Delaney interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Warren: This is Mame Warren. It's tape two with Ted De Laney on July 31, 1996, in Lexington, Virginia. I read this article in the alumni magazine, it was written at the time you were a student, and one of the things I was impressed by in that, and I'd really like to talk about that whole process of being an adult student, but one of the things was you were in a class, and I think something about desegregation was being talked about, and you said, "Wait a minute. I was there," and you brought a perspective into that class that wouldn't have been there any other way. 30 De Laney: Well, as I recall, that was a faculty quote, and that didn't come from me in that article. So I don't know what that person was talking about. Certainly, I've never been one who held back my opinions. The discussion-based classes that I recall being a part of when I was here were Harlan Beckley's and Holt Merchant's, and Harlan Beckley's were—I don't ever recall us doing race in his classes. I took theology from Harlan, contemporary Christian theology, and I took ethics from him. I did have two courses in Judaism that were pretty much the same format, from Richard Marks. I had a couple of seminars with Holt Merchant which would have dealt with race, and I think one of them was on the Civil Rights Movement or something. I certainly probably would have been explicit, and that sounds like a Holt Merchant quote, anyway. But the one thing is that Holt, from my perspective in 1996, is not a very objective person when it comes to comments about me. Holt is a good friend, and sometimes I think that his praise of me is a little excessive. There was a Roanoke Times article that was done by a W&L alumnus in 1993, in June, I think, that, much to my embarrassment, made front page. It was full of Holt Merchant and Taylor Sanders quotes. Holt's quotes are extremely glowing, and I appreciate his friendship, and he's one of the best people I know, but I think he gives me far more credit than I deserve. The one thing that was really interesting about that process is that here's something else that Washington and Lee has not been interested in involving itself in with regard to diversity, and that is the nontraditional student. Certainly we don't have evening classes, and I personally don't want to see W&L move to evening classes, because I don't want to teach in the evening. I function much better in the morning, and would prefer to function in the morning. Most adult students need evening classes in order to participate. But one of the things that was extremely interesting, and there have been some women adult students here since me, one of the things that is extremely interesting is that Washington & Lee was probably less prepared for adult students than they were 31 for black students. Chris Bowring and the Harrison guy whose first name slips me right now, whose son was in the grade with my son, Chris Bowring and that fellow and myself, we sort of created a problem for them. Number one, they had this P.E. requirement—still do. You have to have five credits in P.E., five classes in P.E., to get a W&L degree. So there's this thing about taking P.E. courses with people who are, in my case, twenty years younger than I was. Fortunately, the P.E. offerings are fairly diverse, so you can pick skills that you think that maybe you can manage, because I know the first one I did was skills in horsemanship. So that was horseback riding with kids. I can tell you a funny story about that. The gender issue that came with the horseback riding was so funny. It was just absolutely the funniest thing in the world. I guess, as an adult, I was the only one there who was really conscious of the precious irony in all of this. The horseback instructor was a woman named Margaret Brundage. Her husband, in fact, not her husband, I'm sorry, her younger brother is a fairly eloquent historian, with a Harvard PhD. But Margaret Brundage taught us horseback, and we used to have to go out to Brownsburg to the stable to ride horses. So here I am out there with these college kids, riding horses, and I don't think any of us had any previous horse experience. It was ground zero for Margaret to teach us all how to ride horses. She said the only way that she could strengthen those thigh muscles sufficiently to stay on the horse was through these calisthenics that you had to do on horseback. With the horse slowly moving, both hands behind your head, with stirrups across the saddle, you're doing situps. It's really scary, and the ground is really far down. The interesting thing about this was, then she wanted us to do toe touching, and still the stirrups are across the saddle, and you'd have to take both your hands and go down on either side of the saddle to touch your toes. Well, these are English saddles. Well, the guys whose horses were closest to me were all complaining about how it hurt to do this toe touching, because essentially this toe touching was not pleasant to the male anatomy with regard to the shape of the saddle. But nobody had the courage to 32 tell Margaret Brundage, the instructor, who was a pretty—almost like a hippie—pretty loose kind of person, and that's not to say anything about her character, that this was just not very pleasant on the groin. I thought this was just priceless. This is an all-male school, and we've got a female horseback instructor who's making us do this, and every guy out there is complaining about how unpleasant this is because of their anatomy. But anyhow, that certainly was a digression. But the other course that I took, and because I had advanced sophomore status when I started, I didn't have to take the two courses, the other one I took was skills in bicycling. We went on these long bicycle trips every week, doing things like Natural Bridge and back, or Fairfield and back. But I managed to keep up with the students fairly well, but I was 157 pounds and a lot better shape than I am now. But the interesting thing about this is that a year or two after I'd finished W&L, I was walking toward the post office one day, and I was talking to Bill McHenry, who was the athletic director. Bill was reminiscing on having these adult students take P.E. He said, "You know, you guys were so great." He said, "We waived the P.E. requirement, and all three of you took P.E. anyway." Well, the thing is, nobody ever told us that the P.E. requirement had been waived. They may have waived it, but I don't think that I would have taken P.E. had I known that it had been waived. But nonetheless, when I look back at it, the P.E. was one of the more enjoyable experiences that I had here. I was forced to do things with students that I probably would not have done. I also think that in some other ways that I was less rigid than many people who are half my age. For instance, I took four courses in sculpture. When I was eighteen years old, I used to have dreams of being an artist. I think that art is something that probably ought to be cultivated when you're very young rather than when you're older. But one of the things that I didn't want to do was leave Washington and Lee without having some art training. I had four courses in sculpture from Larry Stene. Well, Larry Stene is a wonderful sculptor. One of the things I can remember him saying very early 33 on was that—we had seen slides of his work, and Larry has done in the past, things that were realism. But he let us know up front that, at this point in his life, he was interested in abstract sculpture. He wasn't particularly enthusiastic about seeing realism developed in his classes. The next thing I knew, I was doing stuff that was welded, welded scrap metal. I was doing stuff that was plaster forms, and mixing plaster, and water color, and metal, and all sorts of abstract forms. One day Larry said to me, he said, "You know, when you first enrolled in this class I was a little concerned, because I had this idea that you were going to have your own fixed idea about what art was, and there wasn't going to be anything I could tell you." Perhaps the greatest compliment that he paid me in that conversation was that he found that I was much more open to trying and exploring things in the sculpture lab than the kids were. I shouldn't call them kids, but the people who were much, much younger than I. I think that my approach to being a student was that way. It was something that I'd missed twenty years before, I certainly was going to have my mind open, and open to all sorts of new ideas. At times it was frustrating. At times it was very frustrating, because one of the things is that the first year I discovered that there were students who had a great deal of regard for me with respect for my academic abilities, and I was being invited to be in study groups, etc. People were borrowing my notebook to Xerox and this kind of thing. But one of the things that used to be frustrating is that you'd join one of these study groups, and you'd spend a couple of hours studying with them, and then at the end of the study group, they would all make plans to go out for beer, and then you weren't included. It took a little while to realize, well, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, remember you're forty years old. When you were twenty, you didn't want to take a forty-year-old guy out for beer either, and to remember that divide. Now, the next year, I got really—the second year I became very competitive, competitive because I think I was a little frustrated inasmuch as I needed to finish it 34 quickly. I also had developed the confidence the second year that I didn't have the first year, because I really had this great fear that I was going to fall on my face, and I was going to fall on my face in front of all of these faculty members who'd known me for years. The second year, when I realized that with hard work I'd make good grades, and it wasn't any big thing, I decided—and it was probably a really bad decision, but it probably helped me keep my sanity the second year, because I also did overloads, because I wanted to finish as quickly as possible—I decided that I was going to finish magna cum laude. It was a horrible egotistic thing that I didn't tell anybody about until after the year was over, and I told my wife. She said, "Well, so that's what happened to our family life." Essentially what I did was I started really sort of competing with myself. It was like, you got this thing to prove, you're this older guy who's doing this, you don't have a prep school background, it's been many, many years since you've been in school, etc., etc. To come out with the very highest grade point average that was possible, and so it was like there was this drive there that sort of kept me going the second year. Then magna cum laude was 3.4, and I finished with a 3.375. So it was a little bit of a disappointment. I told my wife, and she really chewed into me, and rightly so, because it was sort of a silly thing to do. I had had so much support from her and from her father, because one of the things that happened, in 1983, her mother had just died. We had a house and a mortgage. Her dad went away to live for a few years. He worked for Federal Aviation Administration, and he accepted a transfer to Long Island. So he went up there to work for a couple of years, and before he left, he said, "Why don't you guys sell your house, you can live in my house while I'm gone, and you don't have to worry about a mortgage and this kind of thing." So it was like a rent-free environment for two years, thanks to my father-in-law. So that was a real great boon. Then Pat working. The only thing that I had to worry about from time to time was providing child care, because it 35 was important somebody was working. Child care wasn't such a problem, because he was in school. So it was just those days that he might be sick or something. At first it was the Yellow Brick Road, and then he really was in school. But the guys that I came to know during those two years were just wonderful kids, and I think that my experience was very different from Chris Bowring's. I looked at some of the things in that article that were quotes from Chris, and it seems to me I remember one of those quotes being something like having the right or the obligation to question what you were learning, and I never was of that mind. I was here to enjoy what I was learning, and I don't think that students should set the agenda, and I never tried to do that. It was certainly a high time, but it was also a time that meant my life was going to change in a very, very dramatic way, and one of the things that happened near the end of that year was probably one of the biggest racially traumatic things to happen on the campus in a long time. President Wilson fired John White, who had been the director of minority affairs, and that firing of John White was the culmination of something that John White should not have done. There was an honor trial that involved a black student. It was a public trial, because the student had demanded a public trial. During one of the intermissions, one of the kids had made a racially- charged remark. John White, who was the defense attorney for the student involved, because John was also a part-time law student, grabbed this white student by the collar and threw him on the floor. So you had someone in the capacity of dean, who had manhandled a student, so there wasn't much else the president could do. In addition, there were a lot of other things that came out at the time. John had been operating sort of as a Robin Hood, using his cash drawer to bail black students out who were in financial difficulties. In any case, a lot of faculty members who were—I shouldn't say a lot—but faculty members who were on the search committee for a new director of minority 36 affairs urged me to apply for that job. So there in the end of my last year as a student, I'm simultaneously applying for this job and realizing that I ought not to be doing this. I had also applied for jobs to teach in the independent school world, and my wife was so fearful that I was going to take the job here, that she didn't know what do to. She felt that it was going to be nothing but a nightmare, and she certainly was right. I went through the same interview process that all the candidates from outside had gone through, and one of the people who was the greatest advocate for me in this interview process, was a guy named Mike Capetto, who was the associate dean of students, and he was the director of the Student Center. He has since left Washington and Lee. But in any case, there was this full day of interviewing one faculty member after another. A group of black students were supposed to take me to lunch, and when I showed up at the minority affairs house and John White was there, I knew that this was not going to be a pleasant time. The lunch was extremely unpleasant. I was supposed to, I think, have lunch with two or three black students. As it turned out, it was about six of them. At one point during the lunch, one of them said to me, "If a black student was guilty of an honor violation and you knew that he was, to what extent would you go to cover it up?" I said, "Not even if was my own son." I said, "How dare you even ask me that." I said, "This is one of the very reasons that Dean White lost his job, and he has a wife, because he was busy covering up for you guys. The way I feel is if you can't learn how to be honest, how to behave when you're a student, you never will. What's more, I not only have a wife, but I have a child, and I will be darned if I'm going to put the security of my family on the line to cover up for anybody who's behaving wrongly." Well, I knew full well how that response was going to go over. I knew exactly that that was not what these guys wanted to hear. 37 Later that afternoon, Mike Pleva, who was interviewing me—and Mike Pleva was interviewing me at the Alumni House—during his interview, the telephone rang, and it was the dean's secretary, who was a good friend. She said, "Pat needs you to call her." I got scared to death and I thought, "What has happened that Pat would interrupt an interview?" I was frantic as I called her office or wherever I finally reached her, and was just astonished at what she had to say to me on the phone. It was essentially that, "I just got off the phone with Jack Tyrer, the headmaster at the Asheville School, who called to see if you could arrange to meet him in Lynchburg next week for an interview." Well, that wasn't so urgent that I needed to be interrupted during an interview, but the message was certainly strong. "I want to call back to tell him what you're going to do," she said. I said, "Well, tell him okay, and we'll talk about details later." I was sort of rattled by that, that I knew she didn't want me to take the job, and certainly after what had happened at lunchtime, I knew full well she was absolutely correct. Later that afternoon, David Parker, who was also on the search committee, said, "You know, these kids really are upset with you." I said, "I know." He says, "Well, you know, they'll be graduating and going on. As soon as they all finish, you won't have any problem." [Laughter] It was typical David, though. I went off to interview with the headmaster at Asheville School, and the airport interview in Lynchburg demanded an immediate—or was followed up with an immediate on-campus interview, and at the end of the interview at Asheville, he offered me a job and gave me a figure, and I said, "I need about a week to think about it." I came back home, and the next morning in town I ran into Mike Capetto, and he said, "How'd the interview go?" 38 I told him, and he said, "Wait a minute. Don't say yes, because I have to get the committee together so we can make a counteroffer real quick." I said, "No, Mike. There's not going to be a counteroffer. I'm going to take the job in Asheville." I was really glad that I was leaving, because one of the allegations these kids had even made at lunchtime was that the only reason I wanted the job was because my wife having a position in town, and needing to have a job in town so that I could be here with her. Essentially what happened was, and I didn't know at the time, is that they had narrowed the search to three candidates, and I was one of the three. I guess, to the best of the knowledge that I have of the other two people, for whatever reason, backed out, and they had to start the search all over again. But, I never regretted not having taken that job. Certainly it took me far afield from the college. When I finished here, I went to Asheville, North Carolina, and I taught for three years in a boarding school, and that's where I learned what the black students at Washington and Lee were going through. The three years at Asheville School were an extraordinary experience for me, and certainly an experience that was very valuable in my professional formation. But one of the things was that that was like Washington and Lee in miniature. It was like Washington and Lee at the high school level. It's a very small, exclusive school, that at the time was billed as the best high school in the South. It was predominantly male, 350 wooded acres, 200 students, 43 faculty members. The boarders, when I arrived there, I think, were paying $11,000 a year, and the day students were $6,000 a year. It was an altogether new world to me, a world of prep school life, and what parents were willing to pay for in order to make sure their kids had a good start. Out of 200 students, there were 10 black kids. Some of the black kids were from well-to-do families, some were not. Some were there on a program called A Better 39 Chance, the ABC program. Schools that participated in ABC just wrote off the tuition. But Asheville School also had white kids from poor backgrounds who they were writing off the tuition for as well. One of the things that I learned, that a lot of the rules of etiquette had certainly changed from when I was a teenager, and that some of the things that I began to discover that went on between kids across racial lines, kids who were elite white and kids who were black, had not gone on in my experience of growing up in Virginia. One of the things that brought it home to me really quickly was that in a boarding school situation where you were also a dormitory parent, living with kids in a closer situation than you ever expect to live with your students, you know everything there is to know about them. One evening I was on duty and I had papers to grade. There was this office that was off of the common room in one of the buildings that I was sitting in, grading papers. You learn really quickly. When I started there, all of our boarders were male. We had female day students, but no female boarders. The one thing that you learn really quickly is that when you've got male students, every time you hear a noise, you don't jump up, because there's horseplay constantly. You jump up when you hear stuff that you know is really bad. So I was sitting there grading papers and I heard what seemed to be a wrestling match in the common room, and I just continued to grade papers. Then I heard the words, "You black shit," at which point I decided, "You'd better get out there." When I went into the common room, there was this white kid who was on top of this black kid, and these boys are usually seen around the campus in each other's company. The black kid was the son of a dentist, and was from a fairly affluent family. He was also pretty much of an introvert. The one thing that you also learn is you talk to them separately and not together. I called the white kid into the office first and I talked to him. I said, "Why did you call him a 'black shit'?" 40 "Oh, he doesn't mind being called that." I said, "What do you mean he doesn't mind being called that?" "We call him that all the time," he said. "He doesn't mind. He doesn't say anything about it." I said, "He's one of ten black students on the campus. What do you think he can do about it, being called a 'black shit'?" He says, "You don't understand. He does not mind being called that, and I don't see anything wrong with it." I said, "Well, look, obviously we aren't going to agree on this, but know this, if I ever hear you say this again, I'm going straight to the headmaster's office, and I'm telling him that I'm resigning, because I will not teach in a school where students treat one another like this." I dismissed him and I called the black student in to talk to him. He denied being called a "black shit." At first I didn't understand what was going on, and the longer I talked to this boy, the more he denied it. The other kid's name was Christian. I said, "Christian admitted to calling you this." He persisted in his denial. I had heard it anyway. It didn't matter what either of them said. So in my frustration, I sought out the only other black teacher on the campus, and left his house, left his apartment, even more frustrated, because there used to be some rock show that used to come on television every Saturday night, I forget what it was. There'd be some different groups on the show. I got to his apartment; he was too caught up in that to really care one way or the other about what I was excited about, except to look at me as if to say, "I told you so." Then I began to listen more carefully to the student conversations, and there was just a delightful young man there, who I discovered, much to my chagrin, all the students referred to as "nigger." So I started engaging some of the students in conversation about this. "Why did you call him that?" 41 "But he doesn't mind." I said, "What do you think he can do about it?" Then I engaged the boy in conversation about it, this kid, I just dearly loved, and he was so embarrassed that I knew. He was just so embarrassed that it was incredible. Then I realized that a lot of these kids, in order to survive in situations like this, take extraordinary garbage. And some of them, like this kid, would never, ever lash out and defend themselves. On the other hand, there was a kid there, very large black kid, who was a basketball player and a fairly good student. He didn't take stuff off of anybody, and they were scared of him. I found that he was the best person in the world to talk to any of this stuff about, because he was very, very thoughtful with regard to the situation. That year, one of the older faculty members came to me to talk to me about a very, very bright, young black student who was not going to come back the following year. It was his first year at Asheville School, and then he had grades nine through twelve. The school was very fearful of losing this kid. He was extremely talented. He said, "Will you at least talk to him to figure out why he's not going to come back?" This boy said to me, he said, "You know Yeats." Well, Yeats was a good old North Carolina boy who wasn't very bright but had a lot of money. He says, "I'm so sick of him, I don't know what to do. He always starts conversations with me, 'You're not like other black people. I don't mind being around you, but I don't want to be around anybody else who's black, etc., etc., etc.'" He said, "I can't put up with that anymore. I figure the best thing for me to do is leave." I said to him, "Are you going to let him beat you?" I said, "Public school is not what you need. You're being challenged here in a way that you're never going to be challenged in the public school, and your parents can afford to send you here. So you're going to let some jerk be the reason that you leave." I said, "You will be more 42 successful here than he ever will be, but you're going to let him defeat you. I think it's really tragic." The kid stayed on and finished. Then I began to think back to all of the anger that I saw in the early seventies on the part of black students here, and began to understand the anger, realizing that there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that people who are associated with the faculty or the administration in any way weren't seeing. By the time I left there, it had gotten so troubling to me, even though it was not widespread, and I loved the school, and I loved the kids. But my hall was interesting. I had the most diverse dormitory hall on the campus, and I figured that it was probably because of the two dorm parents' race and ethnic background. These were huge dormitories, and there were two faculty apartments for each floor. One hall would accommodate thirty boys. This was a lot of kids. The bachelor apartment at the other end of the hall accommodated an Indian guy named Ajai Sirohi. It was really unique. He and I were the only two non-Anglo Saxon dormitory masters in the school, because the other black guy had left by my second year, to take a job at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. We had a German on the hall, we had an African on the hall, we had two or three black students on the hall. I mean, it seemed like the school's diversity seemed to come to our hall. The German kid on a hall, wonderful kid, just a delightful kid. One day I saw him verbally abused by a senior who went so far as to say, "And what's more, my grandfather risked his life fighting Nazis like you, and I don't even want you on the hall." Well, I just went ballistic. I went in there and I said, "How dare you call that kid a Nazi?" Of course, he was behaving like a Nazi, not the German kid. One time one of the kids in the hall was in a fistfight with an African student. As I tried to figured out what happened, and talk to the two individually, the African 43 student told me that this kid had called him a "nigger." The other kid said, "But he called me a redneck." Well, I said to him, I said, "Wait a minute." Because the foreign students oftentimes had real problems with the lingo. I said, "This kid's first language is French. So where do you think he got the term 'redneck'?" "I don't know." I said, "Ever sit down and listen to how you guys talk to each other?" I said, "You're calling each other redneck all the time. So you've got a kid from the Ivory Coast who speaks French, and he picks up the term 'redneck,' and because his skin is black, and he uses it, the rules suddenly become very different. So you have to retaliate with 'nigger.'" So it was a real education for me. So when I come back to the campus on the ABD fellowship, after then spending three years at William and Mary, and begin to listen— Warren: What year did you come back here? De Laney: I came back here in '91. I left Asheville School in August '88, and I went to William and Mary. I took my PhD comps in April 1991, and came here to teach on the ABD fellowship that fall of '91. So when I began to listen to the black students at that point, then I had an education that I hadn't had before, and was more sensitive to the complaints that they had than I had been previously. Warren: Were you here during the Will Dumas— De Laney: No, I was not, but I met Will Dumas, and I know about the incident, and heard an absolutely horrendous lecture last year that recanted it in terms that just horrified me, a young black female alumnus who recanted it in a speech last fall to freshmen parents, and aside from me thinking that it was an inappropriate venue, her remarks about him just really bothered me to a large extent. 44 I don't suppose there was any kid who tried any harder to be fully assimilated into the student community here than Will Dumas. He was from New Orleans, as I recall. I had a few brief conversations with him in the past, a very handsome guy, about the complexion of my son, but he had straight hair. He was also—interesting for this campus—he was Republican, so he fit into the student Republican atmosphere very well. He was probably more anxious to give the place a chance and to be as fully assimilated into the student body as possible. I think that what happened in his situation, I think, is just an extraordinary irony, and harkens back to what I said about John Branham earlier, where you have a kid like that to come here and then they have those experiences. I don't think that Willard Dumas was radicalized, though. I think that his conservative leanings as a black Republican were too strongly in place that the experiences he had here with the controversy about whether he could be the president of the student body or not, I don't think that that changed his views or his ideals in any tremendous way, but then it would be wrong, also, for me to put words into his mouth, because, as I say, I've only had a few very brief conversations in the past. Warren: I'm going to go and talk with him and get the story from him, but I just wondered whether you were a witness to that. De Laney: Well, I tell you one student who liked him a very great deal, and a student who meant a great deal to me. One of my Asheville School boys— Warren: I should turn the tape over. [Begin Tape 2, Side 2] De Laney: One of my Asheville School boys, who was on my dormitory hall, who was a kid that just—when God made him, he threw away the pattern. My wife just loved this kid, too, a kid named John Thorsen. John came to Washington and Lee because of me. John's a white kid. John's from Wilmington, North Carolina. John was wait-listed at both Washington and Lee and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. John 45 could have been a powerhouse on any college campus or any school campus, except I think John was a little bit on the lazy side, but he certainly was sufficiently bright. I felt really sorry for this kid when here he's caught with no certainty about where he was going to school, and I called him in and I said, "How would you like to go to Washington and Lee?" "I'd really rather go to Chapel Hill." I said, "No, John, I need a commitment to Washington and Lee, because I'm willing to make a phone call up there about you, but you've got to be committed to it if I do that." I called Danny Murphy, and I said, "Danny, here's a kid who's really good, and he's wait-listed. I think that Washington and Lee really needs a kid like this. He will contribute a lot to the student body." He had a letter of acceptance within three days. I've never had that kind of clout with the admissions office before or afterwards, but in any case, John came here. He is presently one of the admissions officers at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. But John was a good friend of Willard Dumas, as I recall, and the first time that I ever heard anything about the controversy, I heard it from John Thorsen. I think that John Thorsen may, in fact, have been the person who introduced me to Willard Dumas. But if you wanted to get some sense of what that was like, I mean, John might provide a perspective for you as well. I guess my experience with that is only through what I've heard about it. Warren: I guess we ought to wrap this up. We've gone on a long time. Is there anything more you'd like to talk about, with your historical perspective now? Any way you'd like to wrap this up? De Laney: Well, one of these days, I guess—and a few people in the history department had suggested that I do this, you don't have time to do things like this, as a rule—one of these days I probably ought to sit down if time provides at my computer 46 and sort of write some reminiscences that at some point could become a part of the files in the Special Collections office. But one of the things that I think is that I've certainly seen Washington and Lee evolve, and I think it's a much better place in 1996 than it was in 1993. I think that it's got a ways to go yet. I'm fearful that what's happening to the declining number of black students is happening all over the United States, and is not unique to Washington and Lee. I'd like to see Washington and Lee try even harder. Affirmative action, which I think is pretty much of a non-issue anyway, it's blown way out of proportion, affirmative action is probably going to be dead in the next few years. I'm very fearful that by that time campuses like Washington and Lee, but also campuses like Northwestern, at one point was thirty-five percent black, because they really recruited very heavily, I'm afraid that those campuses are going to be lily white, and I think the trend is already there. I think that it behooves Washington and Lee to work overtime to recruit, because it's a moral and a just thing to do. That's not a historical perspective, but that's just sort of a moral perspective from my vantage point. And no matter how hard they recruit or how many black students they bring, I still may see very few of them in my classes. That's fine. They don't have to be in my classes because they're here. But they need to be here, because students learn lots of stuff from other students. They learn more from other students than they learn from us. So I think they would be a very, very valuable component to this university. Warren: Thank you, Ted. This has been a pleasure, and I hope you will be a resource for me as I continue, that I can ask you questions. De Laney: Thank you. [End of interview] 47