More on the Origins of CAP and Why MSU is an Ideal Location for Campus Archaeology
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Alice Lynn McMichael: This is Alice Lynn McMichael with Autumn Painter. This interview is Chapter One, Part Two of the Campus Archaeology Program: Oral History with Lynne Goldstein.
Autumn Painter: Topics include more on the origins of CAP and why MSU was an ideal location for campus archaeology. It was recorded on April 9th, 2018.
Alice Lynn McMichael: So I think you’ve you’ve touched on this in a lot of ways, but I was wondering if you my explicate a little bit, what makes MSU ideal for this particular kind of program.
Lynne Goldstein: Okay, so the reason MSU is ideal is several. Number one, we’ve stayed in the same place. It’s a place that’s been used a long time and so that that’s one reason. You know, if you’re a relatively new school, it doesn’t work. If you’re a super old school, it works, but, you know, it depends how the campus is changed, and the physical structure of the campus hasn’t changed dramatically. So that’s one reason.
The main reason is that it was a land grant school and land grant universities are different. They just are. People see them as ag (agriculture) schools, but, in fact, the Land Grant ideal is very, very different and I have to say their president Simon saw and understood the difference. And she said, “Look, the land grant vision is that the campus should be a laboratory.”
If we aren’t using the campus, then we aren’t really fulfilling the land grant mission, because that is part of what we do. And so the setting was important and how it looks is important and all of those things are important. So that became very, very critical and we’ve sort of embraced that.
Now, what happened then — so that was 2005 — and then the next that next academic year [200]5-6, we got a little bit of money and had a lab class that went on all year, and the students processed the information, you know, processed the artifacts and stuff, did a lot of conservation and preservation, and learned a bunch of stuff. We had people come in from Detroit and, you know, so on. So, it was really, it was really a whole sort of package. And then one student, a graduate student, did her master’s degree on the, on the excavations and on the site. So, all that was great. So that gets us to 2006.
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In the summer of 2006, I went on sabbatical, because I was done being chair and I was in Arizona. In the meantime, between 2005 and 2006, the president said to me, you know, “If we’re going to do this, we should do this right. So, it should be that we inform you about when we’re going to do something disturbing the ground. That it shouldn’t just be when the law says we should do it, but we should, if it’s the right thing to do, then it’s the right thing to do any time we disturb the ground.” And I agreed.
But so what happened was, all of the sudden during that 2005-2006 school year, I became inundated with e-mails. I mean inundated. You have no idea how many projects the university does in a year. It is totally unbelievable. And at that point they sent me everything. So, if a new elevator was going in, I got an e-mail. If, you know, a new, whatever, carpeting was going in, I got an e-mail.
And so we finally, where I was sort of work on that to get down, we finally had a system going. And I went on sabbatical and I said to the person who was chair, I said, “I’m leaving. I’m going. I’ll be gone this year. I won’t be able to respond to these e-mails, but, you know, the only things that you, you need to try to respond to are the ones where — you know, somebody has to be in charge of this, and, you know, you need to go out..” And I got a little bit of money to have somebody out.
Well, the chair sent all these e-mails to someone but never told that person that’s what it was they were doing, and that person thought the e-mails were going to everybody in archaeology, and of course, they weren’t. So, I’m in Arizona and I’m happily doing whatever I’m doing, and I get this hysterical phone call from Jodie O’Gorman who said, “Lynne, they’re tearing up Saints Rest, and why didn’t we know about it,” you know, “What? They’re doing all this excavation there. I mean, they’re tearing up sidewalks and doing all this stuff” and, you know, “They didn’t call us”, and blah, blah, blah.
And so, I, of course, went ballistic and I contacted the President and she said, “I don’t know, because I’ve told them they have to do this and, you know, I don’t understand what’s going on”. And so anyway long story short, of course, they had notified us, but nobody did anything.
So, I had then to go around apologize to everybody, and then we did get access, and we were able to do something. But, you know, the thing is, is that this was, this was an experiment. We had no idea what we were really doing, and how it was going to work, or what it was going to happen. So you have to be kind of a loose. You have to be flexible. You have to be willing to be, to sort of let some things go.
So sometimes, for example, you know, they had a contractor coming in who was doing something along the river, and I said, “Look, if you’re going to work in this section of the river, you have to let us know ahead of time, because there are very likely to be prehistoric sites here, and we really need to get in there”. Well, they forgot. Well, what am I going to do? You know, I can’t beat him up about it, because, if I start yelling at people all the time, it’s not going to be conducive to them remembering things. So, I just said, “Look, you know, we really have to not let this happen again”.
06:24
So, that’s sort of the way things went and then, then what happened is I was overwhelmed. I mean, when I came back, I was overwhelmed with all of this stuff and, I thought, man, this is this is not working. And then they decided the university was going to do this big project re-doing all of the fiber optic lines and other lines, in particular, all over campus, but they were starting in faculty, at what used to be faculty row, which is where the complex of dorms are right on Circle Drive, the ones between Grand River and Circle Drive. So, you know, Mary Mayo and all of those.
And, so I get a call that says, “You know we’re doing this project and we know this is really important”. I said, “Yes, it is”. And they said, “So, we’re going to be out here”, gave me the timetable, and I said, I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do it”. And they said, “What do you mean”? And I said, “Well”, I said, “I am one person”, and I said, “I can get some students to volunteer for a day, even for 2 or 3 days, but I can’t get them to — I can’t have students out there working, not getting paid, for that long of period of time”, because it was going to take much of the summer.
I said, “There’s no way. First of all, I wouldn’t get them and secondly, even if I did, it’s not fair”. So I said, “They have to be paid”. I said, “You could argue I don’t have to be paid, but they have to be paid”. They said, “Well, we don’t have any money”. And I said, “Well, neither do I”. And they said, “Are you going to let this, are you going to let this site be destroyed”? And I said, “No, I’m not. You are letting it be destroyed. I am not letting it be destroyed”. You know, I said, “I can’t do the work unless there is funding and so I’m not letting anything happen, you are”.
So that was, we were kind of that, you know, chicken — we’re playing chicken with it, and we had some time before the work started. And everybody, people in the department were saying to me, “Oh, see they really didn’t mean any of this”, “they weren’t going to do it”, “you were wrong”, “they don’t really care”, blah blah blah blah blah. And so I said, “Well, you know, we’ll see”.
So, then I got a phone call from the person who was vice president for, basically, facilities and he said, “Lynne, if we gave you X thousands of dollars, could you do the work”? “This is what”, you know, “We have this much available. Could you do the work”? I said, “For that money, yeah, we could, I can figure out a way to do it”. And so we did and so that sort of solved that crisis. But, it was a crisis.
I got some money from the graduate school and, with that money, I declared the person who was giving that money to would be campus archaeologist, and that was direct graduate school money at that point and that went to Terry Brock. So, Terry and I became the program. I didn’t get paid, but he got paid at least, and we were able to do things. And one of our first issues was that there were two of us, and there was a lot of campus, and there was a lot of stuff we wanted people to know, and how were we going to do it? And so that’s how we became involved in social media, because two people can make a very big presence on social media, if they work hard.
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ALM: So this was around 2006?
LG: Six or 7 by this point. Yeah, might have been 2007 by this point.
And then another curious thing happened. And that was, I had told the university, very explicitly. in writing, that — at the time, they were trying to get the FRIB [Facility for Rare Isotope Beams] Project and I told them that FRIB was an entirely different kettle of fish. That, that they were going to be required to follow the law, do archaeology, do all kinds of other stuff beforehand. We were going to have to write a report. This was not something that could just be, oh well, we’ll just, just do it in our spare time, that this was an entirely different thing.
And I said to — and they were, at the time, they were competing with… blocking on the name that I know really well… with another lab for the FRIB. It’ll come back to me — in Chicago, outside Chicago. The Fermilab, they were competing with Fermilab for the project, and the Department of Energy was down to those two, in terms of the competition. And what FRIB had over Fermilab was that, was the tie to the university and really being able to use it for teaching and stuff as well. So, anyway, so they were doing all this work on the proposal, and I said to them, I said, “You guys need to understand. You need to do some work. We need to do some work ahead of time for the 106 requirements and for, you know, what we have to do.
“Oh, no, no. We know what we’re doing. And when — if and when we get this, then we’ll contact you.” I said, “But you need to know ahead of time what there is out there”. And I said, “That’s going to take several weeks to put together, because it’s not in one place. It’s not like we can just go to look it up”. And so, “No, no, no. We know what we’re doing”.
So Terry and I talked about it and I said, “Let’s, let’s do this”. So we don’t tell anybody and we spent the time and we did the research. We went downtown, we worked there, We worked in archives. We sort of figured out what, what there was, what did we know about what there might be, and what there was. So we had it done and they just kept brushing me off. And it was, “Fine. Let me know if you need me”. And that was the end of that.
One day on a Tuesday afternoon, I got a phone call from FRIB. They had just gotten a list of questions from the Department of Energy, both they and Fermilab. This was the final thing. They had to send in their answers no later than noon, I think, on Thursday and this was Tuesday afternoon. One of the questions of was what is the potential for archaeological sites in the project area? So they said, “What do we do”? And I said, “Well”, I said, “Let me see what I can do”.
I wasn’t going to tell them I’d done all the work already. And I said, “Let me, let me just look at it and I’ll get back to you”. And so they had all the other questions to worry about so they weren’t going to worry about that. And so Terry — we put together what I had, what Terry and I had put together. And I said, “Okay”. And then I call — and then I sent to them, you know, what they needed. It was, like, late Wednesday afternoon I sent it to them and so that was fine. So that got done and, you know, we got the project. Now, did we get the project because of us, I doubt it. But it didn’t hurt and we were able to answer the question.
So, that I left it there, but then a few days later I wrote an email to the president and the provost and all these other people, deans, and facilities, and so on. And I said, “I just want you to know what happened. And here’s what happened. This is with FRIB. They needed this information. We knew they were going to need it. They didn’t understand they’d need it early. We actually did the work because we were already set up to do that because we already had the context”. I said, “Frankly, if you had called me as an archaeologist and said I need this information, it would have taken me 2 weeks to put it together”.
I said, “However, because we were set up to do it, we could get it together in this time and be able to get them the information they needed by their deadline”. So I said, “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just telling you this is one of the reasons you need campus archaeology”. And that was it.
So then I was in the library a few days later and ran into Fred Postman who was head of — Vice President for facilities, basically, for, you know — I don’t remember what the title is. And he said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. Make an appointment to come and see me, because we need to talk”. So I made an appointment to go see him, and he said, he said, “Look, if you can help us get FRIB, then we should be able to help you do things”. So, he said, “Give me a budget”. And so I did.
And at the same time Karen Complerens, who was Dean of the Graduate School had been giving us money, G.O.F. (graduate office fellowship) money to fund graduate students to work — so, Terry and other people. She’d been giving us a chunk of — a small chunk of money, you know, each year, and that, that is what we lived on, basically. And then after this meeting with Fred, then I sent him a budget, and he approved it, and we got the money, and that was all great.
And eventually what happened, when Fred realized he was going to retire, he said, “Okay, this is a problem. I don’t want you guys to get screwed because I’m retiring.” And so he said, “What we’re going to do is, we’re going to put this — we’re going to create your own budget line.”
And the reason that this was important is because the Dean at the time was not being very helpful in terms of Campus Archaeology. And frankly, if you think about it from one perspective, she was right. And that is, it shouldn’t be a college function. It’s really a university function. It’s not a college function.
And so I said — so I mean, you know — and she started lecturing me, I had to do this, and I had to do that, and I had… on and on and on, and really wasn’t very helpful. And I was concerned that if we got this money that, and that we were getting it more than, you know, just one year, that I was afraid that the college would try to take some.
So I didn’t really want it in the college at all. The Office of Planning and Budget wanted me to have it in the College, because it was easier for them. And so they — we had to come up with some way that it wasn’t going to be attacked. Because you see what happens is if it’s in the college and the college gets a budget cut, they can take the whole thing out of us or we could have to do the one percent that everybody else — and our budget do little to do one percent a year.
So, we are exempt from the one percent. It, we do have our own budget line in the university budget and it had a little note on it that if anyone tries to take the money, the president of the university has to be notified immediately. So, I don’t know. Now we have an interim president. I don’t know if that will help us any, but, anyway but that’s, that’s the situation. So that’s what they did.