Throughout his forty-year tenure, Howard Hanson had directed the Eastman School of Music with relatively little assistance from his faculty. Department structure was relatively loose, and there were few faculty committees or other venues to provide for any meaningful involvement of the faculty. Faculty meetings were few in number, usually held once each semester. Those meetings were customarily a forum for announcements to the faculty, or an opportunity to conduct necessary official business such as voting on the approval of degrees. There was little opportunity or encouragement for faculty initiative. Even the admissions process was basically an administrative function, most often without any input from the faculty who were being asked to teach the students once they had been admitted.

The Eastman School was essentially run by Hanson, with the advice of a few people on the faculty and administration to whom he informally turned for advice. The lack of involvement by the broader Eastman community made developing any new initiatives or directions for the school's future difficult. Eastman had also become increasingly independent of influence and control from its parent institution, the University of Rochester. Its generous endowment, compliments of George Eastman, and the growing stature and influence of Hanson allowed it to assume that it somehow possessed a certain amount of autonomy within the university. The fact that it was geographically separated from the rest of the university also enhanced that feeling.

A sense of change was almost immediately apparent with the appointment of Walter Hendl in 1964 as Hanson's successor. Perhaps this was partly the result of Hendl's comparative lack of experience in higher education, a situation that motivated and almost necessitated increased faculty involvement in the affairs of the school. But it also reflected a growing feeling within the faculty itself that the kind of strong paternal leadership that had characterized the Hanson years did not represent the future of the Eastman School of Music. The first sign of change was the formation of a faculty association to address the issue of faculty salaries at Eastman, which lagged behind not only the school's principal competitors but also the other colleges of the University of Rochester. The introduction of academic rank in 1961 had made it possible to make such comparisons, and the statistics were deeply troubling to the Eastman faculty.