{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/gf0ms3kg7k/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Martin Pine 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 Dr. Pine discusses his decision to come to Queens College.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 2: \u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine talks about the loyalty oath and the involvement of Queens College student Andrew Goodman in the Civil Rights Movement.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 3: \u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine recalls changes in the architecture of the Queens College campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 4: \u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine speaks about how the student body has changed at Queens College.\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\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eDr. Martin Pine was Professor of History at Queens College for more than 40 years before retiring in 2004; he then continued to teach as an adjunct until shortly before his death in 2014. During his time at Queens he taught in the SEEK and ACE programs; was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies; and served on the history department’s Personnel \u0026amp; Budget Committee for many years. His specialty was medieval and Renaissance intellectual history.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, Pine looks back on his career and the changes he saw at Queens College through the decades. Some highlights include the student and faculty protests over the Vietnam War, the development of the college’s physical campus, the increasingly diverse student body, and the revolutionary effects of technology in education.\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 (primary)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Coverage"]},"value":{"en":["1960s-2013 (temporal)","Queens College, Flushing, Queens, NY (spatial)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2013-04-23 (Created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. Martin Pine (Interviewee)","Michael Kelly (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":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["http://digitalarchives.queenslibrary.org/search/browse/41049"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 1:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine discusses his decision to come to Queens College.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 2:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine talks about the loyalty oath and the involvement of Queens College student Andrew Goodman in the Civil Rights Movement.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 3:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine recalls changes in the architecture of the Queens College campus.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eClip 4:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e Dr. Pine speaks about how the student body has changed at Queens College.\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\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eDr. Martin Pine was Professor of History at Queens College for more than 40 years before retiring in 2004; he then continued to teach as an adjunct until shortly before his death in 2014. During his time at Queens he taught in the SEEK and ACE programs; was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies; and served on the history department\u0026rsquo;s Personnel \u0026amp; Budget Committee for many years. His specialty was medieval and Renaissance intellectual history.\u003c/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eIn this interview, Pine looks back on his career and the changes he saw at Queens College through the decades. Some highlights include the student and faculty protests over the Vietnam War, the development of the college\u0026rsquo;s physical campus, the increasingly diverse student body, and the revolutionary effects of technology in education.\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/000/096/363/small/MARTIN.jpg?1597940352","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96363","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 6 - 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So, Dr. Pine, I just wanted to get a little background information on you and before you came to Queens College. Were you born in the NY area?\r\nMARTIN PINE:  Yes, I was born in the Bronx, but I grew up in Rockaway Beach, which is devastated now because of …with Sandy, right.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you have any family still there?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, we moved a long time ago but I have many happy memories of growing up there.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It’s changed a lot.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, it was a wonderful place to grow up into a teenager, sort of isolated, away from the big city, but it was a wonderful place to grow up.  Believe it or not, I was a swimming rat for a long time as a kid.  We used to go the beach all the time, we were one block from the beach.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I grew up in Long Beach\r\nMARTIN PINE: So you’re the same thing.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yeah, I used to ride the waves without a board, just ride them.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah body surfing.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Right, exactly. And that was fun. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That’s uh, it’s a nice time these days. I have family in Long Beach, they’re rebuilding.\r\nMARTIN PINE: I can imagine, yeah.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So it’s interesting, and tough. And did you grow up in Rockaway, what did your parents do?\r\nMARTIN PINE: My father was a country physician, and old country physician. And I define that as someone who… half didn’t pay and half he didn’t charge. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: OK, so he’d accept uh….\r\nMARTIN PINE: And even though he was an atheist he didn’t charge clergy. A man of paradox. We had a home across the street for nuns, he wouldn’t charge the nuns and he wouldn’t charge rabbis. That’s crazy for an atheist, but that’s the way, he respected these people because he thought they worked very hard. And he respected them for their work, he said they worked very hard, the clergy. He respected, he didn’t believe in what they did, they said, and he believed they were very dedicated and that’s why he wouldn’t charge them. My father was very idealistic, as you can imagine.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY:  The whole notion of charity that comes with uh…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Right. And it’s true what I said. There were many people who he wouldn’t take money from if they didn’t have it; And he’d always say if they worried he said, “when you get it you can pay me.” Those days are gone forever of course, but that was the old time. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Now you need a health insurance card, otherwise you can’t get in the door. \r\nMARTIN PINE:  Exactly.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: On the survey you filled out, you mentioned that you went to Columbia for undergrad studies.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yes, and Columbia believe it or not, I’m giving away my age, was about $800 a year, and I had a Regents Scholarship for $350.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Oh wow.\r\nMARTIN PINE: So I went to Columbia for what today would be considered virtually free, and I was very lucky in that sense. And very privileged. Of course it was an all-male school, and much smaller, there were only 650 students was it in the class? No. It was a very small school. It was a very small liberal arts school.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: The campus was much smaller?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, the campus was large, but it was…you really got to know most people in our class, or many, many people in your class and that’s what made it distinctive in that sense.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Is there anyone you went to school with that people would know today? \r\nMARTIN PINE: Well I have close friends who I still am friendly with from that day. That was the heyday of Columbia. I studied with Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Richard Hofstadter, uh, Dumas Malone, um…There were four Nobel Prize winners in the science departments, there was the youngest professor of mathematics ever appointed, T.D. Lee, at 28. I think he also was a Nobel Prize winner, and it was remarkable. It really was a center of intellectuals….it surpassed most other institutions at that time, if you look at the people that were there it was incredible. I said to a man named Rice who was president at one time, at one of the football games, “all you have to do is replicate Columbia of the 1950s and ’60s,” and he said “thanks a lot.” \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365#t=1.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365/transcript/21565/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\r\nMARTIN PINE: It was a vey exciting time to be there. I can’t even tell you how many people had or have international reputations to this day. Garrett Mattingly, who I studied with, Paul Oskar Kristeller, one of the two greatest scholars of the Renaissance of the 20th century. Mattingly, who wrote The Armada, which became a bestseller and is still considered one of the best books. Mattingly only wrote three books, but every one was a masterpiece, better than the people who turned out…[pauses and changes train of thought] Richard Hofstadter, who wrote 13 books and died at the age of 53, Henry Steele Commager, I mean, I could go on and on, William Leuchtenberg….it was an amazing…I didn’t get to study with all of them, but it was amazing. I audited classes, you know I was 18 years old, what did I know. I came, I heard people like Franz Neumann, who wrote The Behemoth, which was one of the first great books on Nazism, I audited Meyer Schapiro, who was considered the greatest art critic of the 20th century in the United States, this was an incredible, mind-blowing experience. I didn’t at the time appreciate how important these people were but you know a book has now been written called Why Trilling Matters.  He’s still quoted. Hofstadter is quoted all the time.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, I just read one of his books last year. \r\nMARTIN PINE: Right. He’s quoted all the time. I had a seminar with him on Toqueville. These were amazing, amazing people. They weren’t all good teachers, I might add, they were researchers. Hofstadter wasn’t actually teaching, but he brought wine, and he was nice. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I was gonna ask you about that, because I saw online that many people said that, as far as teaching he didn’t seem to be interested.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well he wasn’t, but I didn’t even go that much because his idea of teaching was letting the students run the class. It was boring after a while. Whenever he did speak, whenever he decided to speak up, of course it was terrific. He was a remarkable and a very nice person but not interested in, he was writing all the time, and died very young.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It’s an interesting group that he came out of there.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Oh yeah.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: And you decided to stay there for…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well I stayed there for my Master’s and I worked with Garrett Mattingly at the time, and then I stayed on for my Ph.D., uh…working with Paul Oskar Kristeller, and I was lucky enough to get a university fellowship for one year and then I went to Italy for a year on a Fulbright. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Oh you did. Is that where you, because I know that your focus is on early Italian Renaissance.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Right, well that’s where I got my interest. Actually, I got it through a professor who was one of the amazing people, he wasn’t someone who had published a great deal, but he was a fabulous teacher, William [Howard] McParlin Davis. I still remember him. He was so skinny that he had to have suspenders to hold his pants up. He lectured on Renaissance art and that’s how I got interested in the Renaissance. One course I took for credit, one course I audited. I never missed a day, he was so interesting. And I still have his notes by the way.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you refer back to them?\r\nMARTIN PINE: I know a lot of what I teach comes from him. When I teach Renaissance art, which I do sometimes. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: ","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365#t=300.0,511.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365/transcript/21565/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":" And as you decided to come to Queens College it was 1961.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Right.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Was that, was Queens the first choice, where you applied? Or were you looking at other schools?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I was very fortunate because a friend was here, now retired, Dr. Stewart Prall, who because one of my…I met at a seminar with Garrett Mattingly, and I became very friendly with socially, and he said, there’s a possibility of a job. You know, we were adjuncting at the time – “why don’t you come out and see about it?” So that’s how I started, I started out as a lecturer here, as a graduate student. I was still pursuing my degree. So that’s how I began, and then of course, at that time, as I said, Queens was considered the best of the colleges, the undergraduate colleges [at the City University of New York]. At that time there was no graduate school. And all the schools were good, but Queens had a particularly good reputation and, as I said, it had the advantage of using part of the Columbia syllabus which I had studied, core curriculum, so for me, teaching it was fun because I knew this stuff, I knew some of this stuff, or at least I remembered some of it. So it was exciting to teach it.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365#t=511.0,582.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365/transcript/21565/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\r\nMICHAEL KELLY:OK, do you remember when you came here, did they make you sign one of these? (shows a copy of the Feinberg loyalty oath) \r\nMARTIN PINE: Oh absolutely, the loyalty oath? A lot of people had reservations and I remember some of my friends who were you know, very left, but even they said you need a job, you gotta eat, sign it.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, I would imagine.\r\nMARTIN PINE: That’s what most people did. Even though there were very few people who were gonna starve just so they wouldn’t sign it…a loyalty oath.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So it was something that basically was a formality for you?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Exactly. That’s how we looked upon it. It was a formality, didn’t mean anything, but we signed it. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That’s interesting. I guess like you said people gotta eat, right?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I guess we weren’t as courageous as Goodman, Schwerner, and you know went down and uh to…and my friend, by the way, who was teaching here at the time and was very involved in the civil rights movement, told them not to go. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Who was that?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Dr. Sol Resnick, who just passed away about a year ago, and he said to them, Michael and the others, you’ll be killed.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Really? I was gonna ask you about that.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yes. And I think it was Schwerner’s mother or Goodman’s mother who just died at the age of 90-something. Those boys went down, and there was another fellow, I don’t know if he was a Queens guy, a black fellow…there were three…\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Cheney.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Cheney. Yes. But Sol knew the two guys from here, and he told them, it’s a wonderful cause, but you won’t get out alive. And they didn’t.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, it’s… they have the clock tower now named after them. It’s a pretty interesting, famous case in movies and books…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Right. Mississippi Burning. Very exciting movie, as I recall. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: You mentioned in the survey that when you first came to Queens, you supported the Vietnam war.\r\nMARTIN PINE: In the beginning, and then as things got more and more intense and I started thinking about it, and a lot of my friends were in the opposition, I, um, I decided that it was wrong, morally wrong, and it was terrible. The students were suffering a great deal. Some were going to Canada, escaping the draft because they either didn’t believe in it, or they were pacifists, whatever the reason.  But I did finally in 1969, I don’t know if I mentioned it, I did go down to Washington with a group of students and professors to protest the bombing of Cambodia. We interviewed a lot of the senators and the representatives and I saw the most beautiful women that you’ve ever seen off a movie lot. And I said to my friend these people do more than type. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: What were they doing there?\r\nMARTIN PINE: They were secretaries, or interns…\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: For the government?\r\nMARTIN PINE: For the representatives and the senators. The first comment as I looked around I said what are these beautiful women doing, I said well they must do something else besides type. \r\nMichael  Kelly: Leave it at that, right?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Exactly.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Interesting. Do you think, was there a defining moment that you changed your views or was it gradual?\r\nMARTIN PINE: I think there were many teachers on campus and I will say this for the organizers of the protests, they always got people who favored the war, they didn’t try to stop a real debate. They had real debates. There were some faculty who – I was never an ardent supporter, but in the beginning I thought well, you know, maybe this is a problem that we should try to solve. Of course the more I know about it now, the more ridiculous the whole thing was. I mean, it was just an absurdity, it was a civil war. It was just a mess.  But be that as it may, I think those teach-ins, particularly some of my close friends like Frank Warren and Mike Wreszin, who just died recently, and Sol Resnick, who was one of my, probably my closest friend here. And I was very close to Sol, we taught together for 30 years and he was one of the leaders of the student rebellion. And I told him, I said, “I feel very guilty,” and he said, “don’t feel guilty, as long as you oppose the war, it’s good.”  \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: And you felt guilty because?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I felt guilty because I wasn’t involved. I didn’t believe that the classes should end, that there should be a protest that would close down the school. But in retrospect, I think maybe that was important, I think the whole student movement was. Well, the Vietnam lead negotiator, Le Duc Tho, told Kissinger, “We have won.” And Kissinger said, “What do you mean, we won?” And he said, “because the American public is for us, or enough part of the American public, so you will never be able to get the support of the people.” And he was right.  At least a third of the country didn’t support it, a third did, but a third were on the fence. \r\nSo I think that that, and the horrors of the war, of course that came, it was on the TV, it was the first real television war. The Korean War wasn’t, but this was, and that persuaded me, as well as the education I got from Sol and Frank and the others. I didn’t agree with all their positions in terms of what should be done at the school, but I did agree that the war was evil and immoral and should have been stopped. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you remember the occupation of the tower?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Oh I remember that, I remember it vividly because they used to push, get food up by pulleys. They were putting food in baskets and pulling them up.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: But you didn’t want to get involved.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I wasn’t, at that time, which was I guess, starting in ’67, around that time, I was sort of, I started to oppose the war, but I didn’t believe we should shut down the school because of it. I thought the protests were fine. And of course there were radical elements that nobody liked, like the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], which were very disruptive I think. But looking back, I think the movement was very, very important, and I think it’s undervalued today by many historians. But the North Vietnamese didn’t undervalue it.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, they saw that, you know like you just said, the Americans aren’t supporting you, you know, they had the upper hand there. And, did you notice during that time on campus, with the student upheaval, and differences in opinion, was there any, was it evident on campus?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, it was evident everywhere, it was evident in the departments where there were people you know on different sides of the issue, and that became, the departments became politicized to a degree. But I don’t think that it ever, at least for me it never became personal, for a lot of people it did.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Professor Warren came to our class and mentioned the rift that had divided the History department, that lasted for a long time\r\nMARTIN PINE: Lasted for a long time, yeah.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Was that something you tried to stay out of or – ?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No. I was not a supporter for many years of Professor Warren, largely because I didn’t agree with him politically on many issues. But once the war had ended, I think all of this dissipated, it turned out, he became a chair, and a very, very successful chair. Very fair. My feeling was wrong, that he would be prejudiced, that he would, you know, not be objective, that he might favor certain people of certain political persuasions, but Frank Warren is a man of great honor, he’s not the type who would do that I learned subsequently, and I became a supporter of his for all the times he ran. Well, everybody supported him after a while, ’cause he was so good. \r\nBut we were –  I don’t want to go into old politics – we were deadlocked once, and I came up with the solution, we were deadlocked between Professor Warren and Professor Peterson, the election went on for days, and finally I said, well, if we don’t come to a conclusion, you know, the President will appoint someone, and we didn’t want an outsider. So I suggested why doesn’t one man do it for 18 months and then voluntarily resign and the other guy would do it. Peterson went first, he did not like the job. I call this the Labor-Likud solution, because that’s what they had done in Israel one time. So Jon Peterson, who was one of my close friends and associates, he – a very steady, very honorable guy – he became chair, and he did not like it. Then [it was] Frank’s turn, and once Frank served, with such distinction, all my doubts faded away and from that time on, I don’t remember when the year was, you know Frank was chair for many, many years, and he had very wide support, including mine. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That’s interesting. When the Vietnam war ended, and I’m sure there was a, and I’m sure when it was going on, there was most likely a lot of veterans that came to attend classes on the campus. Did you notice, were they treated fairly, horribly?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, it was always interesting to have the veterans in the class because they were older, and they had different perspectives. Even in the last decade or so, I had a veteran who was in the Tonkin Gulf thing, when Johnson said that the ships had been attacked and in fact he had been [unclear] a whole big lie, he was one of the sailors on one of our American ships and I said, “You’re a traitor, why didn’t you tell get up and tell the truth?” and he said, “’cause they would have shot me.”\r\nBut recently I’ve had many Iraq veterans, interestingly enough, and most of them have been very serious, good students.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: From the current…\r\nMARTIN PINE: The current, exactly. And that’s closer to my memory than the others.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you find that the students who served overseas, in wars, that they have a certain discipline about their school?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well first of all they’re older. And they’re more serious generally.\r\n[Brief interruption to sign a form for a student]\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So let’s see where were we? Oh, OK, is there anything else about in, during the ’60s when you were here...\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well there have been tremendous changes in the student population. There have been three big changes that occurred in the course of my long tenure here. One is architectural. There are lots of buildings; we just used to have the original Spanish buildings when I came, I think, then Klapper may have been around, that was the library. That’s my recollection. Klapper may have been around. But Powdermaker was one of the first. I’m not sure whether Razran was built soon, and then the one next to it. Well, there was the New Science Building, that was later, that was much later. So that’s one big change, the campus has developed tremendously over the course of time, there are more buildings. But interestingly when I began, there were 26,000 students here. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Was that because of the open admissions?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, it was because it was free. And because we had a very large school of General Studies, which was an independent adult education school for people who were working. And that was eliminated in the fiscal crisis of 1976, when New York was on the brink of bankruptcy and they decided to retrench, and one of the ways they retrenched was to end the School of General Studies. So Queens became much smaller because that school had you know almost 10,000 students who then, not all of whom would come out during the day and during the regular, who could afford to do it. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So did you notice, was it just a decline in the population once they implemented…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Oh yeah it was a big decline in population.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: But was the student body different? \r\nMARTIN PINE:  Oh, ","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365#t=582.0,1405.0"},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365/transcript/21565/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":" the student body was very different. That’s the second change. The student body in the early days in the ’60s was predominantly white, predominantly middle and upper middle class, and over the last two decades it’s become predominantly multicultural, with a large immigrant population. It had a very large, at the time, secular Jewish population, which doesn’t come any more, only the Orthodox Jews are here now. And we have now of course a significant Muslim population. We have a large number of Hispanics. I taught everyone from Tokyo to Afghanistan to – you name it. From all over the world, actually, in the graduate and undergraduate classes. Which is exciting and different and a challenge. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, I couldn’t imagine many other schools, when you look around the classroom and you know, it’s not one person who has the same background.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Exactly. And we have, and that’s been the biggest change. Because Queens, you know, is the most heterogeneous borough in the country, there are 140 languages spoken in Queens, can you imagine? And we have, I used to tease the secretary, I’d ask her, “Have you heard any English today?” I hear Hindi, I hear Arabic, I hear a lot of languages I don’t know,  Eastern European, I hear a lot of Russian, I hear Hebrew, I hear everything. So I don’t hear too much English. You know, really, I’m serious.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I used to tell my friends, the joke is, the first day of class, with attendance, the teachers like me because of my name, Michael Kelly.\r\nMARTIN PINE: I always say to my students on the first day, please help me with pronunciation, because I really want to know the proper pronunciation and it takes me time to get it, sometimes I don’t get it until the end of the term. So it’s a very different, a big change in the population. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: When would you say the surrounding areas of Queens changed, like, since you’ve been here? \r\nMARTIN PINE: Oh sure, I once got lost in downtown Flushing, I couldn’t read a single sign, it was all in Korean.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That had to be you know when you were first here in the city.\r\nMARTIN PINE: No no, absolutely not, that was recently.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It’s interesting how the influx of the different, have surrounded Queens College.  And have you made adjustments to your curriculum throughout the years because of these reasons?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, to some extent.  I think that, I still give what I consider a good amount of reading. I think that I probably assign more papers in survey courses, which I don’t do so much, than I did. I always assigned big papers in, you know, elective courses. But also we have the problem now where the undergraduate courses sometimes are very large, the survey courses, I have 53 students and it becomes really unmanageable, we don’t have readers. I do give written assignments, but usually they’re very short, analysis of text, that kind of thing, which they want us to do and I’ve been doing that too.  But it’s still a big job to read even two or three pages for 50 students. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So you think it’s more the increase in the classroom size than the – \r\nMARTIN PINE: I think that’s part of it. I think also the fact that, because we have this different population, there’s more work that has to be done to help the students. You know, their English is very often a second language for them, or not their native language, but I would say the majority of them probably have gone through high school here, that’s my impression, they don’t speak accented English, although some of them do, as you probably know. But I think that nevertheless, there’s more time that has to be spent, let’s put it that way, in helping them than before, than in the early days. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: There was a few things, moments during New York City history, that I wanted to just ask you about as far as like, you were on campus at the time, in the ’70s, you know, there was a blackout, in 1977. Were you at home, were you on campus?\r\nMARTIN PINE: I was on campus for that, that was really something. But I remember there being a snowstorm where we almost had to stay over but we finally decided to brave it and we got home.  I lived in Westchester at the time, so it was a big trip by car, I mean, you know, the roads weren’t great, but I remember waiting it out and leaving late [unclear].  \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So while you were teaching here you were commuting from Westchester.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yes, from Westchester, yeah, but it was only about 30 minutes. I lived in Mount Vernon, so it wasn’t a big commute. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: OK. Some people consider 30 minutes, you know, the end of the world.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well also, don’t forget, I was going against traffic. People were coming into the city, I was leaving the city. So I never had a, I mean look, there were sometimes, you know, accidents or tie-ups, but by and large it was a very quick trip. I made it in less than 30 minutes sometimes if there was no traffic at all.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you still live there?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, we live in Manhattan now. The last eight years, I live in Manhattan.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you drive in?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yeah, I drive in, because it’s only 13 minutes over the bridge. I spend the money because it’s just so convenient for me to get over the RFK Bridge. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Does the school give you a travel voucher?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Are you kidding? I wish they did but they don’t.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: In the ’80s, some of the architecture that you mentioned, it’s, Queens [College] starts to begin to look like it does today. Do you remember, as the buildings were going up, were there, you know, people for or against buildings, designs, anything?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I think most of the time, people felt that we needed, these old buildings without air conditioning, really were old, and we needed some, we needed modernization.  I don’t think there were too many people who opposed, oh my goodness, air conditioning, well that would be a great help, and so I think that most of the students and the faculty looked forward. Of course, the air conditioning was always imperfect, as you might know, but it was better than nothing and it was, I think most people felt that it was good thing that we had new buildings. And the library needed to be redone, they built that big library, which is quite big and has, you know, big capacity, so that was very important because Klapper was not built as a library, or maybe it was, but it was a very poor building for it. So I don’t think there was much opposition to that.\r\nAnd then, you know, Powdermaker was renovated, under Shirley Strum Kenny, who I think was one of our best presidents, she was the first woman to reach out to rich alumni and get money. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: OK, a trend-setter I guess.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well she was, she was very active and she also was an amazing person. She taught her seminar in English, eighteenth century I think was her specialty. And she was very, very charming, she was Southern, but she was strong and in the beginning the faculty, she tried to pull a few things you know that the faculty didn’t like but they came to respect her and she backed down off, away from some of the more outrageous things she tried to do. But basically I think she was one of our, in my tenure, she was, I look back at her tenure, she was one of the best if not the best president we ever had. She went on to become president of Stony Brook [SUNY at Stony Brook]. Unfortunately, she took one of the big contributors who was prepared to give us 25 million dollars, and then he gave it to Stony Brook, she took him with her. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Was it an alumni of Queens?\r\nMARTIN PINE: I don’t think so. It was some venture capitalist or some technical guy who did technology, who was just a multimillionaire. So we lost out on that when Shirley left us. But she convinced, she was one of those people, she convinced Seinfeld to wear the Queens College shirt on one of the shows.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I’ve seen that episode.\r\nMARTIN PINE: So she was no retiring Southern lady, she was very active, but as I said, very charming, and a wonderful speaker, a wonderful extemporaneous – she could just speak beautifully. So she was an amazing person, I came to like her and respect her and I think she was a very effective leader.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Did you know Jerry Seinfeld while he was here?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, no, I didn’t know him. I must say, unfortunately, you know who was here at the time, the guy who ended up in jail, the ex-, he used to teach here, and I knew his son, the fellow who was Comptroller of the City of New York, and Comptroller of the state – [Alan] Hevesi – Hevesi taught in the Political Science department here, because it was perfectly legal for those people who were representatives in Albany to have another – you know, many of them had law practices. He was fine until – he had a very sick wife – and he for years and years and years, and he – first thing that happened was that he used a state car for transport, which I thought was pretty ridiculous, but then it turned out that he really had done some pretty bad things. And his son, who was very bright and very nice, was involved with him, he got off, but Hevesi just got out of jail. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: For embezzling and things like that?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, what he did was he got kickbacks for having brokers invest in the pension fund, which is billions and billions and billions of dollars, you’re talking big bucks. I don’t know what he got out of it, but that’s where the corruption came in, with preferential – it’s not really insider trading but using these people to buy into, you know, to buy stocks for the pension fund and then getting a kickback, that was basically it. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Seems these days, everyone’s gonna get caught eventually. \r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, with the Internet, you know, nothing is private. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: There’s uh, in the ’70s and ’80s, New York City had high crime rates and there’s drug problems – did any of that trickle into the campus that you know of? \r\nMARTIN PINE: I wasn’t conscious of it at that time. I didn’t think it affected the campus so much here but…I think most students were pretty serious on the whole and wanted to get on, you know, they were oriented towards work. Within the last couple of decades, the last 20 years, again the population changed, and we’re getting a much different population and I think the thing that people don’t realize is… this is one of the reasons I didn’t like Giuliani…was over how long it took people to get through college, it took them so many years, but we have a working population. The students are working, and they work too much in my opinion, but they can’t help it, and they also, in many of the immigrant families, there is a tremendous amount of family responsibility. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Everyone chips in.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I have had many students come to me and say, you know, I have to go help my grandmother, they aren’t making up these stories, I have to be with my aunt, I gotta take care of my nephew. And so there’s a lot of work and there’s family responsibility, which you really didn’t have in the ’60s and the ’70s. You had a different population where the kids were mostly full-time students. Some of them worked part-time, sure, but now we have people working almost the equivalent of full-time. So how can they get through school in five years is to me a miracle, because I couldn’t do it.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: And was Giuliani’s issue with that because of the funding?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, he just generally didn’t like the City University. He was someone who was down on the City University, said we had no standards. He was one of those people who bashed the university and was very unfair in his criticism, I thought. Because he didn’t understand that there had been this big population change. And that people were now – it was very different from when it began. And he just didn’t understand that or didn’t want to understand it, one or the other.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Sometimes it always falls back to money, right?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I don’t know that it was the money so much, you know, as it was the problem that he didn’t, just didn’t understand I think the needs of the students here.  In the whole City University, not just here.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: He had his focus more on the crime in New York City?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, right, he made the claim that he did reduce the crime and so on and so forth.  I am very suspicious of the statistics. Bloomberg says that crime has gone down. But murder has gone up. So if other crimes, which are not great, but if theft and even rape go up that’s terrible, terrible, terrible, but it isn’t murder. Murder has gone way up. That they don’t mention. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Why would they?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well of course it’s like people saying, “The longevity rates have increased.” They have only increased for the middle and upper middle classes. They have decreased for the lower middle and poor. You average it all together, it says increase, this is another. Someone once said, “Statistics don’t lie, but liars make up statistics.”\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Take everything out of context, pick and choose.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Exactly. Exactly. The politicians are very good at that.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: You didn’t live in New York City back then, when Giuliani was major?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, I lived in Mount Vernon, but I had lived in New York during my very early career when I was a graduate student. I lived in the Village, but that was a different time. I commuted by subway and bus. It wasn’t bad in those times\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It was cheap to live in the Village then, wasn’t it?\r\nMARTIN PINE: It was very cheap. I had an apartment for $110 a month. And that was considered just the, the going rate.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I wouldn’t mind that these days.  \r\nMARTIN PINE: No, no, you don’t find that these days.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: As it got into the 2000s and, I wanted to ask some things, were you on campus when 9/11 occurred?\r\nMARTIN PINE: I remember it very vividly, yeah I remember that, the shock and the – it was just such a tremendous shock. And I remember that my sister-in-law worked in that area and she was,  everyone was running. She’s an engineer, she was running away, fortunately, out of the area. She wasn’t in the immediate area, but everyone was running, so she just ran. She didn’t know what happened. She lived in Jersey, and somehow or other she got home, and her husband picked her up at some point, I don’t know where, but it was a big thing. And there were several people here who lost friends and relatives. There were quite a number, I don’t remember the exact number but it was…And my wife at the time taught in Pelham, and that town was very badly hit. There were two brothers, firemen, who were killed, and families with young kids, and there were lots of – it was a terrible, terrible hit for that town, because a lot of them were policemen and firemen and worked in the city and it was a devastating… I think she was affected very directly because Pelham was a very small town right north of where we lived in Mount Vernon, and she had worked there for quite a while and she knew these families, it was just an awful, terrible shock.  She felt it more, because this is a bigger school and I might not have known, I mean I heard of people, but she knew these people and she knew these families so it was much, much worse for her, the shock.  \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Did you notice after 9/11, you were mentioning before you know, a large Muslim population that goes to school here… \r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, there wasn’t such a large Muslim population at that time. And of course a lot of Muslims were killed, they had been working in the building. It didn’t discriminate in race and ethnicity or anything, it just blew it up, everyone who worked there. There were people I know that, the son of a professor who died young, he didn’t go, but his brother went, he was head of some firm there, he had to pick up a child that day, so he didn’t go to work, but his brother did and he just was blown up with the rest of them.  It was a terrible time. I mean, I knew of people, you know, but I didn’t know anyone directly, except as I said, through my wife. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I wondered if the students at the time, because it’s such an ethnically diverse school, if there was any type of suspicions or… \r\nMARTIN PINE: I don’t think so, I think everyone was sort of in a state of shock, and everyone realized, or at least they should have, that when there were two people at an air academy down in Florida and they said, they just wanted to learn how to fly a plane, they don’t want to learn how to land, but they didn’t pick that up. Well, it was picked up, but nobody paid attention to it, but people were concerned about the stupidity of the intelligence system more than anything else, or at least I was. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Just, you know, what happened there last week, Russia warned us, right, about the…? \r\nMARTIN PINE: OK, but that was not as dramatic as this. It was vague. Well it wasn’t vague, they suspect, well lots of people you suspect who are innocent, so you can’t always pin it down.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: In the survey you mentioned how you felt that the increasing corporatization of Queens College would threaten its future and the education of its students. Would you be able to elaborate on what your concerns are? \r\nMARTIN PINE: Yes, I will give you a perfect example. When I came here, there were 26,000 students, there was one President, there was one Dean of General Studies, which was a big school, and there was one Dean of the college and one Dean of Students. There were four or five administrators. And there was Miss Kelly. She was better than a computer. If you had a question, you’d call Miss Kelly in the President’s office and Miss Kelly would give you the answer within two minutes. Pull out a file and bup bup bup bup, she would get the answer. Efficiently run, no computers. Now we have 17,000 students. We have a President, we have several Vice Presidents, we have 14 deans, we have 16 associate deans, 17 assistant deans, and we have an explosion of bureaucracy. And many of these people in this bureaucracy are not educators.  It just so happens [President James] Muyskens is an educator, which is a plus. But many people, they’ve left their respective field, and they are mostly interested in advancing their administrative careers. So that, and there’s the idea that these people should set the academic agenda. And their mentality is such – it’s corporate – that is, that these things can be quantified. That all educational processes can be quantified. And the answer to that is, it can’t, I think. How do you know if a student has gotten suddenly interested and is going to bloom in 10 years? Or that people who are, I mean – Philip Roth just gave a memorial to one of his teachers who actually lost his job because of the Communist hunt – it was in The Times, an excerpt of the thing and how, you know, he changed his life. You keep hearing of these people who had these experiences of teachers who made such great impacts and changed people’s lives. And this idea that you can set agendas and test people, make these tests and quantify everything, is destroying the idea of getting students to think, getting students not just to study for a test but to become thinking individuals and the whole process of education is one of enlarging one’s realm of spirit in learning and to learn to love books and to love things and to love culture and to love whatever it is, to get a passion in life. And how do you quantify that kind of thing? You can’t, in my opinion. This is what they’re doing with all this business of, in the high schools, and even now they want these Pathways you know, that quantify.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Standardized testing.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Standardized testing. And that kind of thing. And that is valuable up to a point. There’s no question about it. And colleges used it for a long time mainly as an exclusive, as a way to exclude people. It’s not a way to admit people; it’s a way to exclude people. And it’s very unfair. I mean someone, unless somebody’s got a particular talent that makes them outstanding.  But other than that, it’s very difficult. And that makes it so competitive and ridiculous.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you think it’s harder for your field in history because it’s not like mathematics, where there’s a right and wrong answer?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well yes, that’s true. But I think the problem now is also that because – that’s the other problem. Higher education isn’t being supported the way it has been, and so there’s the retrenchment and there’s fewer dollars for research; this goes particularly for the sciences but also for all fields. There are more philanthropic interests, certainly, but the problem that the universities face, particularly public institutions, is that there’s been a constant in the last few decades of defunding of public institutions. University of Michigan, for example, now gets 65 percent of its money from alumni, even though it’s a state, supposedly a state-funded institution. Now we have been constantly cut by, the governors are united, Republican and Democrat, in not funding CUNY or the state universities properly. So they have been underfunded. To give you an idea, when they had, years ago, there must have been 800 full-time faculty. Now there are about 300.  It’s a…and this is the problem. They are not replacing people who are retiring. To give you an example, when I was a graduate student in a seminar with other graduate students, everyone knew he or she would get a job. You might not get the job you wanted, but there were jobs. Now there just aren’t jobs. It’s not only true here; it’s true in the high school level. Bloomberg bragged that no teachers were fired. But he didn’t mention that 4,300 – I don’t remember the figure – teachers retired that weren’t replaced. So what does that mean? It means there are fewer teachers for the same number of students or a greater number of students. Same thing has happened here. Just haven’t replaced many people who retired. Our department has been very fortunate in the fact that we had a dean who was very supportive and we’ve hired a wonderful young department in the last 10 years. And I was happy to be part of that process. We have a very vibrant department, but I think in many ways we are an exception.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: What’s the solution do you think?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I think there needs to be a change in the public attitude towards education, and there has to be a change in the way education is viewed. And the value of education, which is, it used to be, interestingly enough, that businesses and corporations would look for people who could analyze things, and that takes critical thinking. Now it seems to be that they want people who are computerized, who can handle computers and do mechanized work. So it’s a whole different world because of technology. There is a technological revolution obviously. That’s,..as I said, there were three big changes, architectural, student body, and technology.  Those are the three greatest changes I’ve seen. And the technology is quite recent, but it’s obviously revolutionary in terms of communication. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY:  So when you retired – in 2004, I believe? – what made you decide to come back then?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I enjoyed teaching very much, but I was overwhelmed with administrative work. And, unfortunately, I didn’t know how to say no, except to being chairman. I refused. I was asked if I would run for chairman and I said no. I would not run for chairman because I couldn’t deal with the emotional problems. You’ve got Frank Warren, who’s got a very even temperament and nothing bothers him. He’s very fair, judicious and very calm. I think I’ve seen Frank get angry only once in all the years I know him. At a meeting. Once. We’ve had some very explosive people here. I say to the young people, because all of you people are sane. We had a couple of real people who should have been committed in the old days.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Do you mean the current faculty?\r\nMARTIN PINE: The current faculty is normal.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Is much more even-keeled?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Yes, definitely. I am very happy about that. We have a terrific faculty. Not only terrific teachers and scholars, but they are very nice people for the most part. I mean I know some of them very well. I don’t know everyone.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Well, you’re instrumental in their hiring.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, we didn’t go by character, you don’t know what a person is gonna be like.  You can tell a little bit. But you can’t ask people anything that’s personal. How much money they make, are they married, are they unmarried, whether they’re straight, gay, whatever. You can’t ask these things or you’ll be sued up the gazoo. But you can tell, you know, personalities.  But that doesn’t usually enter into it. Unless it’s so big a thing that you’re really worried that this person wouldn’t get along. But we never had, I don’t think there were people that we ever interviewed – the trouble is that there are no jobs. And that’s the difference. When I was in seminar, with maybe 10 people, everyone of us got jobs at some place. One fellow who didn’t went to London and got a good job in London eventually. But everyone in that seminar got jobs.  And it was not in a very hot field – Renaissance studies, Renaissance history, Renaissance thought. I mean, that wasn’t the hottest topic in the world even when I went into it. But we all got jobs. Now, I was chair of a committee for modern European history, French and German, we had 206 applications, of which, one committee told me, anyone in the top 20 percent would have been quite good. That’s how competitive. So brilliant people are being turned down everywhere. One good thing I think that’s happened is that the research institutions have limited severely the amount of people they’ll take because why? They support them completely. You go to Yale now, you get $18,000, plus tuition, so at least one person could live on that. You get cheap housing, and food, and $18,000 and there’s no tuition, and there’s minimal teaching. They want to get you in and out, in other words, not in and out, but they want you to not have responsibilities so that you can get your degree.  The other side of that is they take very few people. When I was in graduate school, I don’t know, but the classes, there were a lot of graduate students, I don’t know how many, there were at least maybe 60 or 70, now there’s 15.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That’s all that’s here right now?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, I mean that’s at Columbia! And Harvard’s the same and Yale’s the same, they just don’t take people.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I would think from the economic viewpoint, I know a lot of schools would like to hire a lot of adjuncts rather than a full-time professor.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, that’s what’s happened here too. And adjuncts, I don’t know the exact percentage, so I don’t want to quote it, but I’ll quote what I’ve seen, it was something like 70 percent of the courses are now nationwide being taught by adjuncts. You know, adjuncts can be good teachers, they can be better than the professors many times. They are young, enthusiastic, they’re not repeating notes from 40 years ago. They’re good. But they can’t make a living.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: A lot of times you lose them to an outside corporate job or something.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, you can’t blame them. They can’t make a living. They run around from place to place, looking for jobs, looking for work, it’s just terrible.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So the public has to become more aware and voice their opinions on the importance of education, you think, to get…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I think the United States’ place in the world in education continues to decline. When it reaches the very bottom, behind India, China, Norway, Sweden, Finland, when it really gets below Afghanistan, then the public may wake up.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It’s already below a lot of the countries you just mentioned.\r\nMARTIN PINE: On the other hand, I have always protested the idea of comparing our education system, particularly at the university level, at the college level, to the foreign schools, because they are preselective. In other words, you go to a high school in Italy, Germany or France, you already go to either a high school which is going to lead to college or you don’t. So they’re already winnowing out at a relatively young age those people, which is unfair in many ways, but that’s what they do. So already when you go to university there, you don’t take liberal arts, you had that in college, I mean, in high school, which they work very hard at. Then you go to university and you study law, medicine, history, whatever it is. You go immediately into your field. Except maybe medicine, I don’t know. But in the humanities and the social sciences, you go right into your field. Because you’ve had a very, you’ve had the equivalent of Americans’ –  let’s say, three year college already under your belt, and more intensive. But, they’re dealing with a select number of people. I say if you want a fair thing, take our best people and compare to those best people, and you’ll get the same result. I think it’s very skewed in other words. But there’s been a decline, no question about that. There’s been a decline.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: You mentioned before about adjusting your curriculum. Have you had to adjust it because of that decline?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, I’m just failing more students [laughs]. It’s a very mixed group now. As a matter of fact, I always say, last semester I had the best class I ever had, and the worst class I ever had. Till I had this semester [laughs]. No, but the best class was again was a relatively obscure topic, and I had people, interestingly –  it was a real Queens College people. I had two people from Brazil, a young Muslim lady who was… I mean, they got all As and Bs. The other class I gave 30 to 40 percent Cs and Fs or Ds and Fs. Partly it is, as I said, people have work, people don’t come, people have families. I understand that but also, there is a big failing here and that is, we don’t have a good advisement system.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: You don’t think so?\r\nMARTIN PINE: No, I mean we have peer advisement. We try to do advisements, there have been several attempts, but it’s been hard. Because it’s a commuter school, and teachers are overwhelmed with work because of the heavy teaching schedule, you know three-three [three courses per term] is more than even the state universities here. So between trying to get your research done and teaching large numbers of students, faculty, you’re only gonna get a small number of committed people who want to do that. And they’re probably not going to be compensated. But it’s a bad system in the sense that I have many students that come in, they’re doing poorly, they’re taking five courses. I said, “What are you taking five courses?” “I just thought, you take five courses.”  I said, “No, you don’t take five courses. You’re working 20 hours a week and you’re taking five courses?”  I said, “I couldn’t do it, how you do it, how can anyone do it?” I said, “Where’d you get that idea?” “Well, I just picked out the program…” No one advised them.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Four years…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, but I had one student stop me in the hall one day as a matter of fact and say, “You know, I’m glad we had the …”  He came every day practically to see me after class. He was always worried.  He did quite well as a matter of fact. He said, “You know I am so glad we had those meetings because you told me what I should take and balance my program, and I’m doing better.” I was glad to see the guy. But he remembered, I remembered, because he was a, I mean he was a pain in the neck, but he was sincere. But he would every day come, “I don’t understand this, I don’t understand that.” I’m glad to do it, but I also went over his program and said, “You’ve gotta do this, you’ve gotta do that, you’ve gotta balance your program, you take a tough course here, you take a tough course there, you don’t take five reading courses.”\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I know what you mean. There is a balance to it.\r\nMARTIN PINE: I think people naturally figure it out, but a lot of these kids can’t because they have, first of all, they’re not really part of the mainstream yet of American culture and they just don’t know the ropes.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Yeah, I guess they just come in.  If they’re first generation, they are coming for their five classes and…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, we have no real orientation either. You know, many schools, the private schools, and I think even the public schools, many of the big universities, they have a week of orientation. At which they talk to the students, they talk about their programs, they split up into groups, they meet faculty, we don’t have that here. At least that I know of.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Sleeping in dorms together, getting to know each other.\r\nMARTIN PINE: That’s true, but even in other public universities I just get the impression that there’s more support, there’s more advisement. I think this is something that we need and I’m sure many faculty agree but it’s just a matter of the time element and also that it’s a commuter school, you know, so students are running off to work or something so it’s hard to fit in. I can understand that.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: With the advent of all the computer technology, you were mentioning before, it’s all left to the students to figure it out on their own at home, they’re given...Since I’ve been here, it’s been eSIMS, then it was CUNY Portal, and then it was CUNYfirst, then it’s My QC, every semester it changes. Which one am I supposed to go to to register for classes now? It’s funny. So I see your point there.\r\nMARTIN PINE: It has its great plusses and drawbacks like everything else, you know. But there’s no substitute for telling students how to figure out a program.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Sitting down with them.\r\nMARTIN PINE: Sitting down with someone and saying, “Look, this is what you should do, or what you should aim at.”\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Alright Dr. Pine, I really appreciate it. Is there anything else you’d like to add about your time here at Queens College?\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, I’ve enjoyed teaching, this is why I continue to do it, and as I said, being relieved of the –  I was running a Master’s program, I was very active in department business, I was on the P\u0026B [Personnel and Budget Committee], I was on search committees, I was running a Master of Arts Liberal Studies program, I was active in several of the honor societies, I was just overburdened with the administrative work. I did get one course reduction for it, but you know that wasn’t, I put in much more time than I would for a course. But I enjoyed, at the time, in the beginning, I did enjoy doing it.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: That was before you retired and came back as an adjunct.\r\nMARTIN PINE: That’s right. I did enjoy doing it but it got to the point where I figured this is it.  This is enough, I really, I found people to take over, no one’s indispensable, even de Gaulle said, “Be assured, gentlemen, that I will die one day.” So no one is indispensable. I found someone terrific to take over my Master’s program; it was my baby because I really developed the program and I wanted someone good, so I found Professor Jordan, so I left it in good hands.  And as I say I was happy we were able to recruit so many terrific people and we have a terrific department now. And I’m really very proud of that. And that’s one of the biggest accomplishments I think we have had in the last two decades, last decade at least.  So it’s just great. I mean I feel very comfortable and very happy and proud that this department has become so outstanding. It always had some very great people, don’t get me wrong. We had one time an Egyptologist, which was very rare, Dr. Shulman, and he was a tough teacher. He used to say, “If you’re in the hospital, bring me the doctor’s note. If anyone dies, bring me a copy of the death certificate, otherwise, you fail” [laughs]. I never adopted anything that mean. I think that was one of the big things, and I think that’s peculiar, at least so far as I know, to my department because there are people that desperately need…like the Philosophy department hasn’t had replacement in years and years. That’s partly their own fault, but I mean it’s partly there’s just no money around.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: So it’s the, is that the reason that the History department is able to do all this new hiring? Because of who their chair is and how they’re able to lobby for money? Is that how that…\r\nMARTIN PINE: We had two things helping us. One was obviously Frank Warren, and the other was the fact that the deans were very sympathetic, and he got along very well with the deans, and of course one dean was a History department person, but the other, Professor Hendrey, was from Economics and she was very, very supportive, and I think that we had some brilliant candidates, I think. So we were able to push for that. Also, we got some extra monies, which helped. We had monies to hire people in other fields which we wouldn’t ordinarily have done.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Were they trying to make up for the –  I know there was a hiring freeze in the ’70s, did they realize that…\r\nMARTIN PINE: Well, we’re pretty well back, I mean, I said the funny thing is, now we don’t have enough people to teach American history. We teach Japanese, Chinese, Middle East, Islamic, African, South African, 16 brands of Jewish history, Irish history, we’ve got everything under the sun. Where’s American history? They’re all retired! We’ve got a few adjuncts for American.  I said that to Frank Warren the other day, “We need Americanists! We need Americanists!” For years we didn’t have any Europeanists, and I was carrying on, “Frank, you gotta get someone here,” and we got them now, and we have people teaching everything but American, which is, I mean, we have them obviously, but we have very few people. We have great people like Peter Conolly Smith who teaches immigration. Naturally he could teach American history. But we need someone whose specialty is the Civil War, whose specialty is, now that the two Americanists – Frank Warrens’s, 20th century. We don’t have those fields, where that’s their field. We have people who can teach it, obviously, but their real specialty is a subspecialty in the field rather than some big chunk of American history. We need someone in the American Revolution, we need someone in the Civil War. How can you have an American department that doesn’t teach the Civil War? Well, we don’t have that. But we’ll get it because you know, we’re very determined [laughs].  I hope so, anyway. I have great faith, we have a great department. So much for the propaganda. \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: I agree with you about the teachers. Of all the teachers I have had, you know, some of the best ones were adjuncts.\r\nMARTIN PINE: I remember, since I was an adjunct. I remember that I had one funny experience.  If you can believe it, I used to teach five courses in a row, practically. And one student who I had early in the day who I had one semester came to me in the second semester and said, “What happened to you? You used to be a good teacher!”  I said, “This is the fifth time I am doing this work, you should be glad I am still standing.”\r\nMICHAEL KELLY: Oh, it was the same class over and over again.  \r\nMARTIN PINE: No it wasn’t the same class, but he had taken the first course, it was 101, and then he was taking 102, whatever it was, with me, and he was saying, “What happened to you? You’re exhausted!” I said, “Well, I have been teaching this stuff all day long.”  \r\nMICHAEL KELLY: It will take a toll on you. Alright, Professor.\r\nMARTIN PINE: OK, very good.\r\nMICHAEL KELLY:  I really appreciate it. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/96365#t=1405.0,4000.1045"}]}]},{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/99599","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 6 of 6 - Martin_Pine_Slideshow.mp4"]},"duration":95.3373,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/099/599/small/pine.jpg?1603467170","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/99599/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/99599/content/6/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-queenslibrary.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/099/599/original/Martin_Pine_Slideshow.mp4?1603466811","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":95.3373,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/150/collection_resources/28840/file/99599","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[]}]}