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William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Forrest Armstrong
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 3
[Barbara]
Not as many students as I would like to, but everybody from the faculty and…
What kind of description that tells you what kind of vibes about the place did you
get from others?
[Armstong]
Did I get from others?
[Barbara]
From others. Not what you observed, but what kinds of things were you told
about the college?
[Armstrong]
Okay.
[Barbara]
Anytime you're comfortable.
[Armstrong]
Oh, you're running?
[Barbara]
Yeah.
[Armstrong]
Okay. I think the image that I got when I came was of a place where there were a
fair number of good people, people who were viewed favorably across campus,
but who, genuinely, were not well understood in the kind of thing they had
chosen to put their lives to. The college was not at all well understood. There was
the shared perception that there was nothing of coherence that one might call
general education. The synoptic program was not seen to be a program. The
concept was, I think, not well understood. The grading system was a major
problem. And I think, increasingly, the college became known more by its failures
than by its successes. I think there was a sense that there was a fatal fascination
of moth for a flame. And the college with its perceived lack of structure, perceived
lack of rigor – collectively, though not individually – and lack of grading system as
understood by the rest of the world, was attracting people for the wrong reasons.
Yet, there was attention, I think, because many people on campus could point to
individuals at the college and say: "There's a very bright, very dedicated, very
capable, very attractive, colleague." But somehow collectively it didn't work that
way.
[Barbara]
Okay. Can you be specific about certain things that you were told to change? If
that's a proper question.
�[Armstrong]
I don't think I was told to change anything. I think I came, probably, with an
implicit mandate that things needed to be better organized, that things needed to
be tightened up, if you will. There was the budget fiasco of the previous year,
where the budget had been overspent and we were, actually, in nineteen eighty
debited by over half of the amount that was overspent the year before.
[Barbara]
How much?
[Armstrong]
I'm going to say six thousand was debited and the overrun was twelve thousand
out of a CSSM of sixty. Maybe not close enough for government work even. I
think there was the sense that a number of things had – at least in the near term
– been left unattended. I wasn't here then; I don't really know what that meant.
But there were a number of things that were of the standard organizational sort:
things that needed to be done on time and things needed to be done
comprehensively. In the sense, I believe, those had not been done that way in
the past. I think Zumberge presumed, appropriately, that that's something I could
do. But that's the tail, not the dog. Another thing I think that was probably not well
understood was the extent of which the curriculum changed in a relatively fluid
manner. Not as fluid as TJC's had been, apparently, but far more so than CAS's.
And I think there was some lack of understanding about how that could keep
going on. Why people didn't think it through, get it straight, and then more or less
stay with it once they had gotten it that way. One of the issues – I don't how long
it had been an issue, but it was certainly and issue when I came – was the need
for the institution to run as many course descriptions and the time schedule each
semester as it was doing. And that was attributed largely to James's insistence
that it be that way.
[Barbara]
Okay. We've been talking about other people's perceptions, what were your
perceptions of the college when you actually came and started administrating?
[Armstrong]
My perception of the college was that it had a lot of good people who are very
seriously invested in the college. That there was a real openness to seeing
students as significant participants in the process, which is immensely valuable,
and it helps set the tone for a lot of other things that could happen. I think I also
saw that there was a real openness to ideas. People were used to working with
ideas of others; they were open to that. There was a kind of collegiality that was
important here, and it's something that I think I value especially and is one of the
many things I found that was attractive that led me to come. I think that I also
found that there was probably a mismatch between perceptions of people in the
college about what it was and what it actually was, especially in the nature of the
student body. And my sense is that the perceptions of people in the college –
faculty – probably were formed maybe five years before I came, when the
student body was largely social relations students, and probably largely made up
�of students who were here for what we all came to say were the right reasons.
They understood… they were attracted to the college because of this educational
philosophy, because of the myriad ways they could grow within that philosophy,
because of all very positive things. And, indeed, many of the students I met when
I came for my interview, I later learned were of that sort just exiting the college. I
think, though, probably beginning about seventy-eight, the student balance
changed fairly abruptly. They changed from social relations students to arts and
media students and – not because of that, but I think in addition to that – more
and more came for what might not have been the right reasons. People running
from a perception of the structure and the rigor that they would find in some other
place to a place where they could do their own thing, and everything was okay.
That was never the perception of the faculty, collectively, but I think it was of
more and more students. And I think over time, those students made an impact
on the whole campus's perception of the college. And also had something to do
with the nature of the discourse in classes. I think that was one of the things that
we didn't anticipate and had hurt us in the long run.
[Barbara]
Very clear. What was your impression of the quality of education that we were
delivering or that was being absorbed (if those are two different things) when you
arrived? The quality of the education?
[Armstrong]
I think, in general, it was quite high. I think it was, probably, more ambitious than
an increasingly large percentage of the students were able to handle. One of the
things that I remember vividly is the sense of people saying: "It's not working the
way it used to. We used to be able to do certain kinds of things and we can't do
them now." I looked at the numbers, and the distribution to students, and so forth,
and it seemed relatively clear to me why that might be. But for people who had
evolved through the change from seventy-four to eighty, the changes were
gradual and relatively imperceptible in any moment of time. The difference
between what had been done in the education and vocation class, whence came
the idea for milestone, and what was done in milestone is, I think, dramatic. And
it's probably a symbol of the changes that had come upon us without our
understanding it.
[Barbara]
Good. You must have been in show business.
[Armstrong]
I'm sorry?
[Barbara]
You're very crisp, I was teasing you.
[Armstrong]
Oh [Laughter].
[Barbara]
I was saying you must have been in show business. I'm sorry. What was your
agenda? You didn't get to be [inaudible] for very long, but what was your agenda
�for that, probably, year and a half, wasn't that it?
[Armstrong]
Twenty-nine days after I came, the state’s fiscal crisis was announced. And so
whatever it was that might have been, I think, was really abrogated before even a
month had past. I was really very interested in James, in part, because I had
spent twelve years in a different interdisciplinary setting, and I was quite
interested to get some perspective on what I had been doing. Some perspective
on interdisciplinary teaching, interdisciplinary collaboration. I was also very
interested to see an entirely different approach to the integration of general and
liberal education with a major. Green Bay had had a core program; I had been
centrally responsible for devising, and teaching in it, and revising it when it
happened toward the end. Green Bay, in many respects, was much more tightly
controlled. The whole thing was to be interdisciplinary, but there were many more
strictures. Students would all have to do this, all have to do that, all have to
something else. A very different approach toward achieving what I saw as some
common objectives was the one taken here, and I wanted to get some
perspective on that. One of the things I did not anticipate – but came to
appreciate tremendously and learn a great deal from – is James's way of doing
things. I think, probably, the central institution in the college, was council. And I
had not understood – even intellectually, much less come to appreciate fully –
the importance of council, nor the way it worked; nor the kind of respect for the
ideas of others and concern for avoiding a rush to closure that I found here.
That's one of the many things I think I got from James, was to learn something
from that. One of my disappointments was that I did not find here – in those
twenty-nine days, at least – I didn't really find the kind of collective attention to
epistemology and to the intellectual underpinnings of the interdisciplinary
enterprise that I had hoped. I think, frankly, that was a weakness. And I think that
there were enough people who thought interdisciplinary just meant doing
whatever one wanted, without taking a hard look at it. That disappointed me a bit.
There was a lot of openness to ideas and there was a lot of sharing at some
levels. And on a one-to-one basis, one could go a long way there. But,
interestingly, in the collective endeavor, people backed away from doing some of
the hard questioning, which I think is a natural outgrowth of the process and
ought to be valued… ought to have been valued. But in my experience, at least
beginning in nineteen eighty, wasn't always. I don't quite have a theory for why
that was, but it was one of the strange things that I came to think about, and still
think about, in trying to make sense out of what James was and what it offers us
now.
[Barbara]
What I think of when you talk about that is Walter because I really feel that Walter
was open to that and Walter tried to get people to converse with him in the way
that you're speaking of, and people backed off.
[Armstrong]
I think that's true. I think he did, and he was certainly one of the truly broad,
�fascinating, interestingly educated persons I've met. He didn't get very far in the
public discourse, and I don't know why. I came at a time, which was I think at the
tail end of the discussion I couldn't chair in about visual literacy, and apparently,
he had been central to that in seventy-eight and seventy-nine. My sense was
that, to a certain extent, he'd used up some of his credits, if you will, in that
discussion. I don't know why, but that was more of a closed topic than an open
one with most people when I got out here. I don't know why.
[Barbara]
I don't know why either. I know we're heading towards the end of the first tape,
even though I can't see my light, so let me just ask you… here I'll even…
[Armstrong]
Among the problems that were identified: the colleges unwillingness to collect the
student fees it assessed, the colleges willingness to Xerox things at college
expense, and violate copyright to give them to students, saving students the cost
of buying the book, the willingness to pick up faculty that had been denied tenure
in another unit of the college, the wholesale granting of credit (or so it was said)
for life experience in a couple of instances early on in the experiment with that
which lead, I understand, to the decision not to do so at Grand Valley anywhere.
And then, of course, the lack of tenure, the lack of a grading system that was
understandable by the rest of the college. And also, the perceived lack of any
clear relationship between the major and general ed. Synoptic simply meant
anything that you wanted to the uninitiated outside the college. All of those, I
think, created an atmosphere of misunderstanding.
�
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
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Text
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eng
Oral History
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Dublin Core
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GV016-16_GVSU_50_Armstrong
Creator
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Armstrong, Forrest
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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Forrest Armstrong interview (1 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Forrest Armstrong 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. Forrest Armstrong was the Dean of William James College from 1980-1983 and also served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities during his ten years at Grand Valley. In this interview, Forrest discusses his initial perceptions of William James College upon his arrival at Grand Valley, his impression of the quality of education being delivered, and the state's fiscal crisis that contributed to the college's future. This interview is part 1 of 3 for Forrest Armstrong.
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
College administrators
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>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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application/pdf
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eng
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William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Forrest Armstrong
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 3
[Barbara]
Could you please sum up what you felt was the distinctive core of James in a
sentence.
[Armstrong]
I think that the distinctive idea had to do with working with students individually,
helping them see the relationship between their own efforts and the impact those
ideas and efforts would have on society. I think the essence of the operation of
the college was council, with a profound respect for other people, for hearing
ideas on the merits, for looking things up one side and down the other, and for
drawing people out for playing what Peter Elbow called the “believing game”
rather than the “doubting game.” Immensely important, immensely powerful and
made a lot of the good things in the college happen.
[Barbara]
Good.
[Barbara]
Anytime.
[Armstrong]
Looking back on it, if I had it to do over again, I think I probably would have
accelerated the timetable for some things I tried to do. I don't think I would have
changed them; I would simply have gotten to them immediately. In the second
year, in the beginning of the second year, I proposed an agenda of, I believe,
fourteen different items – things that the college needed to attend to. Almost all
those we did work on, and I think almost all of them, in one form or another, were
received favorably, which I think is a testimony of the power of people to look at
with open eyes and ideas that were not necessarily the same as the ones they
had been working with. We should've done it the first year, not the second. I
remember vividly that we had a retreat in January of eighty-two. We had a retreat
at Kirkhof House. And one of the things I did at that time was read to people the
statement I had just gotten earlier that day from the President, about the charge
to the committee to, you know, attend to overlap and duplication – things of that
sort. At that time… in that meeting, on our agenda was things like a change in
the grading system, and some other modifications which, I think, possibly could
have made a difference had they been in place during the nineteen eighty,
eighty-one academic year. Eighty, eighty-one was a bizarre time. I was never
here, really, during the normal time, except those first twenty-nine days. But, if
we had made some changes then – that I personally think were called for – it’s
conceivable to me, I think it is unlikely, but I think there's probably five to ten
�percent probability that it might have worked out a little differently. That's not a
high probability of success, but those are the kinds of things that I think would
have been taken seriously. I know the changes we made during the eighty-one,
eighty-two academic year were taken seriously by the people across campus.
They looked at us in a little different way as a result. And I think that if we had
attended to the grading system which, in many respects, was the central, most
visible thing about us that people were then taking shots at. Conceivably, we
might have done it. Conceivably we might have had a different outcome. Not
probably, but least conceivably.
[Armstrong]
In retrospect, it is easy to say that I really should have proposed a number of
things earlier. I didn't do it because I really wanted to take that first year and get
to know the college more fully than I could possibly have known it coming in a
fresh. I really didn't want to just bring in ideas and say: "I've got answers and
here they are." I intuited that there was something of great value here, and one of
the reasons I came was that I wanted to learn, and I understood that I could learn
a number of things here. Learning means you talk to people, you ask questions,
you listen. You don't simply come in with your bag of tricks and say, “Here they
are, we gotta do them." And I did – I learned a lot. And that's one of the
immensely important things for me about the experience. That would have been
changed – for me, and I think for the college – had I come in with a whole
agenda in nineteen eighty. On the other hand, in retrospect, maybe something
else could have happened as a result.
[Barbara]
Fascinating.
[Barbara]
Let’s give it a shot.
[Armstrong]
One of the interesting things about the federation – I think probably one of
reasons it came into being initially – was that the several colleges presented
multiple opportunities for innovation, multiple pathways. And during that heady
growth period of the seventies, there were ultimately five different places where a
good idea could be found, where a good idea could be nurtured and grow and
develop. And I think it was always in the eyes of the people in central
administration at that time, that if there were a good idea, it would be
appropriated by other units across campus, and the whole institution would be
stronger as a result. The decision to reorganize then in nineteen eighty-two, I
think, was also informed by that understanding. The decision to create a
divisional structure happened to end up with the same number of divisions as
there then were colleges. I think that was probably accidental; probably had more
to do with the structure of knowledge with the traditional three domains, and the
existence of Seidman, which was a foregone conclusion to continue pretty much
as it had been. But that also offered then multiple pathways for innovation;
multiple structures through which people could work. All smaller structures than
�what would’ve happened had there been just one large monolithic organization. I
think probably people had learned that if there are somewhat smaller
organizational structures and somewhat more of them, maybe it's more likely that
ideas will surface and flourish.
[Barbara]
How are you feeling?
[Armstrong]
Okay.
[Armstrong]
I sometimes wonder what the future of the college would have been had we had
more time. One of the things that has always perplexed me has been the relative
disparity between some of the things that were valued publicly – that were
certainly central to the theory behind the college – and the kinds of things we
would have wanted our students to do, and some the decision-making processes
within it. There seemed to me to be a hard time for people collectively to engage
hard decisions. The idea that the choice of Adrian's successor was left to tie.
Where, repeatedly, people who had chosen to abstain from the voting passed the
decision to Zumberge. The decision at the time in nineteen-eighty when we had
to reduce staff… that faculty could have been collectively, centrally, involved in
that, but chose not to be… before the fact, at least. The difficulty so many people
had with giving no credits, even though the giving of an incomplete, more than
ninety percent of the time, was tantamount to giving a no credit, because they all
lapsed to no credit. There was some, in some sense, a reluctance to grapple
publicly, as council should have caused, with certain kinds of hard decisions.
There was a strain of thought in the college that said one of the things I value
about it is the opportunity to do things… do my own thing, really, without the kind
of real, shared scrutiny that in theory is called for. And that always has perplexed
me. It seems to be out of character with the rest of the institution. But I think it
was something that did not augur well for the future. I don't know why it was.
�
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
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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_51_Armstrong
Creator
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Armstrong, Forrest
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
Forrest Armstrong interview (2 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Forrest Armstrong 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. Forrest Armstrong was the Dean of William James College from 1980-1983 and also served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities during his ten years at Grand Valley. In this interview, Forrest discusses the core of the William James College philosophy, what he would have done differently for the college in retrospect, and how the cluster college structure at Grand Valley provided opportunities for innovation. This interview is part 2 of 3 for Forrest Armstrong.
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
College administrators
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>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Moving Image
Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
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PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Forrest Armstrong
Date: 1984
Part: 3 of 3
[Barbara]
What's your guess… what's your estimate of the… how much of the feelings that
the way that Zumberge saw us was because we were really straight up, and how
much was it that we just made them uncomfortable because of our style?
[Armstrong]
Hard question to answer. I really don't think that the system, collectively, was out
to get the college. I say that because there were so many instances when it could
have done so, and yet did not. When TJC was killed, before I came, that would
also have been a time to change the system, to get rid of James, too. In the fall
of nineteen eighty, when the budget problems were severe, when we had a
financial emergency, when we laid off faculty, we did so across the institution, not
simply by lopping off one of the small colleges, which would've been the easy
way to go, and which had some champions. The reorganization that took place
would not have taken the shape it ultimately did if there had not been some
serious, profound respect for things that the college offered, including both ideas
and people. I do think, though, that there are some things that happened that
created a climate of, at least, misunderstanding and sometimes of distrust on
campus. I think that the idea, of course, was that from the beginning the
institution would be made up of collegiate societies which would share,
profoundly, even though they, in each case, had some distinguishing
differentiating element. My sense is that never really happened, that the
formation of the federation took place after a sizable number of faculty had been
hired at the institution. And largely, as a way to promote innovation and
differences. It's almost as if the small colleges as they were formed were islands
for misfit toys, for people who didn't like what was then the dominant mode could
go and do their own thing. I think this led, at least, James to define itself in very
negative terms. Basically, in opposition to the dominant mode of thought in
higher education at that time. And seldom was the college able to find something
that was positive that it could define itself as being, without seeing that same
positive element picked up, subsequently, in other places on campus. The
attempt to integrate career and liberal education, which certainly marked this
college from its beginnings, ultimately was picked up by only other colleges, too.
So, it didn't differentiate in a meaningful, obvious way to people who were
relatively naïve observers. What William James was that CAS or Kirkhof was not,
each in its own way. So, many people here when I came in nineteen eighty
defined themselves in opposition to something else. That was a clear problem. It
was that we were different than they are, hence, better; rather than we are
�different in particular ways that present particular advantages. I think that was
exacerbated, too, by the series of decisions… style-type decisions. And also,
because in the hiring process, we didn't always go for both "ands." We didn't look
for people who had the credentials and who could fit into any college on campus,
but who, for special reasons, also had dimensions that made them especially
good for James. That process I think began with the first faculty appointments
and probably proceeded all the way through. That obviously didn't help the
college in the eyes of the rest of the campus. There also being no intellectual life
that tied the institution together, where the intellectual life was around the
exterior, the rim of the doughnut, but not anything in the center of the doughnut,
meant that people basically defined themselves in opposition to others on
campus, rather than as something powerful, and positive, and unique that had its
own contribution to make. I think that was a major problem in the air when I
came, and I sometimes am amazed that the several opportunities to kill the
college outright never led to that result. There were certainly days when I feared
it would.
[Barbara]
Was there any sense that there was simple prejudice against us as versus us
screwing up.
[Armstrong]
I'm sorry, simple prejudice…?
[Barbara]
Simple prejudice just against our style, our politics?
[Armstrong]
I suspect that didn't help. I suspect it didn't help, but I think politics in a broad
sense… I don't think that it had to do with necessarily support for or opposition to
any particular ism but perhaps an orientation that was slightly less controlled,
less modulated, less considered, than people perceived academe ought to be,
perhaps.
[Barbara]
I moved something here and then asked you to start talking. I don't know how we
phrased it before, but talk about your mini history of what happened when they
decided they had to do something, regardless of the organization, at what point
was it decided we would kill…?
[Armstrong]
Well, there was concern expressed, I think, always from the time in fall of
nineteen eighty, when the budget collapse struck us, how the institution was
going to respond. And the decision at that time was to prune selectively, if you
will, across campus rather than simply lopping off a college or two. Subsequently,
we had a series of budget cuts. That was only the beginning, not the end. And at
each point, the problem loomed large enough that, potentially, one could have
said, "We will simply cut off a college." That was never done, and I think that was
of real consequence. I think people understood… people intuited, perhaps more
than they understood, that there was something of value in the college. My sense
�is that in the fall of nineteen eighty-one, I believe, the pressure began to build to
do something more consequential than simply pruning here and there. And in the
early part of January of nineteen eighty-two, the President's proposal that we
conduct a study to eliminate unnecessary overlap and duplication said, I think, to
the people who wanted to get rid of the collegiate system that, potentially, that
was an acceptable alternative. The process moved fairly quickly at that point and
by, as I recall, the beginning of March, there was a report from Curriculum
Committee. And there was a time, before the decision had actually reached the
Academic Senate, the President called a campus-wide meeting and endorsed a
particular plan, which is the one that, in essence, that we have today. That plan
took apart the old system. It didn't simply lop off James or Kirkhof. It didn't simply
keep a traditional college and create then a professional college. It did, I think,
much of what we in James were trying to do in some important ways. It extended
the effort to integrate the liberal and the professional programs, to pull them
together, to find some synergy there across the entire institution so that we now
have four academic divisions, each of which has both professional and liberal
arts programs in it. Certainly, that was not the way much of the rest of the world
was organized, and that's an idea and that came directly from James, and people
saw that and valued it. Interdisciplinarity, as a term, was – and I think probably
still is – not a favorable one on campus. I think people react negatively to the
term interdisciplinarity and yet I'm intrigued to see the number of people who are
coming to me and looking for ways to accomplish exactly those opportunities. As
faculty members, as researchers, as teachers – they are looking for that
opportunity to work with others from different disciplines around common ideas.
They just don't call it interdisciplinarity, but there is an interesting, growing
interest on campus in precisely that sort of thing. The new General Ed program
with the categories that are not owned by any single division is, I think, as explicit
as one needs to get in the recognition that there are things that the divisions can
share around common ideas that are important to all of us. The other thing I think
that's important is that the new General Ed program says that there is something
that we all share. We are interdependent. It's not that one division does
something for its students and another division does something for its students.
We are all interdependent. I think, too, that's something they got from James that
they saw to be of value. Probably not at as high a level of articulateness as one
might have hoped. But nonetheless it was there, and it was an appreciation, it
was valued, and it was saved.
[Barbara]
Duplication then was not, really, a serious problem?
[Armstrong]
I have never thought so. If one has full classes – so what, you know? We now
offer fourteen sections of Philosophy 101. Every year, they're all full. If we offered
seven of Philosophy 101 in one college, seven in another college, and they're all
full, [inaudible]. I think that was really an excuse, an opportunity. I don't believe
that we really did save anything of consequence that way. What we did do – and
�I think it was high time that we did – was combine faculty in larger programs. By
the time there had been cuts over time, in the last… seventy-eight, seventy-nine,
eighty, eighty-one, there were lots of programs on campus that were staffed with
very few faculty. Lots of one person programs. That's probably not good, and the
reorganization allowed us to bring together people into larger critical masses of
faculty. And I think probably strengthen programs for students, too. I think that
was a step forward. I think that needed to be done, regardless of the
organizational structure in which it were accomplished.
[Barbara]
There are people who say on tape, more than one people… "more than one
people." [Laughter] The administration was going to close us; they knew it within
the first couple of years. Was that your experience? Did they know they were
going to close us at the point when they started talking of duplication in the
organization?
[Armstrong]
I'm sorry, they knew they were going to do it within the first couple of years of
what? Of the founding of the college?
[Barbara]
Yes.
[Armstrong]
That's very hard for me to imagine, but it's also a long time before I came.
[Barbara]
But, I mean, in terms of your experience when you were in the middle of the
reorganization, talking duplication, did you have a sense they were looking for an
excuse to close the college?
[Armstrong]
No, I think… I think actually the opposite. It seems to me, looking back on it, that
there were all sorts of opportunities for them to have closed the college they did
not take. When they chose to kill TJC, that was a wrenching decision from the
institution. I understand that. But having made the decision to do that, one could
have, I think, at the same time, passed a different resolution which is to kill the
federation concept entirely. They didn't do that. When in nineteen eighty then
Adrian resigned and they needed to replace the dean, that was another
opportunity which they did not take to kill the college. And that was a convenient
opportunity. In the fall of nineteen eighty, when the budget deficit was so severe
and so sudden, that was an opportunity to solve the problem and ruffle almost no
feathers on campus by simply lopping off one or two small colleges. James first
choice and then Kirkhof second choice, I would guess, to solve the budget
problem. Didn't happen! In nineteen eighty-two, when the opportunity came for
reorganization, when it was pretty clear that there was going to be a
reorganization, the only question was what shape it would take. Again, that was
the opportunity; that was the obvious, easy answer and it wasn't taken. That says
to me, that people with the long knives were not out. That there was, perhaps, a
latent appreciation, but at some levels a profound appreciation for that which we
�were trying to accomplish and had made some headway on that people didn't
want to lose. Didn't understand it well but didn't think it ought to be lost either.
[Barbara]
It's blinking at me.
[Armstrong]
Okay.
[Barbara]
We have one more question, I think. I think you've done the legacy, don’t 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
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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>
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
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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_52_Armstrong
Creator
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Armstrong, Forrest
Date
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1984
Title
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Forrest Armstrong interview (3 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Forrest Armstrong 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. Forrest Armstrong was the Dean of William James College from 1980-1983 and also served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities during his ten years at Grand Valley. In this interview, Forrest discusses his impression of how the William James College community defined itself, the outside community's reaction to their politics, and how the institution responded to the budget collapse beginning in the fall of 1980. This interview is part 3 of 3 for Forrest Armstrong.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
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>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
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
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c59f9bf9dcc9119a8a4cf503ac55e34b.mp4
4f0e3d17a74f413f35285835a4bd8d04
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cffc9acb11a6e01e2e1e07f8d9677417.pdf
c55bc3668777774525f179a7c8cd542d
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Tom Bell
Date: 1984
[Bell]
Here at the Network, the Amway Network, bringing to you live today, a
discussion. What was it you wanted to touch on?
[Suzanne]
[Inaudible]
[Bell]
What kind of things was it that, you know, we talked about the other day that
seems relevant to you?
[Suzanne]
Community.
[Bell]
Community? You wanted to talk about community. That's probably the most
difficult…
[Suzanne]
Why don't we warm up here for second [inaudible].
[Bell]
Okay. What do you want to talk about? Where do you want to start?
[Suzanne]
How have you used what you learned at William James in your life today?
[Bell]
Okay, that's a really good question. I'm using the things that I got out of William
James in ways that I probably didn't understand or didn't expect when I was in
school. I think like a lot of folks, when you reach a certain point of pursuing an
education in particular field where you're really paying all your attention to that
particular field and you sort of set aside as a matter of convenience or really in
the drive to obtain a degree, a goal to get out and do what it is you think you want
to do. And so that process for me, I think I put aside a lot of the things were being
talked about at William James. About process, about integration, about preparing
for change. I put those things out of my mind as being conscious focused items
and can try to get on with what I was there to learn. And oddly enough, the things
that were the most valuable to me from William James, were exactly the things
William James was trying to talk about. The aspects of integrating other
disciplines into your own chosen field of discipline. To look towards the future
with an eye to changing and accommodating change. Both social change and
personal change. And I think, now, that a lot of the things that I really was
pursuing and at the time with intensity, technical skills and job opportunities, are
really not that valuable to me now. The things that are valuable to me are the
�skills I've got that allow me to perceive the opportunities of change or the
indicators of the need for change. The comfort that I have with going to other
disciplines or actually always looking at other disciplines to see what it is that
they're doing that I might find useful in my own genre of activity. I think that skill
alone has probably made it worthwhile to spend time at William James. That has
allowed me to have a greater breadth of ability and conversation with people
doing other things. And that's terrifically valuable.
[Suzanne]
How was that enacted at William James?
[Bell]
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.
[Suzanne]
How was the interdisciplinary thing that you are talking about, how did you see
that happening at William James. As a student, walking in there.
[Bell]
I think the whole idea of interdependent disciplines was, and is, a difficult concept
both to talk about in pragmatic ways and difficult to show unless you have a
particular problem right in front of you. In my case, some of the things that I found
really useful was… I was pursuing working in media realms with an eye towards
social applications, to use media, and video, and film for social change in
education and awareness. Which is, in a lot of times, becomes a very technical
endeavor. And the things that I found useful in terms of interdisciplinary kinds of
approaches to things. Let me back that up. The things I found useful in terms of
interdisciplinary… the things that I found useful in terms of interdependent
disciplines was developing the practice of looking at other disciplines like
engineering to see how they organized their thought processes. I found a lot of
things that engineers use, in terms of organizing projects and presentation
modes, to be very useful, both in terms of organizing my own thoughts and my
own projects, but also in terms of talking to technical people. It gave me the skill
to know that I can go in and talk to this group of people within their own jargon,
within their own realm, the paradigms that they're most comfortable with. That
was a tool that I might not have otherwise had, had I stayed working with visual
artist, or graphic artists, or writers, or musicians. And I'm sure that wouldn't have
been available to me. I think another example of that is the way that
environmentalists think about issues. In terms of taking an issue with a larger
scope and water pollution, air pollution, viewing that in terms of how it affects a
region, how it affect the whole nation, how it affects a neighboring nation, and
then taking that larger view and then being able to bring it right down to a specific
region of activity, a specific area that's contribute into it, or not contributing to it,
and examining those things. In essence, being able to jump from a macro view of
a situation to the micro aspects of it. Now that's a skill that has to be developed
within that realm that is also directly applicable to what I do. Again, it also gave
me the vernacular, as it were, of another discipline, so that when dealing with
people in another discipline, where you can start out with a common ground. And
�I think probably even more importantly than starting out a common ground is the
process of developing the ability to listen to other individuals, to other practices,
other disciplines. And any time you practice something like that you're going to
get better at listening to them. Let me start that over again. I think more than
being able to use the particular knowledge I've through the practice of… that's
not what I want to say either. I think the practice of looking to apply
interdisciplinary approaches to what you're doing, is probably immeasurably
valuable. It has given me a leg up in getting in on particular kinds of activities,
from the start. But also, it gives me a sense of comfort in dealing with awkward
situations, knowing that, you know, that I do have a skill that I've been working
with that is aimed at understanding other points of view, other applications, and
not only understanding, but doing it with an eagerness to say: "What can I get out
of this that's useful for me."
[Suzanne]
Do you remember [inaudible] students come in and had to go through this
transition period [inaudible]. Do you remember that?
[Bell]
Yeah, yeah.
[Suzanne]
Can you describe it?
[Bell]
Probably not. The transition period of coming into William James, of leaving a
conventional educational environment to getting into this alternative environment,
I think was really awkward for a lot of people. People just didn't catch on. People
didn't understand that you're responsible for your own process. You're
responsible for your own education. And that was an idea foreign to a lot of
students. Especially in the later years of William James. Now in the earlier years,
it was a whole different story. That was the reason the school was there. I mean
it was a reason a lot of those instructors, a lot of those professors, chose to be at
William James was because they wanted students who were going to assume
responsibility for their own educational process. I think that transition period of
going from a high school or perhaps some other college that was a very
structured, rigidly structured, environment into the William James environment
was awkward for a lot of people. It wasn't particularly awkward for me, it was
exciting for me, it was exactly what I wanted to do, and I wanted to get on with it.
I couldn't learn fast enough in William James. It was an exciting period, to have
the opportunity to jump into the kind of things that I wanted to do, at the pace that
I wanted to do it at, was exhilarating, and I couldn't get enough of it.
[Suzanne]
Can you describe it [inaudible] a little bit more?
[Bell]
What kind of things are you looking for? What would be useful for me to touch
on?
�[Suzanne]
What would be really useful if you said, in one line, actually you just said it.
[Bell]
No, I can say it again if it’s going to be for help for editing. As long are you're not
making me lie.
[Suzanne]
No, it’s what you said actually about the students changed. Just some of the
changes in here, real succinctly. Like the students changed. At first, they came
here they came here, they didn't have to have that transition and later they had to
make that transition and a lot of them couldn't and that was a problem.
[Bell]
I think making the transition from a conventional educational realm, whether it's
high school, or another college, to the environment William James was difficult
for a lot of people. The change in having the ownership of responsibility on the
student was both a hard one for some people to comprehend and apply more.
[Suzanne]
More specifically…
[Bell]
Not that succinct, huh?
[Suzanne]
More specifically, when the school first started, people were specifically looking
for that and they…
[Bell]
Oh, I see what you're saying.
[Suzanne]
How that transition, you think, was a problem.
[Bell]
Sure, sure. I think one of the unpleasant aspects for me about the experience of
William James was… no, I don't want to do that either, that's kind of putting it in a
negative tone. That's the way I feel, but when William James started, the
responsibility for an individual's education was on the student. And I think that's
why a lot of teachers were there. It was a different environment, a different way
to work. I would say almost all the students that I met in earlier years of William
James, that's why they were there, they wanted to shape their own educational
experience. Well, that changed as the time period changed. We got a new
generation of students and they just wanted to be handed the routine that they
could adopt or adapt themselves to, rather. And I think that was a real major
indicator that William James time as a college had come and gone.
[Suzanne]
Okay, now, community. Can you describe what the William James community
was? Just the other day… it was a network, a network. It wasn't being friends; it
wasn't all that.
[Bell]
I think one of the more nebulous parts of the William James experience has got
to be trying to describe that community. I think for the most part, the William
�James community only really exists between those students who caught on to
being self-responsible for the educational experience. And they aren't necessarily
the students who stayed in contact with each other on a social kind of basis, or
even perhaps in in the professional realm. And yet that community of
independent thinkers is a powerful one. Especially as students get further away
from their educational period, their time in college and find the need to make
contacts in other realms. That there is a network of people that exist because of
William James where the dialogue has- the tone of the dialogue, rather, has only
been established. It's one of being ready to think in alternative modes. But that
community is a very narrow one and I don't think all the students from William
James belong in that community, either by choice or just by being able to carry
on the dialogue. It's sort of a self-exclusive room.
[Suzanne]
Can you describe it? The other day you were talking about what it wasn't.
[Inaudible] It was great, there was this community there that was interdependent,
and it wasn't friends or whatever. Remember you were talking about.
[Bell]
Yeah, yeah, and I'm not so sure that I really made the point that I feel strongly
about come across. I think the community of William James College is very
unique one, in that it is made up of people who are posturing themselves or
placing themselves in the positions, intentionally, so they can discuss alternatives
in what they're involved with. Whether it be alternatives in environmental aspects,
or media aspects, or management. There is a basis for dialogue whose
foundation lies upon this desire to look at alternatives and see if they might not
be more appropriate. That's a very unique kind of community. It's a very exciting
kind of community. It's, I think, a very, very valuable kind of community that is
probably not going to happen again for a while. I think people are very much
attuned, nowadays, in this particular period of you know ten years or so, into
finding a status quo that works and to stick with it. Nonetheless, there is a
community of William James students who are getting older and stay in contact,
somewhat, and I just think that what makes that community valuable is that the
readiness to talk about alternatives is ever present. Did that get you where you
wanted to go to, Suzanne?
[Suzanne]
That was really good.
[Bell]
I'm not sure that the community that gets talked about, the William James
community, is really as valid as a lot of the discussion and rhetoric might lend it
to be. I think a lot of the rhetoric about that happens to come from hanger-oners.
I think the people who really engender the spirit of the William James community,
if there is such a thing, are those people who have taken the principles of
applying what you're involved with, with an interdependent view. That is to say
going into whatever activity you're involved with, with a view towards integrating
other disciplines, integrating other points of view so that you'll find the most
�appropriate way to apply yourself to a given challenge or situation. And I don't
think that gets shared by everybody who came out of William James.
[Suzanne]
What about the faculty? I mean with the student community, does that, with the
faculty?
[Bell]
Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think one of the more powerful drawing aspects of
the early days at William James College was the faculty. I think this faculty was a
very special group of individuals with very powerful ideas looking, for a way to
apply these notions of interdependent educate… being personally responsible for
your own education, interdependent disciplines. Wait a second, I'm going to back
that up a little bit. I think for me, one of the things that drew me to William James
was the uniqueness of the faculty. There was a powerful collection of individuals
there, working with a lot of powerful ideas. And not all those ideas ever made it to
fruition, or perhaps made it to fruition in the successful sense that a lot of people
had hoped for. But nonetheless, there was a very powerful professorial
community there. Which drew to it, I think, the early William James community,
which was also a very powerful bunch of people in terms of energy, and
ambition, and vision, and vision, and discipline. And I think that that's one of the
things that set William James College apart and did make it unique. And for a
while, really fulfill its intent, that is, of providing an alternative environment to
acquire an education.
[Suzanne]
Good. I'd hate to ask you the same thing.
[Bell]
Fine, fine. If I'm not hitting where you need to go, please do that.
[Suzanne]
Yeah, do it for me again.
[Bell]
What is that you need to know about community?
[Suzanne]
What I need in the editing process [inaudible] is someone to give a concise, yet
excited, that there was this community there. You know, and you can say the
word community isn't quite right. Maybe a network.
[Bell]
Yeah, but see I don't think that was that much different from any other college.
[Suzanne]
You don't?
[Bell]
No, I don't think to the community that existed William James was any less
enthusiastic than the community that existed at Michigan State. I think the thing
that sets it apart is it's a pretty large collection of people, thinking in alternative
ways. And it just doesn't happen that you get alternative thinkers who gathered in
large groups very often. It's an exciting place to be in. To be in with a bunch of
�people… to be inside of a community that not only encourages alternative
thinking but pursues it. And beats it to death if it were to find ways to really come
out ahead of where you started at. Both in terms of your thinking, your
professional status, in your personal life. So, if there's a William James
community, it's one based upon pursuing alternative visions. And in a lot of ways,
it doesn't mean that it's a limited to the people who went the school at William
James. There are places that still apply a William James technique to learning.
And I think that those people are as much a part of that community as anybody
who was tuition paying person. I think the community of William James is much
larger than just the students and the faculty who participated in it. I think it's a
global thing. Actually it's a network process, where you begin… you go to a place
like William James to get involved in and expanding your processes of thinking.
Expanding your own visions of whatever it is you're involved with. And in that
process of doing so, you make contact, you make a network with other
individuals. And that's the community. That's the exciting part. I don't get that
sense of excitement, that sense of personal and professional value from people
who gone to other schools and who have established their own networks based
upon, you know, whatever their curriculum was. I think that there was something
unique about William James College which extends beyond the school, and that
is that group of independent thinkers.
[Suzanne]
Great [inaudible]. That was real good. What do you want to say, specifically?
[Bell]
What do I want to say specifically? I guess I can say, I think one of the more
powerful aspects of my experience that William James happens to come to be
one of anger rather. To have left the school feeling let down in the last two years
of my time there. And to feeling a sense of disappointment that it was waning.
The opportunity, the time of experimentation was slipping away. And I went to
William James for that opportunity, to indulge in this time of experimentation that
was, I think an outcrop of the sixties and a lot of social change that occurred. And
to have that slip away, it was sort of embittering, for a while, until almost by
surprised, I realized that I was really applying, in my daily activities, the form of
thought, the method of thinking, that William James College was working on. And
whenever that day arrived and I suddenly set up from my desk and I realized:
"It's working! It's working! It made it worthwhile to go to William James." Because
in spite of all the negatives that I had been focusing on, I got a wonderful kit of
tools to take with me from now on out.
[Suzanne]
Okay, that's good.
[Bell]
Okay. I know there's probably one last thing that… I think a lot of people in the
community surrounding the college, in West Michigan, business people, and a lot
of students in other colleges, tend to look at William James, and students, as
being unpractical, or air heads, or in most and a lot of times just in unpleasant
�ways. And I think that kind of perception comes out of the later years, which was
a result of it being a period of change. I think the very powerful time for William
James to exist occurred at the end of the sixties, or the early part of the
seventies, when there were a group of people, mostly Vietnam veterans, who
were wanting to go to school and were able take charge of their own educational
process and were looking for a place to do that in. And so, when you couple that
up with a faculty looking for a way to offer a different environment to learn in, it’s
a wonderful ready-made situation, which may not come along again for a long
time. It was for a while, the most appropriate place for a lot of people to be. And
when those people got their value out of the experience, when the professors got
their value, and it started becoming burnt out and moved on to other
opportunities, when students graduated and went on to apply what it was they
were pursuing, the need for the place to exist dissipated. And so, I think it's
probably appropriate, and it's very appropriate that William James ceased being.
And I hope that in the future, and given ten years when similar circumstance
arise, and it will happen, that those people at that time can say: "Oh look, they
did this at William James, and it was very powerful, and some things worked
really well, and some things didn't, and let's try it again based upon that." And I
think, probably, if nothing else, the important thing about the process at William
James was being attuned to change, being aware of the need for perceiving
other ways to approach what it is you're getting involved with. And if you do that,
you'll become aware just through the process of when it's appropriate to put
something down and move on something else. And so, William James leaving us
was ultimately appropriate.
[Suzanne]
Good.
[Bell]
Anything else?
[Suzanne]
Yeah. [Inaudible]
[Bell]
Let me try that again, alright? Let me shorten it up for you. I think the important
thing to keep in mind about William James is that it came into reality during a
time of terrific change and the kinds of things that it focused on were dealing with
that change, were dealing with the changes both in terms of changing
educational systems, changing social systems, and preparing yourself to be able
to change in the future. So, I think it's ultimately appropriate that when the
students who wanted that kind of education, when the teachers who are willing to
give themselves to that situation, decided to either move on or that they were all
through with the process, and then all new kind of students came in that weren't
looking for that educational opportunity, when all that happened, it was ultimately
appropriate that William James cease to be. Okay.
[Suzanne]
Great. About the community [inaudible]…
�[Bell]
No, fine, fine. If you're not getting what you need, let’s look for it.
[Suzanne]
We're getting it, I'm just thinking [inaudible]. You were talking about people
outside the community, and they looked at… I guess what I'm talking about it the
difference between people who are not part of the community…
[Bell]
Yeah.
[Suzanne]
Who are, I mean there's a major part of the world who aren't part of that
community. So, is that community practical?
[Bell]
Oh yeah. Yeah. With the William James community you mean?
[Suzanne]
Yeah.
[Bell]
I think a lot of people question whether or not the educational process at William
James provided people with practical tools. And I'd say absolutely yes. That
when William James students interface in a more conservative conventional
environment, there is no conflict per se. I mean we're just people, were working
together, and, you know, suits and ties are just another kind of uniform. And we
can all put on a uniform and for that little while people think it's all, you know,
everybody's in the same kind of army, or team, or whatever. And yet, a William
James student possesses a set of tools that makes him very versatile, or her,
very, very versatile. Those tools being looking to other disciplines for useful tools,
looking for other ways to integrate these other tools into your own application so
that you can further yourself and further your own profession, or whatever activity
it is you know you chosen to be involved with. So, no I don't think that people
fitting William James students have any trouble at all fitting into a conventional
industrial environment. As a matter fact, I think they have a leg up in the sense
that a lot of them are subversive to begin with and it gives them an environment
they can be subversive in and in a very practical way, and it sort of works out
better for everybody because employers benefit from people thinking you know
alternative ways, whether or not they're willing to accept the dialogue with that
person thinking in those ways. So yeah, I think people coming away from William
James, if they really caught on to what was going on there, have some very
practical skills.
[Suzanne]
But if…
[Bell]
But if…
[Suzanne]
But if people- one of the issues in this today is going to come out as if society
is…[?] wants people to just be able to [inaudible] one narrow job, everyday, don't
�question it, don't make drama. I mean, things are getting more and more
specialized and liberal education is going away, but William James was focusing
on that. Is that part of the reason for the change or going away of William
James? Is that one of the ways it was not successful because it was training
people for something society doesn't want?
[Bell]
Well, I think there's two issues in the question of the change of William James.
One issue is "Was William James successful?" Because, obviously, it went away
as a school. And I don't think that there's any conflict in when you say: "Yes
William James was a successful educational environment, and yes William
James went away as an educational institution." The point still remains is that it
was appropriate for a certain group of people at a certain time in history, and
when that time came and went, it was no longer appropriate. So, to hang on to
the school in order for it to adapt and to exist it would have had changed into an
environment that it wasn't intended to be to begin with. So much better that it just
went away altogether and rather than become some kind of hypocritical
institution. And this… what was in part of that?
[Suzanne]
The professional training people for something that [inaudible] might not miss or
really want.
[Bell]
Oh, oh, about….
[Suzanne]
That sort of thing [inaudible] .
[Bell]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's true that the other influence that William James
suffered, you know it's demise was a result of…wait a second. Yeah, it's true that
another influence that William James had to deal with, had to contend with, was
the specialization of the job market. Was the increasing unattractiveness of a
liberal education. And I think it's just a temporary thing. I mean, historically it's
temporary. People get specialized, and learn about math, and science until we're
engineered to death and people say: "We need more artist!" And then we get so
many more artists until we suddenly realize: "Oh geez we're lagging in the
technological race, so we need more engineers." I think it's just an ongoing thing.
And I think that there's a lesson there to be learned from William James is
dialogues with what it was trying to do, and that it was attempting to integrate
these disciplines of creative disciplines, of creative art disciplines, the ways of
being creative, with engineering disciplines, so that you don't exclude any
activity. In fact, you include all activities, so that you actually integrate your
society, your… first off on a personal level, and then on a social level, in terms of
your society and workplaces you're involved with, so that what happens is that
you don't have these peaks and valleys. You have a more fulfilled individuals.
You have a healthier society in that it has the ability to adapt to the changes as
those changes come up instead of always playing catch up there. You're always
�looking to the situation in terms of what it needs to be appropriate for the
moment. And I think the only you get that is if you are integrated with multiple
disciplines. Okay?
[Suzanne]
Good. I want to ask you one more other thing. This is just something…
[Bell]
Fire away.
[Suzanne]
…that Barb is asking everybody to sum up, in just a few sentences or more, what
was William James? In a few words or more.
[Bell]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Suzanne]
[Inaudible]
[Bell]
How would I describe William James to somebody that didn't know anything
about it? I would say William James was a very exciting place to. That it was a
collection of tremendous thinkers, in terms of faculty. It was a collection of a
tremendous group of people, hungry for knowledge and hungry for a way to
pursue that knowledge in their own ground and in their own terms. And as a
result, it was a tremendous environment of experimentation that was very
exhilarating, and a wonderful place to be for that period of time.
[Suzanne]
I'm going to stop the tape and look through some notes, to see if there's anything
else [inaudible].
[Bell]
To see if there's any more questions, fine. Hi Vern!
[Suzanne]
This is going great.
[Bell]
Good!
[Suzanne]
You're still taped.
[Bell]
Thank you! One of the keys to William James was its structure, in that it was a
non-competitive structure, both non-competitive for students, in terms of not
having grades, and also non-competitive for the professors. No tenure and things
like that. And the dean wasn't some autonomous feudal lord. And the students
also had a say in terms of how the schools was run. The student council was
more than just an organizing fun committee for bands, and dances, and stuff. It
was a very powerful voice in the decisions that went on in William James. And
that made it for, again, a very unique environment.
[Suzanne]
That was great, can you say that…
�[Bell]
Even quicker?
[Suzanne]
No, with the point that it was intentionally structured that way, from the beginning.
It was thought through and built that way so that it could fit this kind of
environment.
[Bell]
Yeah, yeah. Sure, I can do that. Yeah, I think something that- that is important to
make note about William James is that it structure it's non-competitive structure,
where students weren't competitive, because there were no grades, and
professors were not competitive, there wasn't tenure, and the dean wasn't some
kind of feudal lord, as you find in other institutions. All that structure was
intentionally. It was a well thought out structure for creating the environment that
William James had. Is that what you need?
[Suzanne]
Good. Very Good.
[Bell]
Okay.
[Suzanne]
I'm going to stop it again. Why not just look at that sheet and see if there's
anything else you want to talk about?
[Bell]
These are things that need to be said?
[Unknown]
No, not necessarily.
�
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
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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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/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_64_Bell
Creator
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Bell, Thomas
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
Tom Bell interview (video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Thomas Bell 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. Thomas Bell was a student of William James College who pursued the study of media and film for social change. In this interview, Thomas discusses the personal impact of his William James College education, the transition from a conventional educational environment to the alternative education environment, and the community of independent thinkers that made William James unique. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Thomas Bell.
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>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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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
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GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
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_11_Burns
Creator
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Burns, Robert
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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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
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
-
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
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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>
Rights
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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
Type
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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
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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
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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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>
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
-
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
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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/.
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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
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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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>
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Moving Image
Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6b4d84f00fdc8cd8de12406995503e38.mp4
4dd7674a909a05ce5621e2639b2bfe3e
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c807b3539897a4a2cef639997f1bea5e.pdf
c5ddaec34919cefbda8a7589874da101
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Barry Castro
Date: 1984
[Barbara]
I told you that the students would be among the audience. Was there something
you want to be sure to say?
[Castro]
When I talk to my management classes now, management is a difficult field to
teach, in a way, because you've got lots of students who haven't ever been in a
managerial context, an ordinary one, haven't been in the industrial context, and
they get a bunch of management courses as part of a business curriculum. So,
your task is to find some experiential context that they can connect that
theoretical material to make it their own. And I like using classroom material for it.
One of the major management theories that we talk about is Douglas McGregor's
"Theory Y" notion of invoking participation loosely. McGregor argues that it's
necessary to assume a willingness to be involved, a willingness to work. That
there is no adversarial relationship between work and a firm [?]. And that given
that assumption, it will be ill-founded sometimes, but you will get much more
happening than if you don't. And it talks about the disastrous consequences of
beginning with the opposite assumption. And everybody affirms that, and people
read that stuff and they feel "Lord, it's just mom and apple pie, of course that's
true." And at around that point I asked them how many of them have heard of the
cluster colleges and William James, and Thomas Jefferson, and those places.
And it's recent enough so that many of them have. And I say that, you know, that
is really what we did, we were pushing on that kind of involvement, all the time,
and from ourselves, from students, students doing it to each other. It was what
made the place work. But looking at it from the outside, what do you know about
it? I guess that's the first thing I ask. And they say: "Well non-graded, one. And
two, easy." And we talk about the proclivity to define participative management
as soft management by people on the outside of it. So, the resistance you get to
any effort to manage in a way that involves subordinates in a way a firm really
works is people on outside giggling and saying: "Oh my! Just look at what they're
letting them get away with." And when they can find someone who is actually
getting away with something, there's a cause for real celebration there. And to
say that abstractly is nothing. But to point at the people in my class and say
"Look at what you folks are doing," with very little information. But your incentive
is so great to interpret what you've got, or to make up information that you don't
have, that kind of resistance to managerial innovation, to, I think, good
management, needs to be reckon with all the time. And it's the case in point that I
use. I think for students and faculty, we were made to order for them. Many of
�our students come to school… many students at places like Grand Valley come
to school having a notion that if it's hard, it's good, and if it's fun, there's
something wrong with it. So, the Board of Education in Grand Rapids, I think, last
week passing resolutions saying, "Everybody should have homework." And the
City High School, which prides itself on being a quality institution in Grand
Rapids, advertises itself as "two hours of homework a night," as if that was the
elixir, you know, that was the magic stuff that made it work. And they're onto
something about the sociology of your clientele that's right because the clientele
are so bound up in that notion that if you involve people, and you let them have
fun with it, you're somehow doing it wrong. You're not giving them the real stuff.
And I think that was very hard for us to overcome.
[Barbara]
Could we have overcome it, or did the administration have a responsibility to help
us overcome it? Where could this ever have been fought?
[Castro]
Well, public image-wise, I think we were in much, much better shape for fighting
it for the last few years. I think we got to know what we were doing much better.
And asking for public… the public has a notion that we're supposed to know what
we're doing from scratch. And that were supposed to come in and just do
something, all which has been invented, which in any field is absurd, no field I
think more absurd than in education. The standard item, the routine stuff, the
kinds of classes they are used to… know what they're doing, certainly know
better than we do. In my view, often knew less well, they inquired less
thoughtfully into what they were doing. The question doesn't come up for them,
and folks were… it would be hard to get folks willing to give us the time to be so
much above the mark, so they can begin to trust us even though we were out of
the ordinary. I don't think there's a lot the administration could have done about
that. My neighbors who say "Thomas James" were not reachable by the
administration. And they were sophisticated, nice people who like me and think
that it must've been a little bit okay because I was there. They don't mean to be
putting it down, but they can't get it straight.
[Barbara]
If you had to sum up what made James unique, very, very briefly, like two or
three sentences, what was the thing that was critical?
[Castro]
Keywords: ambition, involvement, tremendous seriousness about education, and
not being caught up in cynicism about careers and making it and looking for
things. We talked about vocation all the time, looking for real vocation, and the
students who are… I think profit most from the place, were most involved in it
and the faculty were most involved in it, had found the vocation there, which was
going to be with them the rest of their lives, as far as I can tell. And that seemed
enormously valuable to me.
[Barbara]
That's a wonderful execution. I think we’re running [Inaudible]… yeah,
�everything’s fine. Is there an answer… this may be too personal, in which case
let’s not treat it as a serious question. Can you phrase why you came to James
without laying on a whole biography? What was there in you that readied you for
an alternative setting? Why was traditional education not satisfactory?
[Castro]
Well, I came there… I read an article about it, actually, that just touched on it.
Mostly about Grand Valley in general, more about TJC, a little bit about James
and change. But I was taken enough with the ambition of what was going on here
to write Don Lubbers a letter saying I read this article about your place and I'm
interested. And Don passed it on to Adrian and I got invited out for an interview,
which was nice. I think the particularities of my own situation is there's nothing…
the only problem about personal is I don't know how generalizable it will be. I
taught with some very good people when I began teaching who were serious and
good about what they did. And I did a kind of extended apprenticeship with them.
A historian named Herb Gottman, a sociologist, people who became friends and
had been at it longer than me and were very good. And I got a sense that I was
going to college over again, only much better this time than I had gone the first
time. And that was wonderful, and I wanted to keep on doing that. That stayed
with me for a while. Then one of the people I taught with at that first institution got
to be dean of faculty at a new branch of CUNY that started in nineteen seventy.
And called me and asked if I wanted to organize a social science program there.
And it was a wonderful opportunity to invent from scratch an institution. And we
did a lot of things wrong in that invention. But I learned a lot at [Inaudible] which
was the name of this place at City University and wanted a place to use what I
had learned and going to an economics department to do micro, macro and an
occasional elective seemed very dreadful, yes. And when I came to James, I
think the first… immediately upon coming in, and meeting people, and getting
some sense of what the place was about. It was as if I had been here forever. I
recognized it and I don't know what folks’ reaction to it – my stance – was, but I
never entertained the possibility that they wouldn't hire me at all. I mean it was
mine and of course they'd… it belonged to me. And they did what they were
supposed to do, but it was very compelling.
[Barbara]
What would you say, again, not being very specific about current things, but in
teaching now… no, it's not a good question, forget it. I’m sorry. Stop for a
second. God, he’s looking gorgeous, isn’t he? Its fine, I'll cut through the other
stuff. Okay, that's the question we’re on.
[Castro]
Okay. I want to talk about…
[Unknown]
That side, yes. Like that, that's…
[Castro]
The difference between… I've been teaching the last couple years in a business
school environment and that seems on first vision… when I first understood that I
�would be going to a business school, that was, it certainly felt like it was going to
be a very alien environment, it was scary. It has not been an alien environment.
The internal dynamics of my classes seem very similar to what went on in
James. I am teaching in the same way and I feel that I am being responded to
well. In some ways, very well. I am more of a rare commodity teaching at a
school of business than I ever was at James. And folks could kind of nod their
head when I did what I did at James and they are hearing it all for the first time.
[Barbara]
Like what?
[Castro]
Well, the purpose of this class is not information transmission, boom boom,
boom, boom, boom. What we’re up to is engaging your thinking and engaging
you in a conversation on the one hand with the literature, and on the other hand
with the experience, and getting you to see that conversation, and respond to it.
And getting smarter. I tell my students that the heart of management, the only
two real ingredients of management are being as smart as you can be and good
manners. And everything else is detail. It all follows from that. You need to listen
to people, and respect them, and you need to think about what you're listening to
as hard as you can. It fits in the context of liberal education much better than I
think most people either in the humanities or in business schools know. And I’ve
discovered a sense of mission about getting people both in the humanities and in
the business schools to recognize that. That business schools can be perfectly
viable milieus to teach well in. And I think a lot of what business schools are has
been a reaction to feeling nasty prejudice coming from humanities. And the kind
of thumbing of the nose back at them and turning up of our speakers, or ghetto
blasters, or whatever, and just letting it blare out. Because you guys expect us to
be doing that anyway, so we're going to let you have it. So, it's been fun to
discover that there was something real for me to do in this milieu. And fun also
that there were large numbers of students who were there, who I didn't need to
go scraping for them, there was support from the outside environment, we didn't
need to defend the business school’s right to exist, at all. I could go on to do the
work that I needed to do as a teacher, without needing to deflect my energies in
all sorts of ways that at James they got deflected. And that's been very exciting.
Students have been… they come to my office a lot. People are around, and
they're grateful for the kind of thing I've been pushing for. And I’ve very, very,
very little resistance. Actually, almost none that I know of… there may have been
some that's quiet. I miss the collegiality. I had Robert Mayberry next door to me
for ten years at James, and that was extraordinary and wonderful and I miss it.
But he's only across a short mall. This not having to worry about Alison
Bernstein's double preciousness has been very nice. I'm not in a precious milieu
now, I'm just in a business school. And if we can do the stuff we can do in that
kind of milieu, that's better. I don't think I could have gotten as good without
James, at all. I don't think we could have. I don't know that we can stay as good
without it, and I worry about that. And I worry about what's going to generate
�more faculty with those same commitments. And my sense is that we have to do
it. We have to keep on talking and wait until the next cosmic change happens,
right?
[Barbara]
Wonderful end to the show. Thank you! It was a good close.
[Videotape recording ends and begins again]
[Barbara]
Because also, like, everybody doesn't cover the same material, so it must be
clear that this isn't a real… I mean, people didn't get together and talk and
organize this. People's conversations do bypass each other a little bit, you know.
[Castro]
Are you going to get Adrian?
[Barbara]
Of course. She troubles me. Has she written you? She hasn't written me either.
[Castro]
She talked to me about three weeks ago.
[Barbara]
Oh really?
[Castro]
Where did I see her? Were we in Minneapolis?
�
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>
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_55_Castro
Creator
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Castro, Barry
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
Barry Castro interview (video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Barry Castro 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. Barry Castro was a faculty member of William James College from 1973-1983 before becoming a professor of management for the Seidman School of Business. In this interview, Barry discusses the qualities that made William James College unique and the personal journey that led him to the college, in addition to how the WJC philosophy informs his management courses. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Barry Castro.
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
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
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>
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
-
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
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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
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1984
Source
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<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
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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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Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
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GV016-16_GVSU_19_Clover
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Clover, James
Date
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1984
Title
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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
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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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>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/11cc0a8c7e5a170862bd06db1a335596.mp4
762baeffba01ff425bc7b6b2631cfa49
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d38c0b5861c8395a12fc620aea8462ef.pdf
10d42c29a0b9e9ed96608dbafbfb09b9
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Tom Cunningham
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 2
[Barbara]
Okay, the first question I have for you then is: Why James?
[Tom]
Why William James? As the name of the college? Well, actually he was… I
thought him last rather than first. I thought about the entire structure of the
college first and the notions of the college should be. I think I'd coined the
phrase… yes, in fact, I know I was. Coined the notion of psychosocial humanism,
rather than scientific humanism, or more classical humanism to describe what I
thought would be the appropriate type of curriculum for our own day and had also
coined the notion of college should be future-oriented, and person-oriented, and
career-oriented. It is evident that we didn't want to go around call me in College
III, that was the name of the task force I was asked to head. And so, what name?
It's easy to name something before it's founded, then to name it after it's been in
existence for a length of time. College of Arts and Sciences had not gotten a
name, and apparently would never get a name for that very reason. There are
too many persons that had a stake in this name or that name. It's like guessing
what name to give that before it actually started. I had happened to have been
reading about that a year before that some works on William James. I'd read
James twenty years before as a phenomena – as a pragmatist. But some works
by John Wilde particularly. From the Universal of Cal… University Florida. He
had been at Harvard and Northwestern, he's a phenomenologist. He had written
a rather interesting book on James as a phenomenologist. I never thought a
James in that connection before and so it occurred much of the ideas that I had.
Mainly the concerned with psychology, even social psychology. And the concern
of manufacturing your own persona. So, it was a natural but when I had thought
of the materials concerning psychosocial humanism and the other things that I
wrote about, even talked about the divisions of the college that would come
about. The emphasis on environment and so on. I had no name in mind. But then
when push came to shove, I thought we better get in name before the college we
founded and James just came to my mind. I had a difficult time convincing the
committee to go for that name, to tell you the truth.
[Barbara]
What did they want?
[Tom]
They had nothing in particular. But it just looked like I was doing too much.
Someone wanted to name it after a guy named Maxie. I don't know I think it was
a Maxi training school for boys in the Detroit area. Some had some frivolous
names, I thought. But I think much of it seemed to me that I looked like I was
�having too much to say. But I thought James was a natural name for the
orientation that they had voted on and was only a matter of time before they
came around to recognizing it. I said: "Yeah, it would be an appropriate name."
[Barbara]
Maybe you better go back.
[Barbara]
I asked the wrong first question. Tell me what the charge was, and how you
came up with the notions for the character of the college.
[Tom]
Well, I had finished my first year teaching here at Grand Valley, and sometime in
the late summer or early fall I received a phone call from the President. And I
knew it was him because my wife was about to have our first son as it turned out
to be. President found me and asked me would I consider heading a committee
to found a new college. The task force was in charge – College III task force. My
inclination as a first-year faculty, having completed my first year as a member of
faculty here was: one does not lightly turn down any of the President's requests.
And truth to tell, I always have been interested in educational activities. I have a
master’s degree in education among my degrees. I'm history and theory of
criticism of universities. So, I thought this would be a time to put my ideas, if I had
any, into practice. But of course, I had asked the President: "What do you want?
What's the charge?" And there was a written charge, and it's written in the
documents. But I thought more revealing was a conversation that I had with the
President. I had completed my first year teaching at Grand Valley, and was about
ready to start my second, And the president had completed his first full academic
year Grand Valley. And was beginning to do his second. He had become
president about eighteen months previously. Basically, had obviously had to
learn this terrain, and the existing colleges on campus. There were two at the
time: College of Arts and Sciences, and Thomas Jefferson College; and having
grasped that, understood that then the obvious for him, too. I say it's obvious
now, looking back, was for him to look at the founding Grand Valley State
Colleges and to look to what was considered to be unique in the colleges. So, I
give him full credit for that. He first took charge of the colleges that existed and
then he very adroitly moved to begin a third college. Grand Valley apparently had
been founded to have four relatively similar size colleges. That was the founding
image twenty-five years before. Each college apparently had two or three
thousand students total of between nine and fifteen thousand students on
campus. That was the notion on the colleges were founded twenty-five years ago
now. So, he said to me: "I have two bits of advice." He said: "One of them is I
want to college that would enroll a large number of students, and then I would
also point out to you that we do have one small college here in campus. Thomas
Jefferson College." I think what he meant by that… I didn't think to inquire any
further the times. I think what he meant by that was that the College of Arts and
Sciences, at that time, enrolled something like twenty-two hundred students.
Thomas Jefferson college had perhaps two maybe three hundred students. So,
�the time two college is one of which enrolled between eighty-five ninety percent
of its number students on campus. The other college, because of its nature,
seemed unlikely that would enroll much more than three hundred students.
[Tom]
So, it seems me he was getting me a charge to have a larger college, then
Thomas Jefferson and it's possibly the college’s largest is the College of Arts and
Sciences. That in turn meant that look and see where students who have to
enroll from then try to excogitate from those factors the likely orientation of the
college. So, it seemed to me that the College of Arts and Sciences seemed
rather traditional. You could either duplicate that, or else one can attempt to
make something different. I chose to do the latter and make something
somewhat different. But yet stick to the President's charge. It was to make
something that would be different than the College of Arts and Sciences. But
make something that would also enroll a significant number of students. With that
in mind, the whole thing was my fields my students were interested in. I majored
in philosophy, teach philosophy, and since I majored in physics as an
undergraduate, and have some degrees in physics, history of science I should
say, it seemed fairly evident that the college should not focus on physical
sciences. A number of people majored in physical sciences. Very small to begin
with. They tend to be traditionally oriented and therefore one of the orientations
that some of the committee members wanted, namely, to focus on environmental
sciences seemed to me to be misdirected. I have nothing against the
environment, I enjoy environmental sciences. But the sheer fact of needing to
know, in any serious way, work in environmental sciences – you need to know
biology, geology perhaps, certainly chemistry – meant that you were going to
limit the number student who would major in fields like that. Feels like time since
we had one college [inaudible] all about the sizes which had very few majors and
those fields seem to have it and we were not in this particular area. [Inaudible]
another college I would have… would be competing for the same small pool. So
we're not being [?]. Environmental sciences, in my mind, should be the focus of
the new college. It should contain that, it seemed to me, as a program, but not as
a complete focus. Some had thought of focusing the college on the University of
Wisconsin's Green Bay which is focused on Environmental Sciences. Others had
attempted to focus the college pretty much on, as I would say, Thomas Jefferson
College had been focused. Namely imitating Evergreen College in Washington
state, as a possible way of organizing college too but it tended to be a small
college, and therefore seemed to me that that would not obey what the President
had laid down. So, the notion… once again I'm concerned about the persons and
the focus on Evergreen College, and colleges of that sort aren't developing a
person… seemed to me to be utterly and totally important and of grave concern
for anyone in our own day. Where the sense of the self is more problematic
perhaps than in previous centuries, and where the students who would come to
us would tend to have a more diffuse identity than students at more traditional
colleges. It seems to me that students come to Grand Valley as students in
�general in our around modern age do not come from a [?] background, do not
have what sociologists I think all described notions, rather they achieve their self.
[Tom]
And so it seemed that rather than having a college where one would fit in
because one's grandfather had gone there, or because one was a member of a
certain class. You would really have to have a college in which some opportunity
would be provided to assist the student to grow as a person and that the notion
of a person oriented it also cemented the notion in my mind of psychosocial
humanism. So those two things work together. However, psychosocial humanism
also borders on how one gets along with people in social context, not merely how
one develops internally. And therefore, it seemed to me that one could use this
facet to develop the person. To recognize a person's development communities.
To recognize also that communities have functions to take care of and so,
granted that the one focus or one division of the unit on Environmental Sciences.
And another concern with Social Relations, it seemed fairly evident that Social
Relations would have in generally a larger market for possible auditors than say-Environmental Sciences. However, Social Relations… there are a limited number
of jobs. Large, but a limited number of jobs for sociologist and even a
psychologist it appeared to me. But most of the jobs in our own age, and
throughout history have been concerned with business. People seem to forget
that. I happen to have degrees in history of science, and one of my specialties
was in studying Babylonian clay tablets. They're about ten to fifteen thousand
clay tablets, about as big as your hand with inscriptions on them. And everyone
remembers, whoever studies the history science, those are Babylonian clay
tablets which talk about astronomy. Or talk to some degree about how the
geometry. Really looking on the… what do they say, the Pythagorean theorem.
Square of the hypotenuse equals how many squares of the other two sides. It's a
famous tablet that shows that in algebraic form shows these triads. But, as a
matter of fact, of those ten to fifteen thousand tablets there's only about two
hundred tablets which would be called scientific. There's another hundred two
hundred tablets which should be called, oh, casual. There's this one tablet that I
remember reading where this student is writing home asking for money.
[Laughter] Fits in with what we normally think of student life. but leaving aside
those for five hundred maybe a thousand tablets which have to do with what we
would consider intellectual matters. The great plurality of the of the tablets had to
do with a simple computation. Business dealings, they were business records.
So, I'm saying in Babylonian epics, in our own epic, the tendency of society is to
have business and social concerns or service concerns attached to some sort of
records and keeping records. It seemed fairly evident then that, like it or not, the
business of America is business. As one of our former presidents said, and
therefore most of the jobs would be in business. So, I had the third and most
important part of the colleges, it seemed to me, would be in what I named
administration and information management. I like acronyms so it was AIM –
“Aim.” I had also copied this, I must say from a professor at Dartmouth College
�who later became its president, John Kemeny, a great mathematician.
[Tom]
So, it seemed to me that the largest of those three units with these administration
and information management, and that would where be where William James
College would have the largest number of those majors. I have to admit that's
one thing I had not entered my mind was to have media group but, as soon as
it’s proposed by a committee members I certainly assented. It seems to me that if
William Shakespeare were alive and writing today, he would be writing as Lucas
does or any of the cinematographers who would be writing for cinema or for
media. So those four units seemed to me to fit in a nice package. Administration
and information management being where most of the jobs would be concerned.
Those who would work in such professions would learn about how to govern
people, and how to govern themselves from such relations component. They
would learn a deeper reflection on man from their emphasis on psycho-socio
humanism. And they would also learn about the world in which they… members
by the concern for environmental science.
[Barbara]
This may be a troubling question. Did you do any marketing research as they
would be running around doing today?
[Tom]
Did I do what? Market?
[Barbara]
This came from your sense of things. Did you run out and test these notions?
That this would be where the students were.
[Tom]
Well, in in a very indirect way. One of my roommates in college is a fairly
significant, at that time, was fairly significant member of IBM Corporation. And I
consulted with him informally over the phone. I also did read the literature.
Seems like one of the easiest things to do rather than make your market
research is to read literature. Much has been printed before by persons whom we
could not afford to hire. So, I did a great deal of reading in what was written about
universities. From the beginning and then studied particularly Canadian
universities over the last twenty years. Because Canada underwent an enormous
expansion between nineteen forty-five and nineteen sixty-five with their
universities. For a very narrow base, classically oriented universities, to a much
broader set of universities that was encompassing. That we're allowing for a
person who never come to college to go to college. So, I did reading rather than
having survey done.
[Barbara]
We're going to run out of tape. We have another tape it’s just that we just don't
want to interrupt an open answer.
[Camera operator]
[Inaudible]
�[Barbara]
We have another five minutes? Okay.
[Tom]
My face was not very mobile, was it?
[Barbara]
[Inaudible] I'd like to ask. Would you say something briefly about synopticity,
which seems to have started right away.
[Tom]
About what?
[Barbara]
Synopticity?
[Tom]
Oh, yes. That was actually--I liked that very much.
[Barbara]
And then your comments as someone from the outside do you think we grew in
the right way or did we get skewed off? And then something about the courses
that were working against the success of the college. If you have any
observations on them.
[Tom]
Alright.
[Camera operator]
[Barbara]
This is not the right tripod. [indistinct mumbling]
[Inaudible] It’s not the right tripod.
[Camera operator]
Okay.
[Barbara]
So authenticity seems there from the beginning.
[Tom]
Oh, yeah. Yes, the synoptic lectures here. That was probably the third thing of
which I'm most proud in attempting to develop within James. It seemed to me
that the most difficult thing for a regional college is how to keep the faculty active.
And it's for that reason I designed the synoptic program. The synoptic program I
envision would be rather similar to actually what William James had done. In the
gifted lecture series, that were later titled, “The Variety of Religious Experience.”
A way to bring to a… to Edinburgh a matter of fact, in James' case. To bring to a
campus a visiting dignitary who it in ten twelve days open up his entire mind and
give you his view of the universe. And I call them synoptic lectures. They would
take place here at Grand Valley. I recognize them as highly significant to the
students. I think the most important thing you can do for students to give them a
view of the universe. That it allows people to tie together in some sort of a
fashion. The diverse notions they have and to make an intellectual synthesis to
the degree they have as well. About their entire status, and the entire stance to
the universe. But I really thought of it is crucially important for the faculty. Grand
Valley State College is in the middle of the peninsula. Grand Rapids is a good
�size city, but it's not a metropolis.
[Tom]
It doesn't have the resources available to it as Chicago, or New York, or Detroit.
And so, to me, it seemed to be crucial to keep the faculty active; to have a variety
of persons from the faculty over a period of years would pick. As becoming some
master teacher in their field to come to campus and to enunciate to students at a
common level, not a technical level. The great ideas the faculty had. And I was
following a man named Jerome Bruner. A good cognitive psychologist. In fact, he
was one of the synoptic lecturers I had invited, as well Jean Piaget, who said
that: "One can always explain, in a decent way, any idea at a level that would be
capable of being understood by a particular audience.” So, that was the whole
notion of a synoptic lecture: to give us a view of the universe for the students, but
also to give the faculty chance to plan ahead for the great mind that they would
consider dominant in that field. Plan ahead for that person visit to initiate students
in that, and of course keep the faculty active. So, in a sense, I was looking to the
faculty. Students come and go after four years. But the faculty can be here for
twenty years. And it could easily turn over old ideas many times, unless one had
stimuli from such great minds. Such as Jean Piaget, or a person like that.
[Barbara]
Would you comment on your observation from the outside that the development
of our college…
[Tom]
Well, I guess, I did stay outside William James College. I tried to start off as best
I could, you know with the committee. We did the best we could to get it going.
And then I thought once you hire faculty, let the faculty do what they considered
best. And obviously the fact that they proceeded in the certain direction. I think I
would express concern. Seemed to me that the faculty either did not understand
or did not pay attention to what President Lubbers said and asked in his first
year. Namely that it would be a large college, and that it would enroll a wide
variety of students in a broad number of fields. It seemed to me that the college
never put the personnel into any administration information management
program that the numbers of students would justify. I think when the faculty
decided for whatever reason, probably very good reasons – I was not a member
of the committees at the side of these – that they would not grow exponentially.
But rather they would only replicate. I think that was crucial.
�
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
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
Oral History
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GV016-16_GVSU_09_Cunningham
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Cunningham, Tom
Date
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1984
Title
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Tom Cunningham interview (1 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Tom Cunningham 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. Dr. Thomas Cunningham was a faculty member of William James College and longtime GVSU professor who was credited with heading the WJC Planning Task Force that founded the college. In this interview, Tom discusses the origin of the name "William James College" and how the character of the new college was created. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Tom Cunningham.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Lectures and lecturing
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a35c2d05aa6a1750dc3ab9311882bdc3.mp4
f5d4d2533eda1e30b2afc769d9ff0676
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/80acad654035dba4f8c8b2edaa8fc212.pdf
1a9a17cd2107f484430a80c8fc5540fb
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Tom Cunningham
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 2
[Barbara]
Where were we? We were talking about growing...
[Tom]
Oh yes, I gather it was a crucial decision sometime in the second and third year
of William James College faculty. Where they decided not to grow exponentially,
you know, for a variety of reasons. They wanted to get to know each other. Each
member of the faculty. But I think it was an unfortunate decision. At the time
Grand Valley as in whole and in general was growing. And there's a certain
number of faculty positions that are open when you're growing that become
closed by the times. Not to grab hold of those faculty positions, for whatever
good reason, means they are going to be closed to you later. And you will not
have those choices to make later. So, it seemed to me that the faculty was
deciding that they would be of a certain size and no bigger, and that's
permissible. But it also meant that you had one college that continue to grow,
College of Arts and Sciences, which would continue to have something like
eighty/ninety percent of the of the students on campus. And therefore, all the
other colleges, now two of them and then the third to start later, would define
themselves in the shadow of that much larger college. Whereas the foundation
documents of Grand Valley and the wish of the President was that you would
have a number of colleges, each the same size. You can do the things if you are
the same size. I looked to Oxford and Oxford University, where you have all your
college and you're a Trinity College… they're pretty much the same size. The
Trinity does not step over [inaudible]. They're members of a larger unit and they
get service to the university. Each doing it in its own particular fashion. I don't
think that ever took place here at Grand Valley, because the College of Arts and
Sciences just ballooned. Whereas the other colleges I had to find themselves to
be smaller for variety a of reasons, and I think that's an unfortunate. I think that
eventually assisted in the demise of William James College.
[Barbara]
As we're on this topic, can you comment further on some of the reasons why the
school had to be closed after only eleven years.
[Tom]
I don't know whether it had to be closed or not. But I do think that… why would it
close? I suppose because most of the functions that it had been doing and then
taken over by other units. It seems to me that William James was on its slippery
slope when it gave up the Administration and Information Management program.
I had never thought about computers, personal computers notion. I had thought
of mainframes as John Kemeny at Dartmouth is associated with twenty-five
�years ago. If I hadn't really known about the personal computers and could
predict that, I would have invested my money and Apple computers and be a
millionaire and not be here. But it was evident that the administration information
management was a high growth potential.
[Tom]
For one reason or another it never achieved that here in William James College,
and indeed, William James College allowed the computer personnel to be
removed from it. That to me was already an indication that it was in its death
throes. I think after that simply a matter of time. Why did it end? One can always
look for scapegoats. There is a conspiratorial view history, with which I'm not in
agreement, which says all of my problems are outside made. And even Freud
knew that most of our problems are within me. And at James you would say that,
too, I think. I do think that institutions survive – even if they're unpopular – if they
perform a function. Nobody likes a prison. Not the prisoners, not even the people
that work in the prisons. And certainly not the people that live next to prisons.
Prisons endure because they perform a socially useful function. I think William
James College, in the certain sense, died because it ceased to do that. Or at
least deceased to do that in a unique fashion or in any cost-effective fashion. I
don't have the data on cost effectiveness but one could look to that it seems to
me. What I do think in the decision not to grow made it evident that William
James would define itself in terms of a counter cultural college. In other words, it
would look to and react against the larger college on campus. Whereas it
certainly had the opportunity to be as large as the largest of colleges. So, I think
in the great refusal it sealed its own fate.
[Barbara]
Many years ago you had certain… you did readings, and you had a philosophy
on what would be important to found a college. Now, it's 1985. Would you do it
the same way with the same rank order of importance to your decisions, or what
would you do differently now?
[Tom]
Well, it does seem to me that college is still must fill a socially and personally
useful task, and I think the tasks that were laid out at William James, however
imperfectly, addressed or were attempting to address those issues. I do think that
every agent, I mention from Babylonian age on, does look to service type jobs,
does look to careers, I would say, in a variety of functions. In a variety of
hierarchy, see. Careers in business, careers in psychology or sociology or
whatever. I do think most of the documents I wrote to William James would be
useful in assisting and founding any college. And I think that would be particularly
useful in founding a college in our own day. One that would look to assisting. For
example, that in Administration and Information Management. That was where
most of the jobs would be for the next century. As far as any data showed.
University of Texas at Austin is putting something like fifteen [inaudible]
professors. A million-dollar chairs exactly in information management. Not that
everyone who goes and gets a degree in information management will become a
�computer specialist. But rather they will use computers. I think computers, which
is simply another word for handling information, is really where the growth of
American universities will be in the next century.
[Barbara]
What about the question of community though, and preparing this tape? What I
get from our alums is a passionate attachment to this college. Because it fulfilled
something that wasn't available to let most run the society. That's gone from
Grand Valley, is it not? Can you imagine another college being founded in the
near future? A small college that has this sense of community?
[Tom]
I don't know, I doubt it. I don't know why community has to be founded in a
college-wide unit. I do know, for example, our geology majors in the College of
Arts and Sciences in Grand Valley’s college now have always been closely knit. I
think they're closely knit because their experiences on the digs. Our anthropology
and our geology majors particularly are closely knit. I think something similar
happens to our nursing group. Granted that there is attention there because only
a certain number of spots are allowed for junior and senior years. But in anyone
who shares an intense educational experience is an opportunity for community. I
do think some of the community aspects maybe a function of the faculty meeting
community more than students do. I think faculty come at a certain age, and you
can go through community experiences at a certain number of times. But after
all, if you're a normal faculty member you have your own family and that's where
you will receive most of your community inputs. I do think that faculty require
close interaction with students. I think that happens with majors, but I think the
tragedy of American education in general, seems to me, is that the freshmen and
sophomores are ignored, and the juniors and seniors majors in the field are
prized. I think the inverse should be true. Freshman should be intensely worked
with, that is where you develop community. And then the sophomores and
juniors, they're around and they're your resources to talking to other freshmen.
And I think that's what William James and smaller colleges tend to do. They have
an intense experience with freshman students and that endures over the four
years. I think in having large lecture courses in other colleges, for example, and
now in Grand Valley in general. That sense, that opportunity for community is
lost. So, I would say have freshman seminars, or perhaps even seminars
directed to persons who might major in particular field as a freshman or plan on
majoring. And you would have a community experience that could grow.
[Barbara]
Thank you. [Inaudible] I am out of questions, but I am not out of tape. Is there
something else you would like to tell us?
[Tom]
No, I think you asked the basic questions. Namely how did it start. What
occurred.
[Barbara]
I guess I do have one more question. Just something that doesn't feel real to me.
�Lubbers asked you to do this. You say you did a lot of reading, but that cannot be
the whole answer. How did you come up with this much this fast?
[Tom]
I worked… Isaac Newton was asked one day how he thought about gravity. And
he said how he discovered the formula about gravity. He said by thinking on it
[Latin?] day and night. I was working eighteen / nineteen hours a day for a period
of three months. I have a picture of my newborn son who's born in September
tenth, nineteen seventy. And he was lying on my chest. In fact, this jacket I wore
when I interviewed with the President. I wore it. Well, my interview with the
President (when he gave me those directions about the schools). Tommy was
lying on my chest, and I was just sleeping between two o'clock feeding and six
o'clock when I would get up. But I had been working steadily. I thought about
education for forty-years. Twenty-years as a college student and university
student. And it was a chance to put into practice all of my ideas. And I wrote
them up because they were all of my ideas. I would also like to point out that
Saint Augustine, someplace or other, says that most skills are learned in a short
time when you're young or not at all. And I guess I wrote this material in a short
time because I thought about it at great length under a period of many years.
[Barbara]
Quickly, what are your various educational experiences?
[Tom]
Three years ago I graduated law school. That was my ninth academic degree. I
had studied physics as an undergraduate after serving in the United States Navy
and Notre Dame. And, then I studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood and
obtain six of my degrees. Three in philosophy, and three in theology. I picked up
a doctorate degree in history science (medieval science) at the University of
Wisconsin. And I think the degree I liked best of all is the master’s degree I
obtained in education - history, theory, and criticism. That's basically what I do at
William James College, was to lay out what I thought was important.
[Barbara]
Where is that master’s from?
[Tom]
From the University of Wisconsin.
[Barbara]
Wisconsin? Okay.
[Tom]
I did that University. One of the ways in which you see how ideas and science
take root, is to see how they can transfer into a curriculum. In other words, Isaac
Newton discovers gravity. How long does it take to get into a curriculum? That's
what I did. That's why I majored in history, that's why I took a master’s in
educational history.
[Barbara]
Okay.
�[Tom]
That didn't hurt it all. [Laughter]
[Barbara]
Thank you so much. That was very interesting.
�
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
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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_10_Cunningham
Creator
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Cunningham, Tom
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
Tom Cunningham interview (2 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Tom Cunningham 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. Dr. Thomas Cunningham was a faculty member of William James College and longtime GVSU professor who was credited with heading the WJC Planning Task Force that founded the college. In this interview, Tom discusses the growth of William James College and how it played a role in the closing of the college after eleven years. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Tom Cunningham.
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
College administrators
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
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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