Sketches from the 60s: Me and SOC

I.  A War Story

 

Spring, 1968.  It was my second time in President Elmo Stevenson’s office.  The first time, summer of l966, had been relatively pleasant.  I was a new faculty member in the Department of English, just arrived on campus, and meeting everyone who mattered.  Elmo smiled on me benevolently, shook my hand strongly, asked whether I fished without seeming interested in my reply, and led me to another office, another administrator.  The gauntlet of introductions that day left me as exhausted as I had been the day before when Helen and I, our son Mark, and his deeply distressed cat had wound our way down from Siskiyou Summit after a harrowing three day, 1500 mile drive from Albuquerque, N. M.   Ashland at last.  An evergreen paradise.  Temperature 102 degrees.

 

My second visit with Elmo was more momentous than my first, for it involved a racial threat to a Black African student.  Not that Southern Oregon College had many races on hand then.  There were some Saudis, four or five American Blacks from the Bay Area, and a smattering of Kenyans and Nigerians.  Elmo himself had had a handsome Ethiopian student living with him the year before, so it seemed reasonable to assume he would listen with care and act positively on behalf of an African student.  At issue was a conflict between a driver of a cement truck and an African male.  The student had the bad judgment to date a white girl, or at least be seen with her.  There was a confrontation in a campus parking lot, and the truck driver had extracted a chain from his truck to emphasize the strength of his convictions about inter-racial dating.  The chain caused damage to the African’s eye, and the driver threatened the black student’s friends as well.  The language he used was not as polite as mine in recounting the event.

 

The Africans were terrified, and because at the time I was president of a fading organization called the Ashland Human Rights Council (membership about 7), they were put in touch with me.  I listened to their grave concerns, after which I told them I would try to arrange a meeting with the President of the College to see what could be done to protect them and allay their fears.  The President agreed to see us.

 

Before saying what transpired, let me provide a brief historical context.  You will remember that issues of race were in the forefront of national consciousness in the 1950s and 1960s.  Compulsory school integration, forced bussing of students, bombing of African American churches in the South. Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus, the violent actions of segregationists during a march in Selma, Alabama, the actions of Freedom Riders.  The arrests and finally the murder of Martin Luther King.  All these made a profound impression on many in my generation.  You could say that our consciences were hammered out and shaped on the anvil of the nation’s racial strife.

 

When I and my new faculty colleagues arrived in Ashland, we were informed that Ashland had not long before had a “sundown ordinance,” designed to make sure no Negroes lingered in town after dark.  And we were regaled with stories of a large contingent of Ku Klux Klansmen marching in Ashland’s Fourth of July parade in 1929, the inference being that the town had deep and persistent racist roots.  We also learned that the Medford Mail Tribune had won a Pulitzer prize for courageous reporting of Klan activities.  On campus rumor was that people in Student Services discouraged mingling of Black men and White girls in the Student Union Building, for fear of upsetting townspeople.  We new faculty members were not certain whether what we heard had some truth to it, or whether events were enlarged for dramatic purpose, to vindicate the virtue of those appalled by the specter of local racism.  So this is the backdrop against which our meeting with President Stevenson played out.

 

Elmo received us cordially into his office, heard the African student voice his fear, and heard me ask how the College might provide for the students’ well-being.  He looked at us shrewdly before launching into a vivid explanation of red-neck and blue collar proclivities to violence in the region. In Prospect, just up the road a piece, loggers still fought with chains; Rogue Valley mill workers, loggers, and truck drivers worked hard, drank hard, and brawled hard.  They had definite if mistaken ideas about racial superiority—it was not wise to provoke them.  Even in Ashland the Beaux Club had been the scene of brutal battles.  As for insuring the safety of the students, his best advice was this:  Avoid going into downtown Ashland in large groups.  It would not do to provoke townsfolk.

 

I was speechless, stunned in fact, as we left Elmo’s office.  In my wildest imaginings I could not imagine five African students constituting a large group in downtown Ashland, not that they would care to go downtown after hearing the President’s advice.  He had not suggested a single thing the College was prepared to do to help.    “What kind of College is this?” I asked myself.  “Do I really want to stay here?”

 

II. Preliminary Matters, including a Brief Discussion of Methodology and Certain Cautions to the Reader

 

New faculty members are rightly impatient when obliged to listen to hoary war stories told by the elders of the academic tribe.  Knowing this, I will nevertheless be guilty of telling some of these stories (as above), not only because they are amusing or absurd or discouraging, but also because they illustrate important aspects of a culture and time now edging into the bedrock of the ignored or forgotten.  As events recede in time they undergo metamorphosis; you might say that the pressure of time and the heat of compaction create a new substance; experience becomes igneous, like a schist or gneiss.  My intention is to preserve some of the particularity of remembered events before they become dense and irretrievable.   Memory, of course, is not to be wholly trusted, for it shapes events to conform to a perceived reality.  Mark Twain’s Autobiography is remarkable for its vividness and its cheerful failure to distinguish between actual events and fancied ones.  The mind embellishes and modifies the past, and there seems no help for it. 

 

Thus it is that I caution the reader that he should not credit every fact as true, or count on every experience to be faithfully remembered and rendered.  While I have been as faithful to experience as possible, I am aware that there may be distortions and omissions.  What follows is reminiscence rather than “hard” history.  It is designed to complement the fine account written by Harold Otness of his career at SOC (see “When I Came to the college in 1966” in Archives on the Emeritus Web Site).   Harold discusses such things as the character of Ashland and SOC, changes to programs, the quality of students, and issues of grade inflation.  My approach is more impressionistic and anecdotal.  When I characterize certain members of the faculty and the administration, it is not my intent to show them in their full complexity and variety.  That would take a more ardent biographer than I am.  Still I trust that the glimpses of them will be true enough to suggest that what I observed was close to what others observed.

 

So, having provided these cautions, I turn to the matter at hand: To tell what I found when I joined the faculty of Southern Oregon College, to say what troubled and amused me, and finally to account for my having stayed as a faculty member for 30 years.

 

III.            The Campus

 

Churchill Hall.   My grandmother, who spent much of her life in the arid intermountain west, once visited us in Ashland.  “My,” she said, “In Oregon everything grows.”   She was right about Western Oregon, if you excluded the 1966 Southern Oregon College Campus.  The expansive lawn fronting Churchill was sun scorched when we arrived, with only patches of green showing.  The expanse had all the appeal of a military drill field or a prison yard.  Trees were scarce, and the few you saw were dusty and droopy.  Some desultory shrubs fronting the building made its beige front somewhat less stark than it would otherwise have been.  I do not remember any flowers, save for spreading myrtle on the southeast corner.  The entrance to Churchill was surprisingly handsome, with massive wooden doors and heavy glass windows.  Once inside the entryway you saw rich wood panels, lustrous in their dark browns.  They implied that here was an institution of substance and proud tradition.  The current Vice President of Administration’s office, centered on the first floor, seemed as if it should be the President’s Office. 

 

A spacious hallway with very high ceilings bisected the first floor, but once you passed the President's Office, the Dean of Faculty’s Office, and the Director of Administration’s Office, aesthetic values shrank.  You passed by a warren of standard institutional offices: Business Office, Registrar’s and Admissions Office, Graduate Office, and so on.  Once you stepped through a rear door the prospect of an attractive campus vanished like breath on a cold morning’s straight razor.  The hokey saying all we new faculty members were subjected to, that SOC was a “Little Harvard on the Hill where the Palms and the Pine Trees Meet” had at least one element of truth to it.  Twenty feet beyond Churchill were a few scruffy palm trees (at least scruffy in contrast to their California cousins).  South of the palms grew a grove of scotch pine, gracing a spot apparently once occupied by a fishing pond.

 

I will not describe all the buildings on campus, for that would be tedious.  Rather I will focus on a few that struck me upon my arrival.

 

Myrtle and Pine Halls.   Directly behind Churchill were two temporary buildings carted in from Camp White, twenty miles away.  They had the usual allure barracks have.  The Art Department used Pine Hall, and though designated “temporary,” it persisted until library expansion in 2002.  Myrtle Hall, the smaller of the two buildings, housed about half the English Department.  I was assigned an office there because I possessed an ABD, while eight other new hires with only MAs were relegated to offices carved out of a small four room house on Palm Street.  There were no palms on Palm Street.

 

Huffman Hall.  If you stair-stepped up the hill rising south above Omar’s Restaurant and Bar (the only bar on State owned property in Oregon), you would first come to the Health Center, then Huffman Hall.  It is the second of these that I wish to mention.  Imagine a beige shoe box designed for size 17 shoes, then multiply its dimensions by about fifty and you will have a fair notion of Huffman’s appeal.  It was a bare bones dormitory when we arrived.  The next year it was half dorm, half faculty offices; perhaps fifteen humanities faculty were housed on the second floor.  We had one phone, in the hallway, to serve us all.  In subsequent years Huffman housed Continuing Education before assuming its current incarnation as Cox Hall.

 

Huffman Hall was where we stayed our second night in Ashland.  Our means were less than modest, so we welcomed a free night’s lodging.  Unfortunately, we were obliged to give up the room the next night to some “Christian Athletes.”  They were apparently a higher campus priority than we.

 

The Library.   A new three-story library was soon to rise above Churchill, but when we arrived, there was simply a construction site.  The College’s library, such as it was, was housed in Central Hall’s second and third stories.  The building’s façade of concrete poured in layer cake fashion, with a stucco topping, was softened somewhat by ivy on its north facing side.  Inside was a collection of far fewer than a hundred thousand books, periodicals, and documents.  Bearing mute testimony to the paucity of the collection was a tiny array of catalogue card files, using the Dewey Decimal classification system.  For no very good reason that I could determine Circulation and Check-out were on the second floor.  I pitied those librarians and student helpers whose job it was to move books between floors, for there was no elevator.

 

Britt Hall.   Below the library was Britt Hall.  When first I saw it I thought it a war surplus Quonset hut.  Closer inspection revealed it to be more like a very large airplane hangar buttressed on either side by thick-walled rectangles.  On the top floor was a ballroom, on the ground floor the Student Union, a bookstore, and a faculty Lounge.  The basement was a perfect maze of offices.  You ran some risk of never surfacing once you entered that curious region.  During my years at the College Britt was the most remodeled, most renovated, most refurbished building on campus.  I came to think of it as an over-the-hill movie star struggling to stay young by virtue of face-lifts, tummy tucks, and liposuction.

 

Taylor Hall.   The most appealing building on campus in 1966 was probably Taylor Hall.  It contained an interesting mix of classrooms (none accommodating more than a hundred students) and faculty offices, most belonging to Social Scientists (a few art faculty had offices on the third floor).  Entrances were inviting, if plain, and the honey-comb façade formed of painted, hollow cinder blocks seemed a refreshing change from the utilitarian concrete and stucco used elsewhere.  Unfortunately, as we new faculty quickly discovered, the heating and air conditions system was discouragingly inefficient.  The honeycomb façade served no functional purpose, except to mask views and provide convenient ledges for pigeons to poop on.

 

Parking lots were unpaved and unlighted, paths were sometimes asphalt, sometimes cement, sometimes dirt.  Lawns did not prosper.  Landscaping seemed an afterthought.  If anything tied the campus together, it was red-tiled roofs and beige paint.  Perhaps there was a campus master plan, but the campus itself had the appearance of being thrown together in higgeldy-piggeldy fashion.  At best you could say its buildings were eclectically arranged and designed.  If you were less charitable you might say the architecture reflected the practice of doing things on the cheap.  It was a campus built on a shoestring budget.

 

If I have seemed critical, it has nothing to do with the affection I developed for the place.  I have maintained over the years that good teaching can occur in a fair sized broom closet, provided there are willing students, a few good books, an engaging teacher, and a blackboard with chalk.  Far be it from me to suggest that the Plain-Jane campus I found was not a good place to begin a career.  The College had possibilities of becoming something nobler, and I wished to do my part in making it happen.

 

 

IV.            The Administration

 

When a graduate student in the early 1960s I sometimes felt guilty about my lack of political idealism.  The demands of my studies made me reluctant to commit myself to causes, to fight against discrimination and racial injustice or to protest an ill advised military campaign in Viet Nam.  In short, I did not think of myself as a campus radical when I arrived in Ashland.  But without intending it I somehow became one, at least of minor sort.  More about which a few paragraphs later.

 

A Prelude    Before coming to SOC I talked to the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico.  He had taught several years at the University of Oregon before coming to New Mexico.  “It would be a mistake to go there,” he said  “Higher education is badly funded, and the bureaucracy of the State System in archaic and Byzantine.”  I soon discovered that he was right to warn me and correct in his assessment of the State System.

 

I chose to disregard his advice.  I was attracted to the area’s recreational opportunities and climate and had heard very good things about The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the beauty of Lithia Park.  If the College proved a wretched place to teach, I knew I could find a job elsewhere; in those days there were more jobs than qualified applicants.

 

At a party given by Chuck and Barbara Ryberg we new faculty members became aware of the turmoil of the preceding years.  Horror story after horror story rolled off the embittered tongues of older faculty members. Members of the administration were pilloried.  Several of the stories had to do with a former member of the English Department, Paul Adamian.  We new folk had all received a circular advertising his house on Liberty Street.  Frank and Suzanne Lang in Biology got the house; most of us coveted it simply because it was the only one we knew about before we arrived.  All of us drank a lot of cheap wine that evening., but it is safe to say that all of us were sobered by what we heard.

 

Intimations of disorder were apparent earlier, of course.  When I met the Chair of English, Dick Byrnes, he asked if I would be interested in buying his house: he was relocating to the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.  Then I met the first of my future colleagues, Chuck Ryberg.  He was very cordial and helpful; however, he would not be in the area for long, as he had just resigned from the faculty and accepted a position at Miami Dade College in Florida.  Ultimately he chose not to go to Florida and asked President Stevenson if he could have his job back.  Elmo had good sense enough to rehire him.  Anyway, Chuck gave me thumbnail sketches of the hirings, firings, and resignations in the Department of English, of which there had been several.  Paul Adamian, especially, seemed to have earned the ire of the administration.  His firing and other arbitrary and unfair personnel actions had several results: 1) all Faculty Council members had resigned; 2) an elected Faculty Senate was being created and a Faculty Constitution adopted; 3) the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University  Professors had been on campus investigating issues of academic freedom; 4) some faculty were strongly opposed to signing a State mandated loyalty oath; and 5) there was a high rate of faculty turnover. 

 

These facts were largely unknown to new faculty members.  In fact, many of us had been hired by telephone by the Dean of Faculty and had no contacts from departments.  Initially I assumed that my credentials and recommendations had won me a position on the faculty.  Later it became clear that the College was desperate to hire anyone, for enrollments were booming and faculty members were leaving.  Instructors were desperately needed.

 

Elmo  My first impression of President Stevenson was generally positive.  He had a sunny disposition and was welcoming, if a bit rumpled in dress, and inclined to show up at Faculty meetings with cow manure on his shoes: he kept a herd of cows off East Main Street.  Depending on whom you asked Elmo was either benignly paternalistic and well meaning or a failed anachronism.  All agreed that he deserved credit for keeping the College open after being sent by the State Board to close it down in 1946, when enrollments were abysmal.  Many faculty felt a genuine affection for him, even when acknowledging that he suffered from “founder-itis” and was still trying to run the College out of his hip pocket, as he had done for twenty years.  In the two years following my appointment I had reason to change my impression of him.

 

Helen and I missed Elmo’s annual steak dinner for new faculty.  A ditto sheet shoved into my mail-box served as an invitation, and as there was no RSVP we did not realize it was a command performance.  We were used to places where invitations came in more formal dress.  Our absence was noted and we were gently chided for being absent.

 

Two other events diminished any initial affection I harbored for Elmo.  One was his response to a racial incident, earlier discussed.  Second was the way he handled a controversial submission of a student’s poem to the campus literary magazine.  In the 60s the “F” word had not achieved the popularity it unfortunately enjoys today.  At issue was a powerful poem written by a very bright English major named Liz Alderson, later to become one of the finest Elementary teachers in the Medford School System.  The poem began thus:   “F. . . me” and proceeded to dramatize the anguish and loneliness sometimes affecting talented students who find themselves marginalized in contemporary mass culture.  It was a cry from the heart and deserved publication in a student literary magazine.  Elmo’s response was to cut off funding for the magazine.

 

Students, upset at what they considered censorship, took the poem to the editor of The Siskiyou, the weekly student newspaper.  The editor agreed to publish it, and did.  However, once the paper was seen to have inflammatory copy, Dean of Students Al Fellars scurried around campus, confiscating all copies he could find.

 

I was shocked at such heavy handed practice, so wrote a letter to the next Siskiyou, decrying what I thought an arrant act of censorship.  In retrospect, I would have been wiser to attempt to discuss the issue with Elmo—tell him censorship was not a useful instrument to exercise at a College, remind him that townspeople probably cared very little about things published in student papers and literary magazines.  But I did not initiate the discussion. apparently believing that administrative perfidy deserved to be revealed in a public form.

 

I was not rebuked for my letter.  There were consequences, however.  Apparently I was perceived as an agitator, activist, and a radical.  I may have seemed partly so by virtue of having the only beard on campus (in those days beards were frowned on).  My letter earned  me administrative enmity, a fact I discovered some months later during a visit to Dean of Faculty Esby McGill’s office.  SOC personnel practice in those days was to reward completion of a terminal degree with a salary adjustment, usually in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars.  I had worked feverishly to finish my dissertation and looked forward to my reward.  When the salary increase failed to materialize, I went to see Esby.  Why had I not received the adjustment?  Esby, in obvious discomfort, told me that Elmo had ordered him not to give me the raise.  Later Esby apparently argued on my behalf and managed to have $500 of the $1000 re-instated.

 

When confronted with unfair treatment, I often become nearly inarticulate.  So when I arranged to meet Elmo to protest his action, I took Jim Bowen, a colleague in English, along with me to serve as my spokesman when I faltered, as I inevitably did.  Neither of us convinced Elmo.  He reminded us there were consequences for institutional disloyalty and suggested I keep my nose clean in the future.

 

One last look at Elmo before I move on.  When I arrived, stories about him were legion:  he returned money to the State System to show how cheaply the campus could be run; he had driven a state car into Klamath Lake when returning from a late night meeting in the Klamath Basin; he mandated that faculty teaching distant learning night classes stay in the cheapest possible motels, as he did; he kept a telescope at the President’s house on Elkader St. so he could check to see that no trespassers walked on his acreage off East Main St; he belonged to all possible service clubs in the region, and encouraged new faculty members to join some; he hired people he met on the steps of the State Capitol, in rest rooms, on trains, often neglecting to tell department members about their future colleagues; he combed all the hills and crevices of the region to recruit students.

 

 

As a president he was more adept at cheer-leading the College than inspiring trust and dedicated service from faculty.  I vividly recall his contribution during one especially tedious day of new faculty orientation.  There were fifty of us neophytes.  It was stifling hot in Mulkey auditorium, and for hours various administrators had explained the minutia of their operations, often reading to us from the dittoed handouts we had received.  Elmo noted that our attention was wavering, that some of us had lapsed in leaden stupors.  It was time to rouse us before a final dispensation of information. 

 

“Please stand up folks,” he called out.  “You need a break, and you need to interact with one another.  So we’re going to play a little game.  It’s called “Simon Says.”

 

Simon says?  My mind reeled.  Was this a joke.  I was not about to play a child’s game.  I and several colleagues sank deep into our chairs, hoping not to be seen.  A few struggled to their feet and half-heartedly followed instructions.

 

I thought back to the year before, when I was an instructor at New Mexico.  New instructors were treated as adults, given useful guidelines and materials to help us teach well.  Then we listened raptly as a brilliant woman teacher of Shakespeare told us it was our great privilege to introduce students to the beauties and profundities of literature in the Western Tradition.  Our calling was noble.  The task was challenging.  Teach inventively, she said.  Teach with passion.  Teach from the heart, live the life of the mind.

 

As the French say, “Quelle Difference.”

 

Esby   Esby McGill, Dean of Faculty, had a mouth full of gold teeth, and his smile was so mechanical and sly that anyone greeting him for the first time sensed that here was a master of insincerity.  My first thought was this:  “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into here?”  But first impressions are not wholly trustworthy, and after several years of dealing with Esby, I could at least say with certainty that he had never lied to me, never deceived me.  This is not to say he had a winning manner.  He seemed a cold fish, with Oregon Revised Statutes and State System Guidelines coursing through his veins.  He was a bureaucrat, and facts and figures guy.  Rumor at the time of my arrival was that he had worked as a shoe salesman before becoming Dean of Faculty. 

Esby had called me in New Mexico, offering  a position.  The most memorable aspect of the interview came when he observed that I had been educated in Utah.  Was I, by chance, raised in a Mormon household?  I acknowledged that I came from such a background but neglected to say I had strayed from the Faith.  I learned that there was a sizable contingent of Mormons on the faculty.  The College valued them because they were hardworking, in harmony with the goals of the institution, and thoroughly dependable.  They caused no problems.  I would fit right in.

 

Al Fellars.   Al Fellars, Dean of Men, was a dapper man of slight build and drooping eyes.  His countenance was cheerful, his shoes lustrous.  I seem to remember that he was fond of rich silk ties.  There was no doubt of his dedication to the College.  He was an ardent supporter of students and of the College’s programs.  A “loyalist” to his admirers, he was perceived as a “yes man” by others. 

 

When I arrived, Al was known as “Mr. SOC.”  A moment of fame came to him when he was quoted in a national magazine.  The magazine was doing a story on the struggles of  bright students from rural Oregon who sometimes found themselves struggling at Ivy League schools.  Al stated that such students would have been better advised to attend a comforting and sustaining regional school like “safe, sane SOC.”

 

 I had few dealings with Dr. Fellars, as he was called by his staff.  He did make a strong impression on several of us new faculty members during a midterm orientation session about Counseling Services.  A friend in the Speech Department said he had a disruptive student, a young woman who seemed to have serious emotional problems.  What sources of help were available to her?  “Oh, I know the girl you mean,” Al said, and then named her and briefly discussed her behavior.  Most of us were dumbfounded at the breach of confidentiality.  It was an ugly moment, one which did little to convince us that students were given the professional treatment they deserved.  But this incident may have been an aberration.

 

Don Lewis.   Don Lewis, Dean of Administration, was a shadowy figure to most of us.  As new faculty members we were distant from issues of budget, support of programs, and operations of the business office and physical plant.  If budget processes seemed arcane, we suspected that the problem was with the Chancellor’s office, a place as remote to us as Pluto.  If we received our paychecks on time, we were satisfied.  If we bemoaned our meager service and supply budgets, a laughably scant library budget, and our lack of support staff, we did not lay blame at Don’s door.  He was always calm and civil, seemed articulate, bright, and forthcoming.  Faculty more paranoid than I suspected that Don was the power behind the throne at the College.  He, after all, knew where the money was.  Undoubtedly there were accounts no one else knew about.

 

Art Kreisman.  After meeting Elmo and Esby my first day on campus, it was a relief to meet Art Kreisman, Dean of Arts and Sciences.  He was well spoken well educated, and seemed to know the value of a liberal arts education.  I later learned he had been responsible in large measure for shifting emphasis of the College from Teacher Education to a mix of programs.  Art was startlingly hearty, teaching and administering enthusiastically.  He was reputed to be amusing and dramatic in the classroom.  Much of the curriculum in English had been developed under his leadership.  We new faculty were curious to know whether he would exercise undue influence in department matters or be like some of the deans we had known in graduate school who distanced themselves from their original academic departments.

 

I came to feel great affection for Art in the latter part of my career.  It should come as no surprise to the readers of this account that we new faculty members saw much that needed to be improved, and were not shy in voicing our opinions.  Art was probably very tolerant of us, a fact we did not recognize at the time.

 

V.  Faculty Members

   English.        Bear with me.  Of the many names that follow you will remember only a few.  I name them simply to show how fluid the job scene was in 1966 and to illustrate the fact that the English Department is, in 2004, with 11 full-time faculty members, far less than half the size it once was.

 

Of the 50 or more new faculty members coming to the College in 1966, 11 were in English.  Of the 11, Ed Hungerford, the new genial chair of the Department, and I had offices in Myrtle Hall, joining old timers Naomi Grant and Don Moore, and relative newcomers Irving Lord, Bob Casebeer, Bob DeVoe, Ellen Hegler, Sarah Mayea, Dave Alexander, Lloyd Bridges, Roger Bacon, Ted Huggins, Chuck Ryberg, John Briggs, Dorothea Von Heune, and Jim Bowen.  The Palm Street Gang consisted of newcomers Beverly Brackenbury, Chanda Brophy, Sharon White, Henry Heller, Don Sieh, Al Harker, Lawson Inada, Mike Baughman, and a nun-like woman whose name I have forgotten.  Marythea Grebner was moving into the Student Services area, though she still taught linguistics for the Department.

 

Of the 11 new faculty members hired in 1966, four persisted until retirement: Ed Hungerford, Lawson Inada, Mike Baughman, and me.  Five of our 1966 colleagues did not return for a second year.  Four were young women MAs.  Some moved on to graduate schools, some to other schools as instructors.  Henry Heller went to Canada.  All quickly dropped from sight.  Don Sieh and Al Harker lasted a couple of years longer, but by then it was clear that the Department and the College wished to “upgrade” by hiring only Ph Ds.  The clear message was that the College had once been obliged to hire any living being who could teach but also that it felt no responsibility to retain or sustain those lacking terminal degrees.  These young instructors were something like today’s adjunct faculty, though better paid and having some benefits.  By and large they were as dispensable as paper towels in a restroom—useful for the moment, easily disposed of.  Some of us struggled against the exploitation of our fellows, but with little success.

 

Joining the faculty in the next few years, and adding depth and expertise, were Ph Ds Don Reynolds, Walt DeMordaunt, Rob Carey, Herman Schmeling, Carol McNair, Brian Bond, and Bob Guinn.

 

What was it like being first year teachers in English?  Well, for one thing, having most new faculty housed a quarter mile from the older faculty did not foster departmental cohesion.  But there was good camaraderie among the Palm Street crew, and by midyear I was an honorary member of this “fringe” faculty.”  On Friday afternoons we often met at Omar’s Bar to down a few brews, compare notes, bemoan the homogenous nature of the students we taught, and complain a bit about the general illiteracy of those we taught.  Some griped about the heavy teaching loads we bore (fourteen credits a term that year, down from 15 the year before).  Half our teaching assignment was in composition, which meant grading as many as 75 essays a week if we were especially diligent.  Reading that many papers a week is a sure prescription for burn-out.  By Spring Term Bev Brackenbury found a way to survive the crush of papers.  She held them all till the final week of the term, then read them all in frenzied and desperate fashion, attaching no corrections, only grades.  Her students didn't appreciate not knowing where they stood in the class till the last week

 

At the other extreme was Chanda Brophy.  She was a demon teacher, relentlessly pushing her students toward the twin hells of correctness and expressiveness; her grade book was chock full of assignments and detailed results.  By Friday afternoons her pent-up frustration in dealing with so many assignments found expression in a profane rowdiness, especially after she had downed a few beers.  She was good looking, though with pencil thin legs.  She also had a large bust, of which she was proud.  When half drunk she would tell us that she had a good mind to show female strippers in the area what the real goods looked like.  She was a very competitive young woman.

 

Our most out-of-place fellow instructor was Henry Heller, fresh from the walled canyons of New York City and Columbia University.  He was shaken by the meagerness of culture in the area, and by the end of the year wrangled enough money from somewhere to run a foreign film festival, probably the first at SOC.  But Henry was perceived as being pushy, and at year’s end there was a parting of ways.  Henry sent President Stevenson a collect telegram from British Columbia announcing his resignation from the faculty.

 

Henry moved north primarily to evade the draft and a probable tour of duty in Viet Nam.  After a few years in Canada he drifted back to Ashland, remarkably changed.  He looked hippy-ish, wearing long hair, logger’s boots, and flannel shirts; he rebuilt the engines of old Volvos and brought firewood out of the forest in ancient pickups.  He later established the Yin Yang Restaurant in town before moving to New Mexico where he worked as an acupuncturist.

 

All we new folk were obliged to teach World Literature as well as composition.  It was a subject most of us were sublimely unprepared to teach.  My days sitting in Mormon Sunday School classes served me well when it came to teaching “Genesis” and “Exodus,” and I could handle the Greeks by virtue of a good grounding in their mythology and drama.  But I was woefully ignorant of much of the rest of world literature.  Fortunately, we all had Art Kreisman’s Guide to the Classics to help us over rough spots.  Heedlessly young as we were, we were sometimes irreverent when using the Guide.  Mike Baughman and I had great fun reading a couple of lines which seemed to us too loosely translated.  I don’t recall the poem (perhaps by Juvenal?), but the lines went something like this:  “Lay my armor on the fender, / I am going on a bender.”  The rhyming of fender and bender cracked us up.  We could not imagine there were many fenders in ancient Rome.

 

The Department of English quickly found it necessary to address the issue of grading standards in composition.  Students felt abused when they received a “B” one term and a “D” the next.  They were quick to complain to Ed Hungerford and the instructor from whom they received the higher grade.  As a consequence we had frequent meetings during which we were encouraged to develop a uniform system or grading.  The system should be both rigorous and fair.  Often we were asked to read an essay, state what grade we would have given it, and then justify our decision based on the paper’s originality, structure, and mechanics.  Reaching consensus was difficult.  During one memorable discussion Bob Casebeer, a resolute encourager of student aspiration, assigned an “A” to a paper.  Ted Huggins, a compulsive editor, gave it an “F”.  Ted would often provide students with critiques of their essays that were longer than the essays themselves.  Most of us were amused as well as appalled by the disparity in grades and not convinced that the sessions were fruitful.  Nevertheless, composition grading issues, including grade inflation, continued to plague the department for many years.

 

Two Old Timers in English

 

Two colorful members of the Department when I arrived were Don Moore and Sarah Mayea.  Don, a slight, nearly bald man with a precise white mustache, was reputed to be superb English Education teacher.  He taught English Education Methods courses and linguistics; he also supervised teachers in training.  Sara was flamboyant, theatrical, and loud.  She dressed vividly, often in red dresses.  Though her primary interest was in theater, she had taught high school English on the Oregon Coast, so was qualified to help Don oversee student teachers in local schools.  He was always scurrying about, sometimes in agitated fashion.  Though portly, Sarah swept all before her in grand style.  As you all know, students have an uncanny ability to label their profs.  They affectionately dubbed Don and Sara “The White Rabbit” and “ The Red Queen.”

 

Don was remarkably cautious when it came to departmental issues.  He never sided with any faction, apparently having an aversion to political agendas and issues of reform.  But he took a liking to some of the new male faculty members and took them pheasant hunting.  As cautious and careful as he was it most things, he also had a reckless side.  Riding to hunting grounds with him was a white knuckle time for Al Harker, Don Sieh, and Mike Baughman.  They recall Don moving them down the freeway at ninety miles an hour, talking spiritedly and hardly glancing at the road.

 

Sarah was a good soul with a brave heart, having raised her children alone after early death took her husband.  She championed “rough diamonds,” bright but unpolished students from rural areas.  Before retiring she served a term on the Faculty Senate, memorably bringing to the attention of that august body an issue of substantial concern, to wit, that the quality of toilet tissue in the women’s rest rooms on campus was deplorable.  Something needed to be done about it.  It was a sublime moment in the annals of the Senate, and vintage Sarah.

 

Upstarts and Old-timers:  The Faculty Lounge

 

A good sized lounge area had been set aside for faculty use in Britt Hall, and it was heavily used.  By midmorning the room filled with a cross section of faculty.  Sometimes we young folk mingled with our elders, though more often we drank coffee or ate with the younger set.  The old-timers  (all of them younger than I am now) had their favorite tables and chairs where they held court.  By and large they talked about administrative incompetence, heavy teaching loads, and what they hoped to earn when they retired.  In recounting war stories they exaggerated their virtues and minimized their failings.  There was little talk about ideas or books, or pedagogy, or excitement about student learning.  But the discussions were lively and opinionated.

 

I recall one delicious time when an old-timer we’ll call D. C. tangled with a friend of mine in English.  D. C. was a banty- rooster of a man, with a crew cut and a large vision of his importance to the Universe.  He presided over a course required of all education majors.  Students dreaded the course because it was filled with busy-work—two weeks of substance stretched to ten.  D. C. was fiercely protective of his space in the lounge, and when he saw two students join me and Mike Baughman, he sent baleful looks our way.  Because all seats in the union were jammed, the students were unable to find seats, so Mike graciously told them they could sit with us.  D. C. pranced over to our table, hands on hips, and reminded us that the lounge was off-limits to students.  They would have to leave immediately.  Mike calmly told D C. that there were no seats open for students in the student union side of Britt.  What harm could come from their joining us?  We were happy to have their company.  D. C. was adamant.  Such a breach of rules could not be countenanced.  Mike finally looked up at the fuming little man and with a benign smile and in a cheerful tone told D. C. to go do an anatomically impossible thing.  I have never seen a man more shocked, amazed, and deflated than D. C. was.  He finally managed a hard stare before skulking away, cursing under his breath.  Vanquished.

 

Faculty from Other Departments

 

English faculty members soon bonded together by virtue a succession of pot-luck dinners, department parties, poker parties, fishing outings, and day care arrangements.  We finally could afford to visit dentists and doctors, so compared notes about them.  Several wives were pregnant and others had babies to care for.  And though we enjoyed a new social life, we were rather skeptical of the folk in the Math Department, for they all wore maroon blazers to work and play.  Such conformity was anathema to us. 

 

I suspect the experience of departments smaller than English was somewhat like ours.  They too had received large infusions of new faculty: I met new colleagues in biology, history, business, sociology, economics, library, mathematics, speech and theater, foreign languages, art, and music.  A quarter of the entire faculty must have been new in 1966, and we all had the unique experience of establishing friendships with colleagues from many disciplines.  For many of us, graduate study was so focussed that most close ties were at the department level.  At SOC there were richer possibilities for interaction.  Friendships begun nearly forty years ago endure until today.  And while it is not surprising that in some cases a primary allegiance to a department was still very strong,  there was a sense among many faculty of belonging to the College as well.  The smallness of the College and of Ashland itself (population 12,500 in 1966) probably contributed to this sense, but I suspect it also stemmed from a sense of shared purpose. 

 

We felt the need to reshape the institution to suit our vision of a school whose governance structure was responsive to faculty desire.  We had no illusions that we were constructing a Holy City, but we did have a strong sense that major changes were needed.  We were not rowdy in pressing for reforms, but we were assertive.

 

When we arrived, department chairs and other administrative positions were appointive, not elective.  Personnel policies were vestigal, ad hoc, or non existent.  No department I knew of had by-laws or a constitution defining authority, establishing committees, specifying voting rights and membership, or detailing due process.  There was much to do, and though we had our hands full teaching all new classes, we undertook to erect structures that would ensure due process in personnel matters, allow for a more flexible curriculum, and insure faculty participation in departmental business.  Were we a bit pushy and arrogant in believing that new ways were needed?  Probably.  Were we self-righteousness in advocating rapid change?  Undoubtedly.  Should we have been more tolerant of work done by those preceding us?  Yes.  But these conclusions derive from hindsight.

 

At the time it seemed to many of us that we had been sucked into a vacuum.  Our only recourse lay in designing something new.  Only at the end of our careers did it seem to a few of us that the systems we established to rescue us from an arbitrary and capricious paternalism had the unintended effect of so shackling us to the necessities of process and self-governance that we lacked adequate time for teaching and research.