INTERVIEW WITH MARTY KALIN, PH.D. AS PART OF THE DR. HELMUT EPP ORAL HISTORY PROJECT DEPAUL UNIVERSITY Interviewed by: Sarah E. Doherty, Ph.D. March 4, 2013
Sarah Doherty: This is Sarah Doherty um interviewing Dr. Marty Kalin as part of the Dr. Helmut Epp Oral History Project on March 4, 2013. Ah, Dr. Kalin thanks so much for sitting for an interview today. [0:19] Marty Kalin: Sure, happy to be here. Doherty: Um. Can you start by reflecting briefly on your personal career at DePaul kind of when you came to the university and the various positions you ve held? [0:27] Kalin: Sure. Ah, I started in the fall of 1969 in the Philosophy Department and I stayed in the Philosophy Department until I think 1983, I d have to double check when I joined the Computer Science Department. And I ve been in what is now CDM since then. Doherty: Excellent. Um. So you have been with, I guess, Computer Science into CDM through various changes through... [0:56] Kalin: Right. Doherty: You know just a degree, to a school to a college within the university. Can you talk about um kind of some of the growth and changes over your career in Computer Science? [1:06] Kalin: Ah, my career or the? Doherty: Your career in general, but also just your work with Dr. Epp and kind of the growth and creation of CDM. [1:14] Kalin: Sure. So when we started I think I would have been. Brian Cicirello: Hold on one second. I think you re kicking the table. Sorry I m getting that on the, ok. Kalin: Ok. Ah. I think that I was um sort of the second wave of hires maybe in Computer Science. I think that the department was founded the year before I officially joined it, but while I was still in Philosophy I taught for a year in Computer Science. Um. We were very small then I m trying to think probably about a dozen faculty members and it was oh sometime in the late-80s early-90s I think that we started ah to grow significantly. Um. Helmut is a very entrepreneurial leader and so we deliberately wanted to grow the department. And ah we did. So, I can t remember exactly what the peaks and the valleys were, but we ve been through you know several of them. There ve been peaks and valleys in interest in computing. And ah I think probably the biggest enrollments ah we ever had were early 2000s. And this would have been shortly before he left to become provost. Doherty: Um. You mentioned Dr. Epp as an entrepreneur. [2:39] 1
Kalin: Mm hmm. Doherty: Um, can you give some examples of how you saw him bringing this skill? [2:41] Kalin: Well I think the general idea that he had so if you go back when to the department was first founded in the early 1980s. There would have been in North America at that time relatively few programs in computer science. There were relatively few PhDs in computer science. So, when we first started all of the academics ah came from backgrounds other than computer science. So for example he has a degree in math. David Miller was the first hire. He s currently the CDM dean. He has a degree in math. I have a degree in philosophy. We had a couple of faculty early on that are no longer with us, but had degrees in linguistics and other fields. Ah. And so Epp s vision which I think was exactly the correct one was that ah he didn t expect us to become a Type 1 research institution in computer science. Ah. But, he wanted to hire Type 1 researchers in computer science. So the faculty tended to be from those sorts of universities. So what we were going to try to do was meld the best research in the field, but take a practical or I guess you might call it a professional orientation. So the big programs in the early days were actually the master s degree in computer science and then shortly thereafter the master s degree in information systems. And the goal was to ah train practitioners. People who were going to be professionals who would treat the M.S. as a terminal degree, but to try to bring state of the art research in computer science into the classroom for those students. And I think it was you know it was a very very good model and it led to early and quick success. Doherty: Excellent. Um, I believe you did some outside consulting work with Dr. Miller and Dr. Epp at various stages. Can you talk a little bit about the type of consulting work you were doing and how that benefitted all three of you as teachers as well? [4:43] Kalin: Sure. Yea I think ah as as ah chair then later as dean Helmut had always encouraged basically outside consulting. Outside work. And ah. Yes, he, David Miller and I did quite a bit of it. So this would have been, again the dates I d have to I d have to double check, but roughly ah the late 1990s to the early 2000s. So probably for five or six years we were extremely busy. We worked in two areas. One would have been process scheduling mainly for steel companies. So the old Inland Steel Company which is now Mattel Steel. Ah, we put in a scheduling system. We re extremely proud of it. It s still in place, it s still running. So we re delighted about that. And then there were some off shoot projects off of that. And then a company that is now Navistar, the truck manufacturing company. We did ah systems in product configurations. So the idea is an order would come in. You had to translate that order into parts actually to build a truck. And we ah wrote the system that did that translation if you like from order basically to to parts. So, in our area product configuration is what I think you d call that. So, mostly we worked on large industrial projects. We did some smaller things. I mean we did some consulting for what was then Illinois Bell Telephone. Some other things, but those would have been the major projects. The Navistar and the Inland Steel. 2
Doherty: Excellent. Um. Can you talk about how it was to work with Dr. Epp as a colleague? [6:32] Kalin: On the consulting or or academically? Doherty: Either. Either side. [6:37] Kalin: Well I think on the consulting you know it was a miracle that it actually worked. You have three fairly strong personalities. We just sort of eh did things informally. Divided the labor and then tried to solve the problems as best we could. I think this attitude is reflected in his leadership style. He s as you would expect very low fuss. Ah, very low bureaucracy. His attitude was always we had a challenge, we need to meet it, let s see what we can do. He s very collaborative. Always has been. And ah just fun to work with. I mean he was not a red tape bureaucratic type of dean. You wouldn t expect that and he was not. It s one of the main reasons I think that we had such tremendous success in growing the student body. Ah. We were able to move very very quickly. We got, this is not a gripe session, I don t mean it as such. I think this is a good thing. We had almost no support from the central university from the administration. But no support also means no interference. And so that was a blessing, ah. We would have liked better resources, ah but at the same time there was really no oversight no supervision. What we did, we did pretty much on our own and it meant that we could move pretty quickly. Doherty: Um, you mentioned some of ah Dr. Epp s leadership qualities. In thinking more about his personality can you pinpoint any other um I guess traits that he had that made him such a dynamic administrator when he kind of switched into more of an administrative role? [8:15] Kalin: Well I think he, he always had great credibility because he had done a lot of work in the field his whole life. I mean he started as a as a professional programmer in his teens and so he really knew what things were like in the real world. At the same time he had an impressive academic background. He has a PhD in math. He taught at M.I.T. And so I think his force of his personality, his accomplishments. He would never grand stand about these things, but I think it gave him credibility with the faculty. Ah. He was never the sort of leader who told people what to do ever. I can t remember his ever giving anybody what might be called a direct order. He didn t work that way. Ah. What he tried to do was find people who were interested in the things that he was interested in and to support them as best he could. So maybe the best way to describe him is if you had something you wanted to do he would give you the resources. He would support you as strongly as he possibly could if he believed in it. And he would hold you accountable which is pretty much the way the real world works. Ah. So, you know a couple of years later if you hadn t delivered the funding would not continue indefinitely. So I think that was for faculty who were entrepreneurial in character it was an ideal situation because you got opportunity. 3
Doherty: Excellent. Um. In the growth of CDM you know from degree to program to school to college. Um. Along the way as you experienced this rapid growth and success of various programs. Was there any resistance from the university community? [10:05] Kalin: No. I I think the central administration was interested in mostly in our continuing to turn a profit and in the early days we turned a considerable profit. And as we used to joke, we bought Barat. We did not think that was a good investment [laughter], but we provided the funding for that. So I think as long as that happened we were left alone. Ah, when there was the bust in computing in the early 2000s ah then there was some pressure. Certain parts of the administration declared that computing was over, it was dead in the water. This was silly of course. It never was dead in the water. Um. But ah, it was not so much resistance I d say as sort of lack of support or enthusiasm. Ah. Things have now turned about again and I think Epp s prediction that none of this was going to south for very long has turned out to be correct. Nobody internally ever believed it, but we were not dependent very much on support from the central administration. Ah. And in fairness I think he would know better of course. But, I never perceived that there was much um resistance or really anything. They wished we had higher enrollments during the bust than we did. Ah, but we recovered and we re now close to peak numbers not quite, but we re close. Doherty: Excellent. Can you talk about um some of those programs that you mentioned that helped you create um money independently that not only benefitted CTI now CDM, but the university as well? [11:47] Kalin: Well. In the early days, in fact, I m trying to remember. This would have been 84, 85 we probably started this. We started a certificate program. We have a center it s called IPD. Ah. It basically does ah professional training for certificates. This was wildly successful in the early-80s through the mid-90s. It still makes profit. Not as much as it did then. But to give you a sense of it. The first big program we did we called the Executive Program. We basically trained corporate executives on PC technology. Um. It was an innovative program. We gave students PCs to take home. This was sort of a rarity in those days. They were relatively expensive machines. And we would have. We would offer this, for example, three times a year and I can remember there were quarters where we would have sixty to seventy enrollees per quarter in these programs. So they were paying not quite what a full-time master s student would be paying, but close to that. Ah. There was the Career Change Program. Highly successful same sort of thing. Boot Camp for programmers. Ah. This would have been Cobalt programmers at the time in the 80s. And this was a six month program also hugely successful. So it s the. These were basically professionally oriented programs not degree programs. They turned a considerable profit they and they really helped us to do things such as buy equipment, develop labs that sort of thing. 4
Doherty: Excellent. Um. How was it like to present new ideas and information to Dr. Epp? [13:39] Kalin: Very easy. I mean I can give you, sure I can give you an example. Ah sometime in the late-90s I proposed a purely online course to him that I wanted to give. And ah it was very low tech which I knew would appeal to him. Um. He knows me very well. He knows I like to ski and so he asked me if I thought I d be living in Aspen and teaching at DePaul and if that was my goal it wasn t going to happen. Um. But, I think the motivation for me was this. I knew that I had a five minute sell to make so that s about what it took. I knew that there would be no paperwork. There would be no forms to fill out. There would be no approval required from anybody else from him than him. I assume that he never took it, Dick Meister would have been his boss at the time. I assume that he never took it to Dick. He certainly never asked Dick s permission. It s something that we just did. So we ran this and we ramped it up a bit. After I had done it a couple of times we got other faculty involved. We started filming some lectures. I did it purely with notes and readings and exams and so forth. Post it online. So my approach was really low tech. We upped the ante a bit. We experimented with this a bit for four or five years. At the same time our Course Online system that we currently use our classroom capture system which is also designed by Helmut. Ah. Became an obviously superior way to go and so our focus turned there. So I think the lesson is if you had ideas. If you wanted to pursue them. It was refreshingly easy if you had a good idea. You. There was absolutely no fuss no hindrance. If he liked the idea, he was completely on board. And you knew pretty quickly. He didn t hold you back or ask for paperwork or anything like that. So. He s an entrepreneur, it s his personality. Doherty: Excellent. Ah. What do you consider to be Dr. Epp s most significant contributions to the DePaul community? [15:56] Kalin: Since becoming well founding computer science. Breaking it off as a department at DePaul is the big one. So, I would say that s right up there. I m not sure I want to rank order them, but I can give you three. Ah. That would be absolutely huge. Ah going into digital media. So when we started the cinema program was also huge. At a place such as DePaul as at most places, ah, you would have small programs in film studies and so forth. We had that here in liberal arts, but certainly something like cinema production, animation production that would be considered too trade schoolish for most universities including this one. I think he had the vision to see that if you look at modern filmmaking, in fact, modern media of any type it s all computing based. Modern cameras for example are really computers with very good lenses attached to them, that s really what they are. And so he saw that there was a natural fit between what we were doing and what was going on in digital media. So I think this was contribution number two. Ah. The sort of numbers that we have for students that we have in cinema and animation and so forth would have never been anywhere near what they are now had we not started this program independently. In other words this would not have flourished had it stayed for example 5
in ah liberal arts and sciences. It just never would have happened. And then from my perspective, I ve been here forever of course. So, I would say that breaking science and health out of liberal arts was also way up there. The truth is in North America the way universities are ranked. The top tier universities have something in common. They all have very strong science. Very strong mathematics. Most of them have strong engineering. So the University of Chicago would be for example a huge exception there. But, it makes up for it with a world class business school, law school and medical school. And Epp has a lifelong love of science and I think he understood that DePaul was never going to go the next step up. I believe this as well. Unless science was given much more focus than it would get were it simply part of an assortment of departments in liberal arts and science. So I think that long term this will have huge impact, I hope positive impact on the university. Doherty: Excellent. Um. You mentioned the creation of the school of Digital Media, Interactive and Digital Media. [18:57] Kalin: Mm hmm. Doherty: With the addition of all that new faculty in CDM. Um. How did that transition go? How were these new faculty received by kind of the older more traditionally trained computer scientists? [19:06] Kalin: It was a struggle at the start, it s a struggle now. It s going to be a struggle forever. Most of those faculty at the beginning had MFAs. The computing faculty have PhDs. Those are two different union groups. Ah. And so there s a there s a pecking order there so it was very difficult to overcome and remains a challenge. I think the change you re starting to see it that we re getting more and more hires on the media side who have PhDs. And so internally that s going to be a struggle for them as well because you have more and more traditional academic interests in areas such as computer gaming, animation and so forth. So last year I m trying to remember. Two years ago off the top maybe our three hires into the media side were all PhDs. So I think this trend is going to continue. There s always going to be some tension between the two sides. There s always going to be some tension within each side. I don t think that. Well, I know for certain that Helmut never thought that was a bad thing. I share his conviction. It s not a bad thing. It s good to have very diverse interest and very diverse skills within a large academic unit. It keeps things vibrant. So at the personal level it can be a problem. It s always a problem. But, I don t see it as a major problem at all. It s just part of the cost of doing business. Doherty: Excellent. Um. Do you have any personal stories you d like to share about your various encounters with Dr. Epp over the years? [20:47] Kalin: Sure. I can share one. I can talk about when I really first got to know him. I think it says quite a bit about his personality. Ah. Those who know the characters involved will appreciate it, so. When I first really met him. We were in SAC at Lincoln Park. So the 6
Philosophy Department had basically one quarter of the fifth floor. I was chair at the time. The Math Department had another quarter of the fifth floor and he was in the process of getting a divorce from Math. So that was exciting as you can imagine. There were some bad feelings there. So the Computer Science Department had just started and he was the initial chair. He s the founding chair. Dick Meister was the dean and once a month Dick Meister would have all of the deans together in a meeting. So this is when I got to meet Epp. And what would happen was at the beginning of the meeting there would be a struggle to see which of the chairs had to take minutes for that meeting. And the meeting even though it was called a meeting really it was just a soliloquy. Dick Meister would get up talk for ninety minutes and then we would get up and leave. There would be really no discussion of anything. So usually the minutes as you can imagine were perfunctory. So you would have a meeting of blah blah blah single type-written page summarizing what Dick had said and then we re off to the next meeting. So finally it became Epp s turn to take the minutes and he took the minutes. And then the next, I still remember it vividly. I can t remember what was in it, but he comes in the next month at the next meeting and he has thirty-five or forty pages stapled together in long hand. All written out in long hand and he distributes this to everybody in the room. And I still remember up at the top it gave the date and then at the next line he had written- Dick said colon. And then he had transcribed everything that Meister had said to the best of his ability for ninety minutes. [laughter] Ah. Dick of course never took the hint. He did recognize that he was being the target of great amusement by all of us and I think this speaks a lot about Helmut s view of the world and his personality. I mean it was, it was subdued. He of course refused to admit that he had done anything unusual. And we just moved on. Doherty: Did he take the minutes again after that? [23:25] Kalin: No. I don t think he was asked to anymore after that. [laughter] Soon after that actually we broke off as a school. So. We were then on our own. Doherty: Excellent. Um. Can you share some final thoughts on Dr. Epp and his kind of service to the DePaul community and the legacy which he s left for DePaul? [23:43] Kalin: Well, I think he s been a tremendous contributor including his role as provost. That s not the kind of job that he particularly likes. I think he really did it out of a sense of duty. Ah. What he really enjoyed, I think. And I ve stayed in fairly close touch with him over the years. Is that he really loved being chair of Computer Science, teaching in Computer Science. And then basically building the school and then the college. That was his real love and so I think he did some other things including the provost job. He was also people forget he was the Vice President for Information Systems. Ah under Jack Minogue which was no easy task He also did that I think out of a sense of duty to the community. It s something he would never talk about, but he took that position pro bono. Ah. He received no extra pay for that at all. He insisted on not. So I think he s always been somebody who d be willing to step up. I can remember in the early days of computing where we would be sending out land mail advertisements for our certificate 7
programs. We d be doing this late in the evening and he would be down there putting the stamps on, licking the envelopes along with everybody else. I think it s the sort of the person he is. He s not somebody who stands on rank. He just wants to get the job done. And that I think is the most impressive thing about him. Doherty: Well thank you very much for your comments and for taking part in this project. [25:28] Kalin: Sure. Glad to do it. 8