297 24 26018 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9034b5f1c6e3d5633f917bbf867187e7.mp4 c0e15153b46a8cc6de240a16df923b96 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/77869612840f9882bb63369a9f81d1e3.pdf 6ad642aec9d470c4f6852947cc364648 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Stephen Rowe Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] Okay, whenever you feel comfortable, if you could just comment on that notion of students adapting to the college. [Rowe] Well, I think a theme that comes up again and again… perhaps the central theme of progressive education hinges on the distinction between the active and the passive mode. Now James' way of putting that was, I think, what he said in the talks to teachers that he gave in Boston which is really his only sustained statement about education. The center of that statement was something to the effect that in education there's one maxim, and that is no impression without expression. Now, the point is that education continuously runs the cycle of impression and expression and that the problem with most of education is not that it's wrong, but that it only runs half the cycle. In other words, it tests… it gives the students a certain set of impressions and then tests to see if they've gotten the impressions. Now, again, the point is not that that's entirely wrong, but that runs only half the cycle. From James' standpoint, and from the standpoint of progressive education generally, that is frequently called active as opposed to passive education, one for every unit of impression there has to be some expression. One has to do something with it. One has to do the kind of… engage in the kind of doing that enables the student to come into possession of the material. Not simply into the possession of the certificates that says that they have temporarily gotten the impression. And there are empirical studies and point out that that kind of learning, take the test, which certifies that you've gotten the proper impressions. That kind of learning disappears very, very fast. I mean the retention curve with that kind of learning, as compared to the more active learning, shows the initial retention higher, but the curve drops off very rapidly. Whereas in the more active mold, which is to say that impression has been followed by expiration – in this case in writing, or internship kind of work, or what we in the early days call project-oriented education – the retention initially is a little lower, but it remains far after the test material has been forgotten. So, with most of our students coming out of traditional high schools and colleges, they have come to us frequently with some notion about what they want at the college, but mostly habituated to this passive mode. And I think one of the basic events that we see over and over again with students is this kind of crucial moment of awakening to the more active mode. And so frequently – and especially entering students – there will be this very distinct process of engaging education in the more active that is initially perceived as frustrating and indeed it �seems to me that to enable someone to make the transition from the passive to the active mode, there is a certain amount of turbulence and frustration. In fact, a good curriculum should induce a kind of frustration that leads to crossing over this threshold. And it seems to me that the, quote, William James students – the ones who are sort of self-evidently reflective of the college at its best – are those who have made that transition and who are able to participate in this active mode of learning. And I perhaps should say that one of the reasons for the demise of the college was the difficulty, late in college, getting students to do that. The influence of career, careerism, as well as the conservatives and the culture, meant that more and more students were resistant to that process and more and more were willing to defer to authority and to wish to be told. And the more survival became the issue, and the more insecure people became, the more we saw real resistance on the part of students to cross that threshold and enter into the more active mode. But the point of contact, again, with William James was the central statement: "No impression without expression." And when we worked well, I think we continuously ran that whole cycle. [Barbara] Perfect! [Rowe] Good, good, good, good. Next question. [Barbara] Is this a useful question? I'm concerned… I'm sorry. Whenever you're ready to go. [Rowe] Okay, I think that James the person is difficult to understand, William James College was difficult to understand, and what both the college and the figure representative are difficult to understand. But I don't mean it is difficult to understand in the sense of being abstract, or many concepts, or it takes a great effort in the intellectual sense. The difficulty in understanding, it seems to me, is perceptual. It's a little bit like the faces and vases diagram that you get in Psychology 101. In other words, the diagram shows that as you look at it one way it's a vase and as you look at it another way it's two faces looking at each other. It's a gestalt, it's a question of perceptual angle. Now James, the figure, again I think is useful in understanding the college, James, another way to say what the opposition was… the two parts of the culture, neither one of which was sufficient, and the brilliance of the figure James… William James coming to a third orientation that was sufficient. James needed to do philosophy. He needed to make sense of things. He needed to understand life as one whole thing, and the schools of thought they were available to him were both insufficient. On the one side there was the German Idealism, which was precisely that theoretical detachment and ivory tower construction of brand theories that don't relate to anything real, on the one side. And on the other side, the reigning British Empiricism, which was enormously superficial, which literally stood around on street corners and counted things. Neither of those world views or perspectives �he found adequate. And one way to explain his genius is that he met that fundamental position, and move through it, and was able to construct a more adequate philosophy. And I think from this standpoint the- a way to articulate that is in terms of a statement he made its end of his career, when he said: "If this culture is to achieve health and vitality, once again, we must turnover, lie face down, and look into the thick of things." In other words, the traditional orientation represented by the German Idealism tended to understand life by taking a transcendent perspective out there. And that became very problematic in the twentieth century. Nietzsche's famous "God is dead" is the most dramatic and very confusing statement of that. That the way of understanding life through a transcendent principle that's out there seemed to no longer work, going to eclipse or be mysteriously absent, et cetera. The second orientation which we see throughout the twentieth century, which corresponds to the British Empiricism, more or less gives up on any larger sense of meaning or value and is happy to count things and expresses itself and materialism and consumerism, et cetera. Now this third orientation, which is not difficult to understand, again in the conceptual or intellectual form, it's a matter of what James called "angle of vision," of worldview, of perspective, of gestalt, involves an orientation to the depth of the present and to the in here, rather than the out there. And that, it seems to me, is the basic problem with understanding James the figure or James the college. It's a problem of world view. It's a problem from the mental perspective. It's a problem, not of rearranging concepts, but rather of stuff just ever so slightly to the side and seeing everything in a slightly different way. Now this is too complicated. [Barbara] No. [Rowe] No? [Barbara] But I'm going to stop and make sure we got it because… It's really whenever you feel comfortable starting, just talking about where William James College fits into the history of progressive education and/or the alternative education efflorescence. [Rowe] Okay, well I think in some ways, it's very important that the college was founded as it was in nineteen seventy-one to seventy-two, more or less on a cusp between two distinct movements. On the one side, the alternative or innovative education movement – roughly dating from, say, sixty-eight to seventy-one, seventy-two, on our campus – to the demise of Thomas Jefferson College, which was a fairly good example of that. And on the other hand, the career orientation, which began, I think, about seventy-four. So, we were fortunate at James to have had the experience really of some of the excesses and confusions of the innovative education movement, on the one hand, and to have done some serious thinking about vocation and career before the nation became obsessed �with careerism in higher education. Now, it had occurred to me that at one point, one way to understand William James College at its best was that we tried to integrate elements of three distinct educational movements. There's the traditional orientation, which in America came regarding critically by about sixtyeight. Then there's the innovative education movement, as I say, from sixty-eight to seventy-one, and then the career education movement. It seems to me that William James College, in some respects, can be understood as a synthesis of the best elements of each of those three movements. And for each of those movements there's a distinct coinage, or it's coin of the realm, or what passes between people. In the traditional movement, the coinage tended to be quantities of abstract knowledge and the innovative or alternative movement the coinage tended to be richness of personal experience. And in the career the coinage tended to be jobs and engagement with the world, primarily in terms of financial success and career. It occurred to me at one point, that if you take each of the three of those elements, the best of each of the three, you have a view of what we were doing at William James College. I think, fundamentally, we were trying to enable people to understand their commitments and to identify, develop, and interact with their most basic commitments. The identification, corresponding to the alternative innovative movement, where identifying what one is basically committed to requires some degree of self-awareness and some capacity to know what one's own experiences is. The development of one's commitment, with appropriate resources – academically, historically, et cetera – corresponds, it seems to me, to the best of the traditional education and the enactment of one's commitments corresponds to the best of the career orientation. So, the foundation of the college, as I say, on a cusp between the excesses of the innovative or alternative movement on one side, and the superficiality of careerism on the other, seems to me is very significant and fortunate fact about the history of our college. Now I think something else should be said about the ambitiousness of doing what we were trying to do. William James College, if nothing else, was enormously ambitious. I remember a day in the mid-seventies when I read in the "Chronicle of Higher Education," some private college in the east – Bennington, I believe, it doesn't really matter - was having to go because of financial difficulties from a student-faculty ratio eleven-to-one to fourteen-toone. At which point I practically expired of sheer exhaustion and realized the ambitiousness of what we were trying to do at a ratio of about twenty-three-point four-to-one. And in some ways, that fact, twenty-three-point-four-to-one is one of the fundamental significant facts about the college. To try to do small classes, individualized advising, internships, project-oriented education, all of that, at a ratio of twenty-three-point-four-to-one, is an enormously ambitious undertaking. And hence sustaining that for ten years is incredible. And we knew about burnout and related matters but the fact we were able to sustain that for a decade seems, to me, incredible. Now this isn't much about progressive education. [Barbara] Well, it's been a different answer. �[Rowe] Yeah. Yes, the college can be understood as a manifestation of the progressive education movement. I think I've already spoken to that in the previous… Is there another angle on that that you want? [Barbara] … comfortable. [?] [Rowe] Okay. Something needs to be said about this word "commitment." It seems to me that one of the most significant studies of higher education in the period of William James College was the famous William Perry book called "Forms of Moral and Intellectual Development of the College Years" and what he really pointed out, as a social scientist, is that higher education, when it works well, enables the student to move through nine stages of developmental process wherein they enter what he calls the commitment stage. Of the word itself, "commitments," has been in some respects a cliché of that period, so that there are understandings of the term "commitment" that are nearly clichéd. But Perry points in a simpler form of his statement that the deep curriculum of the college years involves the student moving through three stages: the absolutistic stage, where they think that there's one right answer, black and white, right and wrong. Secondly: the relativistic stage. Everything is relative in the sense of outer space. I mean everything can become anything else. Pure protein is in flux, and so forth. And if things go well, they emerge from that stage, and through that stage, into the commitment stage, where they are able to commit themselves, both in terms of beliefs about the cosmos or religion and philosophy, and in terms of particular people and projects. So that term "commitment," indicating the culmination of a crucial developmental process that Perry, and his successors, have argued was the deep curriculum of the college years. I think is the way that I want to understand that term and hence the significance… significance is a word I use too much… the necessity to identify what students are really committed to and provide them with the context and a curriculum through which to develop their commitment in terms of awareness, perspectives, what the academy can do at its best. And third: to at least have some experience with the enactment or embodiment or living of that commitment into the world as we find. [Barbara] What I just asked you about coping with the changes that happened… [Rowe] Okay, the future-oriented part of it, it seems to me, was in some ways a sham. Or a reflection of the society perceiving, I guess, the general term is rapid social change, so not a sham but a cliché. I think that at a deeper level there was significance to future-oriented and this is a quality that tends to be present in alternative education, generally. And that is the emphasis, the realization that education involves two elements. It involves a substance and a process. And another way to say what the problem with tradition, much of what traditional education is that it concentrates entirely on the substance and doesn't attend to �the process of learning. To emphasize the process of learning is to emphasize the importance of learning how to learn, quite independent of what the particular subject matter or substance is that the student is being required to master. So that many people in the present… in fact, many of the reports on higher education that we're seeing now – especially the Bell report, for example, and the American Association of Colleges report – emphasize the importance of a student learning how to learn as an essential part of the experience with higher education. So, it seems to me that at its best, what the future-oriented meant was attention to the process and to enabling the student to learn how to learn. At its worst it was a cliché… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_42_Rowe Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rowe, Stephen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Stephen Rowe interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Stephen Rowe by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Stephen Rowe was a faculty member of William James College and a longtime philosophy professor at Grand Valley. In this interview, Stephen discusses how William James students adapted to the college, how the perception of the college was difficult for many to understand, and how William James College fit into the history of the alternative education movement. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Stephen Rowe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3332e020fc383ca7fb5d778ccebdd3fc.mp4 f06de20bdc516c26989c8ee847ba7b53 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e224af6b706927cbd127bc6da306d990.pdf 647876f24c2708041c0b6c041f1d7bb6 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Deanna Morse Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Morse] So, you're going to ask me about the students? [Barbara] Yeah! [Morse] The qualities of the William James students that you don't see…? [Barbara] Or what kind of quality did we really appreciate in some of the people? [Morse] Well, I think one of the things about William James students was that they knew why they were there – and they were there to learn. And my feeling is that some of the students that are there now don't know exactly why they are except that it's a transition point between college and something else… life elsewhere. The qualities that I saw in people were sort of self-initiative, willing to follow things through, willing to take risks, willingness to fail, and a desire to really do what it took to get the job done. Which in many times meant a lot of work and a lot of redoing. And I find that part of the grading systems, I think, is what keeps people from being willing to do that. And I was really surprised… this term I used the technique of giving people very low grades with the idea that they would then redo their work to get the higher grades. And it surprised me that in several cases people accepted their low grade and just stopped right there. They accepted Ds, they accepted D minuses, they accepted C minuses and Fs. And they just said: "Well that's what I'm used to getting in education." And, you know, that's it and then didn't redo the work. Even with my constant prodding saying: "I believe that you have something good there. It's worth redoing. I believe your tape, you know, could use some re-editing, some restructuring." And still people just said: "Well, I'll accept that grade." And I didn't hear that in James. In James it seemed like people were more willing to continue redoing the work. Also, though, I think part of it is the fact that students are juggling six or seven classes right now, too. And what they're learning from education is…I don't think that they’re real-life skills particularly. What people are learning is what they need to do to get the minimum level grades in all of their classes and I really don't see where that translates into real life and learning later on. I had the same kind experience in my own undergraduate experience, and I don't see where that has taught me anything in adult life. I mean, I don't have that kind of experience in jobs where I go into a job and I say: "What's the minimum that I can do to get this paycheck?" It's just not the way that it works in the real world. Yet, in education that's �something that we teach our students is what you have to do to get the minimum grades to get by. And the students at their own level – whether the minimum grades are a B, an A, or a C – and they do whatever it takes to get to that level, just to get by. [Barbara] How do you motivate them? What makes the miraculous change? Why don't they just do the minimum to pass a pass/ fail system? Which is what we had. I mean everybody always said that's what's wrong with a pass/fail system. They'll all just do the minimum. [Morse] That just wasn't my experience that people would do the minimum. It seemed to me that something about not labeling it as C, D, F, B, A… something about not having that label ever put on it made people strive for excellence. And, also, in the pass/fail system, you could require people to redo. And I guess you can in a graded system, too, but somehow it doesn't seem to fit as well as it did in the non-graded structure. [Barbara] What else… comes after a terrific interview question? [Morse] Well, the other thing that I guess I was saying before the tape ran out about my own education… which I understand some of the students now, which is that you do in an educational situation where you are in control of what you're doing. What you get is this sort of a self-affirming kind of feeling that then makes you want to work. And, for me, my graduate experience had that effect on me. Going to Goddard college – which was a similar experience to James – where you were able to define what it is that you felt was important to you, and then you had guidance from an instructor that would lead you on some roads or some paths to reaching whatever that goal was that you determine. Well, you feel then that you are the person that's responsible for your education. And within the more traditional educational structures it's hard to get that because instead it's more an assembly line in a factory or something like that; where you're trying to tell people I've packaged some information which I feel is important and you need to process that information to get out of this course. It's a much different kind of structure saying: "Come to the course, tell me what you feel like you need to do in this course, and then I will help you facilitate being able to do that through taking media production, or art, or whatever the course was.” And you can't just do that… you can just teach that way in a traditional structure because the students don't come with the same values and same expectations. If you try to teach that way now students come in and say: "But I expect you to define what the activities are, what the studies are for the course." And, of course, when I define them they're a different set of activities than if they were defined individually by the students, and their my priorities rather than the student priorities. �[Barbara] It's a combination of two things. I think one is an almost Calvinistic sense that there's sin, you know, that you can't trust people. Okay? In the conventional educational. And also, the notion that the knowledge that's being imparted is real knowledge, you know, in the most Biblical sense. "This is the truth, so you learn it, kid." As versus saying: "This was the truth, but look at the mess the world is in. Let's find out together what we can do better." [Morse] Right and the students come wanting to learn what that truth is. They want to learn: "What are the things that I must know to get a job." Whereas what we teach them are more strategies to facilitate them once they've decided what the job is that they want to get. I mean it's sort of different… it seems in some ways like it's the same, but it's not, for it. I mean if someone comes and they say: "I want to learn media because I'm interested in working in the health care professions." Then you teach the media to try to help and reach that goal. If someone comes and says: "I want to learn media because my high school teacher told me that it might be an interesting thing for me to do." It's just a different… you know, you're talking on a whole different level of approach of education. The students come with different expectations. [Barbara] Can you do an introduction of yourself using your name, please? [Morse] Well, yes. I'm Deanna Morse and I came to William James in 1979. And before that I had done artist in the schools work for about four years and had gotten my master’s degree through Goddard College – which is an alternative school in Vermont – and had done commercial production work before them. [Barbara] Can you name the students that you feel the proudest of in all these years? [Morse] Well, it's hard to name just one. But some of the people that I feel good about are some of the recent graduates that I've stayed in touch with like Susie Zach and Maggie Anareno [?], who are people that are working commercially, locally, and had a sense of questioning when they came into college and are still questioning, somewhat, what they're doing working commercially in media. Some of our current students have a lot of the same qualities and I still feel real good about them so I don't mean to say that when James closed, you know, it's like a whole different ballpark. I really don't see a total difference in terms of the number or the quality of students. But it does seem to me that entering students are coming for a different reason than they came when they were at James. [Barbara] I can think of just one more question right now. When I was interviewing Rose Willey, she was talking about… she almost got accusatory and she stopped herself. She said: "The school… one of the explicit goals of the school was to be change oriented. Future oriented. When real change came, and they tried to close us down, what did you have, what did you have to teach us?" Do you feel, �like, guilty because we didn't save the school? [Morse] Oh, no. I thought that at the time the college was threatened, the discussions around the college were really interesting and also reflected the nature of the college a lot. I remember endless council meetings that we had at that time where there was discussion of Dick Gottlieb, and some other people, about moving the college downtown, off campus, you know, this kind of thing. And there was also, I remember, we had faculty workshops where we talked about how we would teach using some of the William James philosophies within the new system. You know that kind of thing. And so, I know that the students probably felt much differently about it than the instructors. And, also, I think in some ways and students… I guess the one thing I do feel guilty about is that it seems to me that at that time some of the instructors, myself included, saw the change with somewhat of a sense of relief because at least it meant that we would be moving into what we perceived to be as stable environment. And that we wouldn't be spending our lives feeling threatened at all times and feeling on the defensive at all times. And I think some of the students were responding with anger towards faculty. And I felt a bit like I was one of the people that was justifiably hit with that anger at that time. Because I just felt that the continued threats were not worth it, at that point. It seemed to make more sense just to have the college be closed. [Barbara] Do you have anything? [Inaudible] Check back in. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_41_Morse Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Morse, Deanna Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Deanna Morse interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Deanna Morse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Deanna Morse was an Arts and Media faculty member in William James College from 1979 to 1981. In this interview, Deanna discusses the qualities of William James students and her personal journey that led her to teach at WJC, in addition to her final thoughts on the college's closing. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Deanna Morse. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5e80ee69ef712a4f112bc4bcf5477244.mp4 30939aaf18cd7d979b21ef5c88c4f704 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e8e53bdf1ad792dc8608871ef80622e5.pdf 648450292db4b289bcda02d23097fc5b PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Bruce Klein Date: 1984 [Barbara] … So, Bruce, those are the things I want to know. [Klein] So you want to know why I came to James? [Barbara] I wonder if I can do it on this shoulder. Yeah, why… you know what I mean, we’re not into big biographies, we’re into what James was. So, when phrasing your answer… you know what I mean? Hey, that looks nice. That looks nice. Now we got you. Make sure we have you focused. There. Anytime you want to start talking, you're really clear. [Klein] Okay. Why did I come to James? That's an interesting question. I think you have to do a little biography: I was at Virginia Tech. for five years teaching and before coming up here. And Virginia Tech. is like Michigan State and I didn't like that. I didn't like the movement towards one hundred, two hundred, three-hundredperson lectures and movement away from when I started there. It was a very personal place because I was the only faculty member. There were two of us. And by the time I left there were twelve of us with a PhD program and all of what that implied. And it's a long and funny story about how I got to James. I applied at Thomas Jefferson because I felt that any college for advertising in "The New Republic" couldn't be all bad. And they correctly sent me back a letter saying: "We're not interested in you; however, we've sent your material over to William James." And that was the year before William James… that was the year when James was being founded. So, I actually applied to William James before it existed. Ken Hunter was hired instead of me. And two years later – I think it was two years later – the circle came around and I was added to the staff. And it was really, in a lot of ways… coming to James was a reaction against a standard mega-versity type education. [Barbara] Okay, let me shift here. Okay. Now would you like to talk about… I just did something, sorry. Talk about the movement of computers. [Klein] Okay, I think… [Barbara] Let me change the shot just a little. [Klein] To talk about the movement of computers from James to CAS is… I think there were two reasons. One had to do James itself. And that was the students we �were attracting were less and less interested in a linear kind of thing that computing implies. And at the exact same time, a very powerful person on the Grand Valley campus, Don Vander Jack, saw finally that computing was going to be a very important curricula item and waged a campaign to move it. And we were vulnerable because of dying enrollments in that area. [Barbara] That's real clear. Okay. Let me just check focus here. Okay. [Klein] It was interesting. When I came, there was a core of about twenty students, I think, from roughly the first year or two of James that were really interested in computing. And when I left – or when it was suggested I apply for an open position in CAS by the Provost, let’s put it that way – there were probably fewer than ten. [Barbara] Because? Well, you already said. [Klein] I already said. I don't think we were attracting… I think the message of James was not the thing that was going to attract students interested in computing. And the students that were attracted to James were turned off by "you can't take the fourth course until you've taken the first three." I think there was some real problems with that. [Barbara] Real clear. From the position of both an insider and an outsider, I was never an outsider, you know what I mean, for James… [Klein] Yeah. [Barbara] Would you care to comment on its final demise? I mean, could it have been prevented? What should we have done differently? [Klein] I don't think anything could have been done, not in the context of Grand Valley. Grand Valley was going to make itself look like every other college in the state. Because I think, at that time, there were some serious enrollment patterns though James was doing just fine. If you want to look at James vis-à-vis Seidman, the enrollment in James was – to my recollection – just as good as the enrollment in Seidman. But I think the powers that be wanted Grand Valley to look like every other college in the state because they were taking enough flak for not being like every other college in the state. [Barbara] If you were to sum up James – the key to what we were trying to do or were doing – in a sentence, what would that sentence be? [Klein] Wow. That's a hard one, Barb. Well, something that my wife and I have been talking about a lot lately – and that's growth. Personal and intellectual. And I think �to my mind that's what James was more about than anything else. [Barbara] You're a great interviewee. You say it! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_40_Klein Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Klein, Bruce Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Bruce Klein interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Bruce Klein by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Bruce Klein was faculty member in William James College who worked at Grand Valley from 1977 to 2001 and later became Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Information Systems. In this interview, Bruce discusses his personal journey that led him to William James College and the movement of the computer program from WJC to the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). This interview is part 1 of 1 for Bruce Klein. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Lectures and lecturing Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/56647999b9f4cbdb4332832a55e5dfaa.mp4 6ad6be9be8fe13dee38b7a79a3e4752c https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fcd18884ee0436786d5ff2fc5f9248db.pdf 199ab49ab84f708d8f4e7f348944b43e PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Deanna Morse Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] Okay, if you would just start out, wherever you want, talking about the difference of teaching at a conventional situation and teaching at William James. [Morse] Well, one thing for me is the observation about studying both places because I studied at a conventional school and then I got my master’s degree from Goddard. And for me the difference between the two was like night and day. Because what I found in conventional school was that a lot of the emphasis is on grades and how one would perform. And at Goddard a lot of the feeling was what you can do with that… whatever the learning is. And I guess I've seen that at Grand Valley, too. The most obvious thing for me is that when I give students… after students turn in films, I write comments to them on their films, you know, with long comments… a page or two. And what would happen at William James is people would read my comments, and they would take it in, and they would respond to it. And in grade situations, what I find, is that people immediately turn to the last part of it, see what their grade is, and then factor all those comments, you know, on the basis of what that letter grade was. And to me that's the least important part of the learning. The important part is the feedback. But what I find students do is they just look at the grade. And even some really good students in this term, in fact, came to me and said: "Well it's getting near the end of the term and I wonder how much, you know, how much my grade would go up if I redid this project." And it's totally unimportant what the grade would go out. The real important thing is how well they can do the project. But the incentive to do it well seems to be not there in the graded system. [Barbara] But that's the opposite from what people who advocate grades… what most people say. They say you have to have grades or else people won’t work. [Morse] No, I didn't think that was true at all. At James what happened was people worked because then they enjoyed the work and it had nothing to do with how you evaluated that work, in terms of A. B, C, D, or F. But they did the work until they felt the work was right. And in the graded system I find people will say: "Well I was only a C student in high school, so I don't have to do any better than a C now." Or: "I was only a B student in high school, so I’m satisfied with a B." Or: "I was only a D student in high school, I'm satisfied with a D." And then don't try to make themselves better. And that for me has been the biggest frustration… is moving back to grades. �[Barbara] Okay. What other differences in teaching are there that seem important? If there are any… excuse me. [Morse] Besides the grades? The grades is the big one, for me. The other stuff… it's harder for me because I always thought James' requirements of the milestone were a little wacky anyway. And I never quite got a sense of what a student had to do to complete their study plan. And I feel, hearing Richard, I feel part of the difference is really a difference of a nontraditional school within a larger structure versus a school that's nontraditional all the way through. I don't think those questions come up at a place like Goddard or a place like Evergreen. But within William James what happened was it seemed like people trying to sort of mold the alternative ed. to make it fit into what people could see as parallel to traditional requirements. So that part of it to me hasn't been a real difficulty. But the grade/non-graded aspect has been the biggest one. And the fact that at James the nature of the students were different. We got people that were older and were coming back that really wanted to learn this area and now it just seems like we're getting a lot of eighteen-year-olds that just want to go to college and someone told them that film was interesting and they're studying it. And a lot of that kind of thing. [Barbara] What would you say, in your experience at James, was the thing that was most valuable to you or to, you know, the most valuable to the universe? What was the best thing about being there? [Morse] Well, I think the feeling that you were participating in something that was looking for answers, rather than just fitting into a structure that people accept as the norm for no apparent reason for it. That's really for me… and there's no reason that we should accept the fact that traditional education is the answer. It, you know, just a thing… "Well, I did it, so other people should too" or something like that. It has nothing to do with really questioning what students need to know or what students need to learn. It just seems to me that traditional education is based on tradition, basically. And it just sort of comes out of that need of knowledge. Whereas at James what people were doing was saying: "Maybe there is a different way to approach education, what would that way be?" And everyone was sort of seeking that answer. And participating in that environment was the most important overriding aspect of what made it special to me. [Barbara] I think that's a wonderful answer, because I agree with it; however, I wonder if there's something… a specific manifestation of the kind of things we were doing that you could also mention. That's an attitudinal one, and I agree – it’s basic – but is there something we did in classes, or in council, or something, that you can mention that you really miss now or that you think made things work? Because you were in such a pragmatic place, it wasn't just attitude, things were worked �out. [Morse] I don't know. I think it really, for me, it was just that sort of overriding attitude which manifests itself in counsel and all the discussions. And I remember sitting in rooms, and looking around, and saying: "People have such a variety of attitudes and opinions about things. I can look at these people. I can see their opinions, I can see their attitudes, I can see how they manifest, I can accept their different viewpoints as all being valid.” And somehow, within this new system, you don't have that same… it's not that same sort of flexibility towards accepting that there are different approaches. That's really… it's very fundamental and basic. [Barbara] Do you think we failed? [Morse] Oh no, no. And I get real angry when people say that the college was an experiment because to me the sort of connotation of that is: if it is no longer existing and it was an experiment, an experiment failed. And I just don't buy that at all. And I always tend to jump on people or call in, you know, when people say that it was an experiment and it failed and that's why it's no longer there. That wasn't it at all anymore. [Barbara] Why isn't it any longer there? [Morse] I'm not totally sure why it wasn't there. In fact, when I came it seemed like the college was on the verge of folding. I remember the first faculty meeting that I came to, Adrian started the meeting by saying: "If we make it through the year, we'll be glad." And I went up to Adrian at the break and I said: "If this is true, why am I here?" You know? I mean why did I bother coming to school that's already on the decline? And I guess… I don't know how many years. Let’s see, I've been at Grand Valley five. It must have lasted about three years after that… after I came. [Barbara] What year was that? [Morse] Seventy-nine when I came. When did it close? [Barbara] Eighty-one. [Morse] Eighty-one. So yeah, it was just two years. Not long. [Barbara] And that was supposedly the bad two years. [Morse] I think I missed the hay-day of the college and I think I did come in at the tail end and the part when I came in was… I was hired in the week that they took �computers and management out and all that stuff. And TJC was closed. The day that I interviewed I think they announced that TJC would be closed, so I came at a real down time for it. But I remember when I went back to Denver after the interview, I knew that I would take the job if it was offered because I knew that working in this place would be a once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity. And, you know, that was why I came. [Barbara] What was the thing that didn't work most, in your experience? What was the worst thing? [Morse] At James? [Barbara] Yeah. [Morse] I had the most problem with study plans, and I always felt that there was some sort of a hidden agenda to what would be expected on the study plans. And I remember having many long debates with Barry Castro, and other people, about why we just didn't articulate what we were looking for on study plans because it seems like we were. And that was the biggest area of dissatisfaction for me with students… was trying to help them design a study plan that I felt other people would accept. That was my biggest problem. [Barbara] Why do you think they closed us? [Morse] I don't know. I think that… I'm not real sure. I don't think it was politically advantageous for them to keep the college open because they had gotten a lot of bad press in the community and people in the community didn't understand – not so much with James but with TJC. And they put James, sort of, into the same ballpark as TJC. It's alternative ed.; it doesn't make sense. We can't articulate it. We can't say in one sentence what it is at the college, what it means. So, I think that was probably why it was closed. But it's not totally clear to me why it was closed. It's also, in some ways, not clear to me why it held on as long as it did. [Barbara] You came here and felt very comfortable here. Had you read a lot of William James philosophy? [Morse] No, no I didn't know anything about William James. [Barbara] Why do you think you felt so comfortable here? [Morse] Well, I think that my own background in alternative ed. had the most to do with it. What happened to me was that I went to an undergraduate school that was very traditional and when I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I said that there was no way that I would go on for, you know… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_39_Morse Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Morse, Deanna Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Deanna Morse interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Deanna Morse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Deanna Morse was an Arts and Media faculty member in William James College from 1979 to 1981. In this interview, Deanna discusses the differences in teaching at William James College and what she valued most about being a part of its community. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Deanna Morse. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b85e0e93fa57554afc0dd956d7e4784b.mp4 226d6e3dc82a57ccf93a72d912f22b88 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2a98ed2bf41924851efb2814cd89a29f.pdf 440278631a4925a5e6ac299bd15ea24a PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard Joanisse Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] We have everything. Don't you think Gerb? [Unknown] Yeah. We're pretty sure. [Barbara] When I say, "Don't you think Gerb," you know what that means? [Joanisse] Check the damn thing over. [Barbara] Make sure it doesn't screw up. [Joanisse] You are what is called the sous chef. That means he's just, what, a little guy in this thing right? [Barbara] No, no, no. He is wonderful. [Unknown] Alright now we're not talking about me. [Joanisse] We're not talking about him, were talking about his position. Don't confuse Gerb and his position. [Barbara] Anyway, Richard, we're going to start talking. What is the differences in teaching in the current system and teaching at James? [Joanisse] Well, I think that when I first came to the new college I was sort of, I think, catered to a little bit. I was made the chairperson of the senate and put on a lot of committees and things. And I said, "Well if I'm in the new system, what I should really try to do is to get acquainted with everyone and to try to involve people in the governance of the college." And at the Dean 's request, I went and met most of the faculty and I sent them a memo and I had him send a memo out – a threatening memo – the second time around. Because the first time nobody showed up for any meetings. The most we ever had of a faculty of something between seventy and eighty was fifteen people who turned out. So, I went around and I started to talk to people and asked them why. And most people feel in the division, I think, that you shouldn't really involve yourself in any of those kind of things. They're not seen as a chance to involve yourself or to have a say in how colleges ought to be governed. They're always seen as obstacles to your �freedom, in some ways. They're a pain in the ass to do them, they don't bring anything back, it's all a farce anyhow, nothing really happens, it's a waste of energy. [Joanisse] The key, I think, to understanding how they feel is that in some sense they’re never really included. There is an invitation for them to attend things, but the decisions that are made are never their decisions. And that was so true when I went over there. The Social Thought and Public Affairs, which I'm a part of, picked a particular person to represent them, overwhelmingly, and then submitted first and second name. The second person I believe got three votes, the first person, I think, got twelve. The Dean overturned the decision, and when someone asked him why he said: "I didn't say that these proceedings meant anything." And so, somebody who was leaving turned to me and said: "You think I'm going to go to one of your stupid meetings? This is the way things work over here." I think the real difference there is I think that William James, for the very first year that I arrived and we were building up the college, we made it clear to everyone, as well as to ourselves, that the college would be governed by us. I think we created the structural conditions for participation of everyone. And so that everyone had a voice and everyone was listening. And I think that's what is embodied in the council itself. And the Dean certainly, as the head of the college, can always overturn the decision. But if you remember that we had a particular way of making the Dean… if a Dean wanted to overturn a decision, remember what we would do is say to her… she had to say that it was… a what? A great event or something or other. And, I don't know, it was forcing her again to say that something that happened was extraordinaire and therefore she was going to intervene. I can only think maybe two or three times in at least the first ten years of the college where such an occurrence to place. [Barbara] Do you remember any? [Joanisse] I think the decision of Burt Brower was sort of a bad decision and the Dean used her power there in appointing people, I think more than anything else. And some policy decisions… Adrian felt that she knew more information and she would work on people on a very intimate level. Which is, I think, the way that William James worked. And I'm not suggesting William James wasn't coercive at that level either. You couldn't, you know, use people intimately as well as you can use them sometimes bureaucratically. But I think that what William James did have, and something which this place lacks, is that people got used to the notion that they actually have an input and that they, in some sense, were not required to participate, but that participating was, in effect, one of the responsibilities that we had. And it was a responsibility that most people and William James accepted. And that most of the major decisions of the college took place in the council, openly, where people could say anything they wanted to say. I've been in this �unit a year and a half and nobody says anything in public. So, there is no public discourse whatsoever here. There are private statements made about people behind their backs, but people will not say in front of anyone. So, when we have had meetings, the meetings have come to naught. I never felt that kind of cynicism at William James. And I never felt that in William James, even at the end when William James was changing drastically, it seems to me, and the council wasn't as representative as it was in the past, it was nothing compared to the situation that I'm in now. [Barbara] So what can you as an individual really do when you're put in a structure that doesn't give you any opportunity to be responsible? What do you do? [Joanisse] Well, very little. I think that I've tried to have an effect on this college. I mean, my metric at William James is to bring people together. And I'm now with the Dean on a book club and… [Barbara] What's that? [Joanisse] A book club is where people come together who are interested in reading something. I'm also the person who invites guests so we have a committee for intellectual ideas and I invite various faculty people to give speeches. But the sense of the community is not there. These are all individual endeavors. At some institutional level, we're trying to create a sense of community, but the experience isn't there. What we're trying to do is to create an experience, but I'm very skeptical of what's happening here. [Barbara] Teaching, how is teaching different? [Joanisse] Well, there are grades. I mean, you have more students and the students are no better or worse. I think that the students are not in there because they want to be. Let’s start there. The caliber of the students are not that different, but students in William James took a course because they wanted to take it. Very seldom did they feel coerced, in some ways, to have to take a course. Most of the things that I teach now almost, without exception, are to meet general education requirements. Out of a hundred students I taught in social problems last year, not one of those students is a student majoring in sociology. Not one. So that means that in effect I'm teaching students because they have been told they have to take something. And I think that makes an enormous difference. I never have a student come to my office unless there's a question about a grade. My office has never been used; I've never been used by a student. [Barbara] Never? [Joanisse] No, not in the general education. I'm not talking about students who might be in �sociological theory or something like that. But of these students, I can't name any student who's come to me and simply said: "I'd like to talk to you about sociology." I think part of the problem there is that general education courses are considered, by most students, to be irrelevant anyhow. But that experience you would've gotten at William James… you would have gotten the curious student who might've been interested in what you were talking about, or in ideas, and that you don't get. I'm not suggesting that these students are interested in that in their own field, but by the time, you know, when we get them, they're not interested in those things. [Barbara] You said that you were thinking of writing a paper but didn't tell me what about. [Joanisse] Well, the one thing that I find impossible to explain to anybody is what William James was. And I always had this sort of paper on the phenomenology of William James. In other words, phenomenology is always after the question of meaning. And I was trying to say to people: "What does it mean to be in William James? And what was William James?" But I was asking the question from the fact that nobody I've ever talked to who is not a member of William James ever understood what William James is. Now that's terrifying because that's almost like being in a cult and trying to tell people who don't understand what a cult is experiencing. And I don't think we were a cult. I don't think there was anything hidden or mysterious about what we did and therefore it's scary to me. I can understand why people who are on communes, who want to hide from the outside world, and whose experience it seems to me and the kind of beliefs they have may be, in some sense, different from the outside world. But we were offering a traditional state institution in the same environment, no more than ten feet from anybody else; we publicized what we were doing and yet I have never met an outsider… let me give you an example. Jock Bliss and I were in a meeting – Jock Bliss is the director of public relations Grand Valley. When the demise of William James was imminent, he said to me: "I don't understand why you're so upset Richard, if you are such a good teacher you should be able to be a good teacher any place. Isn't William James just really a matter of style." And now, I wasn't offended. I just… something clicked again. I said: "My God here it is again." I mean we were a school about, in some sense, communication; a substantial part of what we do and nobody understands what it is that we're doing. So, it was at that point I said I should write a paper really titled something like "The Phenomenology of William James; or Distortions of Communication" and try and see what is it about what we were doing that was distorted? Why did people perceive… I'll give you a second example. Carl [inaudible]… don't ever use these names… [?] said to me one day: "I never could understand why you people work so damn hard, but now I figured it out." He said, "you had,"… "because, Christ, if you didn't you weren't going to survive." And I says: "That’s what it was all about, Carl." I said: "I mean we really… we had to do it." He said: "Yep, I just had to do it." You know, so everybody had some kind of sense of it. �And even Chris, one time, said to me: "You people really couldn't do all the things you claimed. You really didn't teach all the stuff and know that stuff, did you?" And I said: "You know, if you do one thing for ten years, you can be the best at it." But I said: "For ten years, what your reward is, is to do things with other people and to learn what other people are doing." I said: "You can be very good at that." And I said that… so I stood back: There's another miss… but these are… this person's my friend. This person taught at a school that was, presumably, in some sense, alternative too. But the bottom line of coming for Chris was: "I just don't really believe you people were about what you claimed you were about." And so, it was from that misunderstanding… and I'm not saying in effect that we were what we said we were, in the sense of what we were publicly to people print. But the point is – in some sense – whatever we thought we were, and what we are to each other when we speak to each other about what we were, no outsiders have ever understood. And so, there’s something wrong someplace. And I thought it would be marvelous to write a paper about what it was. [Barbara] What do you think it was? [Joanisse] Well, I think in part – if I start with the negatives from our own side – I think in some sense in order to be successful, we had to isolate ourselves in some ways. To immerse ourselves in our own interpersonal relation, we have no friends outside of William James… most of us. As a good example, all of our intimate relationships were with people [?]… that's still true for most of us even now after two years. If we had a party, most of us would’ve invited people from that college. So, it was very difficult for us to know, in some sense, what was going on outside. I think at an institutional level, we were very open about what we were doing. I think that at an interpersonal level, we were very close and we liked each other a lot and we had no energy leftover for anybody else. At an institutional level, we were just willing to please anyone about what we were doing and publicize anything. I think what we thought is that people would actually be concerned and read about it and understand it. And I don't think most people read it and I don't think most people perceived exactly what we were doing. And I don't think the problem, necessarily, was the way we were saying it. [Barbara] Do you think that part of it could be so much of the thing was experience – experiential – and then we put an intellectual, verbal gloss on it for other people. But what James was really about… which is why we would throw students into it, and they would flounder for a while, and then they would start experiencing and being active, and then they would understand. But it was an experience that they had to go through. So, when you just write the stuff down or verbalize it to other people, that experiment component is missing and they're never going to understand it. �[Joanisse] These are people who don't hold much to these kinds of experiences. And certainly, these are people who have not had the kind of experience that you're trying to articulate. [Barbara] I know… that's what I'm saying. They can't understand. It's interesting, the Jacque Barzun book on James that I'm reading now says there was a certain group of people, always, you could count on year after year that just didn't understand James. Could not understand the English words that he was writing down. Did not know what he was talking about. [Joanisse] I also, I just didn't want to leave this out. I do think that in the first ten years of the college… I want to make some distinctions: certainly, all the time Adrian Tinsley was the Dean, I think, most of us had an incredible commitment to teaching. And lots of the evidence indicates that schools are different. The thing that makes him different is the kind of commitment and motivation you have in your faculty. The real keys is to try and figure out how that commitment and motivation was tied to structural variables. What did the college do, in some sense, to enhance that commitment, to reward people for being highly motivated? And it seems to me that goes back to what we started with and most people felt it was their institution. And that the experiences that they had had, in the institution, had some kind of effect on the outcome of what they were doing. So, one was talking about pedagogical interest or one's philosophical concerns. One could go to one's colleagues and talk about these kind of things, and raise them as an issue in the council. And we did that, it seems to me, constantly. And realized that what one was talking about was not bullshit; that it would have an effect. That some decision would come out of this. That some policy, it seems to me, would be initiated. That's not true at a place where we're at now and think only a fool would think it is. [Barbara] It's not true for us and it's not true for the students. [Joanisse] No. [Barbara] Similarly, yeah, I asked you this before. I phrased it badly but were we responsible for the closing of James or how were we responsible? [Joanisse] No, I don't think we were responsible. If you look across the country, there are no alternative schools that are still open. Evergreen would be an exception, but you know Santa Cruz is no longer an alternative. None of the other schools that were alternative when we started exist. I think that in some ways we are as much a victim of the changing economic situation and the changing historical understanding of education. And as a broader thing, at a more local level, I think Grand Valley simply got to the point where it no longer felt that it could deal with the confusion that the alternative colleges produced. So, you're looking here �more, it seems to me, at public… an attempt to develop a public image where people would no longer be confused about Grand Valley. I never met anybody who ever understood at the administration or in admissions what Grand Valley was about. So I think that there had been enormous pressure in the last four or five years before the closing of the colleges to get one college. Both from the faculty in a large unit and from the administration. And with the closing of Thomas Jefferson, I just think that it was inevitable that William James would close. So, whether or not William James was successful or not I think is irrelevant. The only way that it could've been… there was no way I think it could have remained open, regardless of how successful it was. If it had more students, if its students had been successful outside. I don't think it was any criteria that one could use to point to and say: "Oh it's a successful institution, let's keep it." That's why I said before, I don't think it was failing. It wasn't on the basis of its failure that it was closed. It was on the basis, it seems to me, of outside forces. And certain kinds of the inside forces that felt this is an excellent opportunity to get rid of this cluster that seemed to drive everybody mad. And the minute it closed everyone came up to me who worked in admissions – because I was a Representative of Admissions at William James – and said: "Boy! Now it's going to be easy to explain what this is all about." So, I think there were a lot of people who wanted the colleges closed, who had no animosity towards the colleges. And lots of people who wanted the colleges closed because they never understood with the colleges were about. [Barbara] Interesting. Interesting. Why don't we stop and check, okay? That's also interesting when you're talking about the whole notion of pluralism. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_38_Joanisse Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Joanisse, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Joanisse interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard Joanisse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Joanisse was one of the founding faculty of William James College and an associate professor of Sociology. In this interview, Richard discusses the differences in teaching at William James College and the phenomenology of William James, in addition to the college's eventual closing. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Richard Joanisse. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8ca9213f210cde644dcf36f80960278b.mp4 4eefa220177af47f1b46f38372f55826 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8c89a64aaf9ce37b914ffcdcce412fc7.pdf f36420e1d4f9c6090acb8509733155a7 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard Joanisse Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] So, I don't know if this is something someone can answer off the top of their head. If you were trying to prioritize what was the most… the most valuable thing that James was? If you are prioritizing… is there a way you can prioritize or was it such a unity one could not draw out? [Joanisse] Well, I think maybe there were two or three things… I may end up only saying one or two. I think the commitment to teaching… and you know everybody says they're committed to teaching, but I mean teaching is a way of life at the expense of everything else. And I guess at that point it would be if you did research, if you were interested in furthering your career, you really were going to put that on the side. I remember my adviser telling me when I came from Chicago, he said: "Richard, they'll eat you up there and you'll never be big league." And I think, you know, it took me a couple years to understand what he meant, but I think that in the first three or four years I was here, I certainly was working fifteen hours a day and loving every minute of it. And it's like you immersed yourself in it and I think after a while when you didn't have to work as hard… when you weren't building the institution, the commitment to teaching, it seems to me, was still there. But it wasn't a commitment at the individual level alone, and that's the real distinction we have to keep bringing up. You can only create that kind of commitment by institutionalizing it. You do that by having colleagues who are equally committed and motivated, by rewarding them for that and for creating those conditions that we talked about before that allow people to participate and to help to evolve what a college is all about and commit themselves to a particular kind of philosophies. All of that meshed together, allows commitment to keep on going. If you go to the institution I'm in now, they say: "You always have good teachers." And what they're saying is there's always individual people. Like cream rises to the top who will always be there, and the rest of the people are sort of like, you know, they're mediocre or they won't do it. And I think at William James we just said that's baloney. We can bring people in who might, in some sense be individually motivated, who might have the kind of characteristics that were looking for. But it was a gamble with most people we hired. But if we got them in William James, we believed that what we were doing at William James would transform the person. [Barbara] That sounds religious! �[Joanisse] Well, there was a religious kind of experience at William James, I think. In the sense that, especially in the notion, it seems to me, of community. But I think that when you come to the place where I'm at now, it's always back to individuals. It’s always back to some people are motivated, some more highly motivated, and you rewarded that person for being motivated. [Joanisse] You don't create a kind of sense that maybe what you ought to be doing, you ought to be doing together. In fact, what you do in this institution is you created just the adverse. What you create here is the condition for the separation of individuals, who begin to see themselves as in a deeply atomized situation where whatever they're going to do, they're going to do solely for themselves. And they'll be paid for that either through money, or prestige, power, or influence, whatever it is. And they have no connection to anyone else. And I think that implicitly or explicitly the institution has, in some sense, agreed to that. I think it's more a kind of implicit contract. Where at William James we invited people in and said: "Look what we want from you is openness, a receptivity or something, to what we're trying to do. If you don't like it then you certainly are free to leave, but what we do here we do together. And, you know, we do try to create committees, and we can try to create organization, and we do try to structure the college in a certain way. But you are in the person, it seems to me, through a lengthy conversation that we've had over the years in which continually evolves and change. You are part of that." And I think for most people, an example of someone coming in later would be like Deanna Morris or somebody like that. That's real… that was a really important experience and those people were able to change, and accept what we were trying to do, and accept, it seems to me, willingly. It wasn't, I don't think, coercion on people. There's a coerced notion of community. What we used to call, remember, jokingly people would say: "Did you want to do this?" And we would say: "This is called voluntary coercion," or something. And I think that at some point… that happens a lot in what you might call religious communities. People are constantly being coerced. I don't think that was true, necessarily, at William James. I think that we actually could see that worked. And worked hard to create those kind of conditions that would continue to make it work. And I think that we did end up producing something, we did have a student who is intelligent… we did have students, as some people have said to us on the outside, who are inquisitive and creative. Our students seemed, at least as teachers, to be good. And I think I always measured my students from what they came to me as and what they left us as. And I always thought that they left us better persons and better students. [Barbara] Who was this adviser and how could he sense this was going to happen to you? I don't understand. Remember you had this adviser that said they were going to eat you alive? [Joanisse] Well my adviser was at a research institute, University of Chicago, and at that �time when I was at Chicago it was rated number one, I think. He just thought that if you go to a small school, and you just spend so much time teaching, that you really can't produce the research that would be essential for you to make your name. And that in a very hard, highly competitive academic situation like that, you would start falling further and further behind. Of course, that wasn't a concern of ours then and it wasn't a concern of the college. And that's what I mean by the college never produced any pressure on us. And never saw us as trying; in some sense, in this case we were very close to Marx. In some ways both in Rousseau, and Hegel, and Marx there's a notion that there's no distinction between the state and the individual. We came as close, in some points in the college, to really believe that we were William James College. And therefore, the decisions we made were not being made by somebody else and I think that was very important for us. And certainly, some people can think that we fooled ourselves and I think I can be critical… I can come back and say “wait a minute.” But I think for certain moments in the college, I think that we really didn't only believe that – I think it was true. And I think that makes an incredible difference in what you're doing. There's no separation then from what was administrative and what was teaching. They were both, in some sense, they were as close as you could possibly get them. That doesn't mean to say there weren't tense situations or disagreements and it certainly wasn't true the council ran smoothly all the time. But I think, on the whole, I think that the feeling that this was a college that was whole in some sense, at least that's what we’ve just been talking about. I think for some of us that there was a real strong feeling that that was the case. [Barbara] [Clapping] Beautiful sound… that was good. [Joanisse] I didn't think of that until just now, but I was thinking – Marx tries to make this point and so does Rousseau - that when you're talking about… how can you have a state have power and you know what Marx says, “Well, the state is you,” you know, I mean there is no alienation. If the state were to represent the working class, blah blah blah, all that stuff like that. Then you figure at some moments at William James, if you move away from individuals and make the connection between the institutional processes, like committee work, and governance documents, and the collective kind of representation that we had. You put all of that together… you come as close as you possibly can but there wasn't any separation. And you get into the unit that we’re in now and that's all you feel is separation. It's very difficult then to turn to somebody and say: "What kind of experience did you have?" Because the experience, you see, was not existential alone. It was both a socially produced phenomenon and an existential kind of commitment brought together. �[Joanisse] That was the real thing about William James… that it created through structural arrangements, through its committees, through its working with the Dean, through its understanding of what it was trying to be – I mean its pedagogical statements, it's philosophical purposes – and through the council a set of relationships that solidified the motivational and existential commitments that were perhaps already there. And if they weren't there, this certainly brought them out. And it’s that connection, it seems to me, that we always have to understand at William James. I think – and I'm trying to reflect back – I think that's an important thing. You know it's one thing to say you have good people, it's another thing to say that, you know, that you don't need… there's no place for that to be collectively representative. We did have a collective place that things could be represented. And we have damn near committees for everything; I mean we weren't left off. And I think, in the end, that thing we talked about before – that the belief that what we did in these committees and in this council were actually what we were. I mean, there was a product produced. And the product, in some sense, it's a product of a set of ideas, or a matter of policy, or changing understanding of the relationships between students and faculty. That was it! It wasn't going to be something going to somebody else. This is very important because if it did, it wasn't our fault. And this is a very important point to understand about why, perhaps, William James, was so close. Once we had made these decisions collectively, if the central administration decided not to accept them, then fuck them, you see! They weren't us anyhow. So, we had this enormous protection, it was wonderful. I mean, if you think of it in those terms there was an internal dialectic but also an external dialectic in away. So, we could really come up feeling wonderful even when we were defeated. And sometimes I've always wondered – when I'm in very pessimistic moods – whether our success was not condition on the fact that this outside world outside Grand Valley and that they were always sort of out there and they were different than us; they were our enemy and “they just didn't understand us.” And that certainly - it seemed to me in some sense, just in structural terms – helped us to be what we were. But I don't think it's what we… I don't want to get creative as well, but it certainly lend, you know, a little push for us to keep that kind of closeness in. But my point was that when we collectively agree upon something, and decision was made, it went out. And then the Central Administration could say: "We don't accept this." But see, what we had done is… we had made a decision as a college… had agreed on it. So, we could come back and mourn, collectively, as a college for their stupidity, for misunderstanding, or the fact that they were conservative, or whatever. And it's a wonderful situation because we could never lose. [Barbara] Until we lost. �[Joanisse] Until we lost! Lost almost everything. I didn't like William James the last two or three years, though. [Barbara] I was going to ask you about that because Rose said you were talking about that. [Joanisse] I didn't think that… I lost my spirit really. You think back to the old days, you know, Bob Carow's office down the corner. Man would come and went by like a bird, you know. You'd say: "Hey Bob! Want to talk for a minute?" He'd say: "Oh sure." You'd start talking, he'd say: "Oooohhhh too heavy, Joanisse, too heavy. I'm not into that. See you later!" But the real distinction, I think, was when some of us started to see that the Dean was a dean, in the sort of a classic sense of the word, and whose interest we're certainly not the same as ours. And his interests on very few occasions even overlap with ours. Then it became apparent, I think to substantial numbers in the college, that we had lost everything. And at that point, just began to see it really as a kind of a job. And I really had mixed feelings about the closing then because I didn't think it was going to be able to stay the same; I don't think we could've gotten anybody in after having this person. And I'm not suggesting he's a bad dean or anything. I'm just say his understanding – with the Central Administration – as to what to college should be, was no longer the understanding of what the college was. And at that point it seemed to me the last two- or three-years William James was not the college that it used to be. And that may seem like a minor point, but if the point we were talking about before has any meaning at all… that in a sense wemost of us believed that we were collectively doing something. The minute that was there was that cleavage… the minute there was that separation and that distance, then I think there was an enormous amount of distrust. And that was the first time we began to see real factualism in William James. People, for instance, who began to do things on their own, or who wanted to leave William James, or who wanted to go into the College of Arts and Sciences, or people who saw that the Dean's decisions were more important or more pragmatic, or in the long run were better than the decisions of other people. And so, you begin to feel some real open animosity and… [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Joanisse] But I think once that it happened, I was… [Radio turns on from off screen] [Barbara] This will not do. [Joanisse] We should be close to finished though. [Barbara] Yeah, we are. This is not reasonable. This is not reasonable! [Speaking off �screen to another person] [Unknown] Where did that radio come from? [Barbara] But you're right, we are almost done. That was just brilliant. If, see… if you have an answer to this, and if we don't – we’ll stop. If you were going to do it all over again, one of those stupid questions… not the last few years, the good ten years… [Joanisse] You mean at my age, right now? [Barbara] Nay. I don't mean it literally. Is there something that you can see that was like a critical lack or critical imbalance? Something, with hindsight, that should have been in James that wasn't? [Joanisse] Jeez, that's a hard question. In William James… no, I think we did very well. I don't think we were perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. I could go, you know, do an hour of criticism and stuff like that. But I think, given the kind of students we had, given the kind of location that we were at… [Barbara] What kind of student…? [Joanisse] We had, basically, lower middle class and working-class students. We do not have students who go to Grinnell or to Oberland. We don't have schools like at the new School for Social Research, which is very much like what we are, but who students are perhaps, score-wise and that, hundreds of points beyond ours, who don't have problems in writing and conceptualization who are, you know… and who have the support state-wise of the institution. I don't think from the very beginning of this college… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_37_Joanisse Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Joanisse, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Joanisse interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard Joanisse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Joanisse was one of the founding faculty of William James College and an associate professor of Sociology. In this interview, Richard discusses his experience being immersed in William James College and its transformative power within the WJC community, in addition to his impression of the college's final years. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Richard Joanisse. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a1d3cd97e0a958b0585c7c400414b201.mp4 355d23d1c03ca98f500c567e9c2e05f8 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c747835154253254f0aa9eaa06aa570e.pdf 61346f8570c7bb2ee90c47a582f6fb64 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Krystal Miller Date: 1984 [Barbara] How did this happen? It still sounds like magic. [Miller] We talked a lot about power and taking your own power. We talk about authority; authority coming from the word author, and who is the author? And that you give people power or you take power yourself. And thinking about how you used your own personal power. We talked a lot about ourselves – it wasn't just educational. It was something that was out there, away from us. It was something that was within us and that you had to look at who you were and what did you want? What were your emotional needs? And it wasn't just, you know, facts and dates that were somehow removed from us. We were involved in the world and could create change and that change came from individual. That the old grassroots movement, which is a phrase from the sixties and seventies, but you can't really go out there and make the world change. What you can do is change yourself and be honest and deal with people and try to be honest and then that change can create change in other people sometimes. I mean you can't force it, but by doing your own thing that's one person changing and if every person works on their own self then that creates a change that is more powerful than the political revolution. [Barbara] But how did this happen in courses? I don't understand. [Miller] Sometimes it always didn't happen in the classroom. Sometimes it happened when you were talking to people afterwards because the conversation seldom ended right in the classroom. Sometimes it happens when you are at home alone. And that if you kept thinking that… we talked about if you kept thinking change was everybody else and not you that you weren't doing it, you were just intellectualizing about it. I don't know. [Barbara] That's fine. I didn't want to cut you short. I had a real sense of real communication during all this part, you know. [Miller] I'm trying to think about how that happened in classes though. It happened with students questioning each other. [Barbara] Say that again. �[Miller] Sometimes having one student question each other in classes… if you were saying something that other people didn't understand or didn't think was quite real – it’s not like you – they jumped on you or anything. But you were questioned and asked directly: "Why do you think that? Why do you feel that? What does it have to do with what we're talking about?" And you weren't supposed to remain just intellectual, you know. All of you was involved in the classes. That's the word engaged again - that hands on, that looking at something and pulling it apart and looking at the different pieces. Peeling an onion layer by layer and that things just aren't facts and dates. We talked about spirit of the times. What were everyday people doing at that time? How do they think? What did they want? What did they do? And we just looked at the world more like that, than like "On this date in history the Declaration of Independence was signed." You know, how did it happen? Who lead that? What was their thought? Who were they personally? And that just made it so much more interesting and you learn so much more that way. I mean, we weren't psychoanalyzing each other in class or tearing each other a part – it wasn't that. I mean, sometimes there were some confrontations. I mean it's like sometimes people would get angry, or excited, or happy, you know. It was there was such an air of excitement in those classrooms sometimes. You know it's not like every day, it was just the most exciting thing in the world there. But it happened so often. And I have developed a lot of really good friends through schools that I still have. We have similar ideas. We weren't programmed to think a certain way. We were just programmed to think about what we thought. And to keep working and growing. Growth and change is exciting. It’s scary sometimes, but it's also very exciting and you know. One of my favorite sayings is change is scary but consider the alternative. I don't… [Barbara] Let me check focus. [Miller] I remember there were some folks… some students that seemed really frustrated, and anxious, and didn't quite get William James College because nobody told them what to do. They didn't tell them who they had to be, how they had to do it. Part of William James was figuring that out yourself. What you wanted. How we wanted to do something. Your own ideas, the internships, the projects. And that's hard for people who have been always told what to do, when, where, and how. Especially in an educational or institutional setting. To reach into themselves and to look within. I mean that's, I think, one of the biggest problems in this culture is that we're so removed from ourselves, and from feelings, and how do we want to do things. And I think there were some people that were real angry or intimidated because they were scared to do that and needed to be told what to do. And I think William James hard for them. There were a lot of other people that were so excited at finally being allowed to put their hands on something and do it themselves and to think! When a lot of times questions were frowned upon in classes; it was an interruption, it was insubordinate somehow. And I never felt like that at William James. That the �more questions, even if they seem sort of silly sometimes, some of the most incredible discussions came out of the smallest questions. So, you know maybe William James wasn't the right school for some people. [Miller] But part of the reason why I'm angry that it's not still there is that there are a lot of people out there starving to be able to learn that way and to be involved… to have their personal self involved in the education and not just sitting in a classroom writing notes and taking a test with multiple questions. So, that's some of how we learned how to think or how to be. Just by the probing, keep looking and keep trying. And if it doesn't make sense, maybe there's a reason why it doesn't make sense. That there are seldom simple answers. One of the things that’s been hard for me since leaving William James is that questioning part of me that says: "But why?" Or if it doesn't work, then let’s change it or trying to change it is sometimes very scary to the people that I work with. That the questioning, the "Well, let’s make it better!" is just intimidating to people who are lazy or scared to death of change. And you can become the bad guy because they're intimidated and not ever used to seeing change as exciting and something that makes life and work interesting – the growth. And people are scared to death to grow. And when you work in a world that is scared of that it sometimes makes it difficult for you. It's very frustrating to be seen as the bad guy; to be shut out, to be fired sometimes. And you were the strange person, not them – they’re comfortable. [Barbara] So, was William James education lacking because we didn't learn how to cope with that dissonance? [Miller] No, I think I've learned how to cope with it, but that doesn't mean that it's never painful, or hurtful, or frustrating. You know, life isn't always easy, and we learned that and learned to deal with it. But that doesn't mean you don't feel the weight sometimes. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_36b_Miller Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Miller, Krystal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Krystal Miller interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Krystal Miller by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Krystal Miller was a student of William James College and in this interview she discusses her experience being in the classroom and the personal growth she experienced being a part of the WJC community. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Krystal Miller. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education College environment Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/03f1157e97647dfcdc6a56685b84634a.mp4 80777c9b409648e8ddf90e4cd703cb22 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e4250b4e55bd1b1e848eb9b4d288ec33.pdf 277cc5bcabf70f38a15cf1ee28d9b528 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Ginny Gordon Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] Anyways, so you were talking about community and how… what the quality of community, I guess, you were talking about. Talk about it some more. [Gordon] Well, it was really unusual to have a large group of people to sit together and discuss things intellectually, respect each other, and make things move. I mean and they were very reasonable about things. You go in there with an opinion and you'd listen to, you know, three or four people talk and you come out and you'd get a much broader idea, a broader sense of the way a college should go there. The decisions weren't made by one person in an office. They were made by a group of people and nobody had more control than anybody else. I suppose legally the Dean could throw out a decision, but I don't think that ever happened. I think that they voted on it and usually there was a large majority at the end of maybe an hour or two-hour communal discussion of a problem or situation most of the time people came out being more dedicated to the decision and how it affected the whole community, rather than how it would affect themselves personally. And I think that was one of the real successes of the college. [Barbara] It seems as though a very important decision made early on was to hire Adrian. Do you remember anything about her hiring? I mean we didn't talk about this; I just wonder if you did. [Gordon] Yes, she had been considered the year before and I can't remember whether she turned the decision down or not. But then the next year she was reconsidered and asked to be hired and was hired. She did come here, I believe, for an interview in the beginning, but had another commitment that she needed to finish. And then the second year she was reconsidered, came back for an interview, and was hired. And that was the second year, too, of the college, I believe, when she was hired. Dick Paschke was the chairperson of the Dean search committee. I remember that and there were hundreds of applications for that position. Yeah, Robert Toft I think was one of those two… uh-huh. Yeah. And he was subsequently hired for college four, which became Kirkoff College. [Barbara] You brought community up several times and so have I. How did community contribute to the quality of education? Community’s nice but what does it have to do with education? �[Gordon] Well for one thing, one of the things that the community talked about was the courses that we're going to be taught. You know, so that affected their education: number one. Number two: it kept people here. They didn't just come and take a class and leave. They stayed here. This was like a second home to many people. They would come in the morning and they had their discussions that were informal, as well as formal. They talked about your classes; I mean, education was the main topic of conversation. Another thing that I think that should be mentioned is the political awareness that William James instilled on the students. It wasn't just a question of coming in and getting an education, it was how they could affect the outside world. They were also very much aware of the Woman's Movement, of the Vietnam War, of all the political things that were happening around the world. [Barbara] Okay, I hear what you're saying. Then when these people went out to get jobs or – you yourself, because you were a James student – go to a place where there wasn't community or there's less community where it's very hard to be politically active. Isn't it sort of like the education was aiming us one way and the society another and therefore the wrong kind of education? [Gordon] Well, no because we have to have… it would make it even more strong. It would be even more important to have a political awareness so that you could try to keep other people politically aware who didn't have a political awareness. I can't see that an education does anybody much good other than just earning a living, period, you know. It doesn't help humanity any, that's for sure. So… [Barbara] Anything else? Great answers! [Gordon] Oh well, I don't know, I guess that kind of covers it in a nutshell. Yeah. [Barbara] Good answers, too. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_36a_Gordon Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gordon, Ginny Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Ginny Gordon interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Ginny Gordon by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Ginny Gordon was an Executive Administrative Secretary in Grand Valley's Central Administration during the creation of William James College who provided administrative assistance and helped guide the new faculty in the college's infancy. In this interview, Ginny discusses the quality of community found within William James College, the hiring of Adrian Tinsley during the second year of the college, and how the sense of community at WJC contributed to the quality of education. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Ginny Gordon. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e6fa7c2b14e063475a58ac4f2b970dd5.mp4 4ac98a39910dbe5708d09a3f1bec9bd0 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ff860e7d7305865c01de8cff65b46744.pdf 79ecbaa7e90d2b84379a4ad1204e07fa PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Ginny Gordon Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] First question being: you were here at the very beginning. [Gordon] Uh huh. [Barbara] I just want you to talk about what it was like at the very beginning in terms of starting from scratch. [Gordon] Okay. Well, did you want me to talk about how there was the founding committee. They wanted to add another college. They were into the cluster college concept and they were going to be five cluster colleges. There was College of Arts and Sciences, which they were going to get a name, but they never did. And then Thomas Jefferson, which was well established. And then college three, which became William James College… [Barbara] How did you get faculty for William James College? [Gordon] Well, there was the original committee that was Tom Cunningham, Bruce Loessin [?]… there were about seven people on that and some faculty members from CAS that were on that committee. And they advertised and the first person that they hired was Ken Hunter. They hired Robert Mayberry that year, Richard Joanisse, Dick Paschke, John Mactavish from CAS, Dan Clock who was in TJC (he was halftime CA, halftime William James). So, there was John, Richard, Dick, Dan Clock, Ken Hunter, who else? There were five and a half people that first… Robert Mayberry! Okay, and they came in early August. They all came here. They started quite early. And then they met and got the groundwork… the schedule all made out that was published. Of course, then we were on terms, so classes didn't start till the end of September. Our first two students were Theresa Paul and Tyree Anderson, and they also worked on the committee. So, then there was me, five and half faculty, Bruce Loessin [?] and Tyree and Terry Paul. And the schedule was made up of about probably, I don't know, fifteen or seventeen classes and admissions office recruited a hundred-and-fifty-two students that first year. [Barbara] What were you promising them that they would come to a new school? [Gordon] They were looking for an alternative education. They all had the real pioneer �spirit. Those first-year students, by the way, have been quite successful in the world. Most of them have gone to graduate school. Dick Wilson, do you remember him? Well, he was in that original hundred-and-fifty-two. So, we started out with a very small, selective, close knit, and we had all the first floor of Lake Superior Hall. So, we had our own turf. And we met often between classes; we had like a coffee room and everybody would sit around and quite often after classes. [Gordon] Formally, we had one or two council meetings a week and informally there was always a lot going on. [Barbara] Who went to council meetings? [Gordon] Everybody went to council meetings. We had to have them in thirty-four-thirty-six with the door open; they were usually packed, and they were always open to everybody. [Barbara] What did you talk about? [Gordon] We talked about adding new classes, what we were going to add, what the needs were; the purchases usually were made on a sort of, more or less, a communal basis. Governance document was written then. So, there was nothing when anybody came and we had no government, no structure, nothing. And everybody… they all had a hand in creating their own institution or organization from scratch. They didn't inherit any rules. [Barbara] Well, did the faculty have more say than the students in creating this? [Gordon] Well, in a sense in that they certainly couldn't teach something that the faculty there weren't capable of teaching. I mean within the capability of the faculty, yes. But the original programs where the administrative and management, arts and media, social relations, pretty much environmental studies, and then of course the synaptic program. Those were all that was established prior to the hiring of the faculty. [Barbara] But you say that this whole… [Gordon] The way that the college was going to move… was established, I mean, that was that they can decide they were going to go into economics or something. [Barbara] But the alternative nature of the college was set up by the entire community, is that what you're saying? [Gordon] No, that was… No, the grading/no grading…the grading system was set up by �the administration. By the original committee they were not going to have grades. They were going to have honors credit or no credit. They did drop the honors the second year in or second or third – it must have been the third year. And that was a communal decision we did. [Barbara] When did representation come in? Because by the time I got to James not everybody was on a council. You had… [Gordon] Well, that was all how the governance document was written during the first and second year. So, that was where representation came in. It was a whole community, and then they decided how they wanted to rule themselves or govern themselves. So, the governance document was hacked out, changed a million times over during the course of the first, I would say, two years. What year did you come in? [Barbara] Oh, seventy-five, something like that. Seventy-five, seventy-six. [Gordon] Oh, okay. And it was pretty much established when you came in? [Barbara] Okay, how did… [Unknown] Hollywood! [Gordon] Yeah. [Barbara] How did the James philosophy get imbrued in all this? How did this happen? Was it… did Mayberry lecture or something or how did the community get built here? What were the ethics of the community? How did everybody learn to work together? [Gordon] Well, let’s see. Well, I don't know. [Barbara] Okay, that one's going to go. Do you need Ginny right now? Is that why you came in? Do you need me to stop? [Unknown] Oh, I'm just waiting… [Gordon] No, it's okay. I was just… I didn't really understand your question. I really don't know what you're driving at, it seems sort of a… [Barbara] Why don't you talk about what you were saying before we started about the hiring thing. Where you were getting so many applications. As you could be very selective. �[Gordon] Okay. There were… the first year, there were 2,500 applications. They had advertised in, you know, I would imagine several academic magazines. Whatever. They advertise in New York Times, places like that. And there were 2,500 applications. So, the faculty could be very selective on who they wanted to pick. [Barbara] What kind of criteria were they using? [Barbara] You were in on a lot of it because it was kind of your decision. [Gordon] Well, I think they were looking for people that were, first of all, interested in alternative education. Secondly, who fit into the categories of the programs that William James was offering. And then also, they were looking for people with a very strong background in academia. People who are activists. People who weren't from the traditional background, you know. Like Lafleur. And they were looking for women. They definitely had a dedication to hiring women. So that's kind of, you know. [Barbara] This is getting at the community thing again. [Gordon] Okay. [Barbara] You've been a secretary here. When you were at James, you participated in decision making. [Barbara] In what ways did you participate in decision making? [Gordon] Well, I was on the council as an elected member for about two years. And also, I had the voting privileges of hiring. We voted at the end on who we were going to hire. They would bring two or three people here per position and then hack it all out for better or for worse. And I had… all the secretaries had voting rights on faculty hiring. And the council members, of course, where the ones that had voting rights on other things. [Barbara] Okay. In the years that you've been here, you've seen a lot go on. I wonder if you think we've made certain mistakes at James. What mistakes did we make at the college? What should we have done better? [Gordon] Well, I think the only thing that I think could've been a little… I think it could've been a little more disciplined. Not structured in a sense, like exams, or grades, or anything. But I think that some of the faculty were a little too lenient about student’s participation in the class and work that was required. I got my degree from William James. Totally – I took all my courses in William James. So, I was a student here, as well as working here, so I can speak from a classroom as a �student as well as a worker. I think that some of the students fell into the cracks because they had a view that this sort of cavalier attitude, "It really doesn't matter if we don't go to class. It doesn't matter if we don't get the work in on time. We still love each other, and I'm a real good friend of professor, you know, so and so, and so therefore I don't have a problem." [Gordon] And I think that some of them are still not being able to cope and are still trying to get a degree that started before I did. [Barbara] And you would be the one to know that because… [Gordon] I found as a student that was serious… class I found it very disruptive to students. I had a real hard time with those that would show up occasionally in class and then try to participate as if they've always been there and they didn't even know what the textbooks were. So, that was a problem I had as student. I think that could've been a little loss… sort of, chummy with the students where it wasn't important. Because it was important. [Barbara] What did we do right Ginny? What was the… [Gordon] Well, I think that the level of education was just incredible. think the wide range of classes was phenomenal. I think that the faculty were absolutely superior. I mean they came from the very best schools in the country themselves. They were all very brilliant. The ones that have left, have gone and have been hired by first-rate schools. They weren't ordinary faculty; they were extraordinary. And they brought with them a wealth of culture, education, knowledge. They were all so interdisciplinary. They didn't have one discipline where nothing they taught was nothing but history, they taught nothing but English or they could teach numerous amounts of subjects – each faculty. That was another thing that they looked for. Interdisciplinary! That’s the keyword. And that's something that I missed, in the beginning, when we were talking… is that they were, first of all, hired on how much they could teach. And they could… most of them, like Engie, could teach five or six different disciplines. It was incredible. And they brought all that knowledge to each class. That was the main thing. You don't find that at all anymore. So, I don't think I could have gotten a better education anyplace. I feel real fortunate, you know. And if there were a few flakes that fell by the wayside – so what, you know? I mean the ones that came out of it… the opportunity for a superior education was there if you chose to get it. Yeah. [Barbara] Good answer. You wanted to talk about why you think some of the faculty wanted to come here. Because of the area? [Gordon] Oh, I think first of all, they came here because it gave them the opportunity to create something where they could use all their talents. You know, where they �weren't hired as a quote like Engie hired as a history professor. Period. Where she taught nothing but history. I think they were all looking for that. They all had the pioneer spirit; starting something totally on the ground floor. And it seems like they came from areas where, being close to the lake, having the choice of living in the city or in the country, on the lake, was real important to them, you know. It's kind of like going out to the Colorado mountains or something. I mean it was a pioneer spirit here to come here where things weren't established either. And they lived in Grand Rapids, they lived in Allendale, and they lived in Grand Haven – which are worlds apart as far as the environment goes, you know. I always feel like I've driven 500 miles from the difference between Grand Rapids and in Grand Haven, you know. [Barbara] I was talking to somebody who moved… [Gordon] Yeah! So, you had that choice that I would find very attractive coming here from, say, New York city or you know. [Barbara] Ginny, here's a question I ask people, and I never ask it in advance. I want an answer in a sentence or two: if you had to sum up the core of William James, what was distinctive about William James? Very briefly. One thing. What was it? [Gordon] Mainly doing, in your profession, what you enjoy doing. You know, mixing your avocation and your vocation into one, or getting it as close to it. Developing your avocation. Not getting an education for the sake of a job, per se. We all have to earn a living but not just, you know, engulfing your entire life. [Barbara] Great. [Gordon] You know I was sorry. I really got nervous when Alex was in here. It just shut me right off. [Barbara] I know, me too. It draws all the… he just comes in… [Gordon] Well he was standing there and listening and all of a sudden… [Barbara] I was mad at him because he knows what's going on and he knows it's distracting, so he walks in, does this, went over there. He didn't have to do that. [Gordon] I know it. So, I'm sorry that… [Barbara] No… [Gordon] I don't even remember what the question was now, but I… �[Barbara] What you did was you said: "I can't answer it." Which was the honest response, and we went on. [Gordon] Yeah, okay. [Barbara] You gave some very good answers. One thing that is so neat is that I ask everyone that question about what was the core of William James, say it in a sentence, at the end of an interview. No two people have said the same thing. I just love it. [Gordon] Oh, yeah, yeah. [Barbara] And it’s so William James-y. See. We weren't programmed, there wasn't one thing to hold on to. I've recognized every answer and none of it seemed off the wall. [Gordon] Um-hum, uh-huh. [Barbara] You know, but it's all been different. I just love it. I'm going to run this sequence… [Gordon] Oh, that's neat. [Barbara] Of people answering it. Isn't that nice? [Gordon] Oh! That's… yeah! That's the way to do it! Yes! Yeah, yeah. [Barbara] It really works. I just love your answer, you know? [Gordon] Good! Good! Good. [Barbara] I think you did real well. Please think for minute what else you would want to say. You know what I mean? [Gordon] Um-hum. [Barbara] Sometimes I walk away and then we go: "What we really should have said was...." [Gordon] Yeah, I know it. [Barbara] So just take a second. I think it's a great interview okay. [Gordon] Well, let me just mull a couple things around. �[Barbara] Keep talking. [Gordon] I think that's one of the biggest things that is missed now, but it's also because of the times – it’s not just Grand Valley, it's not just because William James isn't here – is that there's no feeling of community anymore. There might be within small little… like your little film group or you know, your little… but as far as your feeling community with the historians, you could never. I mean, what do you say to those people? Or that… I mean, you know it's nothing but… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_35_Gordon Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gordon, Ginny Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Ginny Gordon interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Ginny Gordon by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Ginny Gordon was an Executive Administrative Secretary in Grand Valley's Central Administration during the creation of William James College who provided administrative assistance and helped guide the new faculty in the college's infancy. In this interview, Ginny discusses her experience being a part of the William James College community since the very beginning, the pioneer spirit of the founding faculty, and the profound interest in alternative education at that time. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Ginny Gordon. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9cf5f2edc299541ca759038129161a01.mp4 fbb1468e68df0fce062591572a6fb79e https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/96287e031721aaccd937168fcae183ba.pdf c93c11b992228c89959b353c09b9e5ea PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Linda Rogers Date: 1984 [Rogers] I only went there because of the Women's Studies program and a friend of mine was going there. And so, I really knew nothing about William James, whatsoever, until I got there and got in my first class. [Barbara] And then what did you find out? [Inaudible] [Rogers] Well, the first thing I realized is that even though… because I was in the class, it was Social Economics with Berry Castro, and I felt stupid. I felt like I didn't say anything and just sat there, and all these older people around, and I was the youngest person in the class, obviously. But my first realization was that I am important, and I have an opinion, and I have an eighteen-year-old’s opinion, and that is important to the class. Just as the forty-year-old over there, her opinion is just as valid as mine. And all the different perspectives, the age, the different ages was scary at first, but it was something I had to go through and was great for my self-esteem. I realized that I'm important and I have something to say. And people would listen and integrate it. That was probably my first whiff of William James. And then immediately after that was the no grade. And I didn't know what to think of that when I first got there, but then I sort of… it changed me. I realize that I was doing my education for myself and no one else. You know I had to be truthful with myself because credit meant only, you know, an understanding between myself and a professor and it didn't project anything to my parents, or my friends, or my colleagues. It just said credit and I knew what that meant. So, that just sort of helped me to get a grip on my whole education, basically. And that whatever I was going to do, it depended on me, basically, to get what I wanted out of it. And I that was a radical change from high school, very radical. Didn't improve my studentship, actually. [Barbara] Then what happened? So, there you are at the College of Liberal Studies and you get a sense of the [Inaudible] education and it seems to be working. Then what happened? [Rogers] Then I got a little bit more courageous. Started taking… I felt a little bit more confident when I took on a new professor. And I started meeting the different professors and realizing that I liked everything about the school. I liked the people, liked my professors; I really was enjoying college and I'd been really apprehensive about it. Then I realized that my professors were my equals. That they were not something godly or so far above me that I had to think lesser of �myself – that came soon after. You know just sort of that repertoire that you… I had with my professors. It was just another great development. [Rogers] I've been interested in WIB ever since I had been a freshman because I knew about it when the paper had come out – it was a real good issue. And I saw the women in the skylight room folding them, and stapling them, and putting the addresses on and I'm like: "I wonder how they got into that and how they all knew each other." And at the time I was still feeling like a girl and I hadn't, you know, totally realized that I was a woman, and I probably wasn't. So, I was anxious about… I wanted to dive into it and get involved and be a part of that, but I didn't recognize my womanhood yet, so I was a little shy about doing that. And finally, I got to know some of the women that were involved in it and they were leaving and they're like: "Linda you have to do it, you have to carry on because everyone else is gone." And so here I was in charge of the whole thing and I had no idea what I was doing. But by that time, I knew I was a woman… I had a lot more faith in myself and issues at hand. I was more up on the women's issues that needed to be focused on in the paper. So, yeah, WIB was a big part of my sort of extracurricular but at the same time it had everything to do with what I was learning in classes. [Barbara] Did you find any time conflict between the structure of James and Women's Issues? Was it a difference in support structure; was it policy structure? [Rogers] Well, I think it was very supportive at William James. It was supportive. The way we were looked upon at WIB, was sort of, from the people that were not directly involved with James, we were sort of looked at the same way as some… the perspective was a little bit more radical or whatever. I don't mean to use that word, but different and alternative and so I think in the same way that WIB was threatening, James was the same sort of threatening feeling that people got. And I think that's probably why I was brought or dove into the WIB stuff immediately after James was gone because it filled that gap. [Barbara] Okay, tell me how you lived through the changes through your organization. What happened in your organization? [Rogers] I lost a lot of contact with – probably was my own fault – with professors. I mean, it was still students around and I knew that I didn't need four walls to keep that comradery and that community feeling. You know, I could still see someone and know that feeling was there, and the mutual understandings were there. But at that point I withdrew from my professors and I couldn't really do it from my fellow students - because they're my friends – but mostly the profs. And so, there was a good year – well maybe not a year, but a couple of semesters – where I didn't drop in and visit. I just sort of felt like, I don't know, there was some static there. Probably resentfulness at myself and them – for everybody – for just letting it �happen. [Rogers] And I finally did go talk to some, you know, some favorites or close ones that I've become very good friends with. "How do we do this? How do we get through?" And not like I wanted an answer but "What are you doing?" Just, you know, little support… a mini support group. Yeah, I kept going and it was a good opportunity for me to, at that point, go out into the outer parts of Grand Valley and meet new professors and new students. [Barbara] Did you feel any static going back into a conventional classroom? [Rogers] At first – yes. There were a couple of teachers that I liked at my first meeting with them. But the other way, their grading system and how they… I went up to one professor and I went to his office and said: "What is a grading system? What do you… how do you grade? How do you know what grades are? Somebody's got to tell me because it's been a couple years since." And I never really knew in junior high what it meant anyway. So, he explained it to me, and I didn't agree with it. And that was all I could do is just not agree. And I had to just fall back on what I learned at the beginning when I went to James… was that I know what I've learned and that's what's important and if he doesn't think the same thing and if he decides to give me such and such a grade then that's fine, but I still have to be strong and know that what I did was worthwhile. [Barbara] Do you think that there was something we should have done that we didn't do that would have [Inaudible]? By “we” I mean the faculty or… you know. [Rogers] Like after the closing…? [Barbara] No. [Rogers] Beforehand? [Barbara] How did they screw up that they managed to close us? [Rogers] That's a big one. I know the time that there were students that we were trying to get student representation on a larger scale and more official level, then we could of all gone in there [Inaudible] said no. But we… in some way, I knew that wasn't going to work. And I just felt like it was being sat on by this big thing and I couldn't push it up, whether I had all my friends around me helping me or not. There wasn't a whole lot I could do about it and that is not a good attitude. That was probably why I feel so bad about the whole thing is because no one really tried even though, you know… I sort of just knew before I even tried that my trying wasn't going to work. But I don't know that though. I can't know that. �[Barbara] It’s a bad lesson, isn't it? [Rogers] Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Barbara] That's how I feel about it. It's a bad lesson. [Rogers] And… I don't know. I don't know. [Barbara] John ask her something. [John] Okay. Well [Inaudible], if William James was considered an experiment, do you think that it failed in its mission? [Rogers] No. [John] Do you think the whole experience has or what you experienced at the end? [Rogers] I knew that the school itself wasn't a failure and that as an experiment it was not… that the potential for it to just go on and on. I could have… I mean, if there was, you know, no outside forces demanding its end and eating it up with their other interests like athletics or whatever – that was another issue. But the school itself was a successful experiment. [John] Could you characterize the kind of student that was supporting James and also perhaps how that characterization changed as it started to reorganize and then compare that to the kind of student who was in other parts of the college? [Rogers] Yeah. [John] You said earlier that some of the qualities aren't there. [Rogers] Yeah. Well, I don't know if it was a result. I think it's… see I was not drawn to James because I knew of it. And probably there were many like myself but I think in general they were open-minded and willing to listen to all those different points of view. And that was something I learned at William James, you know, that was a quality and a philosophy that was necessary to survive there and to get the best of it that you could. And I know that there's a lot of open-minded people in the world and you don't necessarily have to be a James student to know what that's like, but that was one quality that I noticed in everyone that went to James. And it was less that the farther and further you got away from it, you just couldn't trust for that to be there. [Rogers] You know it might be there and it may not be there, but you couldn't count on it being there. And if you were to go into a class after the closing of James… I went �into a class and I didn't know anyone, and I didn't know the professor and I just had to sit down and carry on. It wasn't a whole lot different. It was always a challenge, you know, at James and just going out into the new world of Grand Valley. And I guess that was expected of you eventually at James; for you to integrate into Grand Valley. And so that was going to be a step anyway, whether the school closed or not. So, I didn't go out there with probably… I could've gone out there with a lot more confidence if I had James standing behind me. But with it closed I just had to carry on. It took a lot of strength and took a lot of courage to just continue being what you were and what you learned and trying to use the James philosophies in the class and use as many as you could in as many ways that you could. [John] William James College was very well recognized in the method of it using internships and placements for training. You were in Social Relations and got an internship and a job that would help you. Can you tell something about that? It probably worked well for you. [Rogers] It worked well. It was ideal. I had this… the way, ideally, is it could work that you got an internship, and it could possibly turn into a job, and it did for myself when I started a Domestic Crisis Center. And it was ideal also because probably half the staff at the Domestic Crisis Center was William James already. And so, I felt – even at my job – I felt a connectedness with James. And after it closed, you know, people were still around. It was real nice and it was absolutely necessary. And the whole theory behind going from school into the actual job placement while you're still in school, it just rounded me out like that. It just rounded me… it's really nice. [John] Okay, here's the closer – it’s what we ask everybody. Think about this a second and answer: What was the essence of William James College? [Barbara] In a sentence or two. [Rogers] The essence… the first thing that comes to my mind is friendship. I felt loved. I wasn't just at a school that was, you know, we were all learning, going into premed or something like that. We all knew each other, we all respected each other, but there was love. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_34_Rogers Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rogers, Linda Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Linda Rogers interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Linda Rogers by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Linda Rogers was a student of William James College who came to Grand Valley to pursue Women's Studies. In this interview, Linda discusses her discovery of William James College and alternative education, her experience studying Women's Issues, and the essence of William James College and its students. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Linda Rogers. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a6916b8b00300e7d9c374af6663c350f.mp4 d3ef918560bbce498bb16016831b5178 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/93b920cd55b002ebd4ff45a2aa11d9be.pdf 7d8a1926235dbdf13f1dd712ed1b6c8a PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Robert Mayberry Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] I'd like to talk about how critical the not giving grades was to the process. [Mayberry] I think that it was essential and after a certain amount of time, those of us whose ideas were maybe stereotype as the most radical to begin with became known as old curmudgeons really because I personally would not rely it on the grade question. We had requests from students to have a certain number of courses optionally graded at James and so on. But I think that it was really essential that it be ungraded for several reasons. Dealing with the question of work seemed to me that what we were after was the notion of vocation. That is that people did things with their lives that they felt called to do and therefore loved to do. That it was genuine work worth doing and for its sake. And it seemed to me that working for grades, which not so much maybe grades as the keeping of a grade point average, the normal accompaniment of the grading system is the grade point average. Working for the grade point average is a standard barrier to the student actually experiencing in their own soul, as Plato would say, what it is like to work for the sake of the thing being done rather than for the external reward and competitive ranking. For the same reason that I oppose grades, I oppose merit raises, by the way, and I was very glad that we did not have merit raises in William James for a lot of reasons. But the same – or very similar – considerations come from the liberal education side. That is to say, liberal education is studying a subject for its own sake and studying it in such a way that one becomes the master of it in a sense and being a free human being in relation to that subject. That it possesses a power of judgment and has not learned something by routine and has not learned something just by the rules, but knows how to do it and, again, it is worth doing, it is worth studying, it is worth knowing for its own sake. Whether that subject is to be a useful subject or one of the classical liberal arts subjects, which incidentally have their own usefulness, from my point of view. That's another subject. But from the two directions – from the liberal side and from the vocational side - it seems to me very important that we not have grades. And my experience now that we've switched back to the grading system (and I'm sure my colleagues who did not go through this transition will find it very mysterious for me to say this), but I really think it was possible to operate with higher genuine standards in an ungraded system because there was never an inhibition on the teacher, say in the conference or in responding to a paper or project. There was never an inhibition about being genuinely critical, and you knew, and the students knew that if you got into a �discussion of that assessment, it was a genuine assessment, and one was not arguing about the grade that was going to be attached to the paper. One could stick to the intellectual questions of the assessment in a way that I find confused and troubled, and I would almost say corrupted by the imposition of the graded situation now that I am to try and discuss these problems with students in the new system. I think we had better criticism and better standards from that point of view. [Mayberry] I think it's true that people who depended upon coercion to work, could slip by a certain distance in the ungraded situation and they were not – because it would've been a contradiction and a hypocrisy – punished by the low grade for doing. But that to me does not represent the absence of standards. That represents the people that we were not within a good time able to reach to convince of a better attitude toward education. And I think it was the risk we had to take to avoid lying to ourselves and to students about what was really important that some students took advantage – took undo advantage – of that system. [Barbara] But a Clover says: "They do now." [Mayberry] Yes, they do now. [Barbara] People slip through now like crazy. [Mayberry] There definitely was doing it under the grading system. And maybe it’s harder to reach those students under the grading system. Because you haven't really tackled – and no one is collectively attempting to tackle – the question of what the truer motivation ought to be: to study and to work. [Barbara] I have to stop this because I'm going to shut the door. Okay. [Mayberry] I think there was a change in the student generations, which my recollection is from about nineteen seventy-four. And it goes back to the polarity question and how someone who is attempting to articulate a synthesis not usually made is perceived or not perceived, but I think it is a rough generalization. In the period seventy-one through seventy-four, the opening years, we were chosen by students who saw us as what was then called alternative education, and they had a degree of commitment to that and they accepted because of that commitment what we said was important about having meaningful work to do. It's kind of like you had to convince them, in those days, that they needed a major. Along about seventy-four, the term career education, which we had been employing, you see, all along, we were career and liberal education from the very beginning, that was all he said. And alternative education being a version of liberal education that people perceived as offering. All of a sudden in seventy- �four, because I think their official policy change of some kind under the Nixon administration, which I'm forgetting the details of, but career education suddenly became a national theme and a national policy. But again, without the synthesis with liberal education. So that suddenly we got students who saw the career side of our programs very clearly – that’s what they wanted. And those students had to be convinced that some of the alternative education systems, like ungradedness, were important in the way that the previous students had to have been convinced that really taking seriously, doing meaningful work, was important. [Mayberry] In each case, what it meant was there was a transition into our kind of education that, again, maybe we did not take consciously enough the need for doing with all our students or did not put into place systematic ways of making that transition. Though, I think most faculty were very much aware of the need for it to happen and did it in their own way and after a while you heard from students that that transition was being made – that their attitudes were changing. The force of personal example maybe on faculty and already established student's part… did that work for us that we had not consciously worked out. But it was one of the real tragedies, I think, in the loss of the collegiate system that people who deal with the questions we dealt with now kind of have to do it alone. There was a support structure for it to be done, there was reinforcement, there was discussion, there was an atmosphere, there was a life that helped to be done and it did not leave the individual teacher out on a market research-oriented limb if trying to deal with some of these deeper issues. [Barbara] Robert, if you had to - and you have to because I'm asking – in a sentence or two, very briefly, what was the essence of William James College? [Mayberry] I don't know if I can do it in a sentence anymore. Well, there was an experience… there's many essences. There was an experience that was recurrent – that’s certainly one of them – and it's an issue we haven't talked about earlier, except very, very tangentially. But the professionalization of academia meant the departmentalization of the university. Students here came to a place that didn't have departments, and therefore where all faculty felt, at least, some imperative to try to deal with general questions and with education and its moral context. Students would come and they would say to visitors: "I can't believe it but the thing I studied in that class turns up in all my other classes. It's like magic!" And you know we never did consciously sit down and say: "Now I'm going to do this today in mine, so you do that in yours." It happened because that discussion began to thrive across the lines. That's at least one of the essences. [Barbara] That's super. Nobody said that clearly to date. No one… you are the first to say that. �[Mayberry] Do you remember when the people for accreditation came and so forth? I think we were in at least one of those committees together when students said that and they never said that to us before and they said it to the… [Barbara] Alright, we need some kind of a comment about the fact that our curriculum… [Mayberry] I think that goes back to two things. I think it goes back again to what it was that we meant by liberal education. And it goes back to what was that original impetus toward what was then called relevance. The liberal education part I think is this: the old American liberal, small liberal arts college, on a religious foundation. And I have to say I went to that kind of college, so I was probably thoroughly inculcate it in it. But it took as the specific mission of undergraduate education a thing that in the early nineteen century was called mental disciple. The idea was you study what were then very classical parts of the curriculum – like logic, rhetoric, and grammar – because they were arts, disciplines, art in synonymous terms, worth knowing. And that lead to the capacity of judgment that I referred to earlier. When the university got reorganized again, and professionalized again, and departmentalized again, I think we ended up with a much more content oriented definition of what liberal education is. It's stuff… it's some of the things that come in some of the packages. It’s a stuff definition, it’s a content definition and not an arts definition of liberal education. And we were saying, I think, that you could vary the stuff some, you could vary the content some. Particularly if there were students who were demanding that liberal education connect with the things that were vital concern to their lives. And you could, nevertheless, hope that out of different kinds of stuff – sometimes in unrecognizable packages – you could still get to the important questions about art, and judgment, and discipline, and thinking, and criticism, and self-direction. That you didn't have to have all of those packages be the packages out of which the issues of great concern could be drawn. You can't have no content. Again, the dichotomizing tendency made people think that if we were stressing the art then we would do without content. You can't have no content. But the idea was that the content could vary and that we would be clever enough to see, in the old-fashioned terms, the mental discipline problems that may arise from quite a variety of content. Nor did our content ever vary to the extent that TJC's did. On this campus, I think maybe we were misperceived somewhat because we had involving parts of the curriculum and another part that was quite steady. Well I think the reason that it was allowed to vary was that we saw the demand for relevancy as a legitimate one on the part of students and we saw the possibility of getting the classical arts issues out of various content and not just out of the packages that have recently been packaged. I mean in the last fifty, sixty years the packages have been invented that everybody says are traditional… [Barbara] Alright I'm sorry, just a false start. Please go ahead. Please do it again. �[Mayberry] Oh, you’re restarting. [Barbara] Yeah. [Mayberry] Another essence thing occurs to me and that is, I guess, if I look back at what really typified James for me, as a family member, it was that when we discussed things in our council – let’s say grading policy or some action to be taken or some decision to be made. People sat around and related the things they were studying and they were teaching to the issues under question. You could also call that, I guess, the matter of relevancy on the faculty level as well as on the student level. That was a real example, it seems to me, on the part of faculty to students that what we study is directly related to the questions of our life and without that example and with the more or less general refusal, usually, of people to let that happen and university discussions, I don't know where the students can get that connection. It was a lived connection, very exciting. [Barbara] Thank you. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_25_Mayberry Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mayberry, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Robert Mayberry interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Robert Mayberry by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Robert Mayberry was one of the founding faculty of William James College and an integral part of the creation of the School of Communications. In this interview, Robert discusses the grading system and how it related to William James College, in addition to the generational shifts among the study body and the overall essence of WJC. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Robert Mayberry. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9378a82c74f13e419051f00673e44193.mp4 5dfd765051a02127233aae6d20274f1f https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b5f19865aa338d959612bcace77b9725.pdf 159a46df6684d9403448abba6d6d5ab6 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Robert Mayberry Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] I really want you to start by talking about our placement – our historical placement – the sense of continuity before and after James. Where did we come from? [Mayberry] I would say – which maybe I was not all clear about the time and may or not be all clear about now – but it seems to me that William James College came from two long run movements. The one called Progressive Education, which is really founded by the pragmatic philosophers, especially Dewey, but James played a role in that beforehand and what's called the General Education movement. And both of these are movements that responded to quite major reorganization of American education that occurred, more or less, in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties – in other words, relatively recently and the grandest historical scheme of things – but a reorganization that in effect replaced the traditional American college, which had as its purpose the education of undergraduates, primarily the liberal education of undergraduates for citizenly roles by the research university on the German Model. And among other things the replacement of the MA (which was the traditional teaching degree coming down from the middle ages from England) by the PhD, which was the research degree in the German university. So once the new university – which Johns Hopkins was a pioneer – had effectively consolidated its control in the places where the old colleges like Harvard and Yale were and smaller colleges also came under some pressure to imitate this new model, the functions were kind of left over and undone that used to be specifically undergraduate functions because things – the curriculum especially and departmentalization, which had followed upon this free organization – had kind of taken away the general and liberal education functions. So there began to be a persistent appearance of movements every – I don't know the sequency of it, but every decade or so – to try and get a general education back. On a Deweyan side, or the progressive side, I think there was also the sense that for democracy, specifically, liberal education ought to have direct relevance to what people do and of course the citizenly role is again involved, but to their work lives. Along about the middle of the nineteenth century, you had kind of a really strict interpretation – our purist interpretation – of the old classical liberal ideal. That sort of gradually made the idea become that liberal education, by definition, was something useless; that if it could be put to use, you were maybe corrupting the liberal education part of it. And I think progressive education tried to deal with the elimination of the sort of class bias of that �uselessness idea. To get the liberal ideals reattached to the things that someone seeking education in a democratic context would need and to get critical thinking applied, even to occupational concerns. [Mayberry] So, if you take those two movements, kind of converging, and not everybody who came to James certainly aware of those two movements. Nevertheless, we were precipitated, I think, into our attachment to them by being named for William James because when we read William James and try to take William James seriously and were led to the other pragmatic philosophers, like Dewey and Whitehead, we find these two questions – the question of how to relate specialization and generality and how to relate liberal education and occupation – dealt with very centrally and the tradition that, almost by accident, we had been placed. [Barbara] [Inaudible] I'm curious… excuse me, I didn't mean to cut you off. Were you still completing a thought? [Mayberry] Well, after those two – which are long run patterns converging – seems to me the immediate impetus (and this was probably more on people's minds who came here) was the demand that students had in the period, let's say, sixty-eight through seventy-one. That their chief concern - meaning the war – be somehow meaningfully addressed as, indeed, I would say it ought to have been by the materials, even the classical materials of college education; that room be made for the student and be able to meet in the curriculum a sense that curriculum could help the student deal with this overwhelming moral and political problem outside the classroom. And teachers who had wanted to respond to students making that demand and had found themselves blocked by the then highly specialized, highly departmentalized, highly research-oriented university, were looking for a place that they could do some practical work in the reform of education. Which the plural system here – the college system – seemed to offer. So, you take those two long run movements and that short run immediate concern, and I think that's where we came from. [Barbara] Let me check the [Inaudible] and I'm keeping it running. I want to ask you, as an appropriate question, to ask you. But why does it cycle? [Laughter] In other words: forget about how often it cycles. Why do we have some [Inaudible]? Why did we have to be…? I don't mean specifically James. Why does it have to be a cycle, why is there [Inaudible]? [Mayberry] Well, I mean, that's a huge question and I don't know any better than anybody else, but I have some glimmers of ideas. The reorganization of the university was also the professionalization of the faculty and professions, in general, guard their own prerogative. And since that professionalization became effective, movements to reform the university and the colleges themselves are apt to be �viewed as, I think, as threatening to the professional structure of things which can be praised by a defender of it. [Mayberry] By saying that it's threatening to scholarship and research and all those good things that no one really means to attack. So, I think you have a very entrenched set of structures, habits, interests, and powers that's very, very hard to change. I think it's notoriously conservative. On the elementary and secondary level there was a book by Roland Barthes on open education, which is a movement that more or less corresponds to the James movement on a college level. The opening sentence of his book is something like this: "We do not have in the United States, as they do in France, a Centralized Ministry of Education, but we might as well have." I mean it’s a very brilliant sentence of that sort. Because if you take this power structure and social structure and habit structure, I mean, it gets to be unconscious. There's no conspiracy involved. But if you add to that probably the increased market responsiveness of education overtime, you have a pressure for education to be uniform. So that I think the problem remains unsolved, despite repeated attempts to solve it. And every time the perception dawns again that the problem isn't solved – mainly in general education and the relevance of education to life - that we're not getting that solved, you have some new resurgence of the movement to try to deal with it. And there was a third thing I wanted to add there that now I can't think of, besides market responsiveness. [Barbara] [Inaudible] You know I'll cut this part out. [Mayberry] I really can't. I think it got swept away in a parenthesis somewhere. It might come back okay. [Barbara] Okay, I thought that was very, very clear. I mean what you had said was very clear. My second big question was… stop the deck. I'm still… we’re rolling. [Mayberry] So, if you've got that institutional inertia – leaving problems perpetually unsolved, which occasionally call forth somebody who wants to solve them – and you have increased market responsiveness, the question would be: “What is there about market responsiveness that leads to uniformity?” And I think that is something like competition or something like supply and demand. You tend to converge towards products, toward commodities, and education almost becomes a commodity in that context… that there are like products or commodities that have already succeeded. So, I think we fell under some pressure recently, as the times got harder, to do a kind of education that was recognizably the kind that was in demand. The trouble being, of course, that you can never get a demand recorded for a commodity that isn't offered. But there got to be a real sense that Grand Valley ought to be made more like other places. That was operating not just at Grand Valley by the way, but around the country. And so, we entered a cycle of one of the periodic cycles of reaction to the reformers. �[Mayberry] The third thing as to why it should be cyclical is really much more mysterious to me because I used to think it was American culture that tended to be polarized, but it may be Western culture or some people might say it's the human condition, but somehow, we tend to be oppositional. That whole business of reform or stasis becomes a debate rather than a multi-side discussion and so if one side is in the ascendancy, the other side is out and there really isn't anybody in the business of looking for the synthesis that you inquired about. [Barbara] And each other. [Mayberry] I think that when we started in seventy-one, and we were not the first college in the cluster, in fact it was said, well that's tricky. It was said of us that by being the third we had truly made it a cluster. But at the same time, we had perceived that we were coming into a matter that had been settled. There were to the multiple colleges here and that that was, in that sense, the constitution and we could therefore appeal as constitutional to a value like plurality, and the provision of choice to students, and the creation of really distinct approaches to education on the part of faculty. We could appeal to those things as values that were shared. And it is important, I think, from that point of you to remember that a commonness that we did share – unrecognized by almost all participants maybe in the whole thing, but a commonness that we did share, at least with the original CAS faculty – was of being educational innovators and experimenters. They came here to provide an alternative to education such as was offered in the region. Number one: public, because most of the other education off the junior college level is under private auspices. And number two: they were also deeply concerned to recover the liberal education mission for undergraduates. In any case, as long as times were good, the appeal to plurality often worked in context of discussion. That is people [Inaudible] of governance. People were willing, in a way, to adopt a live and let live attitude. Though, as I say, the deeper foundation of why we might have all been committed to that I think went unknown to the participants. Which was really too bad because that might've made the crisis work differently. I think it was also really too bad on the level of public discussion, too, the administration felt that they had set in motion a kind of competitive game, if you will, among these colleges for the sake of promoting enrollment. And from their point of view, anything could persist in the cluster as long as enrollment figures paid off. But their hands-offness was not so much the constitutional live and let live as the above the frayness; seeing people compete with one another and congratulating them when they did well and calling them on it when they did poorly. So, on that level, I think, had we but known some work had not been done to really make the constitution acceptable to everyone. �[Mayberry] And on this other concealed level, there were conversations we didn't know we ought to be having with fellow educational reformers because we were locked in competitive debate. We thought with CAS as the local representative of the kind of institution we'd all come from elsewhere and which we wish to provide an alternative. So, the common ground was not present and when times became bad, the depths of the hostility in certain quarters toward the whole cluster idea – which had been bidding its time to express itself – emerged to a degree, I think, that shocked all of us. I think we did not know the degree of hostility to the very idea of multiple colleges. Which wasn't so much directed with any particularity at William James, it was just directed at the sense that the original mission of Grand Valley had been lost. And, of course, William James was easy to see in that context as one of the waves of professionalism, professional education, which was – from the point of view, again, of the old-time folks here – a grave compromise with the liberal ideal in education. They were just as much upset, of course, with the growth of professional schools and CAS itself as they had been with the growth of anything like William James. And, again, didn't know that James had as much quarrel with a segregated professional education as it did with the segregated liberal education. The notion of the synthesis that we were working on to try and make professional education liberal and liberal education practical – that crossing of the lines was pretty much invisible to people. And I'm not sure that's our fault. That particular segment of the problem I'm not sure is our fault. There again, I think, is where you do run into the problem of the cultural matrix more broadly in which you're trying to present an idea that just is plain hard to see, as clear as you try to articulate it. The dichotomy of liberal and professional is so strongly built into the inertial structure of education, elsewhere people maybe may not even hear the words that you're uttering, clear as you might make them. And I think we made them very clear from time to time – conspicuously clear. Students understand it better than probably either our colleagues or our administration did. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_24_Mayberry Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mayberry, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Robert Mayberry interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Robert Mayberry by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Robert Mayberry was one of the founding faculty of William James College and an integral part of the creation of the School of Communications. In this interview, Robert discusses William James College's historical placement at Grand Valley and in society at that time, including its place in the progressive education movement and becoming the third college at Grand Valley. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Robert Mayberry. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2193091785e983d01a17bea2f8f084f9.mp4 4186df8ef95d9840fd4db56b6d257e63 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/27a11f382b1f1b8a7f471bdaceaa7dbc.pdf f60524a4c486fa4bd7525e0e579a145c PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Kate Noone Date: 1984 [Barbara] All were doing now is just like a little test recording. But I want to ask you why you chose James? [Noone] I went to William James because of the people that were there and the type of education that was available to me, for me, at James. I didn't come to Grand Valley to go to James. I came to Grand Rapids and ended up at Grand Valley to finish my education and wasn't aware that James was there until a couple semesters at CAS and heard about James, met some people at James, and decided to go over there and check out classes there. What was nice about James is it wasn't a type of situation where you sat and listen to someone talk, and you sat still and you sat quiet, and you were obedient and sat there and listened to them, and then it was two weeks later you spit out what they said on a piece of paper called the test and then you somehow got graded for that performance. I was real dissatisfied with that kind of education. I never did it very well either. It was a difficult thing for me to do. When I was at James it felt a lot freer to do other things. [Barbara] Just continue from where you were. [Noone] Okay. The type of education at William James, for me, worked for me a whole lot better because of the different… yeah, there was a lot of opportunity to think and to think about what you were doing – what I was doing and James. In classrooms it was a matter of going in and listening to somebody speak and writing things down and kind of daydreaming, doodling on the paper. James, you couldn't get away with that. Couldn't get away with not participating. I think one of my first experience is that James was a class that I had and the teacher wanted us to read a book and read it by a certain day. I didn't read the book. I didn't think I had to; that was kind of education that I was used to having – where the teacher told you to do something, you really didn't do it, and just kind of went in, took the test, and always somehow did pretty well on it. But I didn't read and I came into the class real unprepared and it was real obvious and it felt real awkward. I felt like I was really missing out on something. It was like the first time that I think that I really understood what William James was about. Because I didn't read that, I didn't know what was going on – I wasn't learning, I wasn't being helpful to anyone else in the class, and I wasn't being helpful to myself at all. And that really had a big impact on me. I thought about that a lot and I thought about how that all worked and what was different at William James and that was what �prompted me to take classes there and to be involved at James. [Barbara] That's great, I think we got this all… [Inaudible]. [Noone] Okay. What did you ask me? [Barbara] The incident that we care about is… you didn't do the reading. [Noone] Right. The first time that I really learned what William James was about was I was in the class and I was supposed to read a book by a certain day. I didn't read it. I never did – I never thought I had to. In traditional schools in my entire educational upbringing, it's like you didn't really have to do that kind of stuff. You just kind of went in and got a feel for what the teacher wanted, and you gave it to them, and you got a grade. I didn't read the book and I came to class, and I was real unprepared and it was real obvious to myself and other people in the class. And I felt like I was missing something – a lot. I felt like I was not getting… anything. I wasn't getting anything, and other people were getting a lot. And I think it was my first realization about education at William James and what that was about, and how that was different from my previous years of education. I felt awkward and I felt like I really needed to do something if I was going to get anything out of my education and learn anything, and I felt like I had a lot to learn and William James was there, and it had a lot to offer in terms of different kinds of things that I needed to learn at that time. [Barbara] If you had to summarize what the core of the philosophy at James – if you just had to name one thing, in a sentence or two – what was the most important thing? [Noone] James worked on the basis that you were solely responsible for your education and no one was going to do it for you. There were no “A’s” or “B’s” or any kind of grading system – that’s more than a sentence to say. To say there wasn't that “A” or “B” grade system, to say at the end of the semester: "This is what you've achieved." What you achieved at the end of the semester was to your knowledge, and what you worked for, and your paper and your, you know, what you worked on with your projects, your milestone. That's what you achieved and that was solely your responsibility. If you didn't do it nobody cared or that was your responsibility. And I think that had a real impact on me. That had a very, very strong impact on me. So, I think in terms of the goals of James, I think was to make people solely responsible for their education. That's not to say that you didn't do it with other people, and that you didn't work on it with other people, and that there weren't other people around to help. But you needed to find those people, you needed to talk to those people, and we need to find people that wanted to work with you on projects and whatnot, and I think that it didn't mean at all that you needed to do it by yourself. It was a nice community to work and �learn with people. [Barbara] This sounds like nirvana. Surely… don't start answering yet because I have to focus. [Noone] Okay. [Barbara] This makes it sound like nirvana, surely there were some faults. [Noone] I think, yeah, there were some faults. I think it took a while to get acclimated to what was expected and what it was that I wanted. I mean, it was suddenly this responsibility and that things felt pretty wide open, but it took me a while to figure out what it was that I really wanted. So, that was a little difficult. But I'm not sure that was a fault. I mean, it made me work and it made me think. It also made me use teachers in the way I’ve never used teachers before, like going in and saying: "What's going on here, and I didn't understand this, and what's this about." So, it made me use the teachers a lot more rather than going to the teaching and saying: "Well I wasn't in class today because I had a doctor's appointment," and you really weren't, but you just weren't there, you know. That kind of authoritarian kind of thing. It was not that type of relationship with teachers. So, in terms of what was a big disadvantage or for James' fault: it would’ve been nice to have maybe a little bit of a broader spectrum of classes. I think maybe some administrative things maybe weren't there that would've helped facilitate some things a little better. But I can't really think of anything else. [Barbara] Can I show you what we've done so far? [Noone] The film? [Barbara] Start tape. [Noone] Is it started? [Barbara] It's started. [Noone] What's not so good about… I think back at it now and it all looks just really wonderful. But I think if you would've interviewed me at the time when I was taking classes, I was incredibly frustrated. At times it was hard – there was a lot of things going on. It was just a difficult thing. Sometimes it was very frustrating… it was a very frustrating way to learn because there was a lot to be learned and there was a lot going on and you had to structure things yourself and make sure things got done to have you on timelines and stuff. It was real frustrating. [Noone] There were times I just was, you know, thinking that it might have been nice �sitting, doodling on a page, listening to some person – verbally, you know – talk up to a classroom. So, I think that there were some frustrating things about it, but I look back at it now and it just seems like wonderful. [Barbara] Why? [Noone] Why? [Barbara] Wait, wait, let me check the focus, okay. [Noone] Okay. I didn't like that. [Barbara] I thought you did it better before. Maybe we should do it again. [Noone] Okay. [Barbara] Let me focus. Focus, focus, focus. There she is. [Noone] Okay. Do you want me to do it again? [Barbara] Sure. [Noone] Okay. [Barbara] Anytime. [Noone] Okay, it's hard to think about… what was frustrating about my educational at William James. I know there were some things that weren't so wonderful at James and I think if you would've interviewed when I was taking classes at James there were lots of times I was real frustrated and I wanted some times for someone just to say: "You should know this, learn it and that's that” and it wasn't that simple. It was a frustrating way to learn, in some ways, but it stuck. And that's something that I can't really say about all previous education settings – that things didn't stick, it didn't integrate. I mean, it was a painful process sometimes and it was difficult, and I was coming out of class and feeling like your head was spinning a little bit and not sure what had taken place or, you know, trying to integrate it all. And I think that was very frustrating for me at times. But I look back at it now and it feels like it was just wonderful and I wish I was back at James and back taking classes. It was a nice community. I made a lot of contacts, you met a lot of people, there was always something to talk about. [Noone] And I think that [is important] … especially when you're at kind of a mainstream America – not going to school and working and kind of out in the real world. And that is something that's lacking, in terms of people coming together for a common �kind of principles and ethics and whatnot in terms of education and learning and knowledge. I think that's missing in a lot of my experiences in the real world. [Barbara] Do you feel that your education equipped you for employment? [Noone] Yeah, it did. It definitely equipped me for employment. I think what it did, though, was that it made me pretty selective and pretty knowledgeable about what kinds of work was okay and what kinds of work wasn't. And I think I didn't go into my field with blinders on, just knowing book knowledge. I came out knowing a whole lot of other things that were real helpful to me, in terms of my education. It helps me a lot. I was fortunate enough to get a job in my field – social work, social relations field – before I even finished school at an agency that hired William James students. It was full of a lot of William James students and it was full of a lot of people who thought real seriously about what they did and how they worked with clients and what that was about. And it wasn't anything that was ever taken for granted that you knew; it was always something that was in process. And that was very helpful to get hired into that agency. It was good and I think James helped me do that. I'm not sure I would have ever gotten a job at that agency had I not gone to James and sought those kinds of things out at James. I understood what the process was about, so that was nice. [Barbara] Good answer. Good, clear answer. Did your education equip you to get a job? [Noone] Yes, I was fortunate enough to be able to continue learning through work and the job that I got when I was pretty much finished with school. Social relations / social work is one of my majors – what I focused on school – and I got hired into an agency that hired and liked and sought out William James students because they understood what working with clients was about; they understood that it was a continual process; that you never, you know, knew and you can sit back and easy-chair and pretend like you know it all because you never do. It's a continuous process and I was fortunate enough to get hired into an agency and stayed there for quite a while. And it was nice; it was real good. It was being able to continue learning. And I think that's – in terms of my profession and in terms of my work – that’s what I want to do, is continue learning. So, I was fortunate to do that one life after William James… are you filming this now? Life after William James. How it's been difficult to integrate some into the general marketplace, in terms of my profession. [Noone] I have found it very frustrating. I feel like I was real sheltered in the agency that I worked in for four years. And I think learning the kinds of things that I've learned – the things that I feel that are incredibly valuable in terms of my profession – are pretty meaningless, in some ways, to other people and in the field. And I think that's been real frustrating. I wonder sometimes and William James was nice because it was a community to grow with and to learn with. And how do I fill �those needs now? What do I do about that? And I've done pretty well; I still have people around me that I’ve grown with and I learned with and I have that kind of contact and that kind of connection with and I hope I always will. And I think I will. But it was kind of nice William James provided those people. I went there and they were there. Now it's, again, taking responsibility and making sure that those people are in my life now. And they're not so accessible as they were when I was in college, and I hate to think it's because that kind of thought, and that kind of ethics, and those kinds of ways of thinking about process and whatnot, is becoming obsolete with maybe younger generations. Or just becoming more difficult to find people who think like that. But community was rich, and nice, and was good. [Barbara] You talk about the way we think and the ethics and stuff, but what do you mean? [Noone] In terms of social work, in terms of being at James – for me, my education was thinking a lot about how I was going to work with people and how effective I was going to be. And it wasn't anything I can read in a book and learn that that's what this is, you know, and have it integrate. It was not that simple. It was thinking about a lot, it was doing it a lot, it was having the experience doing it. It was whether that was role-playing or having interactions with, you know, fellow students or whatever that was. It wasn't just simply sitting down and reading it, it was doing it and I think in the workplace it's the same thing. You can't just take for granted that things are just going to come to you or that you automatically know things. Every situation is different and needs to be thought about. And there's a process going on with almost every situation that needs to be thought about and not taken just for granted. So, I think in terms of ethics and knowing things… that wasn't so clear was it? Sum it up? To kind of sum it up, James was good while I was there. I still feel like it was good for me. It taught me what I wanted and what I didn't want, in terms of my field and my profession. It taught me what was good and what wasn't good. That was, I think, a lot of what it did in terms of how it still feels for me now. Also taught me how to use other people real well. And that one… I think that's essential and that was good, too. [Barbara] Did it handicap you that you had two or three professors is all? [Noone] I think it would've been nicer. I mean, maybe that just comes from traditional schools – we have a whole lot of different professors you can pick and choose from. I was pleased with my professors. I think sometimes it would've been nice to have a little bit more of a variety of different professors and not have just two or three. But it would've been different to have more. I think sometimes it would've maybe been nicer to have a little bit more of a variety. [Barbara] We have just a little bit of tape. You guys go stand behind Kate, would you? And then we'll know what those little coughs and thing are. You can just-you can just �beat it. Okay, there's one. [Noone] There's one! There's Jamie. [Barbara] See if you can get on the other side. [Noone] There's Jamie. [Barbara] Okay. Poor Jimmy, move so I can see you. [Noone] Move so you can… there. Okay. There's Jamie. [Barbara] There's Jamie. Okay. Jessica why don't you come around on that side, too, because there's not enough light on that side and I want to be able to see your face really well, on the tape. There you go. Now you both show up. I'm going to run out of tape in a minute, but I want to get a shot of you now. [Laughter] [Noone] Do you have anything to say? Here's the microphone. [Jamie] Doot doot! [Jessica] Aww, thanks. Put it on me! [Noone] Put it on you, huh? [Barbara] We’re going to run out of tape in just a second. [Noone] It’s on you. So how was it being quiet for so long? [Jessica] I hated it. [Jamie] [Coughs on mic] [Jessica] Don't cough on it! � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_23_Noone Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Noone, Kate Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Kate Noone interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Kate Noone by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Kate Noone was a student of William James College and a member of the class of 1981. In this interview, Kate discusses her personal journey that led her to William James College, its core philosophy, and how her education equipped her for future employment. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Kate Noone. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e7c954563d8ded187d4aee8b3c446c8d.mp4 e404facd0ab54ff7b4490f513353eb30 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bc4930e3d15733897a6420709300aef8.pdf 6ef9f890f95ae19872c58628c8f7a059 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: John MacTavish Date: 1984 Part: 3 of 3 [Barbara] Why don't you just start by saying how you ever got associated with an alternative college? [MacTavish] I was a junior member of the Geology Department at the College of Arts and Sciences and I was involved in administrative aspects of faculty and faculty life on the campus, and, for whatever reasons, he never told me… the President elected to put me on a committee with nine or ten other people to design a new college. And we spent a year going through the rigmarole of “what's our focus, what's our emphasis, when do we want to start?” All the things that no one ever even conceived would be necessary but had to be gone through. And at the end of that time, we started looking for faculty and I applied, and my application went through along with everybody else's. They interviewed me and I was hired as one of the… I don't know what the word is -- pioneer faculty? And at that point, the next fall we were off and running. [Barbara] I have two questions out of that. One question is: why, how on earth, could it be that only one year is given to planning a college? I mean, it's not like opening a Dairy Queen. [MacTavish] There was some experience on campus for Thomas Jefferson and one of the original scenarios for Grand Valley was a series of Liberal Arts colleges with the maximum size of fifteen hundred students. And the original scenario was all those colleges would be the same and the small size would be what would help the learning in the educational process. When Thomas Jefferson came along it did not fit that mold, but they still wanted to keep one college from dominating the campus and they needed - because of the growth - they needed another college rapidly. We had - I don't remember the exact numbers - but several hundred students immediately and we only had five faculty members, but we were interviewing and hiring as fast as we could. [Barbara] The James philosophy when we got there - which was maybe four years after school started - seemed so clear and so finished. I mean, we were always haggling about it, but it was a clear focus. [Barbara] How do you develop that clear of a… at what point did that clear focus get developed? �[MacTavish] [Laughter] That's your perception maybe, but there wasn't a clear focus in the sense that it was something that was polished and finished and going. It was never finished; it was never polished. [MacTavish] We had - in the very beginning - a lot of arguments over the gross emphasis of the college. Whether it should be a college of sociology. Should it have any science at all? And Will Walco and myself - being the two scientifically oriented members of that committee - were fighting for broad spectrum liberal education. And then the question arose: do you try to include all science? And how do you differentiate yourself from CAS? And there was some nervousness from the College of Arts and Sciences people for fear of competition over students and one of the ways we got around that was to emphasize the environmental emphasis - the environmental approach - to our science. And in fact, at one point they even had an agreement drawn up that William James would do no laboratory science, in effect because that was impinging upon the biologists and chemists and the geologists, and so forth. So, for a long time during that first year, we didn't even know what direction we were going. We landed with the William James philosophy fairly quickly in terms of approach to education, but we didn't know always what we were going to do. Now if you asked me what that approach is, I'll tell you to talk to each individual and he'll give you his ideas because that's how fluid it was. And when we start out with five faculty the first year, and double that the second year, and double it again the third year the philosophy changes every year because we were so democratic it drove us nuts. In fact, there were people pushing for Quaker approach (a hundred percent or nothing). And so, you start with five and end up with twelve months later and it's a totally different philosophy, but not different. It turned out it was a function of the people that were there. [Barbara] How would you characterize the core of what James pretty much was? [Laughter] [MacTavish] [Laughter] We were very naive. We invented the wheel more than once. We tried to set up an educational setting in which the students could learn. We tried to avoid the stereotype college education that we - many of us, most of us - had gone through: a faculty member giving you the rules in front of a thousand students and you giving them back on the exam. We wanted to set up an educational setting where students had a chance to learn, where they had a chance to learn on their own or with somebody, guided by somebody in groups, but in a sense… it's not working right. I'll think of it in a second. [Barbara] Okay, you don't have to hurry. [MacTavish] We wanted the people that were there, in the setting - whether be a classroom or �wherever - to treat themselves as a group of people trying to discover something. The faculty member at times was thought of as the chief learner in a situation where there were a bunch of learners. [MacTavish] We almost got in trouble with that at one point when we had our Piaget conference because the decision was everybody should teach a section of the discussion groups that were associated with the Piaget conference. I taught a section of Piaget. I didn't know anything about the Piaget going in there. I have almost no formal training in psychology or sociology - a little bit of undergraduate stuff in both, but not a whole lot - but the situation was such that we made that fact known. The students signed up for that class, signed up for it knowing that I was learning it the same day or the day before they were learning it - we emphasized that when we started the class. The students wanted that - the ones that sat in in my class - and we had a full classroom of students that were interested in trying to learn about Piaget in that way. It worked. I still have students occasionally, fifteen years later, that I see in the local area, that talk about that class because they really got what they were looking for out of the class and it was apparently one of the few times in their college career that they were able to do that. And we had innumerable meetings over philosophy of education, grading systems, pass/fail, credit/no credit, credit/no credit honors, what does honors mean? Does that mean A-C-F? We went around and around like I perceived virtually every other experimental college at that time doing. We didn't think of ourselves as experimental. We didn't think of ourselves as an experiment which was going to run and then they were going to take it apart and dissect it and see whether or not it worked. We saw ourselves as an alternative which was a permanent fixture, and it was for over ten years on a campus. But it did change every year. The bigger we got, the more bureaucratically ossified we tended to get, the more difficult it was for people to branch out and try things, when in the early years we could. I figured it out just before I left that in the approximately ten years I was there, I taught forty-seven different courses. Almost every one of them several times and in every case, I had to design a course from beginning to end. And my level of involvement was - after about the first five years - probably atypically low because I was burning out. I did burn out. A lot of people were doing more than I was and we are all putting in eighty-hour weeks. [Barbara] Going back to the very beginning, when you applied… it sounds, from your description, that it was nuts. Like the committee… it was so much to decide and everything. What would attract you from a predictable position, such as Geology Department at CAS, to something like this? [MacTavish] Well, the Geology Department of CAS, I don't want to pick on them because they are very much like other science departments in many state schools around the �country. [MacTavish] But it's the kind of a situation where you know what you're going to teach this term, next term, two years from now, five years from now. The only thing that is different is: do we change a laboratory exercise? Do I upgrade the book to another book? Do I get a different collection of specimens and for the laboratory? In the three years that I was there, the third year I was designing the William James College, the second year I designed an Earth Science major because they didn't have one up to that point. But I sat back, and I said: "Is this really what I want to do for thirty years?" And the answer was no. And that's one of the reasons I got involved in campus administrative work. That's one of the reasons I got involved in William James. It's one of the reasons I got involved later in elective governments and that kind of thing. Because I can't do the same thing all the time. I go nuts. So, we had a situation in which we had to hire a staff, recruit students, to a place that had never been. And then once those students got there and that staff got there, we had a couple of weeks to get to know each other and set up a curriculum and bring the students on and give them their orientation and start the whole thing. And boom, we were into recruiting staff the size of our staff, including the Dean, in either the first year or the second year… fog sets in after fifteen. We were looking for a Dean and faculty members, and we got over eleven thousand applications. And we used to sit at a round table and feed the applications in and there were usually six people at a table - three faculty and three students - and if the application got three black balls by the time we got around the table, it was thrown out at the third black ball, and everything that got around the table without three black balls was then looked at again. And by springtime, we were interviewing two faculty candidates a week and the interviews were two days long - all day, both days, with a very heavy dinner and party in the middle. And in some cases that party went on till two a.m. because we felt that we had to get through the academic crap – or through the administrative tie or whatever the person had – to find out who he really was. And at times we didn't get there until two or three o'clock in the morning. And so here we are interviewing two or three people a week, doing our classes, and at the same time trying to recruit as many students as we had in existence. And that's why we're doing eighty-hour weeks. [Barbara] That's neat. Do you remember anything… I know I found in these notes that you went to some meeting in Ann Arbor, some big meeting with lots of representatives from other alternative or experimental schools. Can you tell me anything about the general movement at that time? [MacTavish] That one isn't real clear to me. I know I went to Redlands and did the same thing and… [Unknown] Excuse me, were running out of tape. �[Barbara] Okay, we’ve got to put another… Just thought there might be something you remember. [MacTavish] Yeah – No, I've done that two or three places. Redlands is the one I most remember because it turned out we were doing what a lot of people were saying to do… what it amounted to. People couldn't believe it. [Barbara] Okay, we'll save that. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_22_MacTavish Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource MacTavish, John Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource John MacTavish interview (3 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with John MacTavish by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. John MacTavish was faculty member of GVSC who was hired to teach Geology courses in 1968 and later transitioned to planning and teaching for William James College beginning in 1971. In this interview, John discusses his transition from being a member of the Geology Department within the College of Arts and Letters to becoming one of the pioneer faculty of William James College, in addition to the development of the James philosophy over time. This interview is part 3 of 3 for John MacTavish. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/01e89ad315320de66a14d3ab7ce8ccf8.mp4 f646366da7233fb969677d7ef1cf1106 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7f5957baa0b1c87f9dc89042d6abb881.pdf 16b12a1c292c0a5984c9f27d754f0de2 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: John MacTavish Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 3 [Barbara] Are you rolling? [MacTavish] Yeah. [Barbara] Steven? [MacTavish] Yeah. [Barbara] Why don't you tell me about other, you know, what you know about…? [MacTavish] Well, I personally went to two or three conferences, but we were so busy doing things and we had so much to do that we didn't, at least, I didn't go to very many. I remember the Redlands conference. People were talking about their experimental program here or their experimental program there. And frequently it was just a few students inside of a department that were trying things; there were almost no one out there doing what we were doing. And the people, frankly, found it unbelievable that we were able to do this because that was even beyond what they were fantasizing being able to do: to have the backing of a college behind you to turn you relatively loose. And I can remember when the plan for William James was approved by the faculty council. The thing that put it over the back, over the top, was I think it was Dewey Heininga [?] that stood up and said, "there's a time when you have to cut the child free and let them do it," or words to that effect, because the faculty were wanting to put all kinds of strings and "we'll check on them next year and kill them if they don't do well" and this kind of thing. And I believe it was Dewey [?] that finally stood up and said, "We've got to give them a chance. We've got to let them do their thing and we've got to not have control over them." And that was almost the last thing that was said before it was okayed as a separate academic unit, but we were spending so much time actually doing what other people wanted to fantasize about that we didn't have time to go around and tell people what we were doing. Although the word did get out and it never ceases to amaze me the way that students found us, similar to the ways they found Thomas Jefferson, because somehow there was a student connection out there with high schools and so forth that I never knew about when I was a high school. Of course, I don't think anything like that existed back in the '50s when I was in high school. If it had I wouldn't have noticed. �[Barbara] John, but that didn't go on because our enrollment was down. [MacTavish] That's true. And I honestly don't remember why that happened. Eventually, we got up to over seven hundred and then they started back down again. And I think that at the point when you're seven hundred, then you're dealing with an institutional size that we didn't have in the beginning. And I'm not blaming the decline on that. It could easily have been economic. It could have been changes in the general cultural pattern in the United States. It could have been a lot of things. The '60s were gone, but it also could have been the fact that William James was at that point starting to be a large, standard type of institution, even though we did an awful lot of things that weren't. But there ends up being a level of bureaucracy that is necessarily just to function that the students were arguing with, participating in, and fighting against all at the same time. And I honestly don't know why they started back down. A lot of the faculty were starting to reevaluate their time commitments. I know I did. Some of our best faculty left. Well, if I name names, they all think those are the best and the others aren't. But we did have a fairly high faculty turnover. Eventually, people started hiring faculty for different reasons than they were originally hired in the beginning. They were hiring people to fill out levels of... or areas of expertise. They were hiring a person because he happened to fit as an intern specialist, or we needed a biologist. And the primary concern was a concern different from the original. Sure, in the beginning we needed a writer, and we needed a scientist and we needed a sociologist and a psychologist and so forth. But people were looked at as much for their secondary and tertiary interests as they were for their original interests because we knew that people had to be eclectic, broadly interesting, broadly interested. The person that you could describe as a graduate school teacher in a discipline spending eighty hours a week in the laboratory studyingI'll pick Paschke's rats as an example because Paschke doesn't fit the mold, but they spend their life studying the behavior patterns of rats. That isn't the kind of faculty member we needed in William James. We needed somebody who if he's a geologist, he's willing to tackle Piaget. If he's a writer, he's willing to try and analyze wines or the scientific basis for the difference in the way wine plants grow. And so, he ends up studying geography for a term. We needed people with the kind of interest and nerve to leave their disciplines. And that was phrase keys for me. One of our big problems is a lot of people felt like they were leaving their discipline when they came to William James. I did as an invertebrate paleontologist. I haven't done a whole lot since I joined William James and the rest of the academic world labeled you when you did that because those were lost years, if you tried to come back. Dick Paschke is one of the few people that were able to not have that happen to him, but many of the rest of us had that happen to us. In some ways, it's good; in some ways, it's bad. I don't think I ever want to go back to being a paleontologist again. On the other hand, I spent fifteen years of my life learning to be one, but it gave me and got me where I wanted to be at that time. And that got me somewhere else and so forth down �the road. Where do we go from here? [Barbara] Let's stop for one second. [Inaudible] [MacTavish] We looked for people that were compatible with ourselves and with what we thought William James should be. And that includes not just me who hired on, but that includes the Dan Clocks and the Woodys and the rest of the people on that committee. The Will Walkos, who knew he wasn't going to be in William James and wasn't for years, and then situations changed, and he came over. But we look for people who had what we thought William James needed in terms of educational philosophy and outlook. [Barbara] It's real hard to pin this down in my mind. I keep thinking, you're just not telling me what this magic thing was that made everyone understand what you were aiming for. [MacTavish] No, we did not analyze what we were looking for and we did not- Well, let me say it two ways. We did not sit down and say, "This is the kind of psychological profile we want. This is the kind of credentials we want." In fact, there was a move at one point to kind of look past credentials once a minimum level was established. We did, however, spend long hours haranguing each other with why we're interested in this person or this type of person. And when you spend thirty or forty hours a week, in addition to your regular job, discussing who you should hire, you tend to, as a group, reach a consensus. And they were consensus decisions. We didn't try to say we have to have a person with this particular leaning. We have to have a position for so-and-so. We tried to fight that. In fact, we wanted synoptic positions and everything. But we did look for educational philosophies and we didn't spell out in advance, "This is the cardinal philosophy." Mayberry has his cardinal philosophy; Zapp had his cardinal philosophy; I had my cardinal philosophy. And in a way, they were all the same with different edges and then in another way, they were all different, but the edges overlapped. So that we could out of the five or six thousand applications, we could find six or eight that made sense for everybody. [Barbara] You know, that's kind of hard to imagine. [MacTavish] Well, I think it was in the sense that there was a magic there. There was a feeling amongst this group that never knew each other before; in a period of two weeks, we were old friends. [Barbara] This is the committee? [MacTavish] No, this is the original faculty. The committee was never a group of old friends, but that's another story. The orientation occurred and the faculty started, and we �spent so much- we lived together. I mean, our wives saw less of us than [Inaudible] [Barbara] Really explain- Oh, I know it's about money. They didn't see why the hell you should come here when the money was so low. [MacTavish] Well, that was another thing William James did is they took away all the rewards for teaching. They took away the merit pay. They took away the titles. They took away everything. And the only reward you got was internal. Well, that's fine for a few people, but not for a lot of people. And people tended to grump after a while, even though they participated in the original decision to do that. We took away all the external rewards, which is not good, I don't think. [Barbara] But it's like what we did with the students. We said, "We're not going to reward you with an 'A.' We're going to reward you with an internal accomplishment." It's going to be pure. [MacTavish] Yeah, it's going to be pure. Well, pure works in the Land of Oz, but it doesn't always work in real life because there are so many other pressures involved. When you go to a professional meeting, you say, "Oh, I'm a member of the faculty." Everybody else says, "I'm associate professor, full professor, assistant professor, instructor." And there's some kind of pecking order that's known. When you say you're a member of the faculty, that means you could be anything from a dean on down to undergraduate instructor, you know. [Barbara] Well, what we've gotten into here, and we didn't finish the other thing. I'm asking everyone what critical steps were taken or not taken or what critical weaknesses were there or whatever that contributed to the closing? Surely there was more than one thing that contributed to closing the place down. [MacTavish] Well, I wasn't there for the final closing. I was there for, I guess, what you would call the downhill, at least a large part of it. There were several things, I think, that were involved. And one of them is individual burnout or pullback because of the amount of work involved. Another is the change in the general direction or orientation of the college. It lost a lot of its freewheeling-ness and it became very much more rigid in terms of curriculum, in terms of faculty teaching patterns. We ended up with departments. They were interdisciplinary departments, but there were departments, nonetheless. I think also there were some real political and sociological problems that people experienced in what some people were calling the "Women's Club." We, in some cases, either made offers or hired people. The faculty didn't do it. A certain clique of people did it and they did it on grounds that were not traditional William James grounds. I'd rather not tape some of those things. But Inge got into a lot of trouble in that group setting and some of the other people did, too. I did for a variety of reasons and I don't think that helped �the college at all. Plus, there always was, in the eyes of some of the traditional faculty members on campus, the feeling that faculty members in that college, namely William James, were slumming in some way because they were not disciplinarians in the traditional sense of disciplines. That combined with some initial inabilities in the administrative level. She was learning a lot after she got here and she got much, much better. But for the first few years, she had some problems that tended to contribute to the point where once she was doing a pretty darn good job of it, some people had stopped listening. And there was a general conservativeness that was occurring, especially in this region and then in the college. We never did get to the point where there were a group of equal colleges. And then the fiscal crisis hit the state of Michigan and that was a disaster for William James because the argument was made and very difficult to fight that being a group of colleges was costing us money. What they did is they eliminated all the colleges except the ones that they couldn't get rid of for political reasons like the School of Business, but they kept all the administrators. And if you look at the faculty, if you look at the ratios between students and faculties and secretaries and administrators, you'll see, over a period of years, you'll see that administration level people were being added at a much, much faster rate than everybody else. And when it came to time for cuts, the faculty members were cut disproportionately to the administrators, so that made the ratios even worse. And in addition to that, the faculty members were cut in some cases in ways or places that were political in nature, rather than having to deal with how many students they had and so forth. And I'm not speaking about myself in that situation, although I was one of the ones who was cut. So that there were a bunch of pressures on William James near the end that were political, social, psychological. It was a long story. I don't think the faculty got the break in terms of the break from the heavy workload that they should have gotten to be able to maintain it continuously for years, after years. [Barbara] That's answering the next question I was going to say. I was going to say, the flipside of what I asked you is: in positive terms, what could have been done differently? Looking at this as an experimental school and saying… [Steve] Thirty seconds about until tape end. [Barbara] Alright, well, get the other tape in. Okay. Is there an answer to the positive? � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_21_MacTavish Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource MacTavish, John Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource John MacTavish interview (2 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with John MacTavish by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. John MacTavish was faculty member of GVSC who was hired to teach Geology courses in 1968 and later transitioned to planning and teaching for William James College beginning in 1971. In this interview, John discusses the early days of William James College and its creation, in addition to the sense of "magic" that existed within the community and the critical weaknesses that contributed to the college's eventual decline. This interview is part 2 of 3 for John MacTavish. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Bureaucracy Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3869b733694d40a0b6c251ac79cd7773.mp4 e235725271f014e1c927bf18cbe5d56b https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fe66d700ceac496d0be3fb92ed278f57.pdf cc086eb728147f4e02bcc378ecb15ba6 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: John MacTavish Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 3 [Barbara] …saying is, the conclusion to be drawn, it seems as though one keeps on with the Geology lectures of three hundred and fifty students and a true/false exam, when you close these places down and there's no discussion. [MacTavish] But that's where the college makes its money. You stick three thousand students in the classroom and fill… and then spend the time with the teaching assistants. That's where they make their money. [Unidentified] Sit up so he doesn't [inaudible]. [Barbara] Yes, dear. What can we learn from the James thing though? I mean, it's like it's closed so it never existed. [MacTavish] Okay. James got more of a chance than almost any of the other colleges that I can think of, with some possible exceptions on the west coast. In the sense that we really were given a budget, we were really were cut free to make our own mistakes, we were given a considerable amount of support administratively, but we never reached a point where we were an equal amongst equals in terms of faculty perception of faculty, in terms of student perception of student, in terms of administrative perception of the unit. We never reached that original ideal of Grand Valley, of having a group of equal colleges. Thomas Jefferson, in a way, unfortunately started that by having their problems with courses in Zen Buddhism that started a wall and that kind of thing. And so, we were constantly fighting man image. At the same time, the easy way to fight that image is to show that we're like CAS which we weren't also. And so we ran around in circles fighting that image. I think that one possibility, as I mentioned, was that maybe permanent appointments aren't the answer. But as soon as I say that I think about certain faculty members that are still at the college that still could be in that kind of a setting and probably would prefer to be in the kind of a setting. And maybe on a permanent basis. Because if you think about it in terms of short-term appointments, you're saying things like: "Well, I'll take three years off of my life's work and I'll play in this college." And that doesn't accomplish what you want to do either. So, I think what you have to have is a setting in which you are an equal amongst equals. And given that then it's the game of equal but separate. The South played it the South Africans play it. And it's extremely difficult to be honest about. It might be that you can't do that and have the two units side by side or commingle. It may be that you have to have a separate campus. Because the �perception is always that's the way we grew up, that's the kind of educational system we went through, that's the kind we trained. And what we want to do is not a rebellion from that but is something different from that. And it's looked at as either a rebellion or playing around. [MacTavish] Eventually you will come back to the fold and he will teach your five hundred student lecture class, and you'll have your laboratory spread over the week, and you will do your twelve hours in committee assignment, and you will be available to answer students questions in office hours, and you go home and sail your boat or whatever. Treat it as a job, and that's not what people wanted to do. Unfortunately, the one that's the best, that is a person that commits themselves so totally, that they screw up the rest of their lives. [Barbara] Do you value your experience at James? [MacTavish] Oh, definitely. [Barbara] Why? Because, again, it sounds so crazy when you talk about it. [MacTavish] Well, it is crazy, but it's crazy in the same way that a lot of endeavors are started. It doesn't matter whether it's a marriage, or whether it's starting a business, (which I've also done) or starting college, or whatever. You have a tremendous flush of excitement at the beginning, you don't care that you're working eighty or ninety hours a week. But that's a pace you can't maintain and to shift to a maintainable pace is extremely difficult. And still keep the intensity of feeling and the intensity of dedication to an ideal or set of ideals, that's extremely difficult to do. Doesn't matter whether it's a marriage, or job, or whatever. [Barbara] I really only have two things in mind and there both really short. One is that I just remembered you told me in the halls, or some place, sitting there with applications or something. [MacTavish] Oh in the first year there were only… started out with about five faculty members. The Dean was Ken Venderbush, and he was also the Dean of Students. And that meant he had a full-time job as Dean of Students, but he was also assigned halftime as our [?] and he has no real commitment to us. So, what he would do is he would work his regular job and then he would come over to his office at William James, which would be 4:00 or 4:30 or 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon and that would be the only time we'd see him. He was also dying of a brain tumor at the time, which we didn't-- no one knew about. But what it meant was that Jenny Gordon, as his secretary, and the person who ran the office, and myself, who was some kind of an administrative assistant without title or pay or anything like that, end up making the decisions that ran the college on a daily basis. So, Jenny and I would sit down and do the things that a Dean, or an Assistant Dean, or �Administrative Assistant, whatever, would do. And that's how the college ran that first year. And other people jumped in and did their thing, and we just got it together. [Barbara] Did you guys read James? [MacTavish] No. [Barbara] Because it's remarkable, neither did I. I'm just reading him now. How remarkably the college echoes what you can read in James. [MacTavish] Some of the faculty members did, and some of the members of the committee did. And that translated itself through hundreds of hours of conversation. I read selected parts of James, but I can't say I sat down and read the whole book. Or you know we got stacks of books from James; everybody got their little package of little red books. And some us read the appropriate parts, some of us just participated in that first seminar on James. And some of the stuff that came out in the first semester was stuff that we weren't interested in. James wasn't going to be that way. William James College wasn't going to be that way. And so, what happened was the people that were really interested in the philosophy sat down in group meetings with us and your discussions, cocktail parties, dinner meetings, whatever, and just translated what they had read the into a living reality and then we argued back and forth about it and it worked out to be James. [Barbara] I do have one more. I remember we were both on SPACK. Do you remember SPACK? [MacTavish] S-P, ah, yes-yes-yes. I can't remember what it stood for, but I remember SPACK. [Barbara] No, I can't remember what it stood for either. But I remember we had terrible, terrible arguments. I don't mean you, and I mean SPACK there were terrible arguments. Can you remember back then and translate what kind of frustration went on then? Because I think it’s a key in a very pragmatic way to some of the tensions. [MacTavish] Well, when we got larger – second, or third, or fourth year – to the point we have double a couple times and we were up to fifteen or twenty faculty members, the faculty couldn't hold the tight cohesiveness anymore. And that's when we got into terrible arguments about grading. I can remember… what was his name? T.C.? The student that stood up and was hollering in one of those group meetings. And the tension was… you could feel it. I ended up in the hospital that day. It turned out to be hypertension attack, the only time in my life I've ever had any problems like that. They hauled me off in an ambulance. But it was so vivid, and the commitment was so close to the surface, and the people were so fervent about �their personal beliefs, and they were dumping them right out there on table. [MacTavish] About how you grade, about how you conduct a classroom, about what William James should be. And the students were right in there along with everyone else, they were considered as much a member of the community as anybody. And it got fairly vicious at times because groups tended to appear. I know when we were down to the wire on faculty, on choosing team, I think it boiled down to Ken Venderbush and Adrian. And there were some terrible arguments because of perceived differences in philosophy and differences in administrative style, administrative experience, et cetera that we went around, and round, and round, and they were not situations where people were pulling any punches. We were expected to say what we meant, we were expected to participate, and we were expected not to hold a grudge. You know, we were being honest. And it is very difficult to be honest for years, and years, and years. But we were. [Barbara] Herb, do you have any questions? [Herb] That was a great ending. [Barbara] I know. Is there something else you want to talk about? [MacTavish] Oh jeez. Not really, I'll probably think of something tomorrow. [Barbara] Well, I always think of something the next day. I was like, "why didn't I ask him?" – you know? Because we got more tape. It's in there. [MacTavish] Oh. We played all kinds of games; I don't know whether it's important or not. But when that college- that building was originally designed, it was designed with four suites of offices. And each one of those suites contained six offices. [Barbara] Just start there [Inaudible]. [MacTavish] Oh. Six offices and the administrative area, the secretarial area. And if you think back about those offices, every one of those offices is different. One has two windows, one is big with one window, and there's a couple of real small ones with no windows, and so forth. They were designed that way by Mr. George Potter, who was a system president, vice president, and then finally, interim president for a year, so the faculty could have something to fight over. And they did, and we did. And it got to the point, at one point, where we made a policy where everybody had to move every year. After a while I got nuts, but it was an attempt to break that, another attempt, to break that hierarchy of top faculty, middle faculty, and low faculty. The beginners always got that little windowless office the first year and then I got to move around and move up. We even went around one year and painted the whole inside the building. �[MacTavish] I remember one faculty member put up a picture of the of head Gandhi right outside of his office on the wall, so he could look out the office to see Gandhi's head. Another faculty put a little person with a wood screw his navel and the students put pictures on the wall. And some of it was very, very good. And that led to bring in a commercial artist, who did superb graphics on all the walls with the students. And that was one of those builders of community that we worked very hard to find builders of community. The original synaptic programs, the Piaget program where this little naive college, in what, its second year, or whatever, pulled off the world Piaget conference. You know, we didn't… we're like the G.E. engineer who didn't know it wasn't possible to frost inside of a light bulb. You know we just went up and did it. And there was a lot of those kinds of things that happened that'll never leaving because I don't even always remember, neither do the other guys, unless they sit around and have a beer and reminisce, which almost never happens anymore. Aren't many of us left in this area. That's the only thing I could think of off the top of my head. [Barbara] That's really great because we have… I'm almost sure we can get illustrated stuff for the painting. [MacTavish] Yeah. [Barbara] And I have a painting. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_20_MacTavish Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource MacTavish, John Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource John MacTavish interview (1 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with John MacTavish by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. John MacTavish was faculty member of GVSC who was hired to teach Geology courses in 1968 and later transitioned to planning and teaching for William James College beginning in 1971. In this interview, John discusses the lessons learned from William James College, how he valued being a part of the experience, and his earliest memories of the college. This interview is part 1 of 3 for John MacTavish. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0ca6b1b55e7c8698aa271047e7431d64.mp4 0ad93e83685e5d9deb8dd5ad1718d6b2 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e35e47ad033009e1b411fd9e76c14363.pdf 40175bec014cfd18354f8e456169fb20 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: James Clover Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Clover] William James was an information exchange for all the people that were involved. And I think that in any disciple that you're pursuing, that you need information and that it was a good way to get it. And I don't know, you know. It was the first time that I had ever been involved with engineers, environmentalists, writers. Did we have musicians? We had some amateur musicians. [Barbara] [Inaudible]. [Clover] Right. We had philosophers, psychologist preachers, historians. All in one place. [Barbara] You know what, that was good. Keep thinking- keep talking. Repeat it to me. What was some… [Inaudible]? [Clover] Not bad. [Barbara] What can't you do now, Jim. I mean, here you are in your studio, it looks like your [?] totally. What can't you do now? Why do you need a structure? [Clover] Now, all I do is go to art faculty meetings and talk about problems that all art faculties have been dealing with since nineteen fifty-six and not getting any answers at all. I go to faculty meetings and no one ever talks about teaching. And I wonder about that and I'm still waiting to meet the first person that says they can't teach. And I don't know. I'm just sort of… I'm in an isolated kind of situation right now. As far as artists use information, by the ton. They need lots of information. More, and more, and more, and more information. I mean they eat it up. Now I have… now I'm having to go elsewhere for my information. I have to… I do, I leave the community. As far as productivity of my art goes, there's a lot more happening because I have to drive to Atlanta to find out what's going on. And I have to go to Chicago. And I keep six or seven shows going so that I remain active as an artist. To get the information I have to read more, which is not fine, I mean, I probably should have reading more anyway. I have to… I find myself seeking out things that were available in the William James situation. I have to find somewhere else, and they're spread all over the place. [Barbara] Did you find being at James absorbed so much of your energy you weren't as active in art as you are now? �[Clover] Yes. My involvement at William James was a much more intense teaching situation than I'm currently involved in. Yes I had found myself using the majority of my energy in the James situation. [Barbara] Do you resent that? [Clover] No, I don't resent that. I consider that a real growth process for me. [Clover] I was genuinely burned out as far as creativity goes, when I came to James and that kind of experience gave me a renewal that I'm using now. [Barbara] Well, it sounds like it worked out alright for you that James closed. [Clover] Pardon? [Barbara] It sounds as though it was opportune that James closed. [Clover] No, I don't think so. I think that I would rather have that and less art involvement. I mean it was very important for me. Or I'd like to have some of each. Or I would like to have the opportunity to jump out of the James experience, be an artist, for a while, and jump back in. Which would have been ideal. [Barbara] Can you see ways that students needed the structure… let’s put it, forget the way I asked that. You said you're isolated. How are the students different under the current structure of James? We've been talking a lot about your feelings at James, but what about the people coming through? [Clover] Well, the students were actively involved in the total process of the evolution of the James experience and through community meetings and interactions with the disciplines there was a lot of student involvement. The difference I think is that there was a more complete… for the James student, it was a more total involvement in what living is all about, rather than jumping from specialty to specialty or from building to building. And there seemed to be a relationship there and interaction that doesn't take place in a traditional education. My students come in for three hours a day and then they run off somewhere else. [Barbara] Goodbye. [Clover] Goodbye. Whereas at James we were involved, you know, ten, twelve hours a day. And I knew what they were doing and I knew who they were. And I knew their joys and I knew their troubles. [Barbara] Therefore could teach them better? �[Clover] Sure. Of course. They knew me. I was willing to tell them about me and they were willing to tell me about them. [Barbara] Why did you ask me if anybody cried? [Clover] I don't know. I have a real sadness about the closing of it because it seemed to be an expanding structure, whereas traditional education expands much more slowly. And it’s very difficult to communicate across disciplines in a college situation. Very hard to get their attention. They don't listen. Seems like, you know, whatever the popular education mode is the time, an example, computers, I mean where the interest goes. And there's a great expense to people who think a liberal education is important because of the jumping around from disciple to disciple. I'm sure in ten years it might be something else. I have no idea what it might be. Who knows. Restaurant Management, Nursing, all career-oriented stuff. I talked to a nursing student the other day in the faculty lunchroom: the Oak Room. Which I swear I'd never go into. Because somehow, I thought that it was better for me to eat with the students because we could interact that way and they would know who I am. Now I go to the Oak Room, my friends go there. This girl was talking to me, she butchered the English language, I corrected her, she was embarrassed. And I asked her what level student she was and she said she was fourth year nursing. And I said Lord girl you need to learn how to speak the English language. And she apologize all over herself. And somehow it leaves a void in me when I run into people like that who are supposedly getting an education and I wonder what happened. How did she miss English 110, how did she miss literature, how did she miss writing? And it's not required for her? I think that she leaves us in ways that will hurt her later on. I think that she could have a better life. I think she could be a better decision-maker by being multi-disciplined. Or at least multi-aware. Aww man. So that what I think William James is about. [Barbara] [Inaudible] of shit. Nobody said that. Not one person has said that. [Clover] It pisses me off, it does. [Barbara] What? [Clover] It pisses me off that people categorize themselves and limit their experience. I can't stand. I don't know any of the philosophy people here. I don't know any of the historians here other than ex-William James people. I don't know any of the English people, other than Robert Mayberry. And Ros. Is Ros in the English department still as an adjunct person? Committed lifelong adjunct. And they never come by, you know. But then again, I never go by either. So, who knows, you know. So, it's just these isolated pockets. I go to all college faculty meeting and the politics are so involved that there is no exchange of information. Pure politics. And it seems to be some kind of, I don't know, I find it really interesting �that for the salaries, for the amount of money that people make in higher education, that they are that cutthroat about their interactions and relationships with others. It all seems to be territory protection. [Barbara] Do you think that happened at William James College? [Clover] I don't know. It was like it was not allowed, or it couldn't happen, or the nucleolus of faculty was all small. And the fact that we were all thrown together dissolved that. And it also… outside pressures forced us to us stick together. And we did, as much as possible. I think we really did. And the, you know, the exchanges of information in the James situation. I mean it's, you know, I'm not trying to make this all sound like it was a glorious, wonderful, la la la la la, whatever. It wasn't. It was intense. Oftentimes unnerving. You know, a willingness… my biggest problem was the willingness to listen to other people and what they really had to say and trying to figure out what they're really saying and then deal with that in a reasonable manner. It's not my nature to do that and I was forced into that, and it was super. And I watched that happen to the students. The place allowed you to shoot your mouth off and make a fool out of yourself and people would still back you. Which was kind of neat. I guess while I was there I didn't feel like I really had to protect myself, career-wise. Or I did not have to be as careful what I say or what I do. Probably in that case, you know, when you have that kind of feeling there's a better exchange of information between you and the people you're dealing with. And I don't know and I also I felt a certain kind of protection. I felt like I could go into a class and say what I and can talk about what I felt I knew at the moment, or what I know, and not have the kind of kick back or reaction that I would have in students who weren't oriented in that way. A lot of misunderstanding and I find myself being more careful in class. I don't swear anymore. I gently tell people… I gently try to tell people what it's like to try and be an artist, rather than, maybe I'm not as pushy or demanding. I don't think. Something happens, you know, something happened there. Yeah, we used to just, I don't know, it seems to me like you know, we used to just really it. Get down on what trying to make a drawing is all about. Or what trying, you know, dealing with design principle, what it's all about. And I guess the students, they intuitively understand that we were trying to help them and did not… whereas in the standard kind of teaching situation, it seems like a lot of people come there to be offended. And they're looking for that, and they're offended easily. And they complain. And you end up in the chairman's office, trying to explain what you were trying to do. And it seems real crazy to me that I should have to justify being what I am or what I'm trying to express. And I think these are real cheap shots of people who do not have much background or who really don't understand, and maybe don't want to. Or at least, I don't know. I don't know if the opportunity is there for them to understand. Seems like the schools are afraid of the students. I mean they're so afraid that they aren't going to have enough, that they are going to fill the classroom. And we're told that, you know, numbers are important and �we keep cramming in more and more numbers and there's less and less interaction between us and the students. And it's kind of sad. And I guess I understand the numbers game, the numbers mean money. [Clover] But maybe that's the wrong way to go about it. Maybe you should risk it and maybe you would have the numbers if the information was flowing correctly. [Barbara] We did in the Media Department. We did. [Clover] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We still do. [Barbara] We still do? [Clover] Yeah, like crazy, you know, which is really neat. And I really feel really bad about that. I feel bad that the Art Department at Grand Valley State College is separate from the Media Program is just absolutely ludicrous to me, and it was a pure policy. It was a numbers game. And some of us who happened to be titled artists lost. And we were thrown into an Art Department. Whereas we really preferred to have the whole thing evolve as a cohesive group, and I certainly hope that could happen. [Barbara] [Inaudible] the sculpture now? [Clover] Sure. [Barbara] Is there anything else you want to say? I think we're near the end of the tape. [Clover] No, I, you know, I miss it. And when I walk, you know, I walk across campus and I see some of ex-faculty members of William James, you know, I kind of feel like, you know, God, I used to really know this guy and feel like I really knew him in a professional way and now I don't, you know, it's slipped away and that's too bad. So, we all… we meet each other shake hands and say how's going it and everybody says is going just fine. And I guess it is, you know. Life goes on and it evolves. So, what? Life's a bitch then there's death. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_19_Clover Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Clover, James Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource James Clover interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with James Clover by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. James Clover was an art instructor of William James College and a renowned sculptor whose work can be seen on Grand Valley State University's campuses, including the "Heaven and Earth" sculpture located in the heart of Great Lakes Plaza. In this interview, James discusses how William James College was an "information exchange" for its faculty and students, the importance of working with a community of diverse backgrounds, and the eventual separation of the Arts and Media concentration into two departments at Grand Valley. This interview is part 2 of 2 for James Clover. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Art Study and teaching Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5760583b925689b2c98d5d980573c065.mp4 6b249415649bc6696649acb6b04500ae https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fd7d786f3cbf7cce24d046644f115567.pdf bdbcedba3ba569a7d63b12f04669892a PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: James Clover Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Clover] You do edit this, right? [Barbara] Of course, I do edit this one for you. Tell me, sum up in one sentence, you've got one sentence: What is the essence of William James College? [Clover] Interdisciplinary experience. [Barbara] What does that mean? I'm not sure. [Clover] It means that I got to rub shoulders with a whole lot of folks, all headed in different directions, and we exchanged information about our directions. [Barbara] Hi Dallas! [Dallas] [Inaudible] [Clover] And it was- I don't know. It was a willingness of a group of people to come together and try and understand what each other- what we were doing. What each of us were trying to do. That opportunity to talk about it, compromise. [Barbara] Did you come here to be in alternative college? [Clover] Yes, I've been in alternative arts school, but I had no idea what an alternative college would be about. And the first year I was here I stood around with my mouth hanging open. I did! I didn't- I don't know. I guess what William James did for me was it helped to make me listener. [Barbara] What do you mean? [Clover] I was so into being an artist and being an art teacher that it seems to be that art information was what I was primarily dealing with and I found out that I needed outside information to support my ideas. [Barbara] Like what? [Clover] [Laughter] Like what? Like anything. Life. Anything at all. I think when I came here, I was pretty, as far as art information goes, I was pretty burned out and I �needed to make contact with other people, with society as a whole, and the throwing together of many kinds of people in the William James situation gave that to me. [Barbara] What did we do wrong? [Clover] I don't think we did anything wrong. I think that we were, that the people… you mean administratively, what did we do wrong? I think that people didn't understand what we were trying to do. And maybe it was our fault that we didn't communicate it to them, or maybe they just didn't want to know. I don't know if that's a really good answer. What did we do wrong? I think we did… I don't know. Maybe we were in the wrong place [Laughter]. [Barbara] Okay, um- [Clover] You know, I don't know. I mean, I can sit here and talk to you about this and as soon as you get the camera on, I get strange. [Barbara] Well, don't get strange. [Clover] I know, I'm trying try not to. [Barbara] You're doing a good job, you don't look strange. [Clover] Well, I'm trying not to get [Strange Noise], you know. [Barbara] Now, that's strange. [Clover] Okay, well you know what I mean. [Barbara] Don't worry, we'll make it through this. Some people think we weren't doing a quality education for some of the students. Some of the students just slid through and didn't do shit. [Clover] Yeah, but see I think that's alright. I think it's okay to slide through and not do shit. I think that's a choice of the individual you know. If they don't get turned on during the process, tough. I think the same thing happens in the structure that we now operate under. And -it's just a different kind of symbol that's all. There are symbols there that say, you know, you did this, this and this, you then can slip by on C's and everything's just fine. It's really easy to get the C symbol, and we eliminated a symbol. I didn't see any problem with that at all. Because [Noise] you know, the people involved in the structure wanted it made use of it. It was there, they learned how. It was very creative. �[Barbara] So the key to what we were doing that people didn't understand was that we were inter-disciplinary. [Clover] I think so. I think that people never bothered to find out and you know when some kind of attempts were made to find out what we actually did… you can't drop in for thirty minutes and make a judgment on what's going on here. And I think that there should've been an element of trust involved. Just, you know, based on the experience of the group of people that are gathered together in William James they should have trusted us and said: "Hey, you know, they aren't stupid. They must be willing to do something right. I mean why are they here, you know? They're doing something, it was going well." It's a farce actually. I don't know. We were outnumbered, politically. We were never able to establish ourselves because it was a numbers thing, you know, the credibility thing. Thirty against how many? � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_18_Clover Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Clover, James Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource James Clover interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with James Clover by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. James Clover was an art instructor of William James College and a renowned sculptor whose work can be seen on Grand Valley State University's campuses, including the "Heaven and Earth" sculpture located in the heart of Great Lakes Plaza. In this interview, James discusses the essence of William James College, his experience transitioning from an alternative arts school to an alternative college, and the misunderstandings surrounding being interdisciplinary. This interview is part 1 of 2 for James Clover. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Art Study and teaching Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7962b21f3a15519a3b68f8f811286896.mp4 5d202f75883c15c76b0e22bcbebad4dc https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c285beec6f8420828ed242015cf83a9e.pdf e25b52bb7f9e3ed342ed743fa74286c2 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Dahleen Menning Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] We are rolling. So nice. Such a nice shot. Anyway, we are rolling [Inaudible]. [Menning] Okay, I thought a lot about whether or not we gave the students a quality education. And I think we gave a lot of them very good education. I think we get a lot of them a minimum education. But I'm not sure that that's different from any other kind of college. And that’s the thing that I keep coming back to. And I think about what we gave our students and I think about what I got from a very important major university traditional education, although I didn't have a liberal arts education, I had a very specialized art education but I had their traditional distribution stuff. I also learned some intangible things from my university situation that weren't planned, that taught me more than the things that were planned. And I thought about that many times, that the things that had happened to me, particularly as a graduate student, that were not supposed to be part of the program but taught me coping skills that made it possible maybe for me to even teach at a place like William James. And I think that we gave students a lot of coping skills that were kind of side by side to coursework that they probably drew and maybe continue to draw on more in some ways because life is like that and the real world isn’t [?] a place as a university or campus settings. And so, I think of students struggling to help organize the college, and early on particularly struggling to fight for a course they wanted, struggling to argue their program through, in some instances, and try to defend why it was worthwhile for them. Those probably were good experiences for students. I think that we let some through that were non-thinkers. But they get through every place, even Harvard has some of those, I think, there's people I guess with a minimum they can do, and manage to, you know, pass things at the minimum level. So, every place has students that can do the least possible. We certainly had some. But I think that we were a challenge to students, particularly when they came to graduate. I are used to tease them, and still do, there's a few that are still finishing up this last year, that just to get out was the real test. If they can get their program approved and they can write about it intelligently that in spite of all. And that was sort of an extracurricular academic activity. It wasn't part of a regular course in spite of the fact we tried those various courses about building your program. I can't remember what they're called now, so that obviously didn't stick in my mind that well. But we did try to make students write something about their program and the ones who really struggled with that I think learn some things that were intangible that probably serve them well. And the fact that they had to get out there and maybe generate their own internship, or they actually were part of �council and that they learned how to argue a point and present their case and hold their own against some fairly strong voices that were articulate. They learned coping skills and how to work with people that were different from themselves. And when I take a look at some of those former graduates, I think, "Wow!" [Menning] Those people are doing well in the world and what is an education? And then we start to talk about deep philosophical things. Is it a mere smattering in a smorgasbord way of a certain amount of history, philosophy, English, all of those things? Or is it really learning how to learn, and enjoying what you're learning, and then in life you get around to it in turn as you begin to discover what you want to learn. Which was part of the initial goal of the college was that you would learn what you needed to learn. Well, we never really quite had time for that in four years. It didn't seem that it was time to learn something and then discover that what you needed to go forward you had to go back and learn this. That most students needed to progress through much more quickly and in a more orderly fashion. But that's how life is and that we all continue to learn things that seem important to us because of what we bring to it at that time and I think that a lot of those students that we graduated learned that. They learned that learning was fun, that there was an exhilaration to learning, that it had work attached to it, on occasion, for some people. And that was the value. And I think that because the systems were very loose there were a lot of people who escaped. And we let them escape and sometimes we had a few good arguments about some of them, and there were tears in the hall, and a few loud voices and things over a few of them. But those seem to be the exceptions. I think that by and large we gave a good education to the majority of our students. I would say probably seventy percent got probably a more personal considered education by teachers who cared about them in person, rather than them as a group, who knew their names personally, who can call their name in the hall when they met them going down a hall, and they had a more personal interaction with all of your faculty than they probably would have had in almost any other setting I can think of, other than a few similar alternative colleges around the country, on our campus, and elsewhere. That they had to maybe even confront the fact that we did know who they were in class. They couldn't hide behind a number, or seat, or an alphabet alphabetized row. That they were responsible and even though they didn't do well sometimes and they knew they weren't doing well, they knew that we knew it. It wasn't something they can escape exactly, so they had to own up. There was a certain honesty and fessing up for what was accomplished or what wasn't accomplished. And I think that was good. Even when we didn't somehow strike the right number with the right personal time, because we didn't, clearly. And toward the end I thought that the students, in general while they wanted to learn, they had a different attitude about what learning was about. And the whole thing changed quite radically there. Not just in the courses and in my own teaching, but in my opinion, in the advertising and in the way that we set up the programs. We �started to really pin the stuff down. What they had to study, some of which was good and some of which wasn't. And I think in some cases it was good because students needed that and in other cases it probably damaged a few. And so, I think on both sides there were good things and bad things. [Menning] But I think certainly the education, in my opinion, would measure up to almost anywhere, particularly for the student who grasped it for themselves took hold. [Barbara] If you had to sum up what made James in just a sentence or so…? [Menning] [Laughter] If I have to do anything in a sentence or so I'm sunk. When I think about uniqueness, as a college, I guess independence is the word that keeps reoccurring in my mind. Of all the good things that happened, the best thing happened when people took things into their own hands and then did it. Now both on the part of students and on the part of faculty that occasionally caused some abrasion and some fireworks but things got done for that individual. And the independence and then generated on the part of everyone built a better person, in my opinion, and I keep thinking about that. Integration was another one of the buzzwords that flew around a lot. But I like the idea that people took initiative, and they did things on their own and they didn't always ask first if they could, they just assumed that it was alright, and they went ahead and they tried things. That wasn't a sentence or two but that's… I think that's what sticks. [Barbara] Okay [Inaudible]. [Menning] I think one of the exhilarating things for me personally that I think contributed to a good education to students and to all of the good things that came out of William James was for me and my life was the first time that I had ever encountered a whole batch, a lot, more than one or two professional women altogether contributing to the whole in a way that really made a profound difference. In all of my undergraduate years as I thought back, I had only encountered three women faculty in the entire time none of which had a profound effect on my life. I didn't happen to study under them because of their discipline wasn't my choice. So, I only have them as a cursory experience. And I had never experienced a place where women were major part of anything, and all of a sudden, and perhaps this is where I got caught up for myself to, was a chance to actually do something and believe that I could do it, and that no one else bothered to tell me I couldn't, and nobody suggested that I couldn't. In fact, everybody said, "Well, of course you can." And that was a very heady time, I think, I had enormous respect for the professional expertise that all of those women faculty brought. And even thought I didn't get to know all them well, some of them left shortly and went on other things, there was a time there where you really felt that it was equal it was a totally egalitarian time where everybody's ideas count equally. It didn't matter who you were and it there was not an "old-boy" network that you somehow have �to plug into first. And that was one of the most exciting times. And I think that contributed to the students. The women students saw role models. [Menning] The men students saw that women were equals in this mix, and so they gave you due respect. And the attitudes were different and I noticed that immediately. And since the end of William James I have noticed a change away from that. Not in my own particular setting as much as I have noticed that around campus and other places, and I can see that that really is a very unusual situation. I think that is one of the exciting things that came out of William James. It had that wonderful sharing. [Barbara] Start take. [Menning] I think probably the one really seriously negative thing that was a thorn in my side all the way through was the tension between the two groups of faculty that I alluded to a little bit earlier. The, I think, the Arts and Media faculty particularly as a group, although didn't include all of them actually, but the people in that group who made things and who are very pragmatically oriented, and then there were other groups of people, the other body of faculty who tended to not make things and didn't have that as their experience, but they read things and wrote things. And we approach life differently. We approached organization differently. We approach things differently. And I never ever felt the kind of respect from the group of faculty that read and wrote things that I felt I should have an artist person who made things. That came out a number of instances different tilts that we had by and large. I think it affected how we resolved things in the college. Those two groups would very often line up on different sides of the issue. We could’ve almost expected to never agree on certain kinds of things. And consequently, may have contributed to the ending of the college or may not have. Tension is dynamic and wonderful in certain instances and then it's just destructive and I think that it had its destructive moments and then it had some dynamic excitement to it at that point. And so, it was both bad and good but we didn't ever resolve how to be different together and I wish we had. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_17_Menning Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Menning, Dahleen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Dahleen Menning interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Dahleen Menning by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Dahleen Menning was a faculty member of William James College who taught studio art and developmental art. In this interview, Dahleen discusses the quality of education students received in William James College, the independent spirit that unified the community, and the personal impact of having strong female representation within the college. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Dahleen Menning. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4d60f6a4a26d054225de2696f4872cbb.mp4 67a82aa8f7df39fc812e6cadd27de972 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/657d7614ad54fd0d3e6db113db6ed194.pdf 9891caf345f4bf376c4fe20404ce1b80 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Dahleen Menning Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Menning] Okay, it's hard for me to think back succinctly over almost nine years since we began, since I came. I came, I think, the second year of William James. Actually, it was the third technical year, but the first-year faculty weren't teaching and I was hired the second year that faculty were teaching. So, I saw it pretty much from the time it was a tiny, very tiny college to right up to the end. It kind of went through a growth period and then had loss some students. And seemed like that even though at the beginning we were struggling with so many things: places to have classes, all kind of very basic functions of just getting the teaching job done. There was a real excitement at that point to the students and the kinds of interactions between the different individuals, the faculty and the students, and all the parts that go into to making a college, that didn't sustain itself all the way to the end, after nine / ten years. The memorable things from that early time, besides having my office in a tiny basement, squalid place, was the real independence and assertiveness of the students that would come to you and say I want to do XYZ and here's how I'd like to do it and they had a plan. They thought it all through. They were able to pretty much assess what they would need to learn and how they would go about affecting this whole thing in their lives and could see down the road and it was a very exciting thing to see that kind of independent thinking. Now we had good dialogues and some bad dialogue. I remember with students that used to argue, just for the sake of being argumentative, about their projects, their particular work, their process, but most of the time it was a really exciting, stimulating dialogue of growing and sharing, and those are the times that I remember best with the most affection I think. There was an exploring feeling amongst the faculty, as exploring feeling my student and even when things didn't go well bureaucratically for some students, often times they get hung up in the records office over procedures, those things didn't seem to bother them. We'd roll with the punches, we'd go over and straighten it out and sometimes even it was even funny and a bit humorous and we all enjoyed that. It was part of the reaching out and exploring. The students that I remember most clearly from that particular group were really wonderful creative artists that I had in class, that in spite of the fact we didn't have a traditional art program at that time, they seemed to grasp the necessary things that were necessary to the art world, and they put them together and integrated in with everything that was happening at William James and they wanted to be part of the whole thing, and yet they could retain their independence as artists and I found that very exciting and very mature and that is what I thought was the ideal and I thought we lost that about sixth, seventh year, toward the very end. �We didn't see students that exhibited that kind of independence. One that usually sticks out in my mind took us through the whole art therapy program deal because that was initiated by student who came into my office and planted her feet and said: "I want to be our therapist and I think I can do it here. Can I do it here? Here's how I'm going to do it." And I took a deep breath and said, “Well, it looks like you can probably do it here. Let’s see if we can.” [Menning] And we actually put together an art therapy program for her that involved internships and involve psychology courses, the art courses that she needed, she had to take a few things over in the College of Arts and Sciences, but by in large she put together a very strong personal program to study art therapy with the resources that we had in the college. And that was my first real introduction to internships because my particular persuasion in the arts is not an internship related thing. In the fine arts there's not much you can do. You can't really understand the painter. So, I had to go out and generate internship placements and this student went out and she and I found them. We persuaded people to let her try. It was a very ticklish situation because it involved working with people in a clinical setting and she lived up to the promise. She was very mature, she handled herself beautifully, and she set the pace and then right after her and I have no idea how students seem to hear about it but they came out of the woodwork and they found out that we were doing something with it and they want to do it too and it wasn't very exciting thing and integrated the coursework from the social sciences and from the fine arts and seem to be what the college was about and that represented I think one of the nicest ideals. And we had a group of students that went through, in the art therapy program, we didn't really have one, but they devised their own programs, more or less, and most of the students that I've kept track of have gone on to graduate school one way or another. Some by taking time off to work locally in various social service agencies around town, some of them rose to administrative positions in social service agencies and went on to graduate school, some went right away. But they all seem to make something of themselves and they all seem to use initially what they decided they wanted to do in the context of William James College. And that seem to be one of the shining examples for me and out of that discussion with a student came the class that I was the most excited about in the end, as an integrated thing, and that was the developmental art course that I taught initially, I think with Willard Bradfield, and then I taught it on my own, changing and developing and actually integrating practicum into that, plus studio experience, plus theory and it was a very involved kind of course and the students came through that course were clearly changed in their approach to things in life. And that was what was really exciting to me. That that one course made a major difference in those students in their entire life. They saw things differently, they saw how they could affect change and people even if they were never going to do it quite that way, even if they were never going to be in the classroom or if they were never going to do art therapy, in particular. They all saw that there �were methods for taking theory and then applying them and that if you learn something and used it you could make something else happen and it was a very powerful thing for me to see that happen, I think I learned a lot, and I change a lot of my own teaching philosophy from that. It was a give and take situation with me and the students. [Menning] They wanted something, ask if we can provide it, I was one of the providers, I learned, developed my teaching ideas, developed a course to suit their needs, they responded to the course they went on to do other work that was a companion to that course and went on and graduated and did something important. And that seemed to be a whole example of what the college was supposed to be about. Then later on we tried to deal with this art therapy and make it a "program" and we tried to pin it down because people got nervous about it. People, you know, college, and people across campus because it had clinical associations nervous that we wouldn't do it right or we'd damage somebody and so on. And the whole thing got rather tight and everybody got into it and then got out of it, and then we dropped it. But there were I guess three, four years there where it seemed that we really were able to do something important with students with the nucleus of the few classes, and a few faculty, and a few student working together and learning and teaching each other. Now that was one of the most memorable experiences that happened over a process of several years. There were others I think that we're maybe a little less outstanding in there William Jamesian-ness. There were students and classes in just the art courses portion of the arts and media programs that I saw do actually marvelous things and brought to class a personal integration of what they were learning in the college but didn't have such a strong identification with any one group of things and there were individual students that classes from other individual faculty and have very good dialogues with those faculty and with me and that we knew each other and had and shared that but it didn't happen in such a programmatic way. [Barbara] Then what happened? That happened a lot and then what happened? [Menning] Well, it seem to me that about the fifth, sixth year the students changed quite a bit in their independence, and they became less assertive and less self-directed and didn't seem to want to struggle with why am I doing these things this way and answering questions for themselves and they became more interested in the how should I do it and their focus and classes changed radically. I felt a real difference in their need for different teaching styles. Much more emphasis on what needed to be done coming from the teacher. Much less willingness to explore a personal route. More willingness to work hard sometimes I think, an eager beaver attitude toward let's get the work done but you tell me what the work is and the students initially were more interested in defining what the work was. And so, my teaching style changed quite a bit. I noticed that my, well first of �all, I start writing syllabi for courses, finally. Some of them are fairly loose syllabi. Certainly, wouldn't pass muster to some of the things that end up writing now. But nevertheless, I had to make a plan and follow through. I started to have to have rules about attendance. One of the other things that happen I think was we got a lot of bureaucratic nonsense laid on us that had to do with money. We had to have more students in our classes. [Menning] And all of a sudden confronting thirty students in a studio class changed the dynamics from when we have fifteen or eighteen. And it made a huge difference in how you approach them as individuals. You couldn't talk to them at length and so you had to treat them as groups. So that may have changed. And I think the times changed. There wasn't as much interest in sympathy toward an independent way of thinking and striking out on your own is there was initially. So probably a whole bunch of influences put together changed it radically for me and I found my interest the last two to three years, particularly the last two, it was very hard to sustain my own interest in that the teaching became so different that I started reverting back to more of a disciplinary approach in my own field more of an art approach that sustained my independent interest because I had lost that feeling of group. I think the faculty got a little large; was hard to maintain that cohesiveness amongst faculty. Then we did lose some faculty as programs were cut. But it seemed a little big at the end and I think maybe we outgrew what was possible to do in that same sense. [Barbara] Okay, we are rolling. [Menning] Alright, as I've put a little bit of distance between the close of William James and my own life, a number of things have passed through my mind as they have everybody, I'm sure. But there were obviously more than one group within the college, amongst the faculty, because there were different people coming from different kinds of backgrounds that had different experiences and they tended to cluster somewhat because it's only natural that you speak and commiserate with people and have a similar background and a basic understanding in the same way. And so, there were a group obviously that were centered around somewhat the arts, or at least a more applied way of doing things, and sometimes they were technological way, sometimes there are simply practical ways of getting things done. And then there were people who did a lot of the thinking and the reading and sometimes we didn't always agree and we tend to find a schism I think between two point of view very often and how to approach different issues within the college. And those are always interesting times for me, all the way through to college, but in hindsight as I look back on that; I've thought about the fact that I learned an enormous amount being a faculty member and this kind of college, perhaps more than I contributed, although that isn't the right way to say it. [Menning] But I had to stretch and reached to learn from the frame of reference of others �where they were coming from. I had to read some other books I had to look for the philosophy and understanding of what we were about, and I didn't have a similar thing to contribute in a way that seem to fit the discipline of the arts is kind of a singular process and as I tried to enter that world again, the one thing that has struck me and sometimes with a certain amount of anger and resentment and then sometimes the feeling well we choose a life course and it takes is on a route and then we accept what we getting and then we change back again sort of a live and let live attitude. I oscillate between being somewhat angry and its okay type of attitude that the growth that I experienced didn't take me down my professional path very much. It took me in a sideways way where I learned an awful lot of things. I read a lot of books, learn how to work with people that were very different from myself, learn how to appreciate their values and what they had to contribute. I'm not sure it was always mutual, and it took a ten-year hunk out of my professional life in terms of my own growth as an artist. And now that I'm reentering that world again, I find that frustrating, and sometimes threatening, and the anger builds because I didn't maintain the contact with my field that I wish I hadn't done in hindsight. It didn't seem important in the first few years. The rush of building a college was very strong. The excitement of integrating the need to talk a lot with other people and why we were going to do it this way and that way and work out some systems and build these classes seemed so all consuming that I lost personal side of my own goals. And then I began to find them again, but I didn't have an easy access route to affecting those. I didn't have a studio space. There was no academic support in the college for me to do my thing. I noticed that in particular when it was time for me to take my sabbatical, there was no money for me and the excuse was that I hadn't been doing my thing and therefore I didn't get to have money to do my thing. It was sort of like they haves got and the have nots didn't get, you know. And I felt somewhat cheated because I had done all these things for the college, for William James, the greater good, thousands of hours of countless committee work. And yet there wasn't fifty dollars in the budget for my own artwork based on the ground that I had and stay current. And I've thought about that and I thought that was unfair to this day, but I wish that I had stayed current and in hindsight I would have tried to find a way and maybe insisted on it. If there had been any other way to do the college I think that would be the major thing I would like to see change, would be to have some way that would insist that the faculty stayed current part of their own field so that they didn't lose that. And that might have retained the excitement for me, to bring that back into the college and into the mix. Maybe I went dry. Maybe we all went dry. The times were definitely different toward the end. But the initial excitement was lost, and when I came to the college I was fresh from a large body of work, my own personal was high, I wanted to share all that wonderful stuff with everybody. But then I wasn't doing it and after four, five years of not doing it there's nothing left to share. [Menning] I think I had given all that was inside of me and then it got kind of flat and I really �had to work to sustain it, and I guess that's for my teaching changed. The students were changing. We were all changing and the times are changing. But I would like to have done more with my work. I wish that the college had then sustained our own professional work now. They arrange for studio spaces for the College of Arts and Sciences Art faculty. That should have been done for the Arts and Media faculty. That we should have been given studio spaces. The adequate funding, recognition for work. That should've been done for everyone. We should have been encouraged to go to conferences, exhibit our work, retain the professional identity in our field. And that maybe would have made a major difference. It might've been the difference between the college closing and I don't know, there's so many intangibles there, but it certainly I think would have given me a sense of self-worth that was starting to wane toward the end because ourselves got so entangled up in the whole that was hard to find us. I had a hard time finding me in the end. And I guess that's why my own interest started to lag and that I started to seek way to find me again, which was to naturally revert back to where I felt strong in the beginning was in my own field. And that's both good and bad, you know there's not a clear-cut run answer to that. But now that I'm back there I feel whole again. I still have things to share that I can share with other people and like to do that. But somehow there was no balance at that time. And maybe that was the one failing aspect of the whole endeavor was that we went overboard trying to build this thing and then they maybe ten years wasn't long enough for us to have the bounce back time and then to come back to the middle and level off at some point. We got cut off for whatever reasons maybe a little bit too soon. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_16_Menning Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Menning, Dahleen Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Dahleen Menning interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Dahleen Menning by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Dahleen Menning was a faculty member of William James College who taught studio art and developmental art. In this interview, Dahleen discusses her overall experience being a part of the William James community and her most memorable moments including teaching a developmental art course and the growing student interest in Art Therapy within the Arts and Media concentration. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Dahleen Menning. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Art Study and teaching Art therapy Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0dbcd9eb2f3a0905003b937456a2e1ef.mp4 e3b91bd830b4f3f8a8cdb18cff034451 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/390893e8e36e05f242f6226cee559100.pdf 26ab1abf35dae767206f34371d3c7a03 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: David Rathbun Date: 1984 [Barbara] … talking about three things that stuck out in your mind. [Rathbun] Two or three things. I came to William James in 1981, so I didn't have much time in William James. But my first recollection: my first council meeting. I sat down in the skylight room with this group of people, most of whom I didn't know yet, and during that meeting there was a debate between Robert Mayberry and Steven Rowe in which the two men were arguing: Socrates versus Aristotle. And I thought to myself: "My God! Someone still cares about this stuff." And I remember going home and carrying on a good part of the evening about what an incredible place this must be where faculty people, instead of sitting and bickering about small, petty stuff, argued from real philosophic basis. What an incredible place. That's one of my favorite memories of William James and one of my earliest memories of William James. I also remember the ordeal of interviewing for the position here. I think my first meeting was at eight o'clock with Glenn Niemeyer and I talked to people the entire day and the entire evening and finally finished with Forrest Armstrong at one thirty the next morning. Pretty incredible ordeal. Makes a lot of sense as I got another place in retrospect. Another real strong memory in my mind, and again it’s a fairly early meeting, was in a PCC meeting in which we we're discussing the changes in the photographic curriculum. And the facility needs through [?] needs. And I remember there was a room in the basement which was in question about who ought to use it and clearly the film and video people needed for room, clearly the photography people needed the room. And Deanna and Barb said: "We will give up that room. You need more than we do." And it was a kind of generosity again I had not encountered at any other institution I had taught in. The ability to put aside one's self-interest, one’s immediate needs, in the interest of the larger program. I was impressed. I hadn't encountered that. [Barbara] Let me stop your train of thought slightly while I check everything because I couldn't [inaudible]. Let me zoom in on you a little bit and then we go on. If it’s not interrupting you too much, I would like to know why you think this was all so different. Don't answer yet because I have to get the shot… Right now, I have the shot. [Rathbun] Okay, in the past, at the Institute of Design, which is a pretty remarkable place. decisions were made on the basis of politics. They were made on the basis of narrowly defined self-interest. Your sense from beginning to end was that you better be prepared to scramble and scrap for everything you were going to get for �your program because nobody was going to give it to you. As a result, there was an attitude and the feeling among the faculty of distrust, of suspicion, people were constantly tailoring their behaviors and looking over the shoulders to make sure the right people are watching and that the wrong people one right behind them. [Rathbun] I don't recall ever sensing that at William James and I think for me it was one of the extraordinary aspects of working with a group of people that were the faculty and the last two years of William James. The sense that people really cared about what somebody else was doing. That they wanted to share and making it good. That they were willing to put time and energy and sometimes give up things that they need is in order for something else good to happen. It was not my experience at the Institute of Design it was a very different kind of faculty. People who were not very generous particularly with the resources, or with their time, with their giving to students even. [Barbara] But there must have been structural reasons for all this. What structural reasons can you analyze? [Rathbun] Well, I think one of the things that made William James such a delightful place, for faculty, was that it really was not a competitive environment in the sense that we had to compete with each other to succeed either within our programs or within the institution. The fact that we didn't have merit raises, the fact that the review process was not punitive but was rather something that was intended to help us understand each other and to grow with each other. The fact that we met weekly in faculty meetings, that we knew each other and we knew what was going on that we had some control over our destiny in this building. I think all those were important aspects of that feeling of collegiality and community. That is not that way in very many places. For me it was probably the most extraordinary teaching experience I've had the two years that William James was here. The freedom to dream, the freedom to pursue the dreams, the freedom to share your dreams with colleagues, the willingness of colleagues to dream with you, to be a little bit crazy at times when it was appropriate to be crazy. The sense that things were possible, and it that was good to pursue those possibilities. It was a feeling that pervaded this place. God knows it was no joy to come to council meetings every Friday morning. There were a number of times I would prefer to be sailing around the lake or something. But it was never really a problem to come to those meetings because we were doing something. We were making decisions. We were assuming the responsibility and we were doing a pretty damn good thing with our programs. [Barbara] Let me change the [inaudible]. Wonderful, very clear. Very clear. Very Clear! You're dark on one side your face but I like it. You know what I mean? It’s not dark, I like the naturalness. �[Rathbun] Now, I'm not sure, maybe you should ask me some questions, if you want more specific kinds of things. [Barbara] You were very specific then. I pushed a little on your work. [Rathbun] Because those are… that was the sort of thing I was thinking about saying was those two events, the room generosity from you and Diana. I don't remember the first one now. It’s a good thing you're taping this. And then just the sort of overall sense of what an incredible thing this place was. [Barbara] There are two things that I'd like to ask on the basis of what you said already. You said you taught very well and it’s not clear to me why one would teach better. I can understand why one would be happier as an individual. But why teach better? [Rathbun] If you think that being happy as an individual has nothing to do with teaching well – it has everything in the world to do with teaching well. At the Institute of Design, I never felt support particularly from colleagues or from the administration. That began to chip away and erode my commitment to the place. The more times I was worked over, the less excited I became, and the more I had to turn to purely an internal discipline to keep things going well. And I did that, but it was not with great effort. The feeling of support of collegiality, of sharing both a destiny and also shaping that destiny was absolutely vital to feeling good about teaching and being here and being with students. [Barbara] Were students different? We just have a different breed of students here. [Rathbun] Its apples and oranges. It's difficult to compare. We're talking on one hand about a very expensive private school in Chicago that draws a national constituency of generally wealthy and well-educated students. As opposed to a state college that draws essentially from one area within the state. But the differences I think ultimately are sort of superficial. They have remedies. The biggest difference was simply one of experience and visual literacy Those kids in Chicago have seen a lot and the kids initially here haven't seen very much. Even allusions to people as like Edward Weston drew blank stares when I arrived here. It was changing. The William James students were different in the sense that they were much more aware of what they were up to with their educations, I think, for the most part. I remember when, in the last year of William James, when there was all this rumors and talk and almost every day brought a new scenario of what the reorganization was going to be like. I remember that Provost Niemeyer appeared at a student forum in the Campus Center and there were probably a couple of hundred students who were there. It was interesting to me as I looked around the room that good percentage, perhaps the majority of those students, were William �James students and that the questions that were being asked the hard questions, and the appropriate, questions were coming almost uniformly from William James students. In that respect I think William James is doing something very well for students, making them understand that they had responsibility for their education. [Rathbun] That they had the right to ask questions and to expect answers about their educational experience and about what was going on. And they were asking pretty intelligent questions and Niemeyer wasn't entirely happy about that. He squirmed a lot. He clearly wasn't pleased with some of the questions that were being asked. But it occurred to me and watching that whole thing transpire: that if really interested in an educational experience for students in which they understand that they have control over their lives was working here, he should have been tickled that those people were asking those kinds of questions, because it meant that their education was working. [Barbara] Do you remember what they were asking? [Rathbun] I don't remember the specific questions, Barb, I just remember that during that whole discussion the questions and seem to be right on the mark, that seem to be the right questions that students ought to be asking, the William James students were asking. And it was not entirely comfortable for the administration to have to try to answer those questions. But it was precisely an indication of success in the educational experiences that students were having here. [Barbara] Let me ask you this but let me change the shot and zoom. Woah, that's darker zooming in. Okay, good. I want to ask you: this is all very well to talk about how we taught them to ask the questions, but it didn't save us. What could have saved us, or what was your experience in the process of closing James? [Rathbun] Well, it's all too easy in retrospect to understand that nothing could have saved us, short of moving the school somewhere else. And it's hard for me to really understand how all of that transpired Barb because I wasn't here during most of William James. I had really sort of one good year and then the second year, which was the last year of William James, everything was in turmoil and up in the air. I seriously doubt that there was anything significant the faculty could have done, or the students could have done. I think the decision was made, I think it was simply a matter of how to implement the decision and dissolve the units. And I think after that happened the degree to which there was hostility, it was like someone turn on the tap, it was like packs of dogs were being held at bay and suddenly been released and it seems so unnecessary. [Barbara] Tell me, that's too vague, I don't know what you mean. �[Rathbun] Well, the attempt in an early discussion in the School of Communications to eradicate all evidence of William James having been in Lake Superior Hall. The suggestion on the part of some faculty from a previous unit that the portrait of William James be painted over with post-haste, with great haste. That's the right way to say that. [Rathbun] The articles that appeared in the Lanthorn characterizing William James’ students and faculty as some sort of malcontents. Things which under a healthy old division probably would not have been printed suddenly were popping up all over the place. It seems clear to me that the decision was made and it was only a matter of how to work it out with the least damage from their perspective. [Barbara] Do you see any organizational or other holdovers from James in the new structure? [Rathbun] Well, I don't see very many and I'm so busy that it's hard for me to look very far away. And I thinks that's one of the problems of the new structure. Certainly, we don't have the kinds of collegial possibilities that we used to have. I think it's clear that those holdovers or those instances where the William James philosophy carries on are to be found in individuals, and mostly individuals that were in James, although it is interesting that there are other faculty who continue to be sympathetic and espouse certain ideas. And I'm not, again… because I wasn't a part of William James from the beginning and for years and years and years, I don't know whether I am really Jamesian in the sense of wearing a badge. I think that I'm interested in intelligent educational experiences for students. I don't think of myself as trying to teach them something. I think of myself as a fellow traveler with them. I think of myself as someone who is growing with them, and what I try to do is provide environments and experiences which hopefully allow the students to learn something. And I think that maybe is a part of what William James College was about at its best. I think it's just damn good teaching and I think wherever people are teaching in that kind of way, where they understand that they really are involved in this with students and perhaps at best what we can do is try to create a series of experiences from which students can learn something. And I think that's living. I think it continues to live. But I don't think you're going to find it in any particular unit; I think your going to have to look at individual people. [Barbara] I'm out of questions. Do you have anything else to say? [Rathbun] I don't think so. I mean, I can stop at this point. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_15_Rathbun Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rathbun, David Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource David Rathbun interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with David Rathbun by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. David Rathbun was a faculty member in William James College who taught photography in the Arts and Media program, and was a longtime professor and founder of GVSU's photography program. In this interview, David discusses how he started his journey with William James College in 1981, his initial impressions of the WJC community, and the extraordinary experience he had being a member of its faculty. This interview is part 1 of 1 for David Rathbun. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education College environment Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c443869eceb4bed54e91009309fe299b.mp4 3a610d14cc1c7700293092fa4979116d https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7249ef2c51d4d95fbcb17d5425c0c653.pdf 8734a38be9f7aa2d3155a9d6e972b3bb PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Robert Burns Date: 1984 Part: 3 of 3 [Robert] My nose out in the bright sunlight. Have I got to…? I can suddenly see it. [Gerb] Lean forward. [Robert] Yeah, so maybe I'll… [Gerb] Go back a little bit. [Barbara] … powder my nose. [Robert] That'll keep me going for another… [Barbara] White balance [speaking to camera operator] [Gerb] I don't think you need it. [Unknown] … need makeup? [Gerb] Makeup? [Barbara] Alright. [Robert] Perspiration! [jokingly] [Barbara] Alright, where we were is where we need to start. I guess you need to start that answer again. I asked you to talk about the Byzantine Bureaucratization. [Robert] One of the things that I found most appalling about William James, and I say this with all the love of parents for an abhorrent child of some kind. I couldn't believe what bureaucratic structure we conceived for ourselves. I mean it had to surpass anything that ever occurred in the times of Byzantium. We had committees for every conceivable purpose under the sun, and yet all we were was a faculty of twenty to twenty-two people at most. We had devised so many parallel crosscutting categorize kinds of committees that met for special purposes. Because they met for special purposes they always excluded, by reasons of timing, other kinds of people who might've easily sat in on the conversation. Every time a committee finished it was met in the corridors with hordes of people who needed �to find out what happened that committee. So enormous amounts of time wasted not only in committees, but in filling other people in after the committees had met with the kinds of things that transpired in committee. We watched such an unwieldy group of twenty that we couldn't work these things out in the larger community. [Robert] I mean we had our community meetings, our council meetings, meetings of the whole, and a lot of these kinds of things could've been solved there. [Barbara] But then we had students. There wasn't just twenty of us. We gave students an equal vote. So, it’s a much larger group. [Robert] There is possibly another of one our mistakes. Because I think we lean so far in the direction of according students a role in governance, that we forgot for a moment that we were actually faculty and there was nothing discriminatory about meeting occasionally as faculty without students to come to certain kinds of conclusions that we might easily have come to in that fashion. [Barbara] But that wouldn't be pure. [Robert] No, that wouldn't have been pure, and we were for purity, you know? There was – at that level of simplicity – there was a kind of a search for mom and apple pie at an academic level that we never really quite got over. Or we didn't quite grow beyond it enough. [Barbara] As I was… [Robert] We were committee structured to a point that was quite ridiculous, I think. We were twenty-two people, at most, and yet we had, at certain times, as many as seven-eight-nine-ten different committees going. As if it were possibly that many kinds of purposes that we would've had available to talk about. Each one of which called for a separate slate of individuals to meet separately and to work out some kind of a policy for the college is a whole. Granted, there are cultural differences between James, and Australian bands, and peasant Alpine communities. But I can think of no Australian band, and no Alpine community that can't figure out ways to organize the lives of five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred people in vastly simpler ways then we put together. [Barbara] But they've been around for a thousand years, and we were around for eleven. [Robert] Of course, that's exactly-- that's exactly the explanation. We hadn't been around that long. we were worried about being understood by those who spend enough time reading us or reading about us to know what we were about and we hadn't even been around each other long enough to make sure that we all spoke the �same vocabulary. I mean this was really, from our own internal point of view, the logic back-up, all of this constant probing and testing and fussing with the language. Because what we were really trying to prove was that we understood each other. [Robert] That there was no point on which we couldn't stand up and finally, in a very relaxed and matter of fact way agreed that we occupied a common footing. But there were suspicions, there were doubts, and all of this kind of stuff I think led to this over commitment of time. This over zealousness in pursuit of minutia, and I think anybody, from the outside world, than we ourselves later on in the wisdom that comes with the passage of time, look back on some of these things and think: "Oh my God! Three months taking up discussing that particular issue from the time of this inception to the time where it finally got established in council as college policy." And how insignificant that all is in the long run, when it's related to the fact of the nonexistence of the college at all at the present time. [Barbara] Katie are you thinking something that we can ask him? [Katie] No, not at the moment. [Barbara] Gerb, are you? [Gerb] Mn-mn. [Barbara] Robert, how about you? [Robert] I'm not at the moment. [Laughter] [Barbara] I don't think it's necessary to go back to that thing that you blocked on. I don't think it is at all central, we just let it go. I just won't use it. [Katie] Yeah. [Barbara] Just got off on personal… because I know you're listening; I see you reacting. [Katie] I wish he'd been able to continue with when the tape ran out. I liked… [Robert] There was a way I then… that I couldn't quite get back into that… [Katie] [speaking over Robert] …it made more sense... it flowed… [Barbara] But it made sense this time? [Katie] Yeah, it did. �[Gerb] Okay, now rolling. [Robert] We came from a lot of diverse directions. Points of the compass to get to William James, and we came - probably more of us that would care to admit – at moments of crisis or even mild desperation in our lives. [Robert] Where we really despaired of things in the larger society taking the turn that we would have liked to see them take. I mean -there were so many issues that the sixties had spawned. Everything from civil rights, to women's liberation, to the whole problem with the Vietnam War, and what there was or wasn't of an academics participation in that agreement to it (resistance to it) or what have you. A lot of people that found their way to William James, I think for public and private reasons, had wound up despairing of various academic situations in which they'd found themselves previously. Despairing of what they took to be some of the larger outlines of American education (educational structure) and came to William James to find an alternative, to build an alternative. On the other hand, you don't assemble that motley a crew of people. Motley in the sense that-And this doesn't refute what I was saying earlier about the level of intelligence that I think we brought to the enterprise. I think that we were all very bright, very concerned, very committed people. But I think we came from such disparate backgrounds. We came from such a variant set of our own special bleeding wounds. That one of the very special things we had to touch base on, and reassure ourselves about in William James, was that there was some commonality to our wounds. That our wounds could be shared. I don't think— That may sound like a very anomalous and strange way of putting it; because never once did we sit around talking about ourselves and so many walking wounded. Though, in fact, we were for variety of real intellectual reasons. We were a set of walking wounded. Because it's only if you have encountered things of that kind that you have come to your senses, and packed up, and moved out, and sought to find something different. But we had been wounded in different ways, and one of the things that we worried about was that the special wounds would either get in the way of our being able to carry out our mission; or the special wounds would prevent us from seeing the legitimacy of somebody else's special wounds. I don't know whether this makes sense, and maybe I can figure out a way of saying it more clearly, sometime. But it made for a certain amount of enthusiastic embracing of one another, and then simultaneously in a 'schitzy' kind of fashion, a certain mutual suspicion of one another. Which is one of the reasons, it seems to me, that we spent so much time fine tuning the rhetoric. It would've been no need to fine tune the rhetoric as an instrument to demonstrate our purposes to the outside world, beyond a certain point. Beyond a certain point, we were proving certain things to ourselves. We were justifying our own approaches, rationalizing our positions, trying to define ourselves in relationship-not to the outside world but to one another. �[Barbara] Where did the students fit into this? [Robert] They didn't fit into that part of it. In fact, if I'm correct in what I'm talking about, this was an activity that we did not acknowledge even to ourselves. I'm just simply, after the fact, being analytical about something. [Robert] And I've never really talked about in these terms to anyone else. So, I would be prepared to discover that colleagues disagreed with me on my choice of words, or even on my choice of schisms, or problems, or definitions. But I think that there was an amazing amount of disturbing suspicion within William James. It's part of what lay behind the concoction of a code – a kind of rhetorical code that we employed in talking about the college, and about its purposes, and about our positions with relationship to that purpose, and about the relationship of students to the purposes of the college. And we spelt this out in terms of the number of buzzwords. [Barbara] Like? [Robert] I can't even think of one. I can come up with them if… I can supply that at another time. Just my memory bank on buzzwords is sort of closed down momentarily. But… [Barbara] Oh, surely you can think of some? [Robert] Well, I can't at the spur of the moment. We had lots of them. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_13_Burns Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Burns, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Robert Burns interview (3 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Robert Burns by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Robert Burns was a faculty member of William James College and longtime professor at GVSU who taught anthropology and photography from 1973 until his retirement in 1993. He was also notably the father of documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, who found inspiration from his father's photographs and travels from a young age. In this interview, Robert discusses the diverse directions that brought individuals to William James College and the common ground shared within its community. This interview is part 3 of 3 for Robert Burns. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/07cbe5eceb73b64e701b5be0f32161b0.mp4 b0455d82db8e7bfaabff15b946f1f700 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6dc69307eed3882095c19542e1b10bcd.pdf 0194f74eb90f261babb01cd42f625c65 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Robert Burns Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 3 [Robert] You don't know when the curtain is going to come down. You don't have any idea about just how much time you've got left. You don't have any sense that you're necessarily that endangered. But when you look at it in retrospect the things we did, the things we didn't do, the things we might have done, and the things we insisted on doing. Then I think it's apparent that there are a couple things that we did wrong. Vis a vis the outside world. Like the campus across campus. We never spent enough time building pathways and bridges to the rest of CAS, the rest of the campus the way I think, in retrospect, it didn't make sense that we should've done. We spent so much time immersed in our own problems, in our own preoccupations, within William James that nobody ever really gave much thought to establishing the broader connections overland to the rest of the campus. Because what was clear is that when the crunch came, the rest of the campus didn't understand us. They didn't understand us at all. They didn't understand who we were, what they knew of us, they didn't sympathize with, and it seems to me that all those kinds of problems could've been… would've been alleviated if we had more of a sense of bridge building. More of a sense that part of our security lay in relating to them, not just ignoring them or even worse than that is estranging ourselves from them. Estranging them from us, and that's where I thought of it many times. We weren't as smart as an Australian tribe would've been about the kinds of overland connections you need to develop if you're going to ever have available an escape route to save you when the times come down to the crunch in your own territory. We didn't have anybody under those circumstances that was willing to understand us, and then that comes back to reflect home on what we did internally, which I think was incorrect. With all due allowance to the Monday morning quarterbacking kinds of things go on the time like this. Why didn't we make the overland connection? We spent much too much time polishing, and honing, and fine tuning our internal processes. We labored through all of our committees to perfect every single thing that we wanted to do, every single concept that we wanted to lay claim to, as if somehow this burnishing process was going to represent our salvation. It was almost as if there was some kind of cosmic onlooker who was watching us and grading us on the sincerity, the depth of profundity of all of our efforts, and so it made great sense to us to spend all of this time somehow coming to grips with the meanings of the propositions, the substitutions of prepositions, or conjunctions and the like. As if somewhere, somebody was going to look at this is of the Rosetta stone and fault us for having used the wrong grammar in the wrong place and it was the fault of gilding the lily. We were spending much too much time on the internal processes �than we should have. We acted all this time as if fine tuning the individual word of our own processes was the important thing to do. Without realizing that single word in the outside world simply cancelled us out once and for all when the time came. [Barbara] Why did we choose to do this? We are not all fools. [Robert] No, we certainly weren't all fools. One we all I think… however many routes there were to get to William James, we all came with one main idea and that was that they we were going to do good; we were going to do well doing educational things in a different mode. And we wanted to be very sure we were thinking of every possible eventuality. We didn't want it laid at our doorsteps that somehow we had overlooked the obvious. So, we kept reexamining the obvious, as if we were searching for possible flaws, failures, loopholes, and so on. Well that's either elitism of some strange sort, or this could easily also be the case it's a narcissism of an extreme variety. That we get so preoccupied with the being of ourselves and the doing of ourselves and the eternal expressing of ourselves that we forget that there's a larger context. There's an ecology in education, and if you're not mindful of the ecology, there are things out there, misunderstood and maybe rubbed the wrong way can return to do you in, or to do you no good. [Barbara] Do you want to try lifting the GV level, Gerd. [Gerb] Is it too dark? [Barbara] I think it's dark. [Barbara] You want to put it up one? Yes. [Gerb] Wait! Come sit closer next to me. [Barbara] Yeah? [Robert] Okay, I guess. [Gerb] Then turn this way. [Robert] Okay. [Barbara] Um. [Robert] Go on and say what you were talking about. [Barbara] If we paid attention to the outside, where would we get the energy to build this �nirvana that we were all heading for? [Robert] The energy would've been the energy that we brought to the enterprise simply by being ourselves. I mean, I think we always misunderstood… [Laughter]. Let me say that over again. I think we always misunderstood completely the amount of special energy that we needed to put forth. The fact of the matter was, that all of us, and all of our various ways, and all of the times at which we were interviewed and came into the college. In all our various ways, we represented people that somehow were seen to have some sort of useful talent in the new educational scheme of things, and I think our problem was that we never relaxed, and believed in the existence of that talent. We always felt that what we were called on to do is to put forth some kind of special brand-new effort, without ever realizing that the efforts that we already put forth (that attracted ourselves to the college in the first place) and them to us, was exactly what we should've kept on doing. We should've kept on being the people who were interviewed, rather than somehow trying to transmute ourselves into this new kind of educational being that, less and less people across campus, were prepared to understand. [Barbara] It sounds like a very negative feelings about your eleven years spent there. Is this the case? [Robert] No, on the contrary! I think it was something that you said earlier that made me think that. Now, what I'm getting into at this stage in the game, I suppose, has something to do with grief work. With the death of something that you were really attached to, you begin to look around for all the kinds of things that contributed to that death and you wind up occasionally faulting the system for a premature death. I don't think that's misplaced hostility. I don't think it is hostility for one thing. I think it's simply one of those turns that somebody takes you know uncomfortable circumstances when you're trying to cope with in an absence of something that you've grown to love. And you're wondering where it went? Why it forsook you, and then eventually come around to examining the warts, the frailties, and the flaws that you didn't see at the time because you were simply so busy doing it and being it. We have some vulnerabilities from the very beginning, and I can remember talking with Robert about this many times, and he got quite excited about one of my little characterizations. I started talking about the different years of entry of staff members into William James. As if they had been, in effect, generations. There was that founding generation of Robert and others who in response to whatever the call to glory was at that time came to be the first faculty at William James, and they had always seen it as their mission to think through the purpose of the college, and to try to state that purpose. So, they were constitutionalists in a way. They were writing us an organization platform on which the future college could expand. And the second generation, the secondyear staff, always seem to me to me the wheeler dealers, the actors, and the doers. �[Robert] The ones were going to put the dream of the constitution writers into practice. You had an enormous amount of energy, often times very aggressive energy, that was expended in the cause of carrying out, as they sought, the wishes of the founding fathers. And then that left certain problems for those of us who arrived in the third year. The third generation, so to speak, because we found ourselves not in on the writing of the constitution, and we found ourselves late by year in coming to grips with enacting the constitution, and it was as if the third year came in a little confused as to its role, and it also came in just a little bit suspect because neither the framers nor the doers were quite prepared to believe immediately at the start that this third group of newcomers – “upstarts” – could possibly really understand what they had produced and enacted. So, there was lots of skidding wheels. There were lots of burning brake linings. While those of us who arrived too late to be in on the founding, and too late to even set the stage for the enacting of it all to try to figure out what the new vocabulary was that had been created and how the things we did were supposed to fit in with that new vocabulary. [Barbara] For example? [Robert] All I can point to here, I suppose, in all honesty, would be my own confusion in my first year. It extended into my second year, as well. I thought I'd arrived to do a certain kind of thing. I thought the reason that I had been accepted after the interviews had something to do with my being the anthropologist that I knew I was. And I'd discovered that on arrival that it was as if nobody on the staff had any idea of what anthropology was all about. If they did, it was a purely intellectual understanding and it had nothing to do with the kinds of things anthropologist really say when they're being anthropological. And so, I just discovered over and over again, to my confusion, that anytime I attempted to be myself, an anthropologist, was a time that I could expect to be misunderstood. Either as to content, or as to motive. Either one of those. This is a little off putting when you think that your reason for being here has something to do with what you are, who you are and then discover that you're not recognizable. [Barbara] What did they want you to be? I don't understand. [Robert] Oh, here one strides into dangerous territory. You know, it's kind of stuff with hidden agendas are made and… maybe we need to switch to something else. Well, I can come back… I could come back to it, but I need to think about that one little bit more. [Barbara] Okay. So why did you come to James? [Robert] I had come to James for a lot of reasons. I had gotten thoroughly fed up with the �anonymity of the classroom relationships in the large university. I tried it at the University of Michigan. I tried it at Eastern. And I found that the only improvement that Eastern had represented over the U of M was that I was in charge of the class of two hundred in a section, instead of a class of four hundred. And neither one of them offered me any possibility of developing a personal relationship, a personal rapport with the students that I was talking to. I'd really felt that. Well, I had quit teaching for a year, and I had gone to Europe to think things through, and I'd availed myself of the fact that a number of my anthropological graduate students were in field work in Europe that year, to search and number of them out, and to face them with a simple question: What is Bob Burns good for? And the upshot of it was that I found… they reinforced the notion that a much smaller college setting and one with a much more experimental focus was the kind of place that I would be looking for. And I have to confess that there they were one leg up on me in that regard because I hadn't yet picked up on the fact that there were this many new experimental footings that academia had set out upon or had devised for itself. And so, I came back prepared to begin to look for kind of college that I didn't know existed at the time that I first began my search. I really thought I was looking for a nonexistent animal and instead I discovered that there were these precious few little institutions that had developed under cover under certain kinds of protective wraps in special environments and that probably one of these was exactly the little harbor, the little niche, that I was looking for. [Barbara] Could you summarize in a couple of sentences. Short answer. What you think the essences of James was? [Robert] The essence of James was really the idea of an unstructured highly personalized, highly particularized education to suit the needs of individual students. Instead of the sheep dip approach to education which is about what most places were involved in. Big distribution dipping, a little bit of history, a little bit of economics, a little bit of arts (to make sure we weren't absolutely illiterate) and all of this. Pretty much the same bath going on for all students whether or not it related to what they needed, or whether not related to their ability to pick it up at the moment that they took it. You know you can be dipped on these things and not absorb anything because you're not ready for it. Well, in William James I had the sense that when we function best what we did was to loosen up the structure these requirements. We tried not to let students get away without requirements in the broader sense. But we left the requirements assert themselves, express themselves, in their own way and in their own time at a time when the student was most ready to pick them up. And eventually students would wind up getting that broader education of which we all dreamt. [Robert] In which we all had ourselves, but they didn't get it by virtue of having had their noses rubbed in it. So, it was a gentler tact, which always made a suspect in the eyes of others who believe in scruff of the neck types of introductions to learning. �And in the end, it meant that their breath was self-paced. They got broader as they needed to, and our good students always eventually needed to. No system is perfect so we had our share of the determined educational ne'er-do-wells who will not get an education in spite of anybody's efforts to offer it to them the "right" kind of way. On a silver platter or not. We have those exceptions to the rule, and we all blushed privately and publicly when we think of them. On the other hand, all institutions have those kinds of characters, too. So, I don't think our batting average was terrible in that regard. I am just amazed when I think about the William James accomplishment. Of how many good students, great students, went forth from here equipped to do all kinds of things a little better, I think, than other students who might have to wait five/ten years maybe even beyond that to realize finally what their education is actually done to them and for them. Whereas I think our students left already knowing what their education meant. Precisely because they had had a hand in the organizing of it. [Barbara] Do you regret having spent eleven years at James rather than somewhere else? Now that they've closed it on us? [Robert] Oh no, [laughter] I don't regret a moment of William James. But as I said earlier, I was talking about the Monday morning quarterbacking, or the moments that…the real moments of anguish when you turn on something that you love and fault it for not having been better than it could've been, and that's just a simple part of grief. But no, I would not have traded those eleven years at James for eleven years anywhere else. They were exciting, they were exhilarating at times. All of us did feel as if we were trying to produce something great. I was just talking earlier about the extent to which we got too carried away sometimes by our enthusiasm, and didn't raise our heads enough above ground level to see just how threatening that external environment could be. I think we suffered from the sin of pride or vanity and maybe understandably so on the circumstances. Because we did seem to be treated as very special beings for a time. And that probably lulled us into a sense of security that we shouldn't have bought into. [Barbara] One more question. When I interviewed you before, you talked about comparing peasant society to James. Where we had twenty faculty who spent their entire time on committees. Would you reprise that quickly? [Robert] One of the most appalling realizations I ever had was the day that I looked at our little college. Our little structure, a score of staff, and maybe two or three more at one time than another time. [Robert] But twenty, twenty-two, twenty-three people. And what we had devised internally as a structure for ourselves was a system of committees -- of overlapping committees, of parallel committees, of separately meeting committees -committees which when they had met were immediately confronted in the �corridors by all the people who hadn't been in on the committee. Either because they thought they weren't invited because they were teaching class at that hour. But who had to find out what had gone in and what had gone on in that committee that day? And I kept thinking: this is an appalling structure, what a bureaucracy. Byzantine couldn't have been more crazily subdivided and categorize than this. And all we were twenty/twenty-two lonely little people. I mean, if we had been an Australian band or if we'd been an Alpine peasant village… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_12_Burns Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Burns, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Robert Burns interview (2 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Robert Burns by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Robert Burns was a faculty member of William James College and longtime professor at GVSU who taught anthropology and photography from 1973 until his retirement in 1993. He was also notably the father of documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, who found inspiration from his father's photographs and travels from a young age. In this interview, Robert looks at William James College in retrospect and discusses his thoughts on the endangered nature of the college, the various stages of grief he has worked through with its closing, and what the essence of "William James" really was in hindsight. This interview is part 2 of 3 for Robert Burns. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5712bdd95ac3044b29dd64ac87f5ee52.mp4 28fd7b65fab06820473952e87512fd54 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cd0e1ed6fa0ec1fa0450ef60c42aa9c1.pdf fe01e9a3bc007b0813b0e67cffc66d60 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Robert Burns Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 3 [Barbara] [Working with the video camera] It doesn't look as well, skin tone is… it would just be a mess. I really wanted this. Oh, my is he dark. Let me see what I can do here. I'd hate to go to one six. That is just so… well, I think that this is going to be allowed. Let me just check focus. Let me make sure I'm steady. And I'm steady. And anytime you would like to resume I would be grateful. [Robert] Okay. I think it would be hard for an outsider to imagine how many committees we felt were indispensable to the running of our little college of two dozen odd staff. Their peasant villages that feel obliged to do some things in the bureaucratic way. They wind up doing it was extraordinary classic simplicity. There are individual tasks that are parceled out to a handful of individuals each year, each one he's in charge of a particular kind of activity. They carry out the duties of the office, and then they pass the notebook, which contains records to their successor the next year, and that successor intern then becomes responsible for the handling of that particular detail for the village. We always found it necessary to work with committees, which meant that every time a committee met there was an inside privy group to a particular kind of information. And we tended to not have very good ways of uniformly getting information from committee to the community at large. There would be the decisions, there would be the reports, but very little of the nature of the ongoing dialogue in committee so that occasionally committee results were unfathomable in terms of how they arrived at that conclusion. Typically, what happened whenever a committee met with that the corridors were full of all the little side conversations that we're necessary to be engaged in as different people came out of the woodwork to try to find out what it happened in that particular committee. It seemed to me that the single individuals could have been tasked… could’ve been entrusted to certain kinds of tasks, or that some of these things could literally have been handled in some kind of committee as a whole where literally everybody was going to hear the same information same time and not have to go through the business of asking for a duplicate committee reports one by one by one from any and all members of the given committee. [Barbara] But we were very well intentioned, and we liked each other a lot, and we had all selected each other, and we're not stupid at least not all of us at the same time so why did we persist in this? What structural advantage was there in this kind of super bureaucratization that made it last. �[Robert] I'm not sure that there's any other explanation for why it persisted, except that nobody felt that resort to individual responsibility for individual kind of task was anything other than a kind of an elitism that couldn't be tolerated. Things ought to be done in groups… in small groups for at least good democratic purposes. [Robert] But the small groups were in effect too small, and they always had an external environment of those who (one) needed to know the results but (two) weren't in on the meeting and then this enormous amount of time that was always spent after committees trying to find out how the results had turned out, what decision has been taken. What kinds of points of view had been presented, and the like. There was something I was going to say earlier about this. And it's not fresh in my mind at the moment. [Barbara] Shift yourself slightly towards the window and tell me the part about polishing. I don't mean toward the window, I guess I meant turn [inaudible]. [Robert] Oh, okay. Let's see what did… [Barbara] If you can recall it, not too artificially, we were talking the other day about one of our little problems being… a fine sense of sandpaper. [Robert] We always undertook to do things better than we had done them before, we always looked at our processes as if virtually anything we did. Anything we had done, could be done better if we: examined it carefully, profited from experience, and made the right judicious changes. This is a kind of thing that I've always thought of as polishing, and honing, and smoothing, and whatnot. We spent an enormous amount of time doing that. In one sense we've logically fall to the larger campus structure for having undergone major reorganizational upheavals every few years. But in another sense, we never ever settle down with our own processes inside, in a much gentler fashion, long enough to see how they worked before we were already predicting that they were not working, or finding evidence that they were not working, and then proceeding to tinker with them. So, although it was all carried out on a much more modest, much more gentle scale, and there were no big upheavals… still I think it remains that nothing that we ever tried stayed in place for very long before we found a better way to do it. And we didn't see this as reorganization -- frivolous or whatever. We saw it always “perfectionistically” as doing something a little bit better than we'd ever done before. So, we invented new ways and better ways of the new ways ad infinitum. And this gets to be time consuming, too. So, some of these processes – as I wind up thinking -- where processes had a life of their own. Once you're embarked on them, you follow through with them implicitly. Even if you have thoughts that maybe there may not always be for the best, there's a certain inertia that carries you forward. And you don't really feel it's fair to blow the whistle or to yank things to a complete halt for fear of being seen as a �disbeliever. Somebody who really doesn't belong in the system. Now realize, in this respect, I may sound like a peculiarly ambivalent character. Because on the one hand, I came to William James because I wanted to, because I found it to be an exciting place to be. And I always did, and I believed in what we attempted. [Robert] And I'm very sorry to find… to realize that it no longer exists. That's the part of it, that seems to me, like a death. But I wouldn't be honest if I didn't also say that I found our ways a little peculiar at times. What makes allowances for one family. When you're talking about a set of colleagues who are growing more and more like siblings with respect to one another every day. You put up with foibles because you know all these people too well to simply launch a political diatribe against them because they have failed to do this properly, or they haven't foreseen with the effects of that might be. You put it down to a longer-range type of problem which could be tackled over a considerable period of time. You understand we are all in learning positions, in learning situations, and that there are possible ways of all of us gradually coming to espouse a single point of view that we all share in some future. So, you overlook certain of the little points of potential… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource William James College Interviews Description An account of the resource Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Language A language of the resource eng Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GV016-16_GVSU_11_Burns Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Burns, Robert Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Robert Burns interview (1 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Robert Burns by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Robert Burns was a faculty member of William James College and longtime professor at GVSU who taught anthropology and photography from 1973 until his retirement in 1993. He was also notably the father of documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, who found inspiration from his father's photographs and travels from a young age. In this interview, Robert discusses the bureaucratization of William James College and its numerous committees, in addition to his belief in the college and his thoughts on its final closing. This interview is part 1 of 3 for Robert Burns. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Bureaucracy Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives