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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c443869eceb4bed54e91009309fe299b.mp4
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7249ef2c51d4d95fbcb17d5425c0c653.pdf
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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
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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>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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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/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_13_Burns
Creator
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Burns, Robert
Date
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1984
Title
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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>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/07cbe5eceb73b64e701b5be0f32161b0.mp4
b0455d82db8e7bfaabff15b946f1f700
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6dc69307eed3882095c19542e1b10bcd.pdf
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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
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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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
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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>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
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>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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