Harry Miller interview

              1 Transcript of oral history interview conducted with Harry Miller on April 18, 2005 for The American University in Cairo University Archives Interviewer Caroline Foster: This is an oral history interview for the American University in Cairo’s university archives. The interviewers are Caroline Foster and Stephen Urgola, and the interviewee is Dr. Harry Miller, Dean of the Center for Adult and Continuing Education. We are in the Rare Books Library and the date is April 18, 2005. Will you please tell us your name, and date, and place of birth. Interviewee Harry Miller: Oh, okay. My name is Harry George Miller. I was born on February 15th, 1941. Interviewer Caroline Foster: And will you please tell us about your early career before coming to Cairo. Interviewee Harry Miller: Um, in education I think is what you are referring to, my academic background? Interviewer Caroline Foster: And professional. Interviewee Harry Miller: And professional career, um, my academic graduate work – we could maybe just start with there – started at the University of Nebraska in 1964 with a scholarship to study Scandinavian history. [00:01:06] And uh, I went to Nebraska through a mentor who was a Scandinavian historian who asked me to come there to study. The uh—I subsequently worked at Nebraska, I worked at the university, got my degrees there, did work, consulting work in school systems. And along the way picked up my teacher education certificate in social studies as well, and did consulting work for the State Department of Education which is the Nebraska State Department of Education. And, let’s see, also wrote courses for educational television, it’s called the Mid-American Educational Television Network, Educational Television Network, which encompassed about five states, including Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa. And we did work basically writing television scripts and documentaries ranging from home economics, to egg economics, to rural life, to 4-H programs, you name it. 2 [00:02:14] Simply because all of the states, if you take the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, you might have a population of no more than 5 million people. So educational television was very big at that time. Foreign languages, we offered foreign languages, and so forth. So out of that, and working at the university as a researcher, and so forth. When I finished my degrees I taught and then went on to Southern Illinois University, where I was an assistant professor and taught and spent 22 years there. Leaving there as vice-president and professor of education. At Southern Illinois University I was chairman of the Department of Secondary Education, and chairman of the Department of Educational Leadership, and associate dean for the College of Technical Careers, and then dean for the College of Technical Careers, and then vice-president. [00:03:09] You know, uh, College of Technical Careers was rather interesting because it was a college that offered 2 and 4 year degrees, and then we added a master’s degree. But it was all in technical areas, the 32 associate degrees. Enrolment was around 4000 majors when I left the college. It’s now called the College of Applied Arts and Sciences. But, uh, in the health care field, I think I mentioned to you about mortuary science, we had dental technology, we had dental hygiene, we had, uh, nursing, respiratory therapy, a whole array of 2-year degree programs. In, um, the more hard areas of technology we had an auto mechanics program, we had tool and die making, construction, construction estimation, we had architectural drawing and design, interior design. [00:04:11] We had electronics, programs, aviation, we had flight maintenance, helicopter maintenance, airport security, airport management, air-traffic control. In fact, we had our own airport and 57 aircrafts. So it was quite an array of programs, in fact our master’s program was a master’s program in aviation management. And out flight programs our students were, just to give you an example, TWA at that time United, American, were all—had our graduates who were pilots. And so what they would do is, as you know United was out of Chicago, they would staff the crew of the aircraft and then bring students, fly them down in a jet from Chicago down to, on recruitment. [00:05:12] That’s how we did our recruitment in aviation. So they would have 2 or 300 people, kids, on a plane crewed, piloted by our graduates. And we offered them an Associates and a Baccalaureate degree in Aviation of Flight. So, uh, they would fly them down. We had a Leer jet DC3, and so forth. So the same thing, American did the same thing. American down in Dallas Fort Worth would bring all the students down and go through their flight simulators, which is a huge operation 747, they’d get the chance to do all that. They would hire them as interns for the summer, they would give them scholarships, and so forth, so just a whole variety. Every one of our programs had its own advisory committee and did those kinds of things. [00:06:00] Since I was very instrumental in all of those programming, when the president asked me to take on the articulation programs with the community colleges and us, because we were a rather unique institution offering 2 and 4-year degree programs. He also was interested in our 3 international programs, because of the technology transfer. So that’s how I started in the ‘80s working with Palestine, and Thailand, and so forth, and working with indigenous groups on their craft and skills as well. Our military programs that we had included 58 military bases throughout the continental United States, Germany, and England. And what we did is to take the four-year program, the major if you will, in aviation, electronics, health care, and so forth. We took those to military bases and then worked with enlisted personnel to complete their baccalaureate degree. [00:07:00] So we transcript their work, undergraduate work, identifying where they would need to complete their first two years, and we provided the second two years, called it an upside down degree. And so we had programs all over the United States and its still going. It was a 10-million-dollar operation a year. Then I, in 19, I think it was 1992, this is more of a career than educational profile, but in 1992, during the course of that time I came across Molly Bartlett. And Molly Bartlett had asked me to apply for a position here as Dean and I told her I couldn’t um, in fact we exchanged and she asked me to come for an interview. And I said no, I had been asked to come to the President’s office because of certain problems. And the problems had to do with the person that was in there and it was to make a commitment for three years to put in things such as a direct data entry system on expenditures, um, by fiscal unit. [00:08:07] Or, you would call Mary a head here, what we had is, we put in fiscal officers in each of the units so that as expenditures were being made they could be entered into the accounting system so that at any one point in time the president could take a snapshot on what their expenditures were, and he could compare them with the revenue streams. And usually, in this case in academics, people would make a commitment on their revenue, you know, early on. They’d pay their tuition, they’d be making partial tuition, but to keep track of how their expenditures were going, vis-a-vis the revenue, was difficult. And the paper work, in other words, as you’ve seen the paper work here, you’ve got to fill out a form, you submit it there, submit it there, and the posting of it may take two, three months. So you can never have an accurate snapshot. So one of my ideas was to make a direct, have that done, the data input, at the local level, at the unit level. [00:09:04] So that they could run a snapshot in terms of how much money was being expended, off the language that you were allowed to expend, as well as how much if you were going to trade money, in other words, put a lapse in the funds, and so forth. So I had promised that I would institute that system and so I, uh, said to Molly, no I have another year to do that. And she wrote back then afterwards and she said well would you come after a year, and so I came out for an interview and that’s how I got here for two years. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you please describe CACE when you arrived? Interviewer Caroline Foster: Okay, actually, CACE wasn’t CACE, it was called DPS. And there were actually three units. There was an OE, Overseas Unit, there was DPS, and then there was a CIT, Commercial and Industrial 4 [00:10:03] The CIT was chaired, there was a fellow named Bob Brown who was Dean and he had these three separate entities that were also budget entities, separate budget entities. Bob Younghouse was the Director of CIT, Mohamad Rashidi was, I guess, the person in charge of DPS, and John Monroe was OE, the overseas division. Early on what I um, even before I got here, after I’d done the interviews before I got here, I reorganized the center, and abolished those divisions, and unified, if you will, the budgets, so that there was one budget control for the center. [00:11:11] As well as unifying the programming, because CIT offered English language, DPS offered English language and OS offered, you know, English language. So what I decided to do was make associate deans, and in the program area have a director and then have an associate or assistant directors under each. One would be scheduled programs, which would be the DPS, and the other would be the CIT, which would be the contract programs. Since you couldn’t actually fire anybody because of the Egyptian labor law, it was a way to orchestrate, if you will. So everybody kept their job, we didn’t move them to another part of the university, we didn’t try to fend them off to somebody else, we reorganized it. But, the important thing was that when we looked at the budget, or when we executed the budget, that sometimes one area would be down and another area would be up. [00:12:08] So to avoid every tub being on its own bottom from one year to another, you know, what I decided to do was that we could underwrite, let’s take Arabic studies for example. If Arabic studies wasn’t doing well this year or last year or three years, we wouldn’t start eliminating positions or trying to move people out to other areas, we could underwrite their costs by the more productive areas. And let’s say at that time Computer Studies was very productive. So everybody had a survival net in terms of it, and over the course of the years, things would go up and down, so we wouldn’t really take snapshots or hard fiscal decisions on anything over just the course of one or two years. We would usually use a swing of about three to four years in terms of making a decision about whether we were really going to try to downsize and use attrition and other means of reassignment of people to a division or to another activity of the center. [00:13:13] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you describe how the programs and the curriculum developed from the time you arrived to the present day? Interviewee Harry Miller: At the time when I came there were different curriculums, different textbooks, different programs. And so part of that process was to unify the curriculum in terms of its—there’s one English curriculum, for example, there weren’t three or four. When I arrived there were four English. There was the curriculum out at Heliopolis, there was the DPS curriculum, there was the curriculum that was being used by the CIT, and then anything overseas was negotiated with John, so there was one curriculum. 5 [00:14:00] There was a curriculum committee formed that had to approve all the curriculum. And it brought it all unified regardless of the division, and that is still in place today. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And could you tell us was there a change in mission for CACE from the time that you arrived to the present? Did that develop? Interviewee Harry Miller: That’s a good question. We’ve rewritten the mission statement along the way. And that has been, I think it’s a much better mission statement than we had before, more clearly identifying the areas of thrust. I would say, yes, but whether we did that intentionally or it was marginalized by the university would be another issue. I think it has changed. It has a more limited focus. [00:15:00] When I came, or just before I came, there were—the administrative structure, as you know, the dean of continuing education is one of the university officers. When I came, the structure of—to understand continuing education you have to look at the structure of the university as well. When I came there was a Dean of Faculties and a Dean of CACE, there was not a senate, there wasn’t uh, there were departments, but the heads of the departments reported to the Dean of Faculties, so they were two comparable positions. In 1992, they started with—they started putting together a university senate, and then they created schools with deans. And so the nature of the institution began to change and began to take different forms, however the continuing—which narrowed, if you will, or marginalized, if you will, the role of continuing education. [00:15:59] When I say marginalized, in meaning that the attention wasn’t paid to the continuing education as much as it was to all the issues of putting in this super structure, if you will, for academic programming. And therefore the title of the Dean of Faculties was changed, it was changed to, I think, Vice President, or Provost, now it’s the Provost’s office. And then you had the deans put into the various colleges. So here you had CACE still having a deanship, and so forth, and programming. Also the activities if you looked at what has now happened with the schools and departments you’ll see all sorts of seminars, you’ll see guest lectures, you’ll see conferences, you’ll see all sorts of what we might call, um, continuing education. The elder hostel programs run by John Swanson, under his area, his use, and so forth. So it has created, if you will a superstructure without somebody really sitting down, re-conceptualizing what the role of continuing education should be. [00:17:06] It’s a great opportunity with the new campus to do that. And that’s what I think President Arnold is doing now, which is great. It has to be done because the attention hasn’t been put on continuing education or what its role or mission should be. It has, kind of—there is a role and mission that has come about because of a de facto influence and that is now what’s in place. Now’s the time to make more clear its role and its mission, and where it should go and what it should do. 6 Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you tell us about the relationship between CACE and the overall AUC community, AUC administration, how that developed from the time you arrived and the present? [00:18:00] Interviewee Harry Miller: The, I would say, I’m not sure, you might have to ask the question again and break it down a little bit more for me. When I arrived, there was a great deal of, on the part of the university and on the part, I would say, of the faculty, there was a lot of criticism about continuing education and DPS. You know, whether it was the lack of quality, I mean there were lots of issues out there, the numbers, and so forth. What I think we did was, by our consolidation and focusing and putting in certain factors, certain quality control measures, and so forth, I think we kind of changed that around. I think CACE kind of is an impressive group, and today I mean, its size and its dimensions, people, um, whether they—whatever they think about in terms of what is continuing education. [00:19:04] They acknowledge that there is such a thing and it’s a fairly dynamic, fairly big operation. Whether that should mean that they would want to participate in the continuing education form, such as the Desert Development Center and its training programs, or the Social Research Center and its training programs, or the Journalism department and its training programs, or the Management and its IMD training program, or whether it’s the Human Resources and its training programs, I mean you can kind of go down a whole list of various things that have been going on out there, that have either been allowed to, or has just been fragmented and has continued to fragment without much control or direction. There’s a second part to your question and I forgot what it was. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: I was basically asking, I’m not sure if I saw a first or a second part, but how CACE’s role within AUC changed over the time. [00:20:09] Interviewee Harry Miller: I think, first of all the emphasis on fiscal accountability is certainly a factor when I came, the accounting, again the accounting procedures were not very refined in the university, in fact they were unable to keep track of things. And even today I would say that the accounting capabilities of the institution are somewhat lacking, for example, they talk about depreciation, like the depreciation is building, or how much electricity, or what is the cost per square meter, or square foot of occupancy, those are the questions that they don’t have answers to. [00:21:01] Whether they don’t have the software packages, people or something of that sort, so what they do is lump it all together, into one package. So the accounting procedures for us, we’ve refined it by ensuring that all our revenue was logged in by students and the SIS + system and was all accounted for. And at each of our registration center there is a cashier. The reconciliation of the cashier is done at the end of every day of income and so forth, is done by us and the cashier so 7 that there is, the records are absolutely sure about what our revenue was, and that it is being credited to us. The same with following up on the submission of revenues from companies. You know, the company might pay half and so forth. Before, checks would float around the university and people would say, “Steve [referring to the interviewer], do you know anybody over at Best Buy? [00:22:07] We’ve got a check here for 50.” And finally they would just say, “Well we don’t know. We’ll just put it in this account.” And there’s still some of that going on today. So from our standpoint what we’ve done internally is to make it much more specific so we know where our money is going and where our money is coming in. And so that has changed dramatically, but it also has in addition, it has maybe gone hand–in-hand maybe with the university being, demanding more of CACE in terms of its revenues and its accountability for generating revenue. For example, in the last strategic report, there was, one of the first items on it was to get some agreement on what our indirect costs should be. [00:23:05] I don’t know if you remember our strategic plan. That is really a, a, um, an issue with the university. If you’ll notice in the final strategic, in our final statement we say, we give up. Thus the university does not want to address that issue. We don’t know what the indirect costs should be. They do not want to talk about that vis-a-vis us or the rest of the university, so, you know, right away we just had written that off. Um, we have to, there, unlike a public institution where there is a factor of service to the public, or region, a regional institution has a dimension of service. That service contribution is one that the institution is obligated to give. [00:24:01] So however they put that into their fiscal formula, the service on the part of the institution is not measured in terms of asking them to pay for it. As a private institution and as a center, everything we do we may discount it, but there has to be at the end of the day something has to cover for the expenditures of what we do, and that will, even though we have a statement in our mission statement that we have a responsibility to Egyptian society and so forth. But if Mrs. Mubarak came by and said, you know, would you please make a 100.000 LE contribution to our libraries to enhance the educational development of young people, or our literacy campaign to enhance the level of literacy. You know, the institution would, would creak, it would complain, it would try to get out of it. [00:25:02] It would sneak around, do everything it could to try to figure out a way to avoid or to address the issue because it’s not in that kind of business where you bribe from. For example, at the University of Nebraska or Southern Illinois which is a public institution, you had a direct responsibility. Give you an example, when I first went to SIU in 1970, in the state of Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, segregation was still very big in 1967, when I went in 1970 we had four school districts. We had a black school district, had a university school district, and we had two public school districts. All of the, there was a place called Cairo, which was on the confluence of the Ohio-Mississippi River, there was a major racial conflict between the blacks and the whites. 8 [00:26:02] The Lieutenant Governor at the time was Paul Simon and that’s how I got to know Paul Simon. He contacted SIU, and said you know SIU, Southern Illinois, you’ve got 27 counties that you are directly involved with I want you to work with those educational institutions and with community development to try to help out with that. And they had National Guards and so forth. One of my first assignments was to be going down to Cairo and working the schools, and community leaders in terms of racial integration. And so that is not a part of the fabric of AUC. That is not, if that issue is addressed it’s not a direct issue of we have obligation to do this and we will set aside funds to do this. It’s not that kind of institution. So from day one here, fiscal responsibility in covering our costs was an important thing. [00:27:03] The problem was how much additional money should we have to pay? And how much, how were things such as depreciation going to be leveled? You know, the depreciation at this time, and so forth, we would argue for example, the depreciation, what should be the depreciation on computers? What should be the depreciation on the building, you know, after fifty years? In the United States depreciation has a certain kind of tax basis. Here it kind of moved up and down and changed. The same goes for identifying your direct actual, direct cost, or net cost. Or the direct cost for somebody else. How much does CACE building on the Greek campus actually cost us, as opposed to others, those kind of things? Interviewer Caroline Foster: And just to go back, what year did you come to Cairo? Interviewee Harry Miller: 1992. [00:28:00] Interviewer Caroline Foster: How would you compare CACE with other adult education programs in the world? Interviewee Harry Miller: In the world? Interviewer Caroline Foster: Or you can start with the US, with the Middle East, with Europe… Interviewee Harry Miller: You know, we’re members of several associations. One is the Continuing Education Association in Europe and one is in the United States. We tried to form a continuing education association in the Middle East, but didn’t get very far. At that time, there was a very stringent law about assembly of people. You couldn’t have more than 25 people gathering a spot without specific approval from the government. Continuing education programming here is somewhat— distorted, and that’s not the right word, but it’s somewhat off-base. 9 [00:29:06] Most of the continuing education programs will offer credit courses, off campus credit courses for example. Even Georgetown does that. So that in addressing its enrollment needs but also as recruitment. If you get people to take six, seven hours off campus, you might get more people to come in on campus to pursue a degree. If you look at Georgetown, take Georgetown for example, which is a private institution, and there’s a big difference between private and public, but Georgetown’s continuing education programs runs about 17 million dollars a year. Its profit margin is around five to seven million a year. The profit margin is coming from its delivery of weekend gender based courses which people are paying tuition to take these courses off- campus, off a regular schedule. [00:30:09] CACE does not offer credit courses. It does not offer a non-traditional credit degree. It doesn’t offer such things as work experience credit or anything of that sort. So it’s programming has been narrowed if you will. In terms of, for example, the English language training program which is quite large but it’s quite expensive. 400 pounds for a course - that’s relatively cheap. That’s 375 pounds for a computer studies course – that’s relatively cheap. So it takes a lot of volume to make its budget which is over 5 million dollars a year. [00:31:01] So it’s narrowed its focus considerably. The other thing though in terms of the things where we’ve done some neat things is in, for example, the foreign language areas because AUC doesn’t offer foreign languages, doesn’t have a very strong foreign languages emphasis at all. I mean English and Arabic, that’s it. In a small liberal arts college, you would expect French, especially in this society, you would expect French. You’d probably expect Spanish or something equivalent, and German. I would say probably French, German, Italian, and Spanish. We hope we have all of those languages now started. And we hope to start Chinese. So, you know, there are areas where we try to break out of the box, but again how that will translate into credit, and so forth, will be left to the institution. [00:32:00] Uh, Steve, I think that piece that you had asked was a good one. That I had just now—the relationship between the academic, the use of the academic faculty. We use a lot of part time people and so on. The reason why we have and will use part time faculty, we’ll buy their time, but they are very expensive in comparison to what we are charging for tuition. So we spend 5000 LE pounds for a faculty member to teach a course and we charge, let’s say 300 or 400 LE for the course, it takes a lot for us to make that up. And then the department has to have some say in it and so forth. So we’re not opposed to doing that, and in fact we have on a project basis, where we get external funding, where money that could be paid to a faculty member at the going rate with dollars, at one time dollars was an issue. We could do that. 10 [00:33:05] Interviewer Caroline Foster: And going back to the relationship of CACE internationally, what sorts of affiliations does CACE have with international organizations or governments? Interviewee Harry Miller: We have five, basically five programs overseas. One in Damascus, Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, and in the Emirates. It’s a part, part of it is an off-shoot from when I came with the overseas programs with John Monroe was where some of that was nested, but we solidified and we kind of focused a little more, we focused more on trying to make it more permanent if you will. [00:34:01] We also have centers, branches within Egypt itself, 17 of those. Called the OCP [Off-campus Programs]. It’s part of the culture, to try to raise this…have you noticed that within the Arab societies, families are quite large, they call them tribes, and they come from a variety of countries. For example, Muhammad al-Rashidi’s sister is married to an Iraqi physician. They live in Tripoli. Sawson Dajani’s [Managing Director of the Modern English School] family, mother lives in Jordan. Her first cousin has a large pharmacy in Jerusalem next to the Holy Sepulcher, and so forth. [00:35:03] The families, many of the countries are intertwined. Perhaps there is some distance, and some things, with the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, but even with the Kuwaitis there is some intermarriage and so forth. So there’s a movement if you will of certain populations of Arab society. That’s one. There’s also still remnants of the Pan-Arab influences, where Arabs and so forth. Now some of that might be recent developments building up from the Palestinian-Israeli issues, the United States and so forth. But I think it’s very important that AUC, and even before President Arnold was talking about, “We need more people from the Gulf area to come to AUC. We want to have 25% of our population from there,”. CACE was out there in various areas. [00:36:00] We did studies. We did studies in Palestine. We did programs in Saudi Arabia in economic development and development through education and things of that sort. So I think it’s been a, AUC will go as Egypt goes and Egypt will go as the Middle East goes. So I think it’s important for CACE to be of service to the university and to have these connections and these linkages. From our standpoint, that avenue has had more impact in the less developed countries, the have-nots. Like Damascus, Jordan, because as we see in Doha with the, you know, Texas A & M, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, Harvard Medical School, the wealthy areas bring in programs. [00:37:00] One of the reasons why we went for a grant, and got it, to compare American style, to do a taxonomy on American style higher education in the middle east was to get a better profile of the changes that are happening in terms of the dynamics of American style education and what it means to AUC. 11 Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Earlier you had touched on the other adult, the other continuing education courses, programs at AUC. Could you elaborate on that a bit and where CACE fits in the context of those programs? Interviewee Harry Miller: Well, one, I don’t think it fits. I mean, I don’t think it has a fit. And I think what has happened is that over the years, things have fragmented. It might have fragmented; it would be an interesting question about why it has fragmented. Maybe because there is such little space and everybody hangs on to what little space that they have and so they don’t think of anything more common. [00:38:02] There is a lot of continuing education, and I’m not arguing for it to be housed under one shop. I think what, I think there’s several dynamics to it. One, is I don’t think people at AUC really understand continuing education, that’s kind of an off the cuff remark, but their experiences are not, in terms of continuing education, many people have had experiences overseas, you know in the United States they have, if I had my PhD let’s say from the United States that doesn’t mean that I know anything about liberal arts education. It’s that type of thing. I don’t think people have much experience about the professional associations in continuing education in what they’re doing, and so forth. [00:39:01] Take New York University, for example, if you’ve seen their continuing education its mammoth. It’s great. How about the new school for social work and what they’re doing? Their culinary arts programs and so on. That’s just on the east coast, but take a look at the Chitaqua (sp?) movements and what they’re doing and so on. And so there’s a lot of continuing education models and so forth. The land grants institutions and the sea grant institutions and how they’re approaching continuing education. I don’t think AUC, first of all, has ever had a concept of continuing education. It took the continuing education concept of whomever was in charge at that time and that was the continuing education concept. And they’ve just left that person be. And so things have popped up and things have gone on. And as you know AUC is several things. One is that it tends to, its decision making is by towers. [00:40:01] If, you know, if people in the middle of the organization wants to do something, they’ve got to go to the top of the tower. And that top of the tower goes on over to the other person and they go down and then comes back on up. You know it’s not very horizontal in terms of cooperation and so on. You know, that’s one. Number two is that there is not much depth, if you will, in terms of continuing education or the kinds of experiences that come about. People that do come, foreigners if you will, like myself tend to be one person and then you’ve got the whole organization. If that person comes and they’re retired after several slots over here, they are coming probably, they are bringing their experiences but also they’re probably bringing something else with them. And so forth. So I think there are a number of things. 12 [00:41:01] Those might all sound rather negative, but those are a number of thing. Also, we’ve been through, what, four or five presidents since 1992. We’ve had McDonald, and we’ve had Frank Vandiver, Tom Bartlett, and now David Arnold. So there has also been a lack of continuity if you will, whether they’re interim presidents, or whatever they’re called, there has been a lack of continuity and vision. Another factor is that the new campus from the start of the discussions and all of this has preoccupied everyone’s attention and it’s going to preoccupy even more. So the drive was going to be this and address these kinds of things. I don’t know, how does that, does that kind of get at some of it? Interviewer Stephen Urgola: What would be helpful, I think, if you could give us a brief chronological sketch of the big events that happed during the time you’ve been here at CACE. [00:42:08] Big things at CACE, important events there, as well as the emergence of these other adult education programs. Interviewee Harry Miller: Well certainly my arrival was an event. [Laughs]. And the reorganization. I would say reorganization. The reorganization was an event. The 75th Anniversary was a major event. The strategic plan, five-year strategic plan was a major event. The expansion, the off campus or branches as a group overseas and OCP was an event. The USAID projects, they’re beginnings and endings was an event. [00:43:03] The project that you are reviewing the materials for, the USAID teaching English, was monumental. I mean it was a major, major income resource for the university. We’re talking about making over a million dollars a year. So when that closed down, the institution, it was noticed. My departure might be an event. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: For some of these events could you elaborate a bit and attach some dates to them? Interviewee Harry Miller: Oh. Ok. The reorganization in ’92. The 75th Anniversary, when was that, about ’95, ’96? Right around there. The Five Year Strategic plan ranged, we ended it last year, so it was about ’94 to, five years, ’98. [00:44:09] Another event was the accreditation visit in ’94 by the Middle States Association for CACE. And then the institutional accreditation visit, in about ’98. That was a major…I mentioned the ’94, that was a special accreditation review that was called for…I can tell you how I think it happened and then you can figure out the rest. John Monroe who was the Associate Dean for External Affairs, at that, before I came had written to the Middle States asking for clarification on whether AUC’s 13 institutional accreditation could apply through our non-degree granting programs in Saudi Arabia. [00:45:09] And he wrote directly to them. At the time, there was, the New York office wasn’t very well organized and it was not as huge as it today and people there were not, it was more of a gatekeeper. I mean it was Tom Lamont and there was Arnold who was at the press and then went there. So it wasn’t a very dynamic office. But for whatever reason, for somebody out of the blue at Middle States to, well for example, the Middle States contacted the New York office and said such and such and nobody responded. So, you know, when John Monroe wrote from the institution to the Middle States and said, oh by the way we’re starting something in Saudi Arabia and didn’t explain what it was, Middle States got really excited and threatened to pull the accreditation of AUC. [00:46:09] That then precipitated that there should be a special review and there was a team and that team came and issued a report. That report of ’94 was a document that, you know, gave CACE flying colors, in fact you’ll see in the exit reports and so forth the kinds of comments, well-organized and so forth and so on, our educational testing unit in the 97th percentile rates that we have on teacher evaluations and all that was applauded, that we did record transcripts and they said we should do some things on our certificates and so forth, the Dean should be a vice-president, at the vice-president level with all the changes. [00:47:02] There were lots of things. In fact, the fellow that had directed that, was, who had served the Middle States, Dr. Arturo Iritari was with the Middle States and another member of that was Dennis Payette. Dr. Dennis Payette chaired the consultant review that was just done pending the reorganization of the university and its move to the new campus. I said reorganization meaning what should be done with continuing education now that a new campus is being undertaken. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you just give the spellings of those two names you mentioned? Interviewee Harry Miller: Arturo, A-R-T-U-R-O, something like that. Iriarti, I-R, come on give me some help there, I-R-I-T-A-R-I. [00:48:09] Something like that, fairly close. Dennis Payette. Just like it sounds. How do you like that? [laughs] Payette. I can get those for you and I think, and actually I think, Carrie [Caroline Foster] has them someplace. But I can get them for you. But I can double check on Arturo’s name. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Going back to a couple of these events that you mentioned, the first large restructuring in ’92, can you describe the dynamics of that, the process by which that took place? 14 Interviewee Harry Miller: That was really a top down process. Meaning that when I came, even before I came, I had written out the plan and took the directors of each of the units and made them associate deans. [00:49:05] So it wasn’t really rocket science in a way. But there had to be a way that we organized ourselves quickly, if you will, so that we could do business. Because people were, there was fighting going on and so forth and the disorganization and so on. So what we did was to, I made them associate deans. We had directors. And then we put in the people as assistant directors, one for scheduled. And then we started on writing a procedures manual, a policies and procedures manual, which would also be a significant event, if you will. I mean, if you talk about significant contributions, everything we do is guided, and so forth, by the policies and procedures manual. So it was a top down approach. It wasn’t a herd approach, or a group think approach. [00:50:01] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And what was the biggest factor that prompted the restructuring? Interviewee Harry Miller: Well when I was interviewed by the president, who was McDonald at that time, and then when I came for the interview and so forth, it was the heavy criticism against, I can’t say continuing education, DPS, CIT, OS and so forth. John Monroe was very well, he’s a journalist as you know and so forth, he’s very bright and so forth. He knew, he could sense the initiatives were not very well received on the campus, the same with Bob Younghouse. They could sense that there was a lot of criticism about continuing education. How much of that was true and how much of it was what they thought they saw or heard. [00:51:05] Criticisms that people were making, they were deflecting the other issues that were on campus. Who knows? But there was a lot of concern about what was going on, how it was going on, the quality of it all, and so forth. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you explain where you perceive that criticism was coming from? Interviewee Harry Miller: Well. You know, continuing education is as much a function of what the president wants it to be as it is anything else. And what they conceive it and conceptualize it to be. I’m not trying to, you know, everybody can push stuff off on a president. You know, that’s his job and so forth. Yeah, it’s all of his job. [00:52:00] But there are several things that reflect on the institution and continuing education is one of them. It’s one of the issues that he has to address. Do I want this or do I want this? Do I want it decentralized or do I want it centralized? Do I want a centralized/ decentralized system? Or do I want, what kind of reputation do I want it to be reflective of? Do I want it? Can I have all the 15 great things in the world? Can I have a high reputation making tremendous profits and so forth? You know, so it really depends upon their conceptual thinking. I would say that probably the presidents have, when I came, they didn’t have any concept of it. Harry, just go off and do it. [00:53:00] You’re not creating any problems and so forth so just go off and do it. And the other side of it is that, if you were out there putting stuff in everybody’s face, the jealousy factor gets pretty, pretty, well, why didn’t you ask me to do that, or could we do this, or something of that sort. So, what we’ve done, what my policy has always been, let’s just do our thing, let’s do it well, and let’s move on and make sure that we do our homework well, meaning that we can generate the funds that what we need to cover our expenditures and let’s let the rest of the university take care of their business and when we can we serve the university, meaning we bring people in. For example, the EMT CPR courses with, that Andy [Andrew] Main is talking to Suzanne Sidhom about. [00:54:00] We’re probably going on five, six months now. And you know we’ve got the clinic involved, and Paul Donoghue involved, Shahira (El Sawy) involved, and Andy Main involved. We have still yet to offer one course. So this will go on and then it will kind of die out, you know it will not go very far. Or by the time we get there there’ll be two or three students involved. For sure, it’s not going to happen now with the summer gone and all the students gone if the objective was to get AUCians involved and to prepare them for these kinds of skills. So what we’ve done is to change our focus a little bit and there’s a foundation called the Safe Road Foundation on safe driving and preparing young people for handling accidents and so forth. So we’ll probably do something in that area to kind of save the work that we’ve done. [00:55:00] Something may come out of it, but it will be, it will not be, it’s been not very productive. Well that’s kind of typical, if you will, of kind of the group think. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Another important event that you mentioned was the strategic plan starting ’94, I believe. Can you tell me about how that process developed? What prompted that strategic plan? Interviewee Harry Miller: It was recommended that we do a strategic plan by the Century Committee, and that was, the chairman of the board at that time was Frank Vandiver and he had a Century Committee report. And in that report, which—there were many different assignments, was the strategic plan. When John Gerhart came he didn’t focus on the Century Report at all, in fact, I raised it, you know we have this operation going, we have a committee submitting annual reports, we’ve got sub-committees working and so forth and, you know, what do you want to do? [00:56:08] And he wasn’t even reporting back to the board about the Century Committee obligations of which we were a piece of it. When David came back he had read the Century and said, where is the strategic plan? So, I said, well glad you asked. You know we’ve got, we have fifty people working every year and doing all these reports, and so that’s…this type of thing. It’s kind of 16 interesting about strategic plans, if you look at presidents, strategic plans tend to when there’s a change in presidents, they tend to redo strategic plans or they throw strategic plans out the window and start all over again. The strategic plans have a hard time living beyond the scope of the existing president who started them. So, that’s what happened. [00:57:00] We had formed a committee, you know, a representation of various divisions and people and so forth, and the committee members served on it, the Presidential Intern served on the committee and there were, we had goals and objectives with time frames and we had subcommittees. It’s kind of interesting because on the basic conclusions, I don’t know if you remember it at all, one of the basic conclusions, that is, all of the things, all the objectives and all the work that was accomplished, those things that CACE could control, it accomplished. Anything that was related to the university and commitments on the part of the university were not accomplished. That we had to say, could not do this, it was not followed up by, it was suggested but it was not adhered to. Interviewer Caroline Foster: Related to this, this past fall there was a consultancy team that came again to CACE in preparation for the next strategic plan. [00:58:07] Interviewee Harry Miller: Yes, that was the Dennis Payette group. Interviewer Caroline Foster: And these factors you are talking about with regard to the last strategic plan, how do you see them influencing the strategic plan that will be created? Interviewee Harry Miller: A lot of carry over, because Dennis was on the original team in ’94, so there’s some of that. I think that Dennis and his team, tried to figure out the role that continuing education should play. That’s how the idea of a community college came up. A community college was an idea that he had proposed in 1994, or the team had proposed in 1994. And so he came back, when he came back he said that might be the umbrella, if you will. That might be the, a comprehensive community college. [00:59:01] You offer degrees, you do community service, you can have the flexibility and so forth. When David and I presented that to the board they did not buy it at all. The just said no. And the reason for it was, not so much, I think one was that we don’t want to, Tom Bartlett was somewhat supportive of it, but the general discussion was we’re embarking on the new campus, we don’t want to spend any more money for bringing in, the issues of articulation of coursework and of approvals by the Ministry of Higher Education of tuition levels and so forth. If I offer a course in sociology and its half the amount, what does it do to the sociology course in the academic program. All of those issues of articulation, if you will. 17 [01:00:00] To be frank, they just did not want to address those issues. I mean it was too much, they’re talking about buying 150 or 130 buses just to bus people back and forth to the new campus. You know they’re talking about 10 million LE to hook up the electricity from the power station, extra, you know. All of those issues are paramount on their plate and it should be. So the notion of the community college did not go very far. Dave and I talked about whether we should use some other term, you know, Farouk [al-Hitami] had proposed “University College” or something of that sort. So, it took on different life. I had, you know the, wanted to…we have the different centers. We have a center, you know, downtown, there’s this Heliopolis center, and there’s going to be the New Campus center. [01:01:04] There’s going to have to be a new way of structuring continuing education. Right now we have one of the towers. It’s going to have to be a different approach. It’s going to have to be an approach that’s policy and procedure driven with flexibility to adapt, if, that the policies and procedures have to allow the independence to address and to do certain things which are in the policies and procedures. Let me give you an example. We determine a course credit, or an IU, on the basis of so many contact hours. If you want 12 contacts, its 1 IU. 36 is 3. It’s almost the same as a credit hour, but you can package those IUs in any way you want. You could have, you know, weekends, every other weekend and get up to the 36 and get an IU. Or you can have a training program for so many instructional hours, and then convert the instructional hours into IUs. [01:02:00] The creativity is in that. So, I mean everybody applies the IU principle of what is the number of contact hours, but you can design the contact hours. It doesn’t have to be a 12-week, three time a week, course format. So the policies now are in place and now it will be up to the facility managers or head of these facilities to be adaptive to doing that. Instead, another example, instead of a practicum or an internship, to have that as a number of hours if you will, but to have that at the discretion, and when I say discretion, of using it by the facility manager and the programs within the facilities rather than coming back to a central point to say, can we use the internship hours. In other words, not sending people up and back down again. So the structure will change the base. [01:03:02] The actual new campus will force, is forcing if you will, some changes in terms of how people think of the organization of continuing education, which is good. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Another event that you mentioned, since you’ve arrived, was the development of the off-campus branches. If you could discuss the development of those branches a bit and also explain their relationship to the branches like the Heliopolis branch. Interviewee Harry Miller: Yeah, actually, we probably have three kinds of branches or more. We have the branches such as what we call the OCPs, you could call, some call them centers. And these are affiliate centers. These are centers that are, make applications approved by us and we deliver our 18 courses, they, we approve of their instructors, they take our curriculum. They follow our standards and so therefore they are [unintelligible, Tanta?]. [01:04:01] Actually these centers go started with universities, some time ago, under DPS. And what we’ve done is to formalize it more with more controls. There are project centers. We created an Office of Special Projects and that’s headed by Muhammad al-Rashidi. These are centers to deliver a particular program for a specific period of time and so forth and their administration will be dependent upon what the project is all about. And then there are, there’s the Heliopolis which is a facility owned and staffed by us that operates like we do here. And then are our overseas centers which are affiliates which have our curriculum and which we support, provide training but at a much further distance. [01:05:01] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And one final major event that you’d mentioned, the USAID program, can you discuss that program, how it came about, what its roll was, activities and how it ended? Interviewee Harry Miller: Actually there are several AID projects, and the most noted one is the English Testing and Training Project, the one that we’ve had for about 15 years. It started, it was a fixed based contract, it was started off as offering English language to ministry level personnel. And it grew as more ministries, and it was tied to more directly to, if you will, the USAID projects in ministries. So let say the water, waste and water project, the people would go on a twinning initiative in the United States. [01:06:05] To go to Seattle and take a look at a waste treatment plant and see how they need to know English. So they would be, so they would go to the Center to learn English. So it was directly tied to the amount of USAID projects that were being funded in other ministries and so forth. How it ended, there was a thing called DT2 which captured all, regulated, it was an externally funded, it was a vendered program by AID to IIE, that’s how I met David [Arnold] over six years ago, to handle the internships to the United States. In other words, instead of having each department in AID negotiate where people are to go to get their visas, to cover their insurance to go the United States. [01:07:03] They consolidated all that and said to IIE, here you do it. So that we don’t have to track it, be responsible, make the payments and so on. So then we started working with IIE/DT2. DT2 then was not continued. And the funding for various projects, as you know, has been on a glide-path down. The US government is funding less every year and they’ve been reducing staff and so forth. So the need for English training and testing was discontinued. That’s the short version. Is that alright? Interviewer Caroline Foster: And the dates of that program? 19 Interviewee Harry Miller: Mmm, it ended, what, we had an extension and you know, carry-overs to finish up various projects, but it ended two years ago. [01:08:00] 2001 is when we—what’s it, 2005. This would be two years ago would be 2003 is when we would have the last funding for it. Very close to that. There was a dribble out effect, in other words, the major funding of it had stopped, we had pickups, we were still doing testing for some, we placed them in our programs and so forth. So— Interviewer Caroline Foster: Could you describe CACE students? Interviewee Harry Miller: Probably not. Take the Junior Summer Program. How do you compare them? I’ll just, I can’t really, but I’ll just give you some fun things. I think a lot of the students that come to the downtown campus, come, at least there’s a group there. [01:09:04] They come because they want to be on the AUC campus and whether they want to see the girls, or the girls want to see the boys, whatever all of that is, they like that. I think that the Heliopolis students are much more mature than that and they’re kind of much more business-like and when they pick a course among our competitors in Heliopolis they are looking for value for money, for services, for quality, for things of that sort. They don’t hang around the campus. We try to get them involved through the cafeteria, through CNN on the television, but it’s a little bit different, its tighter. And for example, anything late at night, if we had something, we had during. I’ll give you an example, during our 75th anniversary, we took bus trips of kids because we have a big center in Alex. [01:10:02] We took several bus loads up to Alex and it was an all-day, late evening affair. The Heliopolis people, the girls, the ladies if you will, had to have a chaperone somebody from their family. It might have been a brother, it might have been an older sister, in other words, that was a big concern, in other words you are going to be out and we needed somebody to be there. The kids downtown, I don’t know if you saw the tape of the bands and all that. They didn’t want a chaperone and they didn’t have one and so it just depends on the locations and the same kinds of programs. You should have asked me what the challenges of CACE are for the future. [01:10:51] Interviewer Caroline Foster: Well, while we are talking, we’ll come to that question. But while we are talking about the students, what have the trends of enrollment been while you’ve been dean? Interviewee Harry Miller: The trends kind of go up and down, for example, at one time, Computer Studies was hot. I mean there are lots of, lots of, anything, remember during the whole Silicon Valley rage and so 20 forth, when products were coming out and upgrades were being made and so forth, we were just going gangbusters. Now there’s lots of competition and “mom and pop” operations, [for example] I am selling computers and we’ll give you 5 free lessons. You can buy lessons on the applications stuff on the emails, there’s a lot of correspondence stuff. So it’s changed. We’re changing too. We downsized the amount of staff that we have. We don’t have two assistant directors in that program. We’re focusing it more. [01:12:01] It’s becoming more of a service. English has always been a dynamic program for us, and the challenge with the English language is that it again has a lot of “mom and pop” stuff. There are a lot of people who do private tutoring in English, you know they don’t go through us, but the people will tutor English and there’s a whole market out there. And that happens at CAC, the Cairo American College, through all sorts of things. For us, one of the major avenues and purposes of English is not English for English sake but to be a preparation to get into our other programs. In other words, to take our business courses, to take our computer courses, you have to pass a certain level of English to take those. And one of the problems that we have had, is that we have not done cross marketing. [01:13:00] In other words, these towers, if you will, people in English will say we’re here to teach English and we want people to come back to take English and we want more English being taught and so forth, but they’re not marketing these to help the students to take a look at the other areas of our program. When I first came, Arabic Translation was doing very poorly and today it’s a dynamic, growing field and there’s a lot, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One is that its career focused. People can say, if I do this I have a career, I have a specialty if you will. Second, it’s been the leadership. If you look at the faculty, part-time faculty, in the translation program, they’re young dynamic people. There’s a group there that just, you know, people take their courses and they say, “I want to be like that, that’s what I want to be”. [01:14:01] You know. Whereas in English we have a teaching roster, and the teaching roster is based upon seniority. So the people that are the most senior, they’re the ones that get the first pick of the classes and so they might take three or four classes. And so the young people who come in and are qualified, don’t get to see the light of day until something’s really off until August or something of that sort. And we’ve been trying to change that for years. The Business [Studies Division] we’ve had very strong in our contract programming due to Salwa [Mansour] and her initiatives and our Blue Ribbon committee and our advisory committee for that program has been very strong. Our street courses have not and we need to bring that closer together, but it does go up and down is what I’m saying. The Junior Summer Program has been doing superbly for the last several years. [01:15:00] When I first came, one of the other things that we did, we made CACE a 12-month program. Everybody used to take off. The whole campus shut down in August, it still partly does. But we offer now 150 courses in August and we have activities and so when I first came in 1992 we said that the positions are 12 months take your vacation based upon staffing of the office. That was 21 one of the big changes, a big change made with the reorganization. And there was a lot of resistance to that. People didn’t want to do that. But August is a big month for us now. Summer is a major revenue stream for us. It’s kind of interesting the summer, which is the fourth fiscal quarter for us, is by that point in time, we have expended a lot of our language, in other words, all our expenditures have been committed. [01:16:04] It’s also one of our major revenue streams, so those two have to come together in that fourth fiscal quarter for us to make it. In other words, if we’re off, if our revenues are off we’ve allowed a lot of expenditures to occur anticipating that the revenue was going to be there and it doesn’t happen then we’re not going to make our budget. So it’s always a crap shoot. Interviewer Caroline Foster: What are some of the major challenges that you and CACE have faced during your time as Dean? Interviewee Harry Miller: I think the Presidential Interns have really been the most difficult thing for me to handle across the board. [Smiles and laughs; Note: Foster was Presidential Intern with CACE in 2004-05] Um, well I think, um, the hesitation on the part of the culture to accept change. [01:17:09] To focus on the market value of what we’re doing rather than the culture of the institution. One of the great things that can happen with the new campus is that, I’ll give you an example of this. You know we’re coming up to the what, how many days-vacation if you took the two days off, the 26th and 27th, 12, 15 days. You know, why is that? Because the students aren’t here, we’re going to have a break. And we’re going to close the campus down. I mean that, you know, we got holidays, and then we have a break, and somebody just assume because students aren’t here that we’re going to have a break, right? [01:18:03] All of us here are on 12 month appointments and CACE is operating. Our registration is open. We have contract classes going on and so forth. I am sure the library is going to try to stay open and the computer labs are going to try to stay open. Yet, the attitude is that the institution is going to be closed. And it’s those kind of changes that, the mental concepts that are important, that need to be changed. In fact, at SIU when I was there, the institution never closed. Even if we had a snow holiday, a blizzard, the institution was still open. I mean the security was still working, the custodial staff was still working. [01:19:00] You took your vacation time, as we would do here, but you always coordinated that with your staff that the offices were open, the administrative offices were open. But it never closed. Here, there’s a sense that “Oh wow, we’ve got 10 days-vacation” and everyone’s taking off. But one of the nice things about the new campus is that there can be a new sense of culture on the part of the whole institution about how it behaves and what it can do and so forth. So change is a difficult thing. I tried to get advisory committees going we have one very good one and we have 22 one in the Junior Summer Program, but we should have four or five advisory committees for our programming. You know, it’s something that should be going on in terms of feedback, and in terms of development. But very, very difficult to get that going. So I think change is, uh, I think it’s in the gene pool. People don’t like change. [01:20:15] Interviewer Caroline Foster: And can you tell us about the people you have worked with and continue to work with on a daily basis? Who are the characters that you have worked with? Interviewee Harry Miller: Well, we meet once a week with the Budget Committee, every Wednesday at 12. There’s a committee. And that’s with the Associate Dean for Instructional Affairs, Mohamed al-Rashidi who’s the Acting Associate Dean of Administrative Affairs now and manager of special projects, and Hala [Hussein], and myself. [01:21:01] So we meet every Wednesday for that. And Yasmin [Abdel Aziz], is the Registrar for the downtown campus and Zamalek, which is also a super registrar for pulling together all the numbers for FTEs and so forth for the end of the year reports. I meet once a week out at Heliopolis. I spend an afternoon in Heliopolis with what we call an Administrative Council, which is those chief administrators that are housed there with the facility manager, Muhammad Mustafa. Suzanne Sidhom is out there and Mamdouh Zaki who is the Assistant Director of English, but that’s a council. Eventually they will be out there and there will be a facility manager and a support staff for continuing education but not by discipline, if you will, or by subject area. So I meet once a week out there with them. [01:22:00] I meet once a week with the senior administrative staff of CACE on Wednesday morning. I work with them. I meet with the President at least once a month for an agenda review. I meet with the senior administrators of the President’s Council, which is now every two weeks. We used to meet every week. We meet every two weeks from 9:30 to 11:00. So those are, the meetings kind of direct who you spend time with, as opposed to a person. People come and go. Sandy Darling is now Paul Donoghue. Bob Younghouse now is David [Wilmsen]. So the people—the players have changed, but the activities are still there. [01:23:00] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Could you elaborate on some of the important figures at CACE since you have been here, Mr. Rashidi, Bob Younghouse? Tell us a little bit about their role, a little bit about them as people. Interviewee Harry Miller: As you know Mohamed al-Rashidi has been around for a long, long, long time, I don’t know how many years. I think you have him scheduled for an interview, which would be great because he, I think, crosses over at least three deans at CACE. So you could get a perspective of 23 Bob Brown, who is the former dean and others. He’s kind of the, you know, Mr. Continuing Education, if you will, and he has numerous contacts, and so forth. [01:24:01] Bob Younghouse was Director for CIT. He was brought in by Bob Brown and then he was Associate Dean for Instructional Affairs. He retired and then David [Wilmsen] was appointed as Associate Dean. So John Monroe was the Associate Dean and his contract, I did not renew his contract, and I appointed Bahira [Sami] as Director but not as. She was the assistant to John Monroe and so when he was not renewed, I made Bahira Director of External Affairs and did not replace the position. And so the players haven’t changed a lot. There was Christine Zahir, who was in charge of the English Studies, and then that’s when Magda Laurence came in. Bethany Singer was in charge of Special Studies. [01:25:01] And then Suzanne Sidhom came in. Kamer Abdu was in charge of Arabic Studies and then David [Wilmsen] was hired. So not a lot of changes, I mean a lot of people are pretty much similar faces. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Can you describe for us your most successful initiative since you came to CACE? Interviewee Harry Miller: Successful. There has to be something in there, doesn’t there? [smiles] In the general category of things, I would say that it’s been transitioning developments, in a general sense. Let me put it as a concept and then tell you. For example, closing out of the USAID project. [01:25:01] The renewal of it in, I’ve forgotten what year it was, ’98 when James Collom was head of OSP - the renewal, the writing of the proposal, the transition of things. When we closed it out, there wasn’t a ripple. It wasn’t going off the edge. It wasn’t falling off the cliff. So I would say that that has been part of what I’ve been able to do is to ensure more smooth operation—I’ve not—in the transition of various issues, need, programs, and so on. So as a program has declined, we have transitioned it in such a way as that a lot people haven’t gotten hurt is one, and number two is that we’ve been able to try to give it more life through other means, things of that sort. So I think the transition, so I would say how we are able to transition activities and programs on a variety of fronts. [01:27:09] Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And can you tell us about the initiative that you think has been the least successful? Interviewee Harry Miller: Again, maybe, if you want a successful initiative the 75th Anniversary and things of that sort and the strategic plan, but I want to stay more on the conceptual thing. The thing that I probably feel the, that I have not been able to do, is to provide, if you will, the capability in managers, if you will. 24 [01:28:00] Leaders, administrators at CACE to be flexible or to solve problems in a way that provides, in an unnoticeable way. I mean a good problem solver is one who doesn’t have to turn the jar upside down, but can solve the problem and nobody knew it was a major problem to begin with. I don’t mean that they were concealing it or anything else like that. They were able to find solutions and direct and take initiatives and so forth. The culture does not, I used the word culture but I might be wrong, in CACE, people have not been able to provide the kind of training I guess, or the mentoring that would allow them to take initiative and to see it through to have great things happen. [01:29:09] Likewise, the other part of that is that because of, there are very few people that can write very well in English. And that is a problem. In other words, you do a lot of the editing yourself, you end up having to do the conceptualization. It’s not only the writing sentences down, but it’s the logic about where you are coming from and how to structure that logic in terms of addressing an issue. And there are, I think there are whole different mind sets about how to do that. The old guard will say, we’ll use the pasha and wasta to address the issue. [01:30:04] Who do you know? How do you get them to back off? The other side of the brain will want to, want written procedures and will want to have transparency, will want to have a set of directions and will want to have a set of directions so that it won’t happen again. I don’t know if that makes sense. And so far, I have not been able to train people enough in terms of how to do that, in terms of problem solving and doing it according to policy, or you know some sort of transparency, and have people feel good. Let me give you another example, it’s kind of interesting. I get a lot of request people looking for jobs. [01:31:00] And there are a lot of sad stories out there. I think AUC is somewhat sometimes people at AUC are really myopic and they really are not looking at what’s the environment of Egypt and so forth and it doesn’t take much to go outside the campus area to see some of it. But in Maadi, you get into Old Maadi and so forth, there’s no running water, there’s no electricity. All of those things are very much present. And so AUC is really not a part of the real world in terms of the majority of what’s going on. Just going out to the Zewail house you’ll see some of that. You know here we’re going out to the Zewail house and have cooked barbecues and all that and you get and as you’re going by your seeing all the trash, you’re seeing the donkeys, you’re seeing the breast feeding, you’re seeing all of that going on out there and we’re going out there to redesign a 300 million-dollar campus. We’re going out there to do all these great things. So I think there’s a real dichotomy in terms of all that. [01:32:00] The mindset of how we approach things and so forth is totally, is much different and how we arrived at logic is much different. So I think from a continuing education point of view, and so forth, that we’ve got to keep the real world in mind in terms of what’s happening in Egypt. 25 Interviewer Caroline Foster: How does the e-learning initiative fit into this? Interviewee Harry Miller: The real purpose for the e-learning website was to generate foreign currency. At the time when foreign currency was very difficult, when the dollar was going up. Andy Snaith was preparing budgets on 7, 8 percent exchange rate. And so you know, our revenue streams are all Egyptian pounds. So as the exchange rate, and our budget is put into dollars. [01:33:00] So as we trucked along, and as the exchange rate went up to 7, we had to take in more business, had to do more things to make our budget. So one of the ideas was to create an e-learning site that we could market in the Middle East and we could take in euros and dollars and get to keep parts of that. So that was part of the rational for doing it in our initiation with banks to keep part of the dollar and so forth. Today, that is not an issue. You know, the dollar has declined in value and all those kinds of things. So that was number 1. Number 2, the other objective was to put into place an alternative, in terms of Ashraf [Al-Kosheiry], for example, because you’re [Interviewer Caroline Foster] on the [E-learning] Committee, he has big labs. He has 20 computers in a lab. So people would want to come up and take XP, or they want to take Access, or they want to take Photoshop. [01:34:01] You know, and they’ve got 5 people. It would be wasteful for him to use his laboratories for five people, to tie down the 20 screens for 5 people when he should be focusing on how I can use those screens for 20 people. So that’s one. Number two is to keep up with the latest licenses for these things. Photoshop is into version number 7 or 8. XP has had several versions. We started off with 95 and went on up the line. So instead of trying to buy all the licenses to keep all of that up in all of the laboratories, the thought was why don’t we push these students, when someone wants to take something like that, put them into something like that’s going to keep current. Then we don’t have to worry about doing that across the board because we couldn’t do that to everything. So those were the rationale for it. Has it been successful? No. We’re still struggling to find a niche. [01:35:01] But it will be found. At the same time, the positive side is that Egypt has made a tremendous commitment for e-learning. E-government is out there. The Smart Village is out there. All sorts of things are happening. The direct data lines. At one time, what 5, 6 years ago, nobody could get a direct data line except through an organization and AUC was paying a premium for it. And today you can get them from the telephone company. So things are going to change and they’ll be there some day. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: I have a couple more follow-ups. Could you describe the teachers at CACE? Interviewee Harry Miller: Yeah, we have men and women. [Laughs] A lot of them have been with us for a long time. A lot of them have made a life out of being a part-time teacher. 26 [01:36:01] The people, the younger ones, as I mentioned in ASD, the women are doing it as part of their career, as part of a, the ones that I know, are fairly well, they come from fairly well to do families, so they’re doing this as part of a career objective, but they’re not doing it as a full-time income. And we have some people who are doing it as a full-time income – I want as many courses as I possibly can because this is my source of livelihood. So there’s that kind of group. There is a group of teachers who are there because they think by being associated with CACE that they’re associated AUC. The same is true on the academic side. There are many part-time teachers who are with Cairo University, when you look at their card they say that they are a professor AUC. [01:37:00] You know, I am meeting with one of those this afternoon. She teaches one course in sociology department and her card says she is a professor of sociology at AUC. So we have some of those as well. We have some people that are experts at what they’re doing. Like in the computers, Hussein [Moustafa], the security officer at AUC. We have a group of people from AUC that we hire and from their experiential…and Hussein is the Security Officer for AUC computers and he’s teaching a security course for us. Bobo [Baha Gamal] does one in web development, and things of that sort. So those are kind of groupings. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And lastly, one program you’ve mentioned several times is the Junior Summer Program. If you could just describe that briefly. [01:38:02] Interviewee Harry Miller: The Junior Summer Program is an integrated program. I should let Carrie [Interviewer Caroline Foster] tell you because she’s going to work in that program. The Junior Summer Program is, in fact, AUC ACE was the first to start a summer program for youth. And the program has been highly successful, over-subscribed, large number of kids. More from the younger area than the older, the older ones are more difficult. The fifteen-year-olds are more difficult than the ten-year-olds, let’s say. But, it’s an integrated program meaning that it has some arts and crafts, some sports activities and so forth, and we have a whole range of instructors and helpers, and so forth. [01:39:00] As you can imagine let’s say 1800 students from both campuses, in both campuses, neither one of the campuses is well designed for this type of program, for kids to run around. So there’s a lot of guards, so there’s lots of help to make sure kids aren’t running or falling down the steps and things of that sort. So activities are very well designed, very well structured if you will so that the kids are, so that nobody gets hurt. Heliopolis is more difficult than the Greek Campus because there’s just no space. But they will go to a park to do certain kinds of things and so on. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: And one more quick thing, what kind of family background do these students come from? 27 Interviewee Harry Miller: Actually, I don’t know. I would say they are probably fairly well to—whatever the definition of Egyptian middle class would be, is where they would fall. [01:40:00] They would, it would be maybe above. But the cost of the program, we try to keep it very small. You know the cost of the program went up 50 pounds this year, and Suzanne Sidhom has been really upset about having to raise the prices, but the cost of lunch programs let’s say and things of that sort. That is, we try to keep it at a minimum. But it does cost some money and some people can’t afford it. For example, the head of personal security, General Ivory, I think. I’ve got his name somewhere. Saad something. For the downtown area which means that the personal body guards for the ministry of interior are under him. [01:41:00] He also handles the immediate embassies and the personal security guards for the ministers. We’ve become very good friends when the Junior Summer Program comes. He has two daughters. He gets a scholarship. I provide a scholarship for him. And the reasons for that are locked. For sure, because of the personal security guards that David [Arnold] has. He not only has them here but he has them at his home. You know, the Ministry of Interior right next door is where his office is. Now did David tell me to do that? No. He never said that, and I wouldn’t ask him. But it’s something that we should do to be a good neighbor. [01:42:00] Interviewer Caroline Foster: Does CACE offer many scholarships? Interviewee Harry Miller: You mean for the Junior Summer Program? Interviewer Caroline Foster: Or for the year-round programs. Interviewee Harry Miller: We have a Rashidi scholarship fund that we have collected and we use that for scholarships. We use it, it’s not a large number, and usually the people who make decision are Yasmin [Abdel Aziz], Rashidi, and myself. For example, we had a blind fellow who was very good in languages and he wanted to take simultaneous interpretation. We provided him with a scholarship from Cairo University. There was a lady from Port Said who contacted us about learning English. She had learned English over the radio and she wanted to take English classes. But her father wouldn’t let her. [01:43:00] So we bought her books and tapes and sent her. We haven’t heard much back. Then there’s the minister, a Presbyterian minister who I’ve given a scholarship to, when I say “I” I mean Yasmin and I. He’s Presbyterian and he wants to go to the United States to study theology. And he came in and presented his case. So we’ve given him a scholarship. But it’s very individualized. AUC 28 does provide, they pay for, English languages scholarships for the people at customs, as you know. And that’s handled, there are 50 of those, every year. And we provide the English language courses for them. And the reason for that is to make sure that when [Abdel] Messih [AUC Airport Clearance Coordinator] takes us through, everyone smiles and so forth, nobody gets hassled and so forth. That’s why. [01:44:00] Interviewer Caroline Foster: Do you have anything else that you would like to add? Interviewee Harry Miller: I think well one is, I am retiring, I’m leaving, in December. I think it’s a good time. It’s a major change coming about and the preparation for those changes. It’s a good timing. It’s a good opportunity to make that change. The new campus isn’t quite here yet. The person will be on board and they can not only take the changes and the needs to address up to and beyond the move to the new campus. And I think that’s critical. [01:45:01] To have someone after the new campus, not just up to it. So if you’re talking about five, six years. It’s an ideal time for that to happen. It’s also an ideal time to put a new thumbprint on continuing education as whole. The president has been superb in terms of understanding the importance of that. I mean, of all the things he has on his plate, it’s an ideal time to take a look at what that is. It’s been easy to let it go in its own direction and take care of all the things. Everything from lack of foreign faculty, to faculty speaking in Arabic in class, faculty answering their cell phones in class, doing all those kinds of things which have occupied the major focus, which is true, because that’s what the reputation of the institution rests on. [01:46:06] I applaud him for taking time now to take snapshot and give it some direction. And it will have a different direction, not because I think, when the President said he was going to chair the committee I said well wow, that says something about my leadership doesn’t it. We both laughed. It’s because of the dynamic changes that are going to come about, operating the facilities here, out there, over there, the centers, as well as trying to pull together an umbrella, if you will, to market as continuing education which is good for the institution. Interviewer Caroline Foster: Thank you for sitting with us. Interviewer Stephen Urgola: Thanks very much. Interviewee Harry Miller: Yeah. Thank you. [01:46:51] [End of Interview]