{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/7s7hq3sn3k/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Saul Cohen Oral History"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/010/original/Aviary_QPLlogo_192x192.png?1578574261","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 1:\u003c/strong\u003e  Saul Cohen recalls how he was persuaded to leave Clark University and take over the presidency of Queens College in 1978, in the midst of New York City’s fiscal crisis.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 2:\u003c/strong\u003e  Saul Cohen explains that the support of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo was vital to the construction of the college’s music building; Cuomo had previously been impressed by Queens’ newly established Italian Studies exchange program.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 3: \u003c/strong\u003e Saul Cohen discusses the construction and naming of the Benjamin Rosenthal Library, and how Queens Borough President Donald Manes was instrumental in the process. He also points out the library’s magnificent view of the New York City skyline.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 4: \u003c/strong\u003e Saul Cohen reflects on the extensive political negotiations required to achieve his goals for Queens College. With the help once again of Queens Borough President Donald Manes, Cohen succeeded in reopening the prestigious Townsend Harris High School in a newly constructed building on the college’s campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 5:\u003c/strong\u003e  Saul Cohen recounts which departments had the strongest faculty during his time at Queens College, and how he once intervened on behalf of an outstanding professor who was denied promotion due to lack of publications.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSummary of Full Interview\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eDr. Saul B. Cohen (1925 - 2021) was president of Queens College from 1978 to 1985. His time as president was marked by significant challenges to the college, most particularly the fallout from the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. Cohen has been credited with revitalizing the college through numerous initiatives, including the creation of the Schools of Music and Education, and the construction of Rosenthal Library, the Science Building, and the Copland School of Music building. He was also responsible for the reopening of Townsend Harris High School on the college’s campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eBefore coming to Queens, Cohen was a professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and a leading scholar in his field. After stepping down as Queens’ president, he served as director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and later joined the geography faculty of Hunter College. He was also an influential member of the New York State Board of Regents for 17 years.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, conducted in 2013 as part of Queens College’s 75th anniversary celebration, Cohen looks back on his years at the school and the lasting impact of the decisions made at that time. He recalls the difficulties of obtaining funding for various capital projects and the role of local politicians in securing that funding. He also recounts many anecdotes about campus life and the faculty and administrators with whom he worked.\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003eIn this related  \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnjEeZ22rgo\"\u003eYouTube video\u003c/a\u003e, Saul Cohen offers his congratulations to Queens College on its 75th anniversary.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Source"]},"value":{"en":["Collected as part of the Queens College Spring 2013 History 392W Oral History Seminar taught by Prof. Bobby Wintermute, for the college’s 75th Anniversary Oral History Project."]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English"]}},{"label":{"en":["Coverage"]},"value":{"en":["1950s-2013 (temporal)","Queens College, Flushing, Queens, NY and Worcester, MA (spatial)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2013-04-17 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Saul Cohen (Interviewee)","Christopher Oliva (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCC BY-NC-SA Contact digitalarchives@queenslibrary.org for research and reproduction requests.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Audio"]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["http://digitalarchives.queenslibrary.org/search/browse/40504"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 1:\u003c/strong\u003e \u0026nbsp;Saul Cohen recalls how he was persuaded to leave Clark University and take over the presidency of Queens College in 1978, in the midst of New York City\u0026rsquo;s fiscal crisis.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 2:\u003c/strong\u003e \u0026nbsp;Saul Cohen explains that the support of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo was vital to the construction of the college\u0026rsquo;s music building; Cuomo had previously been impressed by Queens\u0026rsquo; newly established Italian Studies exchange program.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 3:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Saul Cohen discusses the construction and naming of the Benjamin Rosenthal Library, and how Queens Borough President Donald Manes was instrumental in the process. He also points out the library\u0026rsquo;s magnificent view of the New York City skyline.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 4:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Saul Cohen reflects on the extensive political negotiations required to achieve his goals for Queens College. With the help once again of Queens Borough President Donald Manes, Cohen succeeded in reopening the prestigious Townsend Harris High School in a newly constructed building on the college\u0026rsquo;s campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 5:\u003c/strong\u003e\u0026nbsp; Saul Cohen recounts which departments had the strongest faculty during his time at Queens College, and how he once intervened on behalf of an outstanding professor who was denied promotion due to lack of publications.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSummary of Full Interview\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eDr. Saul B. Cohen (1925 - 2021) was president of Queens College from 1978 to 1985. His time as president was marked by significant challenges to the college, most particularly the fallout from the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. Cohen has been credited with revitalizing the college through numerous initiatives, including the creation of the Schools of Music and Education, and the construction of Rosenthal Library, the Science Building, and the Copland School of Music building. He was also responsible for the reopening of Townsend Harris High School on the college\u0026rsquo;s campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eBefore coming to Queens, Cohen was a professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and a leading scholar in his field. After stepping down as Queens\u0026rsquo; president, he served as director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and later joined the geography faculty of Hunter College. He was also an influential member of the New York State Board of Regents for 17 years.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, conducted in 2013 as part of Queens College\u0026rsquo;s 75th anniversary celebration, Cohen looks back on his years at the school and the lasting impact of the decisions made at that time. He recalls the difficulties of obtaining funding for various capital projects and the role of local politicians in securing that funding. He also recounts many anecdotes about campus life and the faculty and administrators with whom he worked.\u003c/p\u003e","\u003cp\u003eIn this related\u0026nbsp; \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnjEeZ22rgo\"\u003eYouTube video\u003c/a\u003e, Saul Cohen offers his congratulations to Queens College on its 75th anniversary.\u003c/p\u003e"]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCC BY-NC-SA\u0026nbsp;Contact digitalarchives@queenslibrary.org for research and reproduction requests.\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Queens Public Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Queens Public Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/010/original/Aviary_QPLlogo_192x192.png?1578574261","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/130/194/small/Screenshot_%288%29.png?1636712489","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 6 - Saul_Cohen_Clip_1.mp3"]},"duration":111.20327,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/130/194/small/Screenshot_%288%29.png?1636712489","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-queenslibrary.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/130/194/original/Saul_Cohen_Clip_1.mp3?1636712197","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":111.20327,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/transcript/34292","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Full Transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/transcript/34292/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Christopher Oliva: I’m here today with former Queens College President Saul Cohen.  He was President from 1978 to 1985.  I’m going to conduct an interview for my History 392W class.  Can you give me a little background about yourself before coming to Queens College?\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure, I went to…. I come from Boston.  I went to what we used to describe as the best public high school in America. Boston Public Latin School.  Very tough school.  It started in the 7th grade but you were told that one out of every three would be failed because they also had a 9th grade entrance point.  ‘Look to your right, look to your left, one of you won’t be here,’ the old Army routine.  I then went to Harvard College. I expected to commute by street car, however, the war intervened and I ended up enlisting in the Army.  I enlisted in the Army and ended up in Europe and when I came back after the war, I had the GI Bill.  I lived at the college and I majored in, as an undergraduate, geography and political science.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I finished college.  I had two choices: go on to graduate school or go to law school.  I was admitted to [Harvard] law school.  My folks wanted me to go to law school. I remember I hadn’t made up my mind.  I walked into the law school and my feet kept taking me out of it.  I walked across the street to the graduate school and told my professor there that I wanted to enroll in the Master’s and Ph.D. program.  I always liked the notion of teaching.  My first teaching position was at Boston University.  I was there for 12 years.  During that period, I also did a lot of consulting in location research for some of the biggest companies in America.  I was taken under the wing of a person who studied geography but never got a doctorate and instead ended up in business [Bill Applebaum] and he became the leading expert in location research in the United States.  He was my mentor there and I learned a lot about management. During my period at BU, I spent a year at the U.S. Naval War College under ideal circumstances [1956-57].  I had six lectures the entire year; I was teaching four to five courses a semester at BU.  That’s how things were like then.  The [Naval War College] library was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at the War College, and the students were mostly Captains, Vice-Admirals, and Rear Admirals, superb students.  They also had a foreign officers’ course with some key people from all over the world.  Anyway, I enjoyed that very much. My field was political geography. I liked challenges. In 1965, I was invited to come to Clark University, which had in its time one of the strongest geography programs in the country, and it was on hard times. The faculty had dwindled to five and the college, the university was thinking about closing it. Clark was known for psychology and geography and I remember the President [Howard Jefferson] was a philosopher.  He urged me to take the post of director of the school, saying ‘I’ll do anything I can for you, and there’s only one thing I can’t do for you.’  I said, ‘What’s that?’  He said, ‘We have no money.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: Need money.\n\nSaul Cohen: But that was a time when the federal government was very expansive with its support of graduate programs, and NDEA fellowships and so on.  So I went to Clark as Director of the Graduate School and we built the department.  I spent 12 years there. When I left we had 16 faculty members and the problem that I discovered at Clark was that [Interruption, recording paused]   The challenge at Clark was simple, the geographers there had ignored the undergraduates.  And Clark depended upon its undergraduates [to support its 300-350 graduate students]. I think they only had about a dozen majors.  Now Clark was a small college/university.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Where was this located?\n\nSaul Cohen: Worcester, Mass.  It had about 1,800 undergraduates and about 350 graduate students.  Well, the first thing I did was insist that every [geography] faculty member teach an undergraduate course.  Some of them weren’t. Secondly, I picked, we had one very outstanding lecturer and I had him create a new course for undergraduates, and promoted him. He couldn’t get promoted because he didn’t publish.  But he was a gifted lecturer.  Anyways, one thing led to another.  We ended up with a very large undergraduate major and we had 55 doctoral students.  None of them paid any tuition.  That’s because the government….\n\nChristopher Oliva: The government would support…?\n\nSaul Cohen: We had NSF and NDEA.  [U.S. Department of Education support for faculty, students and a new facility.]\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s interesting.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194#t=1.0,500.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/transcript/34292/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Saul Cohen: And then, looking for a new challenge.  It was hard to leave Clark.  We had 137 faculty members and I knew every one of them.  I had been Chair of the faculty for six years, I was also Dean of the Graduate School.  It was small enough so you could be everything, not like a big college.  And I know my graduate students didn’t want me to leave but I left. I knew that Queens was a challenge; I didn’t know how big the challenge was. This was, I came in 1978. This was the period of the great financial crisis in New York City, where it went bankrupt, and that’s when the state took over the City University.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, so this is my next question, how did you become the president of Queens College?  Did they reach out to you or did you reach out to them?\n\nSaul Cohen: I had no thought of leaving Clark. One of the members of the [CUNY] Board had heard me  speak and she asked me whether I’d be willing to talk to the Chancellor.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Do you know her name?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194#t=500.0,615.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/transcript/34292/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Saul Cohen: Edith Everett was her name.  She said Queens was looking for a new president and I agreed to meet with the Chancellor, whose name was Robert Kibbee.  Now you’re too young to know, but there was a famous comedian in films named Guy Kibbee.  He was Guy Kibbee’s son and he had the same sense of humor. An avuncular type of person, and he was very persuasive and he ended up with the same thing that Howard Jefferson had told me when he interviewed me at Clark, he says, ‘I’ll give you anything you want; there’s only one thing I can’t do.’  I said, ‘What’s that?’  He said, ‘We have no money, we’re bankrupt.’  That was a challenge. I mean, I’d figured I’d gone as far as, I accomplished everything I could hope to accomplish at Clark and I was also tired of commuting.  We lived in Newton, Mass., our kids went to school there and that was an hour and 15 minutes’ drive every day.  That didn’t help and my kids were now in college so it was easier to move. And so we moved to Queens.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, where in Queens did you exactly move?\n\nSaul Cohen: The college owned a home, I think it still does, in Douglas Manor.  That’s that peninsula parallel to Great Neck.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, it’s like up north.\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s up north.  It’s in the northwest corner of Queens, right on the water.  It’s a yachting community, as a matter of fact, and it’s a closed community.  And when we got there, this huge house, in lousy repair, and it reeked, still reeked of marijuana.  My predecessor, I guess had a lot of students [laughs]… and in lousy shape, to say the least, and it had a particular problem, a plumbing problem.  That part of Queens has a clay, hard clay surface and since Douglas Manor is a private, closed neighborhood, they voted not to allow city sewerage.  So everyone had to have a septic tank.  Every year the stuff would roll off the clay into the bay, Little Neck Bay, and the Corps of Engineers would come in every year and clean it up.  \n\nChristopher Oliva: There’s so much more work that needs to be done. Oh, my goodness.\n\nSaul Cohen: And it was a great house, though, we used it frequently.  In fact I had assured my wife, I said, ‘Look, we’re going to a public university.’  She was working, she’s a manager at the telephone company.  I said, ‘You’ll have no responsibilities because it’s a public university.  It’s not like Clark where everyone knows everyone and you’re always entertaining.’  We were wrong.  The community in Queens expected this house to be its house.  They used to hold events there, once a week, once a month.  It had a huge entertainment place.  That was one of the strengths of the college, it had a lot of people, different groups that were involved with it. You want more challenges, which I found I didn’t know about?  Layoffs. I came to Queens, they had laid off hundreds of young faculty members.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I heard about that.\n\nSaul Cohen: Education in particular, which had grown very fast.  I think they lost 60 to 80 young faculty members who were fired.  You can imagine the morale of the faculty at that point, so I found a faculty with very low morale.  Tuition. The first time tuition had been imposed, and Open Admissions.  And people were very worried about, the faculty, about Open Admissions, because they felt that it would reduce the rigor of the offerings of the liberal arts college. I’ll tell you what offset that, what I found.  First, Queens was more of a middle-class community than any of the boroughs, except parts of Manhattan. So tuition was not an issue, and anyone who needed tuition got it through TAP.  That was never a problem.  Secondly, the African-American community had insisted upon having its own college, York.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, really?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yeah, in Jamaica.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I didn’t even know that.  I knew York but I didn’t know it was…\n\nSaul Cohen: Absolutely, it was a political deal, they wanted their own.  Well, from Queens’ point of view, what this did was draw a lot of unprepared students away from Queens, in this Open Admissions framework.  So that was the second one; you had the tuition, you had York, Open Admissions.  You had the reputation of the college as a tough school.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yes, I was going to ask.  The third question is actually, before coming to Queens College, how did you view their reputation in 1978?\n\nSaul Cohen: All I knew about it was that it was the strongest of the City University colleges. Once, of course, City College had been the strongest, but Open Admissions pretty much killed that, and that Queens had managed to maintain its reputation as a very fine liberal arts college, which was what I was most interested in, liberal arts.  That it also had a very strong faculty.  And that proved to be true. I knew some of the names.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What made the faculty so strong?\n\nSaul Cohen: I think that as City College declined, a place like Queens was able to attract people who otherwise might have tried to get to City College.  Also, City College focused on the sciences. In fact they built a new science building the very year that the whole structure collapsed. They had hired prestigious faculty with [who found they had] no students.  Queens was known for the humanities and social sciences.  It had for example Michael Harrington and Andrew Hacker in the political science department.  These were two nationally known figures.  \n\nChristopher Oliva: I’m sorry, Michael Harrington and who else?\n\nSaul Cohen: Andrew Hacker.  One was very conservative and one was very liberal.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s interesting.  Did they work well together?\n\nSaul Cohen: No. Well, I once asked that question.  I said, ‘How do they get along in the department?’ He said, ‘It’s simple; they don’t talk to each other.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: If it works, I guess.  OK, my other question is, what type of grades did a student need to attend Queens College?  At this point, in I guess 1978 to ‘85.\n\nSaul Cohen: I think basically was about 80.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Like a low B? Was it always –\n\nSaul Cohen: Yeah, but remember that the high schools in Queens were also strong high schools, by and large, so that was pretty good.  And they had, for those who didn’t feel they could make it, you had Queensborough and you had Nassau as community colleges, and the poorer students had York.  So that helped, that helped a lot.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194#t=615.0,1145.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/55930/file/130194/transcript/34292/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Christopher Oliva: Yes, I found that when I went to Nassau, it helped me out a lot to prepare for a university.  It definitely worked.\n\nSaul Cohen: Now the faculty morale, you want me to talk about that?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, sure.\n\nSaul Cohen: I met…I realized that the biggest problem was to raise faculty morale. I began immediately to meet with the chairs twice a month, every chair, all the chairs together twice a month, and I met with every department once a year just for free-form discussions.  I also wrote a monthly newsletter to the faculty.  Encouraging faculty to come in and talk about anything they wanted to…and when you’re talking about 900 faculty,  it’s very different than Clark, where you had 136 people.  So you had to use…Clark, we made all decisions as a faculty of the whole, like a New England town meeting.  Couldn’t do that at Queens.  Well, also we had no union at…\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, Queens didn’t have a union?\n\nSaul Cohen: No, Queens had a union.  City University has a union [Professional Staff Congress-CUNY].  Clark had no union.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, Clark had no union, OK.\n\nSaul Cohen: So it all had to be done through personal negotiations, and that’s a challenge when you’re dealing with a much larger university.  There was also a very aggressive student body.  I don’t know how aggressive it is today, but in those days it was.\n\nChristopher Oliva: When you have to vote for something they shove it in your face, ‘vote, vote.’\n\nSaul Cohen: There were more clubs there than I think Clark had students, and I never saw a university with so many clubs. And what I discovered the first week I went in there, I saw kids lying on the floor. Marijuana.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Really?\n\nSaul Cohen: Pot, just lying there smoking pot.  [Brief conversational interruption.]\n\nChristopher Oliva: Actually one of the questions I have is, we can touch on that now, I guess:  How was the drug culture like?\n\nSaul Cohen: When I came, it was bad.  We had nothing like that at Clark.  I went into the building, and I took the guy who’s in charge of buildings, and I said, ‘How do you allow this?’ And he said to me, ‘We can do nothing, we don’t own the building.’  You know that the students owned the building at Queens?  The Student Union?  A previous president, Joe McMurray, had previously been head of HUD and he made an arrangement whereby the bonds were held by the Student Association.  So they were the owners of the building.  So I said, ‘That can’t be.’  So I called in, they had a group of representatives of various clubs, and I said, ‘First off, we will eliminate pot, whether you own the building or not, but secondly, what do you need? What do you need?’   One of them says, ‘We don’t have enough room here for clubs, we don’t have enough offices.’ I said, ‘Fine.’  There was one big open area, I forget what floor it was on, might have been the second floor.  And that’s where a lot of the bodies were. ‘OK, what we’ll do is cut that area up into offices and that will add to the number of offices.’  So that was the deal that we struck.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, second floor, Student Union, correct?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, I forget which floor it was.  And we just didn’t tolerate.  I wouldn’t tolerate it.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, that’s crazy.  I mean, do it on your own time but not in a college setting.\n\nSaul Cohen: That’s right. When I did that, what I didn’t realize was that I gained… You know, Queens is basically a Democratic county but had a strong Republican base as well, and in particular there was a very strong Republican Senator named Frank Padavan.  I think he just retired this year.  Frank Padavan was a former Army [colonel] and he was not a friend of the college because of all the things that were going on, and when he learned that I cleaned up the college, he became a strong supporter of the college.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh wow. OK, so he became a strong supporter of the college.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, he did.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s interesting.  I mean, today, I don’t even see any drugs today and there’s actually no smoking on campus any more.  It’s a tobacco-free zone. So I really don’t see any cigarettes either. It’s amazing.\n\nSaul Cohen: In those days…we knew nothing about that at Clark.  It didn’t exist, but it did exist in big universities.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I guess it was more of a problem.  Next question I want to touch on is, what was the tuition like in 1978?  I know you mentioned that it wasn’t free, but how much was it starting off, was it still cheap, reasonable?\n\nSaul Cohen: It was certainly reasonable.  What is it now, about $5,000?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Umm, yeah, maybe two to five thousand depending on classes, credits.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, I think at that time the top was about $2,000.  But again, you see, New York state was unique in many ways and it had TAP [Tuition Assistance Program]. You also had Pell [Federal Pell Grants] if you needed it, but you know, the amount of money that was involved then was so little that TAP handled anything that was needed.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Did a lot of students use TAP, or maybe half, half or less than half?\n\nSaul Cohen: I think it was less than half.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Less than half?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yeah, Queens was basically a middle-class borough.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Right, yeah. It still is.  OK. Did any students receive scholarships, and who gave out the scholarships at the time?\n\nSaul Cohen: We didn’t have a scholarship program because there was no need for it.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No scholarships?  OK.\n\nSaul Cohen: No, I want to take that back.  For graduate students, there were certain scholarships and funds, private funds.  Particularly in the School of Music.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Interesting.  Did it change when you were there in ’85 or …?\n\nSaul Cohen: No, we built it up.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, you built it from scratch?\n\nSaul Cohen: We built it up.  Now here are some of the problems I found when I came from Clark.  I talked  about low morale.  The education department was the first.  We had to do something about them.  I turned to a friend of mine who was a professor at Yale [Seymour Sarason], an eminent psychologist who was interested in urban education.  He really was the father of community psychology. And I told him I had a problem with morale.  He agreed to come down once, twice a month, and meet with the entire faculty of education and just talk to them.\n\nChristopher Oliva: This is in Queens College, right, or Clark?\n\nSaul Cohen: Queens.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK. How did talking to them solve the problem?\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, you know what psychologists are like.  How do you feel, this, that.  He got them to, first off, to become more interdependent on one another. But then secondly, and this is luck, the mayor [Ed Koch] had met me, and they had a problem, the city.  There was a building at Junction and Northern Boulevard, it’s now called The Louis Armstrong School.  Huge building.  There were two school districts involved.  The boundary runs down the middle of Northern Boulevard.  There was an Irish, Italian on one side, and black and Hispanic on the other.  The black -- the Irish and Italian did not want that building built.  It was on their side of the line.  So you had a court case, which went on for five years; they refused to allow the building to be finished, the district board.  The judge finally ruled that [the] City of New York [City Board of Education] had to take over the building -- it was 98% finished -- and it would have to run it.  Take it away from the district.  The president, the Chancellor at that time, of the schools, was Frank Macchiarola.  You know that name?\n\nChristopher Oliva: No.\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, Mayor Koch said to him, ‘Why don’t you call Saul Cohen and see what he can do to help you?’ And he called me.  I’d been involved in a similar project in Worcester.  I liked the idea that the college would become involved in creating a new middle school.  We talked it over with the education faculty.  It had been scheduled to be a 7 to 9 [grade] school, and the only thing the faculty wanted was 6 to 9.  They wanted more of a middle school. And it became a major project for our faculty.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I think I read up on that.\n\nSaul Cohen: To train the teachers.  It eventually became called The Louis Armstrong School because Armstrong lived about five blocks away and there’s a museum near there.  A big school, 2,000 students.  [Aside: Where’s your coffee?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Actually that was mine, but it’s OK.\n\nSaul Cohen: Oh God.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No, it’s all right. You sure? OK. Thanks.]\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s not an easy thing. But what the faculty did was they got so involved.  First of all, we assigned two faculty members [Professors Sidney Trubowitz and Paul Longo] full time to work on the recruiting of the teachers.  I insisted that we be able to sign off on the hiring of the principal.  The city agreed, and I also insisted that principal be permitted, not permitted, but be given the right to hire the teachers for the first three years.  Because normally what was done was, according to union rules, you take [new teachers] off the shelf, you do it by seniority.  If someone in another school wants to go to a new school, and they’re senior, they can go.  So the principal was given this right which made a big difference. It was a great school.  The faculty became so involved that, for example, they created what they called the Early Bird program for kids who needed extra tutorial work, and as volunteers, they did this on their own, 12 of them.  They would come in in the morning, I think it was at 7:30, and there was only one requirement, and that is that the parent had to come with the kid -- most of them were ESL kids -- and that the parent had to take an English language class.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s kind of cool.\n\nSaul Cohen: It was a great idea.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s good.\n\nSaul Cohen: And it was on a volunteer basis.\n\nChristopher Oliva: And you started that program, you guys figured it all out and stuff?  Is it still there today?\n\nSaul Cohen: I think it still is.  I’m not sure but I think it still is.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Interesting.\n\nSaul Cohen: But that lifted their morale, morale as a whole.  One thing I’ll never forget:  In one of my letters I wrote about this to the faculty in general and I urged anyone who wanted to get involved to get involved. And I had an urgent telephone call from the chair of the union, Professor Marty Kaplan.  He was a biologist.  He said, ‘I must see you.’  Fine, I’ll come over. I said, ‘What’s the story?’  He says, ‘You can’t do what you did.’  And I said, ‘What did I do?’ ‘In your newsletter, you urged faculty to volunteer for this program.’   I said,  ‘How….?’   ‘You can’t, ’cause you’re the president, and when you urge in writing it’s undue pressure.’  I said, ‘What pressure?’  I said, ‘Marty, would you be willing to volunteer?’  He said, ‘Of course I’d be willing if I were needed.’   The union continues to play, if anything, a more aggressive role, not so much at Queens but at other colleges and what goes on there.\n\nSaul Cohen:  We had a library school problem.  This is 1978, the Board of Higher Ed, the CUNY Board, had decided to close the School of Library Science.  It was the only CUNY library science school; Columbia had one, School of Library Science [which was about to be closed], I don’t know if NYU did.  And the rationale was that someone had made a study which said that there was no more need for any more library scientists.  This was just the time when librarianship was becoming media-oriented and the chair [Professor Richard Hyman] came to me and said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s a rule, we have to close, what can you do about it?’  And I said, ‘Well what I can do is refuse to close.’  I refused to close.  That school now is the only library school in New York City.  It is huge…\n\nChristopher Oliva: The library school?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, library school, it is very big.  I forget the number of faculty but a large number of faculty.  And anywhere you go, you find a librarian who [is] much more than a librarian, a media specialist.  So we saved the library school, that was my first year.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s amazing.\n\nSaul Cohen: So those are two schools where we had some real challenges.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I guess the next question would be, what was the attitudes of the students toward education when you were president at Queens College?\n\nSaul Cohen: Very hard-working group of students, many of whom intended to go on to graduate school or professional school. We created new programs for them. For example, we created an environmental studies program.  And I was able to get Caumsett, the Caumsett estate on northern Long Island, for the college. It was owned by the state, they didn’t know what to do with it.  We got it on a lease, and that became a base for the program.  I was also able to hire one of the first environmentalists, a powerful environmentalist in this country, his name was Dr. Barry Commoner.  He came to spearhead the new program.  And I’ll tell you a secret how you sometimes get faculty.  A faculty member, a biologist, called me and said, ‘I think if you move fast, you can persuade Barry Commoner to come to Queens College.’  I said, ‘How?’  He’s at Washington University in St. Louis, which is a very well-endowed private university.  He says, ‘He’s gotten divorced, he wants to get out of town.’  I called him; we got him. That’s how we got Barry Commoner.  We needed a library very badly.  Terrible building…They were in Klapper.\n\nChristopher Oliva: One of my questions is actually about…\n\nSaul Cohen: The buildings?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, I guess we’ll get to that later.  We’ll see what we get to. You answered this already but what was the general ethnicity of the students?\n\nSaul Cohen: Basically was white; Jewish, Italian, Greek.  I would say those were the three major…\n\nChristopher Oliva: Like it is today.\n\nSaul Cohen: Now there was a problem with the Italians.  There was a lawsuit.  I came and discovered that a group of Italian faculty plus outsiders were suing Queens College as being discriminatory.  I never quite figured out, what the hell they were driving at; I think it had to do in part with promotions within the department. But they accused the college of discrimination and my response was, well, let’s do something positive, let’s create an Italian Studies program.  They had one, but something that has a lot of pizazz to it. And with the help of someone who came to me, unbeknownst to me, and says, ‘You got a problem with the Italian community, I can help you.’  Her name was Rosemary Stigliano.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Rosary?\n\nSaul Cohen: Rosemary Stigliano.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Rosemary Stigliano.\n\nSaul Cohen: I hired her.  I liked her.  We created an exchange program.  We sent our students to Italy, to Rome, and vice versa.\n\nChristopher Oliva: So you started that?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, I started that, and it really changed the image of Italian Studies.  I remember the governor at that time, senior Governor [Mario] Cuomo, saying to me, ‘I like what you’re doing there; I want Italian-American kids not to learn chicken-soup Italian, but to learn Dante.’  One of the ways we were able to do what we did was, we got tremendous support from the political leadership of Queens for some of the things that we did, like the governor, who first became interested -- and he had come from Queens -- but what we did with the Italian exchange program really interested him.  When I wanted, when we needed a building for the School of Music, and the college had constantly been asking for a building, and then rejected by the Board,  didn’t give it a priority.  I went to him [Governor Cuomo] and I said, ‘Look, we have the greatest School of Music in the city’ and it was, is.  It’s both a … it’s a conservatory as well as a general music school. It needs a building.  He intervened and we got the building.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What was the building called when it was first built?\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, we changed to the Copland School of Music.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, that’s still there today.\n\nSaul Cohen: Oh yeah, it’s a marvelous building.\n\nChristopher Oliva: They redid it too.\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s a marvelous building.  And like everything else in life, New York City always [has] problems; there’s a ruling which says that when you’re building a building in New York, you have to hire New York firms.  Now the faculty of the School of Music said to me, ‘We want the acoustics to be designed by the same person and company that did the Berkeley California School of Music, the Peter George Company.  So I said, ‘Fine.’ I didn’t know about this rule. Then it was pointed out to me by the people at the Board that we couldn’t do it. You couldn’t hire an outsider to handle it.  So I figured OK, we’ll create a partnership.  We will take a New York firm which we know is good on the bread and butter things like electricity, heating, plumbing, Lank-Adams, and we’ll partner them with Peter George and we did. [Editor’s note: some of the details referenced in this passage could not be verified.]  And the acoustics are superb.  Have you ever been in that hall?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Since it was built, I went in there once, because I’m on the other side of the college.\n\nSaul Cohen: Anyway, we got the music building.  The library was [another challenge] -- you have used the library?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, I’m always in the library, 6th floor.\n\nSaul Cohen: Do you look outside through the glass to Manhattan occasionally?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh yeah, the view is awesome. I love it.  I see Citi Field, it’s amazing.\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, when I came there, the provost and the deans said, ‘Look, we’ve been pleading with the Board of Higher Ed for a library for years, and they’ve ignored us.  I said, ‘OK, we’ll get a library.’ And I went to the borough president [Donald Manes] and I told him how important the library was to the future of the college, and he knew how important the college was to the future of the borough, and he said, ‘I’ll do what I can.’  Then he called me about a month later.  He said, ‘You remember your conversation about the library?’  I said, ‘Yes.’  He said, ‘Look, I’m willing to get you that library,’ because in those days the borough presidents had a lot more power than they now have.  You had a Board of Estimates [consisting of each borough president and three elected city-wide officials] and they each had a vote and they would trade off: ‘If you want this building, I want this building.’  [Manes said to me] ‘I have only  one request,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, here’s the politician, he wants something, God knows what.’  He says, ‘I want you to name the building after someone,’ and I’m thinking, oh, this is it.  I said ‘For whom?’  He said, ‘For Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal.’  You ever hear that name?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yup.\n\nSaul Cohen: Ben Rosenthal was the great liberal congressman from Queens and I said to him, ‘you’re not doing -- I’m not doing you a favor, you’re doing me a favor, because this wouldn’t have occurred to me, but a name like that…  [unclear]  the college’. So we got the building. And I remember talking with the architect; I said, ‘I want an open glass wall facing Manhattan to attract students even if they only want to come in and gaze, because once they’re in there, they’re gonna do what they have to do.’  It’s a great building.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I love it. Was that fountain there?  There is a fountain there, like right by the front.  Was it there when you were there?\n\nSaul Cohen: I think it was.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, OK, that’s where people go too; the view is amazing there.\n\nSaul Cohen: So we got that building, and toward the end of my term we got an agreement to build a science building.  We never built it, but we got the agreement. I also found, when I first came to Queens…I’m the kind of guy who will pick up a gum wrapper if I see it on the ground.  A hell of a lot of litter on that campus.  So I inherited a person in charge of buildings and grounds, who really was not up to it, to say the least.  So I made him walk with me every single day for the first month out on the greensward and deliberately doing it where students were crossing, picking up, picking up.  They finally got the point.  Is it pretty good now?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, it’s really clean.  It’s a really clean college.\n\nSaul Cohen: It was part of the culture in those days.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Any other buildings that were being built at that time?  Or any new buildings, because I know Powdermaker is sort of new.  Was Powdermaker built….?\n\nSaul Cohen: Powdermaker was there.  Klapper was there.\n\nChristopher Oliva: They were all there.\n\nSaul Cohen: The science [building] was about to be built.  We got approvals, so we had three buildings.\n\nChristopher Oliva:  Was Remsen going to…. was Remsen there?\n\nSaul Cohen: Remsen was there.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, so you just got those two.  The Rosenthal and the science building agreement?\n\nSaul Cohen: Rosenthal was built while I was there and Copland School of Music was built while I was there.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, OK, right. What was the attitude toward education in the surrounding communities?\n\nSaul Cohen: Very supportive. You know we had a program, I guess it’s still there, called the ACE program for continuing education.  It drew, as you know, senior citizens, and I would say the majority came from LeFrak City.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What city?\n\nSaul Cohen: LeFrak, you know the apartments opposite the school.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I think they changed the name, I’m not sure.\n\nSaul Cohen: I would doubt it because LeFrak was the developer, and this was a guy who loved his name.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Is that by….\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s right at the corner.\n\nChristopher Oliva: On Melbourne?\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s at the corner of Main Street and Horace Harding. [Editor’s note: This is not the correct location of the LeFrak City apartments; this and several other references to LeFrak City in this passage could not be clarified by later research.]\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh yeah, OK.\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s a complex.  Several thousand families there.  It was really the political power base; as a matter of fact a couple of the assembly people came from there.  Stavisky, at that time it was Lenny Stavisky, he’s passed away; his wife Toby has taken his place.  She’s from LeFrak City, and there was someone else that lived in LeFrak City. They were very important. In a private college, you get people with money, alright, who support the college.  In a public college, you need people with political clout and who love the college, and that kind of population, which was using college reading courses, they were a very strong base for us.  And the borough president recognized that having a strong college was important for the borough.  He used to invite me every year -- not every year, every month he used to assemble all of the representatives to Albany for a monthly meeting.  He was a real political boss.  Donald Manes was his name.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Don….?\n\nSaul Cohen: Manes, who committed suicide over corruption later on.  But he was a very smart person, and he invited me to all of their meetings and I would talk to them about what we were doing. And I remember later on, toward the end of my career there, Townsend Harris, I wanted to reopen Townsend Harris High School on the Queens College campus.  And there was a lot of opposition to it within the borough from the high schools of eastern Queens, who were afraid that we would be draining them of their best students.  I don’t know whether you know what Townsend Harris was; it was the classical high school for New York City from 1922 to 1942.  If you went to Townsend Harris High School, it was a three-year high school, you had to study Latin or Greek, and you were guaranteed admission to City College.  It was a boys’ school.  And City College at that time was very difficult to get into.\n\nChristopher Oliva: So they got a free ride if they went there.\n\nSaul Cohen: That’s right; and City College was much tougher to get into [at that time] than Columbia, let alone NYU.  LaGuardia closed it in 1942, Mayor [Fiorello] LaGuardia, because he said it was too elitist.  They had the best and the brightest kids.  A group of their alumni had never given up.  They wanted that school reopened. And one day I was in Boston at a friend of mine’s house and he had a friend from New York [visiting], and somehow the conversation got on to our high schools, and we got into a debate as to which of us had gone to a tougher high school.  Either the Latin school, and I learned about Townsend Harris.  When I got back to New York, about a month later, this fellow calls me and he says, ‘We’ve been trying to reopen Townsend Harris.  We haven’t been able to get to first base with the Board of Education. Can you do something?’  I said, ‘Absolutely, if it’s at Queens College.’ And I went to Manes and I said, ‘I want your support. And I want a promise from you that you will build a building.’  You’ve seen their building, right? At Queens College?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah.\n\nSaul Cohen: And he said, ‘I understand what you want and I’ll support it.’  Then he had me come down to one of the meetings with the people from Albany, the senators and the assemblymen, and he says, ‘Look, I know you’re under a lot of pressure from eastern Queens against this notion.  I don’t expect you to come and support it, I just want you to keep quiet.’ That was Manes. And we got it.  Joe Barkan [who was from Queens and was then chair of the City Board of Education] --  well, there was a lot of horse trading.  Stuyvesant [High School] at that time was going under repair, and was building I think a bridge or something across the highway, and the Board of Estimates -- it had to be approved by people from, the representatives from each borough. So the borough representative from Queens [Claire Shulman] said, ‘I will vote against it unless you agree to the proposition of reopening and rebuilding Townsend Harris.’  And they did.  And then Manes gave me his promise that he would build this building, and I remember the difficulties I had with the Board of Ed.  They wanted to build a bigger building and I said, ‘No, we don’t want more than 350 per class.’ And they wanted to build a swimming pool; I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we’ve got a college swimming pool.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: They still do it today.  I work at the fitness center and always see Townsend Harris kids in the gym and gym class, everything.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, you know, that’s what makes the world go ‘round, construction.  But anyway, after he [Manes] committed suicide, I went to his deputy who became borough president, Claire Shulman, and I said, ‘You know that Donald promised that he would get us that building,’ and she said, ‘I know and I’ll respect his promise.’ And she got us that building, and it’s a very good building.  It’s a terrific school.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I know some people who actually went there.\n\nSaul Cohen: I only have one -- this is a funny story.  Their alumni still had six Nobel prize winners from the older Townsend Harris. They had this group of alumni, and we were holding a meeting and one of them says, ‘Well, we have to have girls.’  So I looked at him. ‘You have to have girls for two reasons.  One, if you want this school to be the best of its kind you better have girls, and secondly, the Board of Education will not allow a boys school anymore.’  OK, we hired a principal who hired the first set of 27 teachers.  Again, I got agreements that he’d be able to hire,  and I had a reception for the teachers with this group of alumni. And they come in, and about a third [of the teachers] are women, and one of them blurts out, ‘There are women here, women teachers!’  He said, ‘In our school we never had a woman teacher. We only had two women.  One was the librarian and one was a secretary’.  So I said, ‘Well, you had twice as many as we did because [at Boston Latin] our librarian was a male.’   That’s how things have changed.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Wow. Now it’s basically all, mostly women and some men teachers.\n\nSaul Cohen: Oh yeah, it’s 60 percent women.  It’s a great school. I visited it a month ago.  I love it.\n\nChristopher Oliva: It is.  Was the outside community mostly Asian like it is today?  How has it changed?\n\nSaul Cohen: No, it’s changed radically.  I would say that our Asian population…I’m talking about Chinese, Korean, South Asian, couldn’t have been more than 20 percent, if that, when I was there.  It’s changed tremendously.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What kind of people were there at the time?\n\nSaul Cohen: I said, Jews, Italians and Greeks.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Jews, Italians, Irish…?\n\nSaul Cohen: Irish and Greeks.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, it has changed a lot.\n\nSaul Cohen: It’s changed a lot.  I’ll tell you something on this one.  The last Townsend Harris principal, Ken Bonomo [principal at Townsend Harris 2008-2012], was only there for three years and he then took a job as superintendent, no as principal, of the high school at Scarsdale. And I remember talking to him about that.  I said, ‘Why did you do it?’  I said, ‘Did you do it for the money?’  He said, ‘Yes, I did it partly for the money,’ because they pay at least twice as much, maybe more.  They have huge salaries at Scarsdale. So I then said to him, ‘Well, you know you’re going to buy 2,000 headaches,’ I said, ‘because the parent of every kid in that high school in Scarsdale is sure that he or she knows more than the principal and they’re on your neck all the time.’  So he looks at me and laughs, he says, ‘That’s what I thought, but I’m prepared for it.’  I said, ‘What do you mean? You now have Townsend Harris, a school which is a little more than half Asian, I’m sure the Chinese don’t bother you; the parents are too busy forcing their kids to study at night.’  He says, ‘You’re wrong, it’s gonna change.  In the beginning, you’re quite right, the first generation of Chinese, they had nothing to do with the school. They didn’t speak up or anything. But,’ he says, ‘we are now dealing with a second generation of Asians. The parents were Americanized and saying things and telling the principal what should be done.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: Of course.\n\nSaul Cohen: He says, ‘I’m ready for Scarsdale.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: What neighborhood did most students come from?\n\nSaul Cohen: I would say that most of them came from the Forest Hills area, eastern Queens, and the Long Island City area where the Greek population is.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Like Astoria maybe too?\n\nSaul Cohen: Astoria, yeah.\n\nChristopher Oliva: OK, just a curious question.  I wanted to know, ‘cause that’s what it is today basically too.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yeah, I don’t think that’s changed.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No. Was Queens College known as a commuter college?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Why?\n\nSaul Cohen: Because it was a commuter college. [laughs]\n\nChristopher Oliva: There were no dorms at the time, right?\n\nSaul Cohen: No dorms.\n\nChristopher Oliva: You just went there and went home, basically.\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, a dorm has been built, correct?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, it’s called The Summit.\n\nSaul Cohen: How many do they have?\n\nChristopher Oliva: I guess a couple hundred, maybe a thousand.  Maybe less than a thousand. [Editor’s note: The Summit has 500 beds.]  \n\nSaul Cohen: It’s still a commuter college.  It’s the best bargain in the world. You go to the private colleges you have to pay, fifty thousand dollars a year, you have to borrow.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s too much debt for me.\n\nSaul Cohen: Too much debt for everyone.  Total debt is over one trillion dollars. Student debt. One trillion and it will never be repaid.\n\nChristopher Oliva: My brother went to Saint John’s and it was low twenties, now it’s like….\n\nSaul Cohen: Thirty-five, forty.\n\nChristopher Oliva: How can you pay for that?  People make a yearly salary of that.  Well, anyway, were there any rathskellers, bars?  My teacher mentioned that.  They are kind of like bars on the campus.\n\nSaul Cohen: No.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No bars?  OK, I was just curious because he mentioned that, maybe in the ’50s or ’40s.\n\nSaul Cohen: I don’t recall.\n\nChristopher Oliva: How was parking, was it just as bad back then?\n\nSaul Cohen: Impossible.\n\nChristopher Oliva: It was impossible, just as it is today?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I hate parking in Queens College, it’s insane.  You have to go like 8 in the morning to get a spot.\n\nSaul Cohen: Parking lot six, is that what you are in now?\n\nChristopher Oliva: I actually haven’t paid for a parking lot.  I actually park on the street.  Can you tell me anything about the Athletics Department?  Since I work there, I’m just curious.\n\nSaul Cohen: When I came…first of all, I think we had good facilities.  I can’t remember the name of the director [Rick Wettan] but he was a good person.  A strong person, but we had at that, when I arrived, a national championship women’s basketball team.  The coach was Lucille Kyvallos and I recall in all innocence asking the provost, ‘How many members of the team graduate?’  He looked at me and laughed and he said, ‘None.’  So I said, ‘None?’  He said ‘none. They were recruited by Lucille.  They take half a program, they’re not up to the standards [so they drop out].  So I put a stop to it and we were no longer national champions.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I mean, that’s crazy.\n\nSaul Cohen: It was crazy.\n\nChristopher Oliva: You get to go to school to play basketball and you don’t graduate? That’s kind of…\n\nSaul Cohen: Why, a lot of that goes on now nationally.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Really?\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I didn’t even know that.\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure, they will hire, the professional teams will hire kids out of college while they are still in college.  They drop out of college, they just go on.  But anyway, we put an end to that.  But I think the program was a good program.  I’m trying to remember if they had phys ed at that time.  He [Wettan] was very well-liked, admired.\nChristopher: And he was in the Fitzgerald Gymnasium?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes.\n\nChristopher Oliva: It’s a hangar-looking thing.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes.\n\nChristopher Oliva: It’s still the same. They haven’t done any construction to it at all.\n\nSaul Cohen: Do they have fitness rooms in there now?\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, they actually built a new one.  The building is not too nice-looking.  It’s probably the worst building there.\n\nSaul Cohen: You know what they should do?  They should lease it out.  They should lease out the space to…\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yes, they actually do now.  They have events.  \n\nSaul Cohen: No, I mean they should appropriate a certain amount of land to a developer and build it and run it.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That would be much better.\n\nSaul Cohen: You would have to pay, you’d have to pay to use it.  A lot of that goes on in colleges now.\n\nChristopher Oliva: All right. That’s interesting. The security on campus, how was the security on campus at the time?\n\nSaul Cohen: We had no problems.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Were there a lot of security guards?\n\nSaul Cohen: No; of course it was very different from Clark.  We had no security guards there. [At Clark] we had one gentleman named Arthur, who was about this tall, who was in charge of parking and security. And I’ll never forget the time of the Vietnam War and the crisis there, Arthur would…there was one point where recruiters were coming to the campus, Army recruiters, and the students wanted to boycott.  I was part of a triumvirate running the college then, and we refused to accede to their desires to prevent the Army from recruiting.  It’s a free society, if there are students who want to discuss this, they have the right to do it, so they said, ‘OK, we’re going to lie on the floor with our bodies and they are going to have to step on us to get into the room where the recruiter is.’ And Arthur comes with us, the three of us who were running the college then, and he says, ‘Don’t worry, doc’, he said, ‘we’ll take care of these kids. They’ll be like mice.  They won’t cause any real disturbance.’  And then a faculty member who was beloved by the kids, a philosopher [unclear], came out and he said to the ones who were lying on the floor, he said, ‘Look, I’m going to ask everyone who wants to go in to take off his or her shoes and as they step on your body, and to step lightly, so you cause no disturbance and they’ll cause no disturbance.’   Now I don’t know what went on at Queens at that time.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh OK, that was in Clark. That’s amazing.\n\nSaul Cohen: It must have been a lot tougher [at Queens] in those days.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, I’ve heard.  I had a class last year, a Vietnam class.  A lot of protesting.  Mostly peaceful, but sometimes it got a little out of hand.\n\nSaul Cohen: But we didn’t have an outsized security force at all.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No? Today there are a lot of security posts and everything.\n\nSaul Cohen: No, nothing like that.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No? OK, interesting how times have changed.  Let’s see.  I know you touched on a little of this before.  How would you describe the staff at Queens College?  Different departments, maybe?\n\nSaul Cohen: Very strong.  There was great strength in the humanities of course, but also in political science and in history. Sociology was strong. Biology was strong. Chemistry also -- not physics -- but chemistry and biology were strong.  So was Earth science, geology and Earth science.  In general, across the board, these were people with national reputations.  Well, there was one thing though about it.  I believed you know, in university, including Queens, the issue of promotion depends very heavily on publications.  To the point sometimes where it becomes self-defeating.  For example, our accounting department, we had accounting which was five years, program, it was really economics and accounting, and it was headed by a guy who was just a master at administering this department, recruiting faculty and students, and placing students.  He used to place them in all of the important accounting firms, and wherever I went in the college, they would talk about this as a model for placing professional students.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Do you know his name?\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure, Lou Geller was his name, Professor Lou [Louis] Geller.  And I said [to the Provost], ‘What’s his rank?’ And he’s an older person already. ‘He’s an associate professor.”   I said, ‘How can he only be an associate professor when he’s so valuable to the college?’  ‘Well, he hasn’t published.’ Now we have a Personnel and Budget Committee which makes recommendations to the president on promotions.  So I said, ‘Are there going to be a lot of objections if I override the committee on Lou Geller?’  So the answer was, ‘Absolutely not, we’d love to have it done, but we haven’t had the courage to break the mold.’  So we promoted Lou Geller.  You’ve got to find people who are exceptional teachers, like I mentioned the one from Clark who didn’t publish.  It was the same business. He wouldn’t be promoted because he hadn’t published.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s kind of weird.  I guess that was the standard.\n\nSaul Cohen: That’s the standard.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I guess you have to publish.  What was the name of the…did the staff have a union?  \n\nSaul Cohen: Oh yeah.\n\nChristopher Oliva: The city union, right?  Do you know the name of the union or was it just the city union?\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, it’s a union of the City of New York, of the City University of New York.  It’s completely unionized. Teachers are unionized and administrative staff are unionized.  I found that the administrative staff that I inherited were really good professionals.  The office was very well-run when I came in. They had very good people there.\n\nChristopher Oliva: The organization of the staff, was it how you wanted them when you first came or did you want them to be a little more organized?\n\nSaul Cohen: What did I do?  I didn’t do much reorganizing.  I was very pleased with the provost.  I brought in a couple of people.  One of them was an African-American who had gotten his doctorate degree with me at Clark.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Do you know his name?\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure, Herman Jenkins was his name.  Because we didn’t have much of a footprint there, and Herman had actually been one of Martin Luther King’s lieutenants. [unclear]  He was an artist and a cartographer, and I got a call one day from someone I knew from Detroit.  He says the head of the Urban League here is a very gifted cartographer, very bright guy.  I think he would be ideal for you for a Ph.D. program, and I interviewed him.  Actually, I had created a program.  My profession had one black in it.  One; one Ph.D., and I spent a year as director of – took a year’s leave to direct my professional association, the Association of American Geographers, and at that time I said to myself, this is 1965, the time of the riots, we have got to do something about this.  So I got five universities to agree, including my own, to take on five very talented black undergraduate students and support them through their [doctoral] programs.  Berkeley was one, Michigan was another, Chicago was another [and Wisconsin was the fourth].  And I went to the National Science Foundation and I asked them for support.  I said, ‘The colleges will pay, will cover the tuition, but we need support for the students,’ and they agreed. So we got a big grant.  Out of that program, eventually 42 students, African-Americans, got doctorates.  [We went] from one to 42, and most of them are teaching in universities or some are retired already.  But it was a wonderful program. And I recruited, I went to 10 black colleges during that period.  Just to try to encourage their faculty to find the kind of students who they thought could make Ph.D. programs. And I ended up in one place, in Albany, Georgia, the day after the Albany riots, where someone was killed.  Someone [a college driver] was waiting for me in a college car and I jumped into the front seat and the driver looks at me and says, ‘Professor, get in the rear. I don’t want to be seen driving around this town with someone who [will be seen as a] liberal whitey.  They killed someone previously.’ Anyway, we got the best and the brightest.\n\nChristopher Oliva: How did more of the white schools compare to the black schools at the time? How did it compare to Queens College and Clark?\n\nSaul Cohen: Oh, they couldn’t; they didn’t have the resources, they didn’t have the faculty.  They were low-level schools.  But in any low-level school, you’ll find some bright kids.\n\nChristopher Oliva: There’s always someone.  You took those and they made it.\n\nSaul Cohen: And they made it.  We relied upon … they usually had one, maybe two faculty teaching geography.  We relied exclusively on their recommendations.\n\nChristopher Oliva: It worked out pretty well.  Were you in charge of fundraising?  And if so, what were some of the things you did as a fundraiser?\n\nSaul Cohen: My major issue in raising funds was getting buildings.  You know, you put your energy in trying to raise a couple million dollars, or do you put it in trying to raise a building which will cost 100 million or 200 million?\n\nChristopher Oliva: So instead of asking for the money, you asked for the buildings to be built?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, I put my energy in the buildings.  We were lucky, we had political support.  Someone asked me how I was able to deal with Queens politicians, coming from a small university in Massachusetts.  I looked at him and laughed, and I said, I’m from Massachusetts. You have never seen Massachusetts politicians.  If you can deal with that, you can deal with Queens politicians, who by and large as a group were much better educated and much more responsive to quality needs than the ones you can find in Massachusetts. Not that they turned [out] to be less corrupt, but….\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, you know, politicians.  A lot of corruption…but that’s good that you dealt with the politicians because you had to deal with them in Massachusetts, so you kind of prepared yourself for that.  We’ve just got a couple more questions.  As a president, what type of change did you want?  Like when you first went there, what was your mindset?  What kind of things did you want to change? What was your main goal?\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, my main goal was to build up its strength.  The Music School was in trouble.  It had great faculty, limited support, and some of those faculty were retiring, and it was unlikely we would be able to replace them. Certainly we would have to replace them at the assistant professorial level --untried people. So I went to the Carnegie Foundation [editor’s note: most likely this was the Mellon Foundation]. I knew the president, and I said, ‘Look, I want to be able to maintain the quality of the School of Music and to actually improve it.  The only way I can do that is to have [young] people identified who have already shown that they are going to be greats in their field.  Which means bringing them in not at assistant professorial levels but at associates.  And they would live side by side with the people they were replacing for a couple of years, so we need money for that. And he gave me half a million bucks, and he said, ‘If you were a private institution, I’d give you a million.’\n\nChristopher Oliva: Do you know his name?\n\nSaul Cohen: Sure, Sawyer.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Sawyer?\n\nSaul Cohen: Dr. [John] Sawyer. He had been president of Williams College prior to that.  Building the strong bonds and then rescuing the weak ones, which was education and librarianship.  And then injecting new programs, particularly environmental studies.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s funny because the education program at Queens College nowadays has a great reputation and when – you’re saying to me now it was really weak.\n\nSaul Cohen: They had fired 60 people, but we immediately took care of that.\n\nChristopher Oliva: You took care of it, now the reputation is…\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, it’s a wonderful program.  We lost the dean, unfortunately.\n\nChristopher Oliva: The dean?\n\nSaul Cohen: She went to Montclair [State University].\n\nChristopher Oliva: How did your approach differ from the previous president? Can you just tell me, do you know anything about the previous president and what he did that was sort of different?\n\nSaul Cohen: There had been an interim president, acting president [Nathaniel Siegel], who was the provost, and I guess he desperately wanted to become the president, and he worked on the politicians [of the borough].\n\nChristopher Oliva: He wasn’t successful, as much as you were.\n\nSaul Cohen: Because of [Chancellor] Kibbee.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Kibbee?\n\nSaul Cohen: Kibbee said, ‘I’m going to pick the person the college needs,’ said to Manes and his political friends, ‘but not someone that you simply want.’ So I would say [Siegel] was treading water. Prior to that the president was Joe Murphy who was, I guess he was a child of the ’60s.  You know, he smoked pot with students. [Editor’s note: See addendum for Cohen’s further thoughts on Murphy.]\n\nChristopher Oliva: What? Oh my. That was probably in the Student Union or something?\n\nSaul Cohen: And prior to that, the president was Joe McMurray, who was an administrator in Washington and he really wasn’t an educator.  I suppose the difference was, I’ve always approached university administration as something that’s embedded in teaching and research.  I don’t buy the notion that universities need administrators who come from business or other places, and you know maybe at Queens I was successful because I was perceived as someone who was not just an administrator but who was a faculty member who happened to be a president at the time.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Right, you do well with the people, you get support.\n\nSaul Cohen: In fact, I left the college because I figured I wanted to get back to teaching and writing.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Actually, the next question is, what did you do after leaving Queens College?\n\nSaul Cohen: Well, I spent a year running an international organization.\n\nChristopher Oliva: You know the name of that organization?\n\nSaul Cohen: The [American Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee.  And then immediately went over to Hunter [College, CUNY], which had the only graduate geography department in the city of New York, and I was a University Professor there for about 15 years, and I was also able to spend time with my own professional association.  I became president of the association.  I brought in some changes there.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Everywhere you go you’re bringing some change. It’s always a good thing if it’s needed.  How was your relationship with Queens College after leaving?\n\nSaul Cohen: I didn’t have much of a relationship with my successor [Shirley Strum Kenny], who didn’t reach out at all to me.  But the current president [James Muyskens], I do have a good relationship with him.  He’s reached out to me a few times.  I’ve gone back to the campus and so on.  I like what he’s doing. I think he’s doing a good job.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What’s his name again?  I don’t even know. I can always look it up.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Do you still have a relationship with Clark or Boston College, or even Harvard?\n\nSaul Cohen: Not Boston College, Boston University.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Oh, I’m sorry, Boston University. I apologize.\n\nSaul Cohen: No. I do have a relationship with Clark; I’ve gotten a couple of honorary degrees there.  And you know most, many of the faculty that I knew are now gone.  But I still have phone calls with some of them.  So you know.\n\nChristopher Oliva: So nothing with Boston University?\n\nSaul Cohen: No, I don’t think there’d be anyone around BU now.  [I am] 87 years old, and this is 1952 to ’64. No, my friends there are gone.\n\nChristopher Oliva: How about Harvard University, anything? Any relations there?\nSaul Cohn: Well, my class.\n\nChristopher Oliva: The alumni class?\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, sure.\n\nChristopher Oliva: What did it mean to you to be the president of a college? What did it mean to you personally?\n\nSaul Cohen: To be able to identify problems and solve them.\n\nChristopher Oliva: That’s what you like doing, trying to help things out, change for the better.\n\nSaul Cohen: That’s right.  And to get members of the faculty to work together.  Which is not easy.\n\nChristopher Oliva: No, that’s difficult.\n\nSaul Cohen: I remember we had a particularly difficult time with [faculty involvement with] that transition from community college to the senior college.  It had to do with, I remember, the biology department and its requirements for those transferring over from Queensborough. And there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of our faculty to work with the Queensborough biology faculty.\n\nChristopher Oliva: For the transfer to be easier.\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, and that’s still a big problem.\n\nChristopher Oliva: Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of credits from transferring too.  Because they don’t accept it...\n\nSaul Cohen: Yes, because I have said to them, you don’t solve the problem by saying this is not acceptable.  You solve the problem by working with the person who’s teaching biology to sophomores [in the community college] and saying well, this is what we require and these are the materials that might be helpful to you etc., etc.  But no, it’s become a national problem.\n\nChristopher Oliva: I always hear people complaining about that.  This is a funny question. Do you know any famous actors, politicians, whoever that attended Queens College during your tenure as the president? Any famous -- like I know Seinfeld went there, I’m not sure when…\n\nSaul Cohen: I don’t know. 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