Kelsey: When and where were you born and
raised?
Doto: I’m a
New Jersey boy,
through and through. Born in
Passaic, New
Jersey, in 1946. Raised in
Newark,
East Orange,
Livingston, and
then finally westward to
Morris County.
Kelsey: Where did you go to college?
Doto: Went to
Rutgers in
New Brunswick, at
the time an all men’s school. Difficult to get in
and I was very surprised, having been accepted to
Rutgers and not
accepted to
Montclair State.
So I did choose to go to
Rutgers University.
Kelsey: And when did you graduate?
Doto: I graduated
Rutgers in 1967,
immediately went off to
University of Massachusetts
for graduate school.
Kelsey: What degree did you earn at
Rutgers?
Doto: Health education and physical
education, at
Rutgers.
Kelsey: And at
Massachusetts?
Doto: Same,
University of Massachusetts.
Kelsey: And that was a
master’s?
Doto: That was a
master’s degree,
yes.
Kelsey: Why did you decide to go into
teaching?
Doto: It was really based on the inspiration
I got from several of my teachers, two in
particular, in high school. When I went to
Rutgers, I was
still quite a little undecided. I thought maybe
education would be a good path, and I originally
started in that path, but then I met a professor at
Rutgers who
inspired me even more, and he became somewhat of a
mentor to me, and then after graduation, actually a
colleague and friend.
Kelsey: How did you find out about
County College of Morris?
Doto: That’s interesting. I was home from
just finishing my
master’s degree.
An acquaintance of my dad, who he played golf with,
was a fellow named Jim Gilsenen.
My father mentioned to me that Jim Gilsenen was the
new dean of academic affairs at a new county college
that was going to start up in
Morris County. And
so I had already accepted a teaching position with
the
Wayne Township Public Schools,
and I reached out to Jim Gilsenen who actually
decided to meet with me at my folks’ house, and
interviewed me for the position here. I later went
to the original offices of
County College of Morris,
which were nothing more than offices over a
drugstore in
East Hanover, and
had a more formalized interview, and I was offered a
position here. And so I quickly declined the
position at
Wayne Township Public Schools,
and took the position here at
CCM.
Kelsey:
County colleges
were a new thing in the sixties. What drew you to a
county college
specifically?
Doto: I knew nothing about
county colleges. I
don’t think many people did, in the 1960s. I think
community colleges
were considered a
California phenomenon
at the time. The whole concept was new here in the
state of
New Jersey. What
intrigued me was the notion of building an
institution from nothing. In fact, I recall one day
in the summer, prior to the first academic year in
1968, driving what seemed like an interminable
amount of time westward on Route 10, until I finally
arrived at this location, where
CCM was going to
be. And I looked over the grassy area, which had
some bulldozers and
things moving some dirt around, and I thought, “Wow,
this is really something. This is actually going to
be a college, and I can be on the ground floor to
help build it.” So it was just exciting. And
frankly, I didn’t know much about the concept or
mission of community colleges, until I got here and
started to learn.
Kelsey: So describe a little more what the
physical campus was like. You
talked about what it looked like initially.
Doto: Well, the first time I saw it, it was
nothing more than a farm with some woods surrounding
it, and some bulldozers moving dirt around. But
that was probably in the late spring, early summer,
of 1968. When we actually arrived on campus to
start in September of 1968, as I recall, the start
of the college semester was delayed several weeks
because the only building, which is now
Henderson Hall—we
called it the administration building in those
days—Henderson Hall was not quite complete. We
finally had to have a faculty
meeting—and actually I believe it was like the third
week in September, so it was quite late—in a room
with workers scurrying about, trying to put the
finishing touches on the place. We had our faculty
meeting, and started classes the following week.
There were classes held in the
Dalrymple House, which
had not been renovated. It was simply—the interior
was painted, and some chairs and furniture were
placed into several rooms to make a couple of
makeshift classrooms, with
offices upstairs. And we
had, of course, a few classrooms and offices.
Everything else—the library,
the classrooms, offices, cafeteria, and
administrative offices—all in what is now Henderson
Hall. So it was a little cramped that first year.
Kelsey: What was the
cafeteria like?
Doto: It was nothing more than a large room
with some long tables, a few vending machines, and I
recall a television for recreational purposes. I
believe that was the year the
Mets were in the
World Series, so
people were interested in watching the
World Series. That
was the extent of the recreational area that was
available for students. The
[cafeteria] became a place to hang out. And that
was interesting, because it wasn’t just a place to
bring your lunch and sit and chat with your
colleagues, but it was a
place the students hung out, it was a place the
administrators hung out, so that entire college
community congregated to that one area. And as a
result, in very little time, people got to know each
other very, very well—faculty,
staff, and students.
Kelsey: What was the library like?
Doto: Oh! a little room. The books were on
makeshift shelves at first. And it was an informal
place. It was also a place where a lot of people
would gather, chat. It wasn’t a “library”
in the sense that it was a quiet, respectful place
where people studied. But it was a place where
people tried to study. But of course it was pre-technology,
and so there was no computer access and terminals
and such. It was just a place to go for books and
journal articles. It was rather meager at the
start.
Kelsey: What were the rules regarding
smoking on
campus and in the classroom?
Doto: Anybody could smoke anytime,
anyplace. I had a bad habit in those days of
smoking a pipe. I tried not to smoke in the
classroom. But of course things were much different
in the 1960s in terms of attitude about
smoking. It was
not quite understood how serious it was as a health
hazard—second-hand smoke, and even being a smoker
yourself. But I recall that there were some
professors that asked that, “Please
students, don’t smoke in
class,” but many did anyway. But I think back to
those days, it’s quite a different climate now—both
socially and every respect, but certainly on campus.
Kelsey: What was the general atmosphere like
on campus during that first semester?
Doto: A lot of confusion and a lot of
excitement. The confusion related to the fact that
we had no policies and
procedures for anything. Things had to be invented
on the fly, so very, very often decisions had to be
made at the last possible moment about any number of
things, including such things as when do classes
start, when do they end, how often do they meet,
what is the schedule going to look like? We as
professors had absolutely to build every course from
nothing, so we had to teach the courses fresh. So
we had a lot of scrambling to get things together
for our courses; students had a lot of scrambling to
understand what the requirements were, and where to
be when. But the enthusiasm that all of us had was
such that it enabled us to, in a collegial way,
gather both formally and informally, and help the
college make the kind of decisions to operate in an
effective and efficient way.
Kelsey: 1968, politically and
culturally, was a year of
serious turmoil.
Doto: Sure was.
Kelsey: How was that exhibited on the
campus, and in what kinds of
ways?
Doto: There were student
demonstrations on
campus, anti-war demonstrations against the
Vietnam War.
Faculty members joined in.
There were meetings held—informally—among
students and faculty and
others who were interested in discussing the issue.
Sometimes arguments in the
cafeteria between folks—not fisticuff arguments,
but arguments nonetheless—which was typical of the
time, and not too atypical of our times today, in
terms of differences in political opinions on
things. And of course we all recognized, even then,
that
Morris County was a
conservative area, politically speaking. And so
there were a significant number of students who had
the opposite point of view than some of the anti-war
sentiment that was here amongst some students as
well.
Kelsey: And how did those two groups interact?
Doto: There was no formal interaction. I
think most of it was just discussion, either in
class or in the cafeteria, and the few
demonstrations that were on campus were rather
small—small by general standards, maybe forty or
fifty students would carry a few placards and a flag
around a little bit. But it wasn’t quite as
vociferous as it was on many other college
campuses. I mean, there was no effort to take over
the campus, as they did at
Columbia University,
and other things. So we were very busy, and very
distracted I should add, by trying to build the
place. Not only trying to build it euphemistically
speaking, but literally speaking, because everywhere
you turned, there was somebody with boots and
overalls on that was nailing something to a wall, or
painting something, or moving a
bulldozer or…. While we
were in the process of conducting classes, the rest
of the campus was being bulldozed and buildings were
started. So it was a pretty confusing place.
Kelsey: What was the
demographic of the student body and
faculty and staff like? Were
there a lot of women enrolled or working there;
races; ethnic groups; age?
Doto: The students,
as I recall, were mostly young, fairly
fresh-out-of-high-school students. We didn’t have
very many of these nontraditional students, as we
call them today—older folks. There were very few
minorities—in fact, I only can remember one in
particular. The staff was fairly homogeneous,
really—staff and faculty. So we didn’t have the
cultural diversity then that we strive to have now.
Kelsey: What was social life like for the
faculty and staff that were working at the college?
Did you all go out after work, was there a local hot
spot?
Doto: Well, there were a couple places that
we would occasionally gravitate toward. There was a
hamburger place across Route 10 where the
A&P shopping center now
stands, called Buxton’s, and
it was a popular place to go for lunch if you wanted
to escape the cafeteria,
and we often did. I had a standing lunch
appointment with another faculty member and the
director of student activities—Henry
Found, one of the first
faculty members, and Randy
Rucker, who was the coordinator—or whatever they
called him—of student activities on
campus. And Jerry
Luboff, an English professor.
We would gather over at Buxton’s probably just about
every day for lunch. But after hours it was more or
less if faculty members wanted to have a
social gathering at their home,
oftentimes some students
were invited. But there weren’t any real social
activities scheduled on campus. There wasn’t any
room for them. So everything that was of a social
interaction was really more off campus or in the
cafeteria informally.
Kelsey: And that was true of the students as
well?
Doto: Yes. I don’t recall any specific
student social event that was held that first year.
I may be wrong, maybe there was a student social
gathering or dance or something in the cafeteria,
but I don’t remember it.
Kelsey: How did people dress
to go to work in 1968?
Doto: Well, both from the student, the
faculty, and the staff perspective, much more
formally than today. I was never told what I had to
wear, but let’s put it this way, after my first
visit to campus, I went to a men’s shop in
Morristown and
bought myself a couple of three-piece suits. It was
that formal, for most of the faculty. Some were
much less formal, but for most of the faculty and
staff, it was a tie and jacket every day. And the
students dressed without ties and jackets, but the
students dressed in a more formal way as well, than,
comparatively speaking, they do today. But again,
that was reflective of culture in general, as
opposed to
County College of Morris
culture.
Kelsey: Would you say—you mentioned before
that this was a more conservative area,
generally—that that had something to do with the
dress?
Doto: Yes. And there were some
students who would wear
tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms, and they were
considered the
hippies. But
again, by today’s standards, that would not be
considered anything approaching radical. But in the
main, I think it was a much more formal dress
“code,” if you want to call it that, even though it
wasn’t in writing. It was an informal code that
translated into a formal code, if you know what I’m
saying.
Kelsey: How did people get to the
campus?
Doto: Well, just about everybody
traveled to the
campus from the eastern part of
Morris County. So
the westward trek on Route 10 was just about
everyone. I lived in
Morristown, many of
the faculty lived in the area
around
Morristown. And at
that time, remember, it was much more rural in this
area of
Morris County.
Denville was
considered Western
Morris County in
those days. You had to travel quite a distance up
Route 10 to get to
Denville, let alone
Randolph. That’s
why I said earlier my first visit to the campus just
to see where the campus was going to be located, it
just seemed like an awful long trip westward on
Route 10. But that trip was less in terms of time,
than it is today, with the traffic signals and the
traffic. But Route 10 in this area was a four-lane,
but it was still a country road. Route 80 wasn’t
completely finished, 287 wasn’t completely
finished. So if people wanted to go east and west,
Route 10 and Route 46 were the two ways to get
there In fact, I remember back in high school—I
went to
Livingston High
School—and I remember the occasions when
Livingston played
RoxburyHigh
School in football, and we would drive
from
Livingston all the
way to
Roxbury High School.
And without realizing that I would be working nearby
in
Randolph, at the
time when I was in high school, I remember thinking,
“My goodness, how far out in rural
New Jersey is
it?!” So originally the thinking was that this was
pretty rural. And of course if you look at a map,
this is actually central
Morris County,
where we are. It’s in the center of
Morris County.
Kelsey: What kind of
car did you drive?
Doto: I drove a third-hand used car, of
course. I was a young married
fellow with a new family on the way, so we couldn’t
quite afford to drive anything fancy. It was
actually a
Ford Falcon that
needed a lot of work.
Kelsey: Do you remember what year it was?
Doto: I think it was a ’62 or ’61—something.
Kelsey: Describe a little more what Route 10
looked like.
Doto: There was nothing on Route 10. As you
moved out of the
Morristown area and
started west on Route 10, if you know where the
Hilton is now, that
used to be a dairy farm with an ice cream place on
the corner. And in fact, from what I understand,
that was the first area that was considered for
County College of Morris
location. That farm area, where all those
office buildings are now, was
thought—or was considered, at least—to be the first
location. I think, thankfully, they moved it west.
By today’s standards, this is a better location than
there. As you progressed further west from there,
there were no strip malls. It was just a few houses
and a few farms and this country road, really. No
traffic signals. I mean, I could get from my
apartment in
Morristown to
County College in
the morning in twenty minutes—and in the evening go
home with no trouble whatsoever. Of course even the
traffic going the opposite direction in those days
was much, much, much less. So even if you were
traveling from western
Morris County
toward
Morristown in the
mornings in those days, it was not a problem.
Kelsey: You mentioned
Buxton’s was on one corner. What was on the
other three corners of
Center Grove Road?
Doto: Well, the intersection of Center Grove
Roadwas a busy intersection, and busier because of
the college. In terms of this area, that was
probably one of the busiest intersections. There
was a little, I guess you would call it a greasy
spoon restaurant, called Rudy’s,
that was on the corner where the diner now sits.
And that would be a place to go if you really wanted
to clog your arteries with a greasy hamburger. But
it was also the place where if you wanted to mail a
letter, that’s where you went, because they had a
little post office at the
counter. So it was the post office, and nothing
more than a little luncheonette. And the fellow who
operated it, of course, was named Rudy, and
everybody knew Rudy and said hello when they walked
in to buy stamps or get a hamburger. Across the
street there was a gas station, and diagonally where
Buxton’s was, where the A&P
shopping center now is, there were a few stores in a
strip mall. There was a drugstore and Buxton’s and
the A&P. I think that was about it in those days.
So that was the hustle and bustle of that
intersection. That was it.
Center Grove Road was not as wide as it is now.
It was just a little lane, really, that you turned
off of Route 10 onto. And of course with all
students arriving at the
same time, the place where there was any congestion
to get on campus was Route
10. We didn’t have a Dover Chester Road entrance in
those days—it was only Route 10. So if you had 400
students and 50 faculty and
staff arriving essentially at the same time, with
minimal parking in front of
Henderson Hall and in
front of the Dalrymple
House, that’s where the traffic would occur. So
I would usually get to campus very early. I would
get to campus by 7:30 in the morning to beat
that—just to be able to park and get to my office
and do some work.
Kelsey: Some things never change.
Doto: Exactly.
Kelsey: Describe a typical day in the
classroom.
Doto: Well, a typical day in the classroom
was in the classroom all day. I mean, we had
classes, and of course we didn’t have contracts in
those days—faculty were given
teaching assignments, and those teaching
assignments were quite rigorous by today’s
comparison. I would start in the classroom at about
8:30 in the morning, and I would teach, with a break
for lunch, straight through ’til about 3:30 in the
afternoon, or 4:00 in the afternoon. And then,
faculty would gather, either in various
offices, or in the
cafeteria, because we were
setting up a college, and we were trying to organize
things. There were no committees yet, so we had
info-meetings, where if you were interested in
talking about a topic, you would come at 4:00 in the
cafeteria, and a few of us would sit around the
table, and we’d talk about something, to try to
resolve an issue, or come up with a policy that made
sense.
So
our work days were five days a week, and as I said,
I would arrive on campus at
7:30, and I’d get home at 6:00 or 6:30 at night. It
was a real job in the sense that you almost had a
nine-to-five or more workday—different than today.
Kelsey: What was the
classroom dynamic like?
Doto: The classes that I had were large. My
classes all met in the living room of
Dalrymple House. The
living room was narrow and long, so we oriented it
so that as I faced the students,
I would see left to right, a wide view maybe three
or four rows deep. And I had forty students or so
in a class, with a blackboard. There was a lot of
interaction. As a young teacher, of course starting
here as young as I did, I was the youngest of the
original faculty.
Kelsey: How old were you?
Doto: When I started here, I was
twenty-two. Some of my students were not much older
than me, which is one of the reasons for buying that
three-piece suit, so that I could at least appear a
little bit older and wiser. But the kinds of
interactions I had with the students were very
lively. We would talk about health topics at a time
when health was not a major concern or a major
issue. Many had had experiences in health and
physical education classes in high school, but of
course we had no gymnasium, we had no other way to
teach healthy living and lifestyle, except in the
classroom. So I tried to make it as interesting and
stimulating as possible. That was a time when
LSD was big,
marijuana of
course, so we would spend a lot of lively
conversations about
drugs and
drug behavior and
marijuana use—which
was endemic to the college culture then, of course.
Birth control was a
big issue. The
pill had sort of
just hit the market. Of course the
sexual freedom of
the 1960s was an issue of discussion. But as I
mentioned earlier,
smoking was not
considered to be a major issue.
Weight control was
not considered to be a major issue. So we were able
to hit upon some topics that were of interest to the
students, because of their
experience and their lifestyles. And so I remember
having some quite lively discussions.
I
remember at one time a student in the class
indicated that she didn’t know what I was talking
about with this
marijuana culture,
because she said that she’d never used
marijuana and never
even seen
marijuana. And I
recall a student sitting next to her just turning to
her and saying, “Oh, you want to see some? I’ve got
some in my pocket,” and he took out a packet of
marijuana and
showed it to her. Nowadays that would be a more
immediate cause for concern, but I considered it an
educational experience.
Kelsey: Describe what was considered to be
cutting edge classroom
technology.
Doto: A piece of chalk and a blackboard.
And if you were able to get a
16 millimeter projector
to show a film, that was a real exciting time! I
did try to do that. I wanted to have some films
that I could show my students. And so Bill
Bunnell, the librarian—the
first librarian we had—would arrange to get some
films from the
Morris County Library,
and we would scrounge around for I think the only
16 millimeter projector
we had. We had no A.V. people to operate it, so we
had to figure it out ourselves, and try to get that
thing to work, and show a movie every now and then.
So that was cutting edge technology. And we had
telephones, so that was
technology. (chuckles)
Kelsey: In the
classrooms?
Doto: No, not in the classroom. I had an
office upstairs with four
other faculty members, in
what was a bedroom in
Dalrymple House. I had a telephone and a desk.
The one thing I lacked, that I would have liked to
have had, was heat, because the upstairs rooms of
Dalrymple House were perennially cold. And so we
would sit up there with our overcoats and gloves on,
and meet students, or just
chat. But really, if you had a telephone in your
office, and you had a blackboard and an occasional
16 millimeter projector,
you were set.
Kelsey: What differences do you notice between
1968 and 2008, in terms of interactions with
students, student behavior?
Doto: Well, let me back up and explain
something that will preface my comment here. One of
the things that we, as educators at a
community college—and
I realized this early on in my career—were
challenged with, which isn’t quite the same as what
many of our four-year
colleagues are challenged with, is a classroom
spectrum of abilities that is vast. In a typical
classroom, which is the same today as it was then,
you have students who could excel at any college or
university in the United States and do very, very
well. They’re academically very, very competent.
You have students that struggle exceedingly, that
may not really be ready for college—academically,
socially, culturally—in many ways. And then the
spectrum in between. And they’re all in the same
room with you. We still have that.
The
difference today, I think, is that there’s an
expectation among students
that we as educators will try not to make their
lives too difficult; that we will do everything
possible to allow them to pass a course, or do well
in a course, despite the amount of energy and effort
that some of these students will put into it. Now,
I don’t mean to imply that this is a vast number of
students that have this kind of an attitude, but I
think that there is a segment of students that have
this attitude that is different than the attitude I
experienced in my earlier career. Some of these
students—and again, it’s a minority—create
circumstances in the classroom and outside the
classroom in the academic area, that make it more
difficult for we as educators to do our jobs. In a
way, this small percentage of students feel entitled
to a grade, as opposed to the
need to work for a grade. And the vocal nature of
some of these students occupies a greater percentage
of our time than it did in those days.
Now,
one of the things I don’t want to sound like, is an
old fogy who doesn’t understand what kids are like
nowadays. But after forty years of working with
students that range in age, in the main, from
eighteen to twenty-five—although we have a lot of
nontraditional students, and I’ve experienced many
of them at ages up to ninety. I had a student that
was ninety-two. The majority of the interactions we
have are with students in that age range of roughly
eighteen to twenty-five or twenty-six. I think that
I know a lot about how they think, a lot about how
they act, a lot about what their expectations are.
And so I’m saying this observation about
students who feel entitled to a grade, that small
percentage, being vastly different than in the 1960s
and ’70s—even through the seventies. And it’s made
our jobs harder, it really has. I have called
it—and I say this with some degree of
trepidation—but I’ve called it “the age of
educational entitlement,” in the sense that some
students just feel that
they are entitled to get a good grade, no matter how
much work they do.
And
so I regret that I’m leaving my profession—because
I’m retiring this year—at a
time when that kind of thing seems to be happening
more frequently than in the past.
Kelsey: Would you say that the students in
1968 worked harder?
Doto: Yes.
Kelsey: And what do you think was the
motivation for that?
Doto: I don’t think there was any motivation
except it was considered more the norm, that
students would have to work hard. If I assigned….
In fact, I did, I had a book list, and I assigned
not only textbook reading, but students had to read
anywhere from two to five books off
a booklist in a given semester, and write a book
review. And nobody thought twice about not only
reading the textbook, but reading several books for
one class. Reading books today, because, I think,
of the experience that students have had over their
years with technology, is
something that students don’t typically think of as
a meaningful educational experience. I mean,
literally, having a book that’s bound, on a desk
that they open and look at, as opposed to doing
research on the Internet. And so that’s a big
difference as well.
So I
think that students came to the college in those
early years, from a high school environment that was
different. And they were prepared to do the kind of
academic work that we expected. And of course I
have to admit that when I started at the college, my
expectations of my students
were formed by the expectations that my professors
had of me, just a few years before—having freshly
finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. And we
were typically expected to read four, five, or six
books per class, per year, per semester. We were
constantly in the library.
And so the effort here among the original
faculty was to, I think, just
continue on with that normal educational experience
for our students. And that’s different today—much
different.
Kelsey: Do you think that maintaining a
draft-deferred
status in that time period in the sixties
affected the motivation, at least of the male
students?
Doto: Now that you mention it, yes, of
course. Yeah, the
draft was in
existence then. If you were a full-time student in
college, you probably could get a
deferment. I don’t
remember if it was automatic or not. I do know that
if I taught in a
community college
that was a public institution, I earned a
deferment. Not
very many people wanted to enlist in the army and go
fight an unpopular war. Sounds like déjà vu,
doesn’t it? But in any event, that was a motivation
for some, I’m sure, to stay in school—or even to go
to school. But you know, again, in
Morris County still
today, I think the expectation is, and the rates of
college attendance still today, among high school
graduates, is very high in
Morris County. So
the expectation then was, you graduated high school,
you went to college. “And oh, by the way, there’s a
new one up the street called
County College of Morris.
Let’s try that. Because it’s convenient, and
inexpensive.” So I think that yeah, the issue of
the deferment may have played a role in some, but
they would have come here, and if we weren’t here,
they would have gone to
Rutgers or
Montclair or what
was then
Paterson State.
Kelsey: What do you remember as your most
significant memory of that first year?
Doto: I think…. There were a lot of blurred
memories of the first year, because there was so
much, the pace was so hectic. But one of the
significant memories was that this place was nothing
more than mud from one end of the
campus to the other. I mean,
we had to carry boots in the trunk of our car, so
that if we did venture beyond what is now
Henderson Hall, up the
hill, to see the progress of building the HPE
building and the original library,
and the first of the academic buildings, and the
student center, you just had to have your boots on
so you could trudge through the mud and muck. In
those days, it wasn’t like our recent renovation of
the student center, where the student center got
walled off and nobody could go in. In those days,
you could wander among the workers inside the
buildings under construction,
chat with them—in fact, we got to know some of
them—and really see the progress of building the
place. So I just remember the mud, I remember the
confusion, I remember the workers, I remember the
noise, the bulldozers, and all of that just
happening all the time, all the time. In fact, if
you had a class here, down the hill in Henderson
Hall, the building on campus got to be so noisy
sometimes that…. You just had to put up with it.
It was just something that was a given.
Kelsey: What do you think is the most
significant change in
CCM and its
students between 1968 and
today?
Doto: Most significant change? Hm.
(pause) I can’t specifically say a single thing is
the most specific change. I think that in general
we are a large, mature, institution now, that we
never…. I mean, we expected in the early days that
we would eventually become, quote unquote, “a real
college,” in the sense that we had real buildings,
and real parking lots, and
lots of students, and lots
of faculty. But I think if
you simply arrive on campus
for the first time in your life, and just park your
car and walk around, you might say to yourself, “Oh,
this is a nice place, they have some nice buildings,
and that’s nice stone. There’s lots of
students around, and there’s pretty plants,” and not
understand that all of this came out of nothing.
That it had to have a beginning, and the beginning
was a time when people made the difference.
Maybe I could point to the fact that now we’re an
institution where policies
and processes take preference over people. Because
then, if something needed to be done, you knocked on
somebody’s door and you said, “Hey, can you do
this? Can you do that? Can you set up that
projector in my classroom for me? Can you buy this
for my classroom needs? Can we change the wall in
the design [for] that building, from this wall to
that wall?” Or you picked up the phone. I mean,
there was no formal writing of memos. It was just
interpersonal relationships that got things done;
and interpersonal relationships that began to
establish the policies that needed to be
established.
Today,
CCM is a much more
institutionalized place in the sense that the
policies and procedures take precedence over the
people. But still today, those of us who’ve been
here for a long-enough period of time—and I don’t
mean forty years, I mean just a few years—get to
know the people that are the movers and shakers that
can get things done. So I think any of us now can
pick up the phone and call those people and say, “I
really need this,” or “I really need that,” and
things happen, without the forms, and without
following the policy guidelines. And I don’t mean
that we are in any way, shape, or form trying to do
anything immoral or illegal in that respect, but
just more expeditiously trying to get things done.
So
if there is a change, it’s a change that we’ve
become mature, we’ve become, I think, bloated in our
policies and procedures, and
our abilities to get things done. The answer to
moving ahead at the campus now
is more often “it’s not in the plan,” or “it needs
to be formalized in order to get into the plan, in
order to get things done,” or “we already have
policies about that—did you read, you know, Policy
Number 368.3/2?” And while that may make a
difference from the standpoint of tracking the
paperwork and dotting all the i’s and crossing all
the t’s, this is still a place that runs because
people make the difference. So of the policies and
the procedures and the people, I always choose the
people as the way to get things done. But I was a
lower-level administrator as a department
chairperson on this campus. Perhaps if I were a
higher-level administrator, I’d have a different
feeling about that. But I still think it’s a people
issue.
Kelsey: Is there anything else you’d like to
add in closing?
Doto: Well maybe I should sort of turn
around what I just said a little bit, and end on a
little more of a positive note, in the sense that
I’ll be leaving the institution after forty years
here. This is my final academic semester. And I do
so with a great deal of regret—not because I’m not
looking forward to retirement—I
am. I won’t miss the policies
and procedures. I’m going to miss the people. I’ll
miss my students. I’ll
miss the interactions I have in the classroom. I’ll
miss making a difference in even a single student’s
life. But I think this has been a terrific place to
work. Despite the fact that we have our problems,
this is a magnificent institution. It could be even
more magnificent, and I think that there are ways
and changes that could be made to make it better,
but I think we have an excellent academic
reputation. I think we need to really capitalize,
even more so, on our academic reputation, in selling
this institution better to the community.
I
think we really make a big difference in the culture
of
Morris County—certainly
in the education of
Morris County. And
if we didn’t build this college in 1968, this county
and the people that this college serves now, would
have to look to alternative places for the kinds of
services that we offer. So this has been, I think,
one of the best things that has happened in
Morris County in
the last forty years. I mean,
Morris County has
had a lot of growth. It’s one of the richest
counties in the nation. But I don’t think that the
typical citizen in
Morris County
recognizes the degree to which this institution has
made
Morris County, and
helped make
Morris County, as
good as it is.
So
as I said, I leave the institution with some regret,
with a lot of happy memories, and a lot of good
friends. But it’s been nice being what others have
called the pioneer, one of the original
faculty. I tried to outlast
my colleague, who is the only other original faculty
left, Professor Bob Gebhardt,
in the math department, but I decided that he’s
going to stay a lot longer than me, so my parting
comments to Professor Gebhardt just earlier today
were, “Please turn the lights out when you leave,
Bob.”
Kelsey: Thank you very much.
Doto: You’re welcome. Do you have enough to
use now?
Kelsey: Oh, you bet!
[END
OF INTERVIEW]
INDEX