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Title: Ingeborg Paulus interview
Date: 1996-07-10
Description: Ingeberg Paulus, Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology. Dr. Paulus described the personal and professional paths that led her to Western. She discussed studying at the University of London. She talked about her youth in post-war Germany and how she got to Canada. Dr. Paulus discussed her interest in and experience with gender issues. She also discussed her research on border smuggling. She talked about her perceptions of students over her twenty year career at Western. She also talked about her interests and activities after retirement. Dr. Paulus discussed the collegial climate at Western as well as the reduction in force (R.I.F.) in the early 1970s. She discussed the cultural offerings of Western and Bellingham. She also talked about criminology, the Equal Rights Amendment and what made her retire.
Digital Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Records, Washington Women's History Consortium Collection
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project records
Local Identifier: wwucentennial_paulusi
Text preview (might not show all results): Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 An Interview with Ingeborg Paulus July 10, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific No
Show moreIngeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 An Interview with Ingeborg Paulus July 10, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Bellingham, W A 98225 Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 1 Interview with Ingeborg Paulus 7/10/96 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson [Tape One, Side One] K: This is Kathryn Anderson. I'm interviewing Ingeborg Paulus, Associate Professor Emerita of Sociology, in my office at Fairhaven College July 10, 1996. [break in tape] K: Okay, I wonder if you could start by telling me about the personal and professional paths that brought you to Western Washington University. I: I was doing research in Vancouver, British Columbia. Basically, on drugs, in a foundation that tried to help drug addicted persons. And I had a done a bit of follow-up research on people who had taken methadone; I had done some research on marijuana and LSD with a group of young people that I went out into the community to find and interview. I had been there for three years, and I found there was a lot of opposition to my findings, because you can well imagine with drug research it wasn't [easy to dispel preconceived notions], especially with marijuana. And I was not going to change my report, so I had a few hard words with the executive director, and I decided that my time as a [drug researcher] had come [to an end]. So I went around to speak to my university mentor, and he suggested that I try Western Washington University, because they had placed some UBC graduates -UBC is my alma mater - they had placed quite a few people down here on a short term, actually two year terms. My mentor got in touch with Herb Taylor, who needed a researcher, an applied researcher for the Ford Foundation project on some communications education research. And that's basically how I came down here for the first [two] years. I was doing part time research and part time teaching with the sociology department. And then at that point I had decided that - I just had my MA - that if I really wanted to stay in academia, I better get a Ph.D. [By that time I had] done research for four years altogether; one year for the Alcoholism Foundation Where I could use the data that I had collected ... for my master's; and then three years at the Narcotic Addiction foundation. I decided that I probably liked academia better than just doing plain research. So I decided after the two years at Western - I was down here on a special contract from Canada - I would go off to get my Ph.D. I went to the university of London, England, but that was 1969-1971. In 1970, it became quite clear that it wasn't so easy anymore to get academic positions especially not where you wanted them to be. So I came home for Christmas, and came down here to the sociology department and talked with ... Doctor Call, [who] said to me that they had decided that if I wanted to come back, I could come back. So I followed the whole process of emigrating from Canada to the United States, and of course they had to put in certain kinds of forms and whatnot. In the fall of 1971 I started my teaching career at Western. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 2 K: Now you said earlier, if you wanted to stay in academia ... I: Yes ... K: And ... I: I needed a Ph.D. for that. K: Right; and, and it was basically the environment 'that you liked rather than research that made you decide that you wanted to spend .... I: Yes, I liked the academic environment. My first [two] years at Western were a wonderful experience. And I really liked the academic environment. K: Okay, and how did you happen to pick London, was it University of London, or .... I: London School of Economics and Political Science, which is a college of the University of London. Why did I choose London? Oh, because I didn't want to go - since I'd already done some research in Bellingham [while] teaching. I didn't want to go through the tedious process of having to start at an American university, because in the University of London, you were classified as a research student, and the work that you had done in the past was sort of given to you as credit that you were able to do something. You had to prove yourself for your first year - that you could actually do independent research - because that's where they were putting the main emphasis for a Ph.D., on independent research. If you proved that to your mentor during your first year that you were there, then they would advance , you from a candidate [of M. Phil to a Ph.D. candidate]. And then you were on your own, you didn't have to take any more classes, you were out on your own doing your research. I had looked around, I had gotten in touch with a number of universities, but not very many - actually Carleton University in Ottowa, Canada. When the offer came from London, I decided to go there. But I ... did not put out any feelers anywhere else. K: Now the process by which you were converted from a contract position, how did that work? Where you actually become involved with the department too, were they eager to have you come back from there, or not? I: Well, they knew me quite well, because I was doing half time teaching, as well as half-time research [during my first stay] and they must have thought it was satisfactory what I did. K: Were there any particular mentors on campus? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 3 I: Not particularly, no. No. I did not ever at this university have any mentors. You must remember too, that I was older already. I had been doing a number of things before I even went to university, and by that time you see, I was forty years old. And so I was pretty well on my own, and I knew what I wanted to do. K: Would you talk about that just a little bit? I'm interested in paths by which women became involved in higher education. What about that period of time before you went to university, and how did you get there? I: Kathryn, that's a long story. I grew up on the border between Germany and France. When the war ended in 1945, I did not have a school to go to, because the school I had gone to during the war was in France, and of course I was German, so I would have had to go to continue what they call high school in Germany, my studies somewhere else. But unfortunately, I also ended up for a five month period in an internment camp in France. When I came back, I was quite ill and the doctor did not think I should go back to school, so I left school pretty well at the age of 15. Actually, I didn't really have any more schooling since 14 and a half. So my education was very deficient. When I was in internment camp, I met a young woman who was on her way from East Germany to West Germany via France- a long story, these paths which people traveled at the end of the war were quite intricate. Anyway, she had made it as far as the Elsace where she was caught, and being German, she was also in the internment camp. And she had apprenticed at a farm in East Germany to become an agricultural home economist. Something like that; and when I came back from internment camp and I couldn't go back to school, I said to my parents that it would be something I think I would like to do. It entails a two year apprenticeship, and a four year special schooling. I may just add that in Germany the school system is much more of a fork system, you have many more opportunities. [If you finished] high school, then you can go to university. If you have the equivalent to what the English call A-levels, you can go into many [specialty] schools. I had more or less the equivalent of A-levels, Anyway, I was given the equivalent. So I became an apprentice on a farm for two years. Then the currency reform came in 1948, and my parents didn't have enough money to send me to the requisite school, which was quite expensive, it was a boarding school and [the fees were high]. I decided to stay home and help my mother for a year, because we were a pretty large family. And then for a while I was at odds, and didn't quite know what to do. So then I decided I'd learn some English. During all these years from post-war 1945 to about 1950, we had quite a good correspondence with my uncle in Canada. I decided I was going to come to Canada, and I learned English in Germany, and built on my schooling that I had. And then in 1952 I came to Canada. I worked in an office. And I found that even though I took the same kinds of examinations for an insurance underwriter position that the men did, and I passed the exams, just as the men did, I was never going to become an insurance underwriter. I was Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 4 destined to "punch a typewriter" for the rest of my life. That was the situation in the early fifties, so I decided that was for the birds, and decided to go to university. Now to go to university I had to go and get my university high school graduation certificate, which I did in two years time, at night school and by correspondence courses. And then in 1958, at the ripe old age of 28, I started at the university of British Columbia, and stayed there for six years, until I had my MA. K: That is a long story, but it's a very interesting path. You knew you were going to be working [something] and then you needed something to do, and so this was a path from farm work, to secretarial work. I: To research work. K: To research, to an academic setting. I: Yes. Now you can see why I wanted to go to the University of London, why I didn't want to be sort of [starting from scratch]. K: Okay, you mentioned an observation that your gender seemed to affect your options, especially if you were going to work as an insurance underwriter. I know that later on, when you taught in that last clinic, you began to do research, speaking, writing, and teaching in the area of gender issues. Can you talk about maybe how that developed for you, as an academic interest, as a scholar? I: Well, actually, I didn't do so much research in gender issues. I was actually as a criminologist, much more interested in white collar crime. I think the gender issue came about because I was for nearly 18 years, one woman in a seven to· nine man department - and that was not easy. K: What was that like? Can you tell me about that? I: But I will you tell you something else. I did become interested in gender issues, but it was through the sociology of law. Because you see, I got my ·Ph.D. in the sociology of law, and I was always interested in [it]. And when I came back to Western in the early 1970is, it was a real fermenting period. You may well remember when legal issues for women became very important. And that's when I taught first a workshop and then a course on women and the law. So that's how I really got into gender issues, but it was a side interest, not a main interest, not my main research. K: Let's talk about what it was like being the only woman in the 7 to 9 man department. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 5 I: It wasn't particularly fun, and it was at times very difficult. Now, I mean, I'm not the only one to say so - many women sympathized with me even contemporary members of the department right now would like to leave. Because there are a few people there, two persons to be exact, in the department who've made life hellish for women, didn't matter who the woman was. Sometimes a female graduate student, sometimes undergraduate students, and sometimes faculty members. But these two men were pretty powerful for a while. They're not now, but they were pretty powerful then. So it wasn't any great fun. Because you see, when you are in a position of power as a man, it doesn't take much to take some male students and turn them against the one female faculty. I have been evaluated behind my back; I have had things taken away from me because students were believed rather than I; and things like that happened quite often. But I must say, [it only happened] with the two people, the rest were okay . . K: But those two people really dominate your memories of that. I: Oh yes, there's no doubt about it, certainly, for the first, I would say for the first ten years that I was there, definitely. K: What was your contact with other women faculty on the campus at that time. I: Well, I went to a lot of the gender issue talks, I had a number of women friends on campus, and I certainly went to see women. But you know, when you're a young, well, I wasn't so young anymore, but as an incoming faculty, your life is pretty dicey. I mean, this "publish or perish" seems to even hold more for women than for men. I'll tell you something interesting, just to give you an idea what life could be like. I had done a translation form German to English. It was a very very difficult book and when I carne up for tenure, one of the members of the department - best unnamed - said, "Oh! She shouldn't get credit for that, after all, that's her native language." I ask you, what was he teaching in? What was he doing research in? Certainly in his native language! Anyway, things like that, you see, they would have probably never cropped up with a man, but men have this strange idea that women somehow shouldn't get credit for things that they get credit for. And you know, it was little things like that. Sometimes you would never be aware of them, but sometimes the students would tell you something that they heard, or a faculty would tell you something that he knew, and so all of a sudden, it sort of it builds up, and in retrospect you think, darnmit, how did I make it through all this at the time? K: Well, how did you? What sort of support did you have? Where did you get support? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 6 I: I got support from my friends and from my family. I have very good long-standing friends, and I got support from them. I have a women's group, four of us, with whom I had lunch regularly once a month, ever since I came back from London in 1971. K: Other people on campus? I: [Yes; there were other women on campus who were very helpful and supportive as friends, but the aforementioned] women are all in Vancouver, Canada. They are my long-standing friends from university and from [my time living in] Canada. I have a good family, and then I met Roy. I must say I usually had good outside support. I got through my work by basically not being too much involved other than in my research activities, my teaching activities, and the students. And I just disregarded the faculty with whom I couldn't interact very well. Some people get very aggressive and fight, but I think I basically retreated and did my work. Also, I'd always been very self directed. So I thought what I was doing was okay. I had put together a concentration in criminology because this was the area of my studies. Another faculty member and I taught it, and we got along very well. We had no trouble making sure that we taught the courses that each one was competent in. It worked very well, we always drew quite a high number of students. So I knew, as far as the department was concerned, it didn't really matter what the others said, as far as the department was concerned, I knew that I was doing my fair share. And so found it not too difficult to do what I thought is the best thing. K: I know you were also in Canadian studies. I: I was in Canadian studies for a while, yes. K: Did that provide a collegial home to you, or what was that like for you? I: Well, it was certainly ... a much nicer atmosphere than it was in the department. But again, you see, the faculty came from different departments, and so you still did your own thing in your own department. And pf course, you only met every so often. It was nice to have been part of the action. It was a very nice, very good, very interesting part of my being at Western, but it was again not my major involvement. K: I know you got a lot of publicity for some research that you did on smuggling between the US and Canada Border, do you want to talk at all about that, and what that meant for you here? I: Well, as I told you my interest was basically in white collar crime, and I consider this white collar crime. There was nothing in the literature [on smuggling;] nobody had ever done any research in this area. I was close to a Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 7 border, I'd also grown up on a border and I knew lots of smuggling stories, from my own childhood. So it was even interesting that I could use the border for research purposes, and so I started. Now, I did the usual, trying to get some support for it. But in the criminal justice system at that time, the support was for robbery, perhaps burglary, but definitely robbery and violence. I said, "I'm sorry, but I am not in a location where there are a lot of robberies. I'm in a location where people cross the border all the time." But there was no money for such a study. So it basically was my own interests, my own time, and through the Canadian studies, some monetary support. That helped me, and I did it just in my spare time. Without major support from anybody. But it was interesting. It involved a lot of going into the field, interviewing people, and standing on the border handing out questionnaires, and this kind of thing. So it wasn't just looking at the statistics and trying to make sense out of it, because there weren't any. Or certainly not statistics that would lend themselves to finding out how many people had smuggled or not, or what people were taking across, and how they felt about it. So it was interesting, and it certainly was time-consuming. K: And I'm sure there was a lot of interest in the results. I: Well, actually, I'm not sure whether the interest in the results was all that great. I did a, I did a comparative study on the customs courts - the American and the Canadian customs courts, and I gave reports in mimeograph form to the Canadian customs, and ... I think I must have sent one to the American customs too, because it was a comparative study. But people are much more involved in their own than they are with comparative issues, you see. So I don't think there was really that much interest. K: Interesting. Because the problems we're facing now ... I: It could be, yes. K: You said that your work was largely confined to teaching these students [something]. Any sense of change from ... what exactly is the time period before you retired? I: I was here for a full twenty years. That is including the first two years that I was here before I went off (for two years) to London, England. K: Any forms of change, or cycles, or of the student body that you dealt with over that period of time? I: Yes. I felt - and I know the issue is very mixed - I felt that the students did not get a better background. Their SAT scores may have been higher, but I did not think that they could spell very well. I didn't think they could think very clearly. Now, some of them could, but I thought that on the whole, the Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 8 caliber of the students - at least in my eyes - [has not improved]. Now, I don't know whether this is a function of my getting older and they're getting younger, ... or just jadedness, but they have not gotten better overall. And there was another thing that I always felt, and that I really found very bothersome. I always felt that, because I taught only three hundred and four hundred level courses, my colleagues had not prepared the students sufficiently well. I always felt that they did not teach the kind of things that the students should have known by the time they reached a three and four hundred level course. And that was another sort of not very satisfying issue, because somehow I had to do a lot of teaching in basic requirement when I should have done other things. K: Did you have a graduate program or graduate students at that time? I: I had some graduate students for a while. And then I didn't have any graduate students anymore, for the simple reason that the department thought that graduate students could take a body of statistics and manipulate them. They did not think that graduate students should go out and do research in the community or should learn the rudimentary research methods. But that again had to do with the fact that the department for so many years was dominated by people who crunch numbers. Because they thought that was the only way to turn sociology into a scientific discipline. They really believed that, and they were trying to do everything possible to get the department in that direction. Now I think sociology is not that scientific a discipline. It is like medicine, you have science, but you also have some other issues involved. You may call them art for simplification, but I do not think that you can do sociology by just crunching numbers, you have to go and get the numbers, too, because even though there are plenty of numbers available, they may not always be the kind of numbers that you want. K: Now, this doesn't sound like something that could have been typical of sociology nationwide and worldwide. Is that sort of a microcosm of the larger issues of the discipline? I: Oh, I would think so, yes, definitely. K: How would you describe the development of sociology as a field at Western? I: Well, that's a good question. When you become fairly specialized, and deal mostly with criminology as a subject matter - and it's a very wide subject matter; it embodies a lot - you tend to go to criminology meetings, you tend to get involved more with criminologists than with anybody else. I can't really tell you, and since I've been out of the university for seven years, I really don't know where the discipline is going at the moment. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 9 K: So when you left the university, you left the discipline? I: I left the discipline. Yes, I left the discipline. K: What are you doing for the rest of your life? I: That's a good question. I ask myself that every day, what am I doing? When I retired, I had worked for forty-three full years because I started work at sixteen, and I worked my way through university and everything. So you know, I thought I had enough. I had worked where you had to be ready every day to do something, get up, go somewhere, be prepared, and do it at other people's bidding, and do it too, you know, on a timetable. I thought I had enough of that. So I decided I wasn't going to do anything that involved any more timetables. So consequently I do not sit on boards. I do not do anything where I have to travel other than for my own. And I'm just at the moment enjoying life. I do some, well, call it charitable work - I don't know - but I have a number of elderly ladies that I visit regularly and bake for, and do little things for. And then I have a mother with whom I spend a full day in [West Vancouver]. That means traveling over three hours once a week, so that's how I spend my time. I decided I'd spend my time on the people that are meaningful to me, and the people who have supported me in the past, and who need somebody. So between my mother and my friends and my husband, and a garden and a house, and nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters, I mean, sisters-in-law actually. My time is fully taken up. I was going to take some history courses. I have always been interested in history, and I had never known very much American history because I did not grow up in this country, and so I was always going to take some history courses. I have not yet found the time to take a history course, because I am too often gone. We travel a fair amount, but what I do regularly - and I have done for the last 20 years - is exercises. I've done aerobics for 17 or 18 years, and I now go to the gym three times a week. So I do try to keep fit in body and I keep my mind fit by reading what's going on in the world. K: So more current events rather than scholarly research. I: Mmm-hmm. That's finished. And you know, I'll tell you why I don't do any scholarly research. I thought that the amount of work that you had to put in to get one paper published was not worth the time anymore for me. I have other things to do with my time. [laughs] K: When you came to Western, you mentioned that you were a junior faculty but an older woman, and at that point you were a single woman. What was the collegial climate? Did that affect ... your role among colleagues, ... what was Western like as a place, to work, to be, to grow as ... Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 10 I: Well, the collegial climate when I first came was actually quite nice. The department of Sociology and Anthropology were together. There were some very nice people in there, and they interacted. The collegial climate became strained when people in the sociology department - again the two unnamed but often mentioned people - tried to push sociology into a more scientific discipline and when finally they were also successful in sloughing off the anthropology department. So [anthropology] became their own department, sociology became it's own department, and then the collegiality pretty well sort of diminished more and more. I had much more collegiality with my anthropology colleagues. They also then had some women, you see, so I would tend much more to be social with them. But the collegiality in the soc department diminished quite rapidly over the years. By the time that I left the department, there was hardly any - only among small groups of people, but not among the whole department anymore. K: Did things happen on the larger campus? And you were here during the same period that had people [reductions] What kind of impact or effect did that have on you? . I: Well, it didn't have that much impact on me personally, because as far as my own position in the department was concerned - from a protectionist standpoint - it was pretty protected. As I was the only woman and I had been there as long as at least half of the members of the department. I was not last one hired, first one to go, so from this point of view, a reduction in force did not affect me. Or was not going to affect me personally for quite a while, but what I always found very dissatisfying was that it was always the faculty that was cut and never the administrators. And even though our students were supposed to grow in numbers, the courses and the course offerings did not grow. And I always felt from my point of view, the most unsatisfactory result of the reduction in force was always the fact that the students suffered most, and that I always thought that the administration got bigger, and the faculty student directed activities got fewer. K: Were you involved in any of those conversations about planning and cutting and ... ? I: I was on the so called planning committee for two years, I think, and all that was basically done was reams and reams of paper being turned out. At the end I got so disgusted, I thought - there goes another tree again - when they gave me yet another report, because the faculty input was nil. These planning reports, I really felt it was just the usual sop to appease people who wanted to have a say, but I don't think the faculty had much say - at least I didn't think so. K: Was that your opinion on other committees as well? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 11 I: Yes. I stopped attending committees I think, five or six years before I retired. I wasn't going to go waste my time on committees anymore. I found committees - at least the ones that I was on - very wasteful of my time. K: Were there areas outside of teaching that you found more satisfying, or was teaching for you ... ? I: . Well, I liked doing research, it's just that I had so little support, and I had to do it on my own, and so teaching and what little research I did, I think were my two major areas. But in the last three years before I retired, when I knew I was going to retire, I certainly did not participate much in university activities outside of my teaching. K: What kind of support could the university have given you that would have helped. support financially? Emotionally? What is there? I mean, do you have thoughts on ... ? I: That, you know Kathryn, that's hard to say, because you know, we're all different. And I'm probably quite different than a lot of women. And I have never been all that vocal, nor have I been all that involved. But that is my own, that's my nature, you see. And so I think that as a whole, yes, the university could do more. I think in terms, perhaps, of financial support, but I think that it's very difficult to speak about the university as a whole, because there are so many problems; there are areas where people are well-supported and women are wellsupported, and then there are others where they are not. So I think that probably for a most satisfactory teaching career, I think a department is probably the place where you would start, and that ,of course, is very difficult when you have no other woman [to share this with you]. K: So you retired before any other women were hired in sociology. I: Yes, the year I retired, they hired another woman, and then as more people retired, more women were hired. K: Does that apply to ... I: Yes. K: Do you ever look wistfully at that list of the department and wonder what it would be like to be in a department that was more gender-equal? I: No, I don't look back wistfully, I'm just enjoying the present. I enjoy the present so much that whatever happened in the past, as far as I'm concerned, is passe. It was a good part of my life while it lasted, that is true. I had, well, certainly a good degree of enjoyment and freedom and satisfaction. But I don't look back at it. I have so much to look forward to now. I find Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 12 retirement wonderful. And do you know something? Most women that I know like retirement. It's the men who have the difficult time. K: How do you explain that? I: Because women have much more involvement, involvement in families, in the community, and at our station in life, one usually has a house. And you have things that you have to look after, unless you want to hire somebody. You have to, or you want to, spend a certain amount of time around your house, your garden, cooking, traveling, seeing your friends, and reading. Doing all kinds of things that can be done, being involved in the community, you just don't have time to be bored. K: So the men you know really find it a different experience. I: Yes, especially in the beginning, when they retire. Yes. Because you see, they come home and they don't have a place to fit in. You see, while I was working, it was the weekends and the evenings when I had to do a lot of work. Now I don't have to do this any more. I can do it in the daytime, but many men didn't have that function to fulfill. Or not in the same way I think that women do on the whole. And it doesn't matter how modern the household is and how young the men are ... there's always a certain amount of work that needs to be done. And it's nice to have some spare time. [laughs] K: As you think back over [your time on] campus, is there any particular [memory], does anything stand out about events that happened on campus, or any controversies or funny stories ... I: Unfortunately, I have a very poor memory, and since I have never kept a diary, I've never looked back much. I can't really think of very many funny things that happened on campus. I have always enjoyed Western for the opportunities I've thought that it gave people who lived in Bellingham. I've thought it had wonderful musical offerings, theater offerings, the book reviews, the various library talks, other talks. You know, the professional talks, I thought that in this respect Western offered a lot, and I found that always very enjoyable. K: Did you participate in a lot of these activities? I: Yes, I went to a lot of these activities, yes. I don't do so much now, because I don't seem to have the time, but yes, I did go to a lot of talks, and lectures, and events, yes. I thought, I really, I really appreciated Western for, for that particular aspect. [And the general setting, the landscape. I love the campus]. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 13 K: I know you've been involved in some things in the community, AAVW, and you're still involved in it. Was that ... I: I was involved in AAVW quite actively for five years on the program committee, but I'm not involved in AAVW right now. I let younger people take over. And I'm not involved in the community on a professional level at all. K: Okay, in picking back over the decision making process by which you ended up here, would you say that there were, you said you don't look back, ... but were there any costs for the decision that you did make to spend a big chunk of your [academic] career at Western? I: I don't think there are decisions in life that are not without costs. And I think as far as when I look back the "costs" that I bore, I think they were bearable. I did try for a while to get another position; in fact I had another position in Canada. I had tried very hard to get out of the department and go somewhere else. And when I went to Simon Fraser, I taught for two semesters, but I hadn't resigned from Western yet, because I was in the process of going to London on the foreign studies program. And so I didn't resign, but I did teach one summer, and then one other semester at Simon Fraser V., when I took a leave of absence from here. But when I got there to start my contract with Simon Fraser to start my teaching career there, I got into the same dilemma that I had been in down here. That is I was again on the side of the underdog and there was a struggle within the department there were factions and as soon as I became fully aware of how things were going, I broke my contract and came back to Western. K: Interesting. We have to flip the tape, I want to make sure we don't get interrupted. [Tape One, Side Two] K: So at Simon Fraser, you found some of the things had changed that you found at Western. I: Yes, there were some young hotshots with different ideas who thought that the chairman wasn't doing the right kind of thing, and they formed a little cabal, and tried to oust the chairman. And since the chairman was someone who had hired me, and I wasn't really quite sure how to behave. I thought, uhoh, I'm going to be out of here, and I can't afford to be out of the university at my age, [I didn't have tenure]. So I broke my contract and stayed at Bellingham. K: Did you keep in touch with what happened at Simon Fraser? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 14 I: Yes, a little bit in the beginning, and I found out that I probably would have been on the side of the underdog, and I probably would have been out. [laughs] K: How did it happen that you'd end up on the side of the underdog? I: Well, I don't really know, Kathryn, but I think I'm basically an honest person and not a windbag, and I think at universities, people who toot their own horn and think a lot of themselves usually manage to be heard. K: And that wasn't you. I: That wasn't me. No. K: You were in sociology during the period when scholarship and gender were huge [issues], exploded really enormously. I'm interested in, can you talk of women, how did you see that whole area, the sociology of the law and gender issues, developing and changing over the years? I: Developing and changing. There was a tremendous amount of interest in the issue in the early 1970s. By the early 80s that interest among the students had waned considerably. Somehow, I think what happened in the 70s, the advances that women actually made, the affirmative action programs, the idea that women actually could get ahead in business to some extent. I think probably the publicity was still contrary to [reality],some of these successes either never got to the young women students, or else they just thought, you know, women had made it, and they didn't have to put in any more effort. And somehow I felt that young women thought the issues now were won for them, that the struggle was over. That after all these years that women had really struggled for equality, that they could now just do exactly as men did. And they were no longer interested in women and the law issues, because I really felt that they thought that they were equal now; fully equal. So then in the early 80s, I stopped teaching that course. K: Wow .... What about the scholarship in your field, with regard to women's issues, how did you see that developing? I: Well, there wasn't really in criminology, per se. [but in aspects of women crimes (prostitution e.g.), sentencing: prison treatment, etc. There was scholarship and I was very familiar ,with it - and taught it to my students]. K: In white collar crime in particular? I: No, there wasn't really that much done. And because criminology as a teaching subject was such a rapidly expanding subject, a lot of women actually found work in this area. It wasn't an area in sociology where it was hard to Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 15 get a job for a while. And it certainly wasn't like it was with English, or with History, where women had a very difficult time getting jobs, simply because there weren't any jobs. But criminology was expanding in the teaching field, in the research field, in many different applied areas. It drew well in terms of students on campuses, because that was an area where there was work for people once they graduated, you see. I mean, it might not have been the most glamorous work, but there was work, so this was an expanding area, and a lot of women found jobs there, so the gender issue with regard to equal opportunities, was never that great. Oh sure, there were the odd things here or there that you read or heard about. But basically it wasn't a hot issue. The issues were really more about the professional areas, like women and crime, subject matter rather than gender issues in criminology as an employment subject. K: I was thinking of a question as you were talking, I got so involved in what you were saying, I forgot. So the contrast of the students between the 70's and the 80's, and their interest is an interesting one. Any thoughts about why those changes ... I: The change from a more liberal world view to a more conservative world view, I think that had something to do with the students. I'm concerned too, and I'm quite sure that the rise of the religious right had something to do with it. I think especially at Western, you get quite a few students who come from fairly standard religious backgrounds, and I think they did not see any need to learn a different world view. I think because they were quite enmeshed in their religious world view that was sufficient for them, and legal issues were of no concern to them. I mean, they came here to study, to get a job, if possible, then get married and have children. Be good housewives and if you were a little educated, that helped. I think a lot of the students did not have any high career aspirations. And I also felt that a lot of the students - and I'm talking about female students - still thought in terms of that "knight in shining armor" coming to rescue them, so they would be taken care of. I felt a lack of willingness to be responsible for one's fate; to really work towards being self-sufficient. And I think that still holds. At least that's the way I felt. K: I know in the early seventies you were, from your interest in law and .. .I don't know whether you wanted to say anything about that period for you. I: Well, I believe in the Equal Rights Amendment, because my saying has always been; "legislation give and legislation takes.” At least if we had an amendment, it would be much more difficult to take again, because it would take another amendment. So at least you would have the law more firmly behind you; that is why I was a great believer in the Equal Rights Amendment. And I think women should have HAD an Equal Rights Amendment, but alas, it was not meant to be, and I was very disappointed. I Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 16 was very disappointed in the whole issue, but I also sometimes was disappointed because I felt that some extraneous issues were receiving so much publicity . You know, the "bra-burning women" issue, and this kind of thing, that feminists were not getting the best [representation] at times. And so I felt that certain issues - at least to my idiosyncratic way of thinking - that the issues that were more private, i.e., less unifying, etc. should have been pushed into the background. I think that women did not realize that as a force, they should and would have been more effective had they insisted on the regular legal issues of equality. And put some of those more - what to call it - volatile social issues that were going to get up the ganders of a lot of people, into the background. But, that's my way of thinking. Now I know a lot of feminists would not think that way, and I call myself a feminist. But I felt that for the sake of the greater good, we should have done a few sacrifices for a while, because I felt these issues could have been taken up later. But then, I also feel - from my own point of view - that sexual issues are private issues. And I think what you do in your own home and in your own bedroom, that's your business. And sometime when the society is not ready for some of these issues, then [discretion is] sometimes the better part of ladies' [valor]. K: As somebody interested in the law, you must be interested in the legal cases that followed and raised the whole issue of sexuality, and of a political nature, but ... those were not the areas that you actually ... I: No, I was more into laws that affected education, employment, pension rights, [marriage and divorce and property rights], things like that. The basic bread and butter issues. K: Are there any other aspects of your experience here that you haven't talked about, that stand out as being a significant part of this--half of your working career? I: I know, I know. Frankly, I can't really pick out issues that were really outstanding. I can't say that having changed presidents was a landmark for me. K: You mean, which president? I: No, from one president to another one. K: University president or president of the united states? I: Yes, university presidents; I mean, there was one university president today and there was another one tomorrow, but it didn't affect our teaching. it didn't affect departmental policies much. What other events happened on campus? The increase in students, you see, was just before I retired. You Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 17 know, for a while the numbers were pretty stable. So there wasn't much change there. Oh yes, there were a few new buildings on campus, and that was good because we got better offices, and so that was something that affected us, in that we did get better offices, when we moved to Arntzen Hall from Old Main. What else? You know, I think campus life, by the very fact that it is not really a total part of society, you are isolated, and you are on a campus that is isolated from the rest of the society. You are in a little city of your own, you get enmeshed in the every day activities, and unless the changes are of such a nature that they, you know are sort of almost earthquake like, they remain almost the same, because you have a job to do, you do this job all year round. You have lectures at a certain time, and you always are on time. And it is a very regulated kind of an existence, you see. At least I cannot think back and remember any great earthshaking events that I would have gone around wringing my hands about and saying; "Oh my Lord, what is happening here now?" [Even the airplane death of one president did not affect the teaching schedule for more than one day]. K: That reflection in and of itself I think is meaningful--the focus on the daily .. Do you ever think, what if? What if you'd been able to go to school in Germany, What if you hadn't come here to Canada and to the U.S.? You've lived in three nations in your time. I: Yeah. Well, as far as Germany is concerned, yes, I would have. I would have been wanting to finish school, and I would have probably gone to medical school as I had planned, because that was my idea of what I wanted to do. And with regard to having been to universities in three different countries, in retrospect, well, it became actually quite clear to me after a few years, after I started my career, it would have been much better if I would have had a network. Because I went to university as an older student in Canada, then did some research, did not stay in the university, very few of my fellow students became criminologists - and then I went to England and came back to the states again, I didn't really have a network. And that is one thing for somebody who would like to be a university professor that is important, I would say to all the women, get yourself a network. I said that to my students all the time. I said; "Look, get yourself a network!" I think that was my major regret, that I did not have a network. Nobody ever told me of the importance of having a network, and how you in effect get a network. So I thought that a variety of experiences in different countries would be the thing that would be valued, but no, that was not the thing that was valued. I think it would have been much better if I would have had a deeper experience in one country. At least, that's something that I feel in retrospect. Because my schooling did not allow one to build up a proper network. K: Did you develop a network professionally within your own [subject] internationally? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 18 I: Not very much, not very much. I had some people for a while. When I was going to meetings, when I was giving talks, when I was publishing, but it was obviously difficult, because again you see, the closer support for this area was lacking. There was support in Canadian American studies. But they didn't really bridge the area of criminology very much. Because you do have different laws, you see. The law is quite different in Canada, that governs criminal matters than it is in the United States from an administrative point of view. Because you have a federal law in Canada, whereas you have state law here. So there was not this big bridge here. And then Bellingham is at the edge, in a sense, isn't it? It is at the edge of a country. You can't go much further west, because you jump into the ocean, and you can't go north because there's Canada. So I think that if you are the only person in the department, and if you are not very aggressive, which I am not, you sort of get stuck on the edge, and that's probably what I was. K: Well, now you're off the edge. And that sounds like it's great. I: Yes, mm- hmm. K: I don't have any other questions, if you don't. Maybe we could stop here. Certainly if things occur to you, we can pick up where we left off and add on to any of the areas that you think we should. But thank you very much for participating in this. I: Oh, it was a pleasure. Thank you. [break in tape] K: Since we have a few more minutes, you were talking when we finished, about retiring, and how you came to decide to retire, maybe you could go into that. I: Well, when I thought about retiring, Kris had worked off and on in the department - a quarter here and there. She was away and then she came back again to teach for us, and as I told you before, we had no full-time woman. We've had a woman for a quarter when somebody was on sabbatical or something, but we never really had a full-time woman. And I knew that when I retired, the University would insist that the department get another woman. I mean, the department wasn't perhaps insisting, but the university would insist, and since I knew Kris was available, and she had some other job offers, but really she wanted to stay in the area. I knew she was available, and I really wanted to retire and make sure that Kris got the job. I felt first of all, she had wonderful teaching evaluations; she had a really really good rapport with the students both male and female, but especially with female students. And I really felt she would be the kind of role model that female students needed. You see both my high school experience, and my university experience, I never had any women role models. They were all men. My Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 19 high school teachers, with the exception of one person; were all men. My university teachers in the sociology department at UBC were all men. There was not one woman. I had never, in all my university experience, all eight years of it, I never had one woman teacher in sociology. They were all men. So you see, I had no role model, and I really felt that a good role model would be extremely important. So when the university then did hire Kris, I was very happy to retire. K: And that created a place, a permanent, full position that she could then be hired. I: Yes, yes, it was a tenure track position. Because you know, she had been here and there, and she wanted a tenure track position. Mine was a tenure track position, and I knew they couldn't take it away. We also had other retirees, a year later, and that was good, because one woman in such a heavily "manned" department, wasn't very good. So I knew there were going to be some more women. And of course, they would also have a female colleague, so I think starting with my retirement, people in the department certainly have changed, and it's much easier, I think, for a woman to be in the department. And I think it's also, it's also good for the female students, because there are a lot of female students in sociology, to have good role models. You see, I don't think that I was a particular good role model. I was to some students, especially to the older students, but not to the younger students. After all I was, I was at least 40 years older than the majority of the female students. That's a big gap. And when you are, when you are 20, somebody who is 60 is very old. [laughs] K: Indeed. I: Makes a difference, yes. K: You also talked about the university experience as being kind of an interlude--because you had a lot of experience, and a very rich and full life after here. I don't know if you want to say any more about that, or how you felt that compared to other colleagues, or whatever ... I: I don't know whether it compares to colleagues; but I think it compares well to other women that I know. For whom I guess the university teaching was just one aspect of their lives. And that is not to say that it was not a significant, it was a very significant aspect of my life. I am forever thankful that I was able to be an academic. I enjoyed being in the university. I enjoyed the university environment, I enjoyed the freedom, I enjoyed the fact that I could teach my courses the way I wanted to teach my courses. First of all, I set them up, and then I taught them the way I wanted to teach them, I 'was pretty independent in our concentration. There were only two of us who taught the concentration, and since I pretty well had set it up, I really felt that I had a Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Ingeborg Paulus Interview 1996 July 10 20 good thing going in terms of a working environment. You see I didn't really need my colleagues all that much, because Don Call and myself, we had our criminology concentration. We always had a good body of students, and since we taught mostly three and four hundred level students, we had a good rapport with the students. Even though I did not have collegiality in the sense that I interacted with my whole department, I would interact with many of them. Then there was [something] collegiality, but there was also a good teaching experience. So I would not look back on my 20 years at Western with regret or anything. It's just that sometimes it was very hard. [laughs] But then I don't think that's any different in any other positions, but on the whole, I would say that my 20 years at Western were pretty enjoyable. Compared to other situations where I may have had different colleagues, I may have had a different working environment, but I still think that considering the ups and downs that life is made up of, it was overall a satisfactory experience. K: Thanks, I wanted to get that talk, as we got into it. I: Yes. K: Okay. [End of Tape One, Side Two] Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123
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Title: Carol Diers interview
Date: 1996-07-01
Description: Dr Carol Jean Diers, was an undergraduate at Western and eventually a full professor in the Psychology department. Dr. Diers attended kindergarten through second grade at Western's Campus School. Later, she finished her last two years of college at Western. She returned to teach at Western in the 1960s during a hiring boom and remembered it as a very exciting time. In 1974, Dr. Diers served as Director of the Honors Program and became the first woman on the Honors Board. Since her retirement she occasionally gives talks at Western.
Digital Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Records, Washington Women's History Consortium Collection
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project records
Local Identifier: wwucentennial_diersc
Text preview (might not show all results): An Interview with Carol Diers July 1, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Bellingham, W A 98225 Carol
Show moreAn Interview with Carol Diers July 1, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Bellingham, W A 98225 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 Interview with Carol Diers, July 1, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson [Tape One, Side One] K: This is Kathryn Anderson interviewing Carol Diers in my office at Fairhaven College on July 1, 1996. Carol was an undergraduate at Western Washington University and retired recently as a full professor in the Psychology department. You've been at Western in many capacities. Maybe you'd just like to start with your early memories. C: I'm trying to remember what year that would have been, when I came here in kindergarten. K: The year doesn't matter. C: Well, it probably does, really. [laughs] Let's see, seventy three, probably 1938, it must have been, when I started kindergarten. And so I attended kindergarten, first and second grade here, and apparently I didn't learn to read. My mother was informed they would be fortunate if I ever graduated from high school. K: Oh my goodness. C: And I hated the place. [laughs] So Campus school was not a good experience for me. I had a very isolated childhood and there were too many teachers. I never could get it dear, [laughs] with all these people around. That was one problem. I think probably Dick and Jane readers were a big problem. Absolutely detested that family. [laughs] And all Jane ever did was stand around watching what Dick did. I even felt sorry for the dog. [laughs] K: When did you become aware of that? When did you figure all that out? You think you figured that out in first and second grade? C: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Because very early on, it was dear to me I should have been a boy, because they had all the fun. And that was something that really started very early. Because, it was dear if I followed what I was being taught, I was just going to stand around like a post most of my life. K: And watch Dick do things. C: Right. So I suppose that was part of the problem, too. K: So your memories are pretty hazy of Western as a K-2 student. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: Yes. Right. And then I came here after a couple of years of college. I came home ill and then because I had lived in this area, I just finished my two years at Western. K: Where did you start before that? C: At Whitworth, and a year at Wheaton too, in the Chicago area. So I finished here and then I didn't know what my major would 'be. I almost flipped a coin to decide where to go to graduate school--what area to go in. K: You had an undergraduate degree in ... ? C: Physical sci---Biological Science and Physical Science. K: Oh wow. C: And then, I taught public school for a year, and then decided I could catch up in Psychology in graduate school, and UBC would let me in with not much background. As long as I could do the work, it was fine. So I got my master's at UBC, and then taught another year and then the doctorate at UW, and two years in Bremerton, and then I was back at Western again. K: Why graduate school? C: Oh, I'd, I liked academic life from what I had seen of it, and a year teaching in junior high propelled me on. [laughs] I enjoyed junior high, but it was clear to me I wouldn't survive. K: That is a challenge. C: Yes. K: What are your memories of Western as an undergraduate? Were you ... ? C: It was small, and actually I developed some of my expectations about college life, obviously I would, from then. The faculty and students had coffee together regularly. And it was a much more intimate relationship with the faculty. I'm trying to remember anything really remarkable. About Western. I would never have come to Western, living in this area. And it was just by accident that I came here, and I sort of thought, oh this is a temporary kind of ridiculous thing I'm doing, but then practicality set in. I thought, well, maybe I'd better go ahead and get my degree. And ... K: Any particular classes stand out or anything about campus life, or ... ? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 c: Well, people stand out. My eventual husband I met during that time, Taylor in Anthropology and Woodring in Psych. Those two instructors really stood out for me. K: From classes, or from the coffee? C: Both. But the classes were really good. K: Well, those are two renowned professors from the campus. C: So, yeah, it was really kind of an exciting time to be here on campus. K: Now I've had students explore the yearbooks and so forth about Western, and this would have been the fifties? C: Right. K: And they're absolutely horrified about the rules for girls because there were no rules for boys. I'm wondering what, if you remember, how you felt about them at the time. C: The same way I felt when I was [laughs] in first grade. I don't know what I did, but when we left, we had to have a recommendation, about three recommendations, and one of the them had to be Dean of Women. And I asked the Dean of Men, McDonald, if he would write me one instead, which he was happy to do. So I, I don't know if I'd done something that I thought put me on her bad side, or I just was generally antagonistic or what. Probably I still retain the same sense of .... Well, the fifties wasn't a good time for females, but it's because we were raised on Dick and Jane. K: Did other, did you talk about that with other people at the time? C: No, this is very much on my own. I mean, this is ... K: ... closeted view? C: It was, already through grade school and high school. For example, I refused to be nominated for Secretary of anything. I waited until finally one year they nominated me for President. They voted me for President. I had no idea how to be President of a class, but I just refused [to be a secretary] because that's what females always did, you got put in that spot. K: You're a psychologist, can you explain? Obviously these are pretty strong feelings you had about that role. Any idea where they came from? C: I don't really. My parents are fairly traditional in that regard. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 K: Were they supportive? Did you find support from them? C: I think they tended to let me go-ahead and do what I felt like doing frequently. I really can't see that they positively did anything that induced this in me. They probably wished they could figure out what was going on, but no, I don't know. Clearly that generation is sort of cited as being the most staid and restricted and having very narrow expectations for females, and I just wasn't going to do it. K: Were there any people who tried to put you in your place? Or any situations that tried to? C: Well, this came up all the time, but I'm trying to think if it ever did in college, really. In high school, for example, girls had to take home ec, and boys were taking ag, and I asked my mother to go and ask them if I could not take home ec and take ag, but they wouldn't let me. And so this kind of thing kept going on all the time. K: Did you feel like a rebel? C: No, I didn't. I mean, I had absolutely no idea anybody else might feel the way I did, of course. Of course when you're a teenager you think that anyway, but I almost think maybe I was right because two or three years ago, I demanded that I get on the country club golf course during the men's time, because I was the sole member then--the certificate holder. And there were several other women eligible to do that, you were eligible if you insisted but nobody ever did. And not one of them would come with me. This is within the last five years. And yet the men, many of the men were very nice. In fact they asked me to play with them, again and it's not because I'm a good golfer, either. [laughs] [When you've] got thirty something handicap you're not. But, so it persists. K: Uh-huh. Interesting. Well, we've done some searching in those, in the newspapers in the fifties on Western's campus. In fact, I have them here, I'll show them to you later. A couple of my [students] took pictures from the campus newspapers and they made one whole poster. There were two themes that kept coming up over and over again: beauty queens and engagements. Now they felt like that created a kind of climate, that certainly . made it very clear to young coeds, y'know, what their role was expected to be. Do you remember any of that? C: Right, well, that was true, it was. Yes. By then, it just sort of didn't apply to me, anyway, so obviously I was going off in a different direction. And I can't see that anybody really thwarted me or said, "don't go to graduate school" or anything like that. People said, do go to graduate school. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 K: Were there women faculty in the biological and physical sciences? C: Yes, there was Besserman in Chemistry. She's the only one I can think of right now. K: Was Leona Sundquist here? C: Yes. I, yes she was and Platt, there were two or three that I had. K: I was just curious about [static] C: One thing that was true of me is that I never looked up to women; I had learned men are the ones who get things done. Men are the ones who know how to do science. I almost discounted the women and never considered them models. K: Interesting. But really understandable too. C: Yeah, yeah. K: Okay, so graduate school. UBC, and University of Washington, and then what were your, do you remember thinking about what your options were? How did you get back here as a professor? C: Well, I first of all went to Bremerton to Olympic College. It was just before jobs were readily available. So and I was staying in the Northwest coast area, generally, so I took the job that was available and then just stayed there two years and then there were positions open at Western. I decided to come back to Western. I suppose I thought it would be similar to what it had been, but of course that was the beginning of the boom too. And so it changed. K: So you were really in there in the transition. You knew what it had been like before even though you had experienced it as a student before. What was that like? C: It was okay. Y'know, it was exciting. There were always new faculty coming in, it was very energetic. It was an exciting time. And then the late sixties and seventies, I loved the students during that time because they were exciting. Very stimulating. And after that it got kind of dull. K: Well, the door closed and there weren't any new people coming in either. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: Right, so the departments got kind of old and fixed in their ways, and students sat there rather dully. Conforming again which was so unlike what they had been a few years ago. K: Yeah. let's go back to the early sixties. You were hired into the psychology department, right? C: Yeah, right. K: Were there other women on the faculty then? C: There was a Barbara Etgel who left. Of course, psych is one area where there typically are more women, but mostly in counseling I think. There may have been one in straight general experimental but I can't remember. K: So who was your network on campus? Had you remained in contact with the man who then became your husband? C: Yes. K: When you were gone? C: Yes, and with Blood. Don Blood was in the Psych department, and who else have I maintained contact with? Some anyway. I didn't think Bellingham was a very good place for a single female, though. Bremerton was a lot better. It ... was a lot freer. Western is more conservative than Olympic Community College. K: How did you experience that? I mean, how did that get communicated to you? C: Well, there's so many things set up socially for couples to do. Such as the country club, still is. I think probably that's it, whereas previously, when you're in graduate school, of course, you don't need to be a couple, you can be anything. So it was kind of a step back in terms of feeling free to do a variety of things. K: Of these new faculty coming in, were a number of them single? or were most of them coming in families? C: I, I don't recall any single people coming in. Maybe, but. K: Now, did you, were you actually here with the change from the more general curriculum into the department? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: I think the psych department had just been separated from education and Harwood was chairman of psych. When I got back here, before. K: So was there a lot of department building actually going on? C: " And there, yes. There was, and Harwood was hiring people ostensibly to teach ed psych but really in various psych specialties, so that they would feed into the arts and sciences program. And that worked fine. Of course I was teaching courses to begin with that I'd never had any preparation for, but then, that happened all the time at that time, because there were too many students and not enough people teaching. K: So what sort of things stand out in the time? So you ended up being here for how long before you .... C: I retired in 1991, still taught a couple of years .. K: So almost thirty years. C: Yes. Right. K: That's a long time. C: Right and then, I don't know how to answer what stands out for me. K: Okay. Well, you've described .... C: I mean, it was half my lifetime. K; Sure, right. C: But I don't know what stands out. Probably I'd say my husband stands out. But that's not exactly the same thing as what you're talking about professionally. K: Well that's certainly not completely irrelevant to the history of Western either. When did you actually become a couple on campus? C: Urn, wait, let's see. We married in 1973. So that was quite a while I taught after we were married. And he died in 1991, same time I retired. K: When you came here in '63, were there married people teaching here, or were there still rules against that? C: I think there must have been nepotism rules in effect. At first, but I think they were probably sliding away pretty rapidly as far as I know. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 Certainly, by the time we married, there were already many couples that were on campus. I was almost beginning to think they should put some nepotism rules back into effect. Some problems that came up, it would have been much easier to solve, but they probably won't. K: You talked about the students, I could almost visualize a wave as you were talking about a sort of period of excitement in the early sixties and then again in the ... C: Actually mid to late sixties and early seventies. K: What about that? What was that like for you as faculty? C: And they were just interested. And so, so what if they were protesting various things, or marching through the class occasionally with placards saying something or other, 'and during 1970, '74 I think it was, I was director of the Honors Program and the students were so independent. The honors board was a faculty-student board. [Students] generated their own classes, and actually led some of their own classes, did everything, [including] grading. I'd stop in and be amazed at how much work they were requiring of each other. I never would have required that much, but it was similar to Fairhaven I think. The way the Honors Program was then, and the students, you can do that if you've got the right kind of students; the whole thing depends on having the right kind of students. So if you can draw those kinds of students, then you've got it made. K: Very, and you got to interact with them as director of the Honors Program. C: Yes, yes. And there was students in all areas who were just really serious and enthusiastic and doing fringey things too. But uh, just fun. K: Absolutely. Something you said made me want to follow it up and I forgot. I was getting involved in what you were just saying. Urn, well, all the publicity about your appointment as director of the Honors Program emphasized that you were the first woman to be on the Honors board, let alone ... C: You know, that's right. K: That was really all it was about, now was that... C: Even the UBC alumni magazines put it in, I couldn't believe it. K: It was a surprise, to see that emphasis on "first woman to .... " Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: Yes, it was. Yeah. K: Was that the result of Sam Kelly's description? Or do you think that says something about the times? Did it feel that unusual to you to be ... ? C: It didn't feel particularly unusual. I mean, in high school I was the only girl in advanced math, the only one of two in physics class, I was accustomed to that kind of thing anyway. So, that wasn't much different. K: Um, C: Excuse me, I interrupted you in the middle of what you were .... K: Well, I'm interested in that phenomenon, because, I mean, if you look historically there are all these categories where, y'know, somebody has said, when there can no longer be a news item, that she's the "first woman to ... ", then we'll know that things have changed. C: Yeah, yeah. K: So I'm interested in what that experience was like for you. C: Y'know, I just didn't think of it in terms of being the first woman. It just never occurred to me to put myself in that category, or to care if I was, or to give a hoot. I just didn't care. I was involved with the students, and they were [break in tape] K: We're just having----[break in tape] K: check the volume. And they didn't care. In the early seventies. C: Not that I know of they didn't. Um ... K: Did anybody ever call you a model? Or communicate in any way that they saw you as a model? C: I don't think so. You reminded me, student evaluations I got ·in my courses, where I could pick out being a female was different. I taught behavioral science for quite a while, a large lecture class along with several others, and I directed and taught part of it. And it was important what I wore, I mean, just like some would say, "she should get more outfits." I know the days I lectured I was wearing something I felt comfortable in, of course then that was down to what? two or three outfits. So this was a comment on the student evaluations. Y'know, out of 400 students doing these things. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 Somebody says something like that. They wouldn't say that to a man, I don't believe. K: Yeah, I wonder, I was just wondering if anyone ever said that to a male professor . C: I don't think so. Yeah, that's, the comments, just occasionally, would clearly make that distinction that hadn't occurred to me. And really, I didn't function in those terms. K: Well, I remember students talking about wanting to take your section of the statistics class because, and I can't remember exactly whether they put it in gender terms at all, but you had a reputation of being very effective as a teacher. C: I think they're more afraid of males, they're afraid of statistics, then add to that a male teaching statistics, and they thought it would be nicer if they had a female teaching statistics. Which is probably a good reason to have a female teaching statistics. We taught the same kinds of things, had the same kinds of basic requirements. The course was essentially the same course. K: Maybe it's [something] C: Could be. K: What about, how would you describe any aspect of life at Western-campus life, faculty, classes, curriculum, any aspect that you thought changed, any significant changes that ... ? C: Well, I suppose one, an important change was the degree of insularity that develops with departments. In contrast to having contacts with a variety on a regular basis, on a casual basis, such as at a coffee shop. My husband used to say when they did away with the smoking lounge then, that was it. Because that's where people from all departments came, you could just rely on having a good conversation with a variety of people and then, the contact was gone. And it's a real shame. I think. It's a lot more fun to have contacts with a variety of faculty. K: The faculty who were here during the time curriculum was team taught, you talk about that with a great deal of fondness. And I think probably for some of the same reasons, the collegiality ... C: Yes, right. K: Did that have anything to do with your interest in the Honors Program? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: It probably did. That obviously immediately would get me in contact with students in a variety of areas. And I found that more interesting. K: Very interdisciplinary. C: Right. Right. And I taught behavioral science, and at least that was interdisciplinary in the social studies area. I just preferred having that kind of context within which to work, a little broader. You get tired of looking at the same old faculty, hearing the same old things at the faculty meeting, and within a department. In fact I think we almost stopped having faculty, departmental meetings, because everybody knew what everybody else had to say. K: What about challenges? Do you remember anything in particular? C: I had to struggle to keep armadillos alive. K: What was that like? C: That was hard, because the mothers always killed and ate their young. And we were trying to keep these little things alive. K: And this was your research ... C: Yes, this was a research project suggested by Jerry Flora. Armadillos always have four genetically identical young, so it would have been ideal for a lab animal. But we could not keep them alive in the lab. Pregnant females would deliver and it just didn't work. And you know, after that, I found out H.H. Newman in the 19 teens did the same thing. He got armadillos: he thought, this is going to be the greatest lab animal I ever came across as soon as we solve 'this problem with cannibalism. And I don't even know that to this day any body's really raised them in a lab. So we got halted right there. K: So then what, where from armadillos were .. ? C: Now turning from armadillos, I started research with Darrel Amundsen in classics on the age of menarche and menopause. K: Another interdisciplinary ... C: Other research was dictated sometimes by graduate students. K: Was the graduate program something that developed in the time that you were here? C: Yes, right. And while I didn't think much of it at the time, I sponsored the first graduate student in psych: Tony Tinsley for a master's degree in Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 psych. I think probably he chose me because I was female. Not just for that reason, and no other. I mean he thought he was going to do the whole thing himself anyway and wasn't going to need any advice from anybody. K: Did that prove to be true? C: Oh, he later said, he realized, he found out that he did need a little advice, but, but he was very independent and a very capable student. K: So why would he choose you because you were female? C: I think that students were beginning to feel that they needed to promote females. Two or three times I had males say that, that they had chosen me because I was female because they thought females should have more opportunities, more chances, more support. K: How does that feel to you? C: Oh, it's just fine with me. K: So in the early seventies when people started talking about creating a women's studies program, and started teaching classes about women in psychology and Saunie Taylor taught that class. What was your response to this sort of movement? C: I was pretty much to one side of that. And I recall getting really upset with Mary Robinson, because it was like she'd been hired in a position that was higher than mine, it was an administrative position being paid more money than I was being paid to start trying to protect my rights. And I just blew up at it. I'd spent my whole life insisting I could have a chance to do various things. I was incensed now with, "Oh, we're going to help you." Well, it's too damn late. K: That's, that's not uncommon in response to sort of a paternalistic ... C: I was just amazed at that. How strong I felt about it. So I never was really involved in the women's movement and often was suspicious of some· of the kind of faddish gung ho thing that people get involved with. Not that I didn't want the rights, I wanted all the rights they were talking about but... K: Well, in the early seventies, some of the scholarship began to change, there was a little bit of that happening in college. Did that affect your research at all or your classes? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: I don't think so, not right at the moment just off the top of my head. I wasn't involved directly in teaching any of those courses, I was still teaching social behavior in animals; I was still very much talking about sexual differences sexual dimorphism- and the importance of division of labor, and these kinds of topics, which have really just gone in the other direction, in terms of emphasizing comparisons between the sexes. K: I think a lot of the early studies which do have to do with sexual difference~ put together quite a compilation of research in that area, from all of that research. I just remember as an undergraduate, being irritated that females who wanted to get an A in psych by doing four experiments or whatever had a lot fewer choices than males, because most experiments were for, they just eliminated females. C: Oh, true, but there's another reason for that. When you send around the sign up sheet to a class, more females will volunteer, and if you want a balance of males and females, you've got to somehow get those males to sign up. Not only that, when they do sign up, they don't show up with as great a regularity as do females. K: How interesting. When did you notice that? C: Oh, since, well I taught a lot of intro psych and they're always sending around sign up sheets, and when I was teaching experimental psych, I was sending around sign up sheets through classes to get subjects for students, and that was a problem. K: Interesting. C: It wasn't just that they were looking for males exclusively, but it's true that a lot of the early psych studies used only males and then tried to apply the results to females, like the achievement study. One researcher actually said, well, we couldn't do it with females because we couldn't find high need achievement females. He just couldn't find them, they just don't exist. K: Well, in retrospect, how do you see that research, I mean, how it's come. I mean it's 25 years later. C: Yeah. But they've managed to find examples, some high need achievers. K: Female. C: Yeah. I think now there's care to have a balance and to pay attention to what's going on. I got a little concerned earlier in the movement about, for example, the insistence that females must be equally skilled at math, when Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 study after study after study shows that there really is a difference when you're comparing large groups of males and large groups of females. And it's not quite explained by expectation, I don't think. But there has been unwillingness to explore this as a real difference, perhaps, that is interesting if it is there, and to look at possible explanations. Instead it's just a blanket statement, oh, it's all social, social expectation, forget it. K: And you were clearly good at math. C: Pretty good. K: Better than probably most men. C: I was in high school. I think though, I also experienced a kind of cut off that women report. Females talk about a kind of feeling that you can go this far and no further. Or a kind of, "I won't understand it anymore." Even though I was, I knew, I was top in algebra. I loved algebra. I just went right on ahead. And no one really expected a great deal of me in that regard, but, I don't know. I never felt quite satisfied with any explanations I'd come up with about my math ability and what happened at some point to me. K: That's another question I'd like to talk about. So you were promoted to full professor within ten years of your [something] C: Is that right? K: In '73? C: Probably is, yes. K: Yeah, now that's a pretty quick pace. C: It's pretty quick, I came, well, I came in with, it's the years that counted, they counted graduate school years as well, because I was a T A in graduate school and an RA, and so they counted. They were counting those. Because they were just getting to feel desperate for faculty, so they were counting lots of things that they don't count now. K: And you had finished your dissertation. C: Yes, right. K: So you were raring to go. C: Right. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 K: And you were also publishing. C: Yeah, so. K: So you were a senior woman on the faculty at Western early on. One of a handful of women. C: I guess I was; yeah. I only vaguely realized that later. That somehow you're supposed to be a distinguished, what does this mean for Christ's sake. What am I supposed to do here? It's like, I'm turning 63 in July. I don't know how to act like a 63 year old. As I'm trying to remember 63 year old women, nothing fits in terms of what I think. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. K: Well, I think it is a new generation where fitness and access to golf courses ... C: Yes, right. K: So who, who were your models, who were the people that you received sort of intellectual stimulation from? C: One was my doctoral thesis advisor, Allen Edwards at the University of Washington with whom I worked for a couple of years. He was clearly a model, both in terms of research and teaching. And my husband was a model in terms of teaching and this lively mind and inquiring kind of disposition. And Paul Woodring was a kind of model, but I could never-I know I enjoyed his classes very much, but I could never quite grasp what it was that he was doing that became so engaging. K: As a teacher. C: Yes. He clearly was. I never quite got that. It was easier, in the case of my husband; it was all big chunks of organization and enthusiasm, and I probably modeled my own lecture style after him., after my husband's lecture style. K: But Woodring was somebody you thought about as you ... C: Yeah. K: He had a big impact on a'lot of people. When you were talking about, you loved the turmoil that the students created in the early sixties. Was that a general feeling or ... Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: Apparently not, because I was very upset when the dean sent somebody over to help me out in a class. Students were in the habit of coming through in a semi large lecture class with some kind of placard advertising or protesting something. But first of all, one of th~m asked me, and they came in the two minutes before the class was to start, and so I thought, fine. I mean, I thought they were incredibly polite, first of all, to ask me. Whereas the dean sent somebody over to monitor the situation and I thought everything's fine, what are you doing? K: Protecting you? C: Could be. Yes, in fact I think there was an indication that, perhaps, was happening, but ... K: Did colleagues have disagreements over how to, the appropriate response to this .... C: I think some of them thought, just shut the doors and lock them and get rid of them or something, but students at Western were not really violent and they weren't doing things that were very disruptive. In my classes anyway, they weren't. And I don't think they were in classes in general, I think they were, I think they disrupted the, administration. And that was more their target. And y'know, we just thought that was funny. K: And it showed that you also found it brought something into the whole liveliness of the ... C: Yeah, students were much more willing to ask good hard questions about the content and object to what you were saying. And I found that just really wonderful. And so they were thinking about what was going on. They'd actually read something about it. I mean, all these amazing things. K: But you saw that suddenly change, all around. C: Yes, it did, I think it did. It was in the 80's that people got very conscious about getting grades and not rocking the boat, and they weren't stimulating me as much. And one thing, students may not realize is that whether or not a class is good depends a lot on the students. The faculty person can do so much, and certainly try to do a lot, but still, there's that interaction there that's really important. K: So what did you do to rejuvenate, to keep alive during that? C: I don't know, haranguing them didn't help, I sure went through times of that. But it just didn't seem to produce much good. Now I've never been Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 very good at teaching seminars; but I can do them and enjoy it, because somehow occasionally, people would really get involved. [End of Side One] [Side Two] K: I guess I'm wondering if you were aware of any sort of overall changes in policy about the size of the university, or admission, or larger kinds of things about the university, and how that impacted you as an individual faculty person. Or were you even conscious of that [something] C: There was a greater emphasis On research as time went on, and I think at first, to be a respectable faculty member, all you need do is demonstrate that in fact you could publish a research article. And this gradually became . something then that was absolutely required. And then began the regard for the number of articles published and the typical university kind of system. Research articles were used in evaluation. And so, I dabbled around in various things, and I'd get going. I did a couple of research studies that were perfectly publishable, but I fooled around. The journal wasn't here, it was down in UW, and I never did publish it, and obviously it was important to me in terms of step extension, but I just didn't do it. I got reluctant, in terms of feeling that you had to do research in order to get promoted or step extension. That kind of reward is not an appropriate reward. For doing research. Y'know, talk about shooting yourself in the foot, if you do research because you're involved in research, and you enjoy the process, and so on, and you don't do it in order to tack another star so you can send it over to a committee. And then they started these books on T&P, these elaborate scrapbooks, as if you were in third grade, and you'd be neat, and put everything in there you could possibly think of to put in it. I was on T&P committee twice, so I know. I know how these things changed and pretty soon people had these volumes. [laughs] Every scrap of information about your life is put in there in order to get promotion or step extension. And maybe that's okay, except I didn't, some of it I didn't like, some of the emphasis. They did almost literally count publications. They did not do a good job of teacher evaluation. And the university just doesn't do a good job of teacher evaluation. But at one point, when it was smaller, faculty knew other faculty and knew how they taught and could write really clear, competent, valid recommendations about the teaching of the other person, but as we got further and further apart, you didn't know what people were doing in class. And so there was just a lack of source of information. K: What kind of a teaching evaluation do you think would be helpful, constructive and be a good basis for evaluation? C: Well, some may say it's probably not possible. How does the student value the course. If you're talking about student evaluations, how do they Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 value it five years from now, or even next year. Is quite a change. If you're going to put such an emphasis on student evaluations, make every student in the class fill out a form, not just those who've turned up one the day the evaluations are scheduled. If you want to have some kind of reliable check, there are a few things like that. We're not going to go back to faculty even casually sitting in on other faculty classes, probably, or knowing that much about what's going on, a few faculty might, but I don't know, there are a variety of particular things, I think could be done to make it better. The situation has become so competitive, which is something that I do not like, and I didn't want to get into in my life. There are times when I had to be very competitive, and I can do it. And I can pay real close attention and do exactly the thing that's politically going to be just right at that point to get ahead because I need to get out of this place, but I don't want to live that way. And it became more and more competitive. K: Your response was to .... C: It was kind of to withdraw from it and to just not participate to a great extent. I like competing against absolute standards. In that way, you and the person next to you are in this together and you can help each other very freely, very openly help each other, and it's not going to detract from you if you help somebody else. It's just an odd atmosphere. I don't think it's good for academics to have that kind of competition. K:What do you need to say more about teaching, a little bit about models of teaching, as you look back over your own teaching, how would you say that evolved over the .... ? C: Well, I'm not sure how to say. When I started teaching, I was just terrified of being in front of an audience of any kind. I mean, terrified. Now, fortunately, people didn't usually notice that because I'd, whatever it was I did, they didn't realize. K: They couldn't see the butterflies in your stomach. C: No, they couldn't, and I must have only been here about a year when Harwood asked-me to lecture in behavioral science, which of course was a huge class. It was in L-4 and they didn't even have that aisle down the middle, there were solid rows of seats across and eventually there were even students lined up on the wall, it was packed in that room, 400 people. And so you had to get very organized, and that was really good for me. That was really a turning point because you know you're only going to have so much time and so many lectures. You have to time how much you're going to spend on each section, you have to really prepare for the lecture, and the only thing that I hated was I still had to wear high heels and the slant of that concrete floor as you walked down to get to the platform, was not a good Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 thing to have to do when you're already nervous. [laughs] You think you're going to fall flat on your face before you ever get up to the stage. K: What did you think about that? C: Oh, I was so glad when people started wearing blue jeans. Tennis shoes. God. K: When did that happen in the psychology department? C: Oh, I don't know. It happened to me as soon as it was possible. K: [something] C: No, no, before that. I don't know when, just when that started. K: Well, yeah, that might be interesting to try and reconstruct, though, I mean, that spoke to a change in campus culture. C: Yes, very much. Because I just have to figure that, when I first got here in '63, dearly, I had to wear skirts and I had to wear some kind of heels. K: How did you know that? Who told you? C: That's what everybody was wearing. And it would have been, with the movement in the late sixties, early seventies, with that student movement, that the change would have occurred. And I was certainly right there prepared for that dress code change. K: Was that a controversy at all among faculty? Were there those who did, and those who didn't? C: I don't recall then, but coming out of it, a bit later, I had one faculty person tell me, she was criticized for what she wore in terms of pants, and I think somebody else had some problems with that too. K: By a colleague or by somebody who counted, a supervisor or .... C: A colleague. Colleagues count more than deans. K: Well, I mean, somebody who, was, let me backtrack, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Somebody who was in a position of authority to determine the goodies. C: It was somebody up for T &P and I just heard one reason she wasn't being supported was because of the way she dressed. But that, I don't know Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 that that was true or not. And due to some actions taken by some others, meeting with various administrators, she was promoted. K: As far as you know. C: Yes, and I couldn't believe it was so ridiculous. I mean, I didn't care for the way she dressed either, but who would care? As long as she was morally correct, it wouldn't matter. K: What about other expectations for the faculty, other boundaries, were you aware of any boundaries beyond which it was not okay to go? C: Well, all the ordinary boundaries, but I can't think-that doesn't trigger anything. Certain things you can or can't do. K: I remember the legendary stories of people driving somewhere else to buy their alcohol, for example. C: Oh, yeah. Well, you see, my first job in public school teaching was in Bellevue, that was just before the boom in Bellevue, and they were very, very progressive, and it was okay for the teachers on Friday afternoons to go to a local bar for a drink. K: Instead of out of town, C: Right. Yeah. K: Was there a culture throughout that you know of [or] experienced, of faculty having social relationships outside of their collegiate relationships? C: What do you mean, social relationships? K: Were the people that you tended to spend time with outside of school other people at Western, or people in your community? C: Oh, other people at Western. Yeah, parties other people went to. K: In your department, or ... C: Both. Yeah, I did, I don't think I had a lot of contact with people outside of Western until now. Now I do. Now that I'm retired and back in the community and getting to know my neighbors after 25 years. Y'know, when you're working all the time, summers too, there's not any time to sort of chat around back and forth across the fence. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 K: So do you want to talk about that decision to not be a, a full-time faculty member anymore? C: Well, actually, it doesn't have much to do with academics. Just how I got into psychology, I flipped a coin. I had decided to retire early because my husband and I wanted to travel more. And then we were on a trip when he died, and I came back and I had one more quarter to teach before my retirement would take effect. The dean very nicely said I didn't have to retire if I didn't want to, I could undo all this that had been, but I wasn't making very clear decisions then, and I knew I wasn't. So I just thought well, I'll stick with this. I was like 58? When I retired. No, if I'd had more energy at the time, maybe I would have said, well, okay, I need to teach some more. But now I'm glad. I really am, because there's a lot of other things to do. Or there's such pleasure in just not doing anything. It's incredible to me that I can do it. I was scared, at first. I've spent my whole life either working or in school. How could I ever handle it? But it's doable. K; Well that's encouraging. C: Yes. Yeah. K: Do you find a connection between your academic life and plans for the next thirty years? . C: Because what I find I'm doing is exploring other things that aren't directly related to psychology. At all. I just came back from a Tai Chi retreat, and I'm traveling quite a bit. I started out traveling, making sure I was in a group of course, and now I get braver and braver and have been by myself several places. And so I'm doing that, and I'm going to spend time in California in the winter starting this October, and it's a place where there aren't many houses so lean see the stars. I need to find out more about the stars, do stargazing. I'm just really sort of going off in any kinds of directions I feel like. K: You sound like our incoming Fairhaven students. that's great. C: Right. K: Well, and you can imagine someone sitting and pouring over these interviews and writing a history of Western, what kind of things would you expect to see, and would want to make sure that got into, how do you feel about being part of that history? C: I feel pretty good about it. [laughs] I mentioned some of the directions that I didn't like but, that's not simply characteristic of Western, it's all of academia. You can't single out a given place and say, that's a fault of theirs, Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 when all they're doing is the same thing everybody else is doing. And so in that sense, it wouldn't be a criticism of Western. Western's always had good administrators. I've sent nasty memos to them some of the times, but they basically have had a good administration. And good faculty. K: So you've been pleased or satisfied with the directions and the changes. C: I, I think, yes. It's a very competent faculty, and they, I'm sure they stand up against any comparable institution, they really are good. K: Did you feel, I mean, you put in a lot of time and hard work, and you were always very good at what you do. Did you feel rewarded and validated for what you were doing? C: Sometimes. Other times not. I felt, it's hard to say howl felt. I just felt that the focus on rewards became more of a monetary thing in terms of step extension, rather than simply a recognition that you're doing a good job. And more, perhaps a more personal kind of reward I wasn't getting from the department, or from the institution. The way you got rewarded became, you got a salary increase, you got a step extension. And I didn't like that as, as the sole indicator, I didn't like the game they were playing in terms of competition. Because I mean, everybody, after they've been here a certain while, needs a step extension. It's, if somebody's doing a competent job, give them a raise every couple of years. Why do you have to go though all that stuff they're going through? So in that sense, I wasn't feeling very good about it. K: Is there anything that you wanted to do that you couldn't or didn't, for whatever reason? C: I don't think so, with regards to the institution, you mean. I don't think of anything right now. I think probably that you learn very quickly to modify your goals if you start realizing this isn't going to get you anywhere or . you can't do it anyway, head off in some other direction. K: You mentioned earlier feeling very strong about staying in the Northwest. Is that from being born and raised here? C: Well, I guess so. There are probably two reasons. That's one, the few times I had been away I had virtually gotten sick on the difference in vegetation. [laughs] I couldn't believe a place without fir trees. But I probably would have recovered from that eventually. Then my husband-to be was teaching here. My husband to be was teaching here. And that was a draw. But I probably wouldn't have come back to Western to teach if it hadn't been for my husband, and maybe because of the area. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 K: Did being a couple on the faculty affect your role on the faculty? C: I'm sure it did, but in ways that I was not immediately aware of. K: But wasn't even a conscious. Was not in your face. C: No. K: Was he aware of it? Did it make a difference with him? C: Maybe, but I don't, I don't really, well, he was so well established, we were both pretty well established within our departments by the time we got married, so it wasn't like we'd grown up as a faculty couple. There were several in the psych department that faced rather different kinds of problems I think. K: A nd you were in different departments. C: Right, in different, I think it really helps to be in a different department. I have the feeling it's probably better if you're not in the same department, if you're maybe not even too close on campus. K: How about other areas of campus life? Did you feel like you were pretty much stuck in that hall, or did you enter into the goings on in the community in any way? C: Uh, .... K: Not to mean you were stuck in Miller Hall C: No, Miller Hall is a place you can feel stuck in, you're right. K: . Especially if you're downstairs with the animal cages. C: I got involved. I would occasionally be asked to give a talk someplace off campus, or in a school somewhere, doing something like that, to get away from campus, but I don't know, maybe I was stuck in Miller Hall. Because the faculty club didn't come in until quite a bit later, and it was only partially used, really, as a place to get together. Which I enjoyed very much, but I've sort of stopped going. I wonder why I have because I have a lifetime membership having been there and then retired. But I didn't really get involved a lot in community things. No, but y'know, I would talk at a dorm sometime, or do this and that, and I was involved in the sense of being on committees. But then, everybody's that. K: .... talk about that? Was that a pleasant experience? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: It was as long as the committees had a task to do, and a set task, and it was clear we had to get through this and come to a decision. Or make a recommendation, and if it was a recommendation, it's good if then someone pays attention to it. But I got so I was happy to be on a committee so long as I was chairman, because I'll say, "We'll meet here, this is the question that we'll be considering, please come prepared." [laughs] And you can actually have a committee and have just one meeting. If you do that. K: But what about the ones where you go every week or every other week and stay on and .... C: No, T&P is probably the most serious committee. You know, it's obvious what you need to do, and it does take a lot of time. K: And they're really decisions, and ... C: Yes, they are, they're important decisions to the people involved and everybody takes that very seriously and spends a lot of time and care doing it. But just a committee for coming up with recommendations, that mayor may not be listened to, or read by anybody, is not my idea of how to spend your time. K: Did you have, did you feel like you had a network either regionally or nationally because of whatever you were doing? C: I had various opportunities which I really didn't pursue. And I'm . sorry I didn't. Y'know, somebody would see something, an article, and they had· an interest, and would write and say something and I might respond or not. I didn't pursue those kinds of contacts, and it was a shame. I think I should have. K: Can you imagine, connecting back to he campus at this point? C: Today, going into the halls, for the first time I thought, gee I'd really like to be organized and teach a class. I meant without having then the attendant, "Oh my god. Then I'll be back in all this other stuff." I could let everything else go, and say, I just want to have a class. But probably I won't. I might teach a class sometime now and then, but it's been really good for me to be away from it entirely for a while. K: Are you active in the retired faculty? C: Somewhat, I go on the walks. And I haven't done much of the other things. And I sort of don't want to hear more talks about people retiring. I Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 don't know. It's a good association, and they do a lot of things, they have some interesting trips. I might do more, but I'm half involved. K: Well, I'm sort of out of topics. Are there things that we haven't covered that uh, come to you? C: No. K: Parting thoughts or comments? C: No, what, I, who are you interviewing? K: Well, I think we can close this one off, so I can answer your question. [break in tape] C: Y'know, I mentioned that I had always refused to be a secretary for anything. I got here to Western, and I was put on the committee that Woodring chaired to establish Fairhaven College. I was the only woman on the ~ommittee, and wouldn't you know it, they decided they needed a secretary. Having spent my entire life refusing to be a secretary, they all agreed I should be the secretary. Well, I had only been here a little while. And there were about nine men sitting around there staring at me. K: And the chair was Woodring? C: Yes. And so I just didn't say anything, and I don't think I did this deliberately, but the next meeting I had lost the minutes. I've never lost anything like that in my life, and I just had to tell them, "I lost the minutes." [laughs] And they just laughed and never asked me to do any report again. They decided that they didn't need a secretary. K: Oh, that's a wonderful story. Would you call that passive aggression? C: I think it must have been. I couldn't believe I lost them. I never lose anything like that. But, of course I was really glad I had. I mean, I should have said then, "I'm not going to do this." K: Was it Woodring's presence that made it harder to do this time? C: Probably, yes. Yeah. K: Well, I have a vested personal interest in anything you remember about that whole process which was starting to create Fairhaven College. So if there are any things that you remember about that, .... Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Carol Diers Interview 1996 July 1 C: I think it was pretty much Woodring's idea. Fairhaven seemed to become very quickly what the Honors Program was. In terms of the way it functions, or the way it functioned when I was directing. It's now gone off in a different direction. I don't know why, because I think it was better when you didn't have high requirements for grade point average, for example. Students need to be able to explore a lot of areas, and not worry that you're going to get one "C" on their record, so that things will not work out for you later. It's just ridiculous. It's almost as if Woodring had this in mind, and this was a committee simply appointed to sort of ratify, certify and .... K: Oh, okay, so it wasn't a real... C: Well, a lot of people had suggestions, but I think it was probably really Woodring's idea. K: You were fairly close to him at times. C: At times, yes, but... K: Did he talk about it as it became what it became over the next 20 years? C: He did some to me and he did to my husband, and I sort of secondarily got a little information. But I think on the whole, he was maybe disappointed in some things and pleased with others. Probably expected that there would be change, but [laughs] K: Certainly was a structure that allowed that. My guess is that you might be happier now than in the first few years. C: be. I think so. It would be my guess too. I'm not sure, but I think it would K: And you have wonderful stories. Thanks for bringing that up. [End of Side Two. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123
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Title: Meridith Cary interview
Date: 1996-06-25
Description: Dr. Meridith Cary, Professor of English. Dr. Cary joined Western's faculty in 1964. In 1972 she and Marge Ryan team-taught a Women's literature course. She also helped design and promote the Women's Studies program at Western acting as manager for the first five years. She described a period when the administration cut faculty from all departments, and remembered that the English department faculty handled it with distinction. Dr. Cary has also authored works in a number of different genres.
Digital Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Records, Washington Women's History Consortium Collection
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project records
Local Identifier: wwucentennial_carym
Text preview (might not show all results): Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 An Interview with Meredith Cary June 25, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northw
Show moreMeredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 An Interview with Meredith Cary June 25, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Bellingham, WA 98225 Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 1 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 Interview with Meredith Cary, June 25, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson [Side One] K: This is Kathryn Anderson. I'm interviewing Meredith Cary, Professor of English, in my office at Fairhaven College on June 25, 1996. This interview is part of Western Washington University's Centennial Oral History Project, relating to Western's Centennial celebration. [break in tape] K: Okay, could you describe for me, in whatever terms you choose, the personal and professional paths that have brought you to Western? M: I've been thinking about this, obviously, and when you look back, you see patterns that aren't there when you're going through the experience. But I think I got into the profession because I was working as an academic librarian, and I got to help faculty members with their research. I was fascinated by it and so, inevitably, the next step was, "Why am I not doing my own research?" So that's the way I think that it occurred to me that I'd like to teach. And a second thing was that I had a little girl, and as she became more of a person, I realized I was spending seventy, seventy-five hours a week on the job. I am a workaholic, you see. So instead of imagining that I would change my nature, it dawned on me that I needed work where I could do a lot of it at home, and be there for her. So those two things came together very easily, and I went back to graduate school. I resigned my job. I left my marriage to a very controlling man, and went back to graduate school. I came to the University of Washington because there was a man there who was the only scholar who had published a book length study in English about the Irish novelists that I was interested in. I thought it just seemed like a miracle that he was actually somewhere where I would have access to him. It turned out to be one of the most fortunate things that could possibly happen to a person who was launching an academic career, because he was a mentor in every way. He taught me everything that was appropriate to my personality in regard to teaching. He also taught me a great deal about the way you go at research, the way you add things up and wait, and different elements and so on. As well, the University of Washington when I came there was one of the most amazingly gender neutral universities. I couldn't believe it. I'd never experienced gender neutral group activity and it just seemed like paradise. It was a miracle. So when I was ready to graduate and was looking for a teaching job, they were hiring here at Western. And so I came up. Western unfortunately wasn't like the UW, but the chair who hired me was, I owe him an endless debt because K: Who was it? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 2 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 M: Edwin Clapp. He was generous. He encouraged everyone, male or female. The year that I was hired, half of the incoming crop was female. I don't know that he did it mathematically, but he saw to it that there was no difference made in scheduling and respect. Whatever kinds of fostering he could do, he did. And so if my trip out here, it was a blind trip in a way, I'd never been to the Northwest before, but y'know, I happened, fortunately, to get two mentors right off the bat who were just wonderful to me. K: And the professor at the UW was? M: Malcolm Brown. He's a major scholar. He unfortunately is dead now but he was a major scholar in George Moore studies. K: When you came to Western did you consider other options? M: I applied all over the northwest because I wanted to stay in this part of the country, and it K: Did it become home? M: Yes, and it'll stay home I think. The only university that, or the only school, because I applied at community colleges, I mean, I applied everywhere. The only school that was hiring was Western, except for one of the community colleges in Seattle. But when they found out that I intended to finish my Ph.D., they said they had problems with Ph.D.'s in community colleges, and maybe it's true. I felt like it wouldn't have applied to me, but y'know. K: So that was a major transition from library to M: Yeah, and I like library work, but I could see that if I was going to really enjoy being a mother, there had to be a change. And I've never regretted it, I like teaching too, I seem to like work. K: When you came to Western, how would you describe what you found? M: Well, the first year I was here, we were expected to throw women out of class if they wore jeans. [laughs] That gives you an idea of how things have changed. I didn't, of course. But, I felt like I was taking a risk in refusing to enforce that rule. K: Now that was in '64? M: Yeah, it was still a rule in the spring of '65. No one mentioned it after the spring of '65, so I don't know when it was officially backed off from. But you know, the sixties were beginning to crank up, and it would've been hard Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 3 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 to maintain, I think, for any length of time after that. But we all took seating charts. I quit doing that when my seating charts started coming back with Mickey Mouse, and The Pope and so on. There were a lot of students who wouldn't officially say, "I won't cooperate with this," but they would find other ways. Y'know, the sixties was a fairly lively time, and so they would be there, they would participate, but they would participate in ways that made it clear that they weren't going to do just a rule because it was a rule. And so that loosened the university up a great deal as far as I'm concerned, for the good. I found the orientation toward rules quite disturbing, partly because I'd been on the wrong side of rules so many times as a student myself. And so as it loosened up, I got more comfortable here. But it was a very male dominated environment when I first came here. K: What does that mean? M: Well, the department was primarily male, the reading lists were almost exclusively male. The students didn't seem to react one way or the other. I mean, they didn't, so far as I could tell, they didn't treat me any differently from how they treated their male instructors. But the university itself, as opposed to the student body, seemed very oriented toward male values, male intentions, male careers and so on. The turning point was slow to materialize, and in fact, y'know, I mean, there are still changes going on. Marge Ryan was a tenured member of the department when I came here, and she approached me and another untenured member of the faculty, suggesting that we team-teach a women's lit course, and so far as I know, that was the first women's, distinctly women's course taught on campus. It was wonderful fun, we had a lovely time. K: When was that? M: It was maybe '72, early seventies. I'm not exactly sure when we taught it as an experimental course. K: How did you think about what a women's lit class would be? M: Well, [laughs] we had an odd experience in fact, because I mean, we all thought yeah, this is a good idea, y'know, it's long overdue, and so on, the kinds of things you say to yourself. But at the same time, none of us had studied women writers. I went through y'know, what is it, twenty-two years of education, or something like that, without ever reading the work of a woman. K: Wow. M: Yeah, I mean, we're talking, y'know, cave days. And so we talked a while about what we would do for a reading list, and then finally we said Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 4 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 okay, we will gather up women who obviously deserve a major reputation, and get major attention from contemporary readers, and then, we'll set aside the issue of whether in fact they've been given a major build up. So we went down the list, and they were all just in total despair, y'know. And at the end of the course, all of us were just kind of dragging along the floor, because we had taught this steady stream of stories about victims, about torment, about insanity, suicide, y'know, on down the list, and all of it just utterly despairing work. And so we agreed after that, I mean, we kind of got together and said, we can't do this again, it's hard on us and bad for the students, no doubt. And, although I don't think it was bad for the students, I mean. One of the books that we read was Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, and some of our students had just practically memorized it. So, it didn't worry them, about the negative implications of all that stuff we were working at, so it was a major turning point really, in my attitude. K: How did the students respond, how would you--? M: They felt like, as far as I know, there's always that tact and courtesy between faculty and students, but as far as I could sense, they felt like they were involved in something new. They were excited about it from that point of view. They also reacted to the team teaching model, which they seemed to enjoy. And I did too. I think it is a good way to go into a field that is fairly new, because you get more than one voice. They came in with suggested readings, which doesn't happen in a standard course. They asked for reading lists. It was a much more interactive experience, in terms at least of how they treated us. We also found out that some of them were meeting in conversation groups. They would, if they knew each other, they'd meet in someone's home, but others of them who didn't particularly know anybody before the class began started meeting at the union, y'know, for coffee or whatever, or having dinner together so they could kind of brown bag. So the whole experience took on an almost club-like tone in a lot of ways outside of class, and then inside of class, they would bring up what amounted to major research questions, y'know, just things that had never been dealt with, so we couldn't refer them to the library, because there wasn't anything in the library either. 50-K: Sounds like a ready audience. M: Very. K: this class that you were developing. M: Yes. We felt like it was overdue on the basis of the student reaction. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 5 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 K: When did that class, did you, or did you ever begin to teach that class where the students weren't quite so maybe tuned into the theme of the class or would you--? M: Y'know, that class eventually developed into the women in literature class that we teach now as a GUR, and also as one of the core courses in the women's studies program. And I still feel like it serves a purpose that a lot of our classes don't. K: In what way? M: Well, we teach texts that they might even encounter in another class, but we do it from the point of view of, all right, what questions do you encounter in reading this work that cause you to turn back and look at the experience going on around you? And y'know, that business of putting literature together with your actual daily life, not what you say about your life, but in fact the experience you have. That's a process that we don't really emphasize in a standard lit course. I think maybe we should, y'know, and maybe eventually one of the impacts of the feminist movement in literary studies will be that. I hope so. But at the moment, the tendency is the other way. I think the feminist movement has been somewhat threatening to people who don't want to deal with content and don't want to interface content with life, and so they're retreating into theory, which of course is a really easy way to avoid the whole feminist question. Ultimately it'll turn back, I feel confident it will. K: Were you referring to feminist theory, when you were talking just now, or literary theory in general? M: Literary theorists in general. They tend to retreat into theory which then discusses y'know, concepts that are almost abstracted from the individual texts. Instead of returning the texts to the life implied by the text. And a second thing is that if you step back into theory, you deal less with the implications of the text, so if the text has limited or offensive concepts, it doesn't matter, because you can still talk about structure and y'know, thought and so on. The structure of thought, rather than the content. K: So do you want to say any more about how that, how you see that course having evolved over the last, gee, almost 25 years, with teaching, or some version of the women's literature classes on campus. M: Yeah, yeah continuously. It's gotten far more, well, maybe what I should say is it's gotten less, at first it was so clearly an experiment, and we didn't know what we were doing. We had clear views of what we hoped would happen, and in fact it did happen to a large extent. We wanted students to take a fresh look at the literature instead of just reading what they Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 6 7 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 ( ) were told and responding in the context that they knew they were supposed to respond. The, now, well, when we taught Lessing the first time, y'know, there were maybe two short essays and there was no other criticism. Y'know, now she's an industry, y'know, so one thing that's changed enormously is that you can find scholarship on almost any woman writer, and sometimes there'll be surprises about that. At one point, you could get paperback editions of women writers, where you couldn't get paperback editions of men's writing, of men's writing where the reputation was fifteen or twenty times as big. So it, the impact of the women's movement has been, y'know, I guess you'd say uneven, but it's certainly been clear. The advantage of having research out there is that the students don't feel like they're so on their own. They're not so dependent on the interpretation that the teacher has. And they're not so vulnerable also, to whatever the classroom group might say was true. If they disagree with the class, they can run to the library now, which is true in most literature classes, but wasn't true in women's lit in the beginning. The population, the students who take the class, that's been fairly consistent, ten or fifteen percent men, right along. One time one of my male students said that he wanted me to sign a blue slip for him, a note to let him in, even though the class was full, because he said, he really, and I asked him why, y'know, because, as I always do, and he said, that he really loved women's writing because they were just so into their pain. [laughs] That caused me to do a little thinking, y'know, I'm not doing songs to pain in here. And so, y'know, you never know where an insight is going to come from, when, if you really get out there and allow your students to tell you what they're thinking, it can help you adjust your own thinking. So, that's a change for me, I started consciously stepping aside from the whole victim concept of women's lit. K: Into what? M: Into, well there are a lot of buzz-words for it now. But to phrase it without some of the buzz, into literature which depicts women who are able to formulate what they want out of their life and also are able to organize themselves to reach for what they want. One early stage of that was that the, a lot of the characters who are in that process would be extremely confrontational and cranky and in your face and so on and so on, but now, another recent change that I think is a very encouraging one is that there are getting to be some novels where you just have a woman who's going about her life, and doesn't feel she has to set the whole world straight, all she has to do really is y'know, be appropriate in her own roles and see that she does have roles, and that she's not trapped by them, she can move among them. And that's just an aspect of experience. So the attitude toward victimization, the attitude toward difficulty, the attitude toward social roles, all those things have changed quite a bit, fairly recently I think, within the last five to ten years. It's a major difference. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 K: Would you say that the class is exclusively about that now, or more of a balance, or--? M: Probably scattered all over the place, but where in the beginning the class was almost focused on being a victim, and then a transition phase was to say, we're valuable because we're victims, and we're, we pride ourselves on being victims, and then, beyond that to say what's good about it, [laughs] y'know, and then kind of turning a corner, and introducing the concept of--, if you want a life, then it had better be your life. But we do still have a large group in any of the women's classes that I teach at least, where they're very interested in being a victim and they feel almost defrauded when they read material that doesn't present women in that light. So it's, I don't, I guess I wouldn't call it a balance. But, but there is a considerable scatter, in terms of reactions. K: Maybe this would be a good time to go back a bit and just talk about how the women's studies program developed and how this one class with you and Marjorie Ryan, to what it has become. What are your memories of that? M: Well, yeah, and I, I just talk about my memories. Because I haven't gone back to my files to see, but there was a group, and I have to tell about this in terms of what I was told, because I wasn't part of the original group. There was a group of students, concerned students, I think were the beginning, and they approached a couple of faculty members where they thought they would get a hearing, and sure enough they did, as far as I understand it. They operated as a group, they designed a program, and this would have been in I think '71. And they wanted, the university had what they called innovative funds back then. If you had something, a program preferably, not just a class, but a program that you wanted to experiment with, the university would fund it for two years, after which whatever body would be the appropriate body, would have to pick up the funding. So basically they give you a two year window to do your experiment in, if it turned out to be a valid experiment, then off it would go. This group offered a proposal to the innovative funding, and they were turned down. And, they couldn't tell why they were turned down, they didn't know whether it was just frankly sexist, or whether they hadn't presented it right, or something wrong with the program, or, y'know, all the kinds of questions that you go through in a situation like that. I'd been pretty active in university wide politics by that time, and so they thought I might, I'd been on a lot of committees, and they thought I might be able to figure out what really had happened. And so they came to me, and I said, well, I'd like to see the proposal that they had offered, and y'know, without getting into a ton of nitty-gritty, what it boiled down to in my mind was that two things had probably been against them. One was that they had gone to committee meetings as a group and that looked too much like a sit-in, y'know, and so, it got backed up, y'know, for reasons that Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 8 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 had nothing to do really with gender. And then the second thing is that as they described their proposal, they had tried to make the need for it clear, and as they had tried to explain the need for it, they made it, by accident, sound like a social movement rather than like an academic topic, and so I said, that I would be willing to try again. I hated it in a sense, because I knew I'd have to go back to the same committees that had already turned it down. But I thought well, y'know, let's try it one more time. And so I rewrote the proposal, and I said, I'll go alone, at least in the first stages of this. And that did work. I had, it was perfectly true, I had been in enough committee situations that I knew the tone that would irritate everyone to sort of [laughs] automatically and so I was able to avoid that, and also able to put an extremely academic context on the material. And the combination was enough, so we got innovative funds that supported us for two years. And since I was up to my elbows in it by then anyway, I did serve as the manager for the program for the first five years. Our funds ran out at the end of two years, and mercifully we had set it up, we had done it so that it would look academic, but what we had, which it was, in fact, but what we had done is get the departments to stand behind the three core courses, and so when we ran out of funds, the departments did continue to teach those courses, so the program didn't disappear. But I spent three more years then after that struggling to get funds, and I couldn't, and so I knew it wasn't, I had tried for three years in fact, because I knew the Dean, that was James Davis, I knew he very much fostered academic roles for academic type women. So I kept thinking, it'll work, it'll work, but it didn't, and so finally my last straw was I had heard that Fairhaven might be willing to pick it up, at least in a small way, if arts and sciences wasn't able to come up with support and so at that point I felt free to resign and say I was resigning because of the lack of support, whereupon I handed it over to you, as you know. [laughs] K: So the actual structure of the minor, who designed that? Did you revise that in that process? M: Yeah, that was part of my effort to make it look clearly academic. I felt that any program which looked like what they were calling a social agenda, the committees that had voted against it were calling it a social agenda, and my guess was that that was sincere, because I knew some of the men that were on those committees, I knew them personally. And so I thought let's be high-minded here. Let's assume that this is a genuine reservation rather than a vendetta, and I have never been sorry that I took that approach because it worked and I think a lot of, it's one of the reasons I feel so strongly about avoiding a sense of being a victim. If you think you're a victim, of course you are. You see, whereas I went back to them describing an academic, a clearly academic program. We have three basic courses, and then our second step was going to be that we wanted to design an overview course, which would come after the introductory courses. We didn't ask for an intro course, because we were afraid that they would dismiss that as more social Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 9 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 movement type stuff. We didn't get our capstone course, but we did get our academic courses in the departments. And the fact that they were in the departments, you see, gave them visibility as academic courses, because if I was able to persuade individual chairs, three of them, after all, that these courses were legitimate additions to their curriculum. Then that helped the committees see that well, y'know, the chairs involved think so, and all those chairs were men, and so there was no sense that we were just gathering up the women on campus and asking them to teach. And in fact some of the women on campus that I approached to contribute to the program gave me a lecture instead. Y'know what I mean, it wasn't a men against the women situation, because some of the women were far more outspoken than the men were. K: What were their objections? M: Social movement, basically. They felt that it was, that they were in a standard academic program and they were female and they never mentioned it and why should we mention it, and y'know, that kind of thing. They insisted that they saw nothing except a social movement involved. And I can't assess it, y'know, that may be a perfectly genuine reaction. I had come through a strictly male program too, but on the other hand, but you see, having a daughter really improves your life, or at least widens your view, because when my little girl really disliked school. But when she was ten, she was reading a book about frontier America, and she discovered that girls weren't required to go to school, but boys were, and she came home just absolutely foaming. It was one of those topics that I found it very hard to talk about. Why weren't girls required to go to school back then? And from there it's an easy step to y'know, why aren't men and women both learning about the contributions of women, and so on. And so, I've always been ready to think that the reaction against this kind of curricular innovation may be perfectly genuine, and genuine on the part of a person who just hasn't confronted it on a personal level. I know that it's quite often not a popular attitude, because people would like it to be simple and straightforward, but I don't believe it is. K: Did you observe conversions? M: Oh, yes. yeah. Yes. One of the odd little experiences of my academic life here has been, I was visible in affirmative action contexts in various ways, and people who have, women who have fought me in one way or another have sometimes over the years called me and long after the fact, so that I have y'know, forgotten all about it, and apologized for having fought me and then asked me for help. [laughs] And y'know, it's one of those disconcerting things, you would rather they would just simply ask for help, and not say why they're embarrassed to do so. But conversions do happen, yeah. And I think they usually happen on a personal basis. Some of my male colleagues Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 10 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 have gotten interested because they have little daughters in grade school now. Y'know, that kind of thing. My students, it seems to me, have always been pretty liberal. So my problems of confronting pressure have generally been through difficulties with colleagues rather than the student body, [who] have seemed very very open to the topic always to me. I don't know if that's, y'know, they select the course, so they must be wanting to consider it. That could be, y'know, selfselection. K: But that course has always been very popular. M: Yes. Right. It has, and it's popular with me as well. I thoroughly enjoy teaching it, and I do think, y'know that a teacher who is having fun helps a class to have fun, so. K: If you could have gotten enough funding, what would your vision have been? M: My vision then would have been the same as it is now. I do see women's studies as an academic discipline. I would have liked to see the almost every department have a core course, the sciences clearly need a course which would add the achievements of women to the history of science. The emphasis is not strictly a humanities emphasis, in my mind. The problems that women face in the academy, of never seeing themselves in an academic context, I think those shouldn't have to be discussed, they should simply be demonstrated in reverse. That is, the curriculum for everybody includes the achievements of women. And so y'know, I'd like to see a kind of history course added, that would parallel whatever history course every department obviously does have, and sort of feed information about women into that, until it's no longer necessary. Until there is a balance in the basic course. But I don't see any evidence that the balance is being achieved, so in my opinion, it's still needed, to have a parallel course feeding in. And then I'd like to see in the departments where it's relevant, that is, in any department where part of the topic is human development and personality, and action, I'd like to see a progression within the curriculum that would recognize the equal contribution of women, and in my mind it is equal, but it's never presented as such. So for example, if you're studying history, you would need to revise all the history courses so they don't focus primarily on war, and on politics, and instead talk about lifestyle changes in the advent of technology into daily life, which has a heavier impact on the lives of women usually than it does on the lives of men. I do that kind of background lecturing in my, when I'm teaching Victorian lit. I hand out a timeline which one of my colleagues asked for a copy of, but he also called it trivia. But y'know, I mean, I was delighted that he was interested in it, the first enclosed cooking stove, and so on. Well, it is trivia, but at the same time it's crucial change for women's lives. And in literature I would like to see the profile of personality adjusted to take into account the fact that female Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 11 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 personalities very often are different, maybe that's an innate or biological difference, but also, clearly it is influenced by the kinds of pressures that society offers. And I'd like to see personality described in terms of that. It seems to me that both of those possibilities should be represented. Because I don't think that there's one model of personality. I don't think that there's one model of female any more than there's one model of male, y'know, so, what I would see as the ultimate outcome of this is that as less exclusive presentation entered in, and at first you need almost a parallel curriculum, but as less exclusive interpretations became possible, then what you would have is a range of human behavior and human attitude and human potential, rather than the kind of either or that we get now. Men, and women. I don't, that seems so reductive to me, as to be almost useless. But, unless Western wants to set up a second university, in which women get equal presentation, it's a long road. K: It is indeed. Just a couple more questions about this. When did these classes become part of the General University Requirements? Shortly after they were created as part of the curriculum, right? M: Aren't you the source of that? K: No, they were GURs before. M: Already? K: Yeah. [pause] I can find that out, I just. M: Yeah. K: The reason I ask is that, well, go ahead. M: No, I was going to say, I know that they've been part of GUR for a long time. I don't remember. I remember going to a lot of committees to get things approved. And I remember battling with the curriculum, the university curriculum committee. But I had forgotten, I guess I did go there as the program manager. K: I think you must have, and then shortly afterwards, I think it was in '78, they threatened to eliminate-M: Yes, they, that's happened a couple of times. K: And you wrote a letter to the student newspaper or Fast or whatever. M: Yes. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 12 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 K: objecting to their characterizing women in literature as narrow focus. M: Yeah, yeah. That's the reason that I remember going to that committee meeting because the chair was trying to illustrate the problem, and he said that some things are too narrow. And then he said, for example you can't teach medicine by focusing, I'm paraphrasing obviously, focusing exclusively on the bile duct. [laughs] Whereupon I thought, oh, good, this is just the opportunity we need. And so I was able to be cranky in an amusing way. And the result of that letter was very very rewarding, let me hurry on to say, because a number of men around on campus and other departments called me to laugh in my ear and tell me that that was a good, y'know, the letter had done the job. And I do think that an amused response sometimes is the best approach, particularly in an area like this where a lot of people are simply responding on the basis of the way they grew up, and aren't necessarily out to do anybody any harm, or to ignore anybody or anything of the sort. You, anybody tends to react automatically until they look at what they're doing, so I think sometimes humor is the best approach. K: I'm interested in your accommodating style, or the style that you're describing as a strategic one, as a sort of pragmatic one, and so forth, and I know that you spent some of the early part of your life in what some people might call the South, or at least-M: Yeah. K: And I'm just wondering, this is kind of an aside, but I'm wondering how you would attribute the source of this approach to human relationships. M: I think it's partly just my nature. I think confrontation achieves nothing, and I've seen that demonstrated enough that I believe it on the basis of my experience as well as just my nature. But yes, I do, I come from a southern community and mercifully for me my dad was, he was a real equal, and I'm almost a stereotype in that respect. You know the studies that say that fathers who have aspirations for their daughters have more of an impact. He never, he had one son and two daughters and he never made any distinction among the three of us. I mean, he would give us all the same old speech about, y'know, basically vocational guidance. My mother on the other hand, was very very much into southern, how would you characterize it? She felt that women's roles were clear-cut and that we should stay within them and all the kinds of jittery things that made me uncomfortable as a child. She thought they were right, and so I learned very early on to deal with power that I couldn't escape and couldn't win against, and to go on liking her. I liked my mom, but she was really hard to handle. And that's excellent experience, y'know, if you can deal with your mother who thinks you're doing everything wrong and still go on liking her, which I did manage to do, then you've been trained. And so I did come out of it partly because the Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 13 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 whole community was very much into girls should be seen, and they should be polite and they should, y'know all the kinds of things. But I also saw that you can find a way to have your own life in that context. I left, as you notice, and I wouldn't even consider going back. And one of the things that I find in the Northwest, that just seems really miraculous to me is a sense of emphasis on the individual which was missing from the environment I grew up in. Northwesterners aren't any more miraculous probably, in terms of gender, than you might find elsewhere, but they very definitely emphasize individuality, and so if you make it clear that you are an individual as that being primary ahead of your gender, then you get a hearing in the Northwest in a way that I haven't discovered elsewhere. I've lived in various parts of the country, and this is the only place I know where the individual really is granted primary respect, so yeah, I think my negotiating skills very clearly came out of my childhood to circle back to your question. K: So it's the culture or the climate that keeps you in the Northwest. Or both? M: Yes. That's true. Both. I love the climate. The climate is absolutely right for me. It's beautiful, there's space. We aren't overrun by population yet. But yeah, it's the culture here that I can't turn away from, it's exciting to watch. K: but. I'd like to go back actually we're at the end of the tape so I'll pause here, [Side Two] K: When you consider significant changes or things that have happened over that period of time, you talked a little bit about what the campus was like in terms of the students and teaching when you first came. Can you talk about it more in terms of the campus community of faculty as a whole, and what you see as being the sort of high points since then? M: The tone of the student body has always been extremely warm and outgoing and I think we have an extraordinary student body. The faculty has changed enormously though, and partly I think in response to the women's movement, and then, also in terms of an emphasis on getting other ethnic groups represented. When I first came here, the faculty at least, in the parts of the university that I came into contact with was almost exclusively white male. And they weren't all difficult about that necessarily, but you just walked around campus and you were aware of the fact of being very very much out of step in gender terms, and I'm sure that anybody who was of a different ethnic background felt the same. That's changed enormously, and it's had a ripple effect. It's more than just that you look around and you see people who represent a huge variety. The intellectual constructs that you Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 14 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 encounter have changed, and so where, when I came here, I couldn't quite believe how traditional the campus seemed. K: Traditional in what way? M: Academically. Y'know, I mean, you had your list of historical classes in literature, and then you had your two or three special topics classes which were again, very very traditional and you could have found them on, say seventy percent of the campuses nationwide. But the other side, to balance that is the fact that I've always had a feeling that if you organized your thoughts and made a case for a class or an approach that wasn't conventional, that you would be heard and you would be given your chance. And the curriculum, the structure of the curriculum suggests that, because, we have always had experimental numbers. So if you're teaching something that's really off the wall or where you generally want to try and see if it would work, you can teach a course as a one time thing as an experiment. If you like it, think it worked well for the students, and can show good student evaluations, then you can take those to the curriculum body and your department and ask that it be made permanent and so that structure of curricular change invites a more liberal attitude toward curriculum it seems to me. And I don't know, how many campuses have a structure like that? I don't know of other schools where, y'know, that extreme generosity toward experiment is right out there. It's been helpful because when we've clearly needed to change, the mechanism is already in place, so we don't have to invent the possibility before we go for the change. The department, our English department now is going almost to the other extreme, y'know, because, as I said, when I first came here, every, all the classes taught seemed very traditional to me. But now, we're going into multicultural trends so strongly that the primary question that we're dealing with now, is to what extent do we have an obligation to the students to present the traditional materials so that when they leave us, they'll know what the society at large considers to be traditional material. It is a major issue, because the national tests that help you get into graduate school are still extremely traditional, and so y'know, if you go through a quite liberal undergraduate education and then take the Graduate Record Exam, you're in trouble, and so, y'know, that's our primary question at the moment, is to try to balance the needs of our students who might want to go on to graduate school with the needs of our students who want to see life as it actually is. Another element of that I think is the development of a concept of Pacific Rim, and that's a big change, because when I first came here, only black students were considered as part of the curriculum, but now that has shifted and we have an emphasis on Asian material and Asian influence, which seems highly appropriate given where we are. A second element is the implication of the fact that what are we? eighteen miles from the Canadian border? [laughs] Y'know, when I first came here, if you mentioned Canadian lit, people would just sort of stop talking and look at you for a while. So that's been the primary change that Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 15 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 I've seen in my own department, is a kind of departure from the kind of mind set that also had rules officially throwing women out if they wore jeans. I mean, y'know, there's been just a complete reversal, in mindset, and then y'know, various demonstrations of that, it seems to me. K: You would have been here at a time of pretty significant transition in the nature of the college. M: Yes. We were a college when I came here, and so I was here during the days when we debated whether or not we should ask for university status, what it meant, was it going to become a killer option, were we all going to have to publish a book every two years, y'know, all the kinds of anxieties that a basic change of that sort generates. I don't think it was an actual choice on our part because the legislature had decided to redesign the structure of higher education state-wide. But the debate that went on locally treated it as a choice that we could make. K: You also witnessed the expansion of the faculty numbers. M: Yeah. K: When you came that must have been quite a number. M: Yes, I was hired in the, in an expansionist period. '63, I think beginning in '63, there was a lot of hiring for several years. I've also been through a hideous contraction at one point, our department was cut exactly in half. And it was gruesome, but I have to say this for my colleagues. They behaved in a way which I will always remember with the highest of respect. When it became apparent that we were going to have to cut every , we would cut some programs altogether, and then lose faculty within each of the programs that we maintained, some faculty members took reduced assignments if they could afford to, to leave more courses available for people who had huge commitments, young children or something of the sort. Other people would, I'll never forget one man who looked around and realized that there was a choice that was going to be made between himself and a woman, they were both untenured in a, in one program that was going to lose faculty, and so he went to her and said, let's both apply for jobs, and whichever one of us gets it, goes. And I thought, I've always thought how admirable. Y'know, it's just the faculty, I just, they were wonderful. Y'know, they faced this dreadful situation with real gallantry. And so it made me feel good about my colleagues. The loss was supposed to be temporary, but it lasted forever and ever and ever, it seemed like. And so all of us who stayed had plenty of chance to decide whether we were glad because we were teaching enormous overloads y'know, We were teaching basically double what we had been teaching the year before. One of the accrediting groups that came through said, called us "heroic," [laughs]. Which I've always taken pride in, and said Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 16 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 that it was, we shouldn't be asked to do this forever, y'know. But the return of our faculty ratio has been very slow, so we've had to be heroic for a long time. K: In those early days, were you at all aware of how the expansion was changing the campus for people who had been here for a while? Were there tensions there that you remember, or was that sort of not part of--? M: No, that, I think you're always somewhat aware of that, the department had been, I was, I was a brand new faculty member, but I had been a faculty wife, and so I was aware of the kinds of things that go on between colleagues. The old guard, y'know, there's always an old guard. The old guard had a recollection of a campus and a program and a department that was highly controlled, and the, where they had faced really no challenges so far as I know. They might, I suppose, surely would describe it differently. But . to me coming in as a new member and as an outsider, it seemed to me that there had been very few challenges. And with our student body, they are amiable and they give their teachers the benefit of the doubt, and so my guess is that there probably weren't challenges in the classroom either. And they felt that we were rolling over them, and I suppose we were, y'know. I mean, there was this huge influx of new people, and all of us charged up and sure that we were going to change the world and we did. So I think they felt at a loss. That may be going on again. The new crop of very young faculty that we're hiring sort of look around and obviously think, well, let's set all this aside. Y'know, so it's interesting to me to see it again, but I'm on the other side of the division now. K: What's that like for you? M: It's okay. Because the students still treat me as they always did. And so I, and my dedication has always been to the students, and so that is a continuous part of my life. The second thing is, though, and this is probably unique to me as a faculty member, I've always been yelling and belle ring for change, and so, when the new people come in and call for change, it sounds like an old song to me. And so I don't feel that they're going to take away anything that would have seemed like an oasis. And mostly the changes they call for, I heartily agree with, and have called for them myself, many's the time. So, you know, it depends partly on your attitude toward change. But the other side is, that it is extremely interesting to me in a sociological way to watch happening again what was happening when I was first here, so I do see my experience in terms of cycles and I don't know, is thirty years an academic cycle? Anyway, y'know, that's what it's been. We seem to be back about where we were thirty years ago in terms of the kinds of questions, the reactions to situations and so on. It does seem like a cycle to me rather than a flatout change. But for me personally it's not a bad thing. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 17 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 K: What else, if you were reading a centennial history of Western, what in your experience would you want to make sure, would you like to see noted in terms of things that might have happened while you were here? M: I guess, I'm not at all sure that this is the kind of thing you have in mind in asking the question, but I guess to me the most important thing about Western is the student body, and I, it seems extraordinary to me, year after year, so it isn't that I'm responding to one group of students, it's these people, year after year, they're remarkable. And the university goes through a wide variety of stances you might say, but they have maintained, whatever battles have gone on in the faculty, they have managed always to remember their primary commitment is to the student body, and that's helped orient the faculty as well, I think. So y'know, where some universities become so riven and turned into factions and hardened into their positions through confrontation and so on, that hasn't happened here. There have been battles, I don't pretend that isn't true, but, because the faculty, they fight their battles, but when they go to their classroom, they still have a primary focus on their students. I think that makes a total difference. And that's the thing about Western that has kept me here. Does that seem true? K: Yeah. I'm not sure how I would explain it. Do you have any thoughts? M: No, I don't. K: Okay. M: I don't know where it comes from, but it's the reality that I experience every time I walk on campus. And it seems crucial to me. It's what Western offers. K: Let me switch gears just a little bit in terms of your professional life as a scholar and writer. I know that you've chosen to organize your life so that you have time off to do that, one way or another, with sabbaticals and leaves, that you publish under more than one name in different genres. M: That's true. Yes. K: I know Caroline Heilbrun said she had to hide that for many years, because that was not acceptable at Columbia. How have you found that activity here at Western? M: Well, when I was first, when I first started writing fiction, I wrote women's fiction, and I am still very much interested in that. [laughs] Well, anything that it deals primarily with women's lives and it doesn't depict them in a context of defeat is, in the publishing industry, called women's. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 18 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 Okay. [laughs] That's a rough and ready definition. At first I was very very pleased to y'know, it was hard to crack the fiction publishing market, and so I was delighted and ran around sort of announcing, look! look! look! Lucky me. And I very quickly learned that my colleagues weren't at all enamored of my second career. So I did face a certain amount of pressure, but then when I published last year, I published a detective novel, and that turns out to be socially acceptable in an academic context. [laughs] So, I don't understand the difference, and I don't suppose I ever will, and probably don't even want to, but I get positive treatment, positive feedback from my colleagues about publishing detective fiction, so that's nice. I appreciate, I always appreciate kindness. [laughs] It's easier to deal with than the alternative. But I haven't lost my interest in women's fiction, nevertheless. But I don't talk about that particularly on campus because it's not wanted, I guess you could say. Y'know. I do help students, on the other hand, who want to' break into fiction writing, and I don't care what they're writing if it's something that I read. I don't attempt to help students who are writing something that I don't read, but if it's something that I read, then I do help. And my students don't seem to mind what I'm working on. But I was very disconcerted. I went public with my mystery writing very very hesitantly because I had kind of gotten my ears pinned back over the other, and, and then I had the odd experience of the newspaper identified me when my mystery came out, and so, I was sitting in class, cheerfully nattering on about 19th century Victorian writers, y'know, and after an hour and a half of this, class was dismissed and one of my students came up and leaned both hands on the table in front of me and leaned over so that he could make sure that he had established eye contact and said, SO. Do you write mysteries? And I was certainly taken aback by that. Because I was still thinking about Elizabeth Gaskell, y'know, I wasn't at all thinking about my own, y'know, alternative. [laughs] So it is disconcerting, since it's so different from my on campus obligations. But I'm working it out in the sense that I'm dealing with it, by saying okay, I'm available to any student who wants to write for the commercial market, and wants to talk about writing on that level, and that's bridged the gap for me, so now I know how to behave when I'm confronted with this. At first I was just totally, y'know, flapped, but I have figured out how to behave about it now. K: Since you want to dwell on the sort of positive aspects, what would you characterize in the time that you've been here, as the sources of support, as the most important sources of support for you as a faculty member, for you as a colleague, for you as a teacher? M: My students have always been a, just an absolute resource, and when RD. died, I don't, I couldn't, I don't know what I would have done if, but I took ~ week off, and then I came back, and I apologized for missing. And they were just there, y'know, so. The support I've had from faculty also is remarkable though, and when I went into dealing with the women's question, I knew that I would make a lot of enemies and I did. But at the Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 19 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 same time I made a lot of friends, so it was as if my saying this is my agenda, and I'm going to have to y'know, state my piece here, it's as if they, whether they agreed with me or not, they understood what I was doing, and that was okay. And so a lot of colleagues who clearly didn't care one way or the other about women's literature did nevertheless support me in faculty meetings, that, yes, this is something that our students should have access to. And so they took that approach rather than taking a stand on the issue itself. They took a stand on this should be available for students who want it. As long as the courses enrolled, they would support my offering them. And the amount of help I've had varies enormously, because from time to time other members of the faculty haven't wanted to teach in the program or sometimes a woman would teach a course once and decide no, it was too stressful, because y'know, your students do look on you, they want to use your life, you know that as well as I do. Y'know, it can be a heavy trip. And so some of the people who would look like they would be naturally a good person to add to the list of participating faculty, they'd try and they'd just withdraw, and they'd say, no, no, no, no, no. So you can't predict, or at least I wasn't, I've never been able to predict who, who will be a help directly by participating in the program, who will be a help in terms of supporting necessary change or standing behind courses even when there's y'know, some kind of question about cutting, and so on. I've never been able to tell. But what I can, what I have gradually over the years come to count on is that there will be support in our department, excellent support for material, if the students think they need it, then it belongs in the curriculum, basically that's been something I could count on, and so individuals might squabble with me about any particular course or any particular figure that I wanted to teach, but that would be in the lounge, y'know, it wouldn't be in the curriculum committee. There've been individuals who have fought, y'know, quite enthusiastically against liberalizing the curriculum, but, y'know, I think that would be true no matter what topic you were undertaking. I don't see it as targeted. K: You've done a lot of things in your days for a librarian too. M: Yes. K: Seller of Irish novels, and mystery writer and women's fiction and all the rest. Have there been any costs? M: Yeah. Urn, [sigh] I am a workaholic, y'know. I mean, I don't, I never do anything that doesn't contribute I guess is what you'd say. Y'know, whatever project I'm lost in. And so I mean, where other people are perfectly capable of sitting on their back porch and looking at the birds. Y'know, I mean, that's something that never crosses my mind. Yeah, being, being focused always costs, don't you think? K: What do you think you've missed? Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 20 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 M: Well, y'know, I would never admit that I've missed anything. [laughs] I adore my daughter and I have a strong relationship with her and she's a powerhouse all her own, and so neither of us dominates the other, but at the same time, y'know, we both know who we are. I have a grandson now, I am important in his life. He fantasizes about me, so you know that [laugh] you know I haven't shirked my grand motherhood. I have good friends, and I maintain those friendships, so evidently I do enough there. I keep up my reading in both my fiction realms and my academic realms and also my research realms. So evidently I'm doing okay there. Y'know, I mean, I just, I feel I, the cost has been in giving up idle time, but I don't feel like I've given up anything I've wanted. I have y'know, I do the bonding thing with colleagues who retired, I keep in touch with retired colleagues. That's going on, y'know. That's going out beyond what a lot of people spend time on, and I feel okay about, yeah, I do. The advent of e-mail has been an enormous help, because now I can keep track of my students. I used to dread June, because I would see these people, I had been involved in their lives for, y'know, years sometimes. And they would come in and tell me goodbye and that would be it. And I used to, I would, I'd be depressed, y'know, for months every year. But now, as soon as they have a job, they're back on-line and suddenly they pop up on my e-mail and it's wonderful, because I can keep in track, keep in touch with people that I would normally lose touch with. So I feel like I'm maintaining a balance there, y'know, everything that I want as part of my life pretty much, y'know. It's been available. K: This is a potentially whole new topic, and the whole question of e-mail and internet and education, any thought on that? M: Yes. [laughs] I'm a fanatic on the subject, as you can, that's the reason you thought to ask the question I'm sure. I think e-mail is going to really save us. And I have a little story, which, it isn't e-mail exactly, but it shows you why I believe so firmly in the internet. I teach a correspondence course, I can't remember if I've mentioned this to you, Kathryn, but I, one, I, I normally, if a student takes the trouble to be entertaining in writing their correspondence lesson, I always thank them, you see. Well, so I had thanked this one young man who had written an enthusiastic essay that had obviously taken some effort to be entertaining. And, so and then he, the next paper was even better, and so I, y'know, pointed that out to him and explained why. He phoned and asked me if I knew who he was. And I said, no, well, I'm sorry, y'know, if I should. Excuse me, but no, I guess I don't. And so he asked if he could come over and meet me, and I said yeah, come on. And so he walked in, and, then I understood the whole agenda. He was black. And he wanted to know if I had been, as he put it, friendly to him in my grading responses simply because I knew that he was black, and was encouraging him as a member of a minority group. And I was terribly upset and so was he, and so I said, sit down here and let's talk about this, y'know, Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 21 Meredith Cary Interview 1996 June 25 it's a touchy topic, but we can manage. And where we ended up, or at least where I ended up was realizing that he didn't have, there was no way except through correspondence, except through education that is not face to face, there was no way for him to escape his sense of always being identified in an ethnic context, and then if you're friendly that means that you're getting strokes that you didn't earn, and if you're unfriendly, that means that you're getting negatives that you didn't deserve, and I could see that he had an extremely, wholesome kind of y'know, stable outgoing balanced personality. I responded to his personality very positively but I could also see why he wanted to check and see whether I had been genuine to him. And it changed my way of thinking about what we do. Y'know, I've always just sort of, y'know, I mean, sure education takes place in a classroom, what else? Y'know, because that's the way it's always been. But he changed my way of looking at what we do. And so I'm extremely interested in getting an on-line capacity so that any student who wants to go in, of unknown ethnicity, unknown gender, and participate in discussions and y'know, get feedback from the teacher, and all the kinds of things that happen in a classroom. But where your gender and ethnicity are there before you open your mouth, all that can be set aside on the internet. I'm extremely excited about the potential for the internet, though there's a lot of resistance to using it that way. A lot of my colleagues think that you need the college experience, but to me the college experience involves a lot of prejudice and a lot of negative stuff, and so y'know, for student who wants the, the classroom experience, fine, let's maintain it. But for students, whatever their reason is, who might prefer to avoid face to face, then I would, I'm just, I'm just eager to see that happen. That alternative, that's the big change that I'm yelling for now. But y'know, I've always wanted change, so that's just a y'know, part of it for me. K: [something] M: Yeah. K: Those are the, pretty much the topics that I had in mind. Are there things that you haven't covered that you wanted to talk about? M: It seems to me that you've covered everything. K: Well, if you have second thought when you see the transcript, we can go back. M: Okay, all right. K: Okay, thank you very much for talking. M: It's been fun. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 22
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Title: Dorothy Ramslund interview
Date: 1996-07-29
Description: Dr. Dorothy Ramsland, Professor Emeritus and Chair of Home Economics. Dr. Ramsland joined the faculty of Western in 1949 to teach Home Economics during President William Haggard's administration. She talked about the early staff. She also talked about the older faculty's positive treatment of new faculty. She discussed faculty women and their accomplishments. She talked about the Faculty Forum. She also discussed President James Jarrett, the Great Books program and the changes wrought by his administration. Dr. Ramsland told anecdotes about Dr. Jarrett. She talked about President Harvey Bunke and the attempt to discontinue Home Economics. She told anecdotes about President Jerry Flora and discussed town and gown relations between Western and Bellingham. Dr. Ramsland discussed President Paul Olscamp, Ralph Thompson, Jim Davis and President Robert Ross. She also discussed various president's "open-door" policy for faculty. She talked about the lack of books at the library as well as librarians Mabel Zoe Wilson and Mildred Herrick. She discussed the campus sculpture collection. Dr. Ramsland talked about the Capital Nomenclature Committee. She also discussed Sam Buchanan as well as the reasons she remained at Western.
Digital Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Records, Washington Women's History Consortium Collection
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies
Related Collection: Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project records
Local Identifier: wwucentennial_ramslundd
Text preview (might not show all results): Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 An Interview with Dorothy Ramsland July 29, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Western Washington
Show moreDorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 An Interview with Dorothy Ramsland July 29, 1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Bellingham, WA 98225 Interview with Dorothy Ramsland, July 29,1996 Interviewer: Kathryn Anderson K: Interviewing Dorothy Ramsland [at her home] on July 29,1996. Dorothy was a faculty member and chair of the department of Home Economics on Western's campus for many years. [break in tape] K: You were talking about how they had gotten in touch with some of the former students this summer, and I was wondering if you could reflect on what it was like for you working with the groups of students over the years here at Western. D: I think Home Economics was special in some ways. Being a very humanoriented department, we had very close contacts with our students. We knew them by name. We knew what their majors were within the department. We also had a strong counseling system where we worked very closely with them. In fact, when I think about the time that our faculty put in counseling students, it was considerable. We developed our own system for getting, for example, students into our home economics classes because the majors needed these classes. This was done before you had computers. Every member of the faculty took responsibility for students, and this attention paid off, I think, in many ways because we really knew the students. This summer in seeing a graduate from these years- '56, '62, '69, 72, and they told me how much it meant to them to know faculty so well. We're still getting, even after ten years of retirement, people writing us to ask us for references. I think that's a bit unusual for faculty, but it means that they knew that we knew them well enough to write a recommendation. I think the students changed a little bit, the seventies, ('71, '72) that time was a bit hectic. Perhaps we thought we had more conservative students in home economics, this was not true. We had the whole range. Some of our majors went to Fairhaven, and then came for a major in the department. They represented varied socio-economic backgrounds, like my '62 graduate [who] came to Western for art and didn't like the art department. She had a background of having been in 4-H, and so therefore, home economics was a very natural choice. She was so happy because she still did her art as an integral part of home economics. I always felt that in home economics a general major was like general education, because it was a great variety of concepts about home and family. One woman has recently gone into home economics teaching, and had to go to Central to finish her teaching certificate. At Central they were just amazed at the background that she had in home economics, such a broad background. I think our majors have enabled our students to do a variety of vocations. We certainly didn't think that we were preparing them to do some of the jobs that they've done. We have a graduate who's in New York City, who's a financial advisor into stocks and the marketplace. Our graduates did have something in consumer economics, and they had something in financial home management. Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 We have one who had a minor in English, who has developed her own publication in Seattle called the "Butterfly Press," it's gardening and butterflies! Well, they have done so many things, our graduates have been very successful. I don't think it was just home economics I think it was the education they had at Western. We were a very small department, the maximum number of faculty we ever had I think would have been eleven, and then about five of them would have been part time. So six or seven [full time faculty] was the largest number that we ever had. I think being mainly women, although we did have some male faculty in the later years, in the seventies and eighties, there was a great commitment not only to our profession and our department, but also to the students. That's one of the reasons why I'm really sad to see home economics go off the campus, because it gave a particular kind of student who was interested in that aspect [of home and family], a place to go for a major. Thinking about students, they did change over the years. We had some [with] problems, we knew that, as other departments also had. A problem student that we had during her undergraduate days came to our reunion last year; she is now a very successful preschool teacher, and homemaker. K: What other thoughts, about a huge range of several decades of students. How would you ... D: From' 49 to '86--that was 37 years, and so that's really almost four decades. The students changed. They were in the beginning, I think, from more small towns and rural areas. I remember taking a field trip to Seattle. I had these two girls who lived on Orcas Island who waited for me at the end of the trip. They said, "Can we go with you? We've never been in Seattle before." And to me, this was just amazing. But as our students changed, we had more from urban areas. I think more from Seattle, more from Bellevue, Olympia, Tacoma, so that they weren't just from small towns and rural backgrounds. They became more sophisticated. I ended my career teaching for the last five years in the interior design program, where we had some very sophisticated students. K: In what way? D: I think in where they had been in the world. The kinds of things that they had done, the experiences they brought, what they had seen, like they'd visited museums, they'd seen art, they'd traveled. They had been in a lot of different kinds of homes that would help them in terms of their interior design. The problem solving, was at a very highly sophisticated level. I saw change over the years. K: How about their goals? D: Most of them were goal oriented. They knew what they wanted to do. The ones who knew the most that they wanted to do were the ones that wanted to go into teaching. And at one time teaching was THE program in home economics. I think under President Jarrett when we changed as an institution to more humanities, more of our students went into other majors. A general major was developed, which gave them an option. They weren't quite so definitive in their goal, but they knew that they had a good background, and like any liberal arts major, they could go different ways, and obviously they have gone into different vocations. K: Did you, do you get a sense that their goals as women changed over those decades? D: 1 think that's an interesting question, I'm not so sure about that. I think Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 that probably they were in home economics because home and family, the values of the family, were important. Some were single parents, 1 don't think that their goals as women were so much spoken of among the home economics majors. Maybe in the later years, as faculty faced some of those problems, and thought about those kinds of things too, we changed our definition of what a family is from mother father and children, to a more flexible model. We had many majors who also went into things like nutrition and nutrition counseling, working with the Dairy Council, and working in federal programs relating to nutrition. We had a good program for practically any student who wanted to do it, of going out and getting work experience. Our interior designers, and our nutrition education people went out for real work experience. But I think anybody really had that chance, if they wanted to do that. Perhaps there was an awareness of more options open to women. K: Did you keep any records on the numbers of your graduates who ended up working outside the home, and for how much of their lives? D: We don't have good records on that, I wish we did. We did keep a lot of records on students for a long time (I don't know what has happened to them). Last year when we had our first really home economics reunion on the campus (80 people come back for the luncheon), we realized our records were incomplete. We had many students, when 1 count it up, how many students I've had, they're in the thousands. We sent out a questionnaire for the reunion, and we got information back about them. The Alumni Office assisted us. We asked what they'd been doing in their jobs, that's why I really know more about them now than I did. 1 wanted a questionnaire to be done so that we could put the information in the archives. If somebody wants to study home economics sometime and what it was at WWU, the information is available. Home economics started almost in the very beginning of this school. It encompassed a hundred years, I think. But it has dramatically changed. 1 would say home economics is not the title now. The professional organization has changed the name to Family and Consumer Studies. So that you're not a home economist now, as Lynn Dee pointed out to me the other day when she saw me, but you are now a family and consumer scientist. People made changes across the country and we tried, we tried to change our name to Human Ecology. It was voted down in the council that handled those kinds of decisions. We never could understand why because we had an interdisciplinary committee that studied the name change. Faculty from economics, English, education, and chemistry were on that committee with me. The faculty were in favor of it. We got up to the presentation and it was just scuttled by a senior professor who said, "You cannot change the name, nobody will know what you're talking about, you can't change the name." Well, it has been, the name had been changed across the country. I have my doctorate from Michigan State, I'm from the college of Human Ecology. So home economics I think, like the students, probably changed over that time. We had more men in varying programs. At our reunion we had a young man who's been teaching in child development--in Texas; he's received awards for his program. He came out of our program in home economics. We had male students in interior design, and there were some men in nutrition programs. We had one man, I think, who graduated in teacher education, but that was quite rare to have a man teach in home economics. In the more contemporary sense of encompassing so much more for the individual and the family, however you defined family, home economics Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 broadened it's scope totally. I don't think there's anything that would make me madder, or most of our faculty, like waving a red flag in front of us to say that home economics was cooking and sewing. That just totally antagonized me, because I don't sew. I never have. I know a lot about food and cooking, but I learned cooking from my family at home. You had the scientific part from home economics. I think over the years that home economics became more toward humanities and socio-psychological, perhaps moving out of the scientific background. When I graduated, as an undergraduate, I had a major in chemistry. So you see from the 40's to the 80's, there was tremendous change in that profession. And I think few people would understand that. K: I was going to ask you about a lot of what you've described as changes nationally and regionally and I was wondering how that related to change as implemented on this campus. D: We were what I consider to be one of the more liberal progressive departments in the state. In contrast to Central and Eastern, I think Western, but that was the whole program. K; Now, what would that mean--"more liberal"? D: I would say that we would probably change our focus more, and go with national trends. We did a tremendous lot with summer school. They were all workshops that had to pay for themselves. We brought a lot of national people with revolutionary ideas in home economics programs. We used the community; we went to Seattle and Vancouver for field trips. We did a lot of that, in fact, some of our graduates will say that that's one of the things they remember the most--the opportunities that we gave them to go and see things that they would never have seen and make professional contacts. I think we were very, very much in touch with national issues. We were involved in the state organization and the national organization, I even went to some international congresses and so we knew what was going on. I think a lot of times, we were really ahead of things. I think that's why it's especially sad to see home economics go. I think we were changing and our numbers of students were increasing. K; That's interesting that it would happen, but that it would be more liberal on the West side, than at Central or Eastern. D: I think so. I think maybe even more, we had close contacts with the University of Washington professionally. The dean at the University of Washington and I started the first meetings of the deans and administrators of home economics in the state of Washington. And I served one year as president of Washington Home Economics Association. We had good professional contacts, and so we knew something about the programs going on in other places. K: Now, you had a leadership role in this program, and in your earlier interview you made a comment that interested me a great deal about being a woman administrator in a campus with male dominance. I was wondering if you would care to elaborate on that comment. D: Well, I've often thought about that. When you hear about harassment and some of the other issues today, I've thought back and questioned if I'd ever experienced that at Western. I think I received different treatment from different deans, depending on how much they were willing to understand about home economics programs. I often thought that the best deans I served under were from our own Western faculty because Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 they knew Western: Ralph Thompson from education, Fred Knapman from chemistry, Jerry Flora from biology, and Robert Monahan from geography. [Dean James Davis was helpful and supportive.] They knew something about our programs. The only other women administrators were physical education, home economics, and foreign languages. Eleanor King was chairman in foreign languages for many years. And I think we always felt we could speak up at any meetings, but I think probably that we didn't as much. Somehow we were well known on the campus. I was elected faculty-at-large to the faculty council one year. I think a lot of times maybe women administrators didn't speak up as much as we could have, because we were totally outnumbered, and because there were some very vocal men. I can't say that I felt that personally, I was never put down, not really. Which is quite something to say, I think, being so outnumbered. I felt for my department that oftentimes I had to go around kind of talking one-to-one to faculty in order to have people understand what we were doing. As a whole, I think that I had actually very good treatment. I had some failures, things I think I worked hard for but didn't achieve. Home economics moved from the basement to the top floor, we had some beautiful facilities, and, you know, that was a coup, that we got that. [The move was a successful one.) K: How did that happen? D: George Bartholick, the architect, told me that the best space to have is on the top floor. So I said, let's go look at it, and I said I'll take it. Nobody else seemed to see the possibilities, but that was one of our advantages. We could look around because of our training and see the possibilities in space. Even President Jarrett [was aware of what we could do in a positive way with space), (Don Ferris told me this one). We'd gotten a new space, a laboratory on the first floor in old Main and that was sort of the first we'd started going up and taking some additional space beyond the basement, and [President Jarrett) said, "Well, I must admit, when you give those home economics people a place, they really do something with it." It was attractive, and we used to have a Tiffany glass chandelier hanging at the entrance to the department. You'd walk down the basement hall in Old Main and you'd see that. You would know there was something different there. The first time that we ever tried to do anything different, was early on when I'd come on the faculty. We were going to wallpaper a hall. President Haggard came down to look it over and I had to explain to him and tell him what we were doing and why. He said, "Well, home economics is different," "that's okay, you can do that." It always amazed me that a president would have to come and check out the problem. President Haggard would sign the requisitions [the President was involved in the 50's). We were successful in 1965 when President Bunke tried to get rid of us. The whole faculty [not just home economics faculty) fought that issue. The President couldn't give me a good reason why they wanted to discontinue our department. Our enrollment was increasing, and we were an inexpensive department. We were not so successful in getting increases in salary. We did get some merit increases, all of us. I can't say that we didn't get any, we did. I had a sabbatical--once. I think I was the only one from the department that ever had a sabbatical. And there were those sorts of things where I felt we were not treated equally. As a faculty, we gave more emphasis to students and good teaching than we did to research, and that was to our disadvantage. We weren't given credit for a good counseling program, we weren't given credit for successful students. Another failure that I think, Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 which was part of this, was that I was never successful, and I don't think anybody ever was, any chairman following me was successful, in getting our part-time faculty either on the tenure track as part-time or in getting their salaries so we were paying them really what they were worth. Tried, on that, and tried through affirmative action but I was not successful. So there were some failures that perhaps were a little prejudice toward women, but not out in the open. I started as a chairman when one received five or ten dollars a quarter. Later it went up to fifty dollars. And that's-- you remember all those things, all the extra work that you did extra. I almost always taught "a full load and administrated, too. I think women administrators now are treated as equals [I hope). K: The three women you mention, I'm not sure about foreign languages, but Ruth Weythman, of course, has had it all in physical education, and you two, and foreign languages ... D: Foreign Languages had more men in it than women, even when Eleanor King Was a chair. They did have some women, but there were really more men. And she was very well thought of. K: Maybe you could describe for me the culture of women faculty on Western's campus. What, what was that like? D: When I came, I thought I came at a very good time, 1949. They hadn't had many new faculty for a while and they hadn't had any young ones. The faculty were mainly campus school and education, science and physical education. Since there were about a hundred faculty, we knew everybody and everybody knew us. I remember my first lunch that I went to at Edens Hall, women coming up and introducing themselves. The women were wonderful to me, supportive and they were such interesting women. My chair, Linda Countrymen, had lived at home, (she lived at home until she was 56!). Can you imagine? I can't imagine that. But she had traveled all over the world. And I remember Ruth Weythman telling about having been in Egypt, when women didn't go to Egypt. Ruth Platt, from Science, had gone to China in those early days when they pulled down the curtains on the trains as they were going through cities; foreigners were not to be seen. Well, there was a wonderful camaraderie among those women. There was such commitment because they had stayed by Western through those days of the depression when they hardly had gotten any salary. They banded together. In the early days, we used to have a women's faculty organization; I don't know why it stopped. Different women presented topics from their specialties. And I shall never forget a talk that Ruth Platt gave on the fruit fly and genetics. Marie Pabst gave a talk on geology, and Ruth Weythman talked about her doll collection from her travels allover the world. I bought a doll for her in Norway, I remember, on one of my first trips. The faculty women were so interesting, and well traveled, and many of them were scholarly women. I thought they were good role models for a young faculty member. Of course as we expanded, I think you knew the women who came, but you didn't really know them. In the eighties, I felt like there were so many faculty, both men and women that I didn't know .... Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 K; Do you have any idea why? D: No, I don't know, except that we got bigger. And I think people were more concerned about themselves. It was more self-centeredness. There was greater pressure for research, greater pressure for publication, greater pressures on them as faculty members, I think that went for men as well as women. I did my doctorate while I was here, I finished in '67, so you see I'd been at Western for seventeen years. I had taken quarters off and gone back to school. I'd been here five years when we had a low enrollment in Winter Quarter, so I was just delighted. I took the whole quarter off and went to Europe on my first trip. I remember that President Haggard didn't think that travel was such a good idea for me to do. When I came back, I was so enthusiastic, I told him all the wonderful experiences I'd had and what I'd been able to see, and what I was bringing back to my students. He said, "Well, maybe there is something to travel after all." But I think that when we came to 1965, and the president wanting to cut out the department, that there was very enthusiastic and vocal support among the women. K: All across campus. D: All across campus. It was vocal. That's why I said, when the department came to that position in 1993, there was not the support. Home economics was not as well known. The department had deteriorated in the number of tenured faculty K: Your decision to go back and get your doctorate, what was behind that? D: When President Jarrett came, I was more aware of the need for a doctorate. I returned to being the chairman when President Jarrett came in the fall. I walked into his office and I thought, hmm, hmm, I think a doctorate is necessary. I was at Michigan State studying and trying to decide, was I coming back, or was I going to stay and finish the doctorate. When I returned I began to feel the [change in the] tenor of the campus, I thought I might not want to stay at Western all the time. Michigan State had been giving their faculty in home economics five years to finish their degree or leave ... .1 felt the doctorate wasn't beyond me, and Michigan State was starting a new program. I liked the program because it had a lot of flexibility in it. Home Economics--home management was my major with with minors in sociology and art history. I could see the changes coming to this campus. Where we had been primarily education, and a little bit of arts and sciences, [the change was to] increase arts and sciences. So I decided if I wanted to move in the field or move out of Western, that I had better get the degree. It hadn't been required in home economics previously--a masters degree was [considered] a Terminal degree. K: How did it affect your role here? You didn't leave Western, ... D: No, but I went off on a lot of interviews. One Big Ten university sent a person to this campus to check me out before they invited me back. One of the things that I liked about WWU campus was the interdisciplinary aspect. I am the kind of a person who likes to know other people and not just my own faculty. I like to work with others and had a lot of good friends in many departments. I figured out that this could be a very Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 creative place, if you wanted to work at it. It turned out to be that for me. I'm very satisfied with my professional life at Western Washington University. And even though there were some bumps in the road for us in home economics, I still felt that it was a good place, that there were well qualified scholarly interesting people as colleagues. I liked this place to live. I liked the kind of students at WWU. I taught at Michigan State, and I liked our students better. Maybe different goals, maybe different degrees of sophistication, I don't know. I still have some Michigan State students who are in contact with me. So it isn't just that they never ever remember you again. I just totally liked ours better, working with them. Maybe it was the atmosphere that we created in our department, and on the campus. Our students, you could see them grow--and that was a wonderful thing, the best part about teaching. K: Were there any personal costs in the decision to have such a demanding career? D: Yes, I think for some of our faculty there were health costs. I think there was a tremendous amount of stress on us. If I can travel, I'm happy, so then I can come back refreshed. I can see in several of our former faculty, that there were some other personal problems involved like having parents that you had to live with, or care for and support financially. Bellingham was the kind of town where you could take care of some of those problems. I suppose another problem was that our salaries were not so high. And so consequently in retirement, I think starting in the 90s, that one feels a little more of that [financial] pressure. If we'd waited a few more years to retire, our finances might have been better in retirement. I came in 1949 for $3600 a year. That was for nine months, but I only paid $35 in rent. I had a wonderful place to live, with other faculty and staff. But I think it just depends on you and your personality. I've always believed that a faculty member in a community ought to give something to the community. So therefore I've contributed in many ways, I still do. Of course I found that made some interesting contacts in the community. Town and gown were one as far as I was concerned. So I like that. K: Did this help the transition from being at Western to ... D: Oh, it was easy to retire, easy to retire, and easy to retire here [444 South State Street]. Because I was of a generation from the 50's--early 50's--people are retiring now, or have. So there are people around that I know well. [End of Side One] [Side Two] D: ... at Western Washington University. In my department, and working with colleagues from other departments was a very satisfying professional experience. And I don't think that I would have liked to have been anywhere else. I was at three institutions before I came here. None of them were as satisfying as Western but I stayed longer at Western. My friends, when I came to Western, gave me two years at the outset. They thought WWU was way in the boonies. For many years it was difficult for us to recruit faculty because they did think that way. Until the Seattle World's Fair, when people came out and saw this place, we didn't have any trouble recruiting at all after that. There were some times perhaps that were pretty rough, but that's sort of part of life, and you know, you go on from there, I really liked working with the students at Western, my Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123 Dorothy Ramsland Interview, 1996 July 29 colleagues, and administrators. I never felt that I didn't get along with any of them, but some things I would have changed. Really, in total perspective, it was a good experience. K: Well, that's a wonderful testimony to a career, and I want to thank you for continuing this conversation. D: Well, it's been fun, it's always fun, to talk about one's academic life. [End of Side Two) [P.S. The end of an era came for Home Economics with the sale of the collection of decorative arts on December 2-3, 1998. The chair collection of twentieth century chairs remains a part of the permanent collection at the Western Gallery.) Western Washington University Centennial Oral History Project Center for Pacific Northwest Studies Western Washington University Bellingham WA 98225-9123
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