Mahon: That one’s going and then I’m going to turn this one on, and now this one’s going. Okay. Today is Friday, April 5, 2019. My name is Leeah Mahon, Graduate Intern on this oral history project and Masters’ student in Public History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis
(IUPUI).
Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Doris Merritt at her home in Indianapolis.
This interview is sponsored and funded by the Administration of IUPUI and it is co-sponsored by the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership
Excellence.
This is the second recording session with Dr. Merritt.
There is a biographical sketch of Dr. Merritt at the start of the first recording session.
Before we begin the interview, I’m going to ask you your permission to do the same things that you just agreed to do in writing, just in case the paperwork you signed gets misplaced or lost. I’m asking your permission to do the following: record this interview, prepare a verbatim transcript of this interview, deposit the interview and the verbatim transcript with the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and with the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, and Directors of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center may make the interview and verbatim transcript available to their patrons, which may include posting all or part of the audio recording and transcription to their respective websites. Do I have your permission to do these things?
Merritt: You do.
Mahon: Alrighty, let’s get started. In a second, we’re going to talk about you’re second stint to IUPUI, but first I just wanted to ask you something that you mentioned before we turned on the recording. I want to know about the first office established when Maynard Hine was made the Chancellor of IUPUI.
Merritt: Well, as always, there was very little extra space on campus. Space has always been a problem. So, where was he to have his office? And the University had purchased a little building on the south side of Michigan between the School of Dentistry and well, I guess, whatever was on the other side of it. It had been a cleaners – it had been Curley’s Cleaners – and in the back of Curley’s Cleaners was a one-man insurance office. So, it was a little tiny discrete building and the front of it was all glass; as you would expect in a cleaners. It had no landscaping around it, just big hunks of gravel. At the time, there were a lot of sit-ins and unrest on the
Mahon: Oh.
Merritt: And here we were going to be in an isolated building with large hunks of gravel in front of a glass windowed front, and Maynard Hine did not care for that at all. He chose to take an inner office and he put me in the outer office where I had a full view of Michigan Avenue and we had draped the windows. I can just say that we were in there until they found space in the basement of the Union Building when Glenn Irwin became Chancellor.
Very few people remember Curley’s Cleaners and the insurance room which, was our conference room.
Mahon: Well, now we will know and it is on recording.
Merritt: Alright. (LAUGHING) You know the first office for IUPUI was Curley’s Cleaners.
Mahon: Yes, that’ll be on the record now. Now we’re going to move on to your return to IUPUI in 1988. You decided to return to IUPUI after the passing of your husband, Don. You mentioned that you had your friends and family there, so you decided to move back to Indiana. Upon returning to IUPUI in 1988, the Dean of the Medical School, Walter Daly, appointed you as Associate Dean of the School of Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics on a tenure track. Also, upon your return, Jerry Bepko, the Chancellor of IUPUI at the time, asked you to serve as his Assistant for Economic Development. You agreed to fill all positions; why?
Merritt: I always said yes. I’m sort of like Ado Annie in Oklahoma! – I’m just a girl who can’t say no – and it seemed like a challenge. (LAUGHING) And I understood that there is a lot of criticism from people who really didn’t know any better about the state supporting public universities, and particularly research programs. The state did not support research because they didn’t see the value. I always tried to point out to people how many people we employ, how many technicians, how much
equipment we purchased, and how much we did for the community in an economic sense. My name was sort of associated with that, plus the earlier work I had done.
Mahon: Okay. Did you ever feel overwhelmed by all of those positions or regret taking on so much when you returned?
Merritt: Not really.
Mahon: No?
Merritt: . . .I never regretted the economic development business particularly when Ehrlich asked me to be his Special Assistant. He was the President of the University…
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: … and do the same thing as I did for Bepko. I had no money so nobody was interested in helping me. But I had enough that I managed to put out a publication, Indiana University Means Business, and used the same contact points within both Bloomington and Indianapolis of people that would be willing to consult with industry if they asked to do it.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: We put this on the desk of every legislator in the Indiana Statehouse and, as far as publicity was concerned and public relations, it was great. I don’t know if anybody ever took advantage of the information. It was
overwhelming in that I didn’t know what to do that would make any kind of impact.
Mahon: As far as the economic development of the position went…
Merritt: Exactly.
Mahon: … because you didn’t have any official…
Merritt: I had no official…
Mahon: Experience.
Merritt: … experience and I had no official budget and I really didn’t know a blessed thing about economic development.
Mahon: Right. Well, you mentioned in your biography that your job description as Associate Dean, moving on to that, was to do whatever needed to be done, and that seems to be your motto with all of the jobs that you’ve had.
Did you enjoy such an open portfolio, or did you wish that there was more structure?
Merritt: Oh, I loved it.
Mahon: You loved it?
Merritt: I never really wanted to do anything continuously and it was fun to have new projects to do every time. With Walter Daly, he really gave me a free hand. He would give me something he wanted done and then say go do it.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And that worked. (hits table)
Mahon: Yeah, you enjoyed just the freedom to, to do what you wanted to do and what needed to be done?
Merritt: Yes, and people were very helpful. Of course, it doesn’t hurt. People’s idea of clout is what they invest in you, not what you really have.
Mahon: . . .Right, right.
Merritt: And if they know you can talk to somebody who really is in a position of power, they’re inclined to be helpful.
Mahon: Well, you also mentioned in your biography that you were instrumental in the Medical School’s designation as a Cancer Center and a Center for Aging. The Cancer Center was one of your biggest achievements as Associate Dean. You believed that the IU School of Medicine deserved national recognition for its work in cancer research and treatment, as well as more grant funding, and you were determined to make that happen.
What did you do to make it happen?
Merritt: That was really difficult because we had three giants in cancer research on campus and nobody wanted a czar for cancer over them, certainly none of these three people did. I went around to them and to the chairmen of their departments and they all agreed it would be lovely to have cancer research center, but they could not agree on a director. One name kept coming up as somebody who was doing cancer research, sort of impassioned, but it was the same name from several people, and that was a man named Steve Williams who worked at the VA Hospital.
Mahon: Okay. . .
Merritt: He was not a real what they call researcher. He was a clinical trials person. So nobody thought of him as being cancer research, but because his name kept coming up, I finally asked to see him and called to make an appointment to see him actually. He said no, he’d come to my office, which I always used to go to new people’s office to make them feel comfortable. I realized that he and I were operating on the same radar, that he was coming to my office.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: He was the most modest man. He had a heart condition that I didn’t know about at the time and he didn’t really want to take on any kind of direct leadership and he didn’t see himself as being director of anything. He just wanted to do his job as he did it and did it well.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: It took a lot of persuasion actually. His wife was an attorney and I had to have lunch with her to talk to her about what this would mean in terms of his family life.
Mahon: Oh, wow.
Merritt: And finally, they agreed that he would take it on and he did. He had never written a grant before. Now I worked with him and he was just superb to work for, and he did build the Cancer Center.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: It took a lot of doing. It was a planning grant and then after the planning grant, we got a regular cancer center grant and it was high time we had one; we certainly deserved it.
Mahon: You had to pull three separate organizations on campus together that were doing cancer research?
Merritt: Yes, three people actually.
Mahon: Three people, okay.
Merritt: Three individuals.
Mahon: Okay.
Merritt: Larry Einhorn, who did testicular cancer, was known all over for it – and good heavens, I don’t know how I could forget his name; he would never forgive me – Weber, George Weber…
Mahon: George Weber.
Merritt: … who was doing a lot of basic cancer research. And then there was a very strong cancer research unit in Hematology, and all these people agreed that they could work together as a center. And Williams, with great tact and finesse, managed to do this.
Mahon: What problems did you face, if any, when helping to create this?
Merritt: I actually had to convince the Dean at the time, who was not Walter Daly.
Daly had -- Daly started it, but it was Bob Holden who was the Dean at the time, and Holden didn’t like the idea of a director of a center reporting to him directly and having the freedom to speak for the School.
Mahon: I see.
Merritt: It took a little bit of conversation with Holden to get him to agree that when the site visitors came that he would say yes, he would pay attention to what the Cancer Center Director said.
Mahon: That he would still have authority.
Merritt: Yes, that’s the word, thank you. Good word. (LAUGHING)
Mahon: Yes. Another achievement of yours that stuck out to me when you were Associate Dean, was the establishment of an outpatient Clinical Research Center.
Merritt: Yes. There were a lot of small companies and physicians who had plans to do, who did research, that they had to have human -- do human
experiments on, clinical trials. And clinical trials are terribly expensive and they couldn’t afford to set up their own clinical trials. Now, we had a Clinical Trials Research Center, but that was an entirely different thing.
That was on campus. This was to be on campus for people off campus to bring their ideas in and have us do the clinical trials, testing on them, and the woman who started that with me was Rose Fife. She did a very, very good job with that and she actually made money with the clinical trials.
And we had to actually to put together a business plan to convince the hospital that it was worthwhile to give us three rooms that we could do these trials in. In the business plan, we foresaw that we could make a small profit on this and indeed we did. It was never a lot of money, but it paid for itself and it served a good purpose.
Mahon: Does this still exist today?
Merritt: No.
Mahon: No.
Merritt: Well, I don’t think so. Rose went on to start the Center for Women’s Excellence and I don’t - I think she passed it on to somebody else, but I don’t remember to whom.
Mahon: Okay. You were also involved in the Kinsey Institutes at Bloomington as a Chair on a search committee to find a new director. (LAUGHING) This is a jump, this is a jump to Bloomington, but this also stuck out me because the Kinsey Institute was an extremely interesting place.
Merritt: It was fascinating, and the Kinsey Institute had been under an Acting Director for two years and she was sick and tired of it, and I don’t blame her. There were a lot of prima donnas doing research and that. And the Committee had to, it was represented by law, by medicine – no, not medicine – by law, psychiatry, women’s studies. They had at least – I think business was on it. One of the Committee members was a well-
known homosexual who was well-respected from Australia. It was a fascinating committee and we advertised worldwide, and they had tried this for two years and they hadn’t been able to locate anybody. When they did, somebody in a group was always not in favor of it. They could not get somebody they would agree on. Through good fortune, there was
somebody available in Brittan who was looking to head such a thing and was qualified to do so. Again, it was one of those personal things – he was divorced and had married one of his younger associates and he wanted to get out and he had - across the ocean was just great for him. . . Mahon: Right. Escape. (LAUGHING)
Merritt: . . .Yeah, it was good for him, it was good for us, and I finally got
everybody to agree to this. Using a little bit of charm and trickery, when I took a straw vote, I started, I was sitting at the head of a table, I started at my left and everybody approved. The chief dissenter was the last one on the right and he, seeing that the tide was totally against him, finally said reluctantly he would go along with it. Well, by that time, we were doing things pretty well (INAUDIBLE) and I immediately emailed the results of the search to the Vice President who was in charge of the group and he announced it the following day. It was in the papers…
Mahon: Oh, wow.
Merritt: … because news, newspapers were just on top of Kinsey. All you had to do was say Kinsey and…
Mahon: Right, right.
Merritt: … there’s a reporter in. This man took umbrage at this and wrote a letter to the editor saying that this was reported as a unanimous decision, but it really wasn’t. Well, it was, but it wasn’t because he really had severe reservations about this, and I was asked please to refute this…
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: … and I thought no, there are some things I learned that you just keep quiet about and it’ll go away. I never fanned the fires by reporting and it did go away. And he was a very successful Director and things worked out very well for the Institute.
Mahon: Do you think that there was a lot of trouble finding a Director because of what the Kinsey Institute is and how taboo it was seen as?
Merritt: Yes, and it was famous, but it was taboo.
Mahon: Yes.
Merritt: You are right, exactly.
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: So, it drew a lot of flack.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And there weren’t many people qualified at the time who were openly doing sex research.
Mahon: Right, right. Why do you think they chose you to Chair the Search Committee, of all people? (LAUGHING)
Merritt: I, you know, I don’t know why they chose me for that. I don’t know why they chose me to do a lot of things, except I sometimes think that they’d say, Well, let’s see if she can pull this one off.”
Mahon: Because you pulled everything else off so far.
Merritt: Yeah, the others were, “maybe she can do this.”
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: I really think I was their last resort, so to speak.
Mahon: Well, you made it happen in the end. So, that’s all that matters.
Merritt: It might have by that time with anyone, frankly. I mean, two years is a long time…
Mahon: That is a very long time.
Merritt: … for people to sit in meetings.
Mahon: Yes. Now I’m going to move on to one of the most interesting parts, I thought, of your biography that I read. You mentioned that the academic laboratory animal accreditation certification was quote “one of the least satisfactory things you had to do at the IU School of Medicine.” Can you tell me why?
Merritt: Yes. Laboratory animal research is intrinsic to a lot of research and this was a time, if you know the PETA people, People Against Research in Animals…
Mahon: Yes.
Merritt: … and it was a huge -- well -- a huge national affair. There were a lot of stringent requirements in animal research and we really did not have very
good animal research facilities, but we had to develop them and they have been developed, and the woman who took over the original design of them did a very good job, but she was a veterinarian. She was married to the Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, but she had no
administrative experience whatsoever and she had a terrible time trying to control the technicians who were really dieners and they were very low- paid. They had no particular education to take care of animals. And because of her own insecurity, she was absolutely stubborn and adamant about following rules to the point where they didn’t make sense. The investigators didn’t like to work with her at all. The other thing we didn’t have, we needed an accreditation from the Animal Laboratory Care Institute to show that we were up-to-snuff in all of our handlings of animals, both the handling and the harassing of them, and we were not accredited. She kept saying she was going to write it, she was going to write it, she was going to write it, but nothing ever showed. The worst thing that finally pushed me to going to the Dean and saying we really have to do something drastic, was when one of our major investigators had a large grant up for review and the site visitor who came to the site wanted to speak to the head of the laboratory animal care to be sure that he would have space for his animals. And she absolutely, when she talked to them, she said, “I can’t guarantee it at all.” He may get this grant – I mean, it was several hundred thousand a year – but…
Mahon: That’s a lot of money to gamble with.
Merritt: It sure was, but I can’t assure that he’ll have quarters to put his animals, and he called me, and he was just frantic. I knew the group was on campus, but he asked if I would come over and speak to them. So, I came over and assured them that the Dean’s Office would never ever submit a grant where we couldn’t house the animals and we would be able to house the animals, and he did get his grant, but I should not have to do that and she should have been more able to give that assurance.
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: So, I convinced her that she needed a Special Assistant and I was fortunately – again, fate works in wonderful ways – her name is Kathy Vokowad (SPELLING???) and her husband had been given a wonderful job in Indianapolis and she had a, she was a DVM with a PhD and she was looking for a job. I told her what the situation was and asked her if she would be willing to come into it and try and help take things and make them go. She said yes and I talked to the Dean and we decided we would give Dr. Henry a year’s administrative leave – I think we made that one up, frankly – with pay so she could write the AAALC accreditation request.
Mahon: Okay.
Merritt: She did write the report finally, and it was not well-done, and it had to be redone, which Kathy did. And at that point, she thought she was being harassed unfairly and she resigned, and it was good for her and it was good for us. Actually, I think she lives, by that time, she was taking tranquilizers just to, well we found some in her desk when she left…
Mahon: Oh, my.
Merritt: … but just to try and maintain. I felt very sorry for her because she was a good person, she was doing the best she could, and she just wasn’t equipped for it.
Mahon: Struggling, yeah.
Merritt: And then Kathy took over and everybody breathed a sigh of relief…
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: … and we were accredited and things worked smoothly until – and that was another one – I discovered that our Animal Care Committee, the Advisory Committee, had had one of our investigators under review for some time for doing things that were a little bit questionable with how he was dealing with animals. Then they found him in complete – well, he just lied about what he was doing, and he had his graduate students lie about what he was doing. The thing was then, that if you were caught being noncompliant by the NIH, they would take away, they’d stop every grant to the institution. And they almost did that with Johns Hopkins later on – they caught somebody and didn’t report it fast enough. So, I had to tell this young man, who was just overeager – he was really a very good investigator that I had to take away his grant and put somebody else in charge of it, which his Chairman took over the grant. (stop)
Mahon: And this is, because I think that this is the situation I was going to ask you about next – this was with the Lab Animal Resource Center, correct?
Merritt: Yes, yes.
Mahon: This is when you were the Vice Chancellor and Dean of Research and Graduate Studies…
Merritt: Yes.
Mahon: … from 1997 to 1998, and that he lied to the Oversight Committee of…
Merritt: He just lied.
Mahon: … about his compliance procedures.
Merritt: And they hated to come to me because they thought they should solve it for themselves, but they couldn’t. It was one where they really had to have somebody in my position to say to this guy, “we’re taking away your grant privileges.”
Mahon: Well, and like you said, it, it risked the health of everybody involved in the investigation and jeopardized the School of Medicine’s reputation.
Merritt: And all of that is well and good, but it also jeopardized about four million dollars-worth of grants.
Mahon: Right. Can you explain, as the leader in this situation, what hard choices you had to make to rectify the situation?
Merritt: Rectifying the situation wasn’t so difficult, it was trying to explain to this young man that this was not a personal thing.
Mahon: So, that was the hardest part?
Merritt: That was the hardest part and also to get him situated, give him time enough to get himself another job. And I did call – you couldn’t put this in writing – I did call the Chairman of the department he went to and said you better keep a close eye on what he’s doing because he’s done it twice before; and I’m sure he’s learned his lesson, but he may not have.
Mahon: You would hope.
Merritt: Yeah.
Mahon: Would you consider this one the hardest situations you had to deal with as a leader at IUPUI?
Merritt: Yes, yes. Like anybody else, you don’t like to fire people; you don’t like to get them in trouble. Animals to me is – I still have a cap though that says LARC on it that they gave as sort of an ad (INAUDIBLE) Laboratory Animal Care. It says LARC across it; it’s a blue cap, which is now faded to a pale gray.
Mahon: Moving on, you mentioned in your biography that you saw your position as Assistant to the President and Chancellor in Economic Development as a token female position…
Merritt: Not female; just token.
Mahon: … just token position?
Merritt: A male could’ve done it too.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: It wasn’t female.
Mahon: It was just, you were for show pretty much?
Merritt: I was for show. I was to show an interest for the University and not cost them anything.
Mahon: What initiatives did you take to help with economic development in the IU School of Medicine despite your lack of knowledge on the subject?
Merritt: Well, the state did give one grant for economic development and there was a small group headed by – his first name was Jeremy – that had some money from the state to support new ventures. And then on this campus, on IUPUI, it was Morton Marcus who was a well-known economic development expert and statistician, and he had a grant from the state to support his publication. They both came from the same office and it was clear to me that if I could get both of these grants under one heading that we would make a little more money because they could give it as a sort of inter-campus thing, and I did. When I went to see Morton the first time, the first thing he said to me was, “What do you know about economic development?” And I said, “Nothing, that’s why I’m here.” We became fast friends after that because it was clear when I made the appointment, he was ready to kick me out of the office. And we did get a little more money in the state because I think the grant came to me and then I distributed it to the two of them.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: But having it come to one person instead of two made it a better vehicle for support.
Mahon: Yeah. Did you face any problems in this position?
Merritt: No.
Mahon: No?
Merritt: Dealing with, I tried to get the Deans who were – the Business School Deans…
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: … oh, my goodness…
Mahon: Just dealing with them, could you tell me about that?
Merritt: They had tried to get the Deans of the various business schools together to find out what they thought I could do, and as soon as they found out that the President wasn’t putting any money into this, they didn’t want anything at all and they really just didn’t even want to cooperate. But they were willing to give me information so I could put my booklet together.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: That they thought was alright.
Mahon: So, they at least helped a little bit in the situation.
Merritt: They helped a little bit. Well, they didn’t, they didn’t say no, let’s say.
Mahon: Right, yeah. Throughout your time at the IU School of Medicine, you also continued to serve as an NIH consultant off and on and were appointed to serve as the first Chairman of the Scientific and Technical Review Board for Biomedical and Behavioral Research Facilities for the NIH Division of Research Resources. You received this four-year appointment when you were seventy years old.
Merritt: Yeah and boy was I flattered.
Mahon: Right. What made you continue to add yet another thing to your plate at this point?
Merritt: It sounded like fun, and it really was because can you imagine a
discussion group of thirty people around a table? But we had architects because we were talking about buildings, we had scientists because we talking about science, we had administrators because we were talking about building science and putting them on campus. And it was just a fun group and they all did what they should, and we spent our money wisely, I thought.
Mahon: Did this feel like work to you or it was just something…?
Merritt: I have to tell you that, except for the animal bit, nothing felt like work.
Mahon: Really? Just, and you enjoyed doing all of it.
Merritt: I just loved it. Yes.
Mahon: Well, by 1994, you mentioned that you were ready to stop working full- time and cut back on your hours, which you did; however, you were contacted by Jerry Bepko one night asking you to be the Interim Dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, as if it could not get any weirder. (LAUGHING) The previous Dean had up and left the Saturday before the fall semester began after disagreements among he
and his faculty. What was going through your mind when Bepko asked you to do this?
Merritt: Well, I was a street tramp when the phone rang. It was about 9:30 at night or 10:00, and there had been trouble in the school. It was pretty clear there was trouble in the school, and they had asked me because I had worked with some of the engineers in bioengineering getting the engineers to work with some of the physicians who were interested. I knew the engineers and Jerry had asked me to go over there and talk to a group of the faculty and find out what their problem was. And I had gone over and I had talked to the faculty and group, and they really had a long list of concerns that they didn’t like what the new Dean was doing, and it wasn’t surprising. The former Dean, not the one I replaced, but the former Dean had been Dean for about, oh, ever since the school had started. . .
Mahon: Oh wow.
Merritt: . . .and it was a pretty laissez-faire bit. The engineers consulted where they pleased, they did what they wanted, they were little chiefdoms in and of themselves. And when the new Dean came in, he came in from Lilly, he was going to immediately change all that. He was going to get this organized, put it on a really good business level. And you don’t take a faculty that’s been used to doing what it damn well pleased for ten years and say thou shalt. Well, they shadn’t (sic) and they went and they complained bitterly and they drew up a list of some fifteen or sixteen or more things that they insisted that would be changed before they would support the Dean any longer. I showed the Dean the list and most of them, I said, “You know you could really just do this fairly easily if you just delay the changes that you want to make, which are good changes and should be made”…
Mahon: Just not all at once; that’s a lot.
Merritt: … “but you just don’t walk in and” – well, I can’t say to him – he should have known you don’t walk in and do it overnight…
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: … but he just, he just absolutely couldn’t abide this and he literally, he came in on that weekend and cleaned out his office and walked out.
Mahon: So, prior to you being asked to be the Interim Dean, you were trying to mediate the situation.
Merritt: Yes, I was.
Mahon: Okay, okay.
Merritt: And obviously with no success.
Mahon: Well, it seems like you had a tough situation to try to work with.
Merritt: But Jerry appointed an Executive Committee and they said that they wanted me to be their Dean, and this just shows to go (sic) what Board of Trustees can do if they want to.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: I was absolutely unqualified for this. I didn’t have tenure in any school, which you had to have to be a Dean.
Mahon: Oh.
Merritt: Oh, yeah. You had to be tenured someplace.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: You certainly needed to have the training and the background that was essential to you doing this…
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: … and the other one was is you weren’t supposed to hold an administrative position after you were sixtey-five.
Mahon: Well, you did that.
Merritt: I’m certain – so they forgot all that and made me Acting Dean.
Mahon: Well, this made you then the first female Dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology.
Merritt: Yes, and I also said I didn’t know how Purdue would feel about that because they were in an awkward situation. They had academically reported to Purdue at West Lafayette and administratively reported to Jerry Bepko on this campus. So, I said, “What does the President of Purdue think about this, Steve Beering?” And Jerry said, “Well, he’d talked to Steve,” and Steve had been Dean at the School of Medicine, so I knew him and I had actually been influential in getting him appointed in the first place – not as Dean, but on the faculty.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And Steve said to Jerry, “Well, if he could be President of Purdue, I could certainly be a Dean in one of his schools.” So, they accepted that.
Mahon: Why did you end up, did you have any reservations about accepting the position or did you know that…?
Merritt: Well, I knew somebody had to do it and I knew it could be done. I figured as long as I had the support of the faculty, I certainly could do the
administration and I knew how to deal with people and, frankly, they needed a mother. They had been (INAUDIBLE)…
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: … and it worked out very well. It really did. They were very helpful the faculty was wonderfully supportive. I did have two real problems.
Mahon: I was going to ask you that next – what issues did you face?
Merritt: One of the things that the (INAUDIBLE) name was Potvin (SPELLING???) had tried to do was he wanted PhDs in Chairs of all the departments.
Well, in engineering, you have engineers and you have technologies. You had mechanical engineers and electrical engineers and you have
electrical engineering technology and mechanical engineering technology.
And, in the technology, the Masters’ Degree is usually the terminal
degree. His chairmen did not have PhDs and he wanted all of the faculty to have PhDs. This really wasn’t very realistic.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: He appointed an extremely qualified man to one of these and actually much too good for the position, and he could not work – the faculty liked him, but they couldn’t meet his expectations because they didn’t have the training he had. I wanted very much to keep him at the school, but I knew we had to have another Chair. We were starting at the time – we had the opportunity for the state to start a forensic laboratory and I asked him if he would be Director of that and give up the Chair. He was delighted to do it.
It was a lateral transfer; it wasn’t a demotion at all. And the person who then came in, it was mechanical engineering technology training, yeah.
Why can’t I remember whether it was mechanical or electrical? I think it was mechanical. The man who then took on the chairmanship did a good job of it. Actually when I left, one of the awards I liked more than anything was from the technicians in that department drew up a engineering plan with all sorts of – I could probably even show it to you – circuits on it, which was a circuit board and it was given to Doris Merritt, Wonder Woman. (loud banging on table)
Mahon: Oh, that’s your official title.
Merritt: That was my official title for that department…
Mahon: That’s a pretty good title.
Merritt: … and they were just very good about it. The other one I didn’t realize until later turned out to be a pathological liar, and I had never dealt with that before. He just couldn’t tell the truth. I think even if he could’ve told the truth and it was the right thing to do, he still couldn’t tell the truth…
Mahon: That’s a very intimidating...
Merritt: … and his, his faculty knew it and they wanted to get rid of him…
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: … and I, I didn’t know how to do that. Then I discovered that his wife was getting a degree, a Masters’ Degree, and she was lacking one course to fulfill the requirements and he established one course for one student with one teacher so that she could get her degree.
Mahon: Was that allowed?
Merritt: It’s a terrible breech of etiquette.
Mahon: Right. . .
Merritt: It was a conflict of interest and actually she passed her exam, she was a good person, she deserved the degree, but he couldn’t do that. But I gave him a choice of being tried for, well, non-integrity, I guess, and stepping down from the Chair. So, he did step down from the Chair rather than face the Conflict of Interest Committee.
Mahon: And he was the Chair of what?
Merritt: It was, I think it was, I think that was electrical engineering…
Mahon: Oh, okay, okay.
Merritt: … or mechanic – one of the two, I’m getting them mixed up.
Mahon: One of the two; that’s okay.
Merritt: When Oner Yurtseven came in who was the real Dean who followed me, he immediately assigned him to a position in our outreach post in
Malaysia…
Mahon: Oh, wow.
Merritt: … and got him off campus, finally. He later got hired by another school and I often wondered what they did with him.
Mahon: Right. So, what about -- I remember reading about an issue that you faced with the U.S. Navy’s academic partnership with the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology Can you. . .
Merritt: This was a very strange thing and it really had more to do with the Navy and it went through a little with economic development. There was – this is complicated – there was a school in the middle of the Mohave Dessert called the Electronic Manufacturing Productivity Facility (EMPF), and the Navy wanted to move it out of the Mohave Dessert and put it closer to another Naval development. Well, in the City of Indianapolis, we had Naval Avionics development, which was a huge enterprise where they did research in naval activities and there was no space on their campus to move the EMPF to. They asked if IUPUI could find space for it, but we had no space for it either, but we wanted to cooperate with the city that was very much interested in getting this whole group here because there’s more money, more people, more income.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: We located a spot of land on the canal, which was then practically, well, it was nothing. There was no development there at all. It was tenements and so forth. There was a spot of land there that we could get, and we could build a building on, but we didn’t have money for construction. So, they worked out a plan whereby if we would give them the building, they would give us a contract to do the teaching in the EMPF and we then could charge the fees to the companies that had to send their technicians to the school. And the fees that the companies paid for tuition would come to us which would cover the cost of building the building.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: Quite a go-around.
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: And everybody wanted this except one group in the Navy who wanted it to go to Philadelphia. And this is what I was totally ignorant of and wish I was still ignorant of, didn’t realize the politics that went on between admirals in the Navy and which admiral wanted which facility in their city.
Mahon: Right. Oh, I see.
Merritt: Anyway, I guess the Indianapolis admiral won and we got the EMPF.
Then we had to advertise for a Director of it. And since part of our rationale for being involved at all was that we could use it to teach our engineering students in their laboratories, we needed somebody who was academic. Well, as luck would have it, we found a wonderfully qualified man who had a PhD in engineering and in business and he agreed to take
the position of EMPF Director. But when we advertised for the position, they sent this one admiral who was promised the job and he came to the interview acting as though the job was already his. You know, he came, he was just totally conceited and thought he was doing us a favor by even coming. So, when we appointed Gary Burkhart instead of him, he was furious when he went home, and his contingent was furious who was supporting that admiral. Well, I had no idea this was going on. Who did?
In any event, the reason the EMPF could charge tuition is that all the technicians who worked for manufacturing plants who had contracts with the Navy had to be certified by the EMPF; and all of those people, all of their CEOs, got together and lobbied to have that requirement removed.
As soon as that requirement was removed, they no longer had to pay tuition and we had no support for the EMPF…
Mahon: Oh, no.
Merritt: … that would allow us to cover the rent.
Mahon: Right, right.
Merritt: Well, the Navy decided that maybe that wasn’t fair. They gave us a contract to manage the facility. Of course, there was nobody else – and to perform certain services to the facility. There was nobody else’s name could go on the contract but mine, so mine was on the contract. That I didn’t care for at all, but there was no choice.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: The man who was my pathogenic liar was the one who was supposed to provide the services for the facility. So, when I went the first year to write the progress report and I got this progress report from him, I knew he hadn’t done this stuff.
Mahon: Right. What he had wrote, you knew he had not done. . .
Merritt: . . .What he had -- I knew he had not done and I couldn’t lie about it.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: So, I went to Gary Burkhart and Gary did manage to put something together for me which told the truth but managed to keep us out of hot water. Eventually, the Navy decided that they would move the EMPF to Philadelphia.
Mahon: After all that.
Merritt: After all of that, after all the expense they had in moving some forty people and their families and shipping their goods and everything else.
Mahon: Oh, my.
Merritt: And again, it had to do with admirals fighting admirals and one admiral’s daughter was married to another admiral’s son…
Mahon: Oh, my.
Merritt: … and the person who came up with the competing grant to keep the EMPF was actually still employed by the Navy when he had his name on it as Principal Investigator. It was a tremendous mess.
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: Jerry Bepko and I wanted very much to actually bring legal charges. We talked to people in the Judge Advocate General Office, and we were told we would probably win. But we realized if we did that, we wouldn’t get the contract back and in addition to that, we would put up such bad vibes between the Navy and IUPUI that if we ever wanted to work with them again, we couldn’t. So, we just threw up our hands and let the whole thing go.
Mahon: But you could’ve pressed charges against the Navy.
Merritt: . . .Oh, we could’ve pressed charges. I left a whole document – the entire documented story with our own attorney, with the IUPUI attorney and the IU attorney, but they never, it’s just there someplace.
Mahon: What a mess.
Merritt: What a mess.
Mahon: Well, on the complete other end of the spectrum a very significant achievement you made as Interim Dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, was the establishment of a Biomedical Engineering PhD degree. . .
Merritt: Yes, and I’m really proud of that…
Mahon: Yes.
Merritt: … because we had all the bits and pieces for it and, of course, Purdue at West Lafayette did not want to have PhD students on the Indianapolis campus because they thought it would lose them from students, frankly.
And they also sort of looked down their noses at the credentials of the people who taught in “an extension center.”
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: Well, we were hardly an extension center, but that’s the way it was felt.
We did have one or two students who went back and forth, but they were getting their degree from West Lafayette rather than from IUPUI, which was fine, but we really wanted a bioengineering department on campus.
Fortunately, a grant opportunity came along for Purdue to go for a bioengineering center and they couldn’t do it without the support of a medical school. When two of their vice presidents came down to talk to the Dean Daly in Medicine to ask if he would cooperate, he said, “Well, obviously,” since I was Acting Dean of the School of Engineering that he would leave it entirely in my hands. And then Walter said, as he often did, to me, “Just do what you think is right.”
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And I just frankly said I wasn’t going to support them and sign off on the application unless they approved our program. It was pure blackmail, but they did.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: They did and later on, of course, we had our own program and it’s a good one and we had a professorship in biomedical engineering.
Mahon: So, why was it so important to you to get this degree established?
Merritt: It was very important. It was good for the School of Medicine, it was good for the School of Engineering, it was good for the students who didn’t want to spend time in West Lafayette. They still had to take some courses in West Lafayette, but they preferred to be full-time here. And, of course, we are now such a huge campus, it was just part of the growth of the campus.
It was right for the campus.
Mahon: Right. After your year-long stint in the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, you resumed your roles in the IU School of Medicine. The Purdue School of Engineering and Technology awarded you an honorary Doctorate of Science in 1997 for your role as the…
Merritt: Purdue University offered the doctorate. It’s the University…
Mahon: … just the University in general.
Merritt: Yes, the University offers the doctorate.
Mahon: Okay. So, Purdue University awarded you an honorary Doctorate of Science in 1997.
Merritt: Yes, they did, which was very nice.
Mahon: How did you feel that the position that you held for that year changed your view of leadership, or did it?
Merritt: I never, as I’ve said before, I’ve never really thought of myself as a leader, I was just leading.
Mahon: You were just doing what you had to do.
Merritt: Doing what I had to do to get it done.
Mahon: Right. In 1997, what you called your peaceful return to the Medical School, did not last long when you received yet another call from Chancellor Bepko, this time asking you to act as the Associate Vice President for Research at IU.
Merritt: Vice Chancellor.
Mahon: Vice Chancellor. . .
Merritt: Oh, yes. It was Vice President.
Mahon: Vice President, Associate Vice President for Research at IU and…
Merritt: Yes.
Mahon: … Vice Chancellor for Research in Graduate Studies…
Merritt: That’s correct.
Mahon: … for IUPUI. You agreed to do so for what you said would be six months.
Merritt: Six months – I was tired of getting up at 6:00 in the morning for 8:00 meetings.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: I was seventy, yeah.
Mahon: You were over seventy at this time.
Merritt: Yeah, I sure was.
Mahon: What kinds of things did you do in these roles?
Merritt: Well, first we had to have a job description and it was a kind of difficult little thing because you can’t be an Associate Vice President reporting to the Vice President and President of the University and a Vice Chancellor and reporting to the Chancellor, when the Chancellor had a Vice
Chancellor who considered himself in charge of all the Vice Chancellors.
So, I tried to put together a job description with lots of dotted lines and solid lines showing who reported to whom. I was pretty adamant about reporting only to Jerry and to the Vice President and not going through the Vice Chancellor. (tapping on table)
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: The Vice Chancellor obviously didn’t care for this and we couldn’t get, I couldn’t get the job description cleared. I understood Jerry’s predicament, he didn’t want to upset his Vice Chancellor, on the other hand, he didn’t particular want to upset the President either. And after the first six months, I couldn’t get the job description through, which was my job, although there were things to do at the Graduate School that I did.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And my hands were tied, I couldn’t do anything. So, I went to my own Vice President and I said, “I’m sorry, I did this for six months. I said I’d do it and I’m leaving, and I’m getting no place. There’s no point in your paying me to sit here with something that nobody’s approving.” So, he went to the President and got it approved pretty fast. But they hadn’t even appointed a Search and Screen Committee for the job because they didn’t have the job description. It took six months to get that done and then it took another while to get a Search and Screen Committee appointed.
Mahon: So, you were asked to be in this position as kind of a placeholder to create the job description while they were trying to find…
Merritt: Exactly, and as you’ve probably gathered, that’s not what I wanted to do.
Mahon: No. Nope.
Merritt: I did do some things for the Graduate School. The Associate Dean for Graduate Studies on the campus was pretty set in her ways and she made it almost impossible to get new degrees approved, and again, it’s a growing campus. We had to have our Masters’ degrees and new
Doctorates approved.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: There was no reason why they shouldn’t be and there were too many hurdles that were being put up to make it impossible to do it, and Sheila was just having no part of it. I reorganized her Advisory Committee and put together some rules and regulations that she had to abide by. And Nasser Paydar, who is now Chancellor at IUPUI, actually did a wonderful job in putting together a brochure which showed exactly what you had to do in each school to go through the process of getting a graduate degree.
I left before that thing was fully approved by everybody, but I suspect it was still in use.
Mahon: You ended up staying in these final positions at IU and IUPUI for a year, not six months, and after, in 1998, you decided that you were ready to retire for good.
Merritt: It was eighteen months by then.
Mahon: Okay.
Merritt: And they had finally found somebody to take the job and I realized I could really retire. I mean, I was going to be successful the fourth time in
retiring.
Mahon: So, you felt that you…
Merritt: I’d done my job.
Mahon: You had done your job…
Merritt: As much as I…
Mahon: … in general, but especially in that position to help whoever was going to be in it next be successful.
Merritt: Yes.
Mahon: After everything that you did, what made you realize that you were finally ready to be done with your official work?
Merritt: I think I was just tired.
Mahon: I’m sure you were. (LAUGHING) Merritt: I was burned out.
Mahon: Yeah.
Merritt: I didn’t, I didn’t like getting up early in the morning. I really didn’t, I loved Jerry Bepko; I loved working with him, but being a Vice Chancellor means sitting in all sorts of committee meetings that were duller than dish wash. I mean, his cabinet had to look at things like parking, and I can tell you more about starlings and parking garage trees than you care to know, and it was just, it wasn’t exciting…
Mahon: Right, yeah.
Merritt: … and I wasn’t contributing anything that anybody else couldn’t contribute.
There was no point in my being there.
Mahon: Right. To kind of begin to wrap it up, which with your incredibly long career, is hard to do, you became Professor Emerita Indiana University School of Medicine in 1998. In all your years, you served your country in the Navy during World War II, you taught pediatrics at Duke and Indiana University, held several administrative positions at NIH and Indiana University, including Executive Secretary of the Cardiovascular and General Medicine Study Sections, NIH; Research Training and Research Resources Officer, NIH; Assistant Dean for Medical Research, IU School of Medicine; Assistant Dean for Research, IU; Dean of Research and Sponsored Programs, IUPUI; and, of course, your Interim Deanship in the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, just to name a few
because that is not an extensive list of your…
Merritt: I think we have to add, though…
Mahon: Yes, of course.
Merritt: … the first Director of the National Center for Nursing Research at NIH.
Mahon: Yes, absolutely.
Merritt: Which is now an Institute.
Mahon: Yes. Well, that being said, do you ever look back on all of the positions you held and find it hard to believe that you actually did all of that?
Merritt: Yeah and raised a family too.
Mahon: Yes, exactly, exactly.
Merritt: Of course, I had a patient husband and delightful two young men who most of the time stayed out of trouble and good help at home.
Mahon: Right. I know that you’ve mentioned multiple times that you never, in all these positions, saw yourself as a leader. But do you think that from beginning to end that you grew as a leader and as a person through all these, these administrative…
Merritt: Oh, absolutely.
Mahon: … positions?
Merritt: I always was a tactful person, but I learned how to motivate people…
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: … and I learned not to be dictatorial and I learned I was good at it, and people liked me, and I liked people, and maybe that’s a big part of it…
Mahon: I think so.
Merritt: … you have to like people.
Mahon: Yes, yes. If you don’t like people, then you’re probably not going to be very successful…
Merritt: No.
Mahon: … working with them as closely as you did especially. You did mention to me in our pre-interview that the way to get things done is to work
backwards. Do you feel like this is how you led such a successful career?
Merritt: I think so because when I was asked to do something, I didn’t start at the beginning and say, “Now where am I going?” I started by saying, “Where do I think I want to get to?” And starting from the endpoint and working backward showed me the way forward.
Mahon: Right. So, in 1994, the Doris H. Merritt Award to Honor Service to Nursing by a Non-Nurse was created in your honor by the IU School of Nursing. In 1997, the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology also created an award in your honor titled the Doris H. Merritt Leadership Award. Each award is presented annually to a deserving candidate. In 2000, an annual lecture in women’s health was established in your honor, as well. How does it make you feel to have two distinguished schools honor you and your life in those ways?
Merritt: It’s really three schools, you know. It’s amazing.
Mahon: Yeah, it is.
Merritt: I’m just, I’m very grateful.
Mahon: Yes. Is there anything that you look back on that you are particularly proud of?
Merritt: I think two things; one was getting an increase in stipends in fellowships when I was at the NIH for all of the 17,000 who’d been in training and not getting paid enough to really subsist on. And the thing that will have the most lasting effect, I know, was starting the National Center for Nursing Research and setting up its various departments with the help of the nurses. I didn’t do that alone but managing to get that done and get it on its feet so it became an Institute.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: I think those two things, the National Research Service Award salary increase people will not know, and there’s no reason why they should, but setting up the National Center for Nursing Research the way it was set up, that will have a lasting influence…
Mahon: Yeah, absolutely.
Merritt: … and just going into the future, and I’m proud of that.
Mahon: Right, yeah. What do you wish to be known for?
Merritt: Oh, good Lord.
Mahon: I know. It is a loaded question.
Merritt: I never thought about it. Um. . .
Mahon: I guess, if you would like me to rephrase it, what do you think that you’re known for, because you most certainly are?
Merritt: I guess for getting things done.
Mahon: I would agree with that.
Merritt: I think that’s it.
Mahon: Yeah?
Merritt: Yes, and for doing it honestly and fairly.
Mahon: Yes. Well, those are wonderful things to be known for.
Merritt: Maybe for having a sense of humor. (LAUGHING)
Mahon: Yes, yes, that always makes things better. What have you been doing since you retired from the IU School of Medicine and IUPUI?
Merritt: Oh, dear. Well, of course, on my homeowners association, I served as the President of that. I tried a number of things. I worked for a while down reading to the blind on radio…
Mahon: Oh, okay.
Merritt: … but that, that was for the vision impaired, not necessarily blind, reading the newspaper. That was alright except the obituaries, I didn’t like to read those.
Mahon: Yeah, yeah.
Merritt: And the other thing I discovered, it’s very difficult to read the comics and make them funny.
Mahon: Yeah, that would be.
Merritt: They’re not very funny when just read the comics.
Mahon: No, no they’re not.
Merritt: I did that for a while, but not for very long. I worked for a number of years in the Media Center at North Central High School here, and did some computer work for them, made up some indices. I have a wonderful certificate from the Board of Education thanking me for that. It’s just a little piece of paper and it was, they wanted to make some recognition; it was all they could do, and I just treasure that.
Mahon: Right.
Merritt: And now, of course, I’m old and impaired in many ways, and I spend my time talking to people a lot, and I have a lot of friends. I’m blessed by having two stints of employment, so to speak, at IU. I have two
generations of friends so that even though I’m approaching ninety-six, most of my friends now are in their seventies. And fortunately, I have friends in my seventies because there are no more in their nineties.
Mahon: Right. Is it funny to look at your friends in their nineties and remember what you were doing when you were their age?
Merritt: Well, I think it’s funny for them because when they complain, they look at me and they say, “But you were still working!” (LAUGHING)
Mahon: And you’re like yeah, I don’t know how.
Merritt: Yeah, I was still working, and that’s, I rather enjoy life still.
Mahon: So, is there anything at all that I have not asked you would you like to mention to have on the record?
Merritt: Leeah, I don’t think so. It’s been a delight to talk to you and you are a superb interviewer. You really are.
Mahon: Oh, thank you.
Merritt: I guess you do your homework, is part of it, but you’re just plain fun.
Mahon: Well, thank you. I think you are too, and on behalf of the Administration of IUPUI and the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, I thank you for sitting with me for this interview.
Merritt: I’ve enjoyed it.
(END RECORDING)
