Recalling the more relaxed regulatory environment of 40 years past

 

    My first stint as a higher education administrator fell between 1974 and 1978.  Based in the Department of University Communication at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, I served that R1 institution as an editor/writer and after two promotions the director.  I remember those 4.5 years as a time of significantly less government oversight than we live with today.  One example should suffice.

      Round about 1976 or ’77, I received a call from my boss, the executive vice president.  Peter informed me that an anthropologist on the Western Reserve College faculty had a good story for me.  I had my secretary set up an appointment and dutifully tramped from old main, across Euclid Avenue, to the Anthropology Department in a venerable stone building.  Climbing the stairs, I detected a smell not unlike the one you may have encountered when first opening your tackle box on the first day of trout season.  Reaching the landing, I turned to the open door of Mohammed’s office.

                                        This image comes very close to what I remember.

        Staring at me from empty eye sockets from atop a four-drawer file cabinet was a mummy.  Entering the office, I introduced myself to the moustachioed, dark-skinned Egyptian anthropologist seated at the desk.  Invited to sit, I produced my notebook and heard his story.  A specialist in nutritional issues, Mohammed had been conducting summer research among Native Americans somewhere in the Southwestern U.S., when he came across the mummy in a burial cave, surrounded by the artifacts with which it had been buried some hundreds or thousands of years ago.  Popping the naturally mummified gent into the back of his pick-up truck, Mohammed had brought the old boy back with him to Cleveland.

      Excited by the story, I contacted the late, great afternoon daily newspaper, the Cleveland Press.  A photographer was dispatched to the Case campus.  The next day, Mohammed’s mummy was on the paper’s front page.  My buttons were popping.

       Later that day, I got another phone call from the university’s executive veep.  Did I think there might be some blow-back from the Native American community?  After all, Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indian’s mascot, was already a target of Native American wrath all those 40 years ago.  Gee, Peter, I was so excited about a front page in a major daily that the thought had never crossed my mind.

       Think you know the outcome of this story?  Think again:  we never heard a discouraging word from any American Indian or any Native American organization.  Nor did any federal agency raise a cry of protest.  What could, and undoubtedly today, would be branded as grave robbery raised no eyebrows four decades back.  A different regulatory environment, indeed. 

       Need more convincing?  Same four-year stint, separate setting:  A group of materials scientists in CWRU’s Case Institute of Technology received a $4.2 million NSF grant to develop artificial arteries.  A Cleveland TV station indicated interest in doing an evening-news piece.  I brought them to the Principal Investigator’s lab.  Anxious for some visual interest, the TV reported inquired about how the arteries would be tested.

     “We test them in rats,” came the PI’s reply.

         The reporter’s eyes brightened.  Rats were visual.  And so the lights and camera were set up in front of a lab table.  The PI produced a rat in what appeared to me to be a Tupperware container. 

         “How do you handle them?”

         “Oh, we pick them up by their tails.” And with that, my scientist hoisted his specimen from the container by its tail.  What happened next can only be described as the rat going “ratshit.”  Spinning and gyrating madly under the alien spotlights, the rodent dropped to the table and scurried to the floor and off into the shadows. 

       Smiling onto the camera, the PI held the pinkish appendage between thumb and forefinger and pronounced, “He unscrewed himself from his tail.” 

       Needless to say, we made both the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news broadcasts.  And --- you get the ides --- not a squeal nor a bark out of the animal-rights establishment.

Nor any protest from the NSF or any other federal or state agency.  A different regulatory environment, indeed, indeed.