Ken Krane Oral History Interview, April 12, 2019

CHRIS PETERSEN: Okay, today is April 12, 2019, and we are in Weniger Hall with Ken Krane, emeritus professor of physics at OSU and former department head in physics. We will talk to him about his life and career and experiences at OSU. We will begin with the beginning: where were you born?

KEN KRANE: I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1944.

CP: Is that where you grew up?

KK: I lived there until I was 9 years old. We lived in a very rough neighborhood in the inner city and my father had a store and we lived above the store. I used to regularly in the schoolyard get beaten up and have my lunch money taken away. It was that kind of a neighborhood. When I was about 6 or 7 we came out to Tucson to visit my father's sister who had lived with us for a while in Philadelphia and she met a guy from Tucson, married him, and moved to Tucson so we came out to visit her. My parents said this is a much better place to raise children than inner city Philadelphia. So, we moved there in 1953.

CP: Big change.

KK: A huge change, yeah. There weren't many places I could go on my own in Philadelphia, but Tucson was sort of wide open. It was a small town. At that time about the size of Corvallis, about 50,000 people. We had a house right on the edge of the desert. I used to go wandering in the desert. I learned about reptiles and snakes and minerals that you'd find in the desert. It was just a fascinating experience for me to just be on my own and be able to explore.

CP: So was the mineral, snakes... this is early scientific interest for a lot of people.

KK: I guess you could call it that.

CP: Did you recognize that in an intentional way at that point. Was science a thing for you at that point?

KK: Not really. I don't remember being interested in science at that point. I was in elementary school. It was one of the subjects that you take in school and I don't remember getting seriously interested in science until high school. Then it was more towards chemistry. I had a very good chemistry teacher. I played on the varsity tennis team and he was also the tennis coach, so I had a good 00:02:00relationship with him. We didn't have advanced placement courses then the way we do now. I took a second year of chemistry with him and two or three other friends. Very informal, lab oriented course. No textbook. Just kind of an independent study in chemistry and it was really a fascinating experience. It was my senior year and I was taking calculus also. My family didn't have any history of college. My parents never went to college. My father dropped out of school in the 10th grade because his parents had died and it was the depression so he had to support his younger brother and sister. I grew up with about 10 or 11 cousins in Philadelphia. I was one of the youngest and none of them had attended college before I did. So, I was the first. I don't think my parents knew much about it. I think it was my guidance counselor in high school that persuaded them that I should be thinking about college.

CP: Can you tell me a bit more about your family background before we move on?

KK: Sure. What are you interested in?

CP: Your parents' story.

KK: My parents were children of immigrants. My father was actually born in China, in Harbin. My grandfather and his brother had been drafted into the tsar army in Russia in 1910 or so, and for a Jewish family that was kind of like a death sentence at the time. So, they led out across Russia and ended up in Manchuria, in a town called Harbin. Which was then part of Russia, it is now part of China. My father used to say he was born in China. Not quite true, but a good story. My grandfather met my grandmother there. My father was born there. My grandfather and his brother came over to the U.S. via that side. They came to Seattle by Yokohama in about 1915 or so. My father was born in 1914 and he and 00:04:00my grandmother followed about a year later. They settled in Philadelphia because they had some family that had already made their way to Philadelphia. My grandfather came from a fairly large family. There were 11 brothers and sisters in his family and they all survived into adulthood, which was kind of unusual in those times.

My mother's family came from Eastern Europe. They came the other way through Ellis Island. My grandfather on that side was a furrier and they had 5 kids. My mother was the second youngest of five. We all lived in Philadelphia within a block or two of each other. It was a very close-knit community. I had about 10 or 11 cousins on that side of the family.

CP: Was religion something that was important to your family?

KK: Not really. My father came from what are usually called in the literature, secular Jews: not terribly religious.

My mother's family was more religious. Her parents and most of her siblings kept kosher homes: separate dishes for meat and milk and no bacon or shellfish in the house, but they would gladly eat that stuff when they went out to a restaurant. It was a kind of a strange way of interpreting the laws of Judaism. I didn't really have much of a religious background. When I got to Tucson my parents joined a synagogue and enrolled me in Sunday school and I was bar mitzvah when I was 13. I think that was probably under the influence of my father's sister, who was a little more religious.

CP: Did they operate a store in Tucson also?

KK: Yes. Not at first. The store that my father had in Philadelphia was a watch and clock shop and he did jewelry repair and he repaired watches and clocks. When we got to Tucson he worked in a jewelry store for a few years until he opened up his own store a few years later. I used to go with him to the store, 00:06:00usually on Saturdays, and maybe that's where some of my interest in science and engineering came from, because I would help him repair clocks. He taught me how to repair clocks. I loved the intricate mechanisms of the clocks and where the power came from and what happened when you wound up the spring and how the energy in the spring was gradually released to the clock mechanism. Very clever mechanisms invented in the 17th and 18th century to keep exact time in a clock. My Saturday mornings were to go down with him to the store and help him out and then I'd go to the library, public library, which was about a block from his store in downtown Tucson. I would check out books and photograph records. There was an old guy there. He used to teach chess to anybody who showed up. That was my Saturdays when I was mostly in elementary school and maybe in junior high school.

CP: Do you have any siblings?

KK: I have a younger brother who's an M.D. and a younger sister who is a high school Spanish teacher.

CP: So, education became important?

KK: Absolutely, yeah.

CP: Was school something that came fairly easy to you early on?

KK: I think so. I never really worked very hard in school. I did pretty well in high school. I graduated second in a class of 500 in Tucson. I don't remember ever struggling with any of my studies in high school.

CP: So, things are going well for you in high school. You discovered interest in science. You decide you want to go to college. How does that spin forward from there?

KK: It was my guidance counselor in high school that really helped out a lot. She encouraged me to apply for some financial aid and pushed me in the direction of applying to several top-rank schools and I got several scholarship offers and had a free ride engineering scholarship from Cornell. Really wasn't much interested in engineering, especially in high school. You take some science courses but you really don't take anything that looks like engineering. I opted 00:08:00for Cornell for engineering and was pretty miserable that first year. Most college freshman experience a degree of misery. I was part of that. First of all, the climate was just awful compared with Tucson and I wasn't really sure I liked engineering and then over the summer after my freshman year I talked myself into not going back and continuing in engineering. I really didn't want to go in that direction. By then it was too late to apply to another college, so I went to the University of Arizona because I was in Tucson at the time. I thought maybe I would spend a year there and that would give me a chance to move on to some other field or some other place. But I loved it. I loved the faculty. I took some science courses. I loved the faculty in physics. I decided to stay there and major in physics. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. It was really a superb department at the time and got to do some things in the 00:09:00department that really oriented my career from then on.

CP: What do you think captivated you about physics? Was it mostly the faculty or were there...?

KK: Certainly, the faculty were very, very helpful. One in particular, my undergraduate advisor, Carl Tomizuka, who pushed me towards graduate school eventually. I really enjoyed teaching. I got a job right away with the physics department. I was the person who set up the weekly teaching labs in the physics department. I was fascinated by the equipment. I was mechanically inclined. There was very little electronic equipment in those days. It was mostly mechanical equipment. I loved tinkering with it, taking it apart and repairing it, and putting it back together again. Similar to what I had done with clocks in my father's store. I worked for the department for the whole three years that I was there, ten hours a week. It didn't really interfere with my studies at all.

But I learned a lot, and it really pushed me in the direction of a love for teaching physics, for building equipment to teach physics. In fact, I thought what I might do after I got my bachelor's degree was go to work for a company that manufactured teaching equipment in physics. That was my intention my last couple years in college. But the Vietnam War intervened. In 1965 if I hadn't of gone to graduate school I would've been drafted. That's one of the factors that pushed me towards graduate school at that time.

CP: Any extracurricular activities during the undergraduate years that we want to record here?

KK: Yeah, pretty much. I joined a fraternity: Alpha Epson Pi. I became president my senior year. I was active in the youth campus student organization Hillel. I was also president my senior year. Played intramural tennis. Played in Sunday morning beer league softball. That was about it. Met my wife. We dated in 00:11:00college and a year later got married.

CP: Is there a story there?

KK: Not a real story. I met her. She was also a member of Hillel; the campus Jewish student organization. In our sophomore year there was a retreat out at a ranch or something outside of Tucson and my family were all very heavy smokers. Going to family reunions at my aunt's house was a haze of cigarette smoke. Naturally I started to smoke, and at this retreat I ran out of cigarettes and my future wife had some. So, I started bumming cigarettes from her and the rest is history.

CP: The benefits of smoking.

KK: Yeah. It didn't last very long, thank goodness.

CP: Well, so there's external pressure to consider graduate school and you wind 00:12:00up choosing Purdue. How did that happen?

KK: Carl Tomizuka, my undergraduate advisor, was in condensed matter physics. Very well known nationally, internationally, and he had come from the University of Illinois, also in the Midwest. At that time Purdue was perhaps leading university in the country in semi-conductor physics. In 1965 the first integrated circuits had just come out from Fairchild. An amazing feat of putting two transistors on a single chip. Today there are like 10 million transistors on a single chip, but this was a really big deal at that time and Purdue was one of the universities at the forefront of research into semi-conductors and he was pushing me in that direction because that was his field also. I had offers of assistantships from 3 or 4 different universities, and Purdue seemed like the 00:13:00best offer. I looked at the curriculum, and I wasn't so sure I wanted to do semi-conductor physics, but I noticed they were also strong in other fields: atomic physics, nuclear physics, particle physics. I thought, okay, I'll give semi-conductor physics a try. If I don't like it, I can just switch to another field at the same university. It worked out very well. I was incredibly happy there. It was absolutely the right choice.

CP: So, it was an easy transition?

KK: Climate again was a problem again compared with Tucson. Midwestern climate is not so wonderful. It was great being close to Chicago. My wife and I would attend lots of theater in Chicago. We had friends in Chicago that we'd go up and visit. It was a good time. We lived in married student housing with a lot of other people that were sort-of like us: graduate students about the same age. It was a really nice environment met. We made a lot of friends that we're still in touch with 50 years later.

CP: Tell me about your academic experience as a master's degree student.

KK: I didn't set out for a master's degree. I really was a Ph.D. student. Then 00:14:00as now, most students that are admitted to graduate programs are admitted, at least in physics, are admitted for Ph.D. You get a master's along the way. It comes free. You don't have to do anything special for it. You just have to complete a certain number of courses, which are basically the same courses that you earned for a Ph.D., so the master's came as a bonus. It wasn't something that I set out to do. I was really there to get a doctorate.

CP: What was your program?

KK: Condensed matter physics lasted my first year. I had a very idiosyncratic teacher in solid state physics who taught the introductory course that all the first-year graduate students took, very nervous fellow. He would be at the front of the room writing on the blackboard and if you shuffle your feet he'd turn around and stare at you, resenting the intrusion on his concentration.

I had a very good course in nuclear physics. I said, okay, this is much better for me. I like this guy a lot better. So, I talked to the nuclear physics instructor. We kind of hit it off. He offered me a research position. I didn't take it, thank goodness, because I ended up with a much better position in the nuclear physics group that worked out really well for me. My major professor, Rolf Steffen, who I started working with at the end of my second year at Purdue was a great role model. He was a raconteur. He was a gourmet. He spoke fluent French and German. He was originally Swiss. He had come to this country in about early 1950s. Great lover of wine. I learned a lot from him about physics and about life in general. Art collector. He used to like to when physics 00:16:00dignitaries would come to Purdue to give a talk he would often entertain them at dinner and he would invite his students over after dinner for coffee and drinks. It was wonderful being introduced to these famous people, Nobel laureates, and seeing how the real-world worked in academia. I was fascinated by it and very much taken to it. He and I remained life-long friends. I spent a lot of time with him subsequently visiting him. He eventually moved to Santa Fe after he retired. I spent a time in Los Alamo so I would always visit him when I was in Los Alamos.

CP: The project that he directed you in?

KK: The project was a nuclear spectroscopy project, low-energy nuclear spectroscopy, mostly in radioactive decays. In addition to these integrated circuits becoming available, just the time that I was at Purdue, 1965-1970, very 00:17:00high-resolution gamma ray detectors came on the market. The combination was just irresistible: to put together electronic circuits built around these integrated circuits and these high-resolution detectors. So, what I was working in was a field called gamma ray coincidence studies, where you have 2 gamma ray detectors looking at gamma rays that are emitted in sequence. One goes into one detector and the other goes into the other detector and by varying the opening angle between the two detectors you can pull out some information about the fundamental physics of the nucleus. We had a platform in which there was a fixed detector and a movable detector whose position would change and the signals from those two detectors would go to these fancy new electronic circuits that would process them very quickly. It was really revolution and we wrote several papers together based on this research and eventually I brought that equipment here 00:18:00from Purdue after I got the job here and set up basically the same experiment here that I'd ran for about 20 some years.

CP: Did you do any teaching at Purdue?

KK: I was a teaching assistant my first year and then I got a NASA trainee-ship which I think lasted another 3 years and then I was a research assistant my last year. I was in grad school at a time when there was this enormous explosion of physics research. It is what they call the post-sputnik era in the history of physics. The government put enormous amounts of money into universities to build physics programs to try to close the so-called space gap, or missile gap, with the Russians, with the Soviets. That required, a lot of graduate students were hired. There were plenty of positions in grad school at that time in physics and other sciences and engineering. The problem was that there weren't very many 00:19:00jobs down the line. The year I finished my Ph.D. in 1970 there was a huge spike in the number of physics Ph.D.s granted in the US - 1,400. Two or three times as many as was normally given in the early 1960s. There were like two or three hundred jobs for those 1400 people. So, it was really tough to find a job. It was tough to find an interview. I would go to physics conferences where they were normally set up to interview grad students for positions and you couldn't even get an interview at most places, let alone a job offer. So, it was a difficult time.

CP: What was the NASA fellowship?

KK: It was just money that NASA gave to the university and they reassigned it to grad students. It didn't have any connection with NASA. It was just support for my research. There was no implication of any NASA support or NASA employment subsequent to that. It was just supporting my graduate program.

CP: There's a reference in your vita to a quality control officer job at Philco Corporations.

KK: That was a very strange occurrence. I don't remember exactly how I got involved with that. It was after my first year in grad school. My wife and I were planning to get married that August. I had left Purdue for the summer and driven to Philadelphia to visit my family there and I got this phone call from this company in California that was involved in some defense contract work and they needed a summer hire in physics to help with the project and they asked me if I was interested. I said, what the hell. Didn't have any other plans for the summer except to go back to Purdue and start working on my research and this sounded far more interesting. And this was California, it was the beach. So, I hopped in my car and drove cross-country by myself in about 3 days, 3 and a half days, and worked for this company in Newport Beach, California, which was a 00:21:00division of Philco, which was a division of Ford. They were doing a guidance system on a tank fired missile called the Shillelagh. They were having problems with the guidance system. They used an infrared signal from the ground to the missile to control its directionality and they were having trouble with coding of this infrared signal. That's what I worked on that summer. It was fun. It was great to see industry in action. It persuaded me that I really didn't want to do defense work after I got my Ph.D. It was a wonderful experience. At the end of the summer I drove to Oklahoma City where my wife and I got married and moved back to Purdue.

CP: Well, you finished your doctorate and you began a series of two post-docs at very high-profile locations, the first being Los Alamos. Tell me about that.

KK: That was a wonderful experience. Again, because of the spike in the number 00:22:00of Ph.D.s awarded I couldn't have gotten a job, but at the time if you wanted an academic job at a research university you didn't get it directly from a Ph.D. program. You had to do a post-doc. My major professor from Purdue, Rolf Steffen, had been a consult at Los Alamos and he knew several of the people there and he recommended me for a position in the low-temperature physics group, which is pretty far from my experience, but the guy running that group, Bill Steyert in Los Alamos, had this idea that you could couple nuclear physics and low-temperature physics and do something similar to what I had been doing with the two detectors and the opening angle between them.

Basically, this involved taking a radioactive sample and cooling it down to ultra-low temperature: hundredths of a degree above absolute zero, thousandths 00:23:00of a degree above absolute zero. At that point, all the nuclei would line up and then if they're radioactive they're going to emit their radiation in a preferred direction with respect to the alignment. This is a way of again pulling out information from a nucleus, but it only involves a single detector instead of the combination of two detectors that I had been using in my graduate program research. It was natural for me. Bill knew nothing about nuclear physics, so it was a really good collaboration. I was there for 2 years, and we must have done 15 or 20 papers, which is a phenomenal output. We had the field pretty much all to ourselves, nobody else was doing this.

And he was more interested in exploring fundamental symmetries with this very, very low temperature, a particular field called parity violation, which had been really explored in the 1950s. Parity is a process in which you take a physical 00:24:00system and you reflect it in the mirror. The question is if you do an experiment with the original system and with the reflected system do you get the same result? If you don't get the same result, then this parity symmetry is violated. He had figured out a way of using this low-temperature apparatus to do these parity violation experiments. The story that I heard was that he had proposed a similar experiment when he was a grad student at Caltech and nobody thought it would work, so they ignored him. The people that did the experiment ended up with a Nobel Prize in 1957. So, he was very resentful of that and he wanted to do these experiments in a slightly different context and so we worked on those, but we worked on spectroscopy experiments as well. We generated a lot of papers in that period. It was a very successful time for me. I learned a new technique: low-temperature physics, which I was able to carry through for a number of years.

In Berkeley, a similar story. My mentor at Berkeley, Dave Shirley, was head of 00:25:00the chemistry department, but he was a nuclear chemist, so he was doing what we call nuclear physics here, he was doing as nuclear chemistry. He was also interested in pursuing these low-temperature physics, and he needed somebody to supervise his grad students. He brought me on as a post-doc to be there because his role as chemistry chairmen occupied a lot of his time and he didn't have enough time to spend supervising his grad students so that what he assigned me to do. Wasn't quite as successful as my time at Los Alamos. It was clear that this particular area of research was of relatively low priority to him. He didn't really push that hard to get the students through. I did 3 or 4 papers there. It wasn't a tremendously successful time. I didn't like Berkeley as much as Los Alamos.

I made a lot of friends in Los Alamos. It was a small community. Several thousand Ph.D.s in the same small town, kind of an interesting environment. So, 00:26:00it was a great place for us to live in Los Alamos. Our son was born there. We arrived in Berkeley with a 6-month-old, restricted our ability to do very much. In Los Alamos, we traveled around extensively. We explored Native American ruins. We hiked the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. All the sites there within a day or half a day's drive of Los Alamos. In Berkeley we were kind of stuck. We did get over to San Francisco occasionally, but it was kind of a big city with lots of things going on. But, we didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Los Alamos. There was sort of a social caste in Berkeley. The grad students in physics would all hang out together and the physics faculty would all hang out together, and the post docs are sort of right in the middle. We weren't quite faculty. We weren't students. We had to make our own social life, 00:27:00but it was much more difficult than it was in Los Alamos.

CP: Many topics in physics are difficult for people to grasp, but people can relate to the idea of something being very cold. Can you talk about the practical dimension of working with materials close to absolute zero?

KK: It was very different from anything I had done before. First of all, it was somewhat dangerous, because you got these cryogenic liquids under great pressure. If suddenly something starts to boil over it can do it explosively. I had to learn a new set of safety techniques for the laboratory. Pretty much everything is enclosed in several layers of vacuum and cryogenic fluids, so you're not working hands on with anything that's terribly cold, you're just manipulating things from the outside world and transferring liquid nitrogen, liquid helium into various vessels, turning on the low-temperature refrigerator 00:28:00and watching it start to operate as it goes from helium temperature, which is about 1 or 2 degrees above absolute zero to a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero when it starts working. You'd have diagnostic instruments that are within this huge cryos lab that are telling you what's going on. You don't really manipulate very much. You turn the switches and open and close the valves and things happen more or less automatically.

CP: Before we move on to OSU, I wanted to note that you continued your relationship with Los Alamos as a consultant. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

KK: That was great. My wife and I really loved Los Alamos. Having grown up in Arizona, being in New Mexico, it just felt very comfortable to me. So, I had the opportunity to consult with them. So, most summers after I arrived at OSU, we went back there. I spent the summer there and then I spent my first sabbatical there in 1980/81. A few years later I became department chair here which made it 00:29:00difficult to leave for the summer, so I think that was the last of my formal associations with Los Alamos.

CP: Well, 1974 you finish your second post doc and you arrive at OSU. What's the story? How did that happen?

KK: Once again, it was through Rolf Steffen, my advisor from Purdue. He had been considered for the chairmanship here in about '72 or '73, physics chairmanship. He turned it down, but he really liked the department and he liked the potential of the department. In '74 when I was finishing up at Berkeley he phoned me or wrote me and said there was a possibility of a job opening here and he would like to recommend me for the job in the nuclear physics group.

At that time, we had about 18-20 faculty in physics at OSU. We were divided into 00:30:003 research areas. The feeling was that it wasn't appropriate for a small department to have one astrophysicist and one high-energy physicist, that there was a kind of critical mass that it took to run a research group. There were three groups operating here at a time: there was the atomic physics group, the condensed matter group, and the nuclear group. There was a vacancy in the nuclear group and Rolf recommended me for it and I got the job.

CP: What were your early impressions of the university and of the department?

KK: There had been quite a number of hires from about 1973 to 1975. Out of the 18 faculty there might have been 5 or 6 or 7 young assistant professors, first, second, or third year assistant professors. That part of the department was a very close-knit group because we'd all come on at the same time. The nuclear 00:31:00group at that time was committed to an area called medium energy nuclear physicals, which used a new accelerator facility that was built in Los Alamos and a similar facility built at TRIUMF, in UBC, Canada. My first obligation was to work with that group, which didn't feel comfortable to me at all because I was more in the direction of low-energy, not medium-energy physics. I did a few experiments at Los Alamos in collaboration with one or two members of the nuclear group who were doing similar experiments. In fact, I was working under their research contract at the time for my first couple of years here before I got my own independent research funding.

One of the things I liked about the department, about the university, was that there seemed to be a significant emphasis on research and teaching. I didn't get 00:32:00that the other places that I'd interviewed. In fact, I wasn't really sure I wanted to go to a research university. I interviewed with several liberal arts college that involved no or minimal research. I loved research, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go in that direction. But I also didn't want to go-I had a job offer from Columbia and one from Caltech for research positions and I didn't want to go into 100% research positions. I really wanted to teach. I think that was the carryover from my work I did as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona in instructional physics labs. I really got the impression that OSU valued teaching and research in more or less equal measures. I got that from the people that I talked to in the department. I got that very much from the dean of science when I came for my interview. I thought, okay, I'll give this a try. I don't know if it's going to work out, but I loved teaching and I wanted to be able to spend time developing teaching techniques as well as working on 00:33:00research. As it turned out, it worked out really well for me. It was a good match, a good fit.

CP: So, the transition wasn't too tough, then?

KK: It wasn't too tough. I mean, I hadn't really gotten any teaching as a post doc. I didn't really get much mentoring when I got here for teaching. That didn't exist at the time. Now we do a much better job mentoring our junior faculty. I was teaching the big introductory physics class, calculus-based physics class for engineering students and other science majors for a couple years and I pulled out my class notes from when I took the class at Arizona from when I was an undergrad and from when I was a TA in the class, a teaching assistant of the class, at Purdue and basically repeated all the mistakes that my other faculty had made basically lecturing out of the textbook. Many years 00:34:00later it occurred to me that would be a lot like an English teacher teaching Shakespeare by reading Shakespeare to the class. You expect the class to do something outside of class time and then you can augment their understanding by what you do in front of the class. That took me about 20 years to come to that realization and when I did it was an epiphany. That came around in the bit '90s; we're jumping a little bit ahead in the story. But I loved teaching here. I like the excitement of it. I like teaching freshman. I like teaching the engineering students. That was a real challenge but really very rewarding.

CP: Let's talk a little bit about research. You mentioned that you basically took your experiment from Purdue and moved it here and that's the decay work, is that correct?

KK: I continued the radioactive decay work. I worked on the medium energy projects at Los Alamos and Vancouver and then eventually I wanted to move back 00:35:00in the direction of low-energy nuclear physics so I ended up within a few years of my own set of grants through the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy that was mainly oriented towards-a little bit oriented towards low-temperature physics because Oakridge National Lab wanted to put one of these low-temperature refrigerators at the end of one of their beam lines on the accelerator. Instead of using in planet radioactive sources the way we had at Los Alamos and Berkeley, here you've got an accelerator beam coming directly into a target that's sitting on the end of a refrigerator. It really expands the range of nuclei that you can investigate by very short-lived ones for instance that you couldn't possible reduce as a radioactive sample because they would decay before you could do the measurement, but you could produce them online and measure them online.

So, I spent a couple of summers at Oak Ridge National Lab working on this project, again under a grant from the Department of Energy and we ended up putting this refrigerator on the accelerator at Oak Ridge and used it for a few experiments. Eventually that refrigerator got moved to Vancouver to the accelerator at UBC, and I worked on it up there also. That continued the low-energy nuclear physics and at the same time I was looking at these same accelerators at very complex decay schemes. Unlike ordinary radioactive decay where you might have 10 or 20 different gamma rays emitted, here we have 100 or 200 gamma rays emitted and it's kind of like a puzzle putting them back together to figure out the sequences in which they are emitted in the nucleus. I collaborated with a couple of people on these experiments from other 00:37:00universities. We had a little group of about 3 senior people, post docs, and several grad students that travelled around the country doing these experiments. That continued really almost up until the time I retired and finally gave up the work.

CP: It's interesting to hear you talk about this and think of it in terms of place or geography, that certain types of work had to be done in certain places and that would necessarily inform your research agenda.

KK: Yeah, these are experiments that require an accelerator. So, there are relatively a small number of places that have the accelerator facilities that are necessary to pull this off.

CP: OSU does have a radiation center, though, and do you have a connection with the radiation center?

KK: That didn't come until much later. I did a few experiments, the angular-correlation experiments with sources that I produced here on the reactor at the radiation center, but they were few and far between. I really maintained that apparatus as a kind of training ground for my Ph.D. students who would go 00:38:00off on these accelerator experiments with me. The way these accelerator experiments work is you get an idea for an experiment, you propose it to the steering committee for the accelerator, and if they approve it, they send the information to the scheduling committee, and the scheduling committee will say you have 2 days of beam time next August. You show up at the appointed time with your grad students, but you don't want to let the grad students manipulate the apparatus because if they do something wrong you have to get back in the queue again and it might be another 6 months before you get additional accelerator time.

So, I maintained this apparatus here that I could use to train graduate students, that they would be experiments doing the same kind of experiments that they'd be doing in the accelerator environment. There it runs 24/7, so I can't be there the whole time supervising them. I have to get a little bit of sleep. So, that worked out really well. Occasionally I do prepare a radioactive source with the reactor and most of these turned out to be publishable research projects, even though I had really intended them only for training of students.

But in 1996, one of my colleagues on these experiments from Berkeley, came up with a proposal to do an experiment that needed a reactor and Berkeley had just closed their reactor at the time. He phoned me up and we talked about this experiment. He came up and we did this experiment. I had a couple of undergrads assisting me over the summer, a couple of physics majors that were here for the summer to do research and this was an epiphany for me, because prior to that time the physics department had adopted a requirement that all seniors had to do a thesis, a research-based thesis. I had resisted bringing undergrads into my research project because it involves a lot of travel and putting into this puzzle of 100 or 200 gamma rays would often require replaying computer tapes, you would have big computer tapes, over several years.

It wasn't an experiment that a senior physics major could get a sense of ownership of, or even a good overview of. I could assign them little analysis projects but that wasn't really... if you want somebody to do a thesis you want them to understand what they're doing and it to be their work and for them to have ownership of the work. That happened in '96 with this project on the reactor. We had 2 students and we took the data and my colleague had to go back to Berkeley and I had to go off to some international conference and I left the two students here with the data, and I came back 2 weeks later and they had finished the analysis. I thought, oh, here's something seniors could do for a research project. I talked with the reactor people and they gave me some funding for research projects. I think over the years I've done about 20 or so projects on the reactor with junior and senior physics majors almost all these are publishable, so they got papers with their names on it based on their research. 00:41:00That's been my cottage industry and it's still going, actually, even though I've retired. I'm still finishing up some papers based on this research that I finally closed down just this past year. I closed up my lab at the radiation center.

CP: Can you talk about it as a place of work, the radiation center?

KK: It really worked out well for me, because after I retired they were very welcoming and invited me to basically live over there: they gave me lab space, they gave me office space. In return for which I agreed to serve on graduate committees for their nuclear engineering students. The have to have somebody outside the department serve on their advisory committees for Ph.D. students. I would do about 10 or 12 of these committees a year. I got to know the students really well. I got to know the faculty really well. I'm not a nuclear engineer. I know a little a bit about the basis of nuclear engineering, but not a whole to 00:42:00about the specifics. I would get to read 10 or 12 Ph.D. dissertations or masters theses a year. I really learned a lot. I got to know the students fairly well. Many of them would have significant issues in their research that involved nuclear spectroscopy, which is exactly my fiend of expertise. So, I felt I was really contributing to their professional development as well as helping them out. As an author, I'm a very careful proof reader so I would do a lot of red penciling on their thesis drafts, and it was well-known, if you're going to give Professor Krane your thesis draft you're going to get it back with a lot of red marks on it. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed getting to know a different set of faculty. It was really a second home for me over there.

CP: Did you get to know Chih Wang?

KK: No. Well, I knew him a little bit. He had already retired by the time I got acclimated over there.

CP: Well, I have some notes on a few grants here, and the first I have note 00:43:00about your first big grant at least at OSU, on perturbed angular correlations. You referenced that, and I'm interested in the grant but I'm also interested in the person you worked with John Gardner.

KK: That's a great story. John Gardner had been hired the year before me and he was in condensed matter physics and so I mentioned the closeness of this group of young faculty here and John and I were particularly close. We had kids the same age and we interacted socially a lot and our wives were in similar organizations-the League of Women Voters-and they got to know each other very well. John and I were talking about this technique that I had used as a grad student at Purdue called perturbed angular correlations. So, I mentioned the angular correlation experiment with the two detectors and two radiations going off at different angles. In the nuclear sequence, one radiation is emitted and the second radiation is emitted. There's an intermediate state where the nucleus 00:44:00lives for a certain amount of time after emitting the first radiation but before emitting the second radiation. During that time, the nucleus can interact with the electromagnetic fields of its environment and that can change that distribution. That's why the angular angle is perturbed; hence, perturbed angular correlation. John was working in condensed matter physics and it occurred to him that this might be a way of extracting information about the properties of solvents. He knew nothing about nuclear physics, about this experimental technique, so we got together and we wrote this grant to study a certain class of materials using perturbed angular correlations. I provided the expertise on the technique and he provided the expertise on the materials. It was a great collaboration. This went on for several years and he produced several grad students who worked in the field and we published a few papers on perturbed angular correlations, and it was a really interesting collaboration.

CP: And his career took a turn.

KK: Yeah, he spent a good amount of time, he really advanced the technique more than I could. I bailed after a couple of years when it was obvious that I wasn't contributing very much and he was pushing it far beyond what I was capable of, new kinds of apparatus, new kinds of detectors, much faster processing systems. I realized after a while that he didn't need me to do this. He knew enough about it. He could take off on his own. I continued to serve on Ph.D. committees for his students, providing a little bit of advice, but it was pretty clear that he could do this independently. Then after he lost his sight, he backed off a little bit, but not very much on research. He still had grad students and post docs that were helping him out and he still continued on perturbed angular correlations, I think pretty much until he retired.

CP: I've interviewed John. I'd be interested in getting your point of view on 00:46:00how the department rallied around him. As you say, he lost his sight and had to change everything really about how he could approach his job.

KK: It was very different. Of course, his teaching had to change completely and eventually he really had to drop out of teaching because it was very difficult for him. But he continued his research and he continued to work with activities for the blind with brail mathematics reader that was superior to what was available before. I had one of his students in my physics class, and it was a new experience for me having a blind student in the class. I would catch myself pointing at the blackboard, and saying "As we know from this equation," and there's this guy in the front row that can't see what I'm pointing at, so it really changed my teaching style. John really did very well. I don't know what I would've done under those circumstances, but I think he managed incredibly well.

CP: "Instructional laboratories and optics," Murdock Charitable Trust Grant in 1991?

KK: That was an interesting experience. Murdock Trust had funded a number of grants at OSU prior to that, but they were all research grants. The memo down, I can't remember if it was from the president or vice president or the dean of science, that Murdock was looking for proposals for the next round of funding. The physics department wanted a high-tech optics laboratory. So, I submitted a brief proposal, probably to the dean, and the dean said, "You can't do this because Murdock doesn't fund instructional projects. They only want to fund research projects." I pushed, I said, "Well this is as important to us as a research facility in the physics department at this time, because we are transforming our atomic physics program to an optics program. We really need this high-tech optics for our students, our grad students, and our undergrad students." I really pressed. He said, "Murdock will never go for it." Finally, 00:48:00he relented, and it was one of the two or three projects that OSU approved that year for submission to Murdock and I went up to the Murdock board in Portland or Seattle, I can't remember now where they were meeting. I pitched it to them and they funded it. I got this beautiful laboratory upstairs on the fourth floor, this Murdock Optics Lab. It was state-of-the-art at the time. It probably no longer is. But I think it was the first instructional grant that Murdock funded.

CP: A few years later-"Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need" from the Department of Education.

KK: That was a program that provided fellowships for grad students in science to work in local schools as sort of science resource people. Of course, they couldn't teach. They didn't have teaching licenses, but they would work alongside of a high school teacher in science classes helping to design hands-on activities for the students. The object of this was really twofold. First of 00:49:00all, it would really upgrade science teaching in the schools and it would also provide teaching experience for grad students who are normally very focused on their research. Not that they would become high school teachers, but it would be an interesting teaching experience they could add to their portfolios. We got a grant from the Department of Education for it. It worked very well. OSU got several grants in the area, and in fact Dan Arp was the PI for one of the subsequent grants. It was a great experience for our physics students. They got the experience teaching. It took a little bit of time away from the research but not a whole lot. They really were able to continue doing research and working in the public schools at the same time.

CP: What is the PhysTEC Project?

KK: That was a national program that was started by the American Physical Society and the idea was that many high school physics teachers were teaching physics without the necessary background to teach physics.

They didn't have physics degrees. Some of them had science degrees. Some of them really had no science degrees but they were filling in as physics teachers. So, the American Physical Society was pushing this effort to get high school physics teachers to have physics degrees. Now they don't need as much physics to be a high school teacher as they do to go to grad school in physics, undergraduate bachelor's degree programs, but they do need more than the minimal requirement that was common at that time to get certified to teach physics.

So, the American Physical Society pushed this program called PhysTEC and they got funding from the National Science Foundation and other sources to promote this idea of schools developing an undergraduate physics degree that was targeted to prepare students to teach high school physics. The hope that was not only would we get better-prepared teachers but students would see this degree program and say, oh, I would like to teach high school physics. They picked 7 or 00:51:008 sites for the initial program. We were one of the 7 or 8 that they picked to get this program off the ground. The second year I retired. I came back almost full time for a couple of years but I was technically retired and the director of the PhysTEC didn't think that a retired person should be managing the PhysTEC Program at Oregon State so they pulled our funding after a year or two, sadly. Nobody else in the department wanted to pick up the management of it. We didn't get the full 5 years of the grant. We only got a couple years. We've never really gone back to it. I think we're going back to some loose affiliation with the PhysTEC Program, but we weren't really able to carry through with that initial cohort of students to train them to be physics teachers. I'm really 00:52:00disappointed in that because I was really prepared to be an active leader of the project even though I was retired.

CP: Backing up a bit, I have references to a couple fellowships that I don't know if they were important to you or not, but the first is the Sloan Foundation Fellowship of 1976-78.

KK: I was the first Sloan-you know what the Sloan Fellowship is, it's a fellowship awarded to new faculty members, primarily in the sciences. This was a Cottrell Grant and I was the first awardee at Oregon State. We subsequently had others in physics and chemistry and a number of other fields. I basically took the money and left. I went to Oxford for 3 or 4 months. I had a colleague at Oxford who was also involved in low-temperature physics. I wanted to go and work 00:53:00with him for a while. I had worked with him on some other projects prior to 1978. But he invited me to come over and use my grant to work with him at Oxford. I did it and had a wonderful time.

It was a totally different experience at Oxford University, couldn't be more different than OSU in terms of their research style and teaching style and interaction of faculty were, department closed down twice a day for morning coffee and afternoon tea. Literally closed down. You couldn't find anybody, any secretary, any technician. They were all in the tea room. But a wonderful place to live. My son was in kindergarten a year in a British school. We traveled all around England. It was our first time in Europe. We just had a great time and learned a lot. Augmented my knowledge of low-temperature physics. Did some lecturing at Oxford on nuclear spectroscopy and electromagnetic interactions and 00:54:00nuclear physics. I developed a set of lecture notes when I was there. It was a good experience, fun.

CP: What role have sabbaticals played for you?

KK: My only real sabbatical was in 1980-81 in Los Alamos, and that gave me a chance to work in another different area, still in low-temperature physics. I was working that year with the group called the Neutron Cross Section Group. That group's primary mission was to look at uranium cross sections associated with nuclear weapons, and they would all, all except me, periodically go off to the Nevada test site to blow up something underground. I didn't get to go on those excursions.

They had in mind they could better understand the fission process by looking at 00:55:00fissioning nuclei that are oriented at low temperatures. Again, pulling out some nuclear physics information. That's what I did the year that I was there. I didn't really make a great deal of progress but got them started on low-temperature physics in the nuclear cross sections area.

I had to give up my subsequent sabbaticals because I was the department head until '93-'94 when I went to the National Science Foundation. I was a visiting staff member. Technically not a sabbatical, but it was a leave of absence from OSU. That got me really more involved in undergraduate education. I was a physics program officer with the division of undergraduate education. Really a two-fold role-first is shoveling money out the door and the second is supervising how that money is being used at various sites that have applied to 00:56:00the NSF for funding. This was at a time when what's now called physics education research was in its infancy.

Prior to that, the Reagan Administration had zeroed out the education budget at the National Science Foundation and subsequent to that it had gradually been put back in starting in the early 1990s. I arrived there in '93 when there were several ongoing grants that had been funded in the late '80s or early '90s and a whole bunch of new money that was coming in to support undergraduate education physics. In particular, there were two people that I was working with: Eric Mazur at Harvard and William McDermott at University of Washington. They were promoting an interactive style of teaching which is sometimes called active 00:57:00engagement. These days it's called the flipped classroom, which is not a term I really like very much.

The idea was, getting back to the Shakespeare analogy, we're going to assign students reading of the textbook outside of class. They're going to come to class. We're going to give them a little quiz at the beginning to make sure they've read the textbook and then we're going to do some exercises in class designed to enhance their knowledge of what they read the night before. We're going to do this by posing conceptual questions and having the students answer those conceptual questions with what are now called clickers and then discuss their answers with their students sitting around them and then respond again. I did this for many years, starting in '95 or '96 when I got back to OSU and the amazing thing is that the number of correct answers always increases post 00:58:00discussion as opposed to pre-discussion. So, students are learning from each other as well as or better than they're learning from me. Kind of an insult to my ego, but after a while you get used to the fact that you're not the fount of knowledge for this class. The students are picking up these things by reading and thinking about what they've read.

At that time OSU had just instituted called a technology resource fee. Students would pay a fee into the central account. We had some sort of committee that would dole it out based on proposals, and I proposed to them that we would buy clickers. Nobody had ever heard of clickers before. I had seen them at use at Harvard and several other places. I thought this is exactly what we need because I had been doing this for a year on paper. Students would take a little quiz on paper. I'd get 250 paper quizzes I have to give my grad students to grade. It was a very difficult process. If you do this with clickers, that's the way to do it. I got a grant to buy clickers. Tried to interest the, I forget what the 00:59:00group was called, the instructional materials group at OSU at being an agent for handling these clickers and distributing them. Never heard of these things, didn't want anything to do with them. They had to do this out of the physics department office. At least 250 students would show up on the first day of the term to get their clickers assigned to them. Since then, there's just a lot of departments using these. Pretty widespread use across the campus. It was difficult the first couple of years. We started doing it in one class and then another physics faculty member picked it up so we got another grant to buy more clickers. We were running about 1500 of those per term. But it's absolutely the right way to teach.

I loved the interactive teaching. It felt so natural to me and in particular, 01:00:00under the old way of teaching, I would lecture out of the textbook for 3 or 4 weeks, give an exam, and be horrified at the results of the exam, but you can't go back. You have to move forward, otherwise you're not going to finish the assigned syllabus. In the new way of teaching, I would leave class every day with some sort of a snapshot of what the students know or what they didn't know, and I could either plan things for the next class or sometimes even during class. If they did really poorly on one of the conceptual questions, I have other questions I could bring out that would help what I was trying to do. It just seemed so natural to say, okay, after each class I'm going to figure out what to do with the next class based on what happened in the previous class. It seems very natural. I just loved teaching that way. It was much more rewarding than the old way.

CP: Part of your legacy-the father of the clicker at OSU.

KK: Well, I'm happy with that [laughs].

CP: You referenced a cottage industry at the radiation center. One might posit a different cottage industry for you has been textbooks. How did you decide that you wanted to write a textbook to begin with?

KK: I didn't really decide. I was pushed into it. This goes back to about 1977, my third year here. I switched over from teaching the introductory calculus-based class Physics 211 sequence, to a course that was then called Physics 214, which was the fourth course in that sequence, taken by physics majors, some electrical and nuclear engineers and chemistry majors. It's a course in a modern physics, basically quantum mechanics. Not every engineering student needs that. It was a much smaller class than the big introductory class. I hated the textbooks that were available. There were only 2 or 3 acceptable textbooks that were available. Publishers' reps would come around quite 01:02:00frequently to try to market their textbooks to faculty members and there was a marketer from Wiley that kept coming around and I was complaining to him why Wiley didn't anything in modern physics but what they had, what the other publishers had, was really inferior: hard to teach out of, not very useful. He asked me what I would think would be a decent outline for the material that should be presented in a textbook. I jotted something down and gave it to him on his next visit and I got a phone call a couple weeks later saying Wiley was interested in my project. Well, I didn't have a project. All I had was this quick list of topics that I would like to see included in a modern physics textbook.

Subsequently, many years later, I learned the rest of that story. That is, the introductory textbook, the most popular introductory textbook in the U.S. at the time, was by David Halliday and Robert Resnick. In fact, the course was known as 01:03:00the Halliday-Resnick course, even though their textbook was not necessarily used in the course wherever it was taught. They were going to write a modern physics supplement or separate modern physics textbook at about that same time. When I had written down this list of topics for Wiley, somehow they found their way to them. They basically said, oh let the kid have a shot at it. They abandoned their plans to write a modern physics textbook and Wiley asked me to write a sample chapter and I patched something off pretty quickly and they gave me a contract. I took it with me to Oxford, and that's one of the things that I worked on while I was there.

That book is now going into its 4th edition, which is coming out this month. It's done very well. It's one of the leading modern physics textbook in the U.S. I revised it completely in 1996 to adapt to this flipped classroom teaching 01:04:00style: making it more readable and putting in more conceptual exercises not only in the book for students to do but in the instructor's manual. I've written a complete instructor's manual that provides the instructor with the means to do this kind of active engagement. The problem is faculty really don't have time to invent these things on their own. It's very time consuming. It requires several iterations to test them out and throw away the ones that don't work and improve the ones that do work. You're not going to do it unless somebody presents you with the materials. I worked really hard on this instructor's manual. I got a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on it. I had a TA that worked with me on helping to class-test some of these materials over 2 or 3 years to develop this instructor manual. That's been really successful.

That led to a nuclear physics book. Dave Halliday had written a nuclear physics 01:05:00book in the 1950s and then he got involved with his introductory textbook and never had time to go back and rewrite/update his nuclear physics book. Nuclear physics changed a lot in that time. So, Wiley asked if I would collaborate with him on a new edition of his nuclear physics book. We worked together on it for a couple months. He was a very agreeable guy to work with. At some point, he decided that it would really have to be totally rewritten that nuclear physics had changed so much in 20 years that there was very little of the old book that could be preserved. He said, why don't you just take what you want from the old book and just rewrite it from scratch and I'll take my name off of it and you can have the whole thing. That was very nice of him. That came out in the mid '80s. It was one of the leading nuclear physics books in the world for that 01:06:00level course. It's a senior/graduate level book and I'm thinking about taking it into a second edition. It's more than 30 years old, which is a long time for an advanced book.

Then that in turn led to a real collaboration with Resnick and Halliday on a new edition introduction book, which has gone through 2 editions now, the 4th and 5th editions. That's altogether 7 books: 4 editions of one book, 2 of the Halliday-Resnick book, and one of the nuclear physics book. Each of those about a 4-year project. Keeps me busy.

CP: Yeah, significant time and energy but also responsibility, I'd have to imagine.

KK: You asked my interest in science. If I go back to high school, writing and literature were my primary interests in high school. I loved writing. I love 01:07:00sitting down and putting thoughts on paper. I find it really rewarding, as rewarding as doing science research. The textbook writing has really been interesting to me. Learning how to copyedit and learning how to write effectively is really a challenge. Most science writing is pretty awful.

CP: A couple more questions about teaching. We've talked a fair amount about teaching already. It feels to me like we talked a fair amount about technique. I wonder if there is something that you could say just about how you've been able to convey complicated subjects to undergraduates. Physics is an intimidating subject for a lot of people. How do you make it more accessible?

KK: That's a really hard problem. I don't know. I don't really know the answer to that. I think this active engagement approach at the introductory level has worked very effectively. In a traditional physics class, taught a traditional 01:08:00way, the average on exams is typically 50-60%. That doesn't do very much for the student, and that's a C. That doesn't really do much for a student's self-confidence, to get 50% on an exam and get a C. That reinforces the impression that physics is so hard that all you have to do to get a C is 50% on the exams. When I was doing the active engagement in introductory physics, my average was more in the 70%s. That was much more satisfactory for me and also for the students. You really get the feeling you're learning something if you get a 70% on an exam as opposed to getting a 50%. Not only would I leave the classroom with a better sense of and knowledge of what the students were capable of, but they would also get daily feedback as opposed to waiting 3-4 weeks to get a score back on a test and realizing they need help, the would realize it on a day-to-day basis that they needed extra help. We had a consulting room where 01:09:00the TAs hang out. I would tell the students if you're consistently missing these conceptual questions on your clicker, don't wait for the next exam. After a couple days, come and get help. Either come see me in my office or come see one of the TAs in the TA consulting room. I think a lot of them took advantage of it. I would have 5 or 10 students in my office almost every day. They would get this feedback and realize that they needed some extra help and I was always prepared to give them something to work on that would help them understand whatever subject we were working on. Students would hear from other students that they had gotten this low grade on physics but got a C out of the course before they even took the physics course. That would really intimidate them coming in and that intimidation really short-circuits the learning process.

They know physics is hard and they have one bad experience on the first day and that just reinforces it and their learning is blocked after that. By giving 01:10:00these conceptual questions every day I think that really helps to build up their self-confidence, help them think that they're actually learning the subject.

CP: Tell me about your connection with the honors college.

KK: When I got back from the NSF in 1994 I was approached by the faculty senate president, Mike Oriard, to ask if I would head up one of the faculty senate committees, and he offered the budget and physical planning committee. That was just a couple years after Measure 5 was instituted and everybody was reducing their budgets. I said, no thanks, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be the budge reducer. Then he said, well, we're thinking about forming an honors college. Would you like to do that? I said, "Sold!" I had a really good experience teaching in the old honors program when I first got to OSU. That was 01:11:00abolished in 1990 as one of the Measure 5 cuts, and I was sorry to see it go but I was hoping it would come back in stronger form. When he dangled that, I said yes immediately.

We put together a faculty student committee to make a proposal to the president and provost to form an actual honors college. I've served on a lot of university committees and that was the easiest one I've ever served on. I had no pushback from everybody. Everybody said this is a great idea. Deans felt that it would bring better students - that are now called high-achieving students - to OSU. Which turned out to be the case. We just sailed right on through. We worked out a program. The guiding principles were that we wanted it not to be a separate, 01:12:00elitist group within the institutions, but to set it up so that any faculty member who wanted could be involved as a teacher in the honors college and any student from any major could be involved. Whereas, on some campuses it's exclusively liberal arts or arts and science. Here we wanted engineering and forestry and agriculture to be involved in getting an honor's degree. It worked out really, really well. I just couldn't be more pleased with the way it worked out and I've since come back to serve on the board of regents in the honors college, which I've been for like 10 years or so helping them out with their programming. I think I'm the only faculty member on the board of regents, so I can present this faculty perspective to the other members of the board of regents. They meet twice a year. I'm just really pleased with the growth of the honors college. It's now something like 4 or 5 times larger than it was when we 01:13:00first-we'd take about 100 students per year and we're now admitting 400-500. I think it's a real success story for OSU.

Right now, I think the major goal is to enhance the funding for the honors college so that we can offer any student who needs it scholarship to pay the differential tuition. I think it's unfortunate for honor's students by bringing them into this special group we're going to charge them extra for it, but it's really necessary at this point. And to enhance the funding the kind of experiences that the honors college requires, whether it's study abroad or a research project. My wife and I have provided some scholarships to the honors college as well as a number of other areas at OSU to try to offset the dramatic 01:14:00increases in tuition that have taken place here in the last 15 or 20 years. We have about 12 students a year that we support with scholarships: physics, in theater, in music, and in the honors college. When I started out, I could work 10 hours a week as an undergrad and pretty much pay my tuition and room and board. You can work 40 hours a week now flipping hamburgers and you can't even pay tuition. It's really unfortunate. It flies in the face of what we mean by public university. But don't tell Ed Ray I said that though.

CP: He's a short timer anyway. I want to move on to your administrative career in a second, but I have to ask about something I saw on your vita, which was you have testified in court on traffic accident reconstructions.

KK: There are a couple of lawyers in town who will call up the university asking 01:15:00for a scientist who will help with traffic accident reconstruction. I helped with a couple of those. What I learned the most was it was a pedestrian crossing the street up on Circle and had been hit by a car and the bumper of the car hit right at his knee and basically severed the leg, the knee joint came apart. The question was, could I figure out how fast the car was going? It was kind of a macabre problem to work on. Those are the kinds of things that would come down and sometimes they get passed, maybe the department chair gets a call and will put it out to the faculty, is anybody interested in working on this. I did two or three of those and lost interest.

CP: Something else, I'm jumping around a little bit, I'm sorry, but I want to ask you about your tenure as faculty senate president as well.

KK: That was really interesting. That was the first year that Paul Risser was here as president, so he and I both started in January of '96, I think. I spent a lot of time with him. Really interesting to get to know a new president from the ground up. We'd bounce some interesting ideas back and forth. I found it to be a really rewarding year. I'm not a politician and I don't do campus politics really well, but OSU does not have a strong history of faculty governance. We've been gradually moving more and more in that direction. The faculty senate ran out of an administrative office for a long time, and the faculty weren't really as independent an entity within the university as I thought they should be. I think each faculty senate president has moved us a little further in that 01:17:00direction. My first experience here with governance at OSU was on a faculty committee, I think it was called the registration and scheduling committee. The registrar served on this committee and it was pretty clear who was running things. I think he wasn't even a voting member because he wasn't a faculty member, but the committee would decide things and he would say oh that's not possible. Nothing could get through him that he didn't want the committee to do. I think gradually over the years things really changed and I was really happy to be part of that continuum to move things in that direction. It was a difficult time. It was still early in the Measure 5 era and things were being cut back and programs were being eliminated or university activities were being outsourced. That was an unfortunate part of it. But I really enjoyed the experience working 01:18:00with faculty, working with the faculty senate executive committee, getting around and talking to meeting with different groups.

One of the things I started doing that was really enjoyable is I tried to bring over to my house every week or every other week a diverse group of faculty leaders, 10 or 12 people from different departments just to interact socially over hors d'oeuvres and wine. My wife and I really enjoyed that. It was a chance for people from different departments to get to know one another a little better. The university still very compartmentalized. OSU less so than most institutions, but still we all hang out within own individual little departments. I really enjoyed the opportunity as faculty senate president to go out to the campus and meet other people from other departments and find out a little bit more about what was going on.

CP: What was your sense of Paul Risser from getting to know him a bit?

KK: I liked him a lot. I think he had really some good ideas. One of the ideas that I planted in his head when he first got here was that OSU should establish a policy that no class being bigger than 60 students. He talked about that for a while. Several months and then somebody must have pointed out to him the cost, and then he dropped it. But I was really happy to have that discussion with him, because I thought it was feasible. I worked closely with him that year, more closely with Roy Arnold who was I think provost at the time. And Roy was the one who would meet with the faculty senate executive committee. I got to know Roy really well, probably better than Paul.

CP: Okay, so department chair. This came about in 1984?

KK: Yeah, so I was persuaded by the other previous chair, Charlie Drake, was 01:20:00stepping down after 7 or so years and so departments trying to decide on a new chair and I wanted no part of it. I loved what was I was doing teaching and research. I didn't want to give up either of those things or cut back on either of those things. I mentioned this group of young faculty, by that time all had tenure. Most were full professors then but we still had a fairly close group. We started out as the young Turks in the department. When I was hired, the department rule was everybody taught the same number of courses per year, no matter whether you were doing research or not. This group of young Turks tried to get this policy changed in a faculty meeting and they kind of got stomped on by the senior faculty. First thing I did as the department chair was to change 01:21:00the teaching distribution. They persuaded me, this was a group of people that was hired around the same time I was, persuaded me to try being chair and as long as I could do it without giving up my research. I had a couple of very good grad students at the time. I felt I could cut back on my time with them a little bit and maybe cut back on my teaching from 3 courses per year to 1 or 2 and make room to be chair. It worked out fine. I was appointed for a 4-year term and never reappointed. Somehow 14 years went by and I never had a review. I never was asked to serve another term. I just kind of showed up every September and nobody else was sitting in the chair so I did it another year. I liked it. It was a great opportunity because we did a fair amount of hiring.

The first retirement that occurred was in maybe my second year as chair. We did a recruitment that ended up with hiring Henri Jansen, who just stepped down as chair recently and is now assistant dean, associate dean. Then a bunch of hiring occurred in a relatively short period of time. Hired the first women in the department, which was very rewarding. We're now up to 5 I think, which I think is one of the highest percentage of women in any Ph.D.-granting physics department. I loved working with new faculty, mentoring new faculty, giving them the mentoring that I never got when I was a young faculty member, helping them learn how to plan their time, budget their time, how to keep from being 01:23:00overwhelmed, how to be a good teacher. How to be an effective communicator in physics. What to do, what not to do in the classroom. That I think was the most rewarding part of the job. I was able to keep my research going and even teach occasionally, and nuclear physics textbook was published I think the second year I was chair so I was really heavily involved in writing that the first part of my tenure as chair and then the other textbooks. I was able to balance it. I think it's supposed to be a half-time job but it really isn't. It can be more, but it also can be less if you're careful. I had some good mentors and good teachers that helped me out.

CP: Did it take time to find that balance? I'm always interested to talk to people that move into administration, and they talk about the compromises they have to make and how it can be difficult.

KK: It did somewhat. I got some good advice from someone-never touch a piece of 01:24:00paper twice. In other words, don't open the mail until you're ready to act on it. Don't just open it and sit in on your desk and come back to it. That was pre-email, so, that was paper mail days. I thought that was really good advice and that really helped me to minimize the amount of time the administration took.

CP: You were also director of the engineering physics program?

KK: That was just title and name only. There wasn't really much directorship. It really involved going to a meeting once in a while with the college of engineering. We started out with the engineering physics program in the early 1960s as a vehicle for engineering students who didn't fit totally within any of the existing engineering disciplines. At the time you couldn't build, you have to take a certain number of engineering professional discourses, but they all had to be within a single department, a single program.

So, you couldn't take a few courses from mechanical engineering and from 01:25:00electrical engineering, and in particular students who were interested in aerospace needed to have this diversity of engineering experience and there was no engineering department that matched up with what they needed for aerospace. That was the preferred engineering discipline for students who were interested in aerospace, and a few other fields of engineering that didn't totally fit within the existing disciplines. We had a few students a year. It wasn't a huge program. It was for a while 2, or 3, or 4, or 5 students a year. Eventually we set it up so that students who took an engineering physics degree could also qualify for a physics degree. So, they would get a double degree. That was very popular. It didn't really take an extra year. They could do it in four years.

CP: You mentioned women in physics. This is something you've written about and spoken about. Can you talk more about that?

KK: I don't want to pass myself off as an expert, but after we hired our first 01:26:00couple of women, we found ourselves suddenly with more women graduate students and more women undergrads who were coming to physics. Students come to undergraduate physics from a variety of paths. They don't all start out as physics majors. Some of them start out with other interests, some other sciences, some start in math and find it too abstract and end up in physics. Some start out in engineering and find it not abstract enough and will come into physics. A lot of that depends on the experience they have in their first physics class and having female faculty teaching those classes really helps a lot to bring more women in. We found ourselves with this group of women faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students and we started a women and physics club basically. They would hold meetings and encourage more students to come into physics and overcome the barriers that they see in entering a largely male 01:27:00profession. Word of this spread to the American Physical Society that was holding a meeting devoted to women and physics and they invited me to come and speak to this meeting.

I went back to the headquarters in College Park, Maryland, in the conference center and the appointed time comes for me to talk and I'm kind of standing in the back of the room waiting for my introduction. I get introduced and I go up to the front of my room and go the lectern and turn around and there's this audience of female faces looking at me. I had never had this experience before as a physicist, of talking to an audience with, in some cases no females, certainly not a majority of females. It was an epiphany to what it must be for a woman physicist to go to a conference and to speak to an all-male audience. I 01:28:00think we've done a pretty good job of mentoring our women faculty and producing a fair amount of grad students, Ph.D. student and undergraduates. I think the program's still going on. I don't know if it's still as active as it was before. But I think it's really necessary and I think the department's much better for it.

CP: You've also done some thinking about physics and the humanities, the connection between the two, and served a stint as the board of directors for the center for the humanities here.

KK: The humanities have always been very important to my wife and me. We're very interested in theater. We used to go to plays when we were undergrads together. It was kind of a cheap date at the university theater. We continued after here at OSU in the university theater and the orchestra. I served on the board of the local symphony society. We've always been involved in the arts and in 01:29:00humanities. The director of the center of the humanities asked if I was willing to serve on their board. An interesting thing to do. At one point, I had thought I would take some time off and become one of their resident scholars over there and work on a project in history of science. I never quite got around to it. So, I served on their board for several years, got to know some of the visiting scholars, which was really nice.

CP: Was this Peter Copek?

KK: Peter Copek was head at the time.

CP: Can you tell me about him?

KK: I didn't interact with him very much except at meetings. It was certainly very pleasant to work with him.

CP: He was essentially the center and then he died.

KK: Yes, well, he established it of course and built it up. I really haven't followed it much since I left the board.

CP: A couple other topics-growing an undergraduate physics program.

KK: There is a conference devoted to that that I was asked to speak at. I think that physics programs need to be more diverse than they are nationally. I visited a lot of departments. I do consulting departments. I've done external visiting committees for 20 or 30 departments. There's a kind of homogeneity in physics departments. A lack of diversity, not only the traditional measures in diversity but a diversity in academic programs to the extent that at the time when I started doing this at least many physics faculty regard it as an insult if one of our undergraduate students chooses to do graduate in a field other than physics. They take it personally. This dates back to when I was a grad 01:31:00student, and my first year I was interested in biophysics and I wanted to take a course in the biochemistry department at Purdue and my advisor told me that if I took a course outside of the physics department she would pull my teaching assistantship. That's what passed for academic diversity in those days. So, what we've been pushing for, and what we did here at OSU, and what I was speaking about to other departments is a diversity of tracks through the undergraduate physics program. There definitely has to be a track that prepares you for grad school, the most rigorous track, but if you're interested in teaching high school physics you don't need that rigorous a track. If you're interested in doing graduate work in engineering you don't need that rigorous a track. If you are interested in doing graduate work in astronomy or astrophysics you need a 01:32:00slightly different set of courses, maybe.

Physics departments on most campuses are one of the smaller departments, and if you can grab onto one or two additional physics majors with this additional track that's a sizeable increase in your department. We ended up with about 8 or 10 different tracks through the physics major here, emphasizing different areas: computer science and engineering, and the same started to happen in other departments. I served on a national commission, a national task force, they called it, on undergraduate physics: NTFUP, acronym. Which was funded by Exxon Mobile foundation and that was basically our message, was that you need to have 01:33:00a lot of different ways through the physics program if you really want to build your program and as a result of that, the number of physics graduates in 10 years has doubled in the U.S., and I think that's mostly because of this diversity of tracks. We have an undergraduate national society that tracks where people go after they graduate in physics. The diversity is really amazing. A number go on to grad school in physics, but there's a huge number that go to grad school in other areas as well as going into industry, going into high school teaching, going into military. That's the way you grow a physics department is by providing these alternative paths.

CP: Which dovetails with my last bullet here - connecting physics education with the needs of the workforce.

KK: That's really a similar item. Most of us in academia don't have any idea 01:34:00what goes on in the real workforce. We don't really work for a living. It's really important for us to connect with our alumni who are in the workforce-what are the most valuable things you learned in your undergraduate career. Surprisingly, physics knowledge doesn't rank near the top. What always ranks near the top is communication skills and ability to work in groups. Most of us work in isolated laboratories. They don't do that in the workforce in the real world. They work in various diverse groups and you have to know how to get along with people and how to communicate clearly.

So, from time to time we've brought back some of our grads who are working in either in the workforce or working independently to give a colloquium, maybe 01:35:00give a talk to the department, talk to students about how they need to prepare themselves for the workforce. I think outreach to alumni is very important, particularly those who are using their physics in various clever ways in the industry. I think that's very much related to growing undergraduate programs. When I talked to parents when I was department head and we'd have our Beaver Open House and parents would come with their high school seniors, none of them really had any idea what physicists do professionally. They would push their kids to engineering, so they know that there are jobs out there for engineers but if you think of the New York Times classified, there are no advertisements for physics jobs. There are programmers or computer scientists, and maybe some chemists and maybe some engineers but there's nothing that says physicists in 01:36:00there. You have to figure out a way of broadening your background to qualify for that job. I think physicists are very versatile and can do a lot of things that engineers can do and often engineers can be hired for a specific project but physicists can move from one project to another to another because they have this diversity of background. Part of our job as faculty is convincing employers who come to campus to interview that they really ought to take a good look at our physics majors in addition to our engineers.

CP: A couple of concluding questions. We've touched on this a bit, but if you can touch on your engagement with community life with Corvallis and the ways that Corvallis has changed with your association with the community.

KK: I have to say that my wife and I fell in love with Corvallis. I feel very lucky to have gotten a job here at an institution that I love and a community that both of us have thrived in. She has been very active in community organizations. I was not as active as I probably should have been during the 01:37:00time when I was working full time, although I did a few things within the community. Most of my community, well, many of my community activities were still centered around the campus-through the symphony orchestra and the theater. I've been active in the local Jewish community. I've been president of the board of directors. I'm coming back on the board of directors next month as treasurer. We're building a new synagogue building and I'm on the building committee, that's been an exhausting, a rewarding, but exhausting experience. I learned far more about civil engineering and drainage issues that I ever wanted to know. That's coming to a close this summer, thank goodness.

I'm on the board of directors of our local condominium group. My wife and I downsized our home a couple years ago to a condominium. I volunteered to be on 01:38:00that group. Corvallis really gives you great opportunities for civil engagement. It's really a pleasure to work in the organizations that I've been involved with. There's nobody that I've ever come up against that has hidden agendas. It's all for the community good. I don't' have any desire to get involved with political organizations. My wife is the political arm of our family. I tend to go more with either science-related organizations or arts and culture organizations. That's where I like to put my effort.

CP: Then, a final question looking forward about OSU. How do you see OSU, it's 01:39:00positioning now, as it heads towards its second 150 years?

KK: It's really a very different institution from what it was in 1974 when I came here: much, much stronger in professional areas that faculty are involved with, not just in the sciences but especially in the liberal arts. I think the growth has been much more radical in the liberal arts, I think, than in science, and a lot of the people that I'm friends with in the humanities in liberal arts are much more professionally engaged than some of the people that I knew back in 1970s when I was here, and that's really wonderful to see the growth in those areas. It's really too bad that we missed the boat on graduate programs in most of those areas, because I think the quality of the faculty really screams out for graduate activities, but I'm not sure that's in our future.

We have our land-grant mission, and I think we are fulfilling that mission 01:40:00admirably. I think it's a great opportunity to be the land-grant institution in a state like Oregon. It gives OSU a premiere position. It opens the door for us to get state funding that we might not otherwise attract to doing one-on-one with engineers with farmers and people in the wood-products industry throughout the state. I think that's really helped the ranking of the institution and the status of the institution in the state.

I'm very excited about the new performing arts center. I think that's badly needed and just look forward to being part of that effort and seeing it come to pass as soon as possible. I just got back from visiting the University of Arizona. That campus is more than twice as large as it was when I was a student 01:41:00there. They've taken over an amount of land in the city that's about equal to what they had when I was there. That hasn't really happened here at OSU. A lot of our buildings, like this one, are in really bad shape. I don't know that there's money in the state to provide new buildings. I've seen a number of beautiful new buildings going on campus. A lot of those have been done with a combination of public and private funding. I'm hoping that a new physics building is somewhere down the road. Making this building do has been a really difficult effort and I learned about that when I was chair with repeated floods, with air conditioning problems. We've hired people that could not operate their research in a non-air-conditioned lab. It's just too unstable. Electronic 01:42:00equipment. So, we had to piecemeal air conditioned labs which is probably more expensive in the long run than air-conditioning all at once, but there just wasn't money to do that. I'm always embarrassed when I go over and see what the liberal arts are living in on this campus. I think there needs to be a major building program to bring us into the modern era. The classrooms in Weniger were renovated a few years ago. Up until that time I was always chagrined when I would go to a community college in Oregon and see their lecture facilities compared with ours. We're in somewhat better shape now, but it's been a long process and we were struggling for a long time with our instructional facilities and our research facilities. I'm hoping that those can be upgraded.

Otherwise, let's see, any new directions for the university. I'm curious to see what the new president will bring us. I'm a big supporter of Ed Ray's. I've enjoyed working with him. I attended one of his interview visits when he was interviewing with the job and he talked about the role of the basic science sand the liberal arts in a land-grant institution. I thought, okay, this is the guy that I want. I think he's fulfilled that to a great extent. He's a big supporter of the symphony, and I served with his late wife, Beth, on the symphony board and I'm hoping the next president will make that a kind of commitment. I've seen a disturbing trend in a number of universities where they've taken people from government and industry to be their presidents, not people with a strong history in academia. I don't care for that trend at all. I think good administrators, 01:44:00like Ed, can come from academia and do a good job being fiscally responsible but still advancing the academic mission of the institution. I'm kind of curious to see what they come up with.

CP: Me too. Well, Dr. Krane this has been terrific pleasure. Thank you very much for carving out some time for us and sharing your story.

KK: It's been fun to talk about these things.

CP: Thanks.