Let's just start with that very general question. 
JT: I remember when I first came here that Dr. Quigley had some of his courses cross-listed 
with the History Department and I suspect that the interaction between Political Science and 
people in other departments has probably increased a great deal as the interdisciplinary effort, 
John Turner Interview 35 
and the Area Studies programs, and so on have taken root. Let me just chat a little bit about the 
stuff I know. I'm sure there's a lot more that goes that I'm not aware of. When it comes to 
interaction with people in other departments, people search each other out. I remember on one 
occasion Bob Holt and I, for example, were doing a book called The Political Basis of Economic 
Development and we needed some help in Economics. We went over to the Agricultural 
Economics Department and got some help from people like Jake Schmookler, and Vernon Ruttan, 
and then Leo Hurwicz gave us some lessons in economics. I remember some of those lasted four 
or five hours in an afternoon. 
CAC: You couldn't have a better tutor. 
JT: I remember, too, that Anne Krueger and I ran a seminar together, jointly taught, on 
development; and Bob Holt and Anne Krueger ran a good number of national seminars of 
economists and political scientists for the National Science Foundation. I remember that one of 
our graduate students co-authored a book on income tax with Walter Heller. I think there's been 
quite a bit of interaction with History. Phil Shively, for example, has done some work with some 
History graduate students and I think with one or two colleagues in the History Department. I've 
had a lot of interaction with Theo Stavrou because of our common interest in East European 
affairs. Similarly, I've had a lot of interaction with Byron Marshall, and Ted Farmer particularly, 
on the Far East. Of course, this kind of interaction has increased greatly since two new 
departments have been formed. The Slavic Languages Department was converted into an East 
European and Russian Area Studies program and the East Asian Languages program was 
broadened into an East Asian Studies program. This has brought a lot of us from a lot of 
departments together. Interestingly enough, those two departments are chaired by two historians, 
Byron Marshall and Tom Noonan. I've had some close contact myself with some people in 
Sociology. Bob Holt has gone into the Institute of Technology. He has co-taught a course with 
Larry Markus in Mathematics. He's done some work with some people in Electrical Engineering. 
He's run a seminar or two on the politics of energy. I think he co-authored an article with Larry 
Markus. Bill Flanigan in the American politics field has been very actively engaged with the 
journalists, particularly Jerry Cline, working up courses in politics and the media. I know that, 
once a year now, they team teach a course in that subject matter. I think I've probably just 
touched the tip of the iceberg because, as I say, this is the kind of stuff that oftentimes goes on 
behind the scenes. It doesn't always result in team teaching and that sort of thing. I'm hopeful 
that sometime before I retire that Theo Stavrou and I can do something we've talked about doing 
for quite some time, and that is, to run a joint seminar on the politics of post -Stalin Russia. 
We've been trying to arrange it for the last two or three years; but unfortunately, either he or I 
have been on leave and that's made it difficult. I've got permission from my chair to participate 
with Theo in this seminar and to get full teaching credit on my teaching load; so, I'm looking 
forward to it. He and I don't always look at things through the same prisms. 
CAC: All the better. 
John Turner Interview 36 
JT: We're very good friends and I respect him a great deal for his scholarship. I'm looking 
forward to this as an intellectually rewarding enterprise. 
CAC: All the examples you've mentioned are examples that begin with a shared research interest 
so that study, and research, and publication is a primary focus and it may result in very informal 
conversations, which is part of the cross-fertilization, or it may result occasionally in a seminar 
for graduate students. Do you think, from your experience, much of this then dips down into the 
undergraduate teaching experience? 
JT: Oh, I think it does. When, for example, I've been gone on several occasions in my Chinese 
course, I've asked Ted Farmer to take my place. Whenever he does that, I always suggest to him 
that I'd be very willing to come to his class and we exchange. I've done the same thing with 
Theo and I've done the same thing with the late Frank Boddy. I always used to, once a year, 
appear before Frank's class on the Economics of the Soviet Union to present a picture of the 
political side. By the same token, whenever I came to the Economy of the U.S.S.R. in my class, 
Frank invariably took it. The team teaching part of Media in Politics is an undergraduate course 
and that's a course that's taken off as a result of an intellectual exchange between Jerry and Bill 
Flanigan. 
CAC: I've had, myself, a shared experience at the graduate level in several different settings. 
It frequently worked out very well. In the undergraduate, I've had a couple of team taught 
courses and that has, perhaps, because of the personalities involved, been extraordinarily difficult 
to pull off. I just am wondering whether the students don't have to have a certain level of 
sophistication and experience to be able to shift gears to different styles and different perceptions. 
JT: I haven't team taught an undergraduate course ever; although, I've come in for three or four 
sessions; but, I've never team taught it as such-I did, too! When I was head of the East Asian 
Studies program, I team taught a spring seminar twice. That was an undergraduate one. I don't 
think it was very successful. 
CAC: I find it difficult. Coming back to the relationship of departments to each other and, 
perhaps, particularly through the graduate program, I have the general perception-you can see 
whether you share it or not-that, through the 1950s and up into the early 1960s, it was sort of 
typical for an American History graduate student or a European History graduate student to take 
a minor in Political Science. That was going back to the old alliance of history and government 
that goes back to the tum of the century. Somewhere in the 1960s-1 don't know when it 
happened-the Graduate School policies tended to encourage supporting fields, plural, rather than 
a given minor. I don't think I've had a graduate student advisee who's had an old-fashioned 
traditional minor in a given discipline that would be very demanding and intensive. It seems to 
me that most of the students I see-I sit on lots of graduate oral exams-are kind of drifting. 
What they take out of the core program sometimes makes sense but tends to be kind of 
miscellaneous. 
John Turner Interview 37 
JT: I think that's true and I must confess that I was one of the people who supported the change. 
CAC: When did that happen and how was it done? 
JT: In the mid 1960s . . . late 1960s, perhaps. I think that if we had continued to pursue high 
standards in the supporting field, it would have worked. I don't think we did that. I wanted to 
have the option ... some individuals wanted to take a minor and some of our students took it 
in History, just as some of yours took it in Political Science; but, I also felt that we ought to have 
enough flexibility so that a graduate student could mold his or her program to something that 
fitted needs. What I had in mind in this supporting sort of field was that a person would take, 
for example, a little History but maybe a course in Social Stratification in Sociology, that sort 
of thing, and rather broaden out but, in any event, that there be some testing and some 
monitoring of that area. That hasn't happened. It started out that way. All of my students used 
to take a test, a written examination, in some aspect of their supporting program and that is no 
longer the case. I still have my advisees take either the minor or the supporting program and I 
make absolutely sure that the program that they suggest-I find out what their interests are ftrst 
and what their needs are-is an integrated one. I rather doubt whether that practice is followed 
very much. On the whole, I would say, that this probably is not a wise policy. 
CAC: About the only place that it's monitored is at the preliminary oral exam. 
JT: And sometimes even not then. 
CAC: Yes. 
JT: I've got my ftnal advisee coming up. She's already had her prelims and she's completing 
her thesis now. I don't think that her supporting program was represented very well on the final 
[unclear], in terms of questioning, in terms of anything. I don't really think that we've followed 
through on that. I don't worry about it in her case because she's very bright and she's done an 
enormous amount of reading on her own. I think she's very well-equipped to face the furors of 
the world; but, I don't think that that's true of everybody. 
CAC: You mentioned a bit ago the concentration, in your own case, in Eastern Europe and the 
Soviet Union ... you mentioned Mr. Boddy and Mr. Stavrou. This would lead logically to some 
commentary on the projects supported by the Hill Foundation to take teams of people, scholars 
from this campus, to the Soviet Union for, I think, rather extended trips. Could you tell us where 
did that come from? What trips did you take? Did you have two or three? 
JT: Four. 
CAC: And you were on all of them? 
JT: Yes. 
John Turner Interview 38 
CAC: Wow! Daughter] You probably can't remember and separate one from the other. 
JT: I can separate them all. 
CAC: All right! Where did they come from? When was the first trip and who initiated that 
idea? 
JT: It was initiated in 1957. I had wanted to go to the Soviet Union very badly because I was 
working on a book with Herb McCloskey. I became very friendly with a man by the name of 
Tom Magner. 
CAC: Oh, I remember him. 
JT: He was chair of the Slavic Languages Department and quite an entrepreneur. I was over 
at his home one evening and I broached the subject of, perhaps, pulling together a group and 
having, what was then, the Hill Family Foundation to support it. There weren't all that many 
people in those days going to the Soviet Union. Tom said, "Why don't you block out kind of 
an argument for this, and give it to me, and well get together, and work on it.?" That's exactly 
what happened. Then, we proceeded, after we had pulled out the proposal, to pull together a 
group of people, interdisciplinary in scope, and collect their curriculum vitae and we put together 
a nice little package and carried it over to the Northwest Area [Foundation] people and we 
managed to get it. One of the things we promised to do when we came back was to have a great 
many contacts with the community. There must have been an enormously large number of 
speeches and that sort of thing. I've seen figures on how many speeches the members of the 
group gave; but, I can't recall them accurately. 
CAC: Typically, how many sessions would you have participated in on your return from these 
several trips? 
JT: Thirty or forty. 
CAC: Boy! 
JT: Then, in addition to that, we decided to put out a book, which Bob Holt and I edited. 
CAC: This is the first trip? 
JT: Yes. It's called The Soviet Union: Paradox in Change. It was printed by Holt, Rinehart, 
and Winston. This book sold very well. It's sold out now; but, actually I think the royalties are 
still coming in to the Graduate School on this book. We decided at the end of ten years, in 1968, 
that we would try it again. 
John Turner Interview 39 
CAC: Let's go back. The idea came in 1957; but, you took the trip in the summer of 1958? 
How many went along on that first trip? 
JT: A bout ten. 
CAC: In ten different fields ... Economics, Education, Geography? 
JT: From Political Science ... there were two of us, myself and Bob Holt, and from Geography, 
John Borchert and Frank Boddy and Phil Raup in Ag Econ, and E.W. Ziebarth in Speech, and 
Bill Howell in Speech, and Tom Magner. 
CAC: Stavrou was not along on the first one? 
JT: No, he was not along on the first one. The Hill Family Foundation suggested that we get 
someone from one of the smaller colleges; so, they picked a gentleman in History from Carleton 
College by the name of [Carlton] Qualey. 
CAC: Heavens sakes! he wasn't even a Russian historian. 
JT: No, [unclear] Qualey. He was a member of our group. 
CAC: Beck wasn't along on this fIrst trip? 
JT: Yes, Bob Beck in Education was along. Yes, that's right. I may have missed .... 
CAC: How long were you there on that trip? 
JT: A bout a month. 
CAC: Then each of you did an article or an essay that then was edited and made [unclear]? 
JT: Another one was 1. [W.] Buchta in Physics. 
CAC: Oh, yes. Buchta was an interesting ... maybe we'll come back to him. He was an 
associate dean of the college, then, or a bit later, 
JT: Then. 
CAC: He was one of those scientifIc people that reached out to a lot of different disciplines. 
JT: Yes. He was a wonderful man. He was also my next door neighbor. That was a wonderful 
experience. That was one of the great experiences of my life. Some of the people in the History 
Department opposed this . . . 
JoOO Turner Interview 40 
CAC: Daughter] 
JT: ... a couple of your colleagues. They thought that we shouldn't be doing this and that we 
should not, as a matter fact, be reaching out into the foundation world to get support for a 
boondoggle like this. 
CAC: I see. 
JT: But, we managed to get the grant despite their opposition. 
CA C: I can't imagine their opposition was expressed in very high places. 
JT: Then, at the end of ten years, in 1968, we decided to do it again. I, again, wrote the 
proposal. Tom Magner was gone. 1. Buchta was dead. Professor Qualey was not a member of 
this group. We got Stavrou in History. John Borchert did not go the second time. 
CAC: I think Phil Raup went back, didn't he? 
JT: Yes, he did. 
CAC: Of course, he's travelled in the Soviet Union a good deal. 
JT: Yes. Then, by the same token, in 1978, we did the same thing. This time, we said we 
would get out another book and I had developed an outline for it. We held seminars for almost 
a year ... 
CAC: In advance? 
JT: ... in advance on all of these trips. We ran seminars for a lengthy period of time on this 
last one. I had high hopes that we would be able to pull off a book. Kim Munholland was on 
this one and Stavrou. Holt was not. Borchert was not; John Adams took his place. In the 
second one, Russell Adams took the place of John Borchert in 1968. Matthew Walton, who was 
the environmentalist, a geologist-we wanted to have a scientist-I suppose you could say, was 
taking Buchta's place. 
CAC: There was a conscious effort to maintain a certain continuity of the disciplines involved? 
JT: Yes. I don't think Ziebarth went on the third one. Howell went on all three trips. 
CAC: I'm guessing only one or at the most two would have been fluent in Russian on any given 
trip, right? You had to depend upon translators there? 
JT: Yes, yes. Stavrou and Magner ... yes. We had a good supply of translators. 
Johll Turner Interview 41 
CAC: You kept them all busy. 
JT: We travelled first-class and that gave us a lot of translating service. Of course, people 
familiar with the language over there would check on the translators. Some people could read 
reasonably welL 
CAC: Did you have a different sense of the reception of the host society, the Soviet Union, on 
these trips ten years apart? Was it pretty striking the changes from one to another? 
JT: Yes, you can tell it in your photography, if you put the pictures of the same cities side-by-
side. In 1958, there weren't very many people going to the Soviet Union. People in charge of 
factories would welcome us with open arms . . . by 1968, not quite so much because foreign 
visitors, foreign delegations were much more of a common practice. In 1968, we were there 
during the Czech crisis. 
CAC: Oh, boy! 
JT: That was quite an experience. We were in Moscow at the time that that happened. 
CAC: Were you able to pick up the news of what was going on in Czechoslovakia? 
JT: Oh, yes, up until the time the invasion came, it was broadcast. Bill Howell had a shortwave 
set and then the moment the invasion came, it was jammed. 
CAC: You didn't have any sense that the invasion itself was coming from what you were seeing 
inside at that time? 
JT: No. I went to Bulgaria in advance because I didn't want to go to any country I'd already 
been to; but, some people went to Prague. They could tell that things were getting a little tense. 
In 1978, I don't think our trip was quite so successfuL We had a lot more trouble getting 
interviews. I learned a lot. I took back two great big thick notebooks of materiaL I did a lot 
of thinking about the Soviet Union in 1978 because we were oriented toward this book outline 
that I had advanced. When we got back, it became quite clear that we weren't going to be able 
to deliver on this book. I did not wish to spend my time having people miss deadlines; so, I 
withdrew as editor and the thing fell. What I'm really doing now is using this outline and 
preparing a book on my own. 
CAC: Good. 
JT: That's one of the reasons I'm on sabbatical now. It's an analysis. I developed an analytical 
framework. It's an analysis of change in the Soviet Union since March 1953. There was another 
trip; I said there were four; it was in 1976 to China. The Hill Family Foundation supported it. 
John Turner Interview 42 
CAC: It's the same model but a different ... 
JT: The same model, only it was very, very difficult to get visas. I'm ashamed to tell you this. 
I wanted to go to China very badly; so, I read everything that there had been written in English 
by people who had been to China . . . the things they saw, the things that were being 
emphasized. Of course in 1976, Mao Tse-tung was still alive, the official campaign was against 
Deng Xiaoping, and it was just an ideological society. The cultural revolution was still sort 
going on in little tidbits. We pulled together a group, some of whom were the people that had 
been on the Soviet trip; but, we also included some people from downtown who paid their own 
way. We had an environmentalist from NSP [Northern States Power Company]. We had an 
agricultural equipment manufacturer. We had somebody from Public Health in the university and 
we also had a futurologist who, at the last minute, couldn't go. We really had a good set of 
seminars for the China trip. I wrote a proposal to the minister of Foreign Affairs, which 
followed the Communist line. I emphasized in that all of the things that they were emphasizing, 
the cohesiveness of their society, their ability to bring unity between young and old, and all of 
that sort of thing. The theme that I used was that our society is becoming more and more 
fragmented and we wanted to study the Chinese in order to learn from them. If there's ever 
another McCarthy period, they'll dig that one up. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: And I'll be in the soup. One of the young men who came from Peking to meet us in Canton 
mentioned to me that we were selected because of the quality and preeminence of our 
application. E. W. Ziebarth was on this trip; we elected him leader, as a matter of fact. Bob 
Beck was on it. Bob Holloway was on all the trips; I didn't mention him. He was in Business 
Administration and Marketing. I think Frank Boddy was on this one. The Chinese group was 
a good group. We had seminars in Japan on the way out. 
CAC: You had the same kind of moral obligation when you came back from each of these, each 
of you, to reach out into the public? 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: Did that maintain itself uniformly across all those trips? 
JT: I would say that probably no. No, it wouldn't. I don't think you could expect it to because 
more and more people were going to the Soviet Union over that twenty year period and the need 
was not as great. We had probably the biggest outreach in 1958 with the Soviet Union and the 
second biggest in 1976 with China ... probably the least in 1978. The main thrust of the 
outreach in the 1978 trip to the Soviet Union was to be the book because I had pulled together 
an outline that was going to be different. 
Johll Turner Interview 43 
CAC: I don't know all universities; but, one drifts around the academic [unclear]. I know of 
very few universities who would have had that kind of a joint enterprise. There people all 
around the country travelling all around the world all the time, but to take teams of people, eight, 
ten, on continuous trips would be really a rare kind of strategy. 
JT: I think there was a great deal of benefit to be derived from this. In the fIrst place, the 
interaction among disciplines was very great. The way in which we would raise questions during 
the interviews, the chats we would have together in the bus or over lunch and in our rooms in 
the evening, the notes that we would take, and then the discussions we had oriented around the 
book that we did, for example, in 1958 was all very great. One of the really important and 
impressive persons who went on the second trip was Harold Deutsch. 
CAC: I didn't realized that. 
JT: He's a very, very lively person and a man of great courage and excitement. I enjoyed 
running around the streets with him, and going to visit universities, and that sort of thing. 
CAC: He's so familiar with travelling in Europe. Had he ever travel in the Soviet Union before? 
JT: No, I think this was his first trip. 
CAC: Yes, he is very daring and fresh in his insights. 
JT: Y es. Yes. 
CAC: He's still going strong at eighty-one. He's still travelling in Eastern Europe and Central 
Europe. 
JT: There was a great deal of input, as a result of these trips, into the classroom. This helped 
not only at the graduate level and the community level but at the undergraduate level. I know 
people revised their courses. They used new fresh kinds of materials. I'm still using insights, 
for example, that I got in 1978 in the Soviet Union refurbished . . . 
[End of Tape 3, Side 1] 
[Tape 3, Side 2] 
JT: ... and reinforced by reading the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, which I read every 
week. I can see what I read in the press in a better and fresher context as a result of having had 
the benefIt of those trips over a twenty year period. 
CAC: You're suggesting in the company of others because all of us travel but to travel in that 
kind of company is really a very unique experience. 
John Ttrrner InterVieW 44 
JT: Not to mention things that come to mind again . .. In 1958, there was a group of us-it 
started out being a small group-that decided we wanted to go into the Soviet Union by train; 
so, we left from Nuremberg ... Bob Holt, John Borchert, and 1. We went from Nuremberg to 
Prague, and from Prague to Warsaw, and from Warsaw to Leningrad. In Warsaw, we picked up 
Phil Raup and Tom Magner. I guess one of the most interesting and beneficial kinds of 
intellectual experience that I've had was to travel by train across those frontiers with a geographer 
CAC: Right. 
JT: ... who could tell you, "This is as far as they got in World War I," and "This became a no-
man's land," or to tramp through a collective farm, and have Phil Raup talk to about the quality 
of soil and the kinds of agricultural problems these people were facing, or, as I did on several 
occasions, walk through an educational establishment specializing in vocational tech with a 
scientist like 1. Buchta. He could tell you, "This particular machine was made in Czechoslovakia 
and it's got these things wrong with it. This machine is a first-class machine. It comes from 
East Germany and it manages to avoid some of the problems, as a matter of fact, that we had." 
These are things that I could never pick up myself. This was very, very great. 
CAC: It's such a good model that I'm surprised that it isn't used elsewhere. As I say, I know 
of very few people elsewhere at other universities that have had the experience of 
traveling-sometimes you go with someone else-with a team like that of ten or twelve. It's 
really exceptional. 
JT: Yes. We don't do this enough; but, when we do it, it sometimes happens by chance. I'm 
engaged right now in a little project with a couple of economists. We're analyzing a problem 
that ... sure, it's an economic problem but it's got political dimensions. We have come down 
now to the conclusion that economically such and such a thing is likely to happen; but ultimately, 
it probably won't happen because of certain political considerations. They had to come up with 
the economic part and I came up with the political part. This is an exciting kind of experience. 
So many times, I think, in universities, we're separated by the barriers of disciplines. Now 
problems are so complex-they've always been complex-and they require an interdisciplinary 
team to look at them. To rely entirely upon our disciplinary boundaries means that so many 
things fall through the cracks. This is one of the reasons why I got involved with the 
International Studies Association, which is an interdisciplinary organization. We just forgot about 
disciplines. We just went after a problem oriented focus and looked at it that way. I think that's 
one of the biggest contributions I've made to the intellectual effort in my whole career. 
CAC: I think that's true; but, by another token, the methods of analysis have become so 
specialized in the different disciplines that conversation across those lines are even more difficult. 
Jolll1 Turner Interview 45 
JT: Yes. I've always been pleased with the Hill Family Foundation and the Northwest Area 
Foundation because they were willing to take us on and to support us in this kind of endeavor. 
As I say, except for marriage, the trip to the Soviet Union in 1958 was probably the biggest 
experience of my life. It affected the whole course of my career. It widened my horizons. I 
could never have finished the Soviet book without that trip. I became interested in developing 
societies as a result of that. The whole thing gave me a spark that eventually ignited and lit up 
the path that I continued to follow. 
CAC: It must have had a different but similar impact upon many of the other members, if not 
all of them? 
JT: I'm sure that's true. I'm sure that's true. 
CAC: What a nice model. Do you suppose people kept journals of that trip? 
JT: I did. 
CAC: Do you think others did? 
JT: I'm quite sure a good number of them did, yes. The most complete ones I have are the ones 
from 1968, 1978 in the Soviet Union, and 1976 from China. I have complete journals. 
CAC: Eventually, these go to the university archives or do you know what you're going to do 
with them? 
JT: I don't know what I'm going to do with them. I would take a lot of them down in shorthand 
and then when I came home, I rewrote them in longhand in a book. Every time I would make 
an observation and then in a bracket, I would put down a generalization that I thought that that 
might apply to. My book is full of those. When I came back in 1978, I gave my journal to John 
Borchert to read. It's a great big thick one. He said he was just enormously enlightened by it, 
particularly by the brackets. 
CAC: If other people did that, that would be a wonderful primary historical source not only for 
processes of learning but for insights into the Soviet Union ... Soviet scholars. If you had even 
four or five of you doing that at different times, it would be an interesting resource base. We'll 
explore that later. 
Let's come back to the college just for a moment. You are of long seniority, as we know from 
your early conversation, at the University of Minnesota and had to work with, therefore, a 
number of deans and associate deans of the Arts College and deans and associate deans of the 
Graduate School. Because you've moved at so many different levels, maybe your observations 
about different decanal styles, different structures might be useful. 
John Turner Interview 46 
JT: Let me start with the Graduate School. The fIrst Graduate dean whom I remember is 
Theodore Blegen, who was an historian. I suppose that the demands and the burdens upon the 
Graduate School increased during his term; but, compared with those burdens faced by others or 
carried by others, I suppose they were relatively light. I don't know that I had a lot to do with 
the Graduate School in those days except for advisees, and dissertations, and graduate 
committees; but, my impression of Blegen is a very good one. I get an impression of a person 
here who is a great scholar, who had a strong sense of academic values and standards of 
excellence. Then, of course, he had as an associate dean a very strong man by the name of John 
Darley. Darley, I know, was pushing a lot of projects that I thought were very good in those 
days ... for example, a kind of a center for social relations, which had a set of social scientists 
who must have been, at that point, among the strongest in the United States: William Festinger, 
Harold Kelly, and a couple of people who went to Columbia. 
CAC: Do you suppose that was Darley's initiative or under Blegen's general benign leadership? 
JT: I can't answer that. I know the man that was involved in most of it was Darley. I got 
involved when Herb McCloskey got an outside offer and Darley and I had several chats because 
I was kind of leading the forces for Herb McCloskey in those days. Of course, Arnold Rose was 
a member of that group. They had a number of interesting publications. They had research 
money. I was kind of impressed by that. I don't know what the relationship of Blegen was to 
those kinds of efforts. I'm sure that he would have supported them and I'm sure he helped them 
a lot. Darley was, in effect, managing the center. I was just a young assistant professor at the 
time. I remember a couple times I was invited to sit in on some of their bag lunches. This was 
an impressive kind of thing. 
CAC: My memory of Blegen would suggest that he was the last dean of a leisured era in which 
he could take almost every afternoon to do his own research and writing. I don't think anybody, 
subsequently, ever did that. 
JT: No, no. I think the dean after Blegen ... wasn't that Bryce Crawford? He had an associate 
dean-a very close friend of mine-by the name of Frank Boddy. They instituted a number of 
changes in procedures. I think that the burden was getting a little heavier, at that point, and some 
of the paperwork was getting a bit complicated and they rather streamlined that. I remember my 
association with Crawford most when I became director of Graduate Studies in our department 
and tried to generate a whole new system composed largely of seminars so that our graduate 
students [unclear] have to get credit for fIve-level courses. This was an innovation. I had a long 
session with Dean Crawford and he ended up being very supportive. He could see that I was 
interested in improving the stature, and training, and so on in the Political Science Department. 
He ended up encouraging me; although, he wasn't sure at first what I was about. I liked that. 
I think that one of the difficult parts of the Blegen Administration was the bringing in of a 
gentleman from the outside, at the suggestion of somebody from the outside, by the name of Sam 
Burke. 
Johll Turner IntervIew 47 
CAC: Oh, my! Yes. 
JT: Sam didn't have academic credentials really. 
CAC: He was former ambassador to Canada from Pakistan? 
JT: Yes, he was a Pakistani. The university gave him a lot of financial support for research 
assistants and a very lucrative salary compared to the rest of us; but, Sam wasn't able to teach 
much. As a matter of fact, I think he only had one or two classes the whole time he was here 
and I know it was very poor. Burt Stein and I met with Sam on several occasions in an attempt 
to help him and help him design a course syllabus and that sort of thing. Sam was very reluctant 
to accept any advice from anyone. 
CAC: I think he was very autonomous and proud. 
JT: Yes. As a consequence, it just never really worked out. I would look upon that as kind of 
a waste of academic resources generally. 
CAC: I suppose we needn't pursue it this afternoon ... I was thinking of the very few number 
of cases in which high administrative officers, a president or a dean, after 1945 would bring 
somebody in. I have a hard time remembering any case in which it was successful. 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: There really developed, after 1945, a sense of departmental initiative in these matters. 
JT: That's right and a feeling that the faculty are to be the judges of the credentials. Sam, you 
see, was not a social scientist in the sense that social science was moving in that particular field. 
I think that, on the whole, Dean Crawford and Frank did move the Graduate School on. I think 
that they did in good measure meet the challenges that were needed at that point. Emollments 
were burgeoning. They set up a good system of committees, unit committees and that sort of 
thing, that I thought worked out very well. It gave a kind of a monitoring function at the 
interdepartmental level to keep the committees pure and objective. Later on, that was taken 
away. I'm not sure that it works all that well now. I think that a student has a great voice in 
determining who the committee will be and I'm not sure that's right. 
CAC: I've got a sense ... let me state it as a proposition not as a question and you can respond 
to it. Somewhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s, without regard to the person occupying the 
deanship, the graduate process, the graduate student program, just became the most awkwardly 
managed program in the university and I don't know why myself. 
JT: I began to have trouble. When you get about 7000 to 8000 people, the admissions process 
is complicated. 
John Turner Interview 48 
CAC: Do you think it's that ... that the explosion of numbers from the early 1960s to the early 
1970s is part of that? 
JT: I think it's part of it; but, I don't know how strategic that is. I think that you've got other 
kinds of things operating here. When you get a problem like that, there are various ways of 
handling it. One of the things you've got to make sure of, of course, is that your academic 
standards remain intact. I can't address that because I'm pretty much of a loner on this. When 
I stopped serving on the unit committee and the higher committee, I became out of touch. I 
think it's a little more difficult now to maintain the standards of excellence in the graduate 
program than it was before. I think it becomes now pretty much a matter of an individual 
scholar and that's okay as long as individual scholars all have high standards. But, of course, it's 
an ideal university in which that's the case. In Minnesota, it's just not the case. There are some 
whose standards, in terms of what they expect of graduate students, are not all that high. 
CAC: I get a sense in Political Science that somewhere-maybe you would know approximately 
what years-that as a department at least, you did effectively monitor admissions, programs, 
exams, the whole process and part of that was a very restricted admissions program contrasted 
with other departments in the college. 
JT: Yes, that's right. 
CAC: Now where did that come from if what I'm saying is approximately true? 
JT: I explained that last time. It came about 1963 when we decided to take over the 
departments and improve the graduate . . . 
CAC: But, you held to that? You were able to gain and hold to that consensus? 
JT: Yes, we've still got it. We still admit about fourteen or fifteen. We still have the same 
number of people applying. Out of about 200, we admit maybe twenty or twenty-five and then 
half of them come. We compete with Harvard, and Princeton, and the whole bunch. It's hard 
to keep up the tradition. It's hard to keep up the standard. In our department, I think for 
example, the quality of graduate examinations has gone down. That's a function of the individual 
people contributing the questions. We talk about this. We have a constitutional dinner every 
once in awhile; we had one about two or three weeks ago. We raise questions about what does 
our program look like? Is it falling at all? Are there ways in which we can keep it up? I think 
self-criticism is an important factor here. The business of recommitting ourselves to the program 
and to what it stands for is important and we do that every once in awhile-sometimes more 
successfully than at other times. 
CAC: It's a good process to socialize younger persons coming in. 
10hi1 Turner IntervIew 49 
JT: We used to do that once a year, every year. We'd always meet over at my house. Elsie 
would give us some soup, and then we'd sit on the floor, and chat about our problems. Then, 
we quit and then for three or four years, we didn't do it. Now, we brought in a crop of people 
that weren't socialized. We were figuring up the average the other night. It's been once every 
three years now and that's not enough. It should be once every year that we get together and talk 
and let the tensions come to the surface. 
CAC: Right ... without minutes being kept. 
JT: Yes, that's right. We had a number of other graduate deans that I can't really talk much 
about. Ken Keller served as a graduate dean on an interim basis for awhile. I don't remember 
much about that. 
[End of Tape 3, Side 2] 
[Tape 4, Side 1] 
JT: I remember a short term serve by a wonderful lady, a great scholar, an enormous intellect 
... May Brodbeck. May came in to carry the graduate program forward and she set about it 
very carefully, analyzing some of the problems. I had coffee with her down at the drugstore 
several times and we chatted about these. Then, she recognized that one of the things we had 
to do, if we were to compete successfully, was to get a better system of financial support for our 
graduate students; so, she went out and got some Bush Fellowships, which was her first step in 
a very, very important direction. May did not serve as graduate dean for very long. I think it 
was about two years or so and, then, she was persuaded to go to her alma mater, the University 
of Iowa where she became an academic vice-president. I felt very badly about May for two 
reasons. Number one, I didn't like her to go into administration because she was such a great 
scholar. I recognize that it's good sometimes to have good scholars go into administration; but, 
May was something special. Whenever I'd go abroad and talk to people in other universities, 
they would say, "We know about May Brodbeck and Herbert Feigl." 
CAC: Both of them Philosophy of Science. 
JT: That's right. She had an enormous reputation. Then, the second thing is that I just didn't 
like her to move from Minnesota to Iowa. My colleagues in the Political Science Department 
at the University of Iowa say that the faculty down there worshipped her as an academic vice-
president, even though she was forced to lead them through a period of retrenchment. We lost 
a great talent when we lost May Brodbeck. Then, after May Brodbeck, I think it was Warren 
Ibe1e. 
CAC: Yes. 
JoOO Turner Interview 50 
JT: I think that Warren carried on pretty much a managerial kind of role in which I think there 
was considerable decentralization of things like the selection of graduate committees and so on. 
I'm not sure that that was the best policy. I think that things became a little bit more autonomous 
and a little less well-organized under that administration. I think that some policies were adopted 
during that time and not implemented, which meant that ultimately, later on, those problems came 
home to roost when somebody else took over. Recently, we've had one of my colleagues 
appointed graduate dean ... Bob Holt. He is a person of great intellectual brilliance, and a good 
administrator, and a person of very good ideas. I think he's analyzed the problems of the 
Graduate School very keenly, crisply; and I think that he has a vision for the Graduate School 
and is working very hard in order to achieve it. Whether or not he'll be able to remains to be 
seen. 
CAC: That will be a subject of a later interview maybe ... ten years from now. 
JT: That's right. 
CAC: It's hard to see. Certainly, there are hard times ... just profoundly in many of the 
humanistic fields particularly. How about the Arts College? 
JT: Dean [T.R.] McConnell-I don't think I ever saw him-had a reputation of being very 
dominant, very strong. 
CAC: Strong particularly in Interdisciplinary General Studies areas. 
JT: When I first came here, I taught in that program for about two years, in the International 
Relations part of it, under Dean [Russell] Cooper, who was chairman of the Interdisciplinary 
Department. It was a department in those days. For the flrst year, I taught a course in 
International Relations, Dean Russell Cooper sat in my class every day for one whole year. 
CAC: Not contributing? Just listening? 
JT: Just listening. I don't suppose very many young instructors-I was an instructor-have the 
dean sitting in their class every bloody day. 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: Then, I think they had about a one and a half year search. The chairman of the search 
committee was William Anderson Mattison and they came up with Dean McDiarmid. There 
were a lot of problems in the university during this period and in the college. Enrollments, of 
course, had skyrocketed. The college was called upon to do a lot of things that I don't think the 
state gave them enough resources to do and that creates problems for all kinds of deans. I think 
our real salary problems started during this period. I think there have been two universities-I'm 
talking pretty much about liberal arts colleges when I say that-that after the war were called 
JolUl Turner Interview 51 
upon to do a great many things and the university, in effect, said, "Yes, we'll do them," and the 
state never made enough resources available to have them done comfortably ... one was Ohio 
State and the other was Minnesota. Both schools have suffered as a consequence of this. Let 
me give you an illustration of what our department does. We have a staff of about twenty-eight. 
We have a staff one-half the size of Michigan; but yet, the number of undergraduate majors we 
have is twice the size of Michigan. If we are to compete with them on a national basis in tenns 
of research and so on, it's very difficult to do. It's hard for us as a department to meet the 
quantity of research that Michigan turns out because they've got more staff and, at the same time, 
carry forward the undergraduate program, which we, as a department, are very much committed 
to do. Those kinds of problems started during that particular period. 
CAC: You're suggesting that the error, if there was one, was at a higher level than the deanship 
... the taking on of these responsibilities? 
JT: Yes, we should have gone to the legislature and said, "We've got to have more resources or 
we're going to have to stop . . . " 
CAC: That's a presidential decision more than a decanal? 
JT: That's right. What I'm saying is that the problems began to nestle during that period and 
the dean had to wrestle with that. I think that over a period of time, a series of deans were able 
to develop some strong departments. I'm not sure how resources were allocated to departments. 
I'm not sure that it was on the basis of merit, or achievement, or anything like that; but, the fact 
of the matter is that certain departments did begin to reach national preeminence in the college 
during this particular period. The period of the 1960s was a period of recruitment. We needed 
staff. Sometimes, it was difficult to apply the kinds of standards that we're applying now to 
incoming staff. I think one of the things that helped us a lot was the Koffler Memorandum under 
Henry Koffler, which for the first time began to set up a series of standards for hiring, promotion, 
tenure, salary increments, and that sort of thing. I think that was very, very important to do 
because, in my view, the good teachers are also the good researchers; and if we are going to give 
tenure in someone in the College of Liberal Arts [CLA], we ought to make sure that those people 
can get over the threshold in both. 
CAC: But, interestingly, if my chronology is correct, that comes long after the 1960s expansion. 
JT: That's right. 
CAC: So, that the period of expansion took place without the criteria that you're suggesting? 
JT: That's right. You can tell it now when you serve on P&T [Promotion and Tenure] 
committees because some of the people you see that were recruited then but didn't get promoted 
now come up for promotion and can't make it. I think that's one of the big problems. In other 
words, during the 1960s, we weren't operating on those kinds of standards and, as a consequence, 
Jobll Turner Interview 52 
some people got tenure rather easily and without any publication. I think that's a big problem. 
I still know some people in this college who are not going to get promoted and one of the 
reasons why they won't get promoted is that they shouldn't be given tenure in the first place. 
CAC: In the mid 1960s and forward when this great expansion of staff was taking place, from 
the point of view of Political Science, did you expand in numbers a great deal from 1963 to 1970 
let us say? 
JT: I think during a period of rapid expansion like that and not enough resources to meet the 
expansion-although, there were more resources than we were accustomed to having-it's 
relatively easy to embark upon enterprises which are sometimes difficult to control. I remember 
for example, in some departments in order to attract a particular individual, they would set up 
a whole new curriculum for that particular individual. Then, later on, when that individual would 
leave, the curriculum would stay. It takes a period of retrenchment later on to sort of knock out 
that kind of program. 
CAC: Or, John, it takes a good chairman and a good dean to handle that. 
JT: That's right. 
CAC: You're suggesting that that didn't happen in many instances? 
JT: In many instances ... I think in some instances it did. I want to make my position on the 
teaching and research clear. I don't think anybody in this university has a higher regard for good 
teaching than I and I spend time at it. I also spend time at other things. It's my belief that 
teaching alone in a research institution is not sufficient. If a person wants only to be a teacher, 
they should go to a place like Carleton, or St. Olaf, or somewhere else. But, once a person 
climbs aboard at the University of Minnesota, there is an obligation: an obligation to teach, an 
obligation to do research, an obligation to do public service and take the lead in professional 
service. I think Henry Koffler and his group proceeded to impose standards in this particular 
regard and I think that was a good thing for the university. I think things have improved 
considerably since then; but, it takes awhile for some of the incidents in which people did not 
meet those standards to kind of wear themselves out. I think that the quality of this university 
since the Koffler Memorandum has improved. I think that people who have been in departments 
and deans have been a little bit more cognizant of the kinds of problems that can be involved 
in hiring and the need to emphasize not only teaching but also research. The fact of the matter 
is that it has worked both ways. I've been on a P&T committee for three years and sometimes 
we have denied tenure to someone who was a good researcher but who was not a good teacher. 
I think that's good. I think that the 1960s and the pressures of the kids helped us to put teaching 
in its proper perspective. Recently, in our department for example, when we had some extra 
merit money, do you know what we did with that merit money? We decided to pick out the six 
best teachers and give it to them ... no research, just teaching. It's good to do that every once 
John Turner Interview 53 
in awhile. It's good to recognize that we have an obligation in a research institution like the 
University of Minnesota, which is interested in high quality, of moving in both areas. 
CAC: But, I hear you saying that in your own department those standards were held to, 
unevenly to be sure, pretty high standards all during the thirty-three years of your tenure here but 
JT: After about 1963. 
CAC: Okay, yes ... I hear you also suggesting that it wasn't uniformly true of the college. 
JT: I think that's true, yes. I haven't been saying it well. I haven't been fluent. 
CAC: Oh, yes, you have! 
JT: It's that way. I can give you some names of individuals who are just hanging on and they 
have become human problems. There are problems associated with their initial recruitment. 
We've got a court case on, at the present time, involving one particular department. 
CAC: Yes, indeed. 
JT: I went down and listened to that the other day and that particular individual should never 
have been hired as a full professor with tenure. 
CAC: It's taken us fourteen years for any dean to have the wit to blow the whistle. 
JT: That's right. There are one or two other cases in that department and in other departments 
that are that way as well. 
CAc: Do you have a sense, when the faculty was expanding so, how the Central Administration 
of the college awarded those new positions? 
JT: No. I don't know how they did it. 
CAC: The documentary record is not very clear on how it was done. Since we have the Budget 
Advisory Committee, it begins to be regularized in the college; but, that isn't until 1973 or 1974, 
after the days of expansion are over. 
JT: I know now a little bit more about how things are distributed through the university when 
it comes to budgetary allocations and that sort of thing; but, the reason I know it now is I've been 
serving on the Faculty Consultative Committee as vice-chair in the senate. I've got a little better 
sense of it. I think that things have improved in this particular regard in the last five, or six, or 
seven years; but, there was a time there when the Central Administration was saying to the 
10h11 Turner Interview 54 
departments, "We want you to distribute this money on the basis of merit," and yet, they wouldn't 
make a similar kind of distribution to collegiate units on the basis of merit. In other words, they 
wouldn't make the kinds of hard decisions that they were asking the deans to make. 
CAC: How did Political Science, if, let us say, there were several new positions offered to the 
department in the 1960s when things were expanding, set priorities on what next speciality to 
add? 
JT: Sometimes we'd set up a committee to study it; but, most of the time we'd just sit around 
and talk about our needs. That's not hard to figure out. 
CAC: Oh, but there are always more needs than there are positions in a given year. 
JT: We had eight positions offered at one point. I pointed that out last time. 
CAC: Yes, yes. 
JT: That was a luxury for us. We just sat down and discussed it. We're doing that right now. 
We've got a problem in the field of Comparative Politics, which is our strongest area, with Holt 
leaving, and Roger Benjamin leaving, and Gary Wynia leaving, and I'm retiring; so, we sat down 
and said, "What do we want to do?" We've taken a look at our biennial request. I urged the 
department to do more than look at it from a biennial point of view. Let's look at it from the 
view point of five, or six, or ten years from now and what are we going to have to have? Our 
priorities are such that we could agree upon them very quickly-no problem. 
CAC: You've mentioned several names ... that puts me in mind of another line of conversation 
and that is the number of deans and administrative officers that Political Science has offered to 
the college and the university ... Bob Holt most recently, and Benjamin as associate dean and 
executive dean with the college, and Frank Sorauf as dean of CLA. That's quite a record. 
JT: And Phil Shively as chief lobbyist. That's a big batch. But, that isn't the only contribution 
that the department makes. In terms of time, there's a lot more. 
CAC: Sure. One looks at committees and chairmanships. 
JT: [unclear] Brian Job and people like that. 
CAC: How do you account for that preeminence? 
JT: I think on the whole the Department of Political Science, in the past twenty years, has done 
a good job of recruiting. I think when we recruit people like Brian Jobe, and John Sullivan, and 
[Raymond] "Bud" Duvall, and John Aldrich, and people like that, we're getting first-class people 
who are not only good teachers but good researchers ... who are not only at an early age 
John Turner IntervIew 55 
developing significant names for themselves in the profession but who are also committed to a 
university-wide advance forward and are willing to spend time on committees and they're very 
good on committees. Also, there have been in the department some good role models. 
CAC: So, the responsibility comes back really again to the department. It's at the departmental 
level where the college moves forward or fails. Daughter] 
JT: If every department in the College of Liberal Arts were strong, you probably wouldn't need 
a dean. If every college in the university was applying high standards and achieving objectives 
to which we pay lip service in the field of graduate education, we wouldn't need a Graduate 
School, except maybe to file papers. Unfortunately, we don't have that so we have to have 
Central Administration. 
CAC: And they don't uniformly fill the vacuum or pull it together. 
JT: There's a variation in the relative effectiveness of Central Administration. We have some 
that are absolutely first-class. We have some deans who are first-class [unclear]. 
CAC: You worked with Sorauf as chair of the department and then dean so that you were 
familiar with his style of administration? 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: Coming from Political Science, was he able to provide that central leadership which, 
presumably, the department had in its own affairs? 
JT: Frank Sorauf is a very good friend of mine. I was the one who was instrumental in bringing 
him here. I think I gave you a document on that. He has high standards. He has a sense of 
what the university should all be about. He's committed to liberal education with oak leaf 
clusters. He also has courage. I think that when he came into the deanship he applied a lot of 
the standards that he did when he was in the department to the deanship. I think that things 
moved forward in the college under his leadership. By part of his term, the Koffler 
Memorandum was in place and he was monitoring under the provisions of the Koffler 
Memorandum when it came to promotions and tenure. How he distributed money, I don't know. 
He and I have never talked about the deanship. 
CAC: Of course, this was the retrenchment deanship. 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: By 1973, it was going the other way. 
John Turner Interview 56 
JT: As I say, I think that he was a very strong dean and I think that he did well. He's a good 
manager ... a little inflexible at times; but, he's a good manager. I think he probably carried 
out his pastoral responsibilities quite well. He's a person who, I think, can listen to people and 
be reasonably sympathetic. I think he developed a lot of opposition while he was dean; but, 
that's an index of good deanery. When he came back from the deanship, I thought he might have 
difficulty readjusting to the department. The first year, he didn't have any at all. At the end of 
the first year, I wrote him a letter and complimented him. Since then, I think his leadership 
hasn't been probably as good as one might expect. He tends to emphasize the traditional. I'm 
not sure that his vision of Political Science or where the department is capable of going is as 
keen as it once was. For example, he opposed our getting a word processor in the department. 
When the behavioral group wanted computers, he opposed that at first ... until opposition to his 
position developed, which set him back. Several other things of importance to the department, 
he opposed. I spent two years as director of undergraduate studies trying to bring about change 
in the undergraduate program. It's important for us to do this ... have some different ideas on 
it. He opposed that. I think that was wrong. I think it was wrong to oppose that. I think we'd 
have been much better off if we'd experimented. As a matter of fact, we did experiment with 
some of it through the back door and it worked out very well. We're better off than we were. 
CAC: On Frank ... I get the sense that he felt that he'd lost six years, and that he was in a 
hurry to get back to his own research and scholarship, and I think that was partly distracting. 
JT: I suspect that's probably true. On the other hand, when you get a group of young people 
in our department, as we have, who are very bright, they sometimes can stand a little bit of 
leadership from the older people. I think that in the last couple years or so, that leadership on 
the part of Professor Sorauf has been a little bit lacking. I'm saying that with pain in my heart; 
but, you asked me a question. I think his deanship was virtually without blemish. 
CAC: His deanship followed a period of expansion in which the procedures were more flexible 
and less clear with Mr. Ziebarth. Did "Easy" go on these trips to Russia with you when he was 
dean, at least in some cases? 
JT: Yes. 
CAC: So, you got to know him well in that circumstance. 
JT: Do you want me to try to give you a little personal anecdote on this? 
CAC: Oh, yes. 
JT: He and I were standing-this is 1958-in front of the University of Moscow talking with a 
group of young Russian students. Now, these Russian students were proud of their university. 
You could tell it. They kept pointing out to us that they had 24,000 students there and finally 
they said, "How many students do you have at the University of Minnesota?" I had a feeling that 
John Turner Interview 57 
perhaps "Easy" was going to say, "Fifty-seven thousand," or whatever the hell it was and just 
have their world crumbling. The sequence goes this way. "How many students do you have at 
the University of Minnesota?" John Turner says, "About one in ten." [laughter] 
CAC: [laughter] 
JT: "Easy" got kind of red and said, "John, it's not as bad as that." [laughter] At least, I 
stopped him from saying "Fifty-seven thousand." He was a wonderful person on a trip. He 
meets people very well. He asks good questions. He has published quite a bit as a result of the 
trips. I didn't have a lot of association with him as dean. I think things were a little bit flexible 
then. I don't know on what basis resources were allocated; but, as I pointed out to you, until 
recently I didn't know on what basis resources were allocated anywhere. I can understand during 
the 1960s with the student unrest and the rapid expansion that the problems must have been 
overwhelming. I used to feel sorry for John Turnbull who was the executive officer in the 
college during that period. He used to work so hard and he looked like he was enduring more 
and more pain. I think a lot of the problems must have fallen upon his desk. I suppose that it's 
very difficult to be responsible for a college when the demand for more staff is so great, when 
the job market is so definitely against a person. You have to fill the post and, yet, the number 
of candidates that are interested is small. I suppose it's very difficult to maintain standards under 
those circumstances. We didn't have a Koffler Memorandum at that time. Our expectations may 
have been as high; but, they were not articulated as being as high. As a consequence, we have 
problems that developed during that period that are now carried over. We have to live with those 
CAC: We're coming back to Afro-American Studies. That was one of the expansions that took 
place in the late 1960s ... and American Indian Studies, Chicano Studies. 
JT: ... some of the appointments that had to be . . . 
[End of Tape 4, Side 1] 
[Tape 4, Side 2] 
JT: ... made when there weren't really all that many qualified candidates ... a very, very 
difficult kind of situation. We live with it now. It's easier to look back, in terms of hindsight. 
CAC: Were you in any of those committees or in the CLA assembly at the time those 
departments and programs were being added? 
JT: There's one thing about my career that I can't explain. I have never served on the CLA 
assembly. 
CAC: I see. 
Joh11 Turner Interview 58 
JT: I served for one quarter on the CLA curriculum committee. 
CAC: Most of your service is at the university or the graduate level. 
JT: I served on the college P&T committee at the request of Sorauf and that's about it. How 
anybody can explain to me why I never even got nominated to serve on the assembly, I'll never 
know. I was either at the department level, the university level, or the Graduate School. I never 
[unclear] much in the college. 
CAC: These are overlapping worlds. 
JT: I would have been willing to serve on the assembly if anybody had ever nominated me. 
CAC: [laughter] You've got some years left. 
JT: No, it's too late now. It's too late now. 
CAC: I'll tell you, we've touched on lots of things in the three or four hours that we've had here. 
JT: I hope it hasn't been four hours. I hope it's been closer to three. I didn't mean to talk that 
long. 
CAC: It's pretty close to four, which is very nice. It's been an interesting interview. I'm sure 
that there are another hundred and five items of the agenda we could pick up; but, we've covered 
very central things. 
JT: I wish to conclude by telling one incident which perhaps is apocryphal. It used to go around 
the graduate students when I was a graduate student. William Anderson, the gray-haired master, 
was alleged to have written a book review on one occasion, which went like this: "This book 
weighs one pound and two ounces." That's it. 
CAC: [laughter] You're a great scholar. You never checked that out? 
JT: I never checked it out. 
CAC: As I recall, four hours ago, we started with Bill Anderson. That's a good place to finish 
up. He was a towering figure. 
JT: Yes, he was. We've had many towering figures in our department. I want to say this that 
I've spent all of my life here. I've had opportunities to go elsewhere; but, I always decided not 
to. I have been blessed by good mentors, excellent colleagues, and very, very good friends. I'm 
about ready to wind up my career at the University of Minnesota and I have no regrets, nor do 
I regret very many of the decisions that I have made or the positions I have taken. 
JOM Turner Interview 59 
CAC: You can't do better than that. If my interviews are all that happy, I will be pleased but 
also surprised. Thank you very much. 
[End of Tape 4, side 2] 
[End of the Interview] 
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Johll Turner Interview 60