Joe Klotsche—Chancellor of the 1960s

Guest post by Daniel Bauman

Johannes (“Joe”) Martin Klotsche came to Milwaukee in 1931 to teach at the Wisconsin State Teachers College, a college of 1,700 students on what is now UW-Milwaukee’s (UWM) campus. He stayed until 1978. For a 27-year run, 1946 to 1973, he served as the highest-ranking administrator through name changes and mergers, as President, Provost, and then Chancellor. UWM formed in 1956 with Klotsche as Provost, but it wasn’t until 1965 that Provost Klotsche became Chancellor Klotsche. He served as Chancellor until 1973. As leader he guided UWM through the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s as a pragmatic administrator focused on the creation of a major urban university.

Klotsche in the 1960s was at the helm of a rapidly expanding, but adolescent, university, with all the administrative challenges one would expect: new schools and their respective new buildings, more students and more resources needed, an expanding and increasingly newer faculty, a changing of reporting structure, a Board of Regents to work through, and yes, the larger issues of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, the University sent Klotsche to Brazil for 18 months in ‘67 and ’68, which didn’t calm things.

When UWM was established in 1956, there were 6,177 students. By 1962, there were 9,354 students.[1] Upon Klotsche’s retirement as Chancellor in 1973, UWM had over 23,000 students.[2] UWM experienced expansive growth in the 1960s, but it was not alone. In 1981, Klotsche sat down for an interview and recalled “the 1960s were the golden years as far as higher education in America was concerned…. Anything you asked for you got, and the timing for UWM could not have been any better.”[3] Klotsche had a vision of an urban university, that would evolve into a major urban university. Overseeing UWM in an inherent growth period, he focused on harnessing that growth into evolution. The outcome of this growth was not just a larger UWM, but a newer type of institution.

Klotsche required the right UW leadership in Madison for this development. He had this in Fred Harrington, President of the University of Wisconsin from 1962-1970. As Vice President from 1958 to 1962, Harrington was already supporting the Milwaukee campus with funding and before the Board of Regents.[4] Harrington believed in promoting the growth of the Milwaukee campus and in 1963 worked with Klotsche to draft the ‘25 points,’ which proposed major university status for UWM. The Board of Regents adopted this vision and set the stage for development of professional and graduate programs independent of the Madison campus. From 1962-1966, UWM received approval for Schools of Fine Arts, Business Administration, Applied Science & Engineering, Social Welfare, Library & Information Science and Architecture. When UWM was formed, only a College of Letters & Science and a School of Education existed.[5]

Joe Klotsche regarded Fred Harrington as instrumental in UWM’s growth, even if Harrington didn’t make Klotsche’s life any easier. In 1981, Klotsche remembered a controlling Harrington: “Harrington’s desire to tighten things up was to get things moving, to get the show on the road.” Klotsche viewed this control as being a catalyst itself for the creation of a stronger sense of faculty governance in UWM: “a lot of things that happened that made the control quite offensive to many of the faculty members here on the campus. There was a deluge of new faculty members coming to UWM….and the new group cared less about the Madison tradition.”[6]

Klotsche’s trip to Brazil in 1967 exacerbated faculty frustration. When it was decided that Klotsche would go on assignment in Brazil, and remain Chancellor, faculty were not consulted about the absence of their top leader from campus. The fact that the Vice Chancellor, Charles Vevier, was formerly Harrington’s Special Assistant, seen as ‘his man’, didn’t help either. Pressure from the faculty would ultimately lead to Harrington traveling to Brazil in 1967 to meet with Klotsche and agree to first re-assign Vevier and fire him upon Klotsche’s return to campus in 1968. Klotsche cited this episode as a positive and necessary step for the University in forming a stronger faculty governance. He viewed a strong faculty as necessary for the sake of a strong university.[7]

In the late 1960s, UWM was teeming with new buildings, new faculty, more students, and now its own Chancellor who was on campus one day and in Brazil the next, when it confronted the social and political realities of the times.

The protests around the Vietnam War on campus had a profound impact on Klotsche, even though he and others characterized UWM’s situation as more passive than other campuses. Klotsche recalled that the events “commanded more and more of my attention and presented me with the most difficult problems in all of my years as Chancellor.”[8] Klotsche was supportive of the students’ right to protest and quietly was very much opposed to the war himself. However, he was an administrator that needed to follow the Board of Regents and guide his institution through.

He was troubled by the events because they tore at the fabric of the university ideal. The division of faculty and students, the destruction of campus, the disruption of the activities of the classroom, all bothered Klotsche. He devoted many pages in his Confessions of an Educator to discussing his decision-making around events that constitute 3 years out of a lengthy 47-year career: the Dow Chemical and CIA interviews (1967), the protesting of ROTC (‘69), the S.I. Hayakawa lecture (‘70) and his decision not to close campus during the May 1970 strike.[9] Coming out of the strike, the University charged several faculty members, leading to a handful of terminations, suspensions and reprimands. In short, “those were tough years, those were really tough years.”[10]

The other major context during this time, the Civil Rights Movement, highlighted where Klotsche and UWM fell short of their urban university ideal. In the late 1960s, when students and communities of color in Milwaukee started to push the administration, there were almost no minorities on campus,[11] let alone support for students of color. Klotsche suggested that, to some extent, the University had identified these issues and was working on them before students and communities demanded changes. The most notable institutional change was the appointment of Ernest Spaights as Special Assistant to Klotsche, creating the Experimental Program for Higher Education (EPHE) in 1967, charged with “recruiting underrepresented disadvantaged students, along with personnel to support their efforts.”[12]

Black demands for access and recognition would ultimately lay the groundwork for greater inclusion for Latinos and Native Americans. In the late 60s, student demands, mainly those of the United Black Student Front (UBSF), conceptualized a Center for African American Culture. In 1971 this became the Department of Afro-American Studies in the College of Letters and Science.[13] Klotsche wrote in his Confessions that “universities were slow to realize that the problems blacks and other minorities encountered were the result of a university conditioned by white, middle-class values.”[14] The urban university was in fact not immune to the larger societal issues impeding racial equity. And, perhaps neither was Klotsche, having been a part of that environment for decades. Nonetheless, the doors had opened for change.

UWM’s encounter with both anti-war activities and issues of civil rights showed University connection to the larger community, and the latter showed where the urban mission had blind spots. Neither of these phenomena were unique to UWM, but both were important in the context of UWM’s trajectory. By the end of 1970 UWM had over 20,000 students; a stronger faculty; and increased graduate, professional and doctoral offerings. It had weathered the challenging anti-war era and structurally accepted a need for change in diversity and inclusive offerings. If the major urban university status was achieved, UWM had achieved it by 1970.

The year 1971 saw the merger of the University of Wisconsin System with the Wisconsin State University System into one unified system, giving UWM even more independence from UW Madison. It also formally established that only Milwaukee and Madison would have doctorate programs, reaffirming the major university status Joe Klotsche strived for.[15] This would mark the last major structural change for UWM’s reporting structure to Madison. In 1973, Joe Klotsche retired as Chancellor, mandated to do so at the age of 65 as an administrator, and rejoined the History Department faculty for the last 5 years of his career.

References

 

Cassell, Frank A., J. Martin Klotsche, and Frederick Olson. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: A Historical Profile. Milwaukee, WI: The UWM Foundation Inc., 1992.

Klotsche, J. Martin. Confessions of an Educator: My Personal and Professional Memoirs. Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1985.

Klotsche, J. Martin. The University of Milwaukee: An Urban University. Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1972.

Klotsche, J. Martin. The Urban University: And the Future of Our Cities. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Klotsche, J Martin. “Oral History Interview with J. Martin Klotsche”. Interview by Frank Cassell. UW-Milwaukee Oral History Project Records, 1981-1990. April 21, 1981.University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Archives Department. https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/uwmoh/id/56/rec/1.Schroeder, John H. “University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.” Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu/entry/university-of-wisconsin-milwaukee/.

Schroeder, John H. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: The First Sixty Years. Milwaukee, WI: UWM Foundation, 2018.

UWM Libraries e-guide to Vietnam War Protests at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Archives Dept.: The Student Strike and Later Protests, 1970-1972, https://guides.library.uwm.edu/c.php?g=56372&p=364611.

 

Vang, Chia Youyee, and David J. Pate. Telling Our Stories; A History of Diversity at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1956-2022. Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2022.

---

[1] John Schroeder, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: The First Sixty Years (Milwaukee, WI: UWM Foundation, 2018), 8.

[2] Schroeder, 17.

[3] J. Martin Klotsche, “Oral History Interview with J. Martin Klotsche,” interview by Frank Cassell, UW-Milwaukee Oral History Project Records, 1981-1990, April 21, 1981, audio, 1:50:50, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Archives Department

[4] J. Martin Klotsche, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: An Urban University (Milwaukee, WI: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1972), 60.

[5] Klotsche, 1972, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 62, 142.

[6] Klotsche, “Oral History,” 1981, audio, 1:52:10 section.

[7] Klotsche, “Oral History,” 1981, audio, 2:00:13 section.

[8] J. Martin Klotsche, Confessions of an Educator: My Personal and Professional Memoirs (Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1985), 248.

[9] Klotsche, Confessions of an Educator, 248-277.

[10] Klotsche, “Oral History,” 1981, audio 2:23:15.

[11] Frank Cassell, J. Martin Klotsche & Frederick Olson, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: A Historical Profile, 1885-1992 (Milwaukee, WI: The UWM Foundation, Inc., 1992), 29.

[12] Chia Youyee Vang and David Pate, Jr., editors, Telling Our Stories: A History of Diversity at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1956-2022 (Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2022), 25-26.

[13] Vang and Pate, Telling Our Stories, 28-29.

[14] Klotsche, Confessions of an Educator, 302.

[15] Schroeder, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 22.