Water Resources People and Issues
function of the Budget office should be. I felt the Budget office should be a
very powerful group within the government, but that it should not be a
genuinely managerial group. I think the temptation has been for it to take on
these various managerial responsibilities.
Q: Well, how did you get involved in the mid-fifties with people like Francis
Murphy, and I gather some others, too, who continued your interest in human
adjustment to floods? You were still at Haverford College at the time.
A: No.
Q: I thought you said you were at Haverford for ten years?
.
A: I left Haverford at the end of 1955 and the University of Chicago was
courageous enough to reappoint me to its faculty, taking the risk of having a
somewhat worn-out college administrator in an institution which laid heavy
stress on research. I had been president of Haverford for ten years.
Q: Hadn't you been teaching, too?
A: Yes. While I was president I taught one course a year on natural resources.
I felt I ought to teach along with everybody else. Also, I took a salary which
was the equivalent of the highest salary paid to a professor, including summer
work, because I didn't want to get into a position of being dependent on an
income beyond what I might as a professor later expect. So there wasn't a
great financial jolt in going from Haverford back to the University of
Chicago.
Q: Was Hutchins still there?
A: No. Larry Kimpton was there. Hutchins had left. He'd gone with the Ford
Foundation. His shadow was still strong.
As soon as I got back to Chicago I turned to the research interest I had had
before. I thought it would be a good idea to try to find out what had been
happening to the nation's floodplains since the Flood Control Act of 1936 had
been passed. I went to Resources for the Future and they kindly gave me a
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