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independent.

Jim Allen, against my strident, intense advice, accepted an appointment to the Nixon Administration to be Secretary of Education, or Commissioner of Education, HEW.

That would have been Commissioner then, because the Department had not yet been set up?

Yes, Commissioner. The Department had not been set up. A man by the name of Finch, I think, was Secretary of HEW [Health, Education & Welfare].

You're talking about Robert Finch, who was former Lieutenant Governor of California?

That's right. And who was a friend of Jim Allen and who persuaded Jim to accept the position. And I thought that that was a mistake, and I don't know if Jim lasted a year.

But the cast of characters on the Board was clearly changing, and I found myself in strident opposition with the majority of my colleagues on the Board of Regents. Let me give you an example. There was a case of school segregation and desegregation in Buffalo, and the Regents were defendants, the Commissioner was a defendant in a case brought by the NAACP for the Federal Courts. And one of the Regents, who had been elected during this politically sensitive period, was from Buffalo. A very