Dan Clements
Interview
Interview by Reilly Ebbs
>> So, what years did you attend Penn State?
>> September of 1964 until June of 1968.
>> OK. And where are you from?
>> I am from Westbury, New York.
>> OK. So why'd you choose Penn State for your university education?
>> Interestingly enough, Joe Paterno's brother was my high school social-- a high school social studies teacher and our high school football coach. And I was discussing where to go to college with one of the gym teachers of all things. And he said, "What about Penn State?" And I said, "I really don't know about Penn State." And he directed me to George Paterno's homeroom that afternoon after school. And Mr. Paterno showed me a photo album of Happy Valley as I had never heard of, and he showed me the pictures. It seemed like a great place and I applied. He actually filled out the application because he's here for a lot of the application and my handwriting was terrible and I said I would have to take it home and have somebody else do it and he did it for me. I took it home, my father gave me a check for $25. I was accepted literally just weeks later, early admission, right after thanksgiving. And we sent in our deposit. Never visited the campus, never been to the school, it just seemed like a place I would enjoy.
>> Wow, that's awesome.
>> Yes. And when Mr. DeSalvo, who was the gym teacher, told me about it, he said that George's brother was the assistant head coach, which was true at the time. George Paterno had not become the head coach, he was the assistant head coach in 1964, he did not become the head coach until '66.
>> Mm-hmm. What was your major at Penn State?
>> Political science.
>> And did you know you were going to try the pre-law track prior to starting college?
>> Yes. Very strangely, I decided as a 12-year-old that I want to become a lawyer. It's very odd. One of my 7th grade teachers sees me as having a big mouth and being a wise guy and says, "You'd make a good lawyer." And I didn't even know what a lawyer was, and began to look at it, read books about it and a number of popular nonfiction books at the time, one by a famous lawyer by the name of Louis Nizer, another by a famous lawyer named Edward Bennett Williams, and read some fiction law stories, and thought that the fact Mr. Silver, who was my 7th grade teacher was correct. It sounded interesting and it really, for me, became a social compulsion. I was interested in becoming a lawyer out of an interest in doing socially important things and also about kind of a-- my interest in politics. And I had a-- even as a 12-year-old, had a serious interest in politics, so they kind of combined.
>> Very cool. Was there one particular course or a particular professor that made a lasting impression on your studies?
>> Certainly, in the Political Science Department, it would be Dr. Ruth Silva, with S-I-L-V-A. She was someone who I could go and talk to. I took a number of political science courses with her. She was very interesting and became known nationally later on as one of the authors of the 25th amendment to the United States Constitution regarding presidential succession, and amendment that comes, you may know, because of discussions about replacing a president if he's not competent to serve. So, she now had an influence on me. I remember her well. And actually, she assisted me in picking my law school because I was accepted at several and-- including Georgetown and George Washington. And she recommended me to go to-- suggested to me that I go to George Washington rather than Georgetown even though Georgetown was a higher rated school, because George Washington had a younger faculty, a more interesting program of interaction between the students and the community, and a better facility.
>> Interesting.
>> Yeah. So she talked to me about all that and it really caused me to pick George Washington over Georgetown.
>> Did you go to law school right after undergrad?
>> Immediately. I was a year ahead, so I started college at 17 and didn't graduate-- I graduated-- I had turned 21 the end of April and then graduated the first week or the second week of June, whatever it was. So I was young and had just turned 21, didn't even know there were bars, and then went directly off to George Washington Law School. I was drafted, it was the middle of the Vietnam War, the height of the Vietnam War. And I was drafted and had to go for a physical that fall while I was in my first year in law school and did not pass my physical so I managed to continue in law school and graduated from law school three years later at 24.
>> Wow. What music did you like if you are interested in music?
>> I am not a music person at all.
>> Really?
>> I'm-- Yes, I mean, I certainly knew The Beatles and knew who they were. I knew The Rolling Stones. I would probably say that I learned-- did learn to dance at Penn State. My big brother in the fraternity taught me how to dance. But music just is not something that sticks with me. If there's not, I kid that I suffer from what I call MADD, Music Attention Deficit Disorder. I can't listen to a three-minute song from start to finish with words if the song has words and get through it. My mind wanders away, almost no matter how good the songs are, no matter how poetic they are. Now as I've gotten older, I've gotten better at it, but I'm not somebody who ever turns on music on the radio. If I turn on the radio, it's to listen to MPR, never really listen to music on the radio, never listen to it in the dorms. Just one of those parts of everybody else's life, it seems, but it's never been part of mine.
>> Interesting.
>> Yeah.
>> Where did you get or obtain your news from in college?
>> Well, one of our professors the first year of political science or history, and I forget which it was, because I took the mandatory, whatever it was, 24 credits in political science, but I also took like 18 credits in history, I really am a history buff and still am, still read a great deal of history, required us to read the New York Times at least once a week. And variably, it started on Sundays so we would have to go down and made sure enough editions of the New York Times at one of the newspaper stands or whatever it was, stores downtown and in College Avenue, and I used to go buy the New York Times every Sunday and read it. And the Daily Collegian as I recall, well, I could be wrong about this, the Daily Collegian had some national news.
>> Mm-hmm, yes.
>> Yeah. And I did listen to the radio for news stories. But I would say primarily and oddly of course the New York Times because even then-- and I know most young people don't read newspapers today, they get their news off their phones, the internet, and all the feed. Even then, students were not reading newspapers, which is why he made a requirement for our class. And I continued it after the class. I got into reading the news and enjoying it. But again, it's partly because of my involvement in politics. When I got to campus in '64, the election was going on and I got involved with the Democratic Party and they used the carpools over the Bellefonte to Democratic Party County headquarters to make phone calls for Lyndon Johnson.
>> Cool.
>> Yup.
>> So with-- I mean speaking on that, so there's like a lot going on in the 1960s, you had the first moon photos from space to protests, the election of '68. Besides what you're talking about with the election, what particular interests did you have?
>> Did I have? Well, the war really began to define so much of what was going on campus. Originally, in '64 when I got there, the issues were about student apathy, student involvement, but also primarily about women's rights on campus and at the school. Women were by quota, there was only one female student for every 2.7 male students, OK, outside the quota for out-of-state students which I think was a limit of 7%. And then once there, girls were required to live in the dorms, they were not allowed to live in apartments, they were not allowed to visit men in apartments, they had curfews of 11 o'clock during the week and I think 12:00 or I guess 1:00 in the morning on weekends. And so the serious issues the first couple years was what was called in loco parentis. The university was acting as parents for students and thought that was their obligation. So the campus political parties, their platforms were to get rid of in loco parentis to allow girls to live off campus or at least allow them to visit men in dorms-- I mean, in apartments. There were no mixed dorms back in those days, needless to say. There were dress codes. You were not allowed to wear jeans in the cafeteria. Girls, I think-- Yeah, I think girls, when I first got there, had to wear skirts to go to the dining halls. And talk about changes in the university, they had to wear skirts and-- for student government meetings. For example, all the men put on sport jackets and ties for student government meetings all the way until my senior year and I broke that by not wearing a tie to a student government meeting. And it was kind of-- people looked at me like, what? And I said, "That's ridiculous. We're students. Why are we wearing jackets and ties? It's kind of presumptive to do that, to think that what we're doing here requires us to wear that." And so I stopped wearing a jacket and tie. And very quickly thereafter, everybody else joined in because it's a whole lot more comfortable. But we have these issues going on on campus about the female rights. And so those were kind of serious on campus at the time. There was, as I recall, before I left success in part, I don't think it was until after I left that women were allowed to live in apartments. I'm not certain of this because it'd been so many years, but I'm not even sure that they allowed women over 21 to live off campus.
>> Wow.
>> At first, when I got there in '64. I think by the time we left, they were allowed to live off campus if they were over 21. And certainly, I think the rule changed about visiting men in apartments as well. That said, needless to say, women still visited men in their apartments back during those years but they were subject to discipline and subject to being thrown out of school. And certainly, the curfew was strictly enforced. The dorm doors were locked. And I remember on more than one occasion when I was a senior living in an apartment, I've been in a fraternity, so my sophomore and junior years I lived in a fraternity house. But my senior year, we were allowed to move out of the fraternity and I lived in an apartment. There were a number of occasions where female friends of mine had stayed out beyond curfew and slept on my couch.
>> Oh my gosh.
>> Because they couldn't get back into the dorm.
>> Wow. So different, like such a different time.
>> Well, one would say, yes. The kind of views of equality at the time were very different. The reason there was a 2.7 to 1 quota was because, oh, girls don't need an education. And well, the guys needed education, they need to go to college to get jobs and to work. And their women are just going to become housewives or whatever. And just so you're aware, because it was a very different time, the smartest women in those days, and it changed not much-- not long thereafter. But in the '60s, certainly the '50s and all the way through the '60s, those smartest women went into two professions primarily, teaching and nursing. And it wasn't until the late '60s, with the Civil Rights Movements kind of advancing everybody and the rights of everybody, the Vietnam War, which women got involved in, in demonstrating against that they began to say, wait a minute, we can do other things. So that law school classes, for example, when I started at law school at George Washington, there was 420 students and it was less, just a little less than 10% of the law school students were women. And by-- certainly by 1980, almost every law school in the country was 50-50 male and female. And as you know, of course today, almost every college in the country, the majority of students are female.
>> Right.
>> So it was a very different time by way of equality back, you know, back then. And I think the Vietnam War really did play a role in it, demonstrations against the war. And Penn State was not a hotbed as compared to places like Columbia or Berkeley. But it affected the campus and affected the student government. And we took an interest in what was going on. We passed-- And I was looking through my old scrapbook which I haven't looked at I'm sure in close to 50 years when I graduated. And there were-- the student government at Penn State, and I remember this one specifically, we put in a resolution to condemn the draft. And we condemned the draft because at that time-- today, there's a volunteer army, but in those days, you were drafted. And the draft was geared to protect the wealthy and the educated. If you went to college, you got a draft deferment. And we actually protested and passed a resolution at Penn State, saying that their draft-- the draft was clearly discriminatory because if you had the money to go to college educated and had that background, you got a draft deferment for four years of college, which discriminated against the poor and those people who are not as educated. And we thought that was inappropriate that even though it was against your own self-interests as students, the student government passed it I think unanimously or close to unanimously to condemn the draft. And because it was Penn State and not Columbia or not Berkeley, we got serious national press in the student government for passing that resolution.
>> Oh.
>> Yeah.
>> So, what were your motivations in college?
>> My motivations, I guess it started earlier with the interest in politics. And I decided to get involved in campus politics. I ran for freshman class president and lost, but ran and then continued to be involved in student government just because I enjoyed it. I thought the political process was interesting. The campaigns were interesting. The people who got involved in the student government were also interested in politics as you may or may not be totally aware. The number of people who follow politics closely around the country is not a particularly high number. The number of people who can name their state legislators is typically less than 10%, their own state legislators they're voting for, is 10-- under 10% or 20%. People don't follow that. And I did and found as well, obviously, the other kids who were involved in government or interested in student government also were knowledgeable or aware.
>> So it was a group of people we could talk about issues, talk about the political scene in the state and the country, which was kind of a interest in motivation, meeting other people who had similar interests, friendships are developed amongst the people in student government. We hung out together. I belong to a fraternity but really my closest friends were those from the student government. So, that was a serious motivation for me. I will confess that studying was not a serious motivation. In those days, there was-- the grades were-- An acceptable grade was what was called a gentleman's A. And I had far more C's and I guess ultimately enough B's but my overall graduating average was only 2.69. And I remember being embarrassed mildly going to interview at Columbia Law School. And the professor who interviewed me said, "So what courses did you get A's in at Penn State?" And I think I only got A's in five courses, two of them were speech, one was a philosophy course, one was a humanities course. I forget what the other one was. But even my political sciences courses and I was a political science major were primarily B's. And I didn't work very hard as a student back in those days. I became a student in law school but had not been that diligent of a student in college. The flip side is that there I was, I had a 2.69 average and I was accepted as Georgetown and George Washington and Temple and whitelisted in NYU Law School and eventually got in. I'd already started at GW I think a day or two when my father called and said that NYU had called and I had whitelisted there and I was accepted. And he said, "So come home," since I lived in New York. And I said, "Nope, I'm happy here at GW," and didn't. But you couldn't getting into any of those schools today with those kind of averages. I had very good law boards just as I had very good college boards which is what got me into Penn State. So the whole grading system was different but I readily confessed I was not a devoted student. So it was not a serious motivation for my time on campus. And I knew I wanted to be a lawyer and I knew I wanted to go to law school but I was also aware enough to know that I could probably get into law school with not, you know, those superior grades, because the number of people who applied to law school back in those days was of course much less as well.
>> Right. What's one suggestion that you have then that you would offer to current students at Penn State?
>> Well, I made an observation about politics and student government at Penn State that is still true. And I guess there's two parts to it. One of my high school and actually elementary friends, high school friends, we are still friends the day we graduated together and he was involved in high school student government and then went off to the University of Massachusetts and became very involved in the student government up there while I was involved in the student government of Penn State. And I commented to him at Penn-- while I was still in college that I believed and observed that being involved in the student government and the politics on a campus as large as Penn State, which was then 28,000 undergraduates, was identical to being involved in politics in the real world. Like running campaigns for student government offices, running a student government, the way that politics operated on campus was the same as if you were running for mayor of a city, and that what worked for us would be the same. And he disagreed with that. He said, "No, no, college is very different than the real world." And people have a different view and different level of interest. And apathy was a big issue at Penn State. The student apathy, the number of people who voted was not enormous. And of course on a campus, you're not selling issues to the students that are as compelling as, you know, we're going to vote on your taxes, where your roads aren't going to be built or where your kids go to school. So apathy was an issue, but of course it's to nationally as well. And so my observation or advice was that it was the same. And as time went on and my friend became involved in politics around the country and locally and I did as well, he agreed with me and my observation continued, that it's really transferable. And part of that is, and my thought that anybody at Penn State, which is really surprising to so many people is that one person can, by their own involvement, have an enormous impact. And it's because there are so few people who want to be involved. I showed up at Penn State, there were over 4000 freshmen, 5000 freshmen, whatever it was. And I said to a couple people, "I want to run for freshman class resident. I want to get involved in the campus politics." I just found it fun in high school. And a couple of people said, "You're crazy. There's 5000 students." Well, lo and behold, it was easy. There were only three of us in the entire class who had any interest in running for freshman class president. There were not 20 people putting forward their names, 20 people with great interests. And that's been my observation through-- now I'm 70. Through, you know, my 50 years involved in politics around the country, in Maryland and elsewhere that there's not a long line of people who are interested in running for public office or being involved in campus or supporting candidates or working on campaigns. It is not something that most people think of doing or think they can have any impact doing. And my observation is because of that, if you get involved, if an individual gets involved and wants to stay involved, one can have an enormous impact. And it was two on campus, I, you know, had an impact on campus in terms of some of the suggestions I made to the student government and some of the proposals that I did. And I felt we needed the student opinion bureau which would do surveys and we did once a month. I don't think it had been more often-- yeah, that's once a month, we-- I set up a student opinion bureau. I got 10 other people who were mostly in fraternities because they had the bodies to get five more people each. And we all make phone calls on Sunday nights, we got the list of students from the university and we'd call every 10th name. And so on a Sunday night, we would call 2000 students, and serving them with just four or five quick questions. And the results of the surveys had an impact, telling we could tell the administration, this is how the students feel about this issue, about women in dorms or curfews or dress codes. And it was just my idea. My father was in market and research. And it wasn't easy to execute, and-- because we're just willing to do it. So, a long answer, but I have said it a number of times when I've come up to Penn State, that if you want to have an impact in the world, it's not that hard because there aren't that many people out there trying to do it. And that has been absolutely true in my life in politics over my adult life. And I have been very involved in the state, assisting people running for a public office in Maryland and helping the governor get reelected, get elected and then reelected and other people get elected and reelected. If you just volunteer and then do what you say you're going to do, you standout because lots of people volunteer and then don't follow through. But if you volunteer and you do what you say you're going to do, you clearly standout. So it's really easy to have an impact in the world as an individual.
>> You should write a book.
>> I should buy a book?
>> You should write a book.
>> Oh. I don't-- Thank you. I don't know-- I write poetry.
>> Oh, do you?
>> Yes, I do, I do. Actually, I wrote a poem about how I got to Penn State. It's called "The Small Bang Theory of Life" and how this gym teacher and my conversation about where I should go to college impacted my entire life obviously. I will email it you if you'd like.
>> Oh, I'd love that.
>> Yeah, yeah. I write poetry and have only for the last 20 years, it's kind of this interesting something that somebody-- a friend bought me a book of Pablo Neruda's poetry and I decided in response, having read some of poems, and he's an extraordinary poet of course, that I would see if I could write a poem about this friend and did and looked at it. And lo and behold, it was actually a poem and then I kind of got into writing poetry for myself and sharing with a friend. But a book is, you know, a large undertaking. I find so many books. And I mostly read nonfiction, have a premise that probably should be a short 60 or 80-page book but of course once you start writing on it, that would be 280 pages. So, poetry suits me more, it's shorter, and I can express my thoughts fairly quickly, whereas a book would be a lot. But thank you, thank you. And what you just asked me and what I just said was actually something I thought of in advance because of your involvement in student government. I wanted to say to you I thought at the end of the phone call, would point that out to you that it seems like while you're there and involved in the student government and involved on campus and then does it translate and it absolutely does. It translates into the real world in enormous ways and I can give you an example in my life. And as I said, I was involved as a trial lawyer running the trail or as political arm here on the state, which meant-- as a volunteer, which meant mostly going to Annapolis and testifying on legislation in the capital. We live here now. But testifying on legislating-- legislation, we're leading to our client who suffered from personal injuries or suffered to from medical malpractice for the victims of medical malpractice. So I got involved here in the legislature as well and in politics, and then got involved in people's campaigns. But in late 2006, I read Barack Obama's books and decided that I wanted to be involved with his campaign. And being me, I-- so I wanted to run his campaign here in Maryland because as a volunteer, and then was able to do it. I called my friend, Elijah Cummings, who's a congressman in early January of '07, having read the books and we talked about it and he knew Obama, I didn't. I didn't know anybody in the campaign. And I volunteered and Elijah who I'd worked on his campaigns and helped raise money for him to become a congressman and we become friends, told Obama that I'd be the right guy to help do this campaign in Maryland. And of course, I was volunteer director of Maryland for Obama. And at the end-- By the end of the campaign, we had 180,000 Marylanders who would sign up as volunteers, 18,000 active volunteers.
>> Well--
>> Yes, yes. It was an enormous effort and an enormous support. People were so excited about-- that people did get involved enormously. But having just been involved over the years, I said, I was going to do this, and lo and behold, there I am, saying I wanted to do this and got to do it.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> And which is, you know, one of the real accomplishment of my life, helping to elect the President of the United States.
>> Yeah, I would say so. That's awesome.
>> Yeah, yeah. It was really great fun, an enormous amount of other work. I knew when I said I was going to do it and it wound up being three hours a day virtually every day, some days nine and 10 hours a day. I was practicing law, you know, was still actively practicing law the entire time I was volunteer. It was an enormous amount of work but it was all worthwhile. And the other part that made it worthwhile is the friendships that grew out of it, the people I'm-- the other people that got involved with us. Also, I was involved kind of wanting it but then we had a grad student person who was one of the directors and we had a guy involved with the convention who was also a director there, so three of us ultimately. And-- But it's all the friendships that grew out of it. I'm still very close with the people mostly younger people who were involved in the campaign and it's wonderful. And that's been true throughout my life. It is the people you meet and work with who have similar interests when you're working in the same direction but it's just so nice working with an organization. We have a mission. And following through with that mission and the people you meet and then hang out with who you're on the same side with, whether it's Democratic party or-- I was the chairman of the board of [inaudible] in Maryland back in 2002, 2004, having been on the board for a number of years before that. And it's a great organization and a great mission. And the other people I worked with, it's just nice to hang out with people who are also involved in doing good things.
>> That's amazing, just the involvement.
>> Yeah.
>> The connection back to Penn State--
>> Yes. Yeah, well, we've-- you know, my involvement, I've never really gotten terribly involved with the Alumni Association or other things at Penn State. I graduated and started donating money and have my first wife I met at Penn State so we have a natural of course affinity so we always donated to Penn State. But I never really have felt engaged with the, you know, alumni or need to do that. Our involvement over time has been with-- concerned about scholarships and, you know, assisting people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to go to Penn State. So, you know, still very much attached to Penn State though financial support. When I have spoken there, I have been introduced to Penn State, it's always been-- I've always been introduced as a distinguished alumni and I have a standard line which is absolutely accurate that I'm not distinguished by my 2.69 graduating average, I'm distinguished because I send money--
[ Laughter ]
-- which is true. But it's also true that just by remaining involved, you can have-- it can have an impact and we feel that we have. We-- Even at Penn State, I don't know if you're aware that they recently designated $100,000,000 from the endowment for matching funds for scholarships for economically disadvantaged students.
>> I did hear that and it's amazing.
>> Yes, it is amazing. And I will tell you that Amy and I played a small role in that. We started talking to Eric Barron about that back in the fall of 2005, that Penn State lacked appropriate diversity which it does. It's still a very white place--
>> Mm-hmm, yeah.
>> -- and that, it is. I mean, it was when I was there, it still is. And it lacked appropriate diversity and you wouldn't have appropriate diversity unless you kind of change your scholarship programs to find more scholarship money for kids from seriously economically disadvantaged backgrounds. And also that once they got there, they wouldn't be required to maintain the 3.5 and 3.6 averages that are required to maintain the scholarship to get them, have those high averages to get them and then to maintain them and kids from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds having gone to schools to acquire the study skills and the breadth of kind of awareness to get an average of 3.6.
>> Yeah.
>> And this new program, they will not be required to have those kind of averages to keep their scholarships.
>> I didn't hear that.
>> And so-- you haven't hears that?
>> No, no that not, that aspect of it, I had not.
>> Yes, yes. It's-- They haven't set the-- what it will be so far but certainly, and Amy and I are participating. We are funding a scholarship. And it was-- very clearly, it would the understanding that they could not then expect students to maintain these kind of averages and I understand they will not. Now whether it's going to be-- you'll have to maintain the 2.5 or something. But as I kid, Eric Barron, when I first met him in 2015, I said to him, "You know," I said, "Eric, there are many alumni from Penn State who graduated with 2.69 averages and have done well and we send money to the college every year. And you can't only look after this with high averages and I pointed at myself. I said that I'm one of those guys who has done very well in life. Thanks in serious part because of Penn State in getting good education and then going on to law school. And if I had to maintain a 3.5 average in college, it would have never happened.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> And there's loads of people who have lower averages who contribute dramatically to the world.
>> Definitely.
>> You know? Yeah, well, there's college drop outs, Bill Gates. He didn't even finished college and he's contributed enormously to the world and continues to. So, it is, you know, important to recognize that the campus, you know, needs people that way and we were involved and I'll just tell a story we're involved in, supporting a young lady to go to Penn State from a terrible family background, the first in her family to graduate from high school from Cincinnati. And she was out in McKeesport at the Commonwealth campus. And we went out to visit her and we were in the cafeteria on a Saturday morning with the dean out there or whatever the title was, the provost and as well as somebody else. And the student was there and she was there, she knew the names and said hello to all the cafeteria workers, knew their names, knew the one of the campus security people who came by and to get a cup of coffee and chatted with him. She was talking to him because she wasn't terribly intrigued in our conversation, and she knew all their names and they all knew her. And I have said to many people, I can assure you, when I was at Penn State, I didn't know the names of cafeteria workers. But she did because in her background, those are the people she knew. She knew people who are cafeteria workers. She knew people working at McDonald's so she made an effort to know the names of everybody. That was a real contribution to the campus because the people who work there certainly felt at least one student cared about them and paid attention and appreciated their effort and their work and what they were doing. So, you know, her perspective brought a real plus to the campus.
>> Definitely. That's amazing.
>> Yeah, yeah it is, it is. And it was interesting to observe and watch as she was there doing it and who she was talking to. You know, I'm very comfortable talking to Eric Barron, the President of the university when I was in Penn State, I was very comfortable talking to Eric Walker, who was the president of Penn State at the time because of my personality. She would never be comfortable talking to Eric Barron because she didn't know college graduates, you know, never met them. Other than her high school teachers, she didn't know any college graduates. And so, if you bring young people like her to the college campus, they bring a different perspective for the rest of the students, you know, which was really a plus. One of the other things we haven't-- I did want to touch on since this is being taped so that people understood something else that was going on in campus at the time, I joined the fraternity because of anti-Semitism, I'm Jewish. And although there were seven Jewish fraternities, one of the reasons why there were, was because all the rest of that fraternities included people who just weren't allowed belong to other fraternities. And there were the black fraternities, a couple of them, there weren't many blacks but there were a couple of black fraternities. And there was anti-Semitism, I was-- as a fresh-- when I ran for freshmen class president, the head of the liberal party which I ran on was African-American from Philadelphia, of course in those days, you see a Negro. That was the term that was used in the '60s. And he was from Philly and he was running the political party. He was very involved in the campus. And he lived in North Halls because that's where the athletic-- the athletes lived and so many of the blacks on campus were athletes, so he was more comfortable living there in North Halls. But he'd come down to see me in Polic A. And I began to be called racial slurs because of my religion and because I was friends with a black kid. And that was not uncommon on the campus. My end of our junior year, '67, Bobby Clevelat [assumed spelling] who was Jewish and was in [inaudible] ran against Jeff Long [assumed spelling] who was [inaudible]. And Jeff won the election for president of student government USJ. And the next morning on campus, people had painted some swastikas and we beat the Jew.
>> Oh my gosh.
>> Yes, yes. So, it was, you know, it was a different time up there, you know, up at college. Now again, once I joined the fraternity and I never felt any discrimination based on, you know, my religion and is based on my involvement in the student government, in the following year, Jeff Long-- excuse me, not Jeff Long, John Fox [assumed spelling] who was Jewish and from Philly got elected freshmen class president. Then he's like the sophomore class president and junior class president and then he ran for student government president and was defeated. Those-- And I don't think it had anything to do with his being Jewish, I opposed him being president of the student government because his main platform was to bring an actual lion to Penn State. That was really true. That was the main part of his platform that, you know, the naval academy had-- it's a goat and they had a goat. And, you know, there were horses whatever, schools that have horses as mascots, mustangs, whatever, and he thought, you know, we should get a lion on the campus and have the lion there which didn't seem to be a terribly valuable platform particularly in light of-- we were pleasing the students who were being killed in Vietnam and a war was going on, that was very unpopular, so I think that's why he lost. But I don't think it was because he was Jewish, but there was still a lot of discrimination on campus.
>> Yeah.
>> You know?
>> And I would even say it today though, there's still very prevalent anti-Semitism around.
>> I've-- I had a heard that in two ways. And so I understand it to be somewhat true or have been. One way that I heard it, and my older daughter is now 35 and she started at Penn State among Commonwealth campuses and college was just not her thing. And I was-- She never made it. She stayed, you know, a couple of weeks and then came home. But she did go there, but right before, at our synagogue in Columbia, they had a college night discussion to talk about colleges. And we went, this was like I would say in her junior year. She graduated in 2000, so this would be '99. And a rabbi, in talking about colleges, pointed out that Penn State was not a good place for Jewish kids to go, that there were known examples of anti-Semitism on campus. And I was not shocked of course to hear it but was saddened to learn of it. And then I understood that Graham Spanier, when he was president, was subject to anti-Semitic conversations and talk behind his back because he was Jewish.
>> Well, [inaudible].
>> Yes. Well, how do you know of it?
>> Well, I'm actually a Jewish studies minor. So, I would say, a great deal of my studies, because I am a history major so I focused in a lot on Jewish history and on European anti-Semitism and American anti-Semitism. So, I haven't really taken any specific courses on colleges but just the--
>> Right.
>> -- in the United States, it's 2017 and you still have a lot of hate crimes going on. And those are definitely-- I mean colleges are-- you know, a small representation for the real world and there definitely is still a crime here.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm-- Have there been incidences that have happened? I assume there have been on campus.
>> I'm not sure if there's been-- There's obviously people who see swastikas drawn on bathroom stalls and things like that, which while minor are still very concerning.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> -- but, you know, it's not like a widespread. But there's definitely movements of white supremacy groups that hold up flyers around campus, especially with the recent election, you see lot of that. It's really a lot of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are tied together, I would say.
>> Yeah, yeah. Well, certainly too, nationally, the [inaudible] Anti-Defamation League reports almost 100% increase in public displays of anti-Semitism whether it's defacing synagogues or defacing Jewish cemeteries between, you know, 2015 and '16 and '17, it's been a huge increase. And I think it's a result of empowerment from, you know, what's obvious racism on Donald Trump's part when you have a president who is racist against Muslims and I even-- although his daughter has become Jewish, he still made comments and they're just stunning. And I think that it kind of gives other people a freedom to then say, well, if he can talk that way, I can talk that way.
>> Well--
>> And it was true Richard Nixon was a well-known anti-Semite despite his having [inaudible] his secretary of state, hate of Nixon clearly evident serious anti-Semitism. And it was known at the time and the number of people, the number of incidences of anti-Semitism increased during his presidency.
>> Yeah.
>> Because if you've got a leader who, you know, is-- makes strange comments, then it kind of continues. Look at Lloyd Morris' [assumed spelling] wife the other night commenting, well, the fake news says that we don't like Jews, hey, we have a Jew lawyer. It's like, well, are you kidding me? You just proved the point. Didn't say one of our lawyers is of the Jewish religion or the Jewish faith, no, we have a Jew lawyer, we have lawyer who was a Jew. That's just-- I don't know--
>> Yeah.
>> -- proof, that's proof. That's strange.
>> So I guess is there anything else, I mean, you want to wrap up or any other comments you have? That's all my questions.
>> Let me just-- As I had told you before we talked, I wanted to look through with-- just to let people know because this is about what was going on at the time. Some of the things that we-- some of the issues I found looking through-- and my scrapbook is mostly information about the elections and the election results on campus at the time and campus political parties and some of the platforms. And just-- people might be interested to know that one of the things that we tried to set up and I don't know if they still have it, which was having student advisers for students not just faculty advisers, people felt their faculty advisers weren't accessible enough and thought that if you had student advisers, where they could volunteers who are seniors to be student advisers, it would be helpful. And I think that got set up, I don't know if it worked. A serious issue back in '67 and '68, there was no hospital in the state college and there's hospitals in Bellefonte. But they had the Ritenour Health Center on campus, as I recall across the street from the hub.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> And it did not have 24-hour staffing by a nurse or a doctor. We had 28,000 students on campus and they didn't have a full-time nurse or doctor, which was one of the interesting issues. But other things that people wanted to do is return our freshmen customs, making freshmen wear [inaudible], they used to make them wear hats back in the '50s, carry their student handbooks. And just-- I think I covered the other issues. Oh, one was the return of Froth. I don't know if they had a-- had had a campus humor magazine which got banned. And it was banned because of what was viewed as over-the-top humor, humor that was against the campus or sarcastic humor and probably some of it might have actually been an occasional obscene word. And so there was a fight to bring back Froth, the humor magazine. And that actually occurred. They had an off-campus publication called the Bottom of the Bird's Nest which was a humor thing run by students. But I think Froth came back by '68. They let it back on the campus. They were willing to laugh at themselves a little bit. And the last thing that was interesting back in the '65 and '66, the student government opposed administration proposals to require all students to spend their first two years at Commonwealth campus.
>> Yeah.
>> How's that for an interesting proposal?
>> Yeah. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
>> Well, it was-- it's probably a result of lack of dorm space and maybe trying to strengthen the campus, you know, the Commonwealth campuses, of course some of them have turned into four-year schools. I don't remember how many were four-year schools at the time. They were not-- All of them were not. I think Altoona was but I'm not sure how many of them were. I would not recall exactly. But it's probably, well, to do that. but it would certainly change the face of the campus enormously if you didn't have freshmen and sophomores there. And we opposed it rigorously. No, I think I've kind of covered it. I've answered your questions.