Dennis Hayes - Session IV

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ORAL HISTORIES
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Interviewed by
Ronald Doel
Interview date
Location
Palisades, New York
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Interview of Dennis Hayes by Ronald Doel on 1997 September 24,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/22906-4

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Abstract

Discusses his youth and education in the mid-west and Colorado; his undergraduate education at the University of Kansas and his graduate work at Columbia University; his decision to go into geophysics; his work as chief scientists aboard the research vessels and his relationship with Capt. Henry Kohler; international cooperation in researach projects; the effect on Lamont of Maurice Ewing's move to Texas; his committee work for the National Science Foundation; teaching graduate students at Columbia; plate tectonics; and marine geology.  Also prominently mentioned are Wally Broecker, Charles Drake, Gordon Eaton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Arnold Gordon, Bruce Heezen, Marcus Langseth, Jack Nafe, Jack Oliver, Neil Opdyke, Walter Pitman, Baring Raleigh, Mark Talwani, J. Lamar Worzel.

Transcript

Doel:

This is Ron Doel, and this is a continuing interview with Denny Hayes. Today is, I want to be sure of this, the twenty-fourth?

Hayes:

Yes.

Doel:

Of September, 1997. We’re continuing this interview in your office at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. One of the things we haven’t spoken about yet, and what we were just talking about off tape, was Manik’s [Talwani] as director of Lamont after [W.] Maurice Ewing went to Texas. How did you see Manik Talwani with, in contrast to other directors of the major oceanographic, other research centers in the ocean sciences?

Hayes:

Well, for one thing, he was generally much younger than the leaders of the major institutions. There were some of the lesser players, lesser institutions that may have had comparable young, but in terms of the big players, Manik by far was the youngest. And he — I don’t think he was, but about forty was about the time that he became director. And he had an impeccable scientific reputation. He had already been the recipient of several prestigious awards. So his scientific credentials held him in good stead because scientific credentials were the only thing that counted at that stage. No one was out doing the social scene, or doing PR. No one was really soliciting private funds or doing a lot of the things that you think of a director or a senior administrator naturally doing now. Then the emphasis was science, excellence in science, and if you could do it, it was generally assumed you could probably administrate it well if you demanded the respect of your colleagues.

Doel:

Without wanting to jump beyond Talwani’s period right now, when did you see the change occurring to a director who has had more functions, including fund raising?

Hayes:

Well, there was a lot of rhetoric about the need to do it when Barry {C. Baring] Raleigh came in. And that we had not done it in the past. And up until, well even to the present day, the institution has only been the beneficiary of one major gift. When you think, about over a fifty year lifetime, that’s quite extraordinary. Now they’ve received a lot of money from places like the Vetlesen Foundation, and ongoing support that is very significant, but they only received one major gift.

Doel:

Right. The Doherty.

Hayes:

The Doherty endowment. And I think by the time, early on and even in the recruiting stages, when Barry Raleigh was hired, I think in part he was hired — now that I think back — he was hired at least as much for his, his outward personality, his ability converse. He was quite glib. He’d been seen on television a lot out in California as a spokesman for the U.S.G.S. [United States Geological Survey] in matters having to do with earthquake risk and hazards and commenting. He was the person that frequently appeared. He was good at it. He was very good. The irony was that when he came here, he soon hired a fund raiser to set up the table for him and do that sort of stuff. But he never demonstrated that he was particularly comfortable with fund raising, because he didn’t really pursue it that vigorously. And I take that to mean without getting in his head, people generally do what they like to do, and they don’t do what they don’t like to do. And while you would have thought he was ideally suited for it because as I say of his easy going personality and was very articulate and glib and social, it didn’t happen. I don’t know if that was entirely a unilateral decision, or if maybe what is required to do that in fact was incompatible with some relationship that he had, some agreement that he had established with his wife about Lamont, nine to five, and off Lamont after five. I don’t know the answer to that. Because it seemed a bit incongruent that he could have and he didn’t.

Doel:

You mentioned off tape that compared to other directors that the Raleighs tended to leave Lamont’s professional and social life after five o’clock.

Hayes:

Yes. And in fact, Diane herself rarely participated or was seen even in nine to five activities. She herself was a professional person and it may have just been those demands of her.

Doel:

What did she do?

Hayes:

She was a counselor or a psychologist. I don’t know what her actual credentials were, but she was involved in family counseling or individual counseling business.

Doel:

You mentioned a moment ago that Manik Talwani’s scientific reputation was impeccable. How did he compare to other major leaders of geophysical institutions like Teddy [Sir Edward C.] Ballard or Bill [William A.] Nierenberg, Roger Revelle?

Hayes:

Well, they were, of course, a different era of scientist. And there’s that group of which I place [W.] Maurice Ewing at the top. And some of them were incredible scientists. Others were builders of institutions and that sort of thing. I never thought in my mind, though I don’t know, didn’t know him well enough or long enough personally, I never thought of Revelle in that light. I certainly thought of Teddy Ballard in that light. And certainly I never thought of Nierenberg in that light. Nierenberg was, in my opinion — he may have been a very capable, even more than capable, high energy physicist, but I was never really aware of what he did, and he certainly never did any of it by the time he went to Scripps [Institution of Oceanography], which was in about 1967 or 66 and stayed on there for twenty-five years, more or less and managed the place both on the national scene through his connections with various committee members. And he was a very political animal, both on the state and the national level. So he was effective in promoting Scripps and Scripp’s objectives by that route. Whereas Maurice Ewing, for instance, operated on a different scale, I can remember once we had been operating the Eltanin program for the National Science Foundation [NSF]. At that time it wasn’t the Division of Polar Programs, it was the Antarctic Research Program, supposedly on the Antarctic. And we ran a piece of the program, the geophysical program, which I told you about. And after running this for a while, some other institutions got a little jealous and wanted to get in on the action, and went soliciting NSF, and we decided to have a big pow wow down at the NSF, and Maurice Ewing and I went down together to represent Lamont. I was involved because I was doing the hands on stuff. It was clear that his presence, his reputation, his accomplishments, really just kind of made it a no contest. I talked to people who were at that meeting before that said, you know, you really brought out the biggest gun and it was a no contest.

Doel:

That’s very interesting. So he could play a very effective role simply by showing up at these broader policy meetings.

Hayes:

Absolutely. And, in fact, you know when you’d look around the table and see who he might be debating or discussing with, many of them may have been people who he had trained or set up or hired or recommended or did something like this. They were all clearly subordinate in their minds to him. So it was quite an education for me. I felt nice being on the winning team, even if I was only the water boy.

Doel:

How often did you see him in action in Washington at meetings of this kind?

Hayes:

Oh. I saw him in action, I wouldn’t say it was frequently, but enough times to know that this was not a freak — this wasn’t any aberration, this is the way that it was. When he went down, it was kind of like E.F. Hutton, you know, they listened.

Doel:

Yes, the famous commercial.

Hayes:

Yes.

Doel:

It’s interesting given that by this point and later in your own career you spent quite a bit of time on national committees; The NSF’s [National Science Foundation] earth science panel, the ocean sciences panel. What sort of things that Ewing taught you did you find particularly helpful, important in your own committee work?

Hayes:

Oh. I don’t think it’s anything that you could put your finger on. I think what Ewing taught all of the people that he kept around and that he admired and befriended and encouraged was really that I think he instilled a lot of confidence in. He basically brought out the best characteristics of each individual. I think that’s one thing that he did probably as well as anyone that I’ve ever known. People went out, they were, I don’t know if they were inspired or they were afraid of doing less or what, but they really went out and they — it sounds like a cliche — but it was really always sort of one for the gipper. Okay? So I can’t think of things in particular that he taught me. You know, he taught me certainly to be more aware of thinking critically, of speaking critically. When I say that I mean of being careful about what one said and accurate about what one said and writing as well. And a practical thing, in collaborating with him on papers — I may have mentioned this before — I remember he was very efficient because he might be working and there’d be some reference that he needed to get, to get some particular fact out of it, and when you’d go and do it, he had an uncanny sense of well, we not only want that fact, but we want, there’s other stuff in here that we better get at the time because we’re going to need it. And so he rarely backtracked. You know, he wouldn’t go to a document five times in series as it came up for the need. He would go to a document once and anticipate the five or six things that he was going to need out of it.

Doel:

Very interesting. And that suggests a broad comprehension of what was in each of these particular pieces.

Hayes:

That’s right. He sort of knew what was there and how it was relevant to the big picture, even though, you know, it wasn’t apparent at the moment. It was apparent later. And it also made for a very efficient approach to doing research.

Doel:

Has that been something you’ve been able to do in your own, later collaborative work?

Hayes:

I think far less effectively than he did. I think, you know, you try to emulate that, but in a different league. I think that he — it’s not something that he taught me, but something that I picked up by observing him in action and other people in action. I think Manik was in some ways much the same. And that is to focus your remarks on the important issues. You know, it’s not necessary to engage in every little exchange of this, and then when you have something to say, people listen to you. And that’s something that I try to practice to this day. Sometimes I have a tendency to speak up too often, but I’m aware of it. I find out then when you really have something important that you want to get across, chances of getting it across are much greater.

Doel:

Interesting observation.

Hayes:

And I think something, and I don’t know where I got it from, but I presume I got it from these teachers because after all, where else would I have gotten it from. And that is that to listen carefully and ultimately at some point to cut to the chase and synthesize the key points to bring something to a conclusion; to really cut through all the chaff and be able to get to the point. And I’ve had a number of people come to me and say — just in a meeting the other day, I didn’t say all that much. But someone came up to me afterwards and said really good points. And I listened to what you said, and I asked myself, these are really important points, why didn’t anyone else say this?

Doel:

Less is more at times.

Hayes:

Yes it is. So that’s what I count as one of my assets in the group dynamics of these committee meetings.

Doel:

Back to the beginning of Manik Talwani’s directorship here, the mid-1970s. What seemed to be the biggest challenges for Lamont as an institution?

Hayes:

Well, at that time, at that time the Observatory was still enjoying a golden, healthy, flourishing funding environment. In fact, in the late sixties and early seventies, when our support was close to being fifty percent NSF [National Science Foundation] based and fifty percent ONR [Office of Naval Research] based, or equally balanced with a few other activities elsewhere, it was almost an environment of NSF and ONR competing to fund us. That’s a lot of days gone by. But I think that the biggest challenge at the beginning was here is this institution and this great founding director who was in a class certainly among himself, was to really see how strong a foundation he’d built, that to see whether the institution could survive without his leadership and with the handful of strong individuals he took off with him, he left a lot of people behind whom he taught very well. But the outside world was looking to see how well. And I think I mentioned to you that Manik was actually on the search committee for a new director, and they looked for quite some time. I don’t — I was not on the committee, I was very junior at that time. I think he was even the chair of the committee, and probably in the conduct of the search, you know, the abilities of individuals come out, and at some point, he refused himself because it was clear that people were starting to think and talk about him as a potential candidate. And I think as an individual scientist, as someone who could deal with people, and as a good administrator, he had the respect of the outside community. In my opinion, he sort of stood apart from anyone else here at that time and stood at a level that was not demonstrably at the Ewing level, but demonstrably above a very high level of peers that were here as well. I mean, I really have the highest regard for Manik’s intellect and his integrity. And then as time went on, he was much less autocratic than Ewing was. He could not have been the way Ewing was. He didn’t want to be the way Ewing was. He certainly was far more democratic in his attitude, yet he was forceful. But the one thing that he did at that time was he continued to be very active in science. And so this had the consequence of, I guess, if you’re spending a lot of time doing science, you obviously can’t spend that time doing administration. I think that with various people around him to help him with that administration. Initially his close colleagues and trusted friends, people like John Ewing and Mark [Marcus] Langseth and I’m trying to remember others. It turned out that most of these people didn’t work so well for him. It turned out that they were good scientists and good friends, but they weren’t particularly good administrators. And then after a few years, the competition started to get tougher, and I’m sure I mentioned to you before, that I think some of the people begin to view Manik and his involvement in science as competing internally with them for science funds from an unfair position. I think it probably was an unfair position, because he was smarter than most everyone else.

Doel:

But they were feeling that nevertheless?

Hayes:

They were feeling that nevertheless. And Manik also made the decision to invest some institutional funds to acquire a multi-channel seismic capability for our vessel which was a widely lauded by the community as a whole and by the MG&G [Marine Geology and Geophysics] people, but viewed by some here, as a somewhat parochial investment.

Doel:

Not representing Lamont generally as much as the particular fields.

Hayes:

Yes, but that truly was a very — it was a very parochial view because there were investments being made in the institution. You know, maybe not one big clump of money, but investments made in the institution all over the place. And we had established from the time Ewing was still here a group of Industrial Associates, who consisted of all the major oil companies and a number of the minors. I think at the peak of our activity we had seventeen, eighteen, nineteen members, each contributing fifty K a year just as a kind of generic support for the institution. So I mean nineteen per year at fifty thousand is nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Doel:

That’s right. Very close to a million.

Hayes:

Yes. And most of that was generated because of the activities that were going on in MG&G, and so it was logical that a significant piece of that fed back into those activities. That bred a little resentment too. But a lot of it was shunted off to support other activities, not directly related to those activities that were generating the funds.

Doel:

Right. Was there a greater fragmentation of Lamont’s different divisions under Talwani’s period?

Hayes:

I guess it sort of evolved that way. But it wasn’t obvious. For instance, there was, with the exception of [Bruce C.] Heezen, which we’ll speak about or we’ve spoken about before, to my knowledge there were few or any interpersonal relationships among faculty or researchers that precluded a student or a post-doc or any researcher from interacting, collaborating, and talking to, anyone else. You know, Scripps [Institution of Oceanography] was famous for having.

Doel:

Different fiefdoms.

Hayes:

Different fiefdoms, cliques, whatever you want to call them. As was Woods Hole [Institution of Oceanography] to a lesser extent. And I mean these were the kinds of things where a professor would say, don’t you dare talk to so and so professor and any of his students or I’m done with you. I mean, that’s pretty well known. And, so there’s nothing like that going on here. Nothing like that going on here. Even the arguments with Heezen didn’t result in that kind of restriction. But at that time, we were still doing science in a fairly disciplinary fashion. There was one group out dealing with problems that you could attack mostly with marine seismology. One group each dealing with problems with gravity and magnetics and seismology and heat flow. And that had some good things to it because it provided continuity and territorial responsibility and it also brought with it a base of data and information from which people would come and try to get access to it. And there generally was pretty free access to it. Although it normally meant collaboration with someone if you wanted to do something that required the marine seismology, or the seismology data, you know, you went and you found a partner in the seismology group and you did something together. Gradually those barriers kind of broke down and in some ways the continuity of the program got disrupted, but it became apparent that virtually all of the problems required an interdisciplinary approach and the responsibility for collecting the data shifted directly from the scientists more to the technical support group. And that was a natural transition, but it came with a downside, and the downside was that it broke that continuity and that scientist’s sense of responsibility for the data in the collective.

Doel:

Yes. That’s a very interesting point. And you feel as though the current [cross talk].

Hayes:

Many places at Scripps didn’t have that. And I cite Scripps because of things — you know people would come back from a cruise, put the data in their bottom drawer, and it might, or might not, ever see the light of day. People came back here with the data from the cruise, it’s interesting, usually within the first week, more typically within the first few days, all the seismic data in particular was laid out on the table and the Ewings and whoever else was interested and the chief scientists would go and examine the data. They’d walk through the data within a few days after it came home. And the data was never, ever, ever, ever sent home from the ship anyway, but hand carried by the chief scientist.

Doel:

Is that right?

Hayes:

That’s right, at great expense. Ewing did not trust having any of this original data being shipped or anything else. It was the chief scientist’s responsibility to bring that data back and be accountable for it — Hand carry it. And they took the responsibility seriously. You know, it amounted to several suitcases full of information. And most of this was analogue information, so if it was lost, it was lost.

Doel:

Was there ever a time or an instance where any individuals within Lamont resisted that policy?

Hayes:

Heezen resisted everything. Okay.

Doel:

I was thinking about that, but then were there other cases?

Hayes:

It’s hard to say. Not that I am aware of. There were some other Ewing instituted policies like taking a piston core or two a day, regardless of whether that had anything to do with your program. There were a few people that resisted that because it meant an investment in time and that sort of thing. But it ultimately resulted in a core collection and archive that was invaluable for many global studies or CLIMAP and other things that. Just like collecting the magnetics data. Every time the ship was underway, ultimately led to the validation of sea floor spreading, because of the existence of that data only a short time — Ewing was being criticized roundly for not having a hypothesis that was tested and processed. So, that was a long answer to a short question about whether the place was more fragmented when Manik was there. I’m not sure fragmented is the right word. It operated as more for the semi-independent units. I don’t think that equates to fragmentation. Before it operated through, you know, wise and benevolent autocrat, a dictator, and necessarily had coherency because everything flowed through the top. This more independence was gained sort of de facto when Ewing left because Manik did not try to duplicate that sort of management style in which you were in control of everything. I think was wise, because I think the times had changed and the people, you know, even though they’re strongly supportive of Manik, didn’t see that huge jump between where he was and where they were. I mean, they were more like peers.

Doel:

He was much more of that same generation.

Hayes:

He was more the same generation. And although I think there was a distinct difference between his intellect and his scientific capability compared with a lot of other good people, I keep emphasizing that here; it wasn’t as great as perceived between Ewing and everyone else.

Doel:

Do you think his age, his youth, hindered his administration of Lamont in certain ways?

Hayes:

I think in retrospect it may have, his lack of an accumulated experience base may have lead him to make decisions or not make decisions or take actions based upon years of experience. That may have played some role. Otherwise, I didn’t feel that because there really weren’t all that many people that much older here than he was. Ewing took the older ones with him. Jack Oliver was here but he left shortly after. And he wasn’t that much older. Most of the people were within a few years. It wasn’t as though you had someone twenty years your junior as your leader. And people resenting that.

Doel:

One question that I’m curious about. Do you, when you look back on Talwani’s era, did you sense that there was prejudice either within the university or outside of it, of his being an Indian? Or was that something that you felt did not come up or did not hinder his —?

Hayes:

If it existed, it existed only in a very covert fashion. I never heard anyone say anything derogatory or question that. It may have in some circles. I’m only just speculating. It may have had a negative effect in the sense, not that he was Indian, but that he was not American.

Doel:

Had he had American citizenship?

Hayes:

Oh yes. Yes. So that, you know, he might have been from any place else, and there’s always the thing, well this is really an outsider. Although, you know, he was here as a student. He was here when he was very young. And he came — he was young when he was a student. He also came, as I understand it, from the relative aristocracy in the Indian caste system. So he came from the privileged within India. I never heard anything. I never heard anyone say anything about that. And he — if you spent time or you looked at Manik, you observed Manik, you listened to Manik, you spent time with Manik, and someone came away and said, well describe Manik. You might or might not mention that he was Indian. It was just not a factor at least not in my mind. Meant nothing. You’d look and you’d say here’s one hell of a smart guy.

Doel:

What sort of role did his wife Annie [Talwani] play in Lamont?

Hayes:

Well. She played the — she supported him fiercely as I said before. Sometimes I think unnecessarily so. But she also seemed to be perpetually unhappy. And I don’t know if it was unhappy because Manik was working so hard. Or she felt Manik wasn’t getting the recognition that he should get, or the compensation, or that she wasn’t happy with the house or the support or whatever. But she seemed, I think I said before, she was a chronic complainer. That may not have been a fair characterization. It was more like you got the impression that she was unhappy, and sometimes she vocalized it. She just didn’t seem to be happy in the — gracious in the role, as the director’s wife. Maybe it was that she wanted a role of her own. In fact, if I’m recalling correctly, she did take courses and do things down at Columbia on her own. You know self-enrichment and that sort of stuff. They had three marvelous children; very bright children. Two of whom worked for me at various times, short intervals of time. I had big arguments with Manik about that.

Doel:

I wanted to hear about that because you mentioned that off tape and not on.

Hayes:

Well, Manik, I think, because he had such high integrity and he did not want to do anything or give any impression that there was any bit of nepotism. He wanted people to see him as an example of the straight arrow, which he basically was. And so he told his kids that they couldn’t work at Lamont. He happened to have a couple of the brightest kids around, and we hired high school kids all the time from around. We’d hire a lot of them in the summertime. There’d be ten or twelve around the laboratory. I said, Manik, this is crazy. Your kids are smarter than any of these other kids. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to work here? And I finally persuaded him. And I said they’re not going to have anything to do with you. I’ve got them up there doing this. At any rate, he took some persuading, but he finally acquiesced. I think I’m the only one he allowed to hire his kids, and both his oldest son and his oldest daughter worked for me for a couple summers. They did outstanding work. But he was concerned about it. I think, I think I was probably, if not his closest confidant, certainly one of a very small number.

Doel:

I would say less than half a dozen that he felt that — or was it even smaller than that?

Hayes:

I would say probably even smaller than that. More like two or three, four.

Doel:

One of the things I did want to talk about were the factors that led up to Manik’s dismissal as director of Lamont. I’m curious. We’ve touched on this again a bit off tape. But when you think back, what were the factors that lead to the tensions that caused Manik to leave in ‘81?

Hayes:

Well, I think there were some tensions that were building for a long time between Manik and Wally [Wallace S.] Broecker. Wally Broecker was an intellectual giant here at that time, and about nearly Manik’s contemporary. And Wally’s a totally different personality so he sort of bulldozes his way through things. He has very strong opinions. And I do not know what led to it, but at some point they kind of arrived at a philosophical impasse in which the two factions there — We had an outside review committee who came in and basically were critical of a few things. What it said explicitly that the director should continue as the director. Those who were critical of what happened said this should clearly happen and everyone else is, well if it should clearly happen, they wouldn’t have said that. [Laughter]

Doel:

I’m curious what sort of — Do you recall who was on the outside committee when it was formed? These are people outside of Lamont.

Hayes:

I can tell you exactly if you want to know. I’m trying to recall. There was. I’m certain Karl Turekian was on. He was a very close friend of Wally Broecker’s. Jack Oliver may have been on. I may be confusing him with the second time. I don’t know. I believe Anton Hales. And if you want, I can go pull out the names.

Doel:

No. I was just curious if particular names or people came back to you; those that played a major role.

Hayes:

Those are the people that came to mind. And then you know there were some criticisms that we hadn’t updated our computer system rapidly enough. And was that the director’s responsibility. Things were in the mill to be doing that already. There was some criticism that, I was serving as the associate director at the time, there was some criticism that it was inappropriate to have an associate director of the laboratory in the same basic sub-field as the director. And what Manik had proposed to do, actually put into action, was to appoint one or two additional associate directors. Not in lieu of, but in addition to, to represent the other disciplines. Now, in fact, Wally Broecker was an associate director sort of ex officio by virtue of the fact that he was chairman of the department at that time. And the idea was to name another one. And there had been various associate directors preceding me that — I don’t believe that there were any other than MG&G, and that may have been a blind spot. It may have led to the impression that Manik had an agenda that was too narrowly focused.

Doel:

And in partiality towards MG&G.

Hayes:

And Manik responded to this visiting committees report, in which he said, yes, I agree with this, and this is the action that were taking, and this reaction were taking. And then there were some other areas to me, not so substantive, in which he said, I don’t agree. And anyway those areas in which he didn’t agree, or the manner in which he expressed his disagreement, or both, led some people to be critical of his response to that. We also had a brand new president.

Doel:

This is when Mike [Michael I.] Sovern was here.

Hayes:

That’s right.

Doel:

I just wanted to be sure. When did this review occur? Was it in the late seventies or right before the time that —?

Hayes:

I believe that the review occurred either in the spring of ‘80 or the fall of ‘79.

Doel:

That would have been right, been right about the time that Bill [William J.] McGill was leaving Columbia and Mike Sovern come in.

Hayes:

I believe in fact that in that Sovern came in in the summer of 80 I believe.

Doel:

I think that’s right.

Hayes:

I could be off a semester or something. Anyway he was brand new on the job. And, you know, after all you step into a president or any other thing, half the job is figuring out whom to listen to.

Doel:

Let me pause.

Hayes:

There was a group of approximately ten senior scientists who went to the administration expressing their concerns about the way the Observatory was being governed and led. In part, citing some of these things that I mentioned to you and to my knowledge, with the possible exception of Wally Broecker, no one had explicitly gone to Manik and complained.

Doel:

For feeling that this wasn’t a channel that would lead to productive results of that it might come back to them?

Hayes:

I don’t think they were worried about their own. It might come back on them. I think they were concerned that Manik could muster enough support and forces and stuff to counter whatever that they were challenging, and therefore —

Doel:

And hence become ineffective.

Hayes:

You know. It was done in a coup style fashion. And it came as quite a shock to everyone, and it did, in my opinion, lasting harm to this Observatory.

Doel:

You referred to them, again off tape, as the dark ages. That began at that time.

Hayes:

Yes. It was a time in which we slipped into a period of distrust here on the basis on what had happened. Because some of us saw what could happen. I think a number of the people who were instigators of this Manik’s outing, while they may have wanted the result, felt guilty about the methodology. Again, I’m speculating on that as well because I certainly was not part of that camp. I was part of the disposed coup. Manik and anything around him was. I think we all may have been somewhat guilty in — you know I say no one came to Manik. No one certainly came to me.

Doel:

Did you have an inkling that this was going on at the time?

Hayes:

No. And that’s what I was starting to say. It may have been so engaged in the other activities or lack of awareness on his part and people like myself and others around him that, you know, we have to share. They should have known perhaps. But, it was a pretty clandestine operation.

Doel:

Personally, that must have been difficult for you.

Hayes:

It was extremely difficult for me. And it came at a time, about two weeks before I was scheduled to take a eight-month long sabbatical.

Doel:

This is when you went to —

Hayes:

Stanford [University].

Doel:

Stanford. That’s right. This was your Guggenheim Fellowship if I’m remembering correctly.

Hayes:

And I really didn’t know what to do. I mean, I seriously thought of canceling out and — I mean then it was clear that when they named an interim acting director, Neil Opdyke, who I believe in part was named because he was not an explicit part of the group that had formed to take action. I think most of the people, most of the people. It’s ironic I was thinking in my head, I really don’t even remember all the names. I could probably name six or seven. But I really don’t remember. It’s not something, it’s not the names. But they were mostly seeded in the faculty.

Doel:

Walter Pitman [III] was involved. Wally Broecker.

Hayes:

Wally Broecker, Lynn Sykes, Ian Dalziel and Paul Richards to some extent. He was the newly seated chair I believe. I don’t know whether Jim [James D.] Hays was involved or not. Arnold Gordon was not involved. It was some number of order of ten. And they were basically senior professors. And [Michael] Sovern or Sovern’s appointed agent, who at that time was dean of the engineering school, maybe a vice president, I can’t remember for sure. I mean just caved. They weren’t about to fall on their sword. They didn’t even want to get involved in the mere fact that here are a small, but significant number of senior people who were unhappy and asking for his removal was enough for them. And most of this came as a shock to most of the laboratory; that this had not been discussed. And that’s why it was — it was remained covert. And it wasn’t a — I think if you’d have taken a vote of the people here at the Observatory, that you would have gotten a mixed vote but you would have gotten a vote of confidence.

Doel:

That’s very interesting.

Hayes:

That’s my opinion. Now, I’m one of the guys that didn’t see it coming. So that opinion may not be worth much.

Doel:

What were you able to do once you —? How did you first hear that the discussions had happened? Was it before the time when Manik was asked to resign?

Hayes:

No.

Doel:

Or was it right at that time?

Hayes:

It was right at that moment. I was here one morning, about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning. And I got a phone call. And I was asked to come over to Manik’s house, to his residence. Didn’t know what was going on. I went over there. I think the only other person over there from the — may have been two people. No. There were, as I recall, in addition to Manik and his wife Annie, there was Margaret Swann, who was his right hand administrative assistant. There was, I believe, Mark Langseth. Although I’m not a hundred percent, I’m almost certain there was Mark Langseth, who was a close personal friend of Manik’s.

Doel:

They’d worked together as well.

Hayes:

Yes. They worked together on the lunar project and at sea and they’d just been friends for a long time, students. And I believe Ellen Herron, who was acting as an assistant director, an assistant to the director, at that time. I believe that’s all that was there. And we went over there, and Manik told us he’d just gotten a letter from the president, or on behalf of the president, asking him to resign.

Doel:

It wasn’t delivered personally. This was via —

Hayes:

Or he may have gotten a phone call, he may have gotten this, he may have been called to the campus. This is he just announced this for the first time. And that was the first time I heard anything about it. And I remember him asking at that time if anyone of us knew anything about this. And I certainly hadn’t heard a thing. And Ellen said that she hadn’t heard anything. And Mark said he hadn’t either. But he kind of equivocated I believe that while he wasn’t an active part of it, he had some awareness. I could be wrong on that. So we’d sit there and talked about what to do. Manik said he wasn’t going to resign. That he wanted to fight this thing. But it was clear that the university had made up their mind. I mean, they were not inclined to negotiate or discuss or do anything. And Manik took some action. I think he called Walter Sullivan to make sure that the information got in the New York Times that he’d been asked to resign. And it did get in the New York Times, but, you know, it wasn’t one — some big splashy thing. I think Walter did it as a courtesy. At the same time, it’s hard to know. While Walter [Sullivan] was a good friend of Lamont and I think a good friend of Manik, he probably had a dozen good friends on the campus as well. So it was reported as a rather small, matter of fact, news item in which there was a dispute and this had happened, and blah, blah, blah. And it didn’t have the desired effect that Manik wanted.

Doel:

Manik had hoped to use it for —

Hayes:

Yes. And Manik also tried to enlist the support of various advisors. I think people like, perhaps Anton Hales and Hollis Hedberg and some other people around here. And I think they were supportive to varying degrees but it was just a foregone conclusion.

Doel:

There really were no open discussions at all on this with Columbia administration?

Hayes:

No open discussions whatsoever. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, none. I think the person’s name who came out may have been Peter Likens.

Doel:

I’ve heard that.

Hayes:

And then eventually there was a public meeting called in which Peter Likens came out and made this announcement to the staff

Doel:

To the assembled community. Was this over at Lamont Hall?

Hayes:

Yes.

Doel:

What was the reaction at that meeting? Were you there?

Hayes:

Yes. I was there, listening. I mean there was — by that time, the news was out. This was just kind of certifying its existence. It was really rather matter of fact. You know, as I recall it said that a group of senior people were unhappy, that the university was responding, and that the director served at the pleasure of the president and the trustees, and that it was viewed as a vote of no confidence, and the decision was made, and a search committee would be established, and they were going to appoint an interim director and Manik was still a professor at Columbia, but he was not going to continue as director of Lamont as of such and such which was like then or retroactive or something like this. And as I recall, there was not much give and take. It was a fairly brief meeting — An announcement kind of thing. There may have been a few questions, but it was really to come out and officially announce to this observatory what action had been taken and the justification for that action was really given very little detail, only the most general.

Doel:

Was there opposition mounted with Lamont to the administration’s decision, or did it seem too futile to try?

Hayes:

Well, this all happened in a very short period of time. From the time Manik first announced what had happened, to the time that Manik was contacted, that Manik said he wouldn’t resign, Manik was told he had to resign, and out came the people. I mean, probably in the course of less than a week. Very, very soon thereafter, Neil Opdyke was named as acting director while they established a search committee. I mean, there were a number of letters of protest written. I wrote a letter to the president. And I know Henry [C.] Kohler wrote a letter to the president. I don’t know who else. I have no way of knowing who else.

Doel:

Did you ever get a response to yours?

Hayes:

Yes, I believe I did, but it was a very perfunctory one. We appreciate your support for this, blah, blah. The decision has been carefully considered, the decision has been taken, thank you for your opinion [voice fades out].

Doel:

I wanted to know how first that affected your relationship with the people who had been involved in the coup.

Hayes:

Well, I expressed both an opinion that I thought it was a terrible action and decision, and my disgust at what I believed to be a very cowardly act. Well, you can imagine people’s reaction to that. I was persona non grata, as part of the coup. I was persona non grata squared when I expressed my opinion about what I thought was totally unscrupulous procedure. And I said if you’ve got a problem, at least do it right. And people socializing with Manik one day and next day they’re downtown talking about his ousting. That’s what, in my opinion, called permanent damage to the sense of family and trust that had been grown up here. And I don’t think we’ve ever recovered a hundred percent from it. Barry was brought in; Barry [C. Baring] Raleigh was brought in and was seen as someone who could be a peacemaker. There were factions developed within the laboratory that didn’t quite necessarily debate one another or argue, but they had different opinions. And a lot of people, even those who may have, may or may not have supported the replacement of Manik as the director were highly offended at the procedure. Not just its covertness but the absence of any discussion — The presumption that their opinion didn’t count for anything.

Doel:

It affected your relationship with Columbia as well as it did here, clearly.

Hayes:

Well, I’m talking about within this observatory.

Doel:

Just within. Yes.

Hayes:

I’m talking about within the observatory. The observatory as a whole had very little relationships and interactions with the university. Our relationship with the university and the different levels of administration and the different departments has increased a hundred fold over the last ten years. I mean Barry was responsible for starting some of that, but quite frankly I was responsible for a lot of it because I went down and I served on major committees down there. I chaired them; sat on budget committees. I did all sorts of things. I made a connection. I helped LDEO make a connection. Not single handedly, but an important contribution to it. And other people have continued to do the same thing, and I continued to do the same thing. And our relationship is now very good. So, you know, where before people didn’t even know who the provost was at the university. Now, I’ve had the provost out for dinner, and had the vice president out for dinner. Go to their house for a party. Or stuff like that. And first name, cordial basis with all the senior administrative officials on the university campus. And having served a long time as the chair with many of the professors and the chairs, you know. I sat on the budget committee for the first time there’d been a scientist on there in anyone’s recollection. And happy to have us there because they’d see we weren’t a bunch of crazies. I mean, we were just out in the field and no one ever thought about us and scientists in general were a little suspect.

Doel:

Within the Columbia structure that’s certainly so. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about — certainly that was a role that came on since 1989 or so, the official capacity, when you were department, serving as department chairman.

Hayes:

But Barry Raleigh had a good relationship with the provost. First vice president and then became the provost before I got involved there. But, I mean, for the very last few years I sort of picked up and nurtured that friendship as well.

Doel:

One thing I was curious about — how that development came about? Were you doing it concurrently with Barry Raleigh, or was it something that you felt it important that once he left, you wanted to continue.

Hayes:

Oh, I had started doing it concurrently. Not as a campaign, but I agreed to serve on various committees, and established a rapport and relationship with the provost and other senior professors on the campus in doing committee work. And then I made a special effort at it as well. We had a major change in the benefits plan at Columbia with an effort to save money because we were drawing more than we were drawing in on our fringe benefits plan. And so I wrote a couple of letter regarding positions that I thought they should and should not consider. And I wrote a long letter about how the changes — how what had been good and bad points of some of the changes that they had put into effect. Essentially what I did was that I engaged myself in the process of governance and communication at the higher levels of the university. So you know then I — it wasn’t a letter going down saying, you know, you guys are doing a crappy job. You know, it was a letter saying, you know, this is a tough thing. I realize what you’re dealing with. You know, I applaud your efforts dah, dah, dah, dah, but here are some problems that have emerged out of a years experience here. And here are some things to think about how to solve some of those problems. And it was this was just one letter that I’m speaking of now that was very well received. Received as someone who was part of the team.

Doel:

And this is the one that’s regarding fringe benefits and related problems.

Hayes:

It was, this one really having to do with Columbia’s new medical plan and that point of service business which changed things quite a lot. They established a Columbia-Presbyterian point of service connection with Oxford. And it was really — I think it was quite a good thing; they put together and thought hard about. And I think the — I have a high regard for Jonathan Cole, who I believe really does engage people in advice, and really is trying hard to serve the university in its broadest context.

Doel:

And, of course, has it been Jonathan Cole as provost that you’ve been working with most closely at Columbia?

Hayes:

No, not mostly. I mean, I became a member of the executive committee of the faculty of arts and sciences. This is a body that sort of took over the governance responsibilities on behalf of the faculty when the arts and science faculty was formally established. Before that it didn’t exist. And after serving a year, I became vice chairman and the chairman stepped down and I became chairman.

Doel:

Right. And I should note that’s in 1994 that you become chair of that. So you were on it since the very early 1990s or was it preceding?

Hayes:

Yes. I was on it. And so in that capacity, I had lots of occasion to interact with the vice president of arts and sciences, who was Martin Meisel when I initially went in. Later it was Steven Marcus and then more recently was David Cohen. And I sat on the planning and budget committee that met weekly for two or three hours, with all the deans of the schools of arts and sciences and their support staff sitting around the table. So, three or four hours of contact weekly with all these people. You get to know people. You get to interact with them, and deal with them, and as well as the executive committee deals frequently in concert with the steering committee of the chairs of the departments of arts and sciences to take positions to the administration. So I had occasion to talk, talk to all the senior administrators. And not, you know, not just the provost, but the president and the vice president of finance, and the vice president of operations or administration, and the people up in the budget office get to know you. And you can go up and walk in and say, I don’t understand your spending rule on the endowment, and they’ll sit you down and talk to you and tell you — and happy to do it. So, these are the people who — some of them are quite visible and some of them are definitely in the wings, but they are the people who make the university work.

Doel:

That’s very interesting that you became involved in this after Talwani was deposed, and when you recognized how limited contacts were on certain [cross talk].

Hayes:

Well, I certainly realized that the value of — at some point, I don’t know exactly when — the value of getting out of this adversarial role with the university. In fact, Ewing acknowledged it and almost prided himself on it. I think I told you the anecdote of him telling me if you go down the university and you need something, don’t mention my name.

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

So, at the same time, you know his interactions. He had some very good interactions down there — with [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. I told you, I believe I told you the story. He went down and he was trying to get the things established here. And Eisenhower asked him what he wanted and he told him what he wanted, and Eisenhower said, okay. That was it.

Doel:

Yes. And he had generally a good relationship with Grayson Kirk during –

Hayes:

I think so.

Doel:

I want to make sure.

Hayes:

There was a big battle over the Doherty endowment.

Doel:

Indeed; which came primarily under Andrew Cordier’s and Bill McGill’s brief terms?

Hayes:

And that was the university was very resentful that this big gift had been negotiated with fences and conditions that really kept it out of the general university income and protected it for Lamont’s benefit. They were very unhappy about that — tried to figure out ways to get around that. Ewing was very well connected with the Doherty Foundation and its administrators and they weren’t about to budge. But that created a lot of, a lot more heartburn.

Doel:

It was a monumental clash, period. One thing I want to make sure we cover — these activities and your role in the university in depth when we get a little bit closer to the present. What we haven’t covered yet is how you came to be the associate director of Lamont. Had that kind of role existed before you were appointed by Manik?

Hayes:

Yes. Mark Langseth served as an associate director for a while. John Ewing served as an associate director for a while.

Doel:

In a similar capacity to the way that you did it?

Hayes:

Yes. I actually, I sort of wore multiple hats. I served as an associate director. I also was responsible for administrative oversight for our two ships, our two large ocean going ships.

Doel:

This is at the times that still the Vema and the [Robert D.] Conrad?

Hayes:

And the Conrad was there. And Mark Langseth started out doing this soon after Manik had taken over. And Mark knew a lot about ships and was interested in, had a good rapport with all the people and all this, but he was not an effective administrator and was constantly in financial trouble, or the ships were. And then after a big mid-lift re-fit — I may have the chronology wrong — there was a half million dollar litigation that was open, and Manik asked me to step in and to take care of it as best I could. And I essentially resolved it to Columbia’s benefit [voice fades out], without having to pay anything and getting something like a hundred and sixty grand. And I had a good relationship with the people on the ships. I spent a lot of time at sea on the ships, and so I took over that responsibility, unofficially before I was ever associate director.

Doel:

How did you feel about doing that? I’m curious, particularly, how it related to the research that you were concurrently doing? Did it seem much of a burden?

Hayes:

It was a job, but it wasn’t necessarily a burden because I was spending a lot of time at sea. In many ways, it was a — it was enabling. It made my time at sea easier. It sort of provided a bit of a power base if you want to think of it that way. And so, you could also think of it as an investment, but it was an investment and an activity that I had interest in.

Doel:

How much time did it take?

Hayes:

Oh it’s hard to separate out.

Doel:

You really saw it as part of — it didn’t seem like a separate —

Hayes:

I mean I have — from fairly on in my career here, worn three hats of varying sizes and shapes. One was an administrative, one was a teaching and advisor, and one was a research. And I reflect on that from time to time, thinking well, maybe you’d been better off to concentrate on one or the other, but in fact, I liked the variety. I liked the ability to play in all three arenas and try to compete well in all three arenas simultaneously. And also it meant that it was never, it was never the slightest bit boring because you just sort of lean a little bit one way or the other and you had a whole different set of problems to look at. But I liked having lots of different things too. Not that you can’t have several research projects going in and they’re quite different, but they’re all research projects. And different sets of problems, different than teaching in the classroom and advising, and some overlap with the research certainly, but it’s a different activity. The administration’s a different activity, research mostly different.

Doel:

When you think back on those earlier years, particularly Manik’s period as director — who was your more significant graduate students? And who do you recall particularly as among those that you were training?

Hayes:

At the time Manik was director?

Doel:

I’m just thinking, even if you go back further to the earlier period when Ewing really —

Hayes:

Well there were, there were. Charlie [Charles D] Hollister and I came in together, in the middle of a gigantic blizzard in January, ‘61, — we arrived together. There were other people in place as students who had just finished up, or were just finishing up, and that included people like Mark Langseth, like Manik Talwani, like Bob [Robert] Wall, like people down in seismology, like Maury Davidson.

Doel:

I’m sorry. I was thinking particularly of your own students by that period of time.

Hayes:

Oh my own students. Early on, you see I didn’t become a professor in the department until ‘74. Okay? And I was, while I was doing some teaching. I often taught for [John] Nafe whenever he was gone. And I taught for [J. Lamar] Worzel and various other people. So I didn’t officially have graduate students that I was working with. Although I had students from outside early on that I was working with. I was one of the principal advisors to Jeff Weissel even though he was a student at the University of New South Wales. Because of the Eltanin program and the data that he worked on and all that. And he spent a year over here, and we interacted, and I was one of, you know, we published the meat of his thesis together. John Ringis was another case out at the University of New South Wales. A former employee [Rudi Marke] who got his Ph.D. from Peter Dillinger at the University of Connecticut, I was in effect, was the principal advisor. This was before I was sort of on my own. And then I established a cadre of my own graduate students in the early 70s, having to do with the SEATAR project. This is in Southeast Asia business. And I had about four or five students with me. I also brought Roger Anderson in as a post-doe on that time.

Doel:

Right. You collaborated with him.

Hayes:

And Rich [Richard] Gerard was a post-doe at that time; brought him in. We had another Japanese fellow who was here at that time, [?] Watanabi. So we had a big, very active group. And there were also, I was instrumental in bringing Roger Flood and Sandy Shor. Roger Flood from Woods Hole and Sandy Shor from Scripps out here as post-does. And there were some left overs from Heezen’s previous stable of people that I kind of inherited. People like Jed Damuth and Bob [Robert] Embley. I served on Embley’s committee [voice fades out]. There were a few others like that. Then I had this cadre of students that came in that consisted of Brian Taylor, now at the University of Hawaii. Cary Mrozowski, Steve Lewis, Kerry Hegarty. Rob [Robert] Leslie was a little bit behind them. There was a time when I had about four or five Ph.D. students that I was advising simultaneously, plus serving as a secondary advisor for others as well.

Doel:

Were they primarily on the SEATAR project, or did it cover —?

Hayes:

Yes, the four that I named to begin with, were primarily on the SEATAR project. They all got their Ph.D. thesis out of those activities.

Doel:

Out of these data that came from —?

Hayes:

Yes. That came from that. That was a project that started out with a workshop in ‘72 or 73 over in Thailand. And then I became the U.S. representative of the SEATAR committee. We had a multi-institution, about six or eight institutions involved with twenty investigators from Cornell [University] and Scripps and Hawaii and Woods Hole, and a variety of places.

Doel:

What were the main goals that you —?

Hayes:

Well, it was — there is fairly unknown —

Doel:

This is the Southeast Asian part of the —?

Hayes:

I mean, from the Sea of Japan down essentially including Indonesia and Northern Australia and from the Marianas west over to the Burma sea. And these are all small marginal seas of different tectonic origin. And we were looking at the properties and origin, and active tectonism in these regions. And we were interested in what the hydrocarbon resources might be related to them as well as other resources such as metalliferous ore deposits in the island arcs. At that time, the geostill hypothesis was still around where you essentially under thrust the oceanic crust and distill out of that by heat, various concentrations of metalliferous ore deposits, such as copper sulfides. So the acronym had to do with Southeast Asian Tectonics and Resources. And it was tied to an Asian group sponsored by UNDP [United Nations Development Program] and UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] called the CCOP, which was a coordinating committee for something, something off shore oil production. So that project went along really for about seven or eight years. It was one of the IDOE [International Decade of Ocean Exploration].

Doel:

International Decade of Ocean Exploration.

Hayes:

That’s right.

Doel:

How important was IDOE as an entity in Lamont’s —

Hayes:

I beg your pardon?

Doel:

I was just curious how important IDOE was for Lamont or for —? Thank you. You’re handing me a decal from SEATAR and IDOE and I thank you.

Hayes:

I expect you to wear that on your forehead at all times. What was your question again?

Doel:

I’m just curious how important IDOE was for Lamont or for your research in particular, and how did it affect Lamont?

Hayes:

There were a variety of projects of which Lamont got involved in some, but not all of them. I can’t name all of the projects. The Nasca plate project was one, which primarily involved Hawaii and Oregon State. There was a manganese nodule project of which Lamont was involved with some other players. It kind of went belly up and went south early on.

Doel:

Why did that not succeed?

Hayes:

I can’t really tell you. I wasn’t involved with it. It was just judged that it wasn’t up to snuff.

Doel:

It wasn’t producing the kind of —

Hayes:

It wasn’t a leading edge science project. I can’t remember if GEOSECS [?] was an IDOE program or not. I think it may have been.

Doel:

I believe it was.

Hayes:

Yes. And that was a highly successful program primarily of transect data collection. And then, I know the SEATAR project was viewed as one of the IDOE sponsored projects in geology and geophysics that was among the most successful. We came out with two volumes of our results immediately and a lot of other tangible products. And it was — we were going double time over there. And we had a good relationship with a number of our colleagues in East Asia and the Philippines and Indonesia. Japan was a big player already and to a lesser extent the Koreans, Malaysians. China wasn’t in the picture yet.

Doel:

You really had no relations with the mainland Chinese community?

Hayes:

Well, not really, although we started some programs with the Chinese in 1979. They weren’t part of the CCOP group until later on. Taiwan was represented, and of course, that brought a big conflict with China, and when the UN [United Nations] admitted China. And all these UN sponsored activities had to resolve the conflict between the PRC [Program Review Committee] and Nationalist China.

Doel:

— ever involved you on a working level, these kinds of political difficulties that played themselves out over the late 70s, early 80s as recognition formally shifted from Taiwan to mainland China.

Hayes:

Yes, it did. Because eventually, a lot of the things that we did over there in Southeast Asia were done under the auspices of CCOP because you couldn’t do them through the blessing of the State Department because most of the area we wanted to do research was in territorial disputes so the State Department wouldn’t even get involved. You had to have some sort of umbrella of endorsement, and so we went to CCOP and convinced them it was a CCOP project. And therefore it was in their best interest, and they gave it their blessing. Although we never knew what that meant, if a gunship came up alongside we had no official clearance, but we did a lot of stuff. In the old days we didn’t have any clearances. In 1979 we sailed up the Pearl River to Guangzhou to sign a protocol agreement with cooperation’s with the Chinese in the South China Sea. That ‘79 was very early. The only delegates that were going to China at that time were official delegations of scientists or State Department people, federal agency people. So we started on with them early on and developed that project over a long time. But in answer to your question, you know, we trained many students who are back in Taiwan now before hand and who are now professors and want to collaborate and all this sort of thing. And it did manifest itself in a problem of conflict. That you couldn’t play in both playgrounds. In fact, essentially Taiwan was ultimately excluded, and they’ve just recognized the PRC. So that was difficult. We established our own relationships with the high people in scientific quarters in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia and the Philippines. Eventually at these meetings we were talking to the number one geoscientist, the head of the Bureau of Mines and Resources, or, you know, sometimes higher than that — Head of the science, the Ministry of Science, or whatever it might be in that particular country.

Doel:

How much were you — was this a personal role that you were playing? How involved did you become in those kinds of negotiations?

Hayes:

I was very, very involved. I’ve got a few examples outside I put together over a number of years. I coordinated the proposals from all these ten institutions and wrote all the forward stuff that tied them together and went before the various blue ribbon committees to argue the merit of each of these components of the programs as well as the program itself. I served as chair of the SEATAR steering committee for, I think, its entire existence. Steering committee of about six or eight people, and I chaired it. I did that for all that time. And out of that Lamont was getting, oh quite a while ago, but it was typically of the order of a million dollars a year out of it to do various pieces of science plus ship time. And we were a major player, and I think maybe the other players collectively were getting of the order of a million or a little more. So we were getting like forty or fifty percent of the whole pie. But we were doing at least that much of the work.

Doel:

Clearly it was a major undertaking.

Hayes:

Yes. It was a major task. And, you know, we started off early on, fairly early on in the project, in doing the geophysical data synthesis over there. So, you know, some people are critical of doing data synthesis. They say it’s not science. But really, in fact, if you do it, it’s the first thing you have to do to define the science problems. And it’s — once you do that, you know, you just got a proposal machine is what you’ve got. And you got all the data collected. You can point to exactly where the interesting problems and anomalies and where the data are and what you need to do. It’s a vehicle. It’s not the end; it’s the beginning.

Doel:

Given that that was such a tradition at Lamont, when you say that there were critics, were those primarily outside Lamont? Or were there some even within?

Hayes:

Oh I think it’s just critics in general who will say, you know, these synthesis projects are useful and they’re nice, but they’re not really, they’re not really science. First of all, I don’t agree with that. I think they have scientific value in their own right because it takes a lot of critical scientific evaluation to make these things and to get a product that incorporates all the useful data you can and to get the maximum out of it and to do it in a comprehensive fashion and to make it available to other people. But in the process of doing that, you have to look at data in order to see where the problems are. And it’s impossible to make a proposal without demonstrating an awareness of the existence of data and its relevance to your problems. That’s why I say doing this is a virtual proposal machine.

Doel:

Do you feel that other institutions were slower to pick up on the value of this approach?

Hayes:

Of this approach?

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

Well. No. I would say not in quite as comprehensive a fashion. It was done. Scripps had an effort something like this in the Indian Ocean; a few people over there, Bob [Robert] Fisher and John Sclater.

Doel:

Are you thinking of the follow up on the IGY [International Geophysical Year], the Indian Ocean work done in the sixties?

Hayes:

Yes. Yes. They collaborated with some people in France. Roland Schlich and others. People who had data over there. And some people from South Africa. And we contributed our data. So there was that. There was a major synthesis done up in the Norwegian Sea. Looks like a big area, very comprehensive, of great interest to the Navy. But it’s a small, relatively small piece of real estate when you look at it on the globe. That was done. There were other people who did synthesis of certain areas. When I did my Ph.D., in a sense I kind of set the stage because I was one of the first Ph.D.s to come out of here that really dealt with all kinds of data. I studied really the properties and variations trying to get at the processes that formed the Peru-Chile trench, which went almost from Panama down to Tierro del Fuego. And a huge area, but I was looking at all sorts of data.

Doel:

Indeed — the magnetics data, the gravity data.

Hayes:

The gravity data, the sediment data, the seismological data, the geological data on shore, the earthquake seismology. All that sort of stuff So my thesis, while I don’t think it was of monumental importance in the overall scheme of things, it did kind of set a new trend in terms of looking at something in a multi-disciplinary way. And I got some good feedback from that. It was published in its entirety.

Doel:

That was in JGR [Journal of Geophysical Research]?

Hayes:

Marine Geology.

Doel:

Marine Geology.

Hayes:

And then I got really sort of involved, heavily involved, in several projects mostly dealing with magnetics. I got involved with Jim [James R.] Heirtzler; Actually I led that thing and Jim was kind of a tag along. But I got involved in a really collaborative way with Walter Pitman on a couple projects too. I got some interest in the Antarctic and the whole business with Jeff Weissel and stuff that was coming out of the Eltanin. And I had a lot of interest in the, seems that I had major geographic areas of interest that keep coming back too. Northwest Africa was one. Southeast Asia was one. Australia, New Zealand was one. Circum Antarctic was one.

Doel:

I noted your publication patterns seem to move from one area to another over time.

Hayes:

Yes, it sort of did. It’s — in the case of the SEATAR project, it was a matter of opportunity. It was an opportunity for a major project that sprung out of an international workshop in Bangkok. The thing on Northwest Africa really came in part with my involvement early on in the ocean drilling project, and a long standing interest in really where the boundary was between the North Atlantic plate and the South Atlantic plate in the reconstruction of Africa and South America. I also did a study with Maurice Ewing on the North Brazilian ridge. It was, I thought, a fairly comprehensive study that involved looking at the existence and morphology of this ridge and difference in the sedimentology and how it serves as a continuous barrier and how it was affected by the deep water flows and physical oceanography and bottom topography and seismology and glacial history.

Doel:

It was following the same pattern on the integrating across the disciplines.

Hayes:

Yes. Different, a different bunch of tools or perspective, but really was trying to look at the problem in a pretty comprehensive way. I mean not all of my studies have been like that, but a number of have been.

Doel:

That was after, not long after, your thesis.

Hayes:

Yes. That was early on. That was published. I forget was that published in the sea? No, that was the Pacific boundary structure paper. I can’t remember where that was published.

Doel:

We can check on that and make a note in the transcript.

Hayes:

Anyway, I think that was done in about ‘68 or something like that. And I had a chance then to take the ship down after I had outlined what the problem was. Now what’s the problem? I said, looks like it means more ship time.

Doel:

You found it an effective way of gaining time to continue work on problems you were identifying.

Hayes:

I’m not quite sure what you —

Doel:

Using the — by pulling in large amounts of data to identify the anomalies, the problems, that then that not only became effective for grant writing but for gaining access to ship time, other resources.

Hayes:

Oh yes. That’s true. If you’ve got a good problem and you can convince people it needs solving, then you get access to the facilities to do it.

Doel:

How important were the new technologies, say computers, to synthesizing these data? Was it still primarily being done by hand, hand plotting?

Hayes:

You know, it was and it wasn’t very effective. And once you had a paper copy what did you do with it? You see, once you took a large fraction of your data in digital form, you could look at it upside down, right side up and different projects and reconstruction, and you could do all sorts of things. In fact, I’m still pressing hard now to push for everything we do as getting in some digital format. Because just making a pretty map to go on the wall or draw lines on it is one thing, but having a digital file that represents it is a whole different ball game.

Doel:

Yes. When did that transition begin to increasingly digitize?

Hayes:

Well. We did digitize all our underway data from the early sixties. And I’m not talking marine seismics. Gravity, magnetics, and bathymetry and heat flow and sonobuoy stuff, all lined up in a digital format from the early sixties. We led the charge on that. Eventually the software that was developed here by a whole variety of people, mostly students, led largely by Manik, but with a lot of players like [Xavier] Le Pichon, [Walter C.] Pitman [III], [Ellen] Herron, Troy Holcomb, myself and others. We developed a whole family of software that then became the tools that eventually defined the protocol for dealing with this data. And eventually it got adopted and refined and approved. And then it was probably, oh I would guess it was more toward early to middle 80s when the idea of putting this date in a geographical information system.

Doel:

The GIS [Geographical Information Systems].

Hayes:

Before it was called that.

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

Okay? But that’s why we were able to look at so much data and do so much with it in the mid to late 60s when we demonstrating that Eltanin-19 wasn’t the only profile in the world. And there were magnetic bights and we could get time scales and look at various ocean ridges. It was our ability to manipulate data on the computer. It started out with IBM 1620 and punched cards. And then we graduated to the IBM 1800 and then the IBM 1120. We were the first people to put our computers on ships and start processing data on ships.

Doel:

That’s interesting. How helpful did that prove to be to have the capacity on board ship?

Hayes:

It proved to be extremely helpful. Typically before, we’d bring the data back and it would be digitized back here and there were a few months lag time if there was someone really working on it hard to get a preliminary data reduction. This was not the first time we had a computer on board the ship, we started having computers on the ship in 60s, mid to late 60s to process data. By 1970, I took the system down to put it on the Eltanin, and we did a fifteen or twenty day cruise between New Zealand and Australia, and when we walked off the ship, every bit of the data was processed in final form, just like you would do it six months later on the beach.

Doel:

I imagine the immediacy of it, being able to tackle that.

Hayes:

You did it on a daily basis. You worked on it on a daily basis. And it actually it did have the potential, although at that time wasn’t fully realized, to significantly alter the way in which you used your ship time.

Doel:

I was just curious about that, When did that begin to happen that the analysis and the real time actually allowed for [cross talk].

Hayes:

I think that mostly happened probably in the early 80s, when we started having swath-mapping bathymetry. Where you were getting images in near real time or detailed bathymetry, and you could really see that there was something interesting in a close enough to real time that you could alter your survey patterns, in order to take advantage of that.

Doel:

Yes. The software that you were developing, Manik and others were there either commercial applications, or did other labs pick up on it once you…

Hayes:

Other labs picked up on it. We published technical reports. Started out as the Lamont Blue Book, data processing became the Lamont Brown Book. These are essentially Fortran programs with the codes all there and examples. It was software that plotted reduced profiles or it plotted numbers on maps at different projections or projected different things along tracks. It computed different models of the gravitational or magnetic effects of forward models that allowed you to plot anomalies along tracks on the map so you could draw lines and correlate. The whole suite of programs, a basic set of programs, and a lot of subroutines that you called on as needed.

Doel:

Did anyone feel proprietary about them? Or was there any resentment about sharing that in the broader community?

Hayes:

No. Not really. Actually, if it were happening in today’s environment, there would be a very different approach to it. There’s no question about it. There would be propriety in the sense of value and a sense of recovering the R&D efforts that went into it. But not then, basically, it was here’s something we’ve done. Here’s something we’re using. It ought to be available. Get it out and get everyone using it. It’ll become the de facto standard.

Doel:

I was just thinking about whether that did in fact occur. That it became standard.

Hayes:

It did. It certainly did. And it served as a standard for virtually every institution for many, many years and as well for NGDC [National Geological Data Center]. And then gradually we pulled away from the programming efforts and things started getting defined and the GIS concept started grabbing hold. But there was a major development here by [Paul] Wessel and [Walter] Smith. He’s a student here, very bright guy. Anyway they took and developed a whole other generation of software that has in fact likely been adopted by most places.

Doel:

And this is now within the GIS format?

Hayes:

Yes. [?] Menke was instrumental too here in that second phase.

Doel:

Walter Smith. Thank you.

Hayes:

They developed this — what was called a GMP system, Generic Mapping Tools. And so it was whole bunch of generic software that allowed you to take and manipulate data of different kinds. Take and plot everything you wanted in a certain area, at a certain scale. The approach became much more generic.

Doel:

Were there any tools or resources that you really wished you had more of in this period of time that you didn’t?

Hayes:

Well. We spent many, many ship years cruising around, taking single-channel seismic data, and analog data. And while it proved to be an extremely valuable data set, it’s really unfortunate that at that time we didn’t have some better ability to measure the velocity properties of the sediments so that we could really interpret more quantitatively what the meaning of these profiler records were. We call them profiler records.

Doel:

And this is what you were able to address once you had the multi-channel capabilities?

Hayes:

Yes. But the multi-channel process is many, many times more elaborate and costly and expensive to court.

Doel:

As you say, it attracted some interest at least from the petroleum firms or others interested in resources.

Hayes:

Well, even the other data that we had did as well. Yes because we had regional reconnaissance data from all over the world. They didn’t have that data so they didn’t have a clue what was anywhere. You know, they didn’t know if there was a sedimentary basin there or what was there. So they were very interested in our data, and we still get requests from time to time to look at this old data in places where they don’t have access to any data. Or new, they’re thinking about. It still has value. But we collected so much of it, it would have been nice if we had velocities — the only way that we had to get information about the velocity of the materials that we were profiling, was through the use of sonobuoys deployed discreetly every few kilometers. And that approach still averaged the properties and didn’t give much detailed info on the upper most layers. This may not seem like something so significant — but to my knowledge, we’re the only institution that routinely collected samples. Cores, bottom photographs, bottom dredges, nephelometer measurements, heat flow measurements, all this sort of stuff. And for years and years and years, we collected these data; sometimes for a specific project. Sometimes just as a reconnaissance sampling. And we operated the ship with two wires over the side at one time, separated on the surface of the ship by probably not more than about thirty or forty feet in three or four thousand fathoms of water. And we paid attention. We rarely lost any equipment. So essentially you were getting twice the measurements, or measurements in half the time. So a core would go down, and it might have a nephelometer in the core and a camera in the core and heat probes on the outside, and then you took the piston core, and took the trigger core. And you had a nephelometer over here that you lowered. And you had heat probes on it. And you had a camera, bottom camera on it. We could take a two wire station, from stop of the ship, equipment over the side, to everything back on ready to go, in two hours.

Doel:

I had the impression that Lamont was able to pioneer that development ahead of other ocean going facilities.

Hayes:

I don’t think anyone ever really did it routinely. They may not have done it at all. I mean, they just weren’t, the idea of having two wires over the side was not commonplace.

Doel:

And not have them entangled.

Hayes:

And not losing your equipment, it was just an operational protocol that no one was willing to engage in routinely. And it’s something we grew up with when we went out to sea. Joe [J. Lamar] Worzel wrote up a protocol of the dos and don’ts of two wire operation. If you came back with just a core, he said, what the hell were you doing with the other wire. The winch broken or what was wrong?

Doel:

This is raising a number of very interesting points. Was there a time that management issue in the sense of multiple instruments on the single wire? Or was it more a mechanical one of just determining ways in which all the particular instruments would trip at the right moments when one took these —

Hayes:

No, I think it was more time management. I think it was a matter of getting the maximum amount of data, whether it was station data or underway data that you could. So that every time you went out, if you had to do a marine seismic survey, you towed the magnetometer, you had the gravimeter going, you were catching water samples, you were doing meteorological data, and you were doing everything.

Doel:

Right.

Hayes:

You had a ship there, you’re paying for it, get the most you can. You stopped to take a station, collect all the goodies you can and do it simultaneously.

Doel:

Clearly that was the operational philosophy that had immense implications for Lamont. I was curious if there was anything particular in putting so many instruments on a single wire? Were there any technological bottlenecks that were involved, or were it simply?

Hayes:

Sure. If you put a bottom camera over the side for instance and you lower it and trigger that camera just before you hit the bottom, you can have some control over how far the camera lens is from the sea floor and have some assurance that you get reasonably good pictures. And you drift and you take several “hits,” if you’ve got the camera in the core head, the core enters the sea floor determined by the weight and the accuracy; the agility of the winch operator, and what the sea floor’s made out of. And you might penetrate, you might have variable number of pipes on the core, depending upon what you expect to find. And you might penetrate two or three meters, or you might penetrate six or seven meters. And if the core head is fixed up here with the camera, you get quite a different picture. You might not get anything but muddy water and also the business with the nephelometer. You know, the nephelometer was really to look at suspended particles in the water column. It was a light shining through a calibrated, transparent diaphragm and received on another camera. And to get the idea of how that particle —

Doel:

Distribution changed over.

Hayes:

— density changed over as a function of depth. And the business of putting it on the, on the core head meant that, you know, the dynamics of the water flowing through were different so you couldn’t necessarily compare the two, one from here and one from here. And you couldn’t look at the down record with the up record because you might have mud coming streaming off of the corer itself. Heat flow depended very much on what the penetration and nature of the bottom was. And you typically had four thermo probes strapped on as outriggers, with the fifth one in the instrument giving the bottom water temperature. And depending upon how well you guessed about what kind of penetration; that would determine where you put your probes and how many probes you got in the bottom and how well you could determine the thermal gradients, and whether or not they were linear or non-linear. And that said something about whether you had conductive heat flow or percolating water through the sediments. It’s a long time. I’m talking about this stuff for a long time. [Laughter]

Doel:

Its fun too, isn’t it?

Hayes:

Oh yes. It’s fun to reminisce about — We had a long cruise from Hawaii to Panama and we had a bad winch failure just outside of Panama. And we lost three thousand meters of wire, and we lost our only heat flow instrument. And Angelo Ludas came out and fixed the winch and put on new wiring and all that, but we didn’t have another heat flow instrument so we sailed off. And our main heat flow target was over at the far end of the cruise, near Panama. And in the course of that time we fabricated out of random parts, on board the ship, a heat flow instrument. This heat flow instrument looked like the heat flow instrument from hell. It was made out of old air gun chambers and all the optics and stuff were stolen from a variety of things. But we used it over when we got to our target. And we got some measurements that weren’t very precise but they allowed us to determine whether the basins that we were looking at there were normal, abnormally high, or abnormally low. It was just the thing to do. Well, we thought we’ve got twenty days to get there, let’s see what we can do. The thing weighed about three hundred pounds. It took two men and a boy to lift it up. The normal one weighed about twenty-five or thirty pounds. [Laughter]

Doel:

Indeed.

Hayes:

I’ve often wondered what happened to that piece of machinery that we put together.

Doel:

Was there any piece of equipment that you were using routinely in those days that was so expensive that the loss of it really affected the research program? Or could you fabricate and produce enough of these instruments?

Hayes:

Until we got into the multi-channel seismic business, there was really nothing that we had in the water that if lost, was so catastrophic. I would say probably that the potential for the biggest loss was the loss of the deep sea trawling winch wire, which could occasionally happen.

Doel:

When you mentioned a moment ago the three thousand —

Hayes:

Yes. We had to cut it actually. We were anchored. We had the thing on the bottom and all the planetary gears in the winch were all ground up and. And we couldn’t go anywhere. And we couldn’t put any tension on the winch. We couldn’t pull out. We didn’t have anything else to pull it, and we had to cut the wire. Let it go.

Doel:

Must have been terribly frustrating.

Hayes:

Yes. I was feeling a little nervous since it was my first time and only my second leg as a chief scientist. But the people, Joe Worzel and Doc [Ewing] and everyone else, knew there was no alternative, but it didn’t make you feel any better. The other expensive equipment we had was the gravimeter, but that was within the ship. But because it was expensive, very few other institutions had them, or routinely operated them. It was also a very delicate, again needing a lot of care and feeding. Then when we put the MCS [?] system, the long streamers that we put in, when they went from two or three hundred meters, to two or three kilometers, then that could start to look like a half million dollars of equipment in the water. And we lost a few. Not very many over the years, but we did lose some.

Doel:

It’s inevitable in that —

Hayes:

The other equipment that we had in the water. You know, it wasn’t that they were throwaways, expendables, but they were the kinds of things that cost a few tens of thousands of dollars. The magnetometer you could replace for ten or fifteen thousand dollars. Less for just a part in the water. Single-channel seismic streamer you could probably replace for a few thousand dollars as you could an air gun.

Doel:

At this time as you’re thinking about it, how many of these were commercially manufactured instruments and how many were still coming out of the Lamont shop?

Hayes:

At what time? In the early 60s, they were all coming out of Lamont.

Doel:

They were all coming out of Lamont.

Hayes:

And then, I would say by the early 70s, the magnetometers were off the shelf items from varying or other places at a relatively modest cost. The gravimeters were always manufactured commercially by a couple of manufacturers, LaCoste/Askania. The streamers we originally, we built a lot of those ourselves. We bought the components and built them. The air guns were designed and built out of here, and then eventually. I can’t remember the details, but eventually one of the two air guns that came out of here resulted in the commercial Bolt air gun.

Doel:

Bolt, yes.

Hayes:

[Bruce] Bolt air gun which made a pile of money. But we originally made those ourselves in house. The heat flow instruments were made in house. They became devices that acoustically telemetered the data back to the surface. So when it became apparent that heat flow was quite variable in certain parts of the ocean, especially near the mid-ocean ridge, you couldn’t lower — take a single value, and presume that was a regional value. As you went around, you saw the heat flow was highly variable and that was because it was presumed that there was hydrothermal circulation. So they made a probe that they could lower and drift and lower and drift and lower and drift, and get maybe twenty-five or thirty or forty measurements, with only one lowering of the wire, which itself takes a long time. And they devised electronics so it could telemeter the information about the temperature profiles back to the ship to be received. So if everything was flat and nothing, nothing changed, you moved on to some places more interesting; maybe without ever pulling the instrument up much. Just hovering it above the bottom and moving slowly to someplace else.

Doel:

Again, figuring ways to be efficient in the limited ship time available.

Hayes:

Yes. That’s right. And when we left port, as soon as we got out of the traffic way, the watches started, the equipment went in the water, and things were turned on and they were kept on until you got back to that same spot in another port. I would say it was unusual on a thirty day port to port cruise to have, from the time you tied up to the time you untied, to have, it would be very unusual to have six hours when you didn’t have any data, total.

Doel:

That puts it in perspective. When you look back to your time under Manik Talwani as associate director, were the major challenges administrative or did they also involve policy, setting policy?

Hayes:

It was a little bit of both. But at that stage it seemed to be managerial and operational primarily. The ships, oversight on the ships consumed a fairly large amount of time. You asked me how much before. I don’t remember. But it could have — it wasn’t the same kind of thing we have now where the communications are such that you can be involved on a day to day basis. It was kind of — you had communications, but they were limited, and then you dealt with problems that accrued over a month, month to month, and longer term problems. Funding of the ship was always of concern.

Doel:

Did that begin to change during your time as associate director?

Hayes:

What?

Doel:

The way in which funding for the ships was obtained.

Hayes:

Well, originally we used to get an omnibus grant from NSF [National Science Foundation]. It was of the order of half a million dollars. It supported the Vema and all the science that we did on it for a year.

Doel:

Things changed remarkably.

Hayes:

People started crying foul. The question was the business of the funding of the ships. What happened, the UNOLS [University National Oceanography Laboratory System] organization came into existence. And that started setting some uniform reporting standards for pricing out the vessel, utilization of the vessel. And that in some ways, I think, it made it easier although we always tended to operate ships on the cheapo end. And that’s because we tended to operate them year round, which meant you took your total cost, divided it by the total number of days, which was all you could get, and ended up with a small number. Everyone else might have the same cost, but if they operated fifty, sixty or a hundred days less, their daily costs were higher.

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

So we were known as workhorses, our ships, and that’s why they accrued over a million miles each.

Doel:

I heard there was one time when the Vema came ready to sail a bit earlier than intended and it was ready on December 24th, and Ewing made the decision it would go out then rather than wait until after Christmas.

Hayes:

Oh, doesn’t surprise me a bit. I mean, first of all, that may sound like a harsh thing. But if you’re a sailor or you’re a scientist away from home, the best place to be at Christmastime is at sea, if you’re not at home. I mean, it’s like -–

Doel:

It’s a close community.

Hayes:

There is a family at sea, and you celebrate the holiday at sea, and you do this, that or the other. Or you’re sitting in a corner in some bar, feeling sad for yourself. So being at sea at Christmastime is much better than being away from home in some port at Christmastime, in general.

Doel:

I believe this was an occasion where it was actually leaving from Piermont [NY].

Hayes:

Oh, well. [Laughter] That’s a different story. I remember that one. I remember after about a thirty-five day cruise once pulling into Jamaica, and Ewing deciding — we were pulling in fairly late. Normally you arrive in the morning. We were pulling in the early afternoon or something like that. And Ewing decided he wanted to take a core in the harbor of Kingston Bay. And everyone moaned and groaned, and the Calypso music’s off in the distance, and we’d been to sea for a long time on a tough leg. And we took the core and we had difficulties and all that. And anyway by the time we got everything in and on, all the customs officials and everyone else had left, and we had to spend the night on the ship, an additional night on the ship, within swimming distance of the shore, and all the bars and the activities and the ladies of the night, and everything else. And people were pretty unhappy about that.

Doel:

I can imagine. I’m wondering what it was like for you when, at the time that Manik Talwani was deposed, your own position was effectively eliminated or changed at the same time?

Hayes:

Yes. Essentially I had arranged that I was going off on sabbatical. But I had an arrangement with Manik that I would continue to maintain contact and oversight and I’d come back a bit. And through communications I’d deal with the responsibilities of the ship as associate director. That was fine with him. And ultimately when it was clear that no one wanted to have anything to do with Manik or anyone who had anything to do with Manik, you know, was suspect. Plus, I was fairly vocal about my disdain for not only what happened but the way in which it happened. I wasn’t exactly one to be embraced and trusted and few wanted me in a position of responsibility. So after a while, I don’t know a couple of months or maybe, I decided to go ahead and take my sabbatical. After a month or six weeks, something like that, I got a letter from [Neil D.] Opdyke saying that they wanted me to step down as associate director. And I wrote back and I said, well, I’m not there anyway. I had a commitment to come out here in which it carried a small stipend for doing this. My term goes to the first of July. And I think the institution should honor that financial commitment, and let me serve out the term officially even though I’m not going to be here, and you can do whatever the hell you want.

Doel:

Is that what happened?

Hayes:

Opdyke thought about that for a while, and eventually, I think, reluctantly agreed. It did happen. I don’t think it happened very graciously. So, then I came back late ‘81 and [C. Baring] Raleigh was here and as I said, it’s sort of a time of healing, and by late ‘83 he wasn’t happy with what was happening with the ships or with the MG&G activities, and he asked me to step back in and take a role as associate director in both arenas after a couple of years’ absence.

Doel:

How did you feel about coming back to it?

Hayes:

Well, I was happy to get back in the action. I felt Manik had been wrongly treated, and I felt I had been too. And I resented the fact that the two were seen as one thing, complete.

Doel:

You were saying, just as — That you didn’t want to have the burden of the guilt of association.

Hayes:

Well, not automatically.

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

I mean, if it was justified, okay. But I wanted my own hearing, you know. But then Manik didn’t get any hearing either.

Doel:

Yes.

Hayes:

So why should I expect one.

Doel:

How — was that a time when you were considering other offers from other places?

Hayes:

Right at that particular time I was not. I had before and I did after. Can we just pause a moment.

Doel:

Let’s pause.

Hayes:

Are we getting anywhere?

Doel:

We sure are. We’re resuming after a quick break. And we were talking in particular about your taking the associate directorship on again, under Barry Raleigh’s? Did your tasks change at that point, or did they — was it pretty much the same job that had existed?

Hayes:

It was, by that time, Barry Raleigh had established, which had not existed before, four divisions: Geochemistry, marine geology and geophysics, seismology and tectonics, and oceans and climate division. Each -–

Doel:

The oceans and climate was the newest member in some sense of Lamont?

Hayes:

No. There weren’t any divisions really before. There was — geochemistry sort of had an identity de facto and MG&G had been the stalwart disciplinary reflection of the observatory. But they split these up so that they had some administrative identity and some administrative support and some administrative oversight in the form of associate directors. So there became four associate directors, for correspondingly for these four divisions. There also had been for a long time an associate director for the marine affairs, the ships. And Mark [Marcus] Langseth had been serving in that capacity again. And that office was once again in financial straits. And so I was asked to come in and to wear both hats.

Doel:

How much time did that come to take? Did you notice that it was drawing from your research by that point?

Hayes:

Oh yes. It definitely draws from your research time. But I don’t know. It depends very much upon what kind of quality and number of support personnel you have access to. How much you’re willing to delegate. I delegate a lot in the ship affairs thing. I try to stay completely out of the day to day operations and deal with big problems and policy issues. So, I arm wrestle with the feds about funding — that sort of stuff. But that didn’t take too much time most of the time. And it took a fair amount of time when we acquired the new ship and we had to re-fit that. That took a major investment. And that’s the time where you can really see a drop in the research productivity. The rest of the time I seem to be producing what I thought were significant papers at the rate of about three or four or five per year, which is about what people who were doing full-time research were doing.

Doel:

Often there seems to be a point at which one is not going to produce more research. Some people do find that they can produce more with more time.

Hayes:

I don’t know. I don’t know what determines a steady state level of productivity. But here a standard exists of about three or four papers a year, and if you fall much below that, people ask what you’re doing. And so, if you can do that, with a fraction of your time and still sort of maintain and compete, you’re doing well. And your teaching and your research. And the research and the teaching, as I said, are not totally independent. I feel there’s a lot of teaching and guidance and mentoring gets done outside of the classroom. A lot more time is spent on that than class work. Our classroom teaching loads are very light.

Doel:

And these are the upper division?

Hayes:

These are graduates.

Doel:

Graduate seminars.

Hayes:

Some of them are, the lower level graduate courses are also available to qualified seniors in the [Columbia] College. And the upper classes are available only to the graduate students.

Doel:

Which did you find to be the most rewarding classes that you taught at Columbia?

Hayes:

That’s an interesting question. I really only taught about three or four different classes. It’s not so much the class that you’re teaching.