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Interview with Michael F. McGoff
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Title
Interview with Michael F. McGoff
Contributor
McGoff, Michael ; Gashurov, Irene
Subject
Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education administration; Harpur College – Alumni from Broome County; Harpur College – Alumni in linguistics; Harpur College - Alumni living in New York City.
Description
Dr. McGoff is senior vice provost and Chief Financial Officer for Binghamton University. His doctorate was in computer-oriented onomastics, the study of names, which he programmed to study the indigenous languages spoken in New York State.
Date
2018-06-12
Rights
In Copyright
Identifier
Michael McGoff.mp3
Date Modified
2018-06-12
Is Part Of
Oral Histories from 60's Binghamton Alumni
Extent
57:54 minutes
Transcription
Alumni Interviews
Interview with: Michael F. McGoff
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 12 June 2018
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(Start of Interview)
IG: 00:00
Okay-okay.
MM: 00:02
My name is Michael McGoff, Senior Vice Provost and Chief Financial Officer for Binghamton University. We are in my office, Administration Building 711 and today is June 12, 2018.
IG: 00:15
Okay. Thank you. So, Dr. McGoff, where did you grow up?
MM: 00:22
I grew up here in Binghamton. I was- my grandparents came from Ireland to work at Endicott-Johnson Shoes. My- they did and my father was born in the south side of Binghamton. When he got back from World War Two, he became a Binghamton policeman, and married my mother, and they had nine children. I am the eldest.
IG: 00:48
That is tremendous. So, was your mother a homemaker? Or did she work?
MM: 00:55
She worked in some as a bookkeeper, accountant. It was a finance company, but most of the time, after you have nine kids, you need to be home.
IG: 01:06
I would think so. So did your and-and you mentioned that your grandparents are from Ireland. What about your mother's side? Are they Irish? [crosstalk]
MM: 01:18
My grandparents were from Ireland. That was my father's side. My- her grandfather was from Ireland, and her grandmother was from Ireland.
IG: 01:26
Do you know what part of Ireland?
MM: 01:30
My- well on the paternal side, my grandfather was Monahan, and my grandmother was Claire. I believe that the um, my grandfather's side, I would have to look it up. Actually, I think it is an ancestry, but I cannot remember.
IG: 01:46
Okay, that is fair enough. So, in your family, was education encouraged?
MM: 01:55
It was not discouraged. I was a good student when I was in high school and in an elementary school, my father had nothing past high school, my mother had nothing past high school, and I was encouraged to do what I wanted to do.
IG: 02:12
I see. So did the conversations in your house revolve around local events, your family events. Did you talk about?
MM: 02:26
Well, my father worked three jobs, so he was not home very much.
IG: 02:29
I see. [crosstalk]
MM: 02:32
As I was growing up, you know, most of the talk, I think, was about school and about family. There were, you know, current events, I guess so, right, yeah.
IG: 02:46
So, what were you a big reader? Did you like certain subjects?
MM: 02:53
I always read a lot. I still enjoy reading. When I finished high school--I went to St Mary's Elementary School and was encouraged by the teachers there to study, and I always did well in school.
IG: 03:12
Right.
MM: 03:13
And then when I went into high school, I went to something called St. Patrick's Academy, which closed in my sophomore year, and I graduated from Catholic Central in 1965 it was, I was among the first graduating classes from what is now Seton Catholic Central High School when I [inaudible] just opened.
IG: 03:41
Where did your number in the what-what number child were you?
MM: 03:45
I am the oldest.
IG: 03:46
You are the youngest.
MM: 03:47
Oldest.
IG: 03:48
Oldest-oldest.
MM: 03:49
And my father died when he was 52 so when any girls got married, I was the patriarch.
IG: 03:56
Oh, so who- what did the- your other siblings become? I am, I am watching.
MM: 04:06
No, getting a message. Two of my brothers became firemen since retired, one of them is still very big in sports. He was division one referee in basketball. He also is the assigner for still is the assigner for soccer and basketball, and most of central New York for referees. I have a- there is diabetes in my family. I have a brother Jim, who had severe diabetes, type one, and had a rough life with it, and he was disabled, but everybody is still around. My sisters went into the health sciences, worked in the hospitals.
IG: 04:57
As what, doctors?
MM: 04:59
The technicians, technicians, yeah, and a brother, John, who was longtime fireman, who went back and got his bachelor's and then his master's [inaudible] all the way, and ended up not being able to do what he wanted to do, because if he taught, he would not be able to collect his retirement as a fireman. So, he ends up he is the- whatever the title is, Head of Education for what I know a Spectrum was Time Warner, the others. Let us see, uh, some-some of them had some higher education, and no one finished a degree, except for John.
IG: 05:52
So as the head of your family, by default, you-you sort of stepped into your father's shoes.
MM: 06:02
For somethings [crosstalk]
IG: 06:02
Obviously-obviously. No. Okay, so how did that change your direction? Did you feel more the weight of responsibility on your shoulders? Did that determine certain interests?
MM: 06:14
When he died, I was already was not living there anymore.
IG: 06:20
I see, I see.
MM: 06:22
In fact, by then, when he died, I had already finished my bachelor's, I think, my associates, my bachelor's and my master's, and was working on the doctorate. So, I was living someplace else. I actually had been married, and she and I were both graduate students together.
IG: 06:45
Okay, so let me backtrack, then. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do when you were graduating high school?
MM: 06:55
No, in fact, I was surprised. I must have applied, though I do not remember it. I was surprised at the high school graduation that I got a scholarship to go to Broome Tech Community College, where I went for a couple of years and-and at the same time, was here on campus, studying and doing other things here on campus. And then I went out to New Mexico for a short time.
IG: 07:23
To New Mexico?
MM: 07:25
New Mexico. Yeah.
IG: 07:25
Where in New Mexico?
MM: 07:27
New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
IG: 07:29
Oh, that is where my daughter lived for a while.
MM: 07:31
I was going to go to school there, and I decided that that the education was not as good as New York. So, I came back.
IG: 07:39
But it is a beautiful place.
MM: 07:40
It is beautiful. As long as they keep the water running all the time, then they can have grass.
IG: 07:45
So, when were you there? What are the years that you were there?
MM: 07:48
I was not there for a whole year. I was there for weeks. Let us see when was it? It was 1967, summer and fall of (19)67.
IG: 08:04
So, you know, let us backtrack. So, did you have a you know, why did you decide on Harpur College?
MM: 08:19
I was in New Mexico. I had already been- I was with the woman that I ended up marrying a few years later. We both decided that New Mexico State was not the right place for us. We had both been admitted to Harpur. We both drove back to New York day and night until we got here to start classes in August, late August, early September, somewhere around there. Yeah, that is when I forgot my first job and on campuses.
IG: 08:51
So-so, wait and you got your first job. So, you were working while you were a student. What-what?
MM: 08:59
I was self-supporting.
IG: 09:00
You were self-supporting. You were self-supporting. That is not surprising. Coming from a family that-
MM: 09:08
Yeah, they did not have the resources help, although I had scholarships, and I just-
IG: 09:13
You had a regent scholarship,
MM: 09:15
A what?
IG: 09:15
A Regents scholarship?
MM: 09:17
Yes, I had a, I do not remember exactly what the title of the thing was. Tell you the truth, it was a scholarship that I got in high school. But I do not, not sure they called it Regent scholarship, whatever. Yeah, but I needed to work or I would not have lived.
IG: 09:38
So, you had this idea that Harpur College and New York education was superior. Did you have an idea? Did you have a direction? Did you know what you wanted to pursue?
MM: 09:48
Well, to tell you the truth, as I said, I grew up in Binghamton, and at that time, most people in the area did not hold the college in very high regard. In fact, my father was a Binghamton policeman, and right around that time, Herbert Aptheker had been here. And so, there were a lot of people that just thought this was a communist place. A lot of communists, long haired hippie. I do not think they said hippie at the time, but long haired, sandal wearing communist, but I knew that had a good education, and I knew that I wanted to come back to it.
IG: 10:29
No, did you, did you? I am just wondering you know how you mentioned that you went to Catholic High School, that your siblings went to Catholic high schools.
MM: 10:42
Actually, they did not.
IG: 10:43
They did not.
MM: 10:44
No.
IG: 10:45
They did not.
MM: 10:45
Because at that time, my brother Kevin did, but with my brother Jim and my father being sick and then dying, there was not enough money to pay those tuitions, so they all started going to public school, and all of them graduated from public high school.
IG: 11:07
Do you think that your family was particularly Irish? Was there a sense of Irish culture in your family?
IG: 11:14
Yes.
IG: 11:15
How was that expressed? I was I was getting around that through Catholic-
MM: 11:19
My-my-my grand my paternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were still alive. My father was very close to them. They had very thick brogues, which a lot of people would probably not understand now. We just spent a lot of time there. There were also like cousins that visited from Ireland and so on. Cousins of my father. So, you know, it was clearly Irish. And my grandmother, on my mother's side, was very proud of having been Irish. Her father came from Ireland, and he was he drowned. He drowned in trying to get them dinner by shooting a duck in a river. And so, she had to quit high school about 14 or so, something like that, in order to help the family. But I do not know how she got so smart, but she helped me learn algebra when I was in high school, even though I do not think she ever, I do not know what she finished, eighth grade, seventh grade, I do not know, but all of them were very Irish, yes.
IG: 12:32
So also, you know, what was the sense in your family that you know you said everybody was proud of being Irish? What were they? Were they proud of the of the rich culture of the or their personal sort of stories of survival, of surviving through struggles? What do you think it was?
MM: 12:53
Just a, the love of the heritage, I guess. My I have to admit. I mean, I do not think of myself as Irish very often. But when my wife and I did ancestry, and I found out I was 99.4 percent or 93 percent something like that, Irish, I was proud of it.
IG: 13:17
Right.
MM: 13:18
Yeah.
IG: 13:19
Have you ever heard that the Irish and the Slavic nations were one? There is one theory that they were once one. They came from the same family tree.
MM: 13:35
I never heard that now.
IG: 13:39
Yeah,
MM: 13:39
It is interesting.
IG: 13:39
It is interesting. It is very interesting.
MM: 13:39
My wife, my present wife-- have been married 39 years her-her grandparents and family members came from Russia, Ukraine, whatever it was at the particular time to work at Endicott Johnson, so I have got this whole kind of, we were married in a Russian Orthodox Church. So, I have got this whole-
IG: 13:57
Oh, which, which one?
MM: 13:58
It was called our mission of the Blessed Virgin that is over on-
IG: 14:02
That is where [crosstalk] that is where I go.
MM: 14:04
Okay.
IG: 14:05
So that is very interesting. It is a very interesting connection. So, I was just trying to get a sense of your background and sort of you know what the ethos of this family was, and-
MM: 14:19
It was very close family. I do not know that we thought about being Irish and all that as much as we thought about taking care of each other. It is interesting. People would never [inaudible] a big family. I would come home and, you know, 11 people were living there, and yet, within a few minutes, you would say, “Where is John?” It was just like; it was like a hive or something. [laughs]
IG: 14:42
Right-right. I can imagine. And so-so, you were in school. You were at Harpur College, after, you know your-
MM: 14:55
Came back from Mexico.
IG: 14:56
From New Mexico, and what did you know, and you had this, obviously, you had heard that, you know, Harpur College was full of communists and hippies. What was your first impression of the school? I mean-
MM: 15:14
My first impressions of the school was a lot of hard work, but it was lot of folks from downstate, which was different for me and proud to be here. And the- I said a lot of hard work, it was a lot of hard work. And also, I was working full time, but it was just filled with all this stuff to learn. I mean, I took a lot of different courses. I studied a lot of different things. I love language. So, I was involved with early on, with folks in the English department, mostly, but I ended up in my later, in my undergraduate and then in my graduate work, studying languages. So-
IG: 16:05
Which languages did you study?
MM: 16:07
Old High German, Old English, Middle English. Did some Frisian I studied some-
IG: 16:15
How interesting.
MM: 16:16
[inaudible] and some Algonquin. I did some my dissertation was in languages, or actually it is in an area called onomastics, which is I used I was, I was working in the School of Advanced Technology. So, I had a background in computing, and so I was able to marry computing and onomastics, which is the study of how my study was how names through bilingual interaction, names pass from one language to another, typically becoming meaningless, but also being able to carry that language into a different language, able to study the first language. My-my teacher was a guy named Bill Helm, or Bill Nicolaisen [W. F. H. (Bill) Nicolaisen], who ended up just dying here about a year ago, a year and a half ago in Aberdeen, that he taught here for many years. He came from Ohio State, and we studied together for years. I studied with him.
IG: 17:20
What-what you know, what predisposed you? I mean, this is serious linguistics at an undergraduate level, which is quite unusual.
MM: 17:30
Yeah, there were no linguistics programs, so, yeah, work with individuals, as I said, Old High German, Old Norse, with some faculty members who were here.
IG: 17:40
Do you remember their names?
MM: 17:42
Bill Snyder. I worked with him on some Sanskrit and some Old High German and-and Old Norse. I did [crosstalk]
IG: 17:53
That is phenomenal. That is really phenomenal. I really [crosstalk] no, no, that is okay, that is, that is, but this is at the undergraduate level.
MM: 18:03
We started that stuff at the undergraduate most of the work was at the graduate level. Yep.
IG: 18:11
Most of the work-
MM: 18:11
At the graduate I mean, I was just getting the background in order-
IG: 18:11
So, at the undergraduate level, were you studying old German and Frisian and or did you were you exposed to that in graduate school?
MM: 18:21
In undergraduate I mostly like, I work with Bill Snyder in German, and we did some, some work and older versions of German I did, let us see what I do Middle English with, with I um, with faculty here. And then I got introduced to Bill Nicolaisen, and I started working with him on some things. And the old Norse was in my first year of graduate school.
IG: 18:55
That is fantastic.
MM: 18:56
So, I was here all the time.
IG: 18:59
So, Binghamton, but that is, that is tremendous. So, Binghamton actually had a strong linguistic presence. Were these-
MM: 19:09
It was-there were no programs in it, and so to say strong. We had strong faculty members. It had backgrounds, but it-
IG: 19:17
So, they were teaching these subjects out of their language programs, right out of the German program or English programs.
MM: 19:25
English program, yeah [inaudible] Barney Huppe [Bernard Huppe] is the first one to introduce me to older languages, Middle English. We did Chaucer and some other things. Bernard F Huppe, he was one of the leading lights of the early faculty members here.
IG: 19:42
What is really interesting is that you were kind of ahead of the curve in that you combined your interest in onomastics with computer you know, generated what- to study.
MM: 20:01
Yes, when I first started working here in my first job in 1967 August in 1967 was in the school, the brand-new school of advanced technology, which the current incarnation is the Watson School. And so, I worked for a man named Walter Lohan, who was the first dean, and at the same time was working. We hired a- was a little while later, but we hired a guy named John McHale, who was colleague of Buckminster Fuller, and John was a sociologist who was a futurist. So, when I worked with him for quite a while, I think they called me a research associate, but I read for him, and he had a need to, you know, constantly be reading things. So, we, there were some of us who read things in order to, you know, get rid of the chaff and give him the pearls through the- we at the end of the day, he would have a whole bunch of things to take home that I had sort of filtered out for him so they get so they did not have to read things that were just worthless. I read a lot of things for him. Same time, I worked for Walter Lohan, who was, who was the Dean of the School of Advanced Technology, and eventually, at the end of the life of the school advanced technology, I was acting dean for a couple years.
IG: 21:36
It is very interesting. You know, there is so much that I want to ask about.
MM: 21:43
I am jumping all over the place.
IG: 21:44
No-no. And, you know, it is a personal interest of mine, because I, too, studied linguistics many years ago. So, for example, what was and you got your doctorate in linguistics, what-
MM: 21:56
The doctorate is actually mean, this was, what was what was the title, computer-oriented onomastics survey. It was sort of independent study, kind of thing that I had, I did with Bill Nicolaisen. And then, in fact, I am still involved in, I am still on the editorial board of onomastics journal. And um-
IG: 22:17
So, what were your some of your findings in your thesis, you know, if you could summarize this in in a nutshell. What-what did your research find?
MM: 22:28
Well, that is about 300 and some pages, but I have not looked at in a long time, but it is. What I did was a study of the place names of New York State and the Aboriginal languages and some of the New World, world languages that came here, and was able to trace some things back, how the names came to be, what the language was about, and so on. But I was able to do it on many, many, many, I do not know how many 1000s of names, physical features and so on, and use the computer to be able to analyze it. And nobody at the time was using computing. So, it was a hot topic. And I went around a lot and talked with folks about it, introduced some people to it. And in fact, Peter Raper, who is in South Africa, he does South African onomastics. He was I- he came here and I introduced him to computing, and he is still using-using it.
IG: 23:35
So let me understand. So, you had, you know this corpus of words from names from various Aboriginal languages.
MM: 23:44
Not only all the names, yes, but-
IG: 23:48
Not only the names, but the languages themselves.
MM: 23:51
That I was interested in the languages, we use the names to get to the languages.
IG: 23:54
To get to the to the languages. So, you reconstructed the language through the names, or?
MM: 23:59
In some cases, you know, I do not know, pick on something Susquehanna, the Susquehanna River.
IG: 24:04
Yeah, right.
MM: 24:07
The, it does not matter to me. It did not matter what the what it etymologically meant. I was interested in, like, hannah is pleonastically repeats river right. Hannah is river that kind of thing was what I was interested in. You are taking me back a long way.
IG: 24:27
No-no, but I hope you do not mind. So, this is, you know, we can-
MM: 24:33
So, you can study the languages and reconstruct things about the languages by using what was brought into our everyday language and changed over time. See, you know, you can trace the changes and things like that. People do not know what they are saying when they say Susquehanna. What it means or where it came from, anything else. But you can, that is what I was interested in.
IG: 24:57
Right. And you were. You know, did you find, did you find evidence of-of, you know, a people's history, of their migrations, of their contact with other, other tribal cultures?
MM: 25:18
And you can trace, like you know, you can trace where dialects of the Iroquoian language, for instance, where they were based on the names that are still the areas where those dialects [inaudible]
IG: 25:33
Did you present your papers and at linguistic conferences?
MM: 25:38
Um, onomastics conference, yes uh huh. I [inaudible] international at the time, was called International Congress of Onomastics Sciences, big one in Ann Arbor one year. Just about every major city and the country where there were conferences would be middle- we were mostly associated with MLA in the early years, and then the conferences that I went to, and then in the later years, within the last 25, 20 years, we moved to LSA, Linguistic Society of America, and so that we meet now in January--used to meet during the Christmas break, but that is when MLA met and spoke at MLA, various places like that.
IG: 26:28
Did you- are you acquainted with the work of Chomsky [Noam Chomsky]? Did that influence you do anything
MM: 26:34
[crosstalk] here, and I heard him speak, probably in the (19)60s.
IG: 26:38
Tell us about that. That is wonderful.
MM: 26:42
He gave a lecture, and I believe was Cassata Sioux. I had to be in the late (19)60s sometime in there. Do not remember much of what he spoke about probably was more social than it was linguistics. But-
IG: 26:56
Even then?
MM: 26:56
Yeah, right, oh yeah. He is- had on things then, yeah. A lot of people came and spoke-spoke in Binghamton over the years. Then I tried to go as many as I could. One that comes to mind is Christopher Hitchens. And lots of, lots of big names came.
IG: 27:15
In the (19)60s?
MM: 27:16
(19)67. Yeah, it was, it was a different- the university was a different place than during those years. It was mostly known for the humanities; the sciences were there. And of course, you know when, but in the like, for instance, that we went through a horrible time in (19)76, 1976, (19)75, (19)76 when New York State was financially going south, because New York City was-was having difficulty, and we had huge cuts here one and would not remember what it was--must been the fall of 75 we hired six assistant professors in our school, and in May of (19)76 we laid them off. That was that kind of bad times. And so, it was big on humanities. But my point was going to be that during those bad times, the sciences and the nation engineering school and things like that, they were the ones taking the hits. We had a PhD in physics, which we got rid of at that time. Now that would not happen, but that is what happened then, because Harpur was well known for the humanities and some social sciences, but most humanities are big, very I mean, it was the most famous English department in the country, I think in public schools.
IG: 28:49
It had a great reputation from it had the reputation of being an elite, the equivalent of an elite private college. That is what I hear from almost all the alumni I speak to.
MM: 29:04
Yeah, they call it the public Brown or something like-
IG: 29:07
Something like that. It was based on the University of Chicago system, was not it?
MM: 29:14
Partially also the collegiate was based on the collegiate colleges were based supposedly on Oxford, but there were, there were a lot of people who thought a lot about education in those years, just and higher education and how students learn and that kind of thing, much more discipline oriented now.
IG: 29:38
Did you-you know, I imagine that you were, in part, influenced by your family's perspective on the college you know, the academic community here and the students. Did this perception change over the years? I mean, how did you regard these hippies and communists?
MM: 30:05
Well, I never thought of them that way. I was quoting the local people. Was interesting, because the woman I told you about became my first wife. Her- when we started, we went out to New Mexico. We had gone to school together at Broome. We came back here. We were students here, but her father was a violin maker and played viola in the orchestras. Her mother was a pianist and taught music. She was a dancer herself and a violinist and so but all of her parent’s friends, many of her parent’s friends, were also university faculty, like Ken Lindsay and Christine Lindsay were Ken started the art programs here. We would spend a lot of time with them, either up at the cottage, or they would be coming over Harry Lincoln, who was the beginning of the music programs here, they would be there too. So, I would he even when I was not on campus, I was involved with people from on campus. So, I thought of that. I just came to think of it as a family. And I will have been here 51 years in August, and-
IG: 31:18
That is tremendous.
MM: 31:21
[inaudible] it is. It was. They were different times, but they were still did not seem to be. It was a much more close knit. I think when I stepped on campus first time at (19)65 there were like 22- 2200, 2300, 2300 people here. Now there is 17,300 students, let alone a couple 1000, more than a couple 1000 people that work here.
IG: 31:50
And you never considered leaving when you, for example, earned your PhD. Did you seek employment elsewhere?
MM: 31:58
Well, when I finished my doctorate. I was, let us see, (19)79 I was an assistant dean already. So, I became an assistant dean in (19)76 during all the issues, all the problems and people were being laid off, and I took on new responsibilities. And so, by the time I got the doctorate, I was married second time, and have been married now to my wife, Donna Pylypciw, who for 39 years it will be so, I guess I have forgotten the question. But no, I this was, I mean, I had, I had possibilities of jobs in other places. In fact, went out to Michigan to interview for a job out there. But just this was home.
IG: 32:53
Yeah, I see.
MM: 32:54
I think even though job was home.
IG: 33:00
How did you get involved in the financial aspect of administration?
MM: 33:11
Well, as I said back in the (19)70s, when I stepped into administration from some of the various other jobs I had had. You had to know something about financials. I had lived through the Rockefeller years, when there was plenty of money up here on campus, but I became assistant dean and then associate dean, and so the fight I was, at one-point, Associate Dean for Administration and academic affairs. I think it was the other way around Academic Affairs and Administration. And so, all the financials were reporting to me budgets and that kind of thing. So, I got into it. And when I became acting dean of the School of Advanced Technology, again, you know, I had to oversee, but at the time, was probably like a five or $6 million budget, something like that became much larger over time. And now, when I the provost at the time, when I was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Administration in the Watson school from (19)83 we started the school in (19)83 so for like 15, 14, 15, 16, years, I was in the Watson school. And then in 1999 the provost at the time, Marianne Swain, asked me to come over and be vice provost. I think we were called Associate Provost at the time. And I took on the academic all the academic budgets, and then in 2014 Harvey Stinger decided, when a good friend of mine and colleague, Vice President for Administration, Jim Voorst VORs [James Van Voorst] left, Harvey decided that he was going to put the financials underneath Academic Affairs. So now all of the all the financial side, reports to me. So, you know, I would have some courses and those kinds of things, but I just learned it by working it, I guess. And now I have CPAs who report to me, and they can worry about the details. [laughs]
IG: 35:21
That is a perfect situation. I am just thinking how unusual your background is. I mean, I have known people who have wedded the technologist background with a humanist. I know some people you know. I know some people who have made a career of that. But do you see any future for this direction in engineering, for example, is the Watson school doing anything that you sort of naturally fell into?
MM: 35:56
Well, of course, when I was in the Watson school, I was an administrator. But because I take things on and because I maybe I do things well, I do not know, for a couple of years, I was the chairman of computer science and Associate Dean, because I had had background in computing when I came here in the (19)60s. I, you know, I learned some programming languages in that time. It was over key punch cards, and I helped create a program called foundations in computer science--actually before computer science existed. It was foundations computer systems. And we took people from various backgrounds, everything, art, music, English, whatever, and put them through a series of six courses to prepare them for a master's to study in a master's degree in computer systems. It was called the foundation of computer science. We created video tapes. This is like 1969 right in there, and taught an awful lot of folks, especially folks in IBM and General Electric, Sarah Link, enough background in logic and Boolean algebra, set theory, numerical analysis, that kind of thing, and some programming languages to be able to step in and start learning computing. So that I was, since I was involved in that, and I have got involved in it, I became knowledgeable, and so I did all those things too.
IG: 37:19
Do you think that the (19)60s, in any way encouraged this exploration of different disciplines? And you know, was there a greater experiment, experimentation and searching from one-one area of I mean, I am just thinking about this computational linguistics. I think that it was very innovative. Do you think that it is a product of the time, or just that technology was headed in that direction, and this was exploited by other disciplines?
MM: 38:05
Not sure I can understand or I can answer that question, but I do not know that it was as much the (19)60s as was this place. This place was wedded to people exploring it was big. We still say these things. We do less of it, but in the (19)60s and (19)70s and even into the (19)80s, people were encouraged to explore. When you came into Harpur College, you were, you know, they tried not to lock into things. There were fights. In fact, when people tried to make it easier for registration by picking courses for people and having locked in courses, it was just unheard of. So, I mean, I took many-many courses undergraduate that I, you know, from anti just was lots of there was, it was a big plate, and you could eat whatever you wanted. It was the best part. And things like computer science was not entirely defined at the time. That was so that people from various areas could get into it. It was, there was something called the ACM association for computer machinery. ACM 68 was a curriculum. That was when people first started defining what computer science was. So, it was open to everybody. I mean, as I say, the it was the School of Advanced Technology at the time was designed in order to take advantage of this exploration that people in Harpur [crosstalk].
IG: 39:33
Right. Do you think that this exploration exists at the present time? Is it still sort of, you know, is there still a, you know, a partnership, a collaboration between the arts, the humanities and technologies? I mean, I know that it exists in in the library field with Digital Scholarship. But do you think that there is this kind of-
MM: 40:04
I think it is-
IG: 40:05
-bridging of different [crosstalk]
MM: 40:07
I think the possibility is still there, but it is it. You know, I do not want to sound like some old fogy, but I think it is it is different now in that there are so many forces working against students being able to explore. If you look at the Excelsior program or TAP, people are encouraged just to figure out where they want to head, and they are locked into a set of courses. If they do not follow those courses, they are going to lose TAP, or they are going to lose the Excelsior, or they are going to lose whatever it is. So, you cannot do a lot of exploration when you are being trying to focus like that, because politicians, geez, I lose my job. Politicians have set it out so that it is no longer the responsibility of the state to help create the future of the state, as much as it is the personal responsibility. When I first came here, the tuition, the cost of education, was born by the state and by the student. At that time, it was in the 20 to 30 percent range that the student paid, and the 70 or 80 percent in the 70 percent range that the state paid. It is now exactly reversed so these same politicians have put in place, in my opinion, I think they are abdicating their responsibility for the future of the state. But anyway, they put this in place where now students create these great, enormous financial burdens, which now the politicians complain about by saying that, you know, the colleges are burdening these people with all this cost and they have got to pay for loans into their waning years. The fact of the matter is that there are so many more constraints on people now I did not have the constraints that some of these students have. Now they got to take that lab course. They do not have to want to take that lab course. They got to take. So again, sound like an old fogy. Things have changed, no, and it is, it is back then it was a lot less discipline oriented for the faculty and for the students, and a lot more of this exploration I talked about. You can learn different things, but right now, you will find students that have to take these courses or they are not going to get in pre-med.
IG: 42:26
And essentially, it is because of financial constraints.
MM: 42:29
That is one of the big ones.
IG: 42:31
That is one of the big ones.
MM: 42:31
Yeah, and also that higher education has changed. People are much more discipline oriented. When I first came here, people were wed to the college. Faculty were wed to the college. They, you know, they would come out to things. There was a faculty review. There were things like that. Now a lot of faculty, of course, it is bigger, but a lot of faculty do not know each other. You have to encourage connections so that people can do some interdisciplinary work, whereas then it was, you know, the people from various areas hung out. The physicists were there when there was a concert. Now you find you do not even mind some music faculty when there is a concert.
IG: 43:20
So, what is, you know, what-what is, what is the how? What is the solution? How did you reproduce, you know, very scientifically oriented students to the liberal arts and import and educate them in the importance of having a rounded education?
MM: 43:45
Well, I do not want to sound like an old toot here, but as I say, a lot of things are working against it. And instead of that, and again, I am sure it is different for some people, I am just seeing what I observe generally. And that is that you hear students say, instead of having this exploration I talked about, now we have Gen Ed courses. You got to take a general education course. You got to take it. You hear students saying, well, as soon as I get rid of my gen eds.
IG: 44:15
Right-right-right.
MM: 44:17
You do not want to get rid of your gen ed. That is interesting stuff. So, it is just the world has changed. I cannot say it is better or worse than, you know, I am sure. I am reminded of one of the first Deans I worked with, Leo Faisal said, you know, students are not as good as they used to be, and they never were. [laughs] There is always people looking back at a golden age, right?
IG: 44:44
Well, you know, maybe, maybe there is truth to that, because I have really been meeting with extremely accomplished people from who are (19060s alumni. So, there is probably something to that and-and they all attribute their success to the education that they received at Harpur College and the breadth of courses that they were allowed to take that had nothing to do with their major. So, you know, I just, just give us, you know, maybe, an overview of the significant events that you recall in your life as an undergraduate or even as a graduate, and how the student community, and you yourself responded to them. For example, you know the death of JFK, or, you know, some something that really stuck in your memory, and what the campus was like on that day, or days, or?
MM: 46:00
Okay, I remember something my early years here, the Vietnam War was a big thing. Most men and women were affected by it. Men because they were going to be sent there. I had friends who were sent to Vietnam and were killed. People were constantly worried about whether or not they are going to be drafted or whatever. Bruce Deering was president. I came in just as Glen Bartle was had stepped down and Bruce Deering was inaugurated. I think in (19)67 or (19)68 something like that, (19)60 somewhere in there, and we did not have the Binghamton campus Harpur did not have the kind of intensity and the demonstrations and the anger that went on at many campuses, And I attribute part of that to Bruce Deering, President, went out and he demonstrated with the students. We went down, and we did a march down to Binghamton, and we were all on the city hall, you know, listening to speeches and so on. And he had gone with the students. And so, it was not like, you know, there was something here on campus and administration to say, you know, they were the establishment. He was a major force in keeping this a common campus, even though students were very upset with people were being drafted and going and not coming back. Those were intense years. It was a lot of building going on at the time, so things were constantly changing. What your hose built. This building was built not too long before it came that kind of thing in the (19)70s, the early (19)70s, the big thing was the state being in financial trouble, and so we lost a lot of lost a lot of people at that time. And it was and trust. There was a lot of trust lost because basically people started pointing fingers at each other and saying, you know, they were not my words, but the thought was, they were not as important to this university or this college as these people are, and you ought to, and they did. They-they cut [inaudible] at the time, and I remember some of the painful things about that. There was a lot of change through the years. I mean, I am not doing well at remembering kind of things are going on, but I do have you know, the emotions were quite high most of the most of those years, the early years.
IG: 48:56
Did you feel solidarity in as a student with the other students-
MM: 49:00
And the faculty,
IG: 49:02
And the faculty.
MM: 49:03
We had teachings, for instance. And I still remember Ed Wilson, who was a sculptor, who was in the art department, a black man. I do not remember where it was, but I remember being in a room with a bunch of students and Binghamton, there were not a lot of black people. And so just talking about the world from his perspective, was mind opening for me, and that had also to do with the Vietnam War. But a black man in the Vietnam War era, there were just, I mean, when something happened, the faculty were involved. When there was a teach in, all the faculty were here, doing, helping with the teaching. They did not just stay home.
IG: 49:49
That is quite wonderful.
MM: 49:58
Yeah. I learned a lot from a lot of folks. Stuart Gordon, who was a good friend of this Walter Leon and I talked about, and he was, he never was. He might have been acting president. I think he was chief officer in charge, or something like that, for a while, but he was dean of Harpur. One it was just Harpur. He took over after Bartle stop being dean of Harpur and became a president. And then Stu Gordon became vice president for academic affairs and so on, but he taught people a lot about how to work together. I remember a lot like, for instance, you would at that time, no, of course, no email. You would be preparing memos to each other, and the Secretary would type those memos. And sometimes it takes a whole day to get a memo out, because you were trying to just get it right, and so on. We typed on a letterhead, and sometimes Stu Gordon would send back those memos corrected it was read and saying, nobody was going to work here unless they, you know, think about things this way and express themselves well. And you had to be a good writer. So it was, it was even part of, I mean, that, thankfully, it never happened to me. But I had a colleague who got one back that was, you know, who had somehow complained about something, and the memo that came back was, never shake your hoary locks at me.
IG: 51:26
I wish he were editing over our president's shoulder dispatches, all these misspelled tweets. So, you know, you know, let us see, I am looking at the time, and I am thinking that, you know, if what were some of the most I mean, you have, you have given us a lot of examples, but what do you think were some of the most important lessons that you learned as an undergraduate at Harpur, about studying, about life, about-
MM: 52:10
Well, I had to learn it. First of all, high school, elementary school all that came relatively easy to me. I was a good student, but when I got here, and even Broome was I was excellent student, but he did not have to work as hard as you had to work here, not at the expectations were not as hard high as they were when I came here, unlike probably most of the people you were talking about or have talked to, I was a local and a transfer student, and both of those things were not held in high regard, in fact, by a lot of faculty, transfer students are still not held in high regard. And so, I had to prove myself, but I also had to work very-very hard, because so much was expected of you. And so, I remember my father, who, as I said, never finished or finished high school, but never went to college. He-he one time said, because it was just a different life than he had ever experienced. He said, you cannot really be studying all that time. What are you really doing? No, you had to study. It took hours and hours and hours. It was a full-time job. And unlike, and I should not be saying this, but because I do not want SUNY to hear this, unlike now for many faculty, for credit courses were really for credit courses. They were designed to be more than the three credit courses at other colleges, this whole public Brown and all that kind of thing. They really meant it. There was you earned that extra credit outside of class and inside of class, and it was really four credit hour courses. Now you will bump into faculty will tell you not, the same course I taught when I was at so once, it was a three-credit course. There is four credit here. What is the difference? It was- they were, they were. Expectations were much higher of the students at the time. It was a lot of work.
IG: 54:14
So, yeah, I-I see that. I But what were, what were some of the takeaways from that experience of really working very hard and-
MM: 54:33
Well, I do not know takeaways or some. I mean, I do not think I learned it there, but it became important there the pride in what you do. You do not do anything is half assed. When you write a memo, somebody might be correcting it, right? You do it because you were trying to do your best. This is not just me. This was a lot of these students; I have friends now that were here back in the (19)60s. You know they. We still talk about people and things that happened then, and it was a lot was expected of you, and I felt I am proud to graduate from Harpur.
IG: 55:16
Students are going to be listening to this recording. And I always ask as we are nearing the end of our interview, if you have any advice for them as they embark on their careers. I mean, you have had such a varied and robust and interesting career. You know, from linguistics to computational linguistics to engineering to finance, what is there anything that you can draw from that that would put these students in good stead for their future?
MM: 56:01
I do not know that I am that wise, but I can tell you that, first of all, I should say these students are not the students who are here are not any less smart or less hard working than the students when I was here in the (19)60s. Matter of fact, we had a speaker at the commencement here a couple weeks ago said, you know, your students are far better than we were when I was here. And it is true, these are excellent students. But if I had to encourage anybody, I would encourage them to, you know, do some things you care about because you care about them, and not just because somebody tells you-you cannot be a physician without having done them. Do those things if you have to too. But you know, when you are I do not the Anderson center reports to me. It is the Performing Arts Center, and I go to all the concerts. And oftentimes there will not be anybody there whose hair is not my color which is white there-there are no young people going to classical concerts. You have an orchestra and the place will be half full. That would never have happened in the (19)60s. People are not exploring the way we explored. And I or they do not appear to be, and I would just encourage people to-to open up their lives to other possibilities, other thoughts. Remember that you are going to have to live a whole life, and it cannot just be because you are good at writing code. You got to, you got to enjoy your life to learn other things. That is what I was encouraged to do.
IG: 57:37
That is very good advice. Any concluding remarks?
MM: 57:44
No, I just hope this gets buried for about 10 years and then I do not have to worry about it.
IG: 57:51
[laughter]
MM: 57:51
Probably [inaudible]
IG: 57:52
Thank you very much.
MM: 57:53
Okay.
(End of Interview)
Interview with: Michael F. McGoff
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 12 June 2018
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
IG: 00:00
Okay-okay.
MM: 00:02
My name is Michael McGoff, Senior Vice Provost and Chief Financial Officer for Binghamton University. We are in my office, Administration Building 711 and today is June 12, 2018.
IG: 00:15
Okay. Thank you. So, Dr. McGoff, where did you grow up?
MM: 00:22
I grew up here in Binghamton. I was- my grandparents came from Ireland to work at Endicott-Johnson Shoes. My- they did and my father was born in the south side of Binghamton. When he got back from World War Two, he became a Binghamton policeman, and married my mother, and they had nine children. I am the eldest.
IG: 00:48
That is tremendous. So, was your mother a homemaker? Or did she work?
MM: 00:55
She worked in some as a bookkeeper, accountant. It was a finance company, but most of the time, after you have nine kids, you need to be home.
IG: 01:06
I would think so. So did your and-and you mentioned that your grandparents are from Ireland. What about your mother's side? Are they Irish? [crosstalk]
MM: 01:18
My grandparents were from Ireland. That was my father's side. My- her grandfather was from Ireland, and her grandmother was from Ireland.
IG: 01:26
Do you know what part of Ireland?
MM: 01:30
My- well on the paternal side, my grandfather was Monahan, and my grandmother was Claire. I believe that the um, my grandfather's side, I would have to look it up. Actually, I think it is an ancestry, but I cannot remember.
IG: 01:46
Okay, that is fair enough. So, in your family, was education encouraged?
MM: 01:55
It was not discouraged. I was a good student when I was in high school and in an elementary school, my father had nothing past high school, my mother had nothing past high school, and I was encouraged to do what I wanted to do.
IG: 02:12
I see. So did the conversations in your house revolve around local events, your family events. Did you talk about?
MM: 02:26
Well, my father worked three jobs, so he was not home very much.
IG: 02:29
I see. [crosstalk]
MM: 02:32
As I was growing up, you know, most of the talk, I think, was about school and about family. There were, you know, current events, I guess so, right, yeah.
IG: 02:46
So, what were you a big reader? Did you like certain subjects?
MM: 02:53
I always read a lot. I still enjoy reading. When I finished high school--I went to St Mary's Elementary School and was encouraged by the teachers there to study, and I always did well in school.
IG: 03:12
Right.
MM: 03:13
And then when I went into high school, I went to something called St. Patrick's Academy, which closed in my sophomore year, and I graduated from Catholic Central in 1965 it was, I was among the first graduating classes from what is now Seton Catholic Central High School when I [inaudible] just opened.
IG: 03:41
Where did your number in the what-what number child were you?
MM: 03:45
I am the oldest.
IG: 03:46
You are the youngest.
MM: 03:47
Oldest.
IG: 03:48
Oldest-oldest.
MM: 03:49
And my father died when he was 52 so when any girls got married, I was the patriarch.
IG: 03:56
Oh, so who- what did the- your other siblings become? I am, I am watching.
MM: 04:06
No, getting a message. Two of my brothers became firemen since retired, one of them is still very big in sports. He was division one referee in basketball. He also is the assigner for still is the assigner for soccer and basketball, and most of central New York for referees. I have a- there is diabetes in my family. I have a brother Jim, who had severe diabetes, type one, and had a rough life with it, and he was disabled, but everybody is still around. My sisters went into the health sciences, worked in the hospitals.
IG: 04:57
As what, doctors?
MM: 04:59
The technicians, technicians, yeah, and a brother, John, who was longtime fireman, who went back and got his bachelor's and then his master's [inaudible] all the way, and ended up not being able to do what he wanted to do, because if he taught, he would not be able to collect his retirement as a fireman. So, he ends up he is the- whatever the title is, Head of Education for what I know a Spectrum was Time Warner, the others. Let us see, uh, some-some of them had some higher education, and no one finished a degree, except for John.
IG: 05:52
So as the head of your family, by default, you-you sort of stepped into your father's shoes.
MM: 06:02
For somethings [crosstalk]
IG: 06:02
Obviously-obviously. No. Okay, so how did that change your direction? Did you feel more the weight of responsibility on your shoulders? Did that determine certain interests?
MM: 06:14
When he died, I was already was not living there anymore.
IG: 06:20
I see, I see.
MM: 06:22
In fact, by then, when he died, I had already finished my bachelor's, I think, my associates, my bachelor's and my master's, and was working on the doctorate. So, I was living someplace else. I actually had been married, and she and I were both graduate students together.
IG: 06:45
Okay, so let me backtrack, then. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do when you were graduating high school?
MM: 06:55
No, in fact, I was surprised. I must have applied, though I do not remember it. I was surprised at the high school graduation that I got a scholarship to go to Broome Tech Community College, where I went for a couple of years and-and at the same time, was here on campus, studying and doing other things here on campus. And then I went out to New Mexico for a short time.
IG: 07:23
To New Mexico?
MM: 07:25
New Mexico. Yeah.
IG: 07:25
Where in New Mexico?
MM: 07:27
New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
IG: 07:29
Oh, that is where my daughter lived for a while.
MM: 07:31
I was going to go to school there, and I decided that that the education was not as good as New York. So, I came back.
IG: 07:39
But it is a beautiful place.
MM: 07:40
It is beautiful. As long as they keep the water running all the time, then they can have grass.
IG: 07:45
So, when were you there? What are the years that you were there?
MM: 07:48
I was not there for a whole year. I was there for weeks. Let us see when was it? It was 1967, summer and fall of (19)67.
IG: 08:04
So, you know, let us backtrack. So, did you have a you know, why did you decide on Harpur College?
MM: 08:19
I was in New Mexico. I had already been- I was with the woman that I ended up marrying a few years later. We both decided that New Mexico State was not the right place for us. We had both been admitted to Harpur. We both drove back to New York day and night until we got here to start classes in August, late August, early September, somewhere around there. Yeah, that is when I forgot my first job and on campuses.
IG: 08:51
So-so, wait and you got your first job. So, you were working while you were a student. What-what?
MM: 08:59
I was self-supporting.
IG: 09:00
You were self-supporting. You were self-supporting. That is not surprising. Coming from a family that-
MM: 09:08
Yeah, they did not have the resources help, although I had scholarships, and I just-
IG: 09:13
You had a regent scholarship,
MM: 09:15
A what?
IG: 09:15
A Regents scholarship?
MM: 09:17
Yes, I had a, I do not remember exactly what the title of the thing was. Tell you the truth, it was a scholarship that I got in high school. But I do not, not sure they called it Regent scholarship, whatever. Yeah, but I needed to work or I would not have lived.
IG: 09:38
So, you had this idea that Harpur College and New York education was superior. Did you have an idea? Did you have a direction? Did you know what you wanted to pursue?
MM: 09:48
Well, to tell you the truth, as I said, I grew up in Binghamton, and at that time, most people in the area did not hold the college in very high regard. In fact, my father was a Binghamton policeman, and right around that time, Herbert Aptheker had been here. And so, there were a lot of people that just thought this was a communist place. A lot of communists, long haired hippie. I do not think they said hippie at the time, but long haired, sandal wearing communist, but I knew that had a good education, and I knew that I wanted to come back to it.
IG: 10:29
No, did you, did you? I am just wondering you know how you mentioned that you went to Catholic High School, that your siblings went to Catholic high schools.
MM: 10:42
Actually, they did not.
IG: 10:43
They did not.
MM: 10:44
No.
IG: 10:45
They did not.
MM: 10:45
Because at that time, my brother Kevin did, but with my brother Jim and my father being sick and then dying, there was not enough money to pay those tuitions, so they all started going to public school, and all of them graduated from public high school.
IG: 11:07
Do you think that your family was particularly Irish? Was there a sense of Irish culture in your family?
IG: 11:14
Yes.
IG: 11:15
How was that expressed? I was I was getting around that through Catholic-
MM: 11:19
My-my-my grand my paternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were still alive. My father was very close to them. They had very thick brogues, which a lot of people would probably not understand now. We just spent a lot of time there. There were also like cousins that visited from Ireland and so on. Cousins of my father. So, you know, it was clearly Irish. And my grandmother, on my mother's side, was very proud of having been Irish. Her father came from Ireland, and he was he drowned. He drowned in trying to get them dinner by shooting a duck in a river. And so, she had to quit high school about 14 or so, something like that, in order to help the family. But I do not know how she got so smart, but she helped me learn algebra when I was in high school, even though I do not think she ever, I do not know what she finished, eighth grade, seventh grade, I do not know, but all of them were very Irish, yes.
IG: 12:32
So also, you know, what was the sense in your family that you know you said everybody was proud of being Irish? What were they? Were they proud of the of the rich culture of the or their personal sort of stories of survival, of surviving through struggles? What do you think it was?
MM: 12:53
Just a, the love of the heritage, I guess. My I have to admit. I mean, I do not think of myself as Irish very often. But when my wife and I did ancestry, and I found out I was 99.4 percent or 93 percent something like that, Irish, I was proud of it.
IG: 13:17
Right.
MM: 13:18
Yeah.
IG: 13:19
Have you ever heard that the Irish and the Slavic nations were one? There is one theory that they were once one. They came from the same family tree.
MM: 13:35
I never heard that now.
IG: 13:39
Yeah,
MM: 13:39
It is interesting.
IG: 13:39
It is interesting. It is very interesting.
MM: 13:39
My wife, my present wife-- have been married 39 years her-her grandparents and family members came from Russia, Ukraine, whatever it was at the particular time to work at Endicott Johnson, so I have got this whole kind of, we were married in a Russian Orthodox Church. So, I have got this whole-
IG: 13:57
Oh, which, which one?
MM: 13:58
It was called our mission of the Blessed Virgin that is over on-
IG: 14:02
That is where [crosstalk] that is where I go.
MM: 14:04
Okay.
IG: 14:05
So that is very interesting. It is a very interesting connection. So, I was just trying to get a sense of your background and sort of you know what the ethos of this family was, and-
MM: 14:19
It was very close family. I do not know that we thought about being Irish and all that as much as we thought about taking care of each other. It is interesting. People would never [inaudible] a big family. I would come home and, you know, 11 people were living there, and yet, within a few minutes, you would say, “Where is John?” It was just like; it was like a hive or something. [laughs]
IG: 14:42
Right-right. I can imagine. And so-so, you were in school. You were at Harpur College, after, you know your-
MM: 14:55
Came back from Mexico.
IG: 14:56
From New Mexico, and what did you know, and you had this, obviously, you had heard that, you know, Harpur College was full of communists and hippies. What was your first impression of the school? I mean-
MM: 15:14
My first impressions of the school was a lot of hard work, but it was lot of folks from downstate, which was different for me and proud to be here. And the- I said a lot of hard work, it was a lot of hard work. And also, I was working full time, but it was just filled with all this stuff to learn. I mean, I took a lot of different courses. I studied a lot of different things. I love language. So, I was involved with early on, with folks in the English department, mostly, but I ended up in my later, in my undergraduate and then in my graduate work, studying languages. So-
IG: 16:05
Which languages did you study?
MM: 16:07
Old High German, Old English, Middle English. Did some Frisian I studied some-
IG: 16:15
How interesting.
MM: 16:16
[inaudible] and some Algonquin. I did some my dissertation was in languages, or actually it is in an area called onomastics, which is I used I was, I was working in the School of Advanced Technology. So, I had a background in computing, and so I was able to marry computing and onomastics, which is the study of how my study was how names through bilingual interaction, names pass from one language to another, typically becoming meaningless, but also being able to carry that language into a different language, able to study the first language. My-my teacher was a guy named Bill Helm, or Bill Nicolaisen [W. F. H. (Bill) Nicolaisen], who ended up just dying here about a year ago, a year and a half ago in Aberdeen, that he taught here for many years. He came from Ohio State, and we studied together for years. I studied with him.
IG: 17:20
What-what you know, what predisposed you? I mean, this is serious linguistics at an undergraduate level, which is quite unusual.
MM: 17:30
Yeah, there were no linguistics programs, so, yeah, work with individuals, as I said, Old High German, Old Norse, with some faculty members who were here.
IG: 17:40
Do you remember their names?
MM: 17:42
Bill Snyder. I worked with him on some Sanskrit and some Old High German and-and Old Norse. I did [crosstalk]
IG: 17:53
That is phenomenal. That is really phenomenal. I really [crosstalk] no, no, that is okay, that is, that is, but this is at the undergraduate level.
MM: 18:03
We started that stuff at the undergraduate most of the work was at the graduate level. Yep.
IG: 18:11
Most of the work-
MM: 18:11
At the graduate I mean, I was just getting the background in order-
IG: 18:11
So, at the undergraduate level, were you studying old German and Frisian and or did you were you exposed to that in graduate school?
MM: 18:21
In undergraduate I mostly like, I work with Bill Snyder in German, and we did some, some work and older versions of German I did, let us see what I do Middle English with, with I um, with faculty here. And then I got introduced to Bill Nicolaisen, and I started working with him on some things. And the old Norse was in my first year of graduate school.
IG: 18:55
That is fantastic.
MM: 18:56
So, I was here all the time.
IG: 18:59
So, Binghamton, but that is, that is tremendous. So, Binghamton actually had a strong linguistic presence. Were these-
MM: 19:09
It was-there were no programs in it, and so to say strong. We had strong faculty members. It had backgrounds, but it-
IG: 19:17
So, they were teaching these subjects out of their language programs, right out of the German program or English programs.
MM: 19:25
English program, yeah [inaudible] Barney Huppe [Bernard Huppe] is the first one to introduce me to older languages, Middle English. We did Chaucer and some other things. Bernard F Huppe, he was one of the leading lights of the early faculty members here.
IG: 19:42
What is really interesting is that you were kind of ahead of the curve in that you combined your interest in onomastics with computer you know, generated what- to study.
MM: 20:01
Yes, when I first started working here in my first job in 1967 August in 1967 was in the school, the brand-new school of advanced technology, which the current incarnation is the Watson School. And so, I worked for a man named Walter Lohan, who was the first dean, and at the same time was working. We hired a- was a little while later, but we hired a guy named John McHale, who was colleague of Buckminster Fuller, and John was a sociologist who was a futurist. So, when I worked with him for quite a while, I think they called me a research associate, but I read for him, and he had a need to, you know, constantly be reading things. So, we, there were some of us who read things in order to, you know, get rid of the chaff and give him the pearls through the- we at the end of the day, he would have a whole bunch of things to take home that I had sort of filtered out for him so they get so they did not have to read things that were just worthless. I read a lot of things for him. Same time, I worked for Walter Lohan, who was, who was the Dean of the School of Advanced Technology, and eventually, at the end of the life of the school advanced technology, I was acting dean for a couple years.
IG: 21:36
It is very interesting. You know, there is so much that I want to ask about.
MM: 21:43
I am jumping all over the place.
IG: 21:44
No-no. And, you know, it is a personal interest of mine, because I, too, studied linguistics many years ago. So, for example, what was and you got your doctorate in linguistics, what-
MM: 21:56
The doctorate is actually mean, this was, what was what was the title, computer-oriented onomastics survey. It was sort of independent study, kind of thing that I had, I did with Bill Nicolaisen. And then, in fact, I am still involved in, I am still on the editorial board of onomastics journal. And um-
IG: 22:17
So, what were your some of your findings in your thesis, you know, if you could summarize this in in a nutshell. What-what did your research find?
MM: 22:28
Well, that is about 300 and some pages, but I have not looked at in a long time, but it is. What I did was a study of the place names of New York State and the Aboriginal languages and some of the New World, world languages that came here, and was able to trace some things back, how the names came to be, what the language was about, and so on. But I was able to do it on many, many, many, I do not know how many 1000s of names, physical features and so on, and use the computer to be able to analyze it. And nobody at the time was using computing. So, it was a hot topic. And I went around a lot and talked with folks about it, introduced some people to it. And in fact, Peter Raper, who is in South Africa, he does South African onomastics. He was I- he came here and I introduced him to computing, and he is still using-using it.
IG: 23:35
So let me understand. So, you had, you know this corpus of words from names from various Aboriginal languages.
MM: 23:44
Not only all the names, yes, but-
IG: 23:48
Not only the names, but the languages themselves.
MM: 23:51
That I was interested in the languages, we use the names to get to the languages.
IG: 23:54
To get to the to the languages. So, you reconstructed the language through the names, or?
MM: 23:59
In some cases, you know, I do not know, pick on something Susquehanna, the Susquehanna River.
IG: 24:04
Yeah, right.
MM: 24:07
The, it does not matter to me. It did not matter what the what it etymologically meant. I was interested in, like, hannah is pleonastically repeats river right. Hannah is river that kind of thing was what I was interested in. You are taking me back a long way.
IG: 24:27
No-no, but I hope you do not mind. So, this is, you know, we can-
MM: 24:33
So, you can study the languages and reconstruct things about the languages by using what was brought into our everyday language and changed over time. See, you know, you can trace the changes and things like that. People do not know what they are saying when they say Susquehanna. What it means or where it came from, anything else. But you can, that is what I was interested in.
IG: 24:57
Right. And you were. You know, did you find, did you find evidence of-of, you know, a people's history, of their migrations, of their contact with other, other tribal cultures?
MM: 25:18
And you can trace, like you know, you can trace where dialects of the Iroquoian language, for instance, where they were based on the names that are still the areas where those dialects [inaudible]
IG: 25:33
Did you present your papers and at linguistic conferences?
MM: 25:38
Um, onomastics conference, yes uh huh. I [inaudible] international at the time, was called International Congress of Onomastics Sciences, big one in Ann Arbor one year. Just about every major city and the country where there were conferences would be middle- we were mostly associated with MLA in the early years, and then the conferences that I went to, and then in the later years, within the last 25, 20 years, we moved to LSA, Linguistic Society of America, and so that we meet now in January--used to meet during the Christmas break, but that is when MLA met and spoke at MLA, various places like that.
IG: 26:28
Did you- are you acquainted with the work of Chomsky [Noam Chomsky]? Did that influence you do anything
MM: 26:34
[crosstalk] here, and I heard him speak, probably in the (19)60s.
IG: 26:38
Tell us about that. That is wonderful.
MM: 26:42
He gave a lecture, and I believe was Cassata Sioux. I had to be in the late (19)60s sometime in there. Do not remember much of what he spoke about probably was more social than it was linguistics. But-
IG: 26:56
Even then?
MM: 26:56
Yeah, right, oh yeah. He is- had on things then, yeah. A lot of people came and spoke-spoke in Binghamton over the years. Then I tried to go as many as I could. One that comes to mind is Christopher Hitchens. And lots of, lots of big names came.
IG: 27:15
In the (19)60s?
MM: 27:16
(19)67. Yeah, it was, it was a different- the university was a different place than during those years. It was mostly known for the humanities; the sciences were there. And of course, you know when, but in the like, for instance, that we went through a horrible time in (19)76, 1976, (19)75, (19)76 when New York State was financially going south, because New York City was-was having difficulty, and we had huge cuts here one and would not remember what it was--must been the fall of 75 we hired six assistant professors in our school, and in May of (19)76 we laid them off. That was that kind of bad times. And so, it was big on humanities. But my point was going to be that during those bad times, the sciences and the nation engineering school and things like that, they were the ones taking the hits. We had a PhD in physics, which we got rid of at that time. Now that would not happen, but that is what happened then, because Harpur was well known for the humanities and some social sciences, but most humanities are big, very I mean, it was the most famous English department in the country, I think in public schools.
IG: 28:49
It had a great reputation from it had the reputation of being an elite, the equivalent of an elite private college. That is what I hear from almost all the alumni I speak to.
MM: 29:04
Yeah, they call it the public Brown or something like-
IG: 29:07
Something like that. It was based on the University of Chicago system, was not it?
MM: 29:14
Partially also the collegiate was based on the collegiate colleges were based supposedly on Oxford, but there were, there were a lot of people who thought a lot about education in those years, just and higher education and how students learn and that kind of thing, much more discipline oriented now.
IG: 29:38
Did you-you know, I imagine that you were, in part, influenced by your family's perspective on the college you know, the academic community here and the students. Did this perception change over the years? I mean, how did you regard these hippies and communists?
MM: 30:05
Well, I never thought of them that way. I was quoting the local people. Was interesting, because the woman I told you about became my first wife. Her- when we started, we went out to New Mexico. We had gone to school together at Broome. We came back here. We were students here, but her father was a violin maker and played viola in the orchestras. Her mother was a pianist and taught music. She was a dancer herself and a violinist and so but all of her parent’s friends, many of her parent’s friends, were also university faculty, like Ken Lindsay and Christine Lindsay were Ken started the art programs here. We would spend a lot of time with them, either up at the cottage, or they would be coming over Harry Lincoln, who was the beginning of the music programs here, they would be there too. So, I would he even when I was not on campus, I was involved with people from on campus. So, I thought of that. I just came to think of it as a family. And I will have been here 51 years in August, and-
IG: 31:18
That is tremendous.
MM: 31:21
[inaudible] it is. It was. They were different times, but they were still did not seem to be. It was a much more close knit. I think when I stepped on campus first time at (19)65 there were like 22- 2200, 2300, 2300 people here. Now there is 17,300 students, let alone a couple 1000, more than a couple 1000 people that work here.
IG: 31:50
And you never considered leaving when you, for example, earned your PhD. Did you seek employment elsewhere?
MM: 31:58
Well, when I finished my doctorate. I was, let us see, (19)79 I was an assistant dean already. So, I became an assistant dean in (19)76 during all the issues, all the problems and people were being laid off, and I took on new responsibilities. And so, by the time I got the doctorate, I was married second time, and have been married now to my wife, Donna Pylypciw, who for 39 years it will be so, I guess I have forgotten the question. But no, I this was, I mean, I had, I had possibilities of jobs in other places. In fact, went out to Michigan to interview for a job out there. But just this was home.
IG: 32:53
Yeah, I see.
MM: 32:54
I think even though job was home.
IG: 33:00
How did you get involved in the financial aspect of administration?
MM: 33:11
Well, as I said back in the (19)70s, when I stepped into administration from some of the various other jobs I had had. You had to know something about financials. I had lived through the Rockefeller years, when there was plenty of money up here on campus, but I became assistant dean and then associate dean, and so the fight I was, at one-point, Associate Dean for Administration and academic affairs. I think it was the other way around Academic Affairs and Administration. And so, all the financials were reporting to me budgets and that kind of thing. So, I got into it. And when I became acting dean of the School of Advanced Technology, again, you know, I had to oversee, but at the time, was probably like a five or $6 million budget, something like that became much larger over time. And now, when I the provost at the time, when I was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Administration in the Watson school from (19)83 we started the school in (19)83 so for like 15, 14, 15, 16, years, I was in the Watson school. And then in 1999 the provost at the time, Marianne Swain, asked me to come over and be vice provost. I think we were called Associate Provost at the time. And I took on the academic all the academic budgets, and then in 2014 Harvey Stinger decided, when a good friend of mine and colleague, Vice President for Administration, Jim Voorst VORs [James Van Voorst] left, Harvey decided that he was going to put the financials underneath Academic Affairs. So now all of the all the financial side, reports to me. So, you know, I would have some courses and those kinds of things, but I just learned it by working it, I guess. And now I have CPAs who report to me, and they can worry about the details. [laughs]
IG: 35:21
That is a perfect situation. I am just thinking how unusual your background is. I mean, I have known people who have wedded the technologist background with a humanist. I know some people you know. I know some people who have made a career of that. But do you see any future for this direction in engineering, for example, is the Watson school doing anything that you sort of naturally fell into?
MM: 35:56
Well, of course, when I was in the Watson school, I was an administrator. But because I take things on and because I maybe I do things well, I do not know, for a couple of years, I was the chairman of computer science and Associate Dean, because I had had background in computing when I came here in the (19)60s. I, you know, I learned some programming languages in that time. It was over key punch cards, and I helped create a program called foundations in computer science--actually before computer science existed. It was foundations computer systems. And we took people from various backgrounds, everything, art, music, English, whatever, and put them through a series of six courses to prepare them for a master's to study in a master's degree in computer systems. It was called the foundation of computer science. We created video tapes. This is like 1969 right in there, and taught an awful lot of folks, especially folks in IBM and General Electric, Sarah Link, enough background in logic and Boolean algebra, set theory, numerical analysis, that kind of thing, and some programming languages to be able to step in and start learning computing. So that I was, since I was involved in that, and I have got involved in it, I became knowledgeable, and so I did all those things too.
IG: 37:19
Do you think that the (19)60s, in any way encouraged this exploration of different disciplines? And you know, was there a greater experiment, experimentation and searching from one-one area of I mean, I am just thinking about this computational linguistics. I think that it was very innovative. Do you think that it is a product of the time, or just that technology was headed in that direction, and this was exploited by other disciplines?
MM: 38:05
Not sure I can understand or I can answer that question, but I do not know that it was as much the (19)60s as was this place. This place was wedded to people exploring it was big. We still say these things. We do less of it, but in the (19)60s and (19)70s and even into the (19)80s, people were encouraged to explore. When you came into Harpur College, you were, you know, they tried not to lock into things. There were fights. In fact, when people tried to make it easier for registration by picking courses for people and having locked in courses, it was just unheard of. So, I mean, I took many-many courses undergraduate that I, you know, from anti just was lots of there was, it was a big plate, and you could eat whatever you wanted. It was the best part. And things like computer science was not entirely defined at the time. That was so that people from various areas could get into it. It was, there was something called the ACM association for computer machinery. ACM 68 was a curriculum. That was when people first started defining what computer science was. So, it was open to everybody. I mean, as I say, the it was the School of Advanced Technology at the time was designed in order to take advantage of this exploration that people in Harpur [crosstalk].
IG: 39:33
Right. Do you think that this exploration exists at the present time? Is it still sort of, you know, is there still a, you know, a partnership, a collaboration between the arts, the humanities and technologies? I mean, I know that it exists in in the library field with Digital Scholarship. But do you think that there is this kind of-
MM: 40:04
I think it is-
IG: 40:05
-bridging of different [crosstalk]
MM: 40:07
I think the possibility is still there, but it is it. You know, I do not want to sound like some old fogy, but I think it is it is different now in that there are so many forces working against students being able to explore. If you look at the Excelsior program or TAP, people are encouraged just to figure out where they want to head, and they are locked into a set of courses. If they do not follow those courses, they are going to lose TAP, or they are going to lose the Excelsior, or they are going to lose whatever it is. So, you cannot do a lot of exploration when you are being trying to focus like that, because politicians, geez, I lose my job. Politicians have set it out so that it is no longer the responsibility of the state to help create the future of the state, as much as it is the personal responsibility. When I first came here, the tuition, the cost of education, was born by the state and by the student. At that time, it was in the 20 to 30 percent range that the student paid, and the 70 or 80 percent in the 70 percent range that the state paid. It is now exactly reversed so these same politicians have put in place, in my opinion, I think they are abdicating their responsibility for the future of the state. But anyway, they put this in place where now students create these great, enormous financial burdens, which now the politicians complain about by saying that, you know, the colleges are burdening these people with all this cost and they have got to pay for loans into their waning years. The fact of the matter is that there are so many more constraints on people now I did not have the constraints that some of these students have. Now they got to take that lab course. They do not have to want to take that lab course. They got to take. So again, sound like an old fogy. Things have changed, no, and it is, it is back then it was a lot less discipline oriented for the faculty and for the students, and a lot more of this exploration I talked about. You can learn different things, but right now, you will find students that have to take these courses or they are not going to get in pre-med.
IG: 42:26
And essentially, it is because of financial constraints.
MM: 42:29
That is one of the big ones.
IG: 42:31
That is one of the big ones.
MM: 42:31
Yeah, and also that higher education has changed. People are much more discipline oriented. When I first came here, people were wed to the college. Faculty were wed to the college. They, you know, they would come out to things. There was a faculty review. There were things like that. Now a lot of faculty, of course, it is bigger, but a lot of faculty do not know each other. You have to encourage connections so that people can do some interdisciplinary work, whereas then it was, you know, the people from various areas hung out. The physicists were there when there was a concert. Now you find you do not even mind some music faculty when there is a concert.
IG: 43:20
So, what is, you know, what-what is, what is the how? What is the solution? How did you reproduce, you know, very scientifically oriented students to the liberal arts and import and educate them in the importance of having a rounded education?
MM: 43:45
Well, I do not want to sound like an old toot here, but as I say, a lot of things are working against it. And instead of that, and again, I am sure it is different for some people, I am just seeing what I observe generally. And that is that you hear students say, instead of having this exploration I talked about, now we have Gen Ed courses. You got to take a general education course. You got to take it. You hear students saying, well, as soon as I get rid of my gen eds.
IG: 44:15
Right-right-right.
MM: 44:17
You do not want to get rid of your gen ed. That is interesting stuff. So, it is just the world has changed. I cannot say it is better or worse than, you know, I am sure. I am reminded of one of the first Deans I worked with, Leo Faisal said, you know, students are not as good as they used to be, and they never were. [laughs] There is always people looking back at a golden age, right?
IG: 44:44
Well, you know, maybe, maybe there is truth to that, because I have really been meeting with extremely accomplished people from who are (19060s alumni. So, there is probably something to that and-and they all attribute their success to the education that they received at Harpur College and the breadth of courses that they were allowed to take that had nothing to do with their major. So, you know, I just, just give us, you know, maybe, an overview of the significant events that you recall in your life as an undergraduate or even as a graduate, and how the student community, and you yourself responded to them. For example, you know the death of JFK, or, you know, some something that really stuck in your memory, and what the campus was like on that day, or days, or?
MM: 46:00
Okay, I remember something my early years here, the Vietnam War was a big thing. Most men and women were affected by it. Men because they were going to be sent there. I had friends who were sent to Vietnam and were killed. People were constantly worried about whether or not they are going to be drafted or whatever. Bruce Deering was president. I came in just as Glen Bartle was had stepped down and Bruce Deering was inaugurated. I think in (19)67 or (19)68 something like that, (19)60 somewhere in there, and we did not have the Binghamton campus Harpur did not have the kind of intensity and the demonstrations and the anger that went on at many campuses, And I attribute part of that to Bruce Deering, President, went out and he demonstrated with the students. We went down, and we did a march down to Binghamton, and we were all on the city hall, you know, listening to speeches and so on. And he had gone with the students. And so, it was not like, you know, there was something here on campus and administration to say, you know, they were the establishment. He was a major force in keeping this a common campus, even though students were very upset with people were being drafted and going and not coming back. Those were intense years. It was a lot of building going on at the time, so things were constantly changing. What your hose built. This building was built not too long before it came that kind of thing in the (19)70s, the early (19)70s, the big thing was the state being in financial trouble, and so we lost a lot of lost a lot of people at that time. And it was and trust. There was a lot of trust lost because basically people started pointing fingers at each other and saying, you know, they were not my words, but the thought was, they were not as important to this university or this college as these people are, and you ought to, and they did. They-they cut [inaudible] at the time, and I remember some of the painful things about that. There was a lot of change through the years. I mean, I am not doing well at remembering kind of things are going on, but I do have you know, the emotions were quite high most of the most of those years, the early years.
IG: 48:56
Did you feel solidarity in as a student with the other students-
MM: 49:00
And the faculty,
IG: 49:02
And the faculty.
MM: 49:03
We had teachings, for instance. And I still remember Ed Wilson, who was a sculptor, who was in the art department, a black man. I do not remember where it was, but I remember being in a room with a bunch of students and Binghamton, there were not a lot of black people. And so just talking about the world from his perspective, was mind opening for me, and that had also to do with the Vietnam War. But a black man in the Vietnam War era, there were just, I mean, when something happened, the faculty were involved. When there was a teach in, all the faculty were here, doing, helping with the teaching. They did not just stay home.
IG: 49:49
That is quite wonderful.
MM: 49:58
Yeah. I learned a lot from a lot of folks. Stuart Gordon, who was a good friend of this Walter Leon and I talked about, and he was, he never was. He might have been acting president. I think he was chief officer in charge, or something like that, for a while, but he was dean of Harpur. One it was just Harpur. He took over after Bartle stop being dean of Harpur and became a president. And then Stu Gordon became vice president for academic affairs and so on, but he taught people a lot about how to work together. I remember a lot like, for instance, you would at that time, no, of course, no email. You would be preparing memos to each other, and the Secretary would type those memos. And sometimes it takes a whole day to get a memo out, because you were trying to just get it right, and so on. We typed on a letterhead, and sometimes Stu Gordon would send back those memos corrected it was read and saying, nobody was going to work here unless they, you know, think about things this way and express themselves well. And you had to be a good writer. So it was, it was even part of, I mean, that, thankfully, it never happened to me. But I had a colleague who got one back that was, you know, who had somehow complained about something, and the memo that came back was, never shake your hoary locks at me.
IG: 51:26
I wish he were editing over our president's shoulder dispatches, all these misspelled tweets. So, you know, you know, let us see, I am looking at the time, and I am thinking that, you know, if what were some of the most I mean, you have, you have given us a lot of examples, but what do you think were some of the most important lessons that you learned as an undergraduate at Harpur, about studying, about life, about-
MM: 52:10
Well, I had to learn it. First of all, high school, elementary school all that came relatively easy to me. I was a good student, but when I got here, and even Broome was I was excellent student, but he did not have to work as hard as you had to work here, not at the expectations were not as hard high as they were when I came here, unlike probably most of the people you were talking about or have talked to, I was a local and a transfer student, and both of those things were not held in high regard, in fact, by a lot of faculty, transfer students are still not held in high regard. And so, I had to prove myself, but I also had to work very-very hard, because so much was expected of you. And so, I remember my father, who, as I said, never finished or finished high school, but never went to college. He-he one time said, because it was just a different life than he had ever experienced. He said, you cannot really be studying all that time. What are you really doing? No, you had to study. It took hours and hours and hours. It was a full-time job. And unlike, and I should not be saying this, but because I do not want SUNY to hear this, unlike now for many faculty, for credit courses were really for credit courses. They were designed to be more than the three credit courses at other colleges, this whole public Brown and all that kind of thing. They really meant it. There was you earned that extra credit outside of class and inside of class, and it was really four credit hour courses. Now you will bump into faculty will tell you not, the same course I taught when I was at so once, it was a three-credit course. There is four credit here. What is the difference? It was- they were, they were. Expectations were much higher of the students at the time. It was a lot of work.
IG: 54:14
So, yeah, I-I see that. I But what were, what were some of the takeaways from that experience of really working very hard and-
MM: 54:33
Well, I do not know takeaways or some. I mean, I do not think I learned it there, but it became important there the pride in what you do. You do not do anything is half assed. When you write a memo, somebody might be correcting it, right? You do it because you were trying to do your best. This is not just me. This was a lot of these students; I have friends now that were here back in the (19)60s. You know they. We still talk about people and things that happened then, and it was a lot was expected of you, and I felt I am proud to graduate from Harpur.
IG: 55:16
Students are going to be listening to this recording. And I always ask as we are nearing the end of our interview, if you have any advice for them as they embark on their careers. I mean, you have had such a varied and robust and interesting career. You know, from linguistics to computational linguistics to engineering to finance, what is there anything that you can draw from that that would put these students in good stead for their future?
MM: 56:01
I do not know that I am that wise, but I can tell you that, first of all, I should say these students are not the students who are here are not any less smart or less hard working than the students when I was here in the (19)60s. Matter of fact, we had a speaker at the commencement here a couple weeks ago said, you know, your students are far better than we were when I was here. And it is true, these are excellent students. But if I had to encourage anybody, I would encourage them to, you know, do some things you care about because you care about them, and not just because somebody tells you-you cannot be a physician without having done them. Do those things if you have to too. But you know, when you are I do not the Anderson center reports to me. It is the Performing Arts Center, and I go to all the concerts. And oftentimes there will not be anybody there whose hair is not my color which is white there-there are no young people going to classical concerts. You have an orchestra and the place will be half full. That would never have happened in the (19)60s. People are not exploring the way we explored. And I or they do not appear to be, and I would just encourage people to-to open up their lives to other possibilities, other thoughts. Remember that you are going to have to live a whole life, and it cannot just be because you are good at writing code. You got to, you got to enjoy your life to learn other things. That is what I was encouraged to do.
IG: 57:37
That is very good advice. Any concluding remarks?
MM: 57:44
No, I just hope this gets buried for about 10 years and then I do not have to worry about it.
IG: 57:51
[laughter]
MM: 57:51
Probably [inaudible]
IG: 57:52
Thank you very much.
MM: 57:53
Okay.
(End of Interview)
Date of Interview
2018-06-12
Interviewer
Irene Gashurov
Year of Graduation
1969
Interviewee
Dr. Michael McGoff
Biographical Text
Dr. McGoff is senior vice provost and Chief Financial Officer for Binghamton University. His doctorate was in computer-oriented onomastics, the study of names, which he programmed to study the indigenous languages spoken in New York State.
Interview Format
Audio
Subject LCSH
Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education administration; Harpur College – Alumni from Broome County; Harpur College – Alumni in linguistics; Harpur College - Alumni living in New York City.
Rights Statement
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Keywords
Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education administration; Harpur College – Alumni from Broome County; Harpur College – Alumni in linguistics; Harpur College - Alumni living in New York City.
Files
Citation
“Interview with Michael F. McGoff,” Digital Collections, accessed February 5, 2026, https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/964.
