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where Gardner was and Otto Kleinberg, they provided their students with the freedom to examine the various points of view, the various theories, so that you came out of Columbia not brainwashed, in the sense of being religiously converted to a particular position. You could come out of Columbia with your own emphasis, thank God. Because otherwise it would have been a terrible inbreeding factor operating in our department.

Within the last ten years or so, or maybe fifteen, that problem has been pretty well settled by the vast numbers of young people who have been brought into the department. In the forties, we had about ten or twelve people in the department. At last count, there were nearly sixty. It was hard to have the same kind of background homogeneity when you have 60 people as when you have 12.

We did have an old school tie club approach to staffing the department when I went in. It's one of the things that I'm fighting against now, in terms of affirmative action on university levels. Although I benefited from it. The fact that I went to Columbia made me known personally to Gardner Murphy and the others, in the grapevine approach, and I was invited to be a member of the department at City College because Gardner knew me and because Otto knew Gardner, and told the others, you know, “Here's a broght young man who should be brought into the department.” I hope they didn't say “black”, although it's obvious I'm black. I hope they were saying, “Here is a bright young psychologist with tremendous potentials in the field, and let's get him.”

That's another thing --at no point, at no point at that time