Funding and Campus Relationships
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Alice Lynn McMichael (ALM): This is Alice Lynn McMichael with Autumn Painter. This interview is Chapter 2 of the Campus Archaeology Program: Oral History with Lynne Goldstein.
Autumn Painter (AP): Topics include funding and campus relationships. It was recorded on April 10th, 2018.
Lynne Goldstein (LG): When we talked yesterday, I didn’t tell you the outcome. I mean, I told you the outcome that we were able to dig at Saints’ Rest, but what I didn’t tell you was about the person who stopped us, who said, “No, you can’t dig”, then called me and said, “Oh, now I can’t stop you”.
Alright, so when we were excavating at Saints’ Rest, he came out to visit which was a big deal because he really disapproved. And he came out several times and as he saw more and more of what we found and what was there, he then came up to me and apologized and said, “I was totally wrong and this really was the right thing to do”. So, that was a big deal and that’s actually the reason that I tell the story, because a lot of what campus archeology is about is — you could say it’s about educating people, but it’s about really getting people to change their minds, getting people to look at archaeology and the past in different ways.
People — even people who are involved in planning and heritage and things like that don’t always realize — they think that they know everything there is to know because people wrote stuff down. So they think there’s no problem because they can go to archives, they can look stuff up, people have written history books. We know what happened at MSU. What could you, what could you, by messing up this whole lawn, possibly add to what we already know? And that’s what I see as an important piece of what we have to do. And so I think that’s really fundamental and that’s why I wanted to go back to that story
AP: You know, you’ve mentioned this in your talks at conferences but there’s the list of resources and things that must be protected and how archaeology is now mentioned within the —
LG: It is but it isn’t, because the same person — it was in 2011 — and the same person redid the master plan just, just recently, before he retired, and he took it out.
AP: Oh, I wasn’t even aware of that.
LG: Archaeology is an out completely, but it isn’t even there as much as it was in 2011, and I don’t know if that’s my fault, that I should have sent him something and didn’t. It’s possible. I don’t know if he just — I don’t know what the problem is. I mean, I think it’s fixable, but it certainly — the important piece is that the people in IPF and other places around campus know now. It’s part of their workflow, and that was the other goal was to make all the stuff part of the workflow. So it’s just one thing that they do. So they don’t even think twice about it. That’s the idea and that was that that was the goal. That was one of the goals.
But certainly, even in the new plan, at least archaeology is there in ways that it wasn’t, totally absent before.
03:35
Okay, the other thing I wanted to talk about today, in particular, is construction, because that’s a lot of what we do. And I think it’s important to realize that campus archaeology here — and I guess maybe we need to backtrack a little bit. Campus archaeology at MSU is not like campus archaeology anywhere else.
There aren’t many campus archeology programs, but the ones that do exist, for the most part, what they do is, they’re a unit that does 106 and other kinds of regulations. They do archaeology because of destruction and so on. It’s required by federal law, it’s required by state law, things like that. So, for example, there’s a campus archaeology unit at Santa Clara University and there’s one in Stanford, but they only to archaeology when something’s threatened and when it’s required by law.
Okay, that’s a little bit different than, let’s say, what they do at Harvard. At Harvard, they excavate as part of a class and they excavate in one part of Harvard yard, but they can’t excavate anywhere they want. They can only excavate there. Harvard is building all kinds of stuff all over Boston and they’re not even involved. And they provide — they see that campus archaeology program as being an outreach piece, teaching and outreach. They do not see it is research and I think that’s a mistake. So what happened here is really different, and it’s different because, to be honest, it’s different because of the way it came about and the land grant mission.
President Simon believed very strongly in the land grant mission and that we had to embrace that mission across the university, not just in ag[riculture], not just in vet — you know veterinary stuff — not just in those things, but across the university to really produce rounded citizens.And that’s part of the point, so that the whole campus should be something we should worry about.
Furthermore, this campus, like many campuses, has a really interesting history and we should be willing and, and we should be stewards of that history in all its forms. And she said to me at the end of 2005, at the end of the excavations, she said, you know, “Is this something that we can make work in terms of research”? And I said, “You know. I don’t know”. I said, “I think there’s, there’s lots of research potential here, but is it Ph D. dissertation research? Maybe, maybe not. Is it master’s level research? Absolutely. Are there articles we can get out of it? Absolutely. I don’t know if it’s a dissertation. It may be. It certainly could be with some additions and stuff”. But I said, “Let me think about that research piece”. And she said, you know, you know, “We could make this as a program and you know, have many pieces to it”. So that initially, from the very beginning when we were just talking in the air, it, the idea was, it wouldn’t be just required by law. And the reason that’s important is that it integrates what we do instantly into research and teaching. It isn’t just required by law and that’s, and that’s what happened in Santa Clara. It got separated from the teaching and research, and it just became this stuff they did. They hired an outside person, students to participate. I mean, it kind of just went totally haywire.
And so that becomes an import — that is an important part and. And so that, so that the framing of campus archaeology from the beginning was different and our funding was different. So we’re funded from the president’s office, and well probably now it’s actually technically the vice president’s office – we’re funded through the upper administration and that’s because we’re working for the university. We’re not doing something for the college. I mean, indirectly obviously, we are, but we’re not. We’re really doing it for the university and it’s the university’s responsibility. It’s their responsibility to be the stewards. It’s not the College of Social Sciences responsibility to be the steward of the university.
So, there’s that piece, but there has always been funding not just from that upper ministration but also from the graduate school. And I think that’s an important part that gets forgotten as well. So that from the beginning, that graduate school funding ensured that we’re not just giving people jobs, but what we’re doing is we’re providing them an opportunity to learn things in new ways. Also to, also to do research on different things that may or may not be related to their, their dissertation research. I don’t care. That part, I really don’t care. I want them to do something that’s interesting to them, and so that’s another fundamental piece.
So it really is a different frame of reference than any other kind of campus program. Does it train people to do CRM (cultural resource management)? Oh, yeah, absolutely. But that isn’t the only goal. And that isn’t even the main goal. I mean, the main goal is, of course, to make sure we catch stuff before it goes away, but it’s also to do the research and do the archival work and do the teaching and all of those other things.
And, you know, one piece of the program that can be problematic is outreach. Because there are two parts to it. One part of the outreach being problematic is that, if you let it, that’s all you will do. You will spend all of your time talking to 4th graders and, you know, 8th graders and you will not do anything else. And that’s not the purpose. But the question then becomes, what kind of outreach is the right thing to do? So, if we, if one of our goals is to train the public, and by public I mean students and staff and maintenance people, I mean everybody, is to train them in the importance of archaeology and what you can learn from it, if that’s one of the things we want to do, how can we best do that? How can we do that so that we provide that opportunity while at the same time doing something — you know, that’s sort of a regular outreach, you know
We’re doing this. But we wanted to do something different, partly because of repatriation, partly because of other things. We’ve become much more collaborative in how we see outreach. You know, now people do talk about public archaeology, but they also talk about community archaeology. And where would you want more collaboration than on a college campus? I mean, you want collaboration. So you want people, various people not just professors, but other people to work with you, and so putting in that collaborative piece, I think, is a really fundamental part of what we do. It’s one of the ways our social media’s gone. So we deliberately have done things over the years of doing like, sometimes in the field, we will do an artifact a day — you know, what is this? And people really jump in and identify it and get excited about it and things like that. They do it with the blog. They do it with all kinds of other things we do, but we try — what we discovered — we discovered this by accident.
12:01
I was in my office, because I was doing something. I don’t remember what. And Terry was out looking for something that was about to be destroyed, and they were, he was with somebody else, and they were digging before something happened and he found something. And he didn’t know, he wasn’t sure where I was or whether he should call me or text me or whatever, so he tweeted a photo and said, “I don’t know what this it is”. And before I could get back to it, because I was doing whatever I was doing, he had like 20 answers from people. And people want to do that. People want to collaborate. They want to work with you. They want to do those things. They want their input. People are always coming up to me and telling me about what happened when they were here in the 1930’s or what happened when, and those are important things. I mean, they provide really, really important data, so it becomes more of a collaborative effort. And I think that’s a very, very important part.
But one of the things we do do is construction. We work a lot with construction. And construction people are odd, especially on a college campus. Because remember they have bid the project. This is not, you know, “Oh, hey, you look like a good company. Let’s just go do this”. They’re bid and so they have constraints. And they’re not always nice about it
My first, my first interaction with construction and campus archaeology was shortly after we were sort of just got going. We didn’t have a big budget or anything, but we were digging some stuff around Beaumont Tower — actually around the MSU museum, more appropriately is more specifically. And they were putting in, again, those fiber optic lines and so we were digging there and there were as heavy machinery in there as well. This one construction company, which shall remain nameless, was there, and they, and they were furious that we were in their way, because we were doing whatever we were doing — shovel testing or looking after they scraped — I don’t even remember anymore and you’ll understand why in a minute. They, and they were furious
So, one of the guys on one of the big machines decided that he was going to do something about it and he decided he was going to scare the crap out of the students. And so he’s on this huge machine and he came within this much of a student.
ALM: That’s just scary.
LG: Because it was a huge plate and huge machine. I mean, you wouldn’t even come up to the side of the wheels on the damn thing. And I just started screaming and stopped him and yelled at him and screamed at him and screamed at the owners. They, you know, they claim, “Oh, it’s a mistake”. It was no mistake. There was no question. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “Well”, you know, “it’s a problem”. And I said, “No, it’s not a problem”. You know, “We will be out of here when we need to be and you can come in and there’s no reason you have to” — you know, dah, dah, dah, dah.
Well this is a husband and wife owned construction company and they were, they were really — their response to me was not satisfactory. So I called the vice president and I called the president and I said, “These guys almost ran over a student”. And I said, “This is totally unacceptable”. And I said, “We can’t”, you know, “we cannot be working with people who have that — who are so concerned about their bottom line that they’re willing to harm people to get there”. So the response was immediate from both the president and the vice president and their response was there are plenty of people who want these jobs. There are plenty of people who bid on them. We don’t need those people and that’s what those guys were told.
The next day, the co-owner, who was a woman, the wife, comes up to me and she said, “We didn’t realize how important you were. And I said, “I’m not important and it’s not relevant anyway”. She said, “Well we heard from the vice president and we heard from the president, you know, we understand”, you know. And I said, I said, “Look, we’re trying to do something here. We’re trying to stay out of your way. We want to work with you. We do not want to work against you. And I said, “It can work. It does work, but we have to map all this out and so that we need to know what you’re doing and when you’re doing it and, if you change plans, we need to know. And I sort of laid all this out. “Oh, yes”, you know, “I put you on speed dial” is what she said. And so I said, “Great”.
So then, I’d say maybe 2 days later, they were doing more fiber optic lines and it was about 6:30 at night, in the evening. I had gotten home, just not very much before — maybe I got home at 6:15, and my phone rang. And I’m like…who is that? Pick it up and it’s this woman, from the construction company. She says, “Lynne, we found something and I think it’s really important and I think you have to come here right away”. And I, and I — the first thing through my head is…what are they going to do? Kill me and put me in the bottom of the damn pit?
(Laughter) Is this a murder?
And, because it was getting dark, and I’m like…I’m not really comfortable with this. So I said, “Well, what is it”? She said, “I know it’s something important. I don’t know what it is. We found it in the bottom of the trench, but you have to come now because they’re going to fill it in tomorrow”. And I’m like…oh, crap. So I said, “Okay”. But you know, I re — those people had so frightened us. I was not trusting at all. So I called a student, a graduate student. I said, “I’m going to come and pick you up. I need you to come with me. I don’t need you to do anything. I just need to have a witness”. They’re not going to kill two of us. (Laughter) They’ll kill me, but they’re not going to kill both of us”. (Laughter)
So, the student came with me. And we get there, and sure enough, it is just this woman, by herself in this open trench, and she says, “Look what I found”. And she said, “This is something, right”? And I looked at it and sure enough, what they had found, they had hit the – let me think for a second — they had hit the southeast corner of Williams Hall. Williams being the second building on campus and it’s where the, roughly where the MSU museum is and this corner was just outside that — just outside of where, where the museum corner is. Now, it wasn’t the cornerstone, but it was a cornerstone.
19:33
She said, “This really is something, isn’t it”? And I said, “Yes, it is”. And I told her what it was and she said, “Well, do you want it”? And I thought, what the heck am I going to do with a corner of a building? That — and these are problems you don’t think of.
ALM: (Laughter) Right.
LG: And I’m like, I don’t know what I can do with the corner of a building, but I didn’t want to tell her, no, fill it in. So I said, “You know, I’d like that cornerstone”. And I said, “But, you know what, I need a dolly”. Because where am I going to take it, because, you know. So she said, “Okay”. And I said, and I said, “I’ll come the first thing in the morning if you can have a dolly and you can have a couple guys put it on the dolly for me and so, I’ll bring the dolly back”. “Okay, fine”. That’s what we did.
So, I came out the next morning and they had it on the dolly. And then, I, frankly, had no idea what was going to do with it. If I took it back to the lab, you know that Dr. Lovis would kill me, because it would be so big. And I mean, it was big. He was mad about the wooden pipe we brought back, so I knew he was going to be happy about some stupid cornerstone of a building, which really we didn’t need. This is like, what am I – I’m standing there – I’m by myself — I’m standing there thinking, Okay, I’ve got this thing and I’ve got this dolly. So I thought, Okay. I took the dolly, walked across the street, and went into the administration building, took it up to the president’s office — and if you have a dolly, nobody stops you — and I walked into her office, and left it.
And I just offloaded it in her office and I said, “I just delivered this for the president and you know, you can, you can put it anywhere you want”. But anyway, I left, and of course I got a phone call within a few minutes saying, “What is this and why did I need it and what is it for”? And I said, I said, “Look your office is filled with basketball and football stuff, but you don’t have any historic stuff”. And I said, “Really, this is the cornerstone of William Hall. And Williams Hall was the first real dorm and cafeteria”, you know, and so on. I mean, Saints Rest was the first, but in terms of a more reasonable, you know, bigger dorm, this was it. So she said, “Oh!”, and so she had the carpentry shop build a pedestal for it and I wrote out a label for it and stuff. And so it’s, as far as I know, it’s still there.
AP: We should try to get a picture of it. I think that would be fun.
LG: Well, that could be a little bit difficult since we have an interim president, but it might be possible.
ALM: Do you know what the cornerstone was made of? Are you able to tell that sort of thing?
LG: It’s some sort of granite, yeah. It was heavy. It was very heavy. So I’m sure it took several people to put it up on, and they really had to reinforce that pedestal. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s going anywhere. That’s why I think it’s still there. I suggested they put in the board of trustees room and then people can — a lot of people would see it. But they didn’t do that. I think because it takes up space
So, anyway, so she laughed, and you know, they, then, they just got it. But the thing is is that, with construction people, that’s one of the issues, is you have to — you have to not only work with them, but you’ve got to figure out, sometimes you have to do things you don’t necessarily really want to do. But you need to do it to make whatever point it is you want to make.
One of the other people that we had trouble with for years, for years, and years, was the guy who does the sidewalks. And this one company has done the majority of sidewalks on campus in the last 10 years. And, to be blunt, he’s not the friendliest person, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which, is that when they bid for those contracts, they bid as a batch. So they make money only if they can keep moving. So, if they are delayed, they don’t make money and so that – so, there’s a constant pressure. They want to low bid enough to get the contract, but they don’t want to low bid so much that they lose money, and so it’s always touchy. And so, he was always yelling at us and yelling at the students and yelling at me, because we were — and so I went up to him and I said, “Look, we don’t want to be in your way. We want to work with –”. And he said, “You are always in my way”. And I said, “We want to work with you, not against you, and we want to, you know, figure out ways that we can do what we need to do so that you can do what you need to do”.
And he grumbled and, you know, we kind of worked something out. But then I went, when I met with the vice president, I said to him, I said, “This is a problem”. And he met with the guy and he told him, he said, “Lots of people want this contract. We’re happy to give it to somebody else. There’s no reason we have to give it to you”. And so, ever since then, he’s been very kind and very nice to everybody. But it’s not because he’s changed his mind. It’s because he doesn’t want to lose more money. But, and he’s really not interested, and that’s fine. Not everybody has to be interested in what you’re doing.
And that’s another thing that’s very hard for archaeologists to learn. We all think that everyone is fascinated by what we do. But you know what, they’re not. Some are, some aren’t. You know. That’s like, next week I have a kid coming in to shadow me, doing a job shadow. It’s like, you are going to be so bored. You know, it’s not like every minute is exciting and running around and doing things. Most of its sitting!
25:58
So, anyway. So that, that’s the construction thing. But there’s a piece related to that and one of the things — if you have been here for any amount of time, you will notice that many, many trees have labels saying — not being dedicated or something like that, but saying what it is and all of that stuff. And we treat trees really well. Trees are sacred at MSU. You do not hurt a tree. I think you would be in more trouble hurting a tree than hurting a person. But trees are sacred things and, in fact, in terms of construction people, they are not allowed to work on campus until they have taken this tree course. They are required — I mean, it’s not like a, you know, 15 week course. It’s a day or maybe two, and they talk about what they need to do in terms of trees and stuff like that. So, I have always wanted to establish that for archaeology.
I didn’t get very far doing it for two reasons. One is I didn’t put that much energy into it. But, but the main reason was that the person who was head of, what’s now, IPF was Ron Flynn, who was wonderful and who loved archaeology. But getting him to do like a whole new thing and integrating that, it just would have taken a lot, because he was ready to retire and he didn’t want to start any new things.
The new person who is head of IPF, Dan Bowman, is fabulous and is totally open to stuff. And so, you know, a few weeks ago Stacey came – Stacey Camp gave a talk to the IPF group and that was because I had told him that we need to do that. We need to talk to your staff so that they understand what we’re doing and why we do it. Unfortunately, I was unable to be there at the talk, but hopefully they got that message. And so we begin by doing that, but then I think, subsequently, she’s going to have to push a little bit. Can we have a half an hour of the time that the tree guys get?
Can — you know — and that’s, it’s just going to take work. And probably, that is the most important lesson of campus archeology. It takes patience and it takes lots of work. You have to do lots of, you know, prep work for anything to happen. Almost anything is possible. That’s the nice thing about MSU. But you have to have the patience to sort of wait it out and you have to do all the prep work and you have to make sure it happens. So.
ALM: Thank you. Thank you for talking to us today.