Legends are most often tales that, because of a tie to a historical event, are made believable. Whether the story told is true or not, the fact that the story is being told at all allows people to make commentary upon the circumstances that circulated the legend. A legend is distinguished by the fact that it provides structure to an event. It provides meaning that lifts the event above the average humans life and gives it a status that makes it worth repeating from one generation to another. A legendary person is one closely associated with a legendary happening. A legendary person may or may not be well-known or even famous, other than in relation to that event. The above explanation may, in part, describe the circumstances of the story below: My wife and I retired, me in 1996, and she in 1997. We were called to serve as missionaries at the Ogden Family History Center. Later, I was called to be the Director of the Center in April of 2001. I usually work every day at the center, and my wife usually works two or three days a week. Thursday of every week we decided to use as our date day or P-day, as missionaries refer to it. On one of our P-days together, I believe it was in December of 2010, we decided to see a show at the Newgate Mall. When I walked up to the window to buy the movie tickets, the cashier was a woman in her mid-fifties, whom I did not know. I paid by a credit card and when I did so, she asked for a picture I.D. When she saw my name on the I.D. she lit up and in a louder voice said, “I know you! Well, I really don’t know you but I know about you. My full time job is a English instructor at Weber State University. You are the legendary Emil Hanson, the person that built the STAARS System aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, but how do you know about that?” She replied, “I have never met you but I have heard so much about you and the wonderful STAARS system” (STAARS = Student Accounting And Record System).
The system went on line in 1991 and it was a beloved system by staff all across campus who enjoyed using it each day. She said that she was on a five member committee to coordinate the installation of the Banner System (a commercial student accounting system that the State Board of Higher Education required all the Universities to convert to for uniformity) and she said, “You wouldn’t believe the opposition we ran into. They still don’t have a Graduation Evaluation Program that works.” She said that she was glad that she finally got to meet me. It probably took at least ten years to implement the Banner system, because they ran into so many bugs and so much opposition by staff. There were too many things that just would not work. Parts of the STAARS system are apparently still being used in 2010. I understand that some staff actually considered quitting because they thought it was such a mistake to implement Banner. The chance meeting with this lady made my day. I had never thought of myself as the “legendary Emil Hanson,” I never thought of myself as a legendary anything. If I were to be remembered at all at the University, I thought it would probably be as a rebel, by the highest echelon administrative staff.
I had been retired for fifteen years when we happened to appear at this particular movie theater box office window. I am glad we decided to see that particular movie that day when that particular lady was at the cashier’s counter.
My Weber State story: I began my career at Weber State in 1966 after having worked in the Weber school district for seven years as a high school counselor. My first assignment at the university was as the Director of Academic Standards, suspending students whose GPA’s fell below a certain level. I would always counsel with them first and try to encourage them to do better. The next year, 1967, I was asked by the Dean of Student Administrative Services to serve as the first person at Weber to have the title of Director of Admissions. Under that new title, I remained responsible for Academic Standards, as well as clearing students for graduation.
I knew that if I ever wanted to be promoted at the university that I would have to have a PhD. In 1973, I completed my PhD in Education Administration–Higher Education, from the University of Utah. Besides the above responsibilities, I taught a Psychology class every term, and for ten years I was the editor of the university catalog. In 1983, the Dean of Student Administrative Services retired, and from a pool of 100 applicants, I was fortunate to be selected to replace the Dean.
The student accounting system we were using was very old and obsolete. We were still using punch cards to register students. One of my first big challenges as the Dean was to find a replacement for that system. I traveled to other universities to study their various systems and I found none that were any better than ours. Many of them were commercial systems built by ‘professional’ developers. So I decided that to have one that would suit our needs, we would have to build a customized system ourselves.
There was some opposition to that from the President’s staff and college deans. They were certain that we did not have the skill and ‘know-how’ to do that. So the money was not allocated for it. I went to the student body officers and promised them online anytime transcripts (at the time they had to wait a few days to get one) and faster registration with no lines, and they supported it. They added six dollars to student fees to support my project. That was equivalent to $250,000 annually. The administration allowed the project to proceed after several knock down drag out meetings, and we began to work on it around 1987. We first had to purchase a computer language package to write the new software. Relational databases were just being developed. We bought one that we felt could do the job called ‘1032,’ and we began to develop the new system. I had to hire two new programmers and other than that there was no additional help. I elected to be the coordinator of the development of the new system. I knew that it was going to be very complex, and I was not confident that anyone else had as much detail system knowledge as I had at that time. For each of the specific area offices under me, we asked several staff from each area to serve on a committee representing that area. Programmers (six) were assigned to areas as well. One of the most senior programmers served as the supervisor over all the others and came to all the individual meetings to discuss procedures and development detail. I would write up the minutes of each meeting by hand, and my secretary would type them. They were sent out with instructions that if I had missed anything or misstated any detail that they were to send me a correction. Each area met together in my office at least once every week, with their programmer, to review any questions and weekly progress and/or problems in development. We wanted each area to build into the system all the bells and whistles they wanted, in order to make it the most efficient and effective system that we possibly could. I believe it took us three years to bring the system online. I had a four or five foot long shelf of minutes when we had finished the project.
The President’s staff had agreed at the outset that because we were using the latest technology (Relational Database) that it would take more computer power to operate it. They agreed to support it with new hardware when we finished, if we could build it. Well, in the meantime the President was replaced by a new one, and the new one was not supportive of purchasing new hardware. When we brought it online, it was very slow. They tried to blame, what they thought was an ill conceived system, for the slowness. They brought in two different computer consultant teams to evaluate and determine why it was so slow. Both of their reports pointed to the hardware, not the software, so the administration reluctantly purchased new hardware to drive the STAARS system. It took off and did everything that we had planned for it to do. It was really a dream system. They spent almost as much money on consultants as the hardware would have cost to solve the problem in the first place.
Where other universities, growing as fast as we were, had to hire more staff, we did not have to because of the efficiency of STAARS. We probably saved the institution in salaries as much or more than the system cost to build. I was asked to present, at conferences around the country to describe what STAARS could do, and the usual comments from my counterparts about the STAARS system were, “We will never have anything that nice at our institution.” Those of our top administrative staff who opposed the system from the beginning seemed to be the only ones who did not know the value of what we had. They should have been proud, not in opposition.
We did it with no ‘professional development staff,’ and I heard the comment several times, “if you had had any sense, you would never have tackled an assignment that size and that complex.” My feeling was that if others can do it, we can, too, and we did. I have never felt inferior in any way to those who were considered professional developers. I had gone around the country and observed what they had done and never felt that what they had developed was anything to brag about. By 1991, the system was up and running and performing just the way we had built it to do. I was a controversial figure and a thorn to the president’s staff for a long time, fighting them to support the system that they had originally approved for development. Enough of them saw me as a troublemaker, and the president’s staff voted to have me removed as the Dean in 1994, and for my last two years at Weber I was assigned as an Assistant to the President. I never once felt that what they had done was justified by anything that I had done. But I often thought that had the administration put some faith in me and my staff, there would have been no problem or controversy with the development of STAARS.
At that point I did not care; I had completed the STAARS system and relieved the workload on my staff. I was proud of my staff and all that we had accomplished together. Just before I retired, one of the vice presidents who had opposed me all the way (VP for Business Affairs) asked me to lunch one day. While we were at lunch, he apologized to me and said that I was right all along and that he should have supported me. He never put that in writing, and I never expected him to. They all came to realize that we had done a great work, but no one else ever apologized to me or acknowledged that. Not one of them were ever interested enough, including the president, to ever come to our offices to see what the system could do. My staff ’s reaction to their removing me was shock, many of the female staff cried. They respected me because they knew that I cared about them, and I knew and understood their jobs and fought to make them easier and more effective.
When I retired, I was honored at a dinner by my former staff, and they presented me with a poem on a card, written by one of them, and a unique hat. The hat had wires running all through it and was supposed to represent my brain that is always working to find better ways to do things. There was a write up in the Standard Examiner about my retirement, and it was very complimentary.
The article: ‘Emil Hanson sees the world two ways—the way things are and the way they ought to be. Hanson put that philosophy into play for 30 years at Weber State University. At WSU, the changes he oversaw ranged from a better way to put together the school’s catalog to a cutting edge online student records system.
They all began with an idea. The difference between Hanson and ordinary visionaries is that he followed his ideas with research and detailed specifics of how to implement them. He said, “You can’t just criticise how a thing is done. You have to find a way to fix it” “What’s rare about Emil” says Student services Vice President Marie Kotter, “is that he’s a creative records person. Not only does he have the ingenuity to see ways of doing things more efficiently, he has the meticulous nature to implement the changes. “The biggest change Hanson made at WSU was to design a computer system known as STAARS. It’s one of the most forward thinking and creative systems in Utah’s system of higher education. And not only did Emil create and design it, he went before the students and got the money to build the system.” Former WSU Provost Bob Smith said “Hanson impressed him not only because of his ability to stay focused on a task, but his ability to accomplish a difficult job quicker than expected.” WSU Registrar Winslow Hurst said Hanson “wasn’t a political animal or a social person when he was on the job. Emil was a worker bee. He probably gave more time and effort to Weber State than any two of the rest of us. Emil also had the unique ability to conceptualize complicated computer systems in his head. There we would be, driving along to a conference, and while everybody else was enjoying the scenery, Emil would be designing a mainframe.”
About 1999, three years after I retired, the Director of Computing Services called me and said that the State Department of Education had purchased Banner, one of those student accounting systems that I had rejected as bad, and that they were requiring all of the state institutions to implement it so that reporting to the state would be uniform. They paid millions of dollars for an obsolete system so they could get uniform reports? Is reporting to the state more importing than serving students? Without switching to Banner, the STAARS system could easily match any report that they could get out of Banner. But no! Weber had to downgrade, too, so that we would be the same as all of the rest. The Director had called me to ask me if I would come out of retirement to implement the Banner system at Weber. I told him it would be too painful to replace something great with something bad and that I would not be interested in doing it.
It was 2010 (eleven years later) when we met the lady who called me ‘legendary,’ and who ever was given the assignment to implement Banner was still in the process of changing the system over and having all kinds of opposition from the staff. My former staff did not want to lose what they had (STAARS). STAARS served Weber State University’s students and staff in whole or in part for at least twenty years. That’s my story and I’m sticking by it! Considered to be ‘legendary’ by some and at the same time, possibly, considered as infamous by others.