Ray Beckham Interview - 4/18/2002

---

I've already told you I think in my emails that when Ernest Wilkinson got permission from the Board of Trustees to hire an Academic Vice President--we hadn’t had a Provost or an an Academic Vice President--Wilkinson pretty well handled everything. But he got permission to hire an Academic Vice President and one of the ones that he wanted to talk with was Earl Crockett. It was still a big . . . nobody on the campus knew that he had had permission to hire. The faculty had been pressing for someone to whom they could take their grievances and their problems to because Ernest was not the kind of a man that inspired that kind of confidence and they wanted someone of their own that they could kind of relate to and handle their problems with salaries and rank and all of that. But they’d been pursuing that with requests and letters and Faculty Senate and so forth. So Ernest had gotten approval but he had not shared that with the faculty--that he had gotten approval. He wanted to find somebody first and then present that person to the faculty. Which in retrospect it really would have been smarter to ask the faculty for input and so forth. But he brought Earl and Della over for a visit. I was the one that was asked by Wilkinson, in confidence, to go to Salt Lake and pick them up at the airport and bring them down and kind of give them a little tour of the campus and then take them to the President for their interview with him and so I really got to know them before anybody else did, a little bit--from that one little visit. But Wilkinson had interviewed us and others and he had interviewed us and others. And he had lots of recommendations that had been given to him from the Board and from others. But he selected Earl as the man. And I think that was a divinely inspired thing because I think anyone who came in to BYU as the person in charge of all the faculty at that time was . . . that person had to be a very special person because at that time there was a lot of morale problems among the faculty. Ernest Wilkinson was a great man but for all his greatness he was a dictator type administrator where he had the last word, and the only word, so the faculty had very little to say about almost anything to do with the campus. The Faculty Senate was powerless. We met as a faculty on a regular basis every week to discuss faculty affairs but everything had to go then to Wilkinson for his final approval. Nothing was done without Ernest Wilkinson’s approval.”

Do you think it was helpful to have Earl from another university as opposed to from within BYU?”

Well, at that time the thought was that one of us should be picked, one of our Deans or one of the faculty but for Wilkinson it was very important to have someone come in from outside. He wanted the outsider. And like I say, to have a person accepted by the faculty who came from the outside was a very difficult position to put Earl into. But he came and he was very unassuming. He was not high handed. He was very open. He really was a man that people liked. They just liked him. They had confidence in him and so he moved into that position very carefully I’m sure but also very well. He was accepted completely by the faculty. I think they were disappointed that it was an outsider who was chosen. Many expressed themselves as disappointed when they heard the announcement but when Earl and his wife came they were instant hits. Della was such a marvelous woman herself with the way she interplayed with other faculty wives and the BYU women’s organization, she was just a very remarkable person also. So I think they settled in and were accepted very, very well. I can’t think of the year. What year did he come to BYU?”

“57.”

“57. I thought he handled himself very well. What year did Wilkinson decide to run for the senate?”

“63.”

Yeah. Which was the 64 election. And so Earl was appointed to be the Acting President. Which was only natural. By that time he had really won a lot of support from the faculty and all the people at BYU and so instead of being just in charge of the faculty he now became the administrator for the entire campus. Harvey Taylor who was also a Vice President for Administrative Services became the administrator for the Church school system so Earl and Harvey Taylor divided the responsibility Wilkinson had had. He had BYU President. He had also been the administrator for the Church Education System. So Harvey took the Church Education System and ran with that and Earl then had BYU and he ran with that part of the job. He was quite good. At the time that Earl came I was the Executive Secretary of the Alumni Association. And when Wilkinson decided to run for Senate I was still the Director of the Alumni Association. We had brought in a man named Noble Waite to help us raise some money. He was going to have a three year fund rasing program where he would go out and raise money all over the Church for BYU. So he came on board and I was asked to help him. I had started a fund raising program among the alumni. And so we started to have Noble. When Earl became Acting President, by that time the campaign by Brother Waite had kind of failed miserably. He hoped to raise I think three million dollars. I think he raised about a million and many of those were pledges. So he was called to be a Mission President, I think in Scotland, and so he left. And we were following up on the pledges that had been made. I was still the Alumni Director. His old office was collecting money from what had been pledged to BYU. And Earl asked me if I would kind of become the acting development officer to run Noble Waite’s old office and to still be the Alumni Director. And so I served under Earl that year. Also during that year I was very active in helping President Wilkinson run for the Senate. I was the Utah County person here and very active in that role and so was Wayne Hales and Ron Hyde and Rulon Craven and a few others that were his core committee here in Utah County. John Burnhard had been Wilkinson’s what they call Administrative Assistant. He had been kind of Wilkinson’s right hand man for administrative purposes, he and Harvey Taylor and Earl were kind of the four, and Ben Lewis, who kind of ran the university. John Burnhard resigned from BYU that year and handled Wilkinson’s campaign. So Earl didn’t have a John Burnhard to help administer things like Wilkinson had had. So Earl pretty much just kind of kept things under control but did not make a lot of significant changes. He felt that his role was one of interim leadership and that when Wilkinson either won or lost the Board of Trustees would then select his successor and go on from there. But in my case he felt that fund raising needed to happen by not only following up on pledges but making sure that we didn’t lose any momentum in raising money. So I was the acting Chairman of Development or Director of Development during that year. But it was also one of those years that was kind of a just keep things at a level keep and don’t do anything that would be of significant change. No big projects. So I did that for that year and then Wilkinson came back at the end of his senatorial campaign. He didn’t come back automatically. The Brethren . . . (this is not part of the rote history but) Wilkinson up until that time had never been paid a salary. He had come to BYU as a semi-wealthy attorney who didn’t take a salary for his work. The Board of Trustees determined that this would not continue. That whoever came in as president should receive a salary and it would not be a Church calling. It would be an assignment or a job for which he got paid. And so when Wilkinson lost the election in November there was still a great deal of doubt as to whether he was going to come back as president. So Earl continued during that interim period. And I can’t recall when the Board of Trustees made up its mind. I know I was also asked by Earl if I would find out salaries of other university presidents in the Rocky Mountain area and the West and so I called and made a study of the various salaries that were being paid. In most cases the football coaches were making more than the presidents. We got both the public universities and colleges and also the private schools and the Brethren took some time. Like I say, I can’t recall how long they took but they took some time before they decided to hire Wilkinson back. I know they had petitions from people who wanted him back and they also had petitions from faculty members who did not want him back. But eventually they did appoint Wilkinson back as president but not in charge of the Church Educational System. They left that assignment with Harvey Taylor and so he continued in that role withe seminaries and institutes. Wilkinson came back as president and then when he returned Earl regained his title of Academic Vice President. I think it was in 1964 that I was asked to be the permanent Director of Development. I had prepared a plan and a program for the future of fundraising at BYU and then the Board asked me if I would be the Director. It was also in 64, some time that year, that I was asked to be a Stake President on campus. I had been a Bishop for seven years and in a Stake Presidency for a year and we divided our stake and I was asked to be the Stake President for the BYU 1^st Stake. I asked Della if she would be the Stake Relief Society President. So we served together in that role for about five years, until 1969. So we had some really good times together. In fact, I spoke at Della’s funeral. And so we had a good time. She was a marvelous woman. We were here [in this house] during all that time. That’s just an overall summary of my relationship and my contact with your grandparents.”

What were the challenges of the period? Earl said you were one of the most effective development persons ever.”

Well the challenges of the period were simply that, as I mentioned before, the challenges when Earl came was that the faculty was very restless, they felt put upon, they had no voice, they felt that Ernest Wilkinson who had not been an academician was not very sympathetic to a role of a professor and teacher. His interests were elsewhere and so Earl entered that environment of distrust and low morale and that would be the big challenge of that period when Earl came. I always felt that he did a wonderful work in easing many of those pressures and challenges and concerns because like I say he listened so the faculty began to feel like they had a voice. Wilkinson was a very dominant personality. Earl Crockett was a man, I guess you’d call him a man of peace, but he was a quiet, intense but also very workable person. Workable in that anybody who knocked heads with Wilkinson had to do so in a way Wilkinson respected and Earl was that kind of a man. Wilkinson listened to Earl Crockett. When Earl had concerns about faculty problems or concerns about individual faculty members who were being in some ways disregarded, Earl became their champion. And he was good at that. First of all you have to realize that Earl knew faculty. He knew the ones that were strong. He knew the ones that were weak. And I don’t think he was going to be defending the ones that were weak just because they needed to have some help. He recognized the strengths and weaknesses of our faculty and I thought in many, many conversations I had with him when I became Development Director, he was sympathetic and very willing to go to bat for the things the faculty wanted. And where Wilkinson had never really shared a lot of power before as far as the faculty was concerned, he did share that with Earl. And I thought to his credit he gave Earl a great deal of latitude in handling that part of the university where the faculty was involved. In development, well, I was effective because nobody else had ever done it before. Although Brother Waite came and did a little fund raising program, I think Earl always felt that one of his real accomplishments was appointing me as the fund raiser because it was, we became very good at it. For the first time we hired staff, I trained all the staff. I was asked by Wilkinson to raise five million dollars in five years and I raised eight million dollars the first year and somewhere between forty to fifty million dollars in the five years. Then I wanted out. I didn’t want to be the fund raiser all my life so I wanted out badly. Thanks to Ben Lewis and David Kennedy and others I was able to leave and go get my doctorate and come back and be on the faculty. Earl asked me if I would be the fund raiser and I told him I’d do it until Wilkinson or a new president came in. Wilkinson came back. He asked me to do it. I told him I’d do it for five years but I really wanted to be faculty. In that five years we hired a staff and organized the department and trained them and we were successful but success is measured by comparison with others and BYU had never raised any money before so that’s why your grandfather thought I was the most successful.

What was it like during the Acting Vice President year?”

Kind of a level playing field. We were just trying to keep things going the way they were. I don’t recall anything significant happening that year. I think everything was just status quo. And I think that the whole campus felt that. We weren’t expanding. We weren’t out recruiting a lot. We just kind of kept things the way they were.”

With all of that money that you did bring in the fund raising, is that when the big boom of building new buildings took place?”

Yes. We raised money for the new football stadium and the Marriott Center. During that same time the Tanner Building was started. But before then the university raised all the money for buildings. We weren’t asked to go out and raise money to build buildings. Now we are. But in those days the Board of Trustees approved a building and it was built. And they paid for it. The Church paid for it. The Richards Building, the McKay Building, the Joseph Smith Building, I can’t even recall all of them now, but anyway they were all paid for by the Church.”

We had a question about the administration but you’ve kind of talked about that a bit already.”

Yeah again, under Earl’s direction that one year . . . but I’m not looking at just the one year. I’m looking at his total time. He was a great influence, I think, on Wilkinson for moderation and for patience and for looking at the long term picture. So I think the biggest single problem was the unrest of the faculty when Earl came and then that pretty well became a non-issue after a few years. Then the issue was handling the enrollment growth, and the expansion of the campus, and hiring new faculty members, and expanding our faculty somewhat during those years. Those were years when we were looking for new faculty members and Earl pretty well guided us through that. When did he retire?”

77 or 78. He went to teach abroad for a year. But he retired after he taught for one more year.”

I think Bob Thomas took his place, didn’t he?”

I think so. The next area is how were university appointments made? Recommended to the Chair, and then recommended to the Dean, and then was that recommended to Earl who recommended to Ernie? I think it was just curiosity of how appointments were made. I don’t know how much you know about that part.”

I would guess that there was not a definite procedure for all of those things. When Wilkinson came, and I don’t know if this was still going on when Earl Crockett came as Vice President, but it had been a BYU policy that when you were appointed a department chairmen or a dean you served for the rest of your life. It was a permanent appointment until you retired, or until you resigned. We had department chairs that had been in place for twenty years. And they were some of the most difficult encounters that Wilkinson had. These department chairs who had been used to doing it their way for so long it was hard to modify. I think Wilkinson had a great vision for BYU but a lot of people didn’t. And it was awfully difficult for Wilkinson to work around those who did not have his same vision. And so somewhere along the line, I don’t remember when it was, whether it was before Earl or during Earl, the university said that no longer would department heads and deans be appointed for lifetimes. They would rotate the department chairs and so department chairmen were rotated. You served for three years. It became evident after the first three years that some department chairs needed to be reappointed. So that evolved to where you could be reappointed for an additional three years. I know some that were appointed for an additional three years beyond that. But it had not been a policy at BYU over the years to have the faculty recommend their leaders. The policy was pretty much that the administration would look at the faculty and they would decide, kind of, whom they wanted to be the department chairmen and the deans. Sometime they would bring in people from outside to be the chair and of course the faculty would have no knowledge of who else was available out there to come and be chairman so very often they had very little voice in selecting their chairman. Now as that got on beyond Earl and beyond Rex Lee and Dallin Oaks and Jeff Holland a lot of those things have been pretty well put into a process of where the faculty do make recommendations and it goes to the dean, the dean to the Board, and so forth. But in the Wilkinson/Crockett era, it was pretty much the administration that made the selection of the chairs for the department.”

And they just had to get approval?”

With the approval of the Board of Trustees. Right.”

The next one is, when Ernie did things that annoyed the faculty how did that get smoothed over? And how accessible were Ernie and Earl to the faculty?”

Well, Earl was very accessible as I told you before. He made it his policy to be accessible. President Wilkinson was not very. I mean you had to really press to get an appointment to see Ernest Wilkinson--if you were on the faculty. And keep in mind, this goes back a long time but, the faculty at BYU back in the 30's and 40's had really pipelines into Salt Lake City to the General Authorities. They worked on boards--Young Men, Young Women’s, Sunday School board. And those organizations were very powerful organizations back in those years. Because of the fact they had worked on the boards for years, maybe they were no longer there, but they knew the General Authorities by first name. They were good friends. So when Ernest Wilkinson became the president, he got a promise from President David O. McKay that the faculty would not be able to go around him to Salt Lake City to get things accomplished. The previous presidents, it was a great problem for them because they didn’t have ultimate, complete, absolute control as president. So when Wilkinson came . . . you see a faculty member would write a letter to Salt Lake or make a phone call to Salt Lake and it was an absolute promise by President McKay that those were reported back to Wilkinson so he knew about those kinds of . . . not always by name but at least by subject matter what was being said, and what was being requested, and what was being complained about, and so forth. And so because the faculty were so annoyed with the high-handed, dictatorial methods employed by President Wilkinson, and don’t get me wrong. I loved the man. I think he was a great person. I’m just telling you the way it was. Because he was annoying to the faculty. And he had a lot of confrontations with certain ones of the faculty, he just kind of cut it off. He didn’t have time to be bothered by their continual complaints, and criticisms, and even their positive suggestions. He just lumped them all together and cut them off. So the question about if they had access, that changed when Earl came because Earl did have an open door policy for faculty members. Now he would prefer that the faculty member work through his dean to get to him because he didn’t want to have everyone running to him with a lot of complaints. But even so, if you were a faculty member and you had something you wanted to say about your dean, Earl would listen. That’s where the access was.”

And then, what would be Earl’s greatest contribution do you think? And maybe associated with that, what were some of the greatest challenges and greatest disappointments?”

Well, I think his greatest contribution was settling down the rumblings on campus when he came. I can’t even begin to explain to you how it was. It was pretty bad for a faculty member. Just think about it. Here you are teaching physics or say, English--especially English--the English Department was group of very dissonant faculty members who mostly were, in Wilkinson’s mind, a bunch of liberals, and he was an ultra conservative. He thought the whole pot of unrest and dissent and revolution practically--I don’t think the thought was getting rid of them. It was just he didn’t want to have them have much of a voice. And so I think Earl’s greatest contribution was that he brought the faculty together, kind of smoothed over the unrest, and just let things be a university again where faculty had some input on what the university was heading for or doing. I think that would probably be the greatest challenge too. But later on I think the greatest challenge was finding faculty members to hire, to bring them on. Because we were expanding. And to have enough faculty to come in a take the place of those who were retiring was a challenge. And I think, I don’t know any disappointments he had. I just don’t know. But he was well respected and well thought of. Wilkinson listened to him. I’ve also heard Wilkinson chew him out. Just like he chewed out everyone. His best friend for many years was Bill Edwards who he brought in from New York to be his dean of the college of business and later his Financial Vice President. They’d been lifelong friends. Man I heard him chew out Bill Edwards many times. And he brought Ben Lewis in from the Marriott Corporation. He and Ben were close personal friends but President Wilkinson was a man who you always knew where he stood on everything because he would let you know when you were not performing the way he thought you should perform. And that’s a good man to work for. I think you would agree with that. So I’m sure he and Earl had many conversations.”

Can you tell us any stories about Della? It sounds like you worked with her for quite a while.”

Della was such a sweet person. As you know better than anyone of course. But she was a great, kind, patient person. In her Relief Society Presidency she was so . . . I want to give it the word ‘democratic’ but . . . I don’t remember who her counselors were now. We had our meetings with the Relief Society Presidency and she would always defer, you know, to them, to talk about what they were doing, how they were doing. And if there was time left over she would pitch in and say things as well but she very much deferred her leadership to her counselors. And the young women on the campus, the young Relief Society Presidencies that were students, were very much supportive of Della. She was a wonderful leader. But she was a very quiet, unassuming kind of leader. Straight as an arrow. She followed the Church program right down to the tee. She really was a wonderful person. I loved Della. She was a wonderful, wonderful influence to all those young women.