  When Bill Bugg came to UT as a graduate student 48 years ago, he had no idea that he would become, to many, the face of the physics department. In the years since, he has braved classrooms full of dubious sophomores, presided over faculty meetings, and secured millions of dollars in research grants, all the while maintaining both his sense of humor and his tennis schedule. On July 31, he officially retired as a physics professor, having accumulated a long list of accomplishments and stories, some of which he shared on a sunny day in early October.
William M. Bugg arrived at the University of Tennessee campus in 1954.
"I'd just gotten out of the Army," he said, and after working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the summer, he decided to apply to graduate school.
"I'd been accepted to two or three places, but inertia led me to Tennessee," he said.
It was in graduate school that Dr. Bugg honed his physics teaching skills, albeit by accident.
"I had the GI bill. I hadn't even applied for an assistantship," he said. "(Dr. Kenneth) Hertel caught me in the hall and said 'Would you like a graduate assistantship?' and I said yes sir, I thought that would be nice and he said okay. He handed me a book and said 'The class meets at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning.'"
The class turned out to be 120 students enrolled in Physics 101, a course for education majors.
"It was for really non-science majors," Dr. Bugg emphasized. "But on the other hand, there were lots of good-looking girls, so that's better than having people understand equations. After teaching in the Army, University teaching was a piece of cake. So even after I joined the faculty I didn't feel bad about nine to 12 hour loads," he said.
Once his coursework was behind him, he approached Professor Dick Present to decide on the course his Ph.D. research would take. Dr. Bugg remembers the incident with his trademark self-deprecation.
"I went in after I'd passed the qualifying exam and said 'I'd like to do a theoretical thesis under you,' and he basically said, 'You're not smart enough,'" a story Dr. Bugg punctuates with a laugh.
"What he really said was, we have a new professor, Dr. Dave King, coming in this summer, and maybe you'd like to work for him. Dave is a great guy and I enjoyed working with him, although his New Zealand speech patterns were different. I never learned whether 'cosign theta over two' was ½ cos theta or cos ½."
After completing his dissertation in 1959 under the guidance of Dr. King, the newly-graduated Ph.D. found himself with a number of options. But Dr. Alvin Nielsen, the physics department head, made him an offer to stay at Tennessee.
"I joined the faculty after an intensive search," Dr. Bugg joked.
"I was walking down the hall and Al Nielsen said, 'What do you plan to do after you graduate' and I said, well, I have offers from Bell Labs and places like that, and he said, 'How would you like to join the faculty,' and I said okay. We didn't talk salary or anything like that, but the search was over."
In another 10 years, he would move on to become the head of the physics department, following the distinguished tenure of Dr. Nielsen.
"Now there they did a search," he said. The department considered a couple of candidates and even made an offer to a professor from Illinois, who declined the position.
"I don't think I applied," he said. "Al asked me to be a candidate. So they sorta said, gee whiz, if can't get anybody good we might as well take Bugg."
He would remain department head until 1996, when Dr. Lee Riedinger (now with Oak Ridge National Laboratory) took over.
Dr. Bugg said the biggest personal challenge of the job was "being head of a department that had Dick Present in it, because as a graduate student, as all our graduate students, we were scared to death of him. He was absolutely harmless and nice, but we were all terrified of him."
The climate of the University, however, was a bit less daunting.
"The University was undergoing a major change at the period. The attention of the country, after Sputnik, was turned back to science. The University's attention was turned the same way. There was a lot of support for graduate students."
Dr. Bugg said the department had about 180 or so graduate students in the 1960s, a fact he attributes to increased federal funding and the draft. He also credits visionary people like Dr. Nielsen, who served as dean of the college, and Herman Spivey, vice president for academic affairs, for making the decisions that helped the University expand.
Another big boost came when the National Science Foundation awarded UT a $1.45 million Science Development Grant in 1968, part of which went to the physics department.
"It enabled us to take the research groups to state of the art status," Dr. Bugg explained. "It enabled people to do research without having to depend totally on Oak Ridge National Laboratory," although the long-standing relationship with ORNL also helped strengthen the department.
"It gave us a supply of first-rate graduate students," he said.
"We had had, ever since I was a graduate student, really close contacts with Oak Ridge. At least half the graduate students when I came here, maybe more than half, were Oak Ridgers.
"Up until about the late '60s we had been a fairly small department with a limited number of areas. We started a more focused program after that. We tended to add people where we already had some reasonable strength," such as nuclear, atomic, and plasma physics.
Although a great deal of progress came during his watch, Dr. Bugg takes little if any credit for it, instead ascribing the success to his predecessors.
"I think the department, before I came in, always had good leadership," he said. "Al Nielsen always had science at the top of his mind."
Memorable CharactersDuring his headship he also got to know many of the storied administrators outside the department, including UT's beloved 16th president (1959-1970), Andy Holt. "Andy was just a wonderful gentleman," Dr. Bugg said. "He made everybody feel at home. He made everybody believe that he really remembered your name. I can understand why everybody at the University loved him the way they did. "One the activist students didn't love so much was Charlie Weaver, although he was a great guy," Dr. Bugg continued. "Charlie had just become chancellor when I become department head. Charlie was there for my first budget hearing, which just absolutely petrified me. I had submitted a written report, and Harold Read, (vice president for finance), said, 'Bill, you just lied. You produced about 60 percent as many credit hours as you claimed to.' I gulped, and actually came up with no explanation for it, until the next day when I went back to the office and I realized we were the department of physics and astronomy. I had counted physics and astronomy, and Harold had only counted physics." That was not the only harrowing incident in the budget hearing, as Dr. Bugg went on to explain. "Charlie Weaver had said to me, 'Bugg, I've got a bone to pick with you. I've got a boy. He's taking a physics course. My boy's going to be an engineer. But one of your blankety-blank faculty members is trying to recruit him to be a physics major, and I want that stopped.'" Dr. Bugg asked for the name of the offending physicist and offered to speak with him, to which he said Mr. Weaver replied, 'I don't know the guy's name, but I'll tell you this, he looks like a soft-boiled egg.' "Now I spent some time trying to figure out who on our faculty might look like a soft-boiled egg," Dr. Bugg said. "I could have gone back to see what class Charlie's boy was in, but I really preferred to speculate." Dr. Bugg survived that first budget hearing, and many thereafter. When asked what he considers his greatest accomplishments as department head, he hesitated a bit before responding. "I guess I think that during the time that I was department head we had the most significant growth in faculty and research capability," he said. "Over the years we increased the funding and research productivity . . . by orders of magnitude. I don't take any credit for that, particularly," he continued. "The only effective thing that a department head can do is see that the faculty's not pestered too much by things that don't involve teaching and research and to make sure that when you get a chance to hire people, you hire the right people. I think our track record was pretty good in that respect." One concern he has about the future is that many of his colleagues, like himself, are approaching retirement. "We're all getting a little long in the tooth," he said. "I think that's probably the thing that bothered me most in the later years of being department head . . . the fact that we were beginning to lose faculty positions and we've continued to lose them for the last 10 years or so. There's been a steady decline in the number of positions in spite of the fact that year in and year out we're the top research department in the University, and, if you'll pardon me saying so, quality-wise and funding-wise." However, he said he has hope for the new directions UT is taking. "I'm encouraged by the new leadership of the university," Dr. Bugg said. "It seems to me that (UT President John) Shumaker is doing an impressive job, and I think (Newly-Appointed Chancellor Loren) Crabtree is doing an impressive job." Now, however, he doesn't need to worry so much about administrative affairs, as he moves into the realm of working when he wants to. "It turns out that's pretty much what I did before, except no more committees," he said. His primary occupation, at least on campus, will be research. "I like to teach but my brain has slowed down some," Dr. Bugg said. "I didn't realize how much entropy had been introduced into my brain until I taught thermodynamics. I will continue to spend most of my time on research projects . . .and tennis." Dr. Bugg continues to work on a Department of Energy grant awarded to his high energy physics group, which has enjoyed tremendous success over the years. "I think our grant over the years has brought in about 23 million dollars," he said. "Those are not concrete numbers, but it's certainly over 20." Dr. Hans Cohn, an adjunct professor physics, has worked with Dr. Bugg since 1961 and can attest to his success as a researcher. "Bill built up the high energy group at UT with the addition of George Condo in 1964 and later more faculty. Bill succeeded in procuring a Spiral Reader pattern recognition device that we located at Oak Ridge to take advantage of expertise available there. I believe that the fruitful collaborations that exist between UT and ORNL in physics are due to Bill's early on vision and first hand experience," he said. Their 41-year collaboration continues to this day and Dr. Cohn explained that among Dr. Bugg's attributes are "his passion for physics and a personality that imparts enthusiasm for what he does." Dr. Josh Shimony finished his Ph.D. in 1988 under Dr. Bugg's guidance and echoed those same sentiments. "He was a very good mentor," Dr. Shimony, now a radiologist at Washington University, said of Dr. Bugg. "It seemed like he always had time for me." Dr. Shimony worked at Fermilab for at time and said that Dr. Bugg would visit on Mondays to see how the graduate students were doing. He also relayed a mystery involving Dr. Bugg that he later solved. "I had this really nice coat and somehow it had coffee spots all over it," Dr. Shimony said. "So I had it cleaned, but then it happened again. It took maybe three or four weeks of this to figure out the pattern." What happened is that Dr. Bugg would come to visit and set his coffee cup on top of the group's rickety coat rack while he hung up his own coat. Invariably coffee would spill over the coats already hanging there. "On Mondays, I began to put my coat elsewhere," Dr. Shimony said. As Dr. Bugg puts it, "actually it is a well-known fact that Bugg could be found anywhere by following the trail of fresh coffee stains: much better than bread crumbs." Coffee stains aside, Dr. Shimony recalled working in Dr. Bugg's group as a positive experience. "It was a very congenial and warm environment to work in," he said. As Dr. Bugg himself said, "To me, what makes a good faculty member, and a good department, is good teaching, good research, and good service." For more than 40 years, he practiced what he preached.Cross Sections, Fall/Winter 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on December 5, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu. |