Named one of the 10 outstanding governors of the 20th century by the University of Michigan, Daniel J. Evans, ’48, ’49, has also served his state as a legislator, U.S. senator and college president. Along the way, he has always held a special place in his heart for his alma mater—starting when he sneaked over the fence during football games in the 1930s. Now stepping down after two terms as a UW regent, Evans reflects on his many UW connections in this interview with Neil McReynolds, ’56, an award-winning newspaper editor, Evans’ former press secretary and a long-time business and civic leader in the Seattle area.

We grew up close to the University in Laurelhurst and there were several other young boys who lived on the same street. It was a small dead end street into a playfield. There were five of us—we were all the same age. One, incidentally, was Gordon Berlin, who later became an all Pac-10 center for the University of Washington. Our first association was going over on a Saturday morning early and climbing a tree that was right next to the fence by the open end of the stadium. And we’d all climb the tree and all at once drop inside and scatter like a bunch of quail while the guys guarding the fence made a half-hearted attempt to get us. But we got free entry into the stadium, watched the football game and I remember very well we all were transfixed by the 1936 Huskies who went to the Rose Bowl. They lost to Pittsburg in the Rose Bowl but when we were playing touch football games at the playfield, we’d always adopt names of the era: Cain, Haines, Logg, Nogrowski. They were the backfield of that era.

When you got to make a decision about where to go to school, did you consider any schools other than the University of Washington?

No, I didn’t. Actually, as that first association continued, we got a little more legitimate. In those days, they asked Boy Scout troops to act as ushers during the football games. So we signed up and I went to many games in full Boy Scout uniform as an usher. We saw lots of free football games during those early days. Not many that were winning seasons, but interesting none the less. When it came time to go to the University, it was during the war and I graduated in February of 1943 from Roosevelt High School. And at that time, I was still 17 approaching 18, but at 18 you got drafted and we were trying to figure out what to do. Another fellow who lived on the same street and I investigated and signed up for the V-12 Program which was the naval officer training program and I started the University. My first duty station was the UW. I graduated from Roosevelt on a Friday and started University the next Monday in a special spring quarter that was designed to take the midyear graduates of high school. So I had one quarter at the University and then on July 1^st of that year I went on active duty in the Navy. My first station at the V-12 program was at the University of Washington. So I started at the University of Washington in the Navy. We lived in the Sigma Nu house. The Navy had taken over all the fraternity houses and they assigned people by alphabetical order, so I got to know cadets whose names started with C, D and E pretty well.

It is hard to imagine a person who has been so successful as a politician whose education was an engineer. What made you choose engineering?

I think genetics more than anything. In school, I was always good at math and science and physics. My father was an engineer, and I admired him very much. He served the last part of his career for 13 years as King County Engineer. He was a graduate of the University of Washington, School of Civil Engineering in 1917. So I guess there was something of that in the choice. And then of course when I went into the Navy, there was no choice. You took about half of the hours during your naval training as naval courses and the other half were engineering. So I naturally moved toward an engineering degree, mostly because of the Navy training that required it.

Was there a particular professor or class at the UW that has significant impact on your life or your career?

Interestingly enough, I met and had classes from several professors that my father had had many years before when he took civil engineering. He had a young associate who taught him and later C.C. More was, I think, chairman of the department or at least a very senior member when I went there. The current civil engineering building is named after him. But I think the one professor that I remember most was not an engineering professor at all but a woman who was brought into the engineering school to try to infuse a little of the arts and sciences and writing and that sort of thing into engineers who seldom got any of that during the time I went to school. Her name was Amy Violet Hall. She was a remarkable person. I think that I, at first, got a little bit of the rest of the educational world into me besides engineering.

Did you get your start in politics on the campus at UW?

No, no, I really didn’t. I was there in the Navy, and so everything was pretty restricted. The only kind of movement you could make in the Navy was to be a platoon leader or one of those kinds of things as you got more senior in your Navy career. But I only stayed at the University for eight months and then I got transferred from the V-12 to the Naval ROTC program at Berkeley and spent the next 16 months there. I finally graduated with a commission as ensign in the U.S. Navy. And by that time I was 2/3 of the way through the engineering degree, but I spent the next year on active duty in the Navy. First I got some radar training to become a fighter director, which was the officer that guided combat planes out from a carrier by radar to intercept enemy planes. But there were no enemy planes by the time I got out to sea. We spent most of our time bringing back planes and men from the Far East. So I stayed in the Navy until July of 1946, and then came back and started at the University that fall.

So when did you finish up your degree?

I didn’t take very much part in activities on campus at that time. I think, like a lot of other people who have been in the service, you’d been delayed in what you were doing and you wanted to catch up and the best way to catch up is to move as fast as you could toward a degree. But I did graduate with a degree, a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1948 and then I wanted some extra time. I was on the GI Bill, so we did have some benefits—financial help for education—but then financial help wasn’t all that difficult in those days because tuition was so low. I decided I wanted more education and I had to make a choice between starting law school, which was interesting to me, and going for a graduate degree in engineering. I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years. I felt the pressure of being a little behind although I was just 22.

When did you get your master’s degree?

In 1949.

The next involvement with the UW after that was in the Legislature.

That’s right. In between that, one of my first design jobs was designing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. (I figured I have lived too long because that marvelous permanent structure that I helped design is now under fire and they want to take it down.) Then I got called back into the Navy during the Korean War. I spent two years, one year on a destroyer and one year as aide to an admiral who was then transferred as one of the first five members of the Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjom. I spent a month and a half before the truce living in a tent—of all things for a naval officer— at the United Nations camp at Munsan-Ni. That was a time that I really got to a point were I thought maybe I would want to be involved politically. When I was on the destroyer, I know I wrote a letter to my father in honor of Father’s Day, and I talked about how much I admired him and went on in the letter to really berate what was going on nationally and the fact that we couldn’t win and we were engaged in the stalemate in Korea and all of that sort of thing, and all of that angst of a young naval officer. I said in that letter “if I were only back in Seattle, I would run for the Legislature.” I wrote the letter and sent it off and totally forgot about it. My father put it away in a little box he kept on the top of his dresser and didn’t show it to me until after I became governor, when he showed me this letter and said, “Well, I guess you did it.” So I guess that I did have that in mind.

Tell me about your first election.

When I came back from Korea, I got to work again in engineering design, but also volunteered for the Republican Party. He got me in touch with a young Boeing engineer, John Barnard, who was head of the 43^rd legislative district at the time. So I called him up, volunteered and went to work with him on organizing the 43^rd legislative district. And we didn’t really know what we were doing but read the book and figured the best thing was to get precinct committeemen. Pretty soon we had almost every precinct with committeemen and well-organized. Most importantly, we knew everybody in the district.

Two years later in 1956, Mort Frayn, who had been speaker of the house and lived in that district, retired. So there was an opening. The “cardinals” of the district would get together and decide who was going to be the next legislator. And John Barnard said, “We have got to do it.” I will never forget the meeting. We had it at his house and all of these people gathered, probably a dozen or 14 men—no women—and they went around the room and they would talk about somebody and somebody else would say, “No, no, he’s too busy.” And then they would talk about somebody else and “No, no, he’s too old.” And they get around to Barnard and John (would say, “Well what about young Dan Evans, he has been working well.” Total silence. And they would go around the room again, and John was very, very good that evening because when they came to somebody and it looked liked it was somebody they might settle on, he’d always put in a little prod, a problem, and why it wouldn’t work and all that. We spent a couple of hours and at the end of the evening, finally they all decided, “Well, I guess we just can’t decide.” They had the meeting, they made no decisions. When they all left, John turned to me and said, “OK. Get busy.” We got what he had sought, which was an open primary.

I started running at that point. Those were the early days of doorbelling. Two years before, I had worked hard on Tom Pelly’s congressional campaign. Joel Prichard was the one who had really pushed that campaign and had worked on doorbelling with potholders for Pelly. My gosh, I passed out more potholders, but they had Pelly’s name imprinted on them. I figured they were a pretty good idea because every time you pick a potholder up in the kitchen, there was “Pelly” staring at you. So two years later, we did the same thing, but substituted leaflets for potholders. We doorbelled virtually every part of the district. And there were four of us running for two seats. In those days, it was the first two would get the nomination for the two seats in the legislature; they weren’t by position. One was the incumbent—Newman Clark—who nobody was running against, but three of us were all running for the other seat. I’ll never forget election night. My mother was one of the poll watchers in our precinct and the other poll watcher was the next door neighbor, whose daughter was married to Jack Lycette, who was one of the other candidates. So it was a little tense.

In those days there were voting machines. At the end of 8 o’clock when the polls close, they would run a bar down the back of the voting machine and there was a paper inside that imprinted all the results of that voting machine. They tore it off and then, by law, they had to post it outside the precinct. So I could hardly wait until they tore that thing off and I looked and I saw that I had run—in our precinct—not only run ahead of Jack Lycette, but ahead of Newman Clark by quite a substantial margin. We had a big party that night and everybody went around gathering results from various precincts and each person would get four or five precincts and then come to the house. There were no cell phones or anything to get results phoned in early. It was a great party because not only did I win the contested primary, I ran ahead of the incumbent, so it was a great start politically. Once the primary was over, there was little question about the general election because in those days; the Democrats didn’t have a chance. That same district today, Republicans don’t have a chance.

That was the first year of four terms in the house.

That is correct.

Was the University of Washington in your district in those days?

Not quite. The 43rd legislative district in those days included Windermere, Hawthorne Hills, Laurelhurst, almost all of Capitol Hill and the Central Area, but it did not go west far enough to include the University of Washington. But my district had an awful lot of University professors, staff members and others living in it, so the University was a very important part of the district.

What were the issues in Olympia that really impacted the University of Washington in those days?

We were just at the end of what had been a rather tough kind of thing for the University of Washington and that was when they got into the loyalty oaths, and they had several university professors who were fired.

The Canwell Hearings...

The Canwell Hearings. And those had just about run their course, but it really damaged and hurt the University and the University was in the process of recovering but I had a big interest in the University and of course as an engineer always in highways, so I asked for and got assigned to the highways committee and the higher education committee. But in those days, interestingly enough, there was pretty good support for the University. It had started to come back and there were senior members of the Legislature who really took the University of Washington and Washington State University under their wing. Marshall Neill lived in Whitman County; he was a senior Republican senator. And he took care of Washington State University. John Ryder was from Seattle, he was the No. 2 guy at Washington Mutual Bank and a Republican senator, and he was very much the one who took care of the University of Washington. The two universities really had some very strong internal leadership and support and there wasn’t a whole lot of competition. The three other schools [Eastern, Central and Western] weren’t regional universities, they were teachers’ colleges at the time. They had a rather specialized direction and there was no state community college system, so the universities really were a much bigger focal point. And at that time, interestingly enough, the whole idea in the legislature was to provide sufficient support to the universities to keep tuition extremely low. If they could have found enough money to do it, they probably would have gone back to the theme of the early days of the statehood. When they moved to the new campus from downtown, the bill that authorized a new campus said, among other things, “that tuition for all bona fide residents of the state of Washington shall be free.” They understood the broad importance of higher education, I think, to a much higher degree than legislatures do today.

What’s changed in the years since then?

I think one of the things that has changed is that the competition for tax money has grown extraordinarily. Remember in those days, during the time when I was in the Legislature, we had prisons, but nowhere near to the same degree did we incarcerate people. We have gone on a binge. Everybody loves the idea of “three strikes and you are out” and being tough on crime. Sometimes they don’t understand the price you pay for being that tough on crime—incarcerating people who might be helped better by treatment. Every dollar you put there you have to take away from something else. Every person you put in a Washington state prison you could cover three tuitions for University of Washington. To me, that is a bad trade. The other thing is the cost of health care. Health care has grown and it is just consuming tax money to the extent that everyone else is in trouble. So it is that competition—a much broader and bigger set of issues than we had when I was in Legislature—that makes it tough on the University.

UW athletics department had its problems in the mid-1950s.

Yes, it did.

And national media coverage prompted the Legislature to conduct investigations.

That was a little earlier than when I came to the Legislature. Interestingly enough, that evolved a lot around the time that John Cherberg was coach at the University and then got fired, and immediately turned around and ran for lieutenant governor. He got elected lieutenant governor the same year I was first elected to the Legislature, so he was lieutenant governor from then on for, I don’t know, 25 or 30 years. But the investigation had pretty much run its course by the time I got there.

You have always been interested in higher education and that certainly was evident in your 12 years as governor. You have accomplished many things, but if you had to limit it to one thing in the higher education, what would it be?

The most significant thing that happened in the 12 years that I was governor was the development of the state community college system. We had a very small set of community colleges that were independently connected to individual school district. It seemed like we were facing, when I first became governor, a flood of war babies who were now going through high school and facing higher education. We did not have nearly enough spaces for them in the four-year institutions and many of them were students who sought a different kind of higher education. Frankly, at that time, there was a growing amount of remedial work necessary for high school graduates who weren’t quite up to four-year institutions and they needed extra help.

I might say that in retrospect, looking at where the community college system is today, I think we may have gone too far. The community college system is so big, so broad, so consuming of tax money. That has really prevented some of the necessary support for four-year institutions and post-graduate work that now should be the priority. So priorities have changed in 30 years and we haven’t yet responded to those priorities.

Some of those community colleges now might be four year schools …

I think that probably we’re better off to have the two-year, upper-division institutions—the branch campuses like Tacoma and Bothell, and for Washington State University, the Tri-Cities and Vancouver. It’s easier to go down and add the freshmen and sophomores than it is to add juniors and seniors to community colleges. If you think about it, the libraries, the facilities, the laboratories and what has been built for those juniors and seniors are expensive parts of four-year institutions and bringing in those freshmen and sophomores is pretty easy. Adding those at a community college is a lot more expensive.

For years, they were talking about getting higher education institutions in the state do a better job of working together. You had initiated a coordinating council that has now evolved into the HEC Board [state Higher Education Coordinating Board] if I understand correctly.

Yes.

Have these coordinating boards accomplished what you had set out to do when you were governor? Or do we need a super board of regents for the overall higher education of the state?

The coordinating council started because of the Nixon administration. Congress at that time saw what they thought was a need for better coordination of higher education. They were seeing what we were seeing: a flood of new students, war babies, coming into higher education and the rapid growth of higher education in many states. The growth was in a scattered and uncoordinated way, so they authorized these programs and funded them, which is where we got started.

I am of two minds. I think that there is some benefit in having institutions work together. There is some benefit in trying to establish overall need for higher education, and then trying to work with the various institutions and the various classifications of institutions to respond to those needs. I think that a super board of regents would be a bad idea and I am very much opposed to that. I think that the independent boards of regents and trustees of our four-year colleges and our state community college system’s board of trustees have worked really well. They are much more oriented toward seeing the success of the particular institution that they are guiding, but the presidents of the four-year institutions do currently work together in a Council of Presidents. The coordinating board has some chance to look at overall need. I think there is pretty good cooperation today. Frankly, I am a whole lot more in favor of cooperation than compulsion.

When you were governor, I know you paid a whole lot of attention to whom you appointed to these higher education boards. There is a lot of pressure to appoint certain people and it is probably especially true for the University of Washington Board of Regents. How did you approach these appointments?

I had found out early on as governor that appointments to various boards and commissions was a huge task. In fact, we finally had one person on my staff whose sole job it was to just keep track of appointments. We even had a beginning computer program (in the days before active use of computers) to really control what was coming up and what the vacancies were. I spent a lot of time, even with that kind of staff help, working on appointments.

There were two sets of appointments that I felt most strongly about and one of those was the judiciary. I knew the judges were likely to last a lot longer than I did as governor. In fact, the current chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Gary Alexander, was one of my last appointments. He is still serving on the court, so it lasts for a long time. The other set of appointments was members of our board of regents and trustees of our higher education institutions. They, too, tended to last. Those six-year terms were very important jobs and very sought after.

I will never forget, early on, just a few months after I became governor, Jim Dolliver came in to me and said—he was kind of chuckling, “You know, I had an interview with someone who had been on the board of regents,” (I forget even whether it was Washington or Washington State), “during the previous administration who was still there and his term was coming up.” And [the board member] said, “I’d really like to help the administration here. Where can I send $5,000?” and the very strong intimation, of course, was [a political contribution] if he could get reappointed. Then Jim just looked at me and I looked at him and said, “He’s out.”

In my time as governor, not only with the judiciary but also with boards of trustees and regents, appointments were overwhelmingly white men. We just hadn’t gotten to the point yet where there were broader appointments. I really tried to seek out people of color, and women particularly. Not only did we have some success but it was extraordinarily important. Bob Flennaugh was a young African American dentist in Seattle and I appointed him to the Board of Regents at the University of Washington. He proved to be absolutely indispensable in the time of civil rights demonstrations and difficulties on campus, because he knew the subject, he knew what was going on and he could talk to students and—occasionally when necessary—face them down. Later on, I was really proud of some of the last appointments I was able to make. Three vacancies came up for boards of regents at Washington and Washington State University. I appointed Kate Webster, who was a prominent women’s activist in Seattle to the Washington State University board; Edith Williams, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s granddaughter and a very strong, marvelous person; and Mary Gates, all three of them the same day. Those latter two were regents at the University of Washington. Mary, interestingly enough, was reappointed by a Democratic governor, the first time by Republican John Spellman and then by Democrat Booth Gardner. Shortly after Mary finished her 18 years, Mike Lowry called me and asked if I would be interested in serving on the Board of Regents for the University, so I took Mary’s seat after I appointed her 18 years before.

One of my most vivid higher education memories during my days in your office came during those antiwar demonstrations in 1970. The UW had incidents but nothing like Kent State and other universities throughout the country. You were in constant contact with the UW in those days. Could you reflect on what was happening in those days?

There was a growing tide of opposition to the war in Vietnam and it was primarily among the young. After all, they were the ones who were going to fight the war or were fighting the war. There were increasing demonstrations and sometimes the demonstrations were very large. When I see a demonstration today on the University campus and they think it is a big demonstration, I just smile, because it is nothing like the almost 10,000 students who one day marched to the federal courthouse downtown and used the freeway to do it. It was a massive demonstration but one that was, for the most part, very peaceful with just a lot of hot rhetoric. A couple of students at the end of the march threw bricks through a couple of plate glass windows downtown. The news that night made it sound like 10,000 students from the University trashed downtown.

I got hundreds of letters from people, mostly really bitter against the students. That’s when I went on television. KING-TV offered me a half hour to talk with our citizens. I did it just with a few notes and a sample of some of those letters, trying to just calm everybody down, because it was getting pretty hot. I met with student groups frequently. And they were all pretty great at acting out vocally and marching and that sort of thing, but they generally had the right ideas. Maybe they had somewhat bizarre ways of showing it, but they were against the war, which was an increasingly bad war. They were for greater opportunities in civil rights and for minorities and people of color, and they were right. So it was not only interesting, I think it certainly impressed me and might have even changed me in my attitudes.

I will never forget this time at Washington State University when I had been urged by the president of the Young Republicans to come over. He said, “I can guarantee you we’ll get 100 kids there,” and I was going over to eastern Washington, so I agreed. When I arrived at the Pullman airport, I was met by Glenn Terrell, who was president of WSU, and this young man who had to be a Young Republican. He said, “Governor, governor, there are more than 2,000 students over there.” They had to move the event to the big auditorium, and gosh there were students practically hanging from the walls, it was just jammed. That was one of the finest two hours I think I ever spent, because I didn’t get a chance to talk very long, I just opened it up to their questions. We got into a debate on the war and a whole host of pretty important stuff. It was a great function and it was the right kind of thing to do.

I think one of the other things that happened, I give enormous credit to two people for the fact that we didn’t get into a kind of tense state operation. Will Bachofner, who was head of the state patrol and Howard McGee, who was Adjudent General of the National Guard, were called in. The city wanted the National Guard to come in on several occasions, once at Seattle Central Community College when they were really having some big demonstrations, and once or twice at the University, but we always refused. Will Bachofner said, “Look. We aren’t trained like highway patrolmen to do that kind of thing, city police are.” We told the mayor, “If you get to the point where every single Seattle policemen is on duty at the front lines and you have no more backup, we’ll move in as backup. We’ll handle the communications and we’ll handle the sorts of things that we can do well, but not the front lines.” Howard McGee said, “Governor, we can’t bring the National Guard in. I don’t want 19-year-old soldiers shooting 19-year-old students,” and that was before Kent State. They were pretty wise people.

Who were the leaders at the University of Washington in those days?

Charles Odegaard was president and I thought he did an absolutely magnificent job. He was a medieval historian and could talk the leg off an ox, I’ll tell you, but he understood what was going on. He was strong enough so he didn’t let students run the University, but he was wise enough to listen to what they were saying and make changes where changes seemed appropriate. I think one of the finest things that happened, as a reflection of that, was when they started an educational opportunity program. Everything was a demand in those days from students, and the demands from students of color were that they have an educational opportunity program, that they be given open opportunity and then get help integrating students of color when they got into the University. Later on, they had a series of banquets, which they still do, and at the first one, the students who had been the instigators of a lot of the protest had collected money and created a scholarship and named it the Charles Odegaard Scholarship. Now that’s pretty darn good; it’s a measure of that guy and how wise he was. A lot of university presidents in those days really collapsed under pressure. They just kind of gave up and let students take over or they reacted in the other ways, like at Kent State, and tried to get tough without listening. So I think he was clearly a strong leader and at the same time was guided by an extraordinarily good Board of Regents. Jim Ellis and Bob Flennaugh were two of the leaders of the Board of Regents who were willing to go out and talk to students. Instead of locking the doors, they went out and talked to them. They really calmed things down and helped us get through some really tough times.

You’ve had various leadership roles beyond the state of Washington. In your days as governor, you were chair of the Western Governors Association, chair of the National Governors Association and the like. What were the issues state governors were facing in those days?

During the time I was governor, they were all facing the same kinds of issues, which primarily was the huge expansion of education. They were facing the mob of youngsters, war babies who were growing up, and as they grew they were putting pressures on all kinds of institutions, not only K-12 schools, but later on higher education. At the same time, there was a growing need for social services. The number of teenagers and 20-year-olds grew and so did the attention to crime. So there were lots of issues that sort of bulged as that age cohort bulged and every state was facing the same kind of thing. When we got together in governors’ conferences, we’d find the most effective parts of those conferences was during the lunch or dinner hour. Half a dozen governors would be sitting together, you’d lay out a certain problem that you had run into, and find out that someone else had run into the same thing and had some ideas. It was a very effective method and I found that when I became chairman of the National Governors Conference, I thought it was time that we did a whole lot better job of organizing governors in a more cohesive group. During that time, we founded what’s now called the Hall of the States, which was a building in Washington, D.C. There are hundreds of organizations made up of state officials—the Association of Agriculture Directors, the fisheries directors, this and that and the other thing—as well as governors. We wanted to put them all, to the degree of a national headquarters, in one place so we could be a more cohesive force. I feel that has really been accomplished. Governors have a much bigger voice in Washington, D.C., and that was what we were going through at the time. Not only were the needs growing very fast, but it was the time of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson. Those Great Society programs, for the most part, required state support as well. They would come into a big amount of federal money for a social program, but then the states had to match it, so every state had a very large increase in their responsibilities. That meant new taxes, and if you didn’t respond, first you were in violation of national programs, but you would also lose 50 to 70 percent of matching monies from the federal government. Then Ronald Reagan, who was known as the big tax cutter, came into office as Governor two years after I did. The very first thing he did when he came in was raise taxes substantially in California, because he thought that the needs were absolutely overwhelming the tax base he had at the time.

When you left the governor’s office after three successful terms with a national reputation, many people were surprised that you accepted the presidency at Evergreen State College. Why did you make that choice?

I had a number of other opportunities, some general that I did not even pursue, and others that were much more specific including one running a major foundation—but that meant moving to New York City. I was too much of a Northwesterner, so I turned that one down very quickly. One was being CEO of a fairly large company that I was on the board of and I just really did not think that was something I wanted to do. I announced in March of 1976 that I was not running, and it was in December of that year that I was still thinking about what to do. Then came the offer at Evergreen. When Charles McCann decided to stepped down as president and go back to teaching, I had a call from Herb Hadley, who was on the Board of Trustees at Evergreen, asking me about my interest. I had not thought about it at all, but the more I thought about, I realized maybe it would be a good challenge. I had always been interested in higher education. I did not consider myself an academic at all, but at the time, after about seven years of existence, Evergreen was becoming a remarkable education institution. It had not yet proven itself to the legislators, to many of the high school counselors or even to some potential students in the state. I figured, well, that is something that I can help on, and do it was a real challenge. I think I helped save Evergreen. We had has some great legislative support in building an institution that now has a national reputation.

Some people were hoping that it would die.

There were some. [Washington Governor] Dixie Lee Ray had no love for Evergreen at all. She proposed to turn it into office buildings for the state government. But we were just beginning… it was Charles McCann and the first few years that set Evergreen on its way. They were doing the right thing but there were not enough graduates yet to prove how well they were doing. One of the first things I did when I got there was to take one faculty member away from the classroom for one semester, and say, “You be my institutional researcher and find out what we can talk about to the legislators, the high school counselors and others about the success of Evergreen.” He did a great job. The first thing that he did was come back to me and say that we had about 60 graduates who applied for medical, law and business graduate schools throughout the country, including some of the best schools—like the Harvards, Stanfords and the rest of them—and 92 percent of them had been accepted. That was way, way above the average for other schools. I said, “Wow, let’s grab that,” and we ran with that for a while. It began to open the eyes of legislators and high school counselors. Slowly what was then a declining enrollment turned around and started to grow, and then the very first U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities came out. Evergreen State College in its classification was ranked No. 2 in the country and the “Best in the West.” I got a lot of copies of that and reprinted the article. That really did more than anything else at the time to really stall legislators who wanted to close the college. It added ammunition for legislators who were helpful as well as convinced an awful lot of people on the outside that we do have something here and we are preserving it.

How does Evergreen compare with the UW?

Interestingly enough, during the time I spent as regent at the University of Washington, we had a number of new programs which would have to come to the Board of Regents for approval. Increasingly, as those new programs would come to the Board of Regents, they would be touted as “here is this great program and it includes people and faculty from this discipline and this discipline, and it’s a great interdisciplinary program.” About the third time it happened, I couldn’t help myself, but say, “You know, it’s really nice to see what the University is doing, but there is this ‘other’ institution that has a whole school full of interdisciplinary programs.”

I think what happened is that Evergreen was really a predecessor of what’s now become much more recognized, and that is the end of the old “silo” type of education. You teach within disciplines and students have to choose between silos and never understand the interconnections or don’t easily understand the interconnections. What’s happening is those silos are breaking down. What used to be biology, and what used to be medicine and what used to be these individual disciplines are now biotechnology and biophysics. Everything is crisscrossing and the silos are breaking down. The need for interdisciplinary approaches to complex issues is growing. The University is, by reputation, one of the very best of the big universities in the nation in terms of its willingness to enter into interdisciplinary studies and to create new interdisciplinary efforts. We’re far, far ahead of places like Stanford and Harvard and some of the other Ivy Leaguers.

I remember a comment one time, that you always thought partisan politics was tough, but after being president, you thought academic politics were a lot worse. Why did you feel that way?

They probably weren’t so partisan at Evergreen as they are at more traditional institutions. Evergreen made a very strong pitch to be different in a lot of ways, including faculty. They started the institution with faculty having no tenure because they said tenure was really for protecting academic freedom and not protecting an ordinary faculty member from being fired. They agreed with the Board of Trustees that they would substitute independent arbitration—so neither the Board of Trustees nor the faculty would have the final say—and in trade for that, the faculty said they would go on three-year contracts. So the faculty members were graded and counseled. We’d say, “You’re doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing and at the end of the second year you will get another three year contract,” or “You’re short in something and we’ll help you, then at the end of the second year if you come up to snuff you’re ok, but if you haven’t, you’ll get a notice that your contract will not be renewed.” During the time I was at Evergreen over a seven-year period, we did not renew approximately 10 percent of the faculty. It’s not necessarily because they were all bad faculty members, but some didn’t fit with they style that we had at Evergreen. But when I’d go to conferences with other presidents of universities and we’d talk about this kind of thing, they would just shake their head and say, “Oh God, if I could get rid, in seven years, of the bottom 10 percent of my faculty, we would just soar.”

I think faculty politics in the traditional university starts with the fact that it is shared governance. The faculty really believe that they are the heart of the university. The students also think they are the heart. Administrators aren’t sure, but shared governance means that we’ve got a totally different kind of an institution. George Schultz, former Secretary of State, put it very well when he was asked what the difference was, because he had served in private industry, in government and in higher education. He just thought for a minute, then he said, “In private enterprise you give an order and expect for it to be carried out. In government you give an order and hope that it will be cared out, and in higher education you give no orders.” And that’s pretty close to being true. Unfortunately, what educational politics turns into is often just interminable arguments about things that really are not important. That is were you get the problems of governance. It was said long ago by a faculty member that the reason we fight so hard about things is that there is little to fight about, so we make the little things very big.

You left Evergreen as president after seven years when you were appointed to Scoop Jackson’s seat and later won it in a special election in 1983. You were in the United States Senate for five years. Were you involved with higher education at all in the Senate?

Oh, sure. Interestingly enough, I had decided that I had done about all I could at Evergreen after seven years. I called the chairman of the Board of Trustees, Thelma Jackson (that was in August of 1983), and told her I would stay on till the next June and that I had done about all I could. Evergreen was really on its way, and it really needed an academic president now. We had set a time for lunch a week later to go over all of these things and how we would work it out, and between making that appointment and the luncheon, Scoop Jackson died. So I didn’t last till the next June; I lasted 12 days and then I was voting in the Senate. So it was very sudden. It was a sort of precipitous leaving of Evergreen.

After joining the Senate, I did not serve on a committee that had direct responsibility for higher education, but I had a real interest in those kinds of issues that came up—issues that related to budget mostly, trying to ensure that there was a substantial and continuing support of research in higher education. On several occasions I worked with other senators to try and derail people who somehow didn’t like the kinds of things that were going on in higher education, and who wanted to impose new regulations, new deals to meet whatever they thought were the deficiencies in higher education. We fought hard to derail those, in almost every case successfully. But there was always that pressure. You could always find somebody in the House or the Senate that thought they could run everything better that the people who were running them.

The University of Washington has consistently done well on federal grants. Why?

Because it has a superb faculty, and they are very, very good.

These are all awarded on a competitive basis ...

They are all done on a competitive basis, so we are competing against Stanford and Harvard and Michigan and all of the fine universities in the country on every one of those grants. And we are just very good. Look at one of the more recent grants. The feds set up three centers to study the human genome, and these three were not just ordinary centers. They were multi-million-dollar grants for three centers in the country, and the University of Washington won two out of the three. We have continued to win just huge and superb kinds of grants. As I said, it’s the skill of the faculty. In fact, I believe the success is due to the fact that they are so willing to work together and create these interdisciplinary groups. They are then far more capable of winning a grant, because they have got all the bits and pieces that are necessary to meet the challenge of that particular grant, which increasingly requires interdisciplinary kinds of teams to make it work.

After you retired from the Senate you came back to Seattle, and two years later were appointed to Board of Regents of the University of Washington. Who made that appointment?

Well, Governor Lowry ...

He was your political opponent.

He ran against me in the U.S. Senate, but that was a special election, and he was then serving in the House of Representatives. We had a pretty spirited race for the Senate, but then we got together when we were both in the Congress. In those days, the Washington delegation was a very strong, bipartisan delegation. We met every week for breakfast, Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, and, of course, Tom Foley was then Speaker of the House, so we had a little extra zip in terms of authority. But we would meet in those breakfasts, and between all of the members we covered virtually every aspect of the issues that came before the Congress. And we worked cooperatively; we tried to work for the state of Washington.

Very quickly Mike and I became compatriots on many of the issues that faced the Senate—or faced the Congress. I remember the Washington Wilderness Bill, which was one of the really big wilderness bills that came along. The whole delegation personally worked on and drew that bill. It wasn’t done by staff, it was done by the members themselves. Then, after I left the Senate, Mike also ran again for Senate in 1988 against Slade Gorton and lost, but this time he lost his House seat. So he came back to our state. About a year later, we were asked by some environmentalist leaders if we would join together and we jumped on it. We thought this was a great idea. I mean, here are the two of us, who are about as far apart politically as you can get, but on the environment we both had very similar views, and they asked us to co-chair what became the Washington Wilderness, Wildlife and Recreation Coalition. That coalition became a group of over 200 organizations devoted to trying to build into the state’s budget a strong, continuing investment in protecting the environment and providing recreational spots, and that’s essentially been done. Even during the depths of our difficulty in the last few years, the Legislature always has kept $30-40 million per biennium in the budget for that coalition, and it still continues. So Mike and I worked together, and he became Governor, and he called out of the blue one day and asked me if I was interested in serving. He said, “I want a chairman of the Higher Education Coordinating Board or the Board of Regents at the University of Washington.” And I said, “Well, Mike, my first love is the University of Washington and the Board of Regents,” so he made the appointment.

Looking back over your 12 years on the board, what would you say are your significant accomplishments at the University?

I think the single most important job of a board of regents or a board of directors for a company or the board of a foundation or a nonprofit is select leadership. You set policy, but you don’t run the place, and in fact, boards that try to run organizations generally run into disaster. So leadership is important. We had, during my 12 years, two chances to select new presidents. I served in the last years of Bill Gerberding as president of the University of Washington, and he was a superb president. In fact, as Governor and later on, I worked with two enormously great presidents of the University, Bill Gerberding and, before him, Charles Odegaard. Each man served about 16 years as president, and each took the University to the next level. Frankly, we thought we’d done a good job in selecting Dick McCormick and he turned out not to be the right president for the University. It wasn’t that he was bad, but he ran into some problems and he lost the confidence of the Board of Regents. We then went into a new search. We did the search twice because we weren’t quite satisfied at the end of the first one, and at the end of the second search Mark Emmert was selected. I have every expectation he will be a president in the mold of Charles Odegaard and Bill Gerberding. I hope he stays with the University the same length of time, and I am confident he will take the University to that next level.

The next level above us now is to be in the half-dozen best public universities and in the top 10 of all universities in the country, which I think is very much achievable. We’re halfway there already. I think that if we can get the kind of support from the Legislature and the increasing amount of private support that’s necessary, and if we have faculty continuing to provide the extraordinary leadership that they have provided, we’ll get there. So that was the most important.

The UW had its troubles when you were a regent. Football Coach Rick Neuheisel was fired for participating in college basketball betting pools. The volunteer team physician for women’s softball was caught distributing drugs without a prescription. And the UW’s physician groups had to pay $35 million to settle billing fraud charges in Medicare and other programs.

We ran into problems. Each member of the Board of Regents in the time I was on it was assigned different areas of the University to pay special attention to, and my two during the time I was there happened to be medicine and athletics. It was during this time that we had all of the extraordinary problems with the School of Medicine and athletics as well. But it was a challenge that was very useful. I worked hard on the billing problems at the University. I still believe very strongly that the University was unduly penalized and that there was not sufficient understanding of both of the complexity and the difficulty of billing. The challenge from the U.S. attorney, I just think, was they wanted a pelt on the wall rather than really what would have been appropriate under the circumstances. But we lived with what we had to do. We were under the kind of situation where it would have cost more, with much more difficulty and time spent, to take it all the way to court, even though I thought we were right. On athletics, I think what happened is that athletics itself grew rapidly into the monster that it is today, nationally. It has become obsessed with big-time money. I think it’s out of control. I think somehow, nationally, we need to rein in the amount of money spent on athletics. But Barbara Hedges, I think, did a good job as director of athletics. She created a whole new set of facilities. But the job finally got just too darn big.

Are athletics under control today?

I leave the Board of Regents with the feeling—and the expectation—that we’ve got extraordinary leadership in the President of the University. We’ve got extraordinary leadership in Todd Turner, the new director of athletics. We’ve got some extraordinary coaches. And I think we’re really on our way to a University that recognizes the role of athletics—which can be a positive and a good one—as best expressed very recently in the national championship of the women’s volleyball team. Great athletics, great athletes, great students: they’re really a team the University can be extraordinarily proud of, and I think we can expand that outlook to the other teams—the basketball team, and the football team. And the football team will come back in a way that will make the University and the community very proud.

You think there is a proper balance between athletics and academics at the University?

Mark Emmert happens to be a very, very strong president. He also understands and is deeply involved with athletics and isn’t likely to let that get out of hand. But he will also be a real supporter of athletics as the needs require. He says it very well. He says that for many, many people, both in the community and nationally, athletics is the front porch of the University. You will see a whole lot more ink spilled and a whole lot more time spent by the electronic media on athletics than you ever will on all of the academic activities of the University.

Does that bother you?

Sure it bothers me. I am bothered currently, today, by the thin level of news coverage we get. We get instant news coverage, but we don’t get the depth we used to because people don’t read newspapers to the degree they used to. They watch news on television. And television news has turned into a miserable exposé of 10 or 12 minutes of rape, pillage, murder, fires, arson and whatever, and virtually nothing on the really important, long-standing issues. What bothers me is there is almost nothing on accomplishments, not only by the University, but by the various kinds of institutions in our community that are doing some great things. We’re almost under the radar.

There has been a steady decline in state support for higher education over the past 20 years or so. What has this meant for the University. What is the outlook? What are we going to do? Should we figure out different ways to fund higher education, or just find different ways higher education is delivered?

Higher education has the real problem—both here and elsewhere—of being a growing competition for state general fund dollars. It’s public school education that is really having troubles in terms of funding because their job is a lot more complex than it used to be. They are dealing with—in the Seattle school district, for instance—over a 100 separate languages that are the native languages of students, and that’s very, very different from how it used to be. There’s a whole host of problems that require more money. Health care is expanding, the need for support of corrections facilities is growing and they’re all impinging on that state general fund dollar. So when it comes time for a Legislature to look at where they spend their money, public school education has a constitutional priority; then it’s aid to dependent children, the disabled, the blind, the elderly, and those who are in the corrections institutions; and then higher education. Higher education is the one that gets squeezed because these others appear to be of higher priority and necessity. Nobody in the Legislature today is willing to make another investment that will require them to raise taxes. The real question currently is whether the recovery in the economy, which is providing some extra money, will allow the Legislature to make the investment that’s required in higher education, that will provide what’s needed for our future citizens, our young people and our state. If they don’t, we will fall behind as a state, both economically and in the great competition we have not only with other states but with other countries. So we’ll see.

The University will continue to say, “OK, help us. But if you can’t help us, or won’t help us, then we’ll have to do two things.” We’ll have to continue to raise money on the outside. We’re in the final stages of a $2 billion private campaign, which is going to be successful. But that isn’t enough.

Secondly, we will have to convince the Legislature, “Look, if you cannot or will not provide the extra help that is necessary, then for heaven’s sakes, relax some of the strings.” Give us some of the opportunity to become—I guess, what you’d call a semi-independent branch of government. But it’s very difficult for them to let go .

I think the University ought to have total responsibility for the tuition that is charged; we ought to have more independent responsibility for handling contracts for buildings, for doing purchasing, for doing a lot of things where the state likes to retain a degree of control. The state likes to maintain control, but they don’t want to put any money in the pot. It’s like a poker game: You don’t put any money in the pot, you can’t play. And it’s about time for the Legislature to recognize that.

You and Booth Gardner did a wonderful job a few years ago in an effort to get the state Legislature to increase the amount of money available for higher education construction projects. Did this initiative produce the results you and Booth had in mind?

No. It produced the money, but the money didn’t go to where we had in mind. The first biennium it did, but it didn’t in the second biennium, even when it was all planned out where the money was supposed to go. That was the biennium when the University of Washington, which in the first biennium got a limited amount of money, was to really start getting a larger amount of money. We wanted funds evened out over the period of six or seven years for this program. In the second biennium, Booth and I weren’t around as strongly during that session. We figured that things were going in the direction they should. But they didn’t. The community college system moved in and used their financial clout to get extra money, and it was at the expense of the University and some of the other four-year institutions. Particularly the University of Washington got shortchanged, and it continues to get shortchanged. It has a significant share—I forget the exact percentage, but I think something like 60 percent of all of the square footage of all of higher education in the state. And yet it really gets cut down on support in two ways; one, in terms of new facilities, which for the University have increasingly been built through private money. Secondly, even if we provide private money for 100 percent of the cost of a building, then the Legislature and some of the staff in higher education in the Governor’s office say, “Well, we didn’t provide that in our budget, so we’re not going to provide the money for maintenance and operation of that building.” And that is not only unfair, it is just plain stupid, and it’s time it changed.

The interview wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t ask about the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. You have the distinction of few living people—having a school named after you at the UW. What is the Evans school trying to accomplish?

That’s right. In fact, I asked Mark Lindenberg, who was then dean, when he first called me, I said, “Gee, why didn’t you have the good grace to wait until I was dead?” And he said, “No, we don’t want to just the name, we want you.” And so they included me. It’s been a great joy for me to be involved with and be part of the school, and to meet some of the students, particularly the Humphrey Fellows and the Gates Packard Fellows, who are students that come from other countries to study for a year in the Evans school. That’s about 30 students, mostly from developing countries. It’s been really challenging and fun to meet with them.

I think what the school is trying to do is turn out the very best public administrators we can. And the school has reached out—you talk about interdisciplinary studies—we are working with the School of Medicine, with the School of Law, with the Business School, with many other schools to bring their talents in together with the great talents of public administration people in the school itself, to create interdisciplinary programs. If a student’s interest is really in public administration in medicine, we pull in the medical school, and if it’s business we pull in business faculty, and if it’s law we pull in the law school.  I think we turn out, as a result, better graduates than would normally be the case because they have this breadth of interdisciplinary education.

If I can provide any help to turn out students who have great pride in public administration, and the feeling that public administration is a first-rate calling, then I think that that we will be successful. Because I believe public administration is a first-rate calling. Our country was started with people who had, many of them, great wealth, great success, and they were willing to put all of that on the line to take part in public activities and public administration and public enterprise, because they thought it was the most important thing they could do. I think that it’s time we rejuvenated that kind of spirit and understanding in the country today.

Now that you’re off the Board of Regents will you be spending more time in the school? What’s next for Dan Evans?

The pressure is on for me to finish an autobiography. I’m in the process of interviewing a new research assistant. I had a great research assistant Aaron Best, a graduate of the Evans school, who got a fellowship in Germany, so I lost him. So now the new research assistant, will come out of either the Evans school or the history department. I will continue to push, hopefully, for finishing off an autobiography and letting everybody else know what I’ve been doing for a lifetime. Whether it will be publishable I’m not sure, but it will be something that at the very least I’ll be able to give to my nine grandchildren.