1 24 66 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/eaf285fef8bbaaa63efe8e2f5de2cc8e.mp4 f65a858fd0951d1719f16ccf0f662757 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7f3e58bdae16743c8c0999882c013395.pdf 81d5000bf6060fa85b01d69f5c221445 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 8 of 8 [Barbara] The question is: what is the quality of the education that we were giving students? [Tinsley] Okay, ready for me to go on that? [Barbara] Yep, anytime. [Tinsley] Okay. The issue of quality was a real one during the life of the college. I think looking back, I would have to say that the quality of what we did was variable. For the good students, what we gave them was breathtakingly good, I think. We gave them access to superb faculty. We gave them access to sort of a panoply of resources that they would not have gotten in a conventional undergraduate education. The students that were less good could skate and that was a problem – and I think we did have some students skate. It seems to me that the issue of quality was very tied into the real ethos in the college on individual energy and individual rights. I think the college always leaned towards wanting the individual to express himself or herself. It was difficult in the college to get a clear sense of institutional norms; at least, those norms could not be imposed easily by administrators. They needed to develop in kind of a more organic fashion and I think that was a problem sometimes. For example, in terms of our beliefs about appropriate curriculum, appropriate grading standards, and the like. As the years went on, I think we had a lot more homogeneity about those things. But part of what I did as Dean was endlessly negotiate with faculty. There was no sense that I had any divine right to set standards or, indeed, to set policy. It was a matter of endless negotiation in a milieu where, as I said earlier, the ethos was on the individual's right rather than the institution’s necessity. Looking back, I guess, as Dean of the College, if there is an area where I should have paid more attention, it is… no, let me stop that and you come back to this, okay. [Barbara] Let me change the shot, then you can do it. That's fine. [Tinsley] As the college matured, we began to get a curriculum we were pretty comfortable with. I think there were still, probably, some issues around supervision of internships and independent studies. There were still some course titles that remained as symbolic battles between the faculty and the administration. I think in another two, three, four years we would probably have been on a cycle of �independent curricular reviews with outside consultants. In the end, in terms of the curriculum itself, I felt very good about it. I felt it was a strong curriculum. In terms of the standards of the college, in terms of what happened to individual students, I think we probably always let students skate a bit too much. I think we paid for that very heavily. [Barbara] Say that last sentence again because I screwed up. So just the last sentence: "In the end..." is a good time to start. [Tinsley] In the end… about the curriculum? [Barbara] No, just in the end about individual students. [Tinsley] In the end, I think we always erred a bit on the side of putting out a hand to individual students to help them through. And sometimes, in some places in the college, we did that too much; we weren't tough enough. We paid for that, I think, very, very heavily. That's something I won't do again; it was too costly for the college. [Barbara] Finito? [Tinsley] Finito. [Barbara] Good. [Tinsley] I guess the last thing I'd like to say about the college – after having done some thinking about it in connection with this taping – seems to me that most of us, or all of us, brought to the college a desire that our work have real meaning; that our work bring meaning into our lives; that our work perhaps be the significant source of meaning in our lives. We wanted a kind of a texture in our work; a kind of depth in our work. Clearly not some kind of situation where we did our work and did home in our real lives outside of work. Our real lives – our most important lives – were in our work in the college. Sometimes this provided some stress and strain. We made demands that our work give meaning that I think aren't very unusual in American work life. And I think for most of us, the experience of having the college no longer present is that it's forced us to say: "In whatever work life I'm in now, how can I make it have that kind of meaning for me?" That's certainly true for me. One of the things that is very interesting to me as I look at what the faculty are doing now – and because of my position, I knew the faculty better than I knew most students – it seems to me that there's almost a little explosion of good work going on: research, writing, work products coming out of people that were on the William James faculty or interesting jobs. Almost as if some of our energy that was being used to make the college work is going right into creative work products. And I see that as coming out of this desire to find �meaning in one's work that I think is so important and that I think was really critical to us at the college. Sorry I trailed off on that. [Barbara] [Laughter] I'm tempted, I won't do it, I'm tempted… � 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_33_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (8 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the quality of education at William James College and how the experience brought meaning to the lives of those involved. This interview is part 8 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education College administrators Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4082a53062701be1ef0f139a40d64be7.mp4 6bf51067c429ce5698da83268a6142b9 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2126441a7c7ddbae8e0ccd5ab59d2336.pdf 3bf07d5bad3b1264044f6441d7f2d581 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 7 of 8 [Barbara] Oh, I always ask you to do it when the cameras are warming up. [Tinsley] Alright. Okay, let’s see a piece of white paper in front of my… [Barbara] Okay, it’s all wound up. It's not in really great shape, truth be told. I kept it, though, for some reason… must have something I'm supposed to do. [Tinsley] Yeah, you’re supposed to tell them how to allocate your TIAA and your CREF. [Barbara] Oh yes, I think I'll just let it set. Thank you. I didn't really plan on that saving me anyway. Alright, we are almost good. Best thing about your experience at James? Is that a meaningful question? [Tinsley] Oh, I think it is. It's like a psych quiz question, but, yeah, the best thing about it is that it had meaning – it really had meaning – and it was important. You felt like you were using your life for something useful. I've always liked Marge Piercy's poem "To Be of Use." And you felt like, at James, you weren't just treading water, you were doing something very, very useful. And that was the best thing about it. And you were also doing it in the company of like-minded people who were friends, and intimates, and you really had a family that you were doing it with. So, I think those two things were the best. We weren't the only institution that was doing this; there were other colleges like us. FIPSE, the grantmaking agency in Washington, was very much like us. A lot of little enclaves of people doing this kind of work and it seemed real and important. [Barbara] If you… [Tinsley] And it was! Sorry. [Barbara] I'm being a bad interviewer. I'm really listening to you. I am listening to you, but I was thinking of the next question. Which is: if you had to sum up the nature of William James College in just one sentence, what would it be? [Tinsley] Well, I actually frequently did have to sum up the nature of William James College in just one sentence for a variety of public relations and mission definition purposes. But I don't remember any of the sentences and I'm sure �none of them were very real. William James was a place where people talked about real things and did real work, and really loved each other. [Barbara] No two people have said anything resembling the same thing. They just go with the strength of the college and its weakness. And no one has said “synoptic” either. [Laughter] [Barbara] Okay, there is one question around in my head and it’s something that I wrote down in the beginning. It has to do with power, and you sort of talked about it when you talked about CAS and all that sort of stuff. Couldn't have we been more political? Even though we were small, dammit, some small things survive because they are so political, because they do their own PR so as well. Do you have any feelings about that? [Tinsley] Well, let me think about it. I am myself a structuralist, and I believe the structure of Grand Valley – not the structure of William James – worked against us. In the back of my head is the nagging thought: "Suppose we really had been more like them?" Because I don't think you can fudge that, because you can't go around pretending to be like somebody when you're really not. Suppose we're really more like them, and our values, and what we want to do, but our values were sort of more like theirs, would it have helped? My honest answer is no, it probably wouldn't have. Because, structurally, we just had a very difficult situation to deal with. But that's from my perspective. I sure did everything I could. And so, you know, maybe it's in my interest to not be able to think of anything else that could have happened. [Barbara] Richard talks about a siege mentality being very useful to us, energizing us. To go out more would have destroyed some of the energy that helped us work as well together as we did. [Tinsley] Yeah, I don't think going out more on the Grand Valley campus would've helped us a lot. I really don't. Because it would've been that painful work of trying to make friends with CAS. And they didn't really want… it takes two to make friends, it really does. If we would've been able to get outside into the local community even more than we did – and we did a lot – that might have helped. [Barbara] Do you want to do it again, quickly, the story about… the story happened because you were talking about how we could not… how this could not work, how we were at a disadvantage. One example was losing computers, and you made that bit by the anecdote of the day we lost computers. And if you want to retell it using euphemisms, fine by me. [Laughter] [Tinsley] [Laughter] I don't think so, the point of the story comes from the cast of �characters. But I will trust you not to use it on the tape. [Barbara] What about first part, when you talk about them being from Holland? Is that okay? [Tinsley] I think. [Barbara] I think so, too. [Tinsley] I think it’s okay. [Barbara] Is there anything to say here? [Inaudible] [Tinsley] Oh golly, well there probably is, but I can't think of it at moment. [Barbara] It’s tiring at this point. [Tinsley] It is, it is tiring. No, I mean I would like to talk on about it for another ten hours, but I don't have anything in particular at the moment. � 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_32_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (7 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the highlights of her experience at William James College and the overall nature of the college consisting of community and conversation. This interview is part 7 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education College administrators Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bb6b0043b473fdc2973378dc4ed2ac99.mp4 5f271fddab80448de0ebc486388ae64a https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a00bd1f1e28160b998aaa9f5aeb65626.pdf d016e24b77f01d78e6d14cf11831bdeb PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 6 of 8 [Barbara] Come on, camera! There you go. Nope, not yet. Sorry. I’m still getting in there, so I don’t have your finger [in the shot] and you have an incorrect white balance. Hey, you didn’t do it! There it goes. Alright. We’re actually rolling. We can go any time. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] We were talking about the legacy of the college as a partially conservative... [Tinsley] Okay. The legacy of the college… that's a really broad question. And I guess what I'd say about that is that we were very early strugglers with some things that now need to be struggled with less and are just a very normal part of the college scene. The whole issue of professional programs, for example, we struggled hard over that, both intellectually and personally within our college community. And we were dealing with professional programs, I think, long before they became such a very important feature of collegiate life. Nowadays it's a very rare student who majors in anything other than a professional program. I think we struggled with some issues around how you do liberal education in a professional program context. I think we came to some really good solutions to that issue. And that, you know, probably that hasn't filtered out as much into the larger community as I wish it would. I think there are a lot of articles to be written there, if everybody's looking for articles to write about the college. Because ninety percent of the students who go to college major in professional programs now. So, I think that's important. I think, for students, a lot of the things that we wanted to do for students and with students exist in very mainstream colleges. You know, all the way from independent study, to at least some credit no credit grading, to certainly internships, to stress on projects related to community needs. A lot of stuff that was very innovative when we did it is not particularly innovative now and is pretty much an accepted thing now. So, I think we were sort of the first wave of a lot of new stuff that was coming into higher education. That kind of legacy certainly remains; what doesn't remain is a space, you know, a local habitation in the name; a place where you can go to get something. I'm not sure I how want to put this. Where you can go, where you don't have to worry about what the meaning… I'm literally going to take this answer again. Let me think about it a second. I've talked to some of the William James faculty the last year or so, talked to Richard, to Margaret Proctor, to Barry. Barry, I think it was, �has talked in an interesting way about what it means that the William James faculty are mainstreamed now and they're part of the ordinary units at Grand Valley. And they haven't just disappeared into those units. I mean, they have begun, maybe this is grandiose, but they have begun a little bit to transform the settings that they're in. I know, you know, some of the William James faculty are doing that in the places where they are at Grand Valley. And what Barry said about that was: "Well, you know, as long as we had each other to talk to you, we didn't really have to talk to the other faculty." And we didn't very much. But the place was poorer because we didn't. And that's right. So, there is some sense in which I think Grand Valley as a whole is enriched by having William James faculty in the mainstream. It's the same argument you might have if you were talking about women's studies, you know. [Tinsley] To what extent do you want to have a special place that women can go and totally deal with their own issues and one another, and deal with women's courses? And to what extent do you want to say every course in the university should contain topics of particular relevance to women and should address its subject matter from the perspective of the new scholarship on women. What's missing is that there is no place you can go to now where you go there, and you know that all the people there share your values, and care about the same kinds of things that you care about, and want to… [Barbara] Okay, [inaudible] we'll use the rest but [inaudible]. Okay? [Tinsley] Okay. No place you can really go where you know that everybody shares your values and cares about what you care about. And I think having that space is really important to our students and to our faculty. [Barbara] Why? [Tinsley] One answer is because it was there, and it was safe, and we didn't have to create it every day. You had it. It gave you some identity. You didn't have to always be creating it at all the time. It was a place where you could go, and it gave you some identity because you shape it and it shapes you. [Barbara] But Barry said, in his interview, that… you know, he very much believes in this notion of moving out into the mainstream, and that its working, and that in his classes that he is still teaching in a Jamesian way. But he said: "Of course, I don't know how long it's going to last. I don't know how long my energy can last since it's not being infused anymore." [Tinsley] Yeah. [Barbara] Because that's what the places does. �[Tinsley] Yeah. If you concentrate the energy there and concentrate the people there, you can go deeper, and you can replenish it. And that's what's missing because the space isn't there. And I suppose all of us are looking to find some other similar kinds of space out in our lives. [Barbara] Including the students? [Tinsley] Yeah. [Barbara] Would you put this in personal terms now. What does it mean to personally spend the eight years you did, working very hard? [Tinsley] Well, I suppose… let me say what it meant to me professionally really first, rather than talking first about what it meant personally. I went from William James to the state… stop. Let me think about this another minute. I don't want to, you know, falsely romanticize the period at William James; although, I personally do believe it was a kind of Camelot. I do know that when I did go back and do administrative work, I felt very strongly that I wasn't ready to go back to another campus. I couldn't give my heart to another campus in the same way. And so, I took a job in the central office of the state university system. And two things seem important to me that I want to say. In Minnesota, I've been in a very mainstream administrative situation. I work with seven separate state universities, with their vice presidents, with their presidents, with strategic planning, with academic policy. The people in that system are very good. They are very competent, professionally. Minnesota, I would guess, is one of the very advanced states in the union, in terms of not only its support for higher education, but the professionalism with which their system is managed. And what I've learned is that, although I work with an incredibly competent professional people, professional values are not enough. The change for me was growing from a place where, I mean heaven knows we did want to be competent, but there was a real value beyond competence. There was a reason you wanted to be competent. There was a reason you were doing what you were doing. So, by the contrast that existed at William James, simply, the value of professional competence is not enough. It doesn't keep you warm at night. It's too thin. I'm on my way to go to Glassboro State College in New Jersey and I 'm now ready to be back on the campus, and I am just really excited about going back to campus, and, you know, and having a substantial leadership and management role on a new campus now. But here's what I asked myself: I say, at William James, everybody knew the meaning of what they were doing, so you could stand up and so recite the litany, or you could have an external person to come in and recite the litany and say this is what's important about what we're doing, this is why it's important to work this hard, and this is why we're not cynical. Because here's why we're doing what we're doing, and we really care about it. I go to �Glassboro and I say, you know, what does the vice president do? The vice president has got to find that thing that the institution is doing that's important and put that in the public space and say: "This is what we're doing, and this is important, and it's important that we're doing it and we're doing it well." And I don't find it really easy to look at a Glassboro or at the state colleges in Minnesota and say: "Here's what I can say about that. Here's why it's important in the mid nineteen-eighties to be doing this." And I think that's a problem that we are dealing with in higher education. It's hard to talk about why we're doing what we're doing and why it's so important. And it's hard to get that into the public space. [Tinsley] I remember when the colleges were about to be dissolved, and Robert said: "The problem is that it's not that I don't want to work in CAS, I mean all those people are fine, but I've got to have something I can believe in. I just can't work with people who are cynical or who are apathetic." And so, what I'm saying is there was no cynicism, or very little, or little apathy at William James. And how do you find in a mainstream institution… how do you find, sort of, what you hang your hat on for the meaning of it. And I think that's the question that we answered at William James. And that's the question I want to try to answer now at a more mainstream institution. I don't think finding that answers is going to be just real, real easy. [Barbara] This is going off from that answer what we thought was important in James and the reason that we would be energizing and uniting the kind of notions that we had. Were they specific to the time? Are they not specific now? Why can't you just take those notions to your new job? [Tinsley] No, they're not; they are specific to the time and let me talk a little bit about that because I have thought a lot about this and I really believe it. In the midseventies, the agenda of the society was access and new opportunities. And it was very important to open higher education up to women, and black people, and minorities of all kinds, and older students, and people that hadn't been to college before. And we put a lot of stress on that. And William James came out of that milieu and that was very important to us. That is not a value in nineteen eighty-five. In nineteen eighty-five, we talk about quality which is – depending on how you look at it – is either a positive or negative from my perspective. I think there is some genuinely good work being done under the rubric of upgrading quality, but there's also some genuinely reactionary stuff being done under that rubric. And the agenda for the institution is the economic development of its region, science, and technology. The issues that the institutions are dealing with are very different. In the mid-seventies, we had the federal government really pushing access, really putting money into social services. Now we have science, and math, and technology. I think there's no reason that we can't relate to this �new agenda. But we haven't really thought about what it means for the values we had in the seventies. So, I think the times are very, very different. And I think that's why it's hard to find the spine of the institution in the eighties. I mean that's what I learned from dealing with seven mainstream institutions in Minnesota and the state legislature. [Barbara] Because my experience… I'm blinking again. My experience… � 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_31_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (6 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the legacy of William James College and the importance of having a community with shared values, in addition to the importance of keeping the William James philosophy alive. This interview is part 6 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education College administrators Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/21006ae57ddf7f3e23506b884642356e.mp4 f37ac2cb1e5e843082adab1b0311588d https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7e428a4e09dbdc4c76a863dedfae8083.pdf 558a57f961c0488dfb7f959fe7009be4 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 5 of 8 [Barbara] It’s meant to warm up [the camera]. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] Okay. We are balanced. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] When you left… [Tinsley] When I left… [Barbara] Yeah. Did you think that we would…how long did you think we would survive? [Tinsley] When I left, I didn't think the college would not survive, but I thought it was problematic. And the reason I thought that is that the college was getting smaller. We were finding it more difficult to hold onto programs. I started thinking about leaving in seventy-nine, actually the end of seventy-eight, and left in the summer of nineteen eighty. And I left for two reasons. The compelling reason was I needed a rest. I needed to find out who I was when I wasn't being the Dean. If I could've gotten a year’s sabbatical, I probably would have stayed. And I discussed that with Glenn and while he was not opposed to a sabbatical, he felt that he couldn't spare the Dean for more than three months. And there was some reason to that. In any case, I decided I would simply move it on. Another thing in my thinking about that was that I did not see how Grand Valley could continue to put the kind of money into administrative salaries it was putting into to run the collegiate structure. I thought that the collegiate structure was getting marginal from a financial perspective. If you think about what it cost to have at William James, a Dean. We had – for most of our time – an Assistant Dean at least part time. We ran the Records Office – Hank Mei's operation. We put money, you know, modest amounts of money into Student Services – that was a lot of overhead. If you counted that up that was probably a hundred thousand dollars a year in the administration of William James College. We were smaller than many departments. I mean, we were twenty-two, twenty-four faculty. If I looked at Grand Valley – and you remember at Grand Valley at its peak was at six collegiate units and by the time it ended was at four – that’s a lot of salaries and �administrative overhead and that made me nervous. So, I thought that was problematic about the college's survival and I was just tired. I thought I needed to do something else. It's, you know, it was a long… I was Dean, what, eight years, I guess. And that's a number of years of working very hard and cheerleading so I needed a rest. When I left, I said to myself: "This is a window in the college’s history. Right at this moment, I perceive us as very secure, nothing is threatening us. It is time for me to leave and this is a good moment to leave," because I didn't want to close the college – that was last thing I wanted to do. And so that’s kind of why I decided to leave and when I decided to leave. [Tinsley] And at the time I decided to leave, I did not think we were in any danger, though I was well aware of what the administration of those collegiate units was costing. And I was also, by the way, well aware - and I haven't said this on this tape - you know, if you think about it, the Deans of the two alternative colleges were women. Women were pretty well represented at Grand Valley during the time I was there. But we were running the alternative colleges and I said, and I remember saying this, you know: "When we choose the next Dean, we have to choose someone who's more like them. We have to try to get this embedded in Grand Valley." So, I was not, you know, looking for another woman. I was hoping that the college would get someone who could maybe do a better job than I had of getting the college really embedded in the Grand Valley social structure. And those were my thoughts as I left. [Barbara] It occurs to me that it in your last answer, you said there were two levels of administration and you talked about Bruce Loessin. What kind of feedback did you get from the other level? [Tinsley] You mean from Glenn or from Don. [Barbara] I don't know. [Tinsley] Oh, the second… once we started reporting to Glenn, I talked about getting feedback about programs. Glenn certainly never said anything to me to suggest anything other than he supported William James and he was working very hard to understand William James. He found a lot of it incomprehensible, but I believe he did work to understand it. And I believe as long as he thought it was supportable, he worked to support it. That's not a very good answer. [Barbara] Okay, I understand. I was envisioning Lubbers. [Tinsley] Yeah. Let me talk a little bit about… you know, some question like: were there any major threats to the college or… [Barbara] Yeah, what were they? �[Tinsley] You’ll remember that towards the end of the seventies, things starting to get – financially – really tough in Michigan. And Grand Valley had to go through a retrenchment and reallocation, and I believe that happened in seventy-nine. And that was the first serious and significant threat to the college. And that one, we came out of okay. And I guess I'd like to talk a little bit about that because I don't think many colleges could handle that situation the way that we did. [Tinsley] The deans were not involved in making the decision to reduce and reallocate; that was done at the level above us. We were simply brought together and told Grand Valley was going to reduce and reallocate; that it was probably going to cut Thomas Jefferson and that we had to prepare budgets. Well let me go back because I want to get this accurate. I'm going to pick that up again. The deans were brought together and told that Grand Valley was looking at a shortfall of money that we were going to reduce and reallocate. And we were given targets. We were given, I think, three levels of targets for cutting: the deepest, the middle, and the lightest. And we were told to go home and figure out how to do that. To go home to our college. Go home, it sounds like home, we go home and figure out how we do that and come back prepared to meet those three levels of cuts. And also, to figure out where the new money would be reallocated. The family obviously didn't want to do that. I mean that is a very painful thing to do. But when I went back to William James, and I remember that afternoon because I went back on a Friday afternoon to say: "The news is we’re going to have to reduce and reallocate; here are the levels we have to shoot for." I said, "How do you want to do this? If you like, I'll just do it. If you like, you can. I am open to suggestions; we'll do this any way you want to." And the faculty… it wasn't a council meeting; it was just the faculty. We didn't take any votes, people just said: "Look Adrian, let's make a committee of people that we all agree we trust and then you guys just do it and come back and tell us what you've done, and we'll tell you if it's okay." So, a committee was made of Robert and Barry and Kathleen. The next morning at five in morning, the phone rang and my father was dead. So, he died literally the next morning. And that committee came over and we sat around my dining room table before I flew off to my father's funeral, figuring out how to do this. And then that committee just sat down and figured out, you know, what we could do and what they could live with. And we brought it back to the college and nobody fetched, and nobody screamed, nobody said: "Kill the administration." Everybody just said: "Well, you folks have done the best you could, thanks." I was really amazed. [Barbara] What percentage cut did we lose? [Tinsley] I can't remember, but it was deep. It required a retrenching. I think in the end three faculty. It was not clear if it was going to be five, four, or three, and my memory is it in the end was three now. It wasn't clear, at that point, whether the �cuts in Thomas Jefferson were going to be so deep that the college was going to die as a result. And we had one meeting that was sort of the last critical incident of my watch, as it were. We were all given to these nautical and military metaphors. But I do think of it as my watch, and it was the last critical incident, and I'm rather proud of it so I guess I want to tell it on this case. [Tinsley] The deans were all brought together in the Dean’s conference room and we simply were to go around the table and talk about how we'd like to meet the budget shortfall, and so I presented our plan, everybody did. It was very clear that the senior administrators wanted to deal with the problem by merging Thomas Jefferson and William James. And they thought that would take two units, both of whom we're getting so small that they might be marginal, and perhaps give them enough substance to be able to survive as a joint unit. I thought that would be an absolute disaster. Just an absolute disaster. I thought that although, indeed, the two of us we're both alternative colleges, and we both had women deans, that didn't mean our operating philosophy is… our ideologies as colleges were just so different. I could not see anything positive would come of that. And I knew that it rested on me to prevent that from happening right that moment. And I can remember taking a deep breath and remembering, and knowing I had to get on my feet. I had to somehow get some height in the room and to be able to speak with the kind of authority I wanted to speak with. And there was a folding blackboard in that conference room which was closed and I can remember getting up and very slowly walking to that thing, opening it up and getting a piece of chalk and beginning to draw diagrams on the blackboard. And I have no idea what I drew, but I was trying to get myself, you know, organized, to make the pitch to show how different we were. So, I drew these diagrams and delivered a little lecture about the differences between the two colleges. And maybe talked for ten minutes, you know, as compellingly as I remember going about anything. And when I finished there was a long silence. Nobody said anything for about a minute and then Doug Kindschi – and I will be grateful to him for this to this day – said: "You know, that's right. William James and Thomas Jefferson are very different and if we put them together, we'll likely lose what's good in William James." And that was it, you know, and then they passed on to other topics. So things were tense during that last… that reduction. And then, of course, there were further reductions to be had after Forrest had come on board as Dean. So [Inaudible] started getting really tough in seventy-eight and seventynine. [Barbara] And that's the… you said, plural, the threats, buts that's what they did? [Tinsley] That was the most compelling one that I had to deal with. [Barbara] What about hostility from CAS all along, did we feel it? Did you feel it? �[Tinsley] Oh sure, sure, it was a real pain. I didn't feel it from my colleagues because, you know, they weren't allowed to for one thing. And also, it was simply we were at a level where we were kind of above that. But for the faculty it was very tough because there was that constant grinding: "You're different, you're not as good. We won't play with you. We don't have to. We're traditional, we're good." And it was so ironic because our faculty was one of the finest in the country. I mean, we didn't come from Michigan, we came from all over the United States. And we had superb degrees from superb schools. And we had to put up with this kind of "Well you're not good enough for us to let you, you know." We took all of CAS's courses for credit. But CAS was always very picky. "Well, we might not take that, it might not be up to our high standards." And so that was a constant problem for us; and it's too bad. And it happens in all kinds of places that try to do this kind of thing. [Barbara] That's true. What would it have taken for us to survive? [Tinsley] Well, I don't think we could've survived. And I have really given that a lot of thought, obviously, because I've had to think: "Is there something I could have done that would've made a difference for us." And here's why I don't think we could've survived. It wasn't financial; although, as I indicated earlier, it was very expensive to have four, or five, or six different deans. That was a problem, but the reason we didn't survive wasn't because of money. And I think that was clear when Grand Valley reorganized itself into schools or colleges. They didn't leave faculty off, at that point, because the issue wasn't financial. The issue was twofold. One, and they're both important, but the first issue was Grand Valley was always fighting with itself. The problem could never be solved that the units were competitive with one another. There was no way to make them stop fighting each other. And particularly not if you're working in a political model. I often thought, if the presidential just said: "There will be no more fighting. I won't have it. The next complaint, the person will be fired." Maybe it would have stopped, although I doubt it, because it is human nature. But it would have put the central administration at a very autocratic position, saying: "CAS will do this, William James will do that, and that's the end of it. I don't want to hear any more about it.” And they didn't want to that do that. And I can't blame them. They would've come off as tyrants, and they would not have won any friends with CAS, which was much larger and more powerful a unit, just to kind of save us. But because they didn't do that, everything was in a constant state of turmoil. And Grand Valley, in the end, just couldn't afford that. We needed to pull together and put our energies outside the institution, not with constant battles inside. And I believe that's the reason that it couldn't work and that cluster colleges, in general, have a very hard time working. I think, also, and I never used to believe Bruce Loessin about this, but I think it gave Grand Valley a kind of weird image in the community. It's a very conservative community. We always used to say that William James is really lucky to be embedded in a community this conservative because it kind of… that �Grand Valley protected this, really quite radical unit, in a very conservative community. But even having the different collegiate units, in the end, was pretty hard for Grand Valley. [Tinsley] It gave it a weird reputation and it couldn't afford that. And in the end, it needed to get rid of it. So that's where I think we couldn't survive. [Barbara] Can you see that light? You're doing a good job knowing right when it ends. � 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_30_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (5 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her experience transitioning away from William James College, the conversations surrounding combining WJC with Thomas Jefferson College, and her perspective on the college's future. This interview is part 5 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. 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 Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/14658cb13005e4c207bd82efbcb54138.mp4 ec8e601ad6311d86c6027e320ed57869 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b14e73f4cd28bbe0f70381f282ef762a.pdf c143e2bb8723b3c16a980e7665f3bef3 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 4 of 8 [Tinsley] Yeah, test at the end. [Barbara] Question will be: [inaudible] the administration at Grand Valley, at various times, would give you, sort of, “We're not completely happy – shape up” or “You're doing very well – this is going to go on forever.” Did you get that kind of feedback from [inaudible]? [Tinsley] Yeah. [Barbara] That's not phrased very well, is it? Do you know what I mean? [Tinsley] Yeah. It's another version of "What did the administration think was happening." [Barbara] Yeah. Okay, anytime you feel comfortable. Let me just double-check that we’re rolling. Yeah, we are. What kind of feedback were you getting from the administration? [Tinsley] It's interesting that I'm having a difficult time answering questions about feedback from the administration at Grand Valley and there were really two parts to the administration at Grand Valley. The first phase was during the period that I reported to Bruce Loessin. And I might just say, parenthetically, that one of wonderful things about being totally greenhorn, an inexperienced dean, and being a woman and never having served in the army, I was told I reported to Bruce Loessin. I guess the first year I reported to Harold Colbert; I had no clue what it meant to report to somebody. I had no notion what the term meant or that I was supposed to tell them what was going on in the college and that was what it meant. But from the college’s second year, up until about nineteen seventyseven, I would guess, Grand Valley had a structure which differentiated where the colleges reported. And William James and Thomas Jefferson reported to Bruce Loessin and the other colleges reported to Glenn Niemeyer. That function was split. In seventy-seven, or whenever the reorganization took place… it may be seventy-seven, maybe seventy-eight. Let me start this answer again Barbara. Okay. [Barbara] No harm. �[Tinsley] Let me think about it for a minute first. Okay, the question that you asked is what kind of feedback, criticism, encouragement, direction that you got from the administration of Grand Valley. There were really two administrations at Grand Valley during the time that William James existed. During the first administration, I reported – William James reported – to Bruce Loessin. Grand Valley had a structure in which the vice presidents were all equal and they were all called the Vice President of the College. [Tinsley] Bruce was, at that time, the vice president of the college William James and also Thomas Jefferson reported to him. This is not just a bureaucratic thing of interest to administrators. Bruce was responsible for William James and for Thomas Jefferson and so he wanted us to do well, as well as he wanted us to do good and fight evil. And he bent his fairly considerable energies to helping us do that and to fighting our battles. You didn't ask if I had any mentor at Grand Valley; if I ever did, it was Bruce. He was a kind of funny mentor, you know, a little short guy. People used to laugh about little, short Bruce and his high heels. But he looked out for William James because it was his – it reported to him. What I got from him was: "You’ve got to make it so it looks like the other colleges. You can't be out there looking weird. I don't want to change anything you're doing; I don't want to change you. I think William James is great and I think you have the finest faculty at Grand Valley, but you have to not look weird." And that was really, to tell you the truth, that was right. Bruce was right about that. He would give me a little pep talk about not looking weird. I'd go back; try to get us not to look weird. But he helped us, you know? He would fight for us when we had clashes about who was going to offer what or were we going to be able to get our name out in advertising brochures. Bruce was there fighting for us. So, he had an interest in us. And seventy-seven or seventy-eight… this was a bizarre structure at Grand Valley with these deans, the vice presidents at the college and the academic units reporting lines split. Don changed the reporting structure and Glenn became the Vice President for Academic Affairs and all of the collegiate units reported to Glenn. Now, you have to understand I'm not saying anything about Glenn or Bruce personally; I'm talking about structure. The day that reorganization came down, Bruce took me to lunch at the Matterhorn and he said: "I just want you to know, that I've always been on your side, always before, and I have really busted my ass to make sure William James got its fair share and survived, and I've been your friend, but you need to know that I'm on the other side now." And I said: "Right. I understand that. I appreciate your just saying that upfront, you know? Thanks for everything Bruce." And in some ways, I mean, you could say that was the beginning of the end. When the college is reported to a different vice president, what it felt like was you had your very own knight. When I needed something, I went to Bruce; CAS needed something, they went to Glenn. Then Bruce and Glenn got into their suits of armor and rode out to go like this to one another. And, you know, sometimes one won, sometimes the other, but the Dean just kind of sat back, you know, and waited to see who was �going to triumph. When all the units reported to Glenn, we had entered the era of rational planning and the emphasis went to program. When the units reported up different lines the emphasis was on, not program distinctiveness, but distinctiveness of mission, distinctiveness of student body, distinctiveness ethos. [Tinsley] When all the students reported to the same vice president – and maybe this would have been true whoever the vice president was. I'm suggesting that I think a lot of the issues were structural; the issue then was which college will do what? We'll have a rational plan, and programmatically, we'll differentiate programmatically, you know. And I think people do have to understand that this was not an individual decision that Glenn made because he was an individual; it had to do with rational planning with the kind of accountability that he had placed on him. Because we were entering a time of much tighter money and Grand Valley couldn't really afford to have computer science programs in both places. It was confusing, it was messy, and it was expensive. So that's the apologia. What actually happened when we started reporting to Glenn was that the whole emphasis went on programs and on new programs. What Glenn wanted from Williams James was that it would develop new, sexy new programs that would attract new students and that could give us a niche that we could occupy. And we fiddled with a lot of things there, at one point, I mean, computers was our thing. At another point it was going to be environmental science and planning; at another point it was going to be social work. The problem that happened there… rational planning might've worked as a model, but the units were of such a different size and political power. We could make all the bargains we liked, we can say "We'll do social work and you do nursing. We'll do arts and media and you do fine arts." But every time a decision was made, we do this and they'll do that, and what we were doing looked interesting or looked like it was drawing students, then the other unit wanted to do it. And we didn't have it – I don't think it was the political clout – we didn't have the size. There were too many faculty angry that little William James got to do this and they didn't get to do it. And so those faculty would go to Glenn or they would go to Don. And Grand Valley was governed in a political way. It was and probably still is on the political model. There are books written about styles of academic governance and you can have the bureaucratic model, and you can have the hierarchical model, and you can have the political model. And Grand Valley was governed in the political and that meant that we couldn't keep our gains. So, the problem for us was that Glenn would say: "Develop some new programs." And our tongues would hang out and we'd say: "My god, we developed a whole new college. We've got zillions of programs. We've got three programs per faculty member." You know? We need to consolidate some programs; we need to grow some programs; we need to develop; you know, we need to let some programs get bigger and stronger. When we got good stuff, we'd lose it. We couldn't hang on to it. �[Barbara] Like what? [Tinsley] Like computers. I suppose that was a real good example. [Tinsley] The deal was, initially, when I went to the college that the math department wanted to do computer science. Right at the beginning, the math department had an opportunity to hire Ken Hunter and had refused to do it. And William James had hired Ken Hunter. Ken had a genius for understanding how to teach the use of computers in business and applied context. And that's what our students wanted to learn. And he built a super program in that area. It was called Administration and Information Management. Very strong in information management. And it was very clear where the lines were. It was rational planning. Mathematics Department did computer science and students who did that went to graduate school and they became computer scientist and if you wanted to be an information managing specialist and work in business in an applied way, you went to William James. Along about the middle or end of the seventies, it became clear that we were in a gold mine; we were sitting on a gold mine. We were sitting on top and what everybody wanted to do. And the math department began to want to do it. And the math department had a lot of political power at Grand Valley. The lines were clear, you know, there was no question about what the agreements were. But there was a lot of political issues, so Don Lubbers set up a task force to look into the matter. And he hired a consultant who came and spent a couple of months on the campus one summer looking into the matter. And then he called a meeting and we all trooped into the President's office to have the meeting at which we were going to decide what was going to happen with computer science. And Don VanderJagt went in from the College of Arts and Sciences; Bruce Klein at that point was already in the College of Arts and Sciences or maybe he was with us, I can't remember this. The punchline of the story was VanderJagt trooped with the Dutch guys from Holland and this area and William James trooped in with the woman, the Jew, and the Martian. And I thought: "I think I know how this is going to turn out." In the end, you know, I suppose I should be careful putting that statement on this tape. [Barbara] Maybe you need to say that again. [Tinsley] Yes, probably… I will say that again. [Barbara] Why don't I change the shot… it's accurate, but I don't think you're really… [Inaudible]. [Tinsley] Yeah. [Barbara] Okay, let’s see. So, then William James trooped in. You can go from there. �[Tinsley] Yeah, so then William James trooped in with a fine program, but we didn't have the political clout of the people that had been at Grand Valley for a very long time and we're very close friends of Niemeyer and of Lubbers. [Tinsley] We were a smaller unit; we didn't have nearly the potential to make trouble for Lubbers that CAS had to make trouble for Lubbers. So, somehow we ended up losing out. Now the way in which we lost out was not that Don said: "I've thought about this and on the face of it the College of Arts and Sciences is a bigger unit, it has more students, it makes more sense for the program to be there." Don said: "I've thought about it and it doesn't make sense for me to prevent the College of Arts and Sciences from doing it. I'm not going to prevent them from doing it. I certainly want you to keep doing it; you're doing a wonderful job. Let many flowers bloom." And when you broke down the trade agreements and let many flowers bloom, it was very hard for William James to compete. So that's why it was very hard for us to hang onto students, because we were a smaller unit. Now you might ask me, it might be good question to say: "Why was it hard for William James to compete, you know, in an atmosphere that said 'let many flowers bloom.'" And that's the real question. Because we were smaller, because we were viewed as an alternative, because as the decade began to draw to a close, people in large numbers began to be a little afraid. Maybe they always were, but it was a little closer to the surface of their mind, they didn't want to go to a school that was weird. So, if you wanted a real straight-line thing, like computers in relation to business, and you had your choice of taking it at CAS or in William James, chances were unless you were an unusual student, you would take it at CAS. Because we really were an alternative to that. And yet it meant it was hard for us to hold onto our programs if they took equipment because we couldn't develop enough students. That was a rambling answer, but you can maybe use parts of it. [Barbara] It's blinking at me anyway. [Tinsley] Okay. � 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_29_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (4 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the two administrations at Grand Valley during the time of William James College and how the college developed over time. This interview is part 4 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. 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 Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/87ae057bb80134a199788b0801fac231.mp4 9b6d9cb5256e7ae095f44fae10bcfb88 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d532358870b38f47b104952ec650a917.pdf 44e7f725305ce13c81a99d6004dfe4b3 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 3 of 8 [Barbara] There you go. There’s a good tape… [inaudible]. Okay, we’re a go. Just tell me, just [inaudible] about the beginning. [Tinsley] Well, what I really remember about the beginning – although, of course, I didn't realize it at the time – was we were all so young. I sometimes think about the three older faculty who are in their fifties, who were hired because the initial core faculty had some sense that we ought to have a spread of age and experience in the college, which was an absolutely right instinct. But I wonder what it must have felt like to Willard and Doris and Phyllis to arrive with this entire college that was so very, very, very young. And I look at the pictures of us from those days, and it's kind of interesting to see us. We were very concerned to build a sense of community in the college and that expressed itself in a lot of ways. The first year, I recall, the first fall that I was there we decided to go on a retreat together. And we all packed up our camping gear and we went off. I can't even remember where – somewhere on a river. I remember being out on a rowboat with Pat and Inge and Romano. I remember that Robert wouldn't go because he didn't believe in going camping. And I remember that Richard expressed the sentiments that he would not know how to pack the right food and he was hooted down for the sentiment and told that he would have to work like everyone else. We had the phrase – which I'm sure many people have referred to – we wanted to integrate our work and our lives. We wanted to be an intentional community. In some ways, as the years went on, that wore a little thin as we realize that the integrating our work and our lives meant basically abolishing our private lives. And spouses were not always thrilled to be part this of intimate, intentional community. But I remember the first fall… our way of doing business was typified by the first fall. We had a confrontation. One of the students, a black student, whose name I have forgotten… I may be putting two or three incidents together. But there was some real criticism of how we were doing business. I believe it came from a black student, although I have forgotten his name at the moment. And to deal with that, we simply shut college down for a day and all got together to talk about it. And that seemed to be the most reasonable thing in the world to do. Toni Cena wrote a very moving statement which she read. I can remember us all sitting around on the floor, talking earnestly about whatever these charges were that had been brought, and how we can do better as a college, and how students could take more of a hand in the college. And that seemed the most natural way in the world to do business and very, very good. And we did a lot of �that. I remember the first year we painted the walls of Lake Superior together and that was very nice. And I can remember – or maybe it was the second year – Rhonda was the Assistant Dean, and I can remember people painting mustaches on me and Rhonda and taking pictures of us. [Tinsley] I had a good friend that I worked with in the Modern Language Association who visited me in the first year and I brought her out to the college and showed her around and she turned to me and says: "You can't fool me, Adrian. I know what a college is; this is not a college; this is a summer camp." I always remembered that because I took that as a compliment. There was a real attention to community. [Barbara] Where did that attention come from? Where did that ethic come from? [Tinsley] Well, I think Robert, as he did so many things and gave it articulation. We were – this is not Robert 's formulation – we were not to be alienated from our labor. That's not Robert 's formulation; Robert would have talked about not being cynical. Robert would have talked about, you know, controlling the conditions of your work life so that they were human and met your human needs. They came from the whole movement in the sixties to make work life more responsive to human needs. And I think most of us had felt very alienated in our graduate kind of experiences… had felt we were part of big faceless bureaucracies. It was also a time in American history where there were an awful lot of communes. It was right in the middle of the “back to the commune” movement. So, I think it came from those places. And then once we were all there, is when it kind of took on a life of its own. And I think was, probably for me, it was one of the very, very appealing parts of the college. That it was not only a workplace, but it was a place where you really were yourself, and you know, in a sort of a whole human way. [Barbara] Some people I have talked to acted as though there were two William James Colleges: the early one and the late one. Would you comment on that? With the kinds of things you're talking about, how much of that persists? Or why did it change if it changed to something other? [Tinsley] Yeah. Well, I like to like think it persisted. And for me, of course it persisted. [Barbara] Me, too. [Tinsley] So I don't have the sense of their being two colleges. The college changed in its externals. The college change in some of the externals of its organization to reflect demands that came about as Grand Valley put them on William James, and as the State of Michigan put them on Grand Valley. I learned as I'd gotten older a lot more about the kind of demands that come from the outside that mean �you don't operate as free agent, if you're looking to the state for your money. And as Grand Valley began to get its act together. You asked me earlier what Grand Valley wanted from William James. Grand Valley didn't have its act together, they didn't know how they were going to develop. As they began to get their act together, they wanted William James to fit into their structure. [Tinsely] And so we began to have to do some things to suit Grand Valley. For example, we always had a great deal of flack around the title of the course, "Uptight About Writing" – it became symbolic of kind of conflict we were always in. The faculty thought that the title absolutely expressed with that course was about. The Grand Valley administration thought that that course title made William James look silly and made Grand Valley look silly. We did a lot of changing of external things so that Grand Valley didn't feel it was looking silly. Some of that was legitimate, I think. So, my view was that what changed a lot was our way of fitting into the bureaucracy. The student body changed, you know. That seemed very real to me even though I was not, myself, in the classroom often. I taught maybe once a year. I could tell the students were changing. And the students wanted different things. And I think that's where the sense that there were two William James' comes from. The later students came because we had an Arts and Media program. They just wanted to learn what they, you know, were supposed to learn so they can get jobs in arts and media. The kind of students that really wanted to direct their own education, we had very few of them towards the end. So, I think that was a real change. But for me the other stuff was superficial. [Barbara] I would argue, being in Arts and Media, some of the guys that just graduated and the last people to graduate… I interviewed one of them, and he's typical, okay? And pissed off because they took James away. And he articulates and personifies something that is far more than just a hard nose, "I now have my professional stuff and I'm going out in the world." He talks about being in Steven's class before William James was closed and afterwards and the difference in the other student. You know what I mean? [Tinsley] Yeah, oh yeah. [Barbara] I'm still not convinced it's just the students changed. [Tinsley] Well, it may not be. But my first answer to the question: I didn't feel there was an early William James and a late William James. Perhaps there was in a sense that we were younger earlier and it was fresher. We believed it was a good idea to all go camping with one another. Probably after ten years, we didn't think it was a good idea to all go camping with one another. But that's just sort of time passes and, you know, life happens to you. I didn't think what was at the center of the college changed much. I really didn't. �[Barbara] That makes two of us. [Tinsley] [Laughter] [Barbara] Where did the seminal ideas come from? We talk about feminism – and that's really important – but how did William James actually… it seems like a miracle. I don't understand how James suddenly, genuinely, infused the college… something that had been dead for X number of years, you know. [Tinsley] I think it came from a really happy confluence of a lot of streams of thought and a lot of things that were happening. I think we all acknowledge we were awfully lucky to get the name "William James" and I don't think we thought that up. I believe Tom Cunningham named the college, so we had that to work with. We also had that very thoughtful document that the task force had put together, which embodied a lot of the ideas of the late sixties but pointed forward in his emphasis on careers. So, it gave us something we could kind of sink our teeth into. I think we came from a lot of different intellectual places. We were just Godgiven lucky that it just worked together. Robert, for example, whom I knew the best of anyone because I had known Robert – we had been graduate students together at Cornell. Robert was very interested in the philosophic base the college was working off. He cared passionately about not making what he used to call invidious distinctions between the liberal arts and practical subjects. Roberts was a person… it was very important to Robert to view himself as, simultaneously, a philosopher and a practical man. From his philosophic side came many of the ideas that carried the college forward. And then in the next year also from Stephen. For me, I didn't come to it by reading philosophy. I came to it by teaching at the University of Maryland in the English department. The University of Maryland had, like, fifty thousand students on the College Park campus. There were over one hundred faculty in the English department. And I couldn't figure out what anyone was doing there. I used to look out over the rows of parking lots and say: "I know why I'm here; I'm getting paid to be here. But why are the students here?" I really didn't understand that. It was the late sixties and early seventies. All of the students who were majoring in English were paralyzed, they didn't know what to do with the lives, their degrees we're not going to fit them to do anything, the Vietnam War was going on. The students I knew spent most of their time smoking dope and being very scared. And really not knowing how to interact with the world that was going to greet them when they left the University of Maryland with a kind of a third-rate degree in English literature. For me to come to a college that was going to put some emphasis on being able to do in the world was really important. I mean I cared passionately about that and when I was interviewed, the Grand Valley administration said to me: "Well you have a PhD in English literature, what makes you think you can be the Dean of a college that is practical?" And I said: "You just don't know how much I desire this. This is the desire of my heart." And then I think feminism came in also, with its �stress on theory and practice. I think a lot of people came to the college from an ideologically feminist perspective wanting to combine those two. [Tinsley] So all that came together. And I don't want to say we were just lucky, but we were living at a historic moment where it could come together. [Barbara] This comes from another question that I forgot to ask you. What is a male synoptic heavy? [Tinsley] Oh, a male synoptic heavy? Well, that's the men in the college and it was interesting how it did tend to divide on gender line. [Barbara] Oh damn. Adrian, I just moved the damn thing again. [Tinsley] Oh well, we'll do it again. [Barbara] Keep going anyway. [Tinsley] One of the tensions in the college was that a compelling interest in discussing the philosophical base of the college seemed to divide along gender lines. It divided, to some extent, on professionals versus the liberal arts line, but really it was on gender lines. And there were a group of men that were perceived as the male synoptic heavies, and they carried the flame of the sort of philosophic base of the college. The women saw themselves, in many ways, more as the doers and tended to rely, in many ways, more with the professional faculty. And yet those two had to talk to one another. One of the tensions in the college had to do with one's synoptic credentials. Only on a tape about William James College could one talk with a straight face about one's synoptic credentials. But I can remember at faculty retreat, prior to one of our years, in which we had facilitators come in to get us going for the year. And that's what came out – that there seemed to be a distinction between the philosophers, the synoptians – those who were seen as guarding the flame of those who were appropriately liberal artsy and the others. It was an interesting tension in the college and people felt very insecure about it. The man who did not see themselves as the liberal arts heavies felt very insecure about it, as did some of the women. The women in the college who have those credentials to be synoptic heavies were sometimes impatient with it. I felt that I could really relate to both sides, and those were the strengths. And that the college needed both… because one of the things that gave the college power was that it did have a concept – it really did – and that gave it enormous power. [Barbara] Concept of? [Tinsley] Theory and practice. And using theory and practice to make a difference in the world. �[Tinsely] And we spread out from there – the concept got broader from there. But it had that core concept. [Barbara] End of tape. Good answer. � 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_28_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (3 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her memories of the early years at William James College and the importance of community, in addition to how the college developed over time and the role of feminism in theory and practice. This interview is part 3 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. 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 Women college administrators Women in higher education Feminism Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/354f3ad1f96b741ab62276b0aeb34e68.mp4 baa701d267c1fb3b7ffeb14aacdcabc3 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ddd97b05c966bf3ee59f9b5f4e0e1cdb.pdf a1814268b269c8fe86f32b0836c9badf PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 8 [Barbara] And I'm rolling. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] And I wanted to ask you: we refer to some mysterious beast called a “real William James student.” What's a real William James student? [Tinsley] Well, again, you know, a real William James student – you knew one when you saw one. We wanted students to take responsibility for their own education; we painted it up on the walls in Lake Superior Hall… that wonderful cartoon of the student we didn't want which was somebody having knowledge poured into his head through a funnel. We wanted students to do it themselves. And so, a real William James student was a person who knew what he or she wanted to learn and took their own route in getting there. [Barbara] I just screwed up, Adrian; I just pulled the panhandle. Can you repeat the last part? [Tinsley] Sure. [Barbara] I’m sorry. [Tinsley] A real William James student was a student who knew what he or she wanted to learn and desired to take responsibility for learning it. Wanted to use the faculty as resource people. Wanted to figure out how to learn and was willing to hustle to, you know, really move their butt to get what they needed. Willing to go to a lot of sources and use a lot of resources. Had some drive and motivation. I think in the early days, the real William James student was somebody who was specifically seeking an alternative education, who shared the views of the faculty. In the areas, for example, of grading. That letter grading was at the root of all evil. Who wanted the freedom to design their own way of studying things, who wanted to do independent studies. And as those students became fewer and fewer in number because we had many more those of in the early days of the college, you know, then I think the real William James student became simply the one with energy. The one who was self-initiating. �[Barbara] How did we teach them this? [Tinsley] I don't think we taught them to it, they came with us. They came with us. [Barbara] But there was a phenomenon of students who were lost for a year and then turned it on. [Tinsley] Well, that's true. But I don't know how that happened. But you have to remember, I was not in the classroom teaching the students so that I got to know the good students and I got to know the problem students. [Tinsely] But I could not explain how that mystery actually happened in the classroom because I wasn't there. [Barbara] Let me grab my notepad out of here. Oh, the rocking adds a nice comfortable touch. We were profoundly egalitarian, and yet you were in a leadership role. How does one lead a commune? [Tinsley] That is a very good question, and I must say what I learned about leadership in that situation… that's probably the most important learning I took from the college actually. I guess I'd answer that by saying I didn't go to William James; I didn't set out to be the leader. I didn't know enough to know I was supposed to set out to be the leader. And I think one of the things that is important about William James and my contribution to it is that not only were all the faculty very young, I was very young. I have never been a dean before. I didn't know, really, what deans we're supposed to do. All of us made this college up out of we what we knew. And all of us had a critique, but none of us really knew how to make the college happen. I think it's important for the college that I did not arrived with an agenda. I arrived responsive to the same social climate that everyone else was responsive to. We had a variety of ideologies, a variety of critiques, but I didn't go there saying "I am the Dean and this is my vision of alternative education". I think that the role that I played… and I don't want to give the impression that I was the colleges facilitator, because I don't view what I did in that way. But I think what I did I think I had the gift of being able to understand what kind of vision for the college motivated most of the people who were there. And they were very different visions and I think my gift was to be able to find some common ground among those visions that we could agree to and put that in the public space and affirm it. And I think that – as I thought about in later years - I think that is probably the quintessential quality of leadership. Pat Labone used to say to me that what the dean should do is read the litany. She had a Catholic childhood and there was some real truth to that. I often used to long to have a chapel and William James that everyone was required to attend so the little inspirational speeches could be made. I think it's important that an institution have that and I think that I brought that to the college. And I think that I had the ability to bridge �among the various kinds of faculty at the college. I think it was extraordinarily important to success of the college that I could talk to heavy male synoptic types, that I could talk that language and that I valued that. I think it was important that I could talk to the women. And I think it was important that I could talk to the people who brought professional skills into the college but more scared, frustrated, and sometimes irritated at the quality of intellectual discourse that went on because they felt insecure about participating in it. And I truly believed there was room for everybody. And I think that I kind of could embody that. And I think I also – in terms of leadership – was able to work with the college's peerpressure structure. [Tinsely] Because you can't tell people to do things and you can't make people do things, and an administrator has to work with what's there. You can say "no" but you can't make it happen. And so, the trick to it is to be able to mobilize the energy that's there, give it some focus, and get people on the same wavelength. And the college had very strong norms of behavior. I mean there was a lot of peer pressure in the college that said, I believe, what faculty were supposed to do and what they were not supposed to do. And I think I was able to work with that and I think I was able to find some constructive channels for using people's energy. Not always, but if there was a trick to operating as a leader in that kind of setting, that's how I would describe it. [Barbara] But surely what you just described at the end of your answer would be true of being an administrator at any college. [Tinsley] Yeah, it is, but it was more so at William James because we had a rhetoric about – and said and really meant – that we were non-hierarchical. I think that's how the whole critical issue format developed, which I think was a very healthy one for the college. As inexperienced as I was – and I really was absolutely green when I came to William James as Dean – and I remember, practically, the first week that I was there we were drafting the governance document for the college. And that was drafted by Robert and Inge and it was very elaborate, and it was really a model for participatory form of governance that worked neither on hierarchy nor Roberts Rules of Order, which was what we wanted. But even though I was I very green and I looked at that and I said: "Wait a minute, the Dean has responsibility beyond, simply in a consensus fashion, gathering the will of the faculty and implementing it.” There are probably issues at the college that I am responsible for and there are issues that the faculty is responsible for, and yet we’re all responsible for all of this together – how can we sort that out? And out of that came the notion of a critical issue. That most of the times we would all be on the same wavelength about what we wanted to have happen. But because we had different responsibilities and sat, in a sense, in different chairs, there might be times when the college would want to do X, but I would know it couldn't. It absolutely couldn't. And thus, was born, you know, the critical issue and the �veto. An elaborate way of saying: "But the college says this and the Dean said that, the Dean would say 'no.'" And then you'd go back and discuss it some more. And you might still come out with yes and no but their would be ways so… I didn't abrogate what was my real responsibility to make sure that in matters of relating to the structure at Grand Valley, the college didn't harm itself. And that the college at some basic level operated in the way it ought to: in trust from the people of Michigan, through the Board of Control, you know, through the President, and down to me. I had real, legal, responsibilities there. [Tinsley] And yet at the same time I was a member of the community and wanted to be involved in the process of working out what the college was going to be and do. Because I didn't know. So, I was both part of the process and outside of the process. [Barbara] Presuming that some people are going to see this tape that have no direct experience with James, would you care to give an example of a critical issue that actually came up? [Tinsley] Yes. The critical issues came up around hiring issues and around money. And two examples were: at one point the council voted to hire a faculty member and I felt the decision was untenable, that it was made not because the person was the best candidate, but because there were a great many…the person was known to us, there were many personal feelings involved. And I felt it would be irresponsible of me to let that decision go forward, so I vetoed it. Another issue came when we had a very elaborate, as you will recall, salary administration policy. And which I did not like, but never really interfered in because I felt that was the faculty's business to determine. I did not approve of it. In one particular year, it works to really the detriment of an older member of the faculty who was going to end up with a less than a cost of living raises as a result of the operation of this policy and I said "No, that would not be acceptable." There may have been others that were more, you know, policy issues but I don't recall them. One of the interesting things was that these issues arose very rarely because we have did most of our work by persuading one another. It was very interesting; we were frequently compared with Thomas Jefferson College because we were both alternative colleges of sort of different kinds of stripes. I thought, and I think many people agree, that there were very different leadership styles at the two colleges. Thomas Jefferson was run by guru, a bearded, alternative education dean who put his picture on the front of all the colleges brochures. And then, in fact, the early brochures, you know, showed his face with his beard and the little legend was: "This man runs a college." The faculty at Thomas Jefferson seem to be very pleased to have a dean who would be their guru and who would not tell them what to do exactly but would take care of them. That was basically what it amounted to, would take care of them. And we had a model that was much more political. Our model was: everybody had to understand how this works, �everybody has to have an operator manual because we all have to understand the political context we're working in order for to work, I guess. I don't want to say, "We won't survive," because we didn't sit around thinking "Well, maybe it won't survive." But we all had to understand it. [Tinsely] And I felt really strongly about that and I think most of the faculty felt strongly about that. And I was not there to, you know, be there to take care of them, and they were not there to be, you know, recipients of somebody's guruism. I think that was real important as to how we worked. It was like a marriage, it really was. People called me Adrian, but if they were really angry at me, they referred to me as the Dean and I didn't like that, you know. I can recall saying: "I am not the Dean!" or "I am Dean, but my name is Adrian!" So, there was, you know… I don't quite know where I'm going with the rest of that answer but… [Barbara] Let me check on the tape. Ah, look there! See, I have this sixth sense. � 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_27_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (2 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses what makes a "real William James student" and her experience as a first-time dean of William James College. This interview is part 2 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. 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 Women college administrators Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a5ebf586a38a740256eb61c049b22f66.mp4 d85f0b989c29931c790ad3bd782d7669 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5fefd6df044f016e68be5bede9225881.pdf e60d6081691d0d5440a0935d4297cb6b PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 8 [Barbara] Hit the light. Okay, now I actually am running. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] When you came to James – you know, it would be nice of you to mention when that was, when you actually came as Dean – what did the administration tell you about what was expected at the college? [Tinsley] I came in the summer of nineteen seventy-two. The college had completed one year of operation when I came. I can't say that the administration of Grand Valley told me anything about what they wanted the college today. Let me just start this again. It’s going to take me a little... [Barbara] Well, I'll adjust the shot. [Tinsley] Okay, it's going to take me a little bit to kind of warm up. [Barbara] I know, it always does. [Tinsley] It's like doing a practice interview. [Barbara] It is, so start again and take as many times as you want. I have an entire case of tapes. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] What was it like? What did the administration tell you? "Hi Adrian, here's what you're supposed to do." [Tinsley] Well, I came to the college in nineteen seventy-two. And I can't say that the administration told me anything about what they wanted the college to be. The college had completed its first year of operation. I knew that Grand Valley was beginning a cluster college operation and that William James was the third college and that Grand Valley anticipated that there would be more colleges. That the decision had been taken early in Grand Valley's life – in fact, it had been a plan George Potter's, I believe – that instead of just growing bigger, because �Grand Valley expected to grow significantly. Instead of just growing large, they would develop a whole series of colleges and each would have its own mission and its own curriculum. So, William James… I understood William James was to be part of that. And I understood that there had been a task force to set up William James chaired by Tom Cunningham. And I understood that what was written in the task force document was what the administration wanted the college to be and that was a career-oriented college. What I did not understand was that even at the point at which I arrived at William James – in its second year – there was some significant concern in the Grand Valley administration about the direction that the two cluster colleges, Thomas Jefferson and William James, were taking. [Tinsley] And, in fact, after I had been the Dean of William James for a year, the Vice President to whom I reported, Bruce Loessin, said to me with a big smile: "Well you've really done a good job – the college has survived! Most of us didn't think that was going to happen!" And that was my first indication that there was any question in anybody's mind that the college would survive. [Barbara] Two things about that I didn't understand. I don't understand who Potter is… you made a reference. [Tinsley] Potter was, I believe, a Vice President for Academic Affairs at Grand Valley and the first president of Grand Valley, James Zumberge… I don't know if it was Potter or Zumberge that had the notion of developing a cluster of colleges. They had that idea but didn't implement it. Don Lubbers was the president who caused that to be implemented. [Barbara] Why… I mean, when Loessin said that to you, you must have said whatever [Inaudible]. Why start a college and presume it's going to fail? I don't understand it. [Tinsley] And reasonably enough you don't understand it. William James was supposed to be a career-oriented college. When the first faculty were hired by Bruce Loessin, he took pains to hire a faculty that came from the traditional liberal arts disciplines and were very – not traditional – but very good faculty in the traditional sense. They had good academic degrees. They were not interested in doing career education in the sense that I think Grand Valley had in mind. I think Grand Valley had in mind that William James would be what they later had to start Kirkhof in order to get. So, there was a sense right from the beginning that they were looking for a technical college and William James was becoming something quite different from what they had in mind. But what can they expect, given the faculty that they had hired to found the college? [Barbara] Turn this off for a second. Make sure this thing is running right. I get a certain �amount of neuroses… paranoia, that's the word I'm looking for. Tell me… Ah! Tell me… let’s get you in the shot. [Tinsley] Tell me, whoever you are. [Barbara] Okay. Tell me what the administration said… what did you observe? What was it in total, you know, really meshing all kinds of things? What was going on when you arrived? What kind of place was it? [Tinsley] It was struggling to be born when I arrived. It had been in operation for you a year. It had had no planning time. It had been started just immediately, crack off the bat. After that, the task force report had been completed; an acting dean had been put in; the faculty had been brought in. [Tinsely] And they had no lead time, they were just told that you are open in September and get your curriculum together. So, they were struggling that whole first year to put together a first curriculum and hire a new staff. There was not much opportunity to do anything other than run very hard to accomplish those tasks. But my belief about the college… and I knew it pretty well because I interviewed for its deanship before it started and then did not come at that time…had other commitments and then came a year later. So, I had a chance to talk to Robert Mayberry and Bruce Loessin that very first summer, and then again in the interview process for the second year. What I observed were that the faculty that were at the college took that planning document – the Cunningham Task Force Report – very seriously. And they were about the business of trying to make that happen. And I observed that the most compelling part of it – it certainly was to me and I believe it was to the faculty – was the notion of good work. We had a lot of words for that, you know. Vocation with a "V," career-oriented, the notion of doing something useful in the world. And we struggled a lot because we didn't want this college to be simply career-oriented, but we wanted to have utility to do something useful in the world – to make social change – and there were a whole bunch of ways of talking about that. But that's what I saw when I came… that people were looking at the college to be and that people wanted the college to be. Everybody came to the college with a critique of their own graduate education because we were all young. So, we were very clear about what we wanted the college not to be and, in fact, that was kind of a problem early on. We kept defining ourselves in terms of what we didn't want to be. We didn't want to have grades. We didn't want to have majors and disciplines. We didn't want to have a sterile kind of research focus. So, everybody had their own critique and everybody, I think, also had their own dream of what the perfect college would be, what the perfect society would be. The piece of it that was in the public space right from the beginning was making a difference in the world and that's what I thought people wanted to do in the world. �[Barbara] Change the shot here. [Tinsley] Does the tape pick up your questions? [Barbara] Yes, but what I'll do is redub them because I'm off mic. [Tinsley] Okay, okay. [Barbara] You can hear them, but you have to strain to hear them. [Tinsley] Okay. [Barbara] So I get a chance to clean up my act. [Barbara] James operated as a sovereign state. You would agree? [Tinsley] Yes. [Barbara] Did we seize that sovereignty or was it given to us? [Tinsley] Neither really. We didn't seize it. Seizing implies some kind of resistance. I think in the early years, the Grand Valley administration did not have a particular plan as to how they thought the college should develop or indeed what they wanted from it. We took a lot of freedom, but we didn't really have to fight them for it. [Barbara] If we can just stay in this shot. How did feminism infuse the college? [Tinsley] Well, feminism was extraordinarily important in the college. I think… you obviously are going to have to edit this because I will get rolling in a little bit but I'm not yet. I think feminism was probably one of the most important social forces that operated in the college. It's an interesting mystery why the initial first eight male faculty turned around and hired a number of strong women faculty and the women dean. But that's in fact what happened. I said earlier that everybody brought their own dream to the college. I think the women, in particular, brought a feminist dream and you have to remember this was nineteen seventy-two, so feminism was just really becoming a significant social force. And feminism embraced both notions of, you know, gender equity and also notions about organizational structure. There was a lot of talk in the feminist community at that time about non-hierarchical decision making. About rotating authority. About everybody taking turns doing the job so that everybody got a chance to do all the jobs. A lot of talk about how you didn't want to specialize into male roles and female roles or faculty roles and administrative roles, you know, to go by extension. So, the whole philosophic context of radical feminism came into the college as in many ways as the dream – or at least the strong interest – of a lot of �the women faculty that came. And particularly as it related to, you know, malefemale relations and organizational structures. The men were coming in with the same kind of a dream. They may have come to it through feminism per say or they may have come to it through some other kind of social analysis. But there was general agreement on what our politics and then for the social structure of the college. So, I guess I would say feminism affected the college because there were a lot of women there. I mean we were very unusual in that there were so many women and that the women really were in positions of a good deal of authority, respect, and influence – both formally and informally. Whether they were program coordinates, or the Dean, or whether they were just strong faculty who were “Weighty Friends” in the Quaker sense in the design of the curriculum. Feminism, I think, influenced a lot of our early attempts and organizational structures. [Tinsely] The whole governing structure, the coordinator's temporum, or the notion that we would take turns doing the college's jobs. And I think it influenced the way we treated each other. It influenced what kinds of interactions were acceptable in the public space of college and, indeed, in people's home lives. And I think it was interesting in that regard the ways they interacted with each other – the men and women in college. We never fell into sex roles – or the kinds of gender-based, sex-based teasing – that is real frequent in other situations. The place that feminism didn't affect the college terribly strong was we never developed a very strong Women's Studies program. I often felt as Dean, you know, I was really remiss in the kinds of formal curricular or extracurricular things we could offer our women students. I often saw women students come in, you know, if they’re first in their family going to college, with very conventional aspirations and it was possible for women students to go through this structure that was a college and be a little untouched about what was going on. And I thought that was a real weakness. And I think it came from the fact that the women were so busy in their nontraditional roles - sort of running the college, developing the curriculum – that there really weren't people to spare for developing the more usual Women's Resource Center, Women's Studies program, and the like. [Barbara] I think to me, a question that follows that when we were interviewing faculty, we went through these long interview processes – forty-eight-hour things – and we always knew what we were looking for. What were we looking for? [Tinsley] Well, I think the easy answer to that is we were looking for people like ourselves. But what did it mean to be like us? I think we were looking for some sort of real evidence of commitment to social change. We were looking at people's politics. We had political litmus tests and I think there's… you know, we shouldn't blink that fact. I can remember interviewing a candidate for psychologist at one point – a woman – and she was asked something that had to do with feminism and then she responded that she didn't care to define herself; she didn't care to take on a �label. It was very important to us that people we label that they have politics. So, I think we were looking for that. I think we were looking for breadth. I think we were looking for people that were interested in a lot of things. And I think we were looking for people that weren't interested in sort of narrow, discipline based, traditional academic interest. I think we found them kind of pompous and kind of boring. We could know us when we saw us. But how you'd write that down on paper it isn't really clear. Except we did know us when we saw us, and we were anti-pomposity and we were pro-politics. But our politics had a very broad definition. We were pretty inclusive in our politics, but we demanded that people have politics, I believe. [Barbara] It’s coming up to the… conveniently this blinks at me when we’re running out of tape. [Tinsley] Okay, okay. � 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_26_Tinsley Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tinsley, Adrian 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 Adrian Tinsley interview (1 of 8, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Adrian Tinsley 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. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her arrival at William James College during its second year of operation, in addition to how feminism infused the college. This interview is part 1 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley. 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 Women college administrators Women in higher education Feminism Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0da55dc21449dbf92e5825f93fc15cd0.mp4 b2eeecbbee5fc187296715de0e70b723 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/640508d60514792dc199f078b3c696b9.pdf 20755cfc594dd771655eac549651b7d6 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Ronald Poitras Date: 1984 [Poitras] How is Burns doing? Is he doing okay? [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] Good. [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] You're only teaching part-time though, right? [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] You’ve got to do it full time now? [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] Do you want to, or don't you want to know? [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] Walter! How about Walter? Is he coming around? Huh? [Barbara] I'll tell you all about it. [Poitras] Okay. [Barbara] Focus on your eye... [Inaudible]. [Poitras] Okay. [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] Okay. Thank you. [Barbara] Anytime we can go. [Poitras] You want me to put this down? You going to start? You're asking questions? �[Barbara] I ask you a question. [Poitras] And I can answer them. [Barbara] If you had to sum up William James philosophy in a sentence or two, what would you say? [Poitras] A sentence or two? I would say that the William James philosophy was teaching, and that we were all teachers. Both the students and the faculty alike. I think that's the biggest thing that we all receive from it. That's how I'd sum it up. Is that too…? [Barbara] No, that's fine. I've not gotten the same answer from… [Poitras] Anyone. [Barbara] Which is fine. Which is fine. Okay, you were saying that you… If you were special… [?] Projects? Is that why you came to the college? [Inaudible] [Poitras] No, I came to teach. I also had another opportunity to teach at Ohio State in the graduate school. And I chose William James because I knew I would do more than just planning. So, I came to William James because I could do more than just planning. But what I did for William James, and what William James got for me and Grand Valley was the projects I did. Because I continuously got reviews on the presses, and TV, and newspapers, and that was the neat thing. But that's not why I came to William James. I came to William James because I knew I can do more than just planning and I did. Well, you and I team taught, Barbara. And think I almost team taught with everyone at William James. Probably one of the few that did. There aren't many people I didn't team teach with, almost everyone I went through. Just I had a list when I got there. I went bang, bang, bang, bang, and I went through everybody. And I learned, that was the whole idea, right? So, I learned, I learned a lot. And that was one of the neat things. The projects, as I saw it, for me were just a little icing on the cake. But it was very important to William James for their survival. It was really important for professionalism. It was important for our students, and important for Grand Valley. So, I did that just… not because I wanted to do it so much, not because I think maybe is the best teaching device (although I think it's good), but I did it as something extra for the college. Just with all the Public Relations. [Barbara] It fascinates me that we all think of James and somehow recognize it for what it was. How did we all come to understand James' philosophy? What is the background that we all have? [Poitras] That's a tough question. That is a tough question, right? Well, I think when… see �when I first read about the ad for William James, it talked about professional planning. You know, in kind of a free environment. But those weren't the terms. It insinuated it, implied that. [Poitras] So I said okay. I would like to see what a free environment is, and I think maybe something to that effect even though the words are different probably for all of us. Something to that effect probably attracted most of us. I mean maybe that's a common thing. That we would not be tied down to a lot of the traditional things. Like requirements for each class, and one class fitting the other. That we would have a lot of freedom, and flexibility. And I think that's maybe the thing, the common bond. A group of individuals you'll never find that, such a group again, everybody was such an individual and that was a neat thing. I could walk through the hall anyway, anytime, anyhow I wanted to. Anytime, and nobody would say a thing-- one thing. Even though we were a community, but a community of individuals that was a neat thing. And that was the success of it, right? Because each person went out, and did their own thing and made a college very successful. Primary aspect, you look at Robert and his ability to run CAS-- not run it but at least part of that whole thing. And Steve with his strong academic liberal arts background, and go to everybody. Then me with a lot of professional things, and yourself a professional and academic background. Just looking those things, each one of us unique, and then we could get together and struggle through our councils together to try to mesh our ideas. But I think was that freedom, just that freedom. In fact, I could walk through those halls and I was famous for walking the halls, and I could say anything to anyone, and it wouldn't upset them. Almost everyone. It wouldn't upset them. It didn't matter what I said because they were too bogged…you know, involved with all the things that they're doing, and they didn't care. You know they didn't take it. They weren't paranoid like a lot of other professional settings and organizations. [Barbara] Do you think we made some critical mistakes? [Poitras] The critical mistake, and I don't know if it was our fault, the critical mistake was we started taking in students that were more concerned with professionalism than careerism that's concerned with the overall concept of William James. And I don't think that's our fault because we're worrying about numbers, and so-- But that's what led to the decline of the college as far as I'm concerned. We were only concerned with professional career areas, and less concerned with the ideas of the students. Not all of us, but generally that's what happened, and that's what led to the fall the college. That was a real problem because look at all the students that we have near the end compared to the students that way maybe couple years earlier. They were just different times, neither good nor bad, just different and I think that was a critical mistake. Let me give you a real good example of that. So, I can just… have to defend this statement. A good example would be, we'll say in the arts program. Not the media as much, but the arts �program. They became known for certain type of art program. So, the admissions office would send people to them that were interested only in art, and then they would let them into the college. [Poitras] And that's true planning and other things, too. I just use art as an example. So, the students came there interested in art as a career, but not interested in James and the concept. Some certain lots were but many weren’t, and I think that's what led to the decline of the college. That's my impression that was as far as I was in the most critical error that we made. [Barbara] How else could we have— [Poitras] Yeah, well I don't know, see? So, that's… I'm saying I can blame us… because following in [?] and all of the country following moment here [?] we had to have students. So, I guess that's a compromise we made in the process I think that led to the fault college because if we would've had the same students that we did in the early years, I don't know, I think William James would still be there. I think they would've given us as faculty [?] and the support that we went [?] and want to be able to stand and fight for James and we just didn't have… it wasn't a mutual thing, you know. The students gave us energy and we gave the students energy and it worked real well but near the end it wasn't way. I'm not absolutely… gosh [?] doesn't really need kids there you know. I know that just the career thing really got us, and I think that it's too much of the career thing with all the other components and I think that lead to the end. That was the year, as far as I'm concerned. [Barbara] What you're teaching now, are you teaching the same lesson? [Poitras] Yes, in fact, I'm doing some graduate classes as well and I had a student to graduate William James who works at the college who came and took my graduate class, she goes: "Gosh, I like this class it’s just like William James." Now that's easier doing a graduate level. I think in my undergraduate levels (classes) they're a little different but I know that it's really hard. It's hard to make that compromise and the bridge between giving grades and people that come in there and then they have taken the of course after that. But I'm trying real hard to be who I am when I am and I don't think I've changed too much. [Barbara] I want to talk about a thing that worked for you best in your years. If you were telling somebody about the college and wanted to be very specific about something, what story would you tell? [Poitras] I guess, I can think of two stories. One story might be just doing all the team teaching. It was just such a beautiful experience for me. The other story would have to be the projects I worked on with all the different students and they were �really pretty fantastic and I guess the Prospect House was the biggest one that we worked on. Trying to take an inner city house and making it self-sufficient in the inner city and it took so much out of me and so much out of the students. But to this day every one of those students are in well-paid professional positions. [Poitras] The ones that were a part of the key team that ran that thing, they all have big, good careers. They all went to the best graduate schools; they all have well-paid jobs. So, this really paid off for them and I was glad to see that the Prospect House itself, as far as the costs were concerned, worked out. We managed to get out of it before there was some problems with it. So, the cost was okay but as an overall concept just didn't carry on as long as I wish it would've but that was fine. The big thing, heck, I worked… I didn't sleep for I think two years. I worked on that thing straight for two years, day and night, with all the students. About thirty William James’ students and there must been a hundred involved through different levels and, of course, you did things, too. But there was a core of about thirty students that worked on that thing, and maybe even a real small core of about ten that worked day and night on that thing, also. And I can't take any of the credit; they have to take as much credit, and probably blame as I do. [Barbara] You didn't have anything beyond that did you? [Poitras] Well, a little bit, but not really – that was Rod Bailey's project. Really a good project. [Barbara] If you were going to do it all over again, would you do it again? [Poitras] Oh yeah. The Prospect project? [Barbara] No, I meant James. [Poitras] Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. Oh, God, yeah. Hey, I'm so sophisticated, I could have never… I made leaps and bounds. You know, I can go to professional organizations, which I do, the planning ones, urban planning organizations. I can sit there and talk on anything. Hell, are you kidding? Of course, I’d do it again, it was the best education I ever had. [Barbara] How? [Poitras] Just, well, just being able to teach the courses I wanted to teach, being team teaching and teaching things outside my area. I mean, I came here thinking I was going to teach… well no, I would've had to teach urban planning at Ohio State. Here I taught urban planning, political science, I taught geography, I taught a writing class. I taught myself …this isn't team teaching now. I taught some philosophy classes about William James. Oh gosh I can go on and on. And as �you know just to prepare for each one of those classes just took time, and time, and time. So, I learned all sorts of things, and I became less narrow, I think. I hate to use that. That sounds so much of a cliche, less narrow. [Poitras] But it provided me with a better background to teach the courses I'm now teaching. It really broadened my education. Expanded my undergraduate education enormously. [Barbara] Let’s stop the tape a second. Let’s repeat the question. What about burnout? [Poitras] Well, I think in some areas the projects have tired me out. Just doing those professional projects is really difficult, especially with the different students that we have because it takes a lot of initiative on the individual student’s part to do a good project. So, I've been doing more… well, I was doing more [Inaudible] when I was in William James. And I think that part maybe wiped me out a little bit. But as far as burnout, as far as the college was concerned overall, uh-uh. The feedback from some of those good students, it was a lot of energy they gave me and it was a reciprocal thing. I think that was a really neat thing about William James. Just having that ability to act with the students, get energy from them, and return the energy. So, I never felt burnt out. I think we could've kept going. You know some people say there's too many meetings, and I, you know, I don't like a lot of meetings either but in a lot of ways it was good, and we found a lot of information. One neat thing about Adrian, the dean that hired me, was that she would always let us know everything that was going on and that was kind of neat. So, those meetings I thought paid off and I didn't get too tired of them. Some people thrived on them. So, I can't believe there could have been too much burn out. I don't know where the burnout would have come from. Nah, I don’t think burnout was an issue or question at all. [Barbara] Okay, okay, why don't you do the family stuff because I'm not sure what you mean, so just do it. [Poitras] Yeah, well, I think some personal ways William James was really good for me was because… in the following ways: (One) Not only could I do my thing but Peggy helped me do a film with the college under Jan Zimmerman and there were several faculty involved in that. That was a nice experience. My son, Walter Wright, I had my son in his computer classes. That was always good. Moscovitch is always [?] I need to advise my students… I mean my own family. So, on a personal level, William James was good not only for me, you know, through my work. But was also good for my family and their own growth. So, I think that William James provided a lot of stuff professionally, but a lot of stuff personally for all of us, too. And I look at other faculty people and often it was both spouses were teaching at William James. And there was a lot of growth. So, it wasn't just a separate thing. And it wasn't that… even though I mentioned earlier that were �all free as individuals. There was that little, somewhat of a community, because we'd all help one another. You mentioned in the hospital that one of the faculty was there with you. And when my son was hurt his leg. [Poitras] I think almost everyone in James faculty went to the hospital and visited him, when he got hit by a car. So almost all of them were there. So, it was kind of neat. I think it’s a real personal experience that we all enjoy also. [Barbara] [Inaudible] [Poitras] One little note, one little mistake that we made, Barbara, was that we didn't work close enough with our counterparts in CAS and I really made an attempt to do that for William James and I team taught with several faculty in CAS so that we can try to bridge the gap. And I think more faculty should've done that and I think it would've helped our college immensely. [Barbara] Politically at the end? Or other ways? [Poitras] Everyway. I think politically we would've had more friends and more people supporting us, and if we did put on a big fight, if we would have then we would've had more support and I think that would have helped everyone. [Barbara] Should we have tried to fight? [Poitras] Oh yeah, yeah. I think we should have. [Barbara] I think so, too. [Poitras] Good. [Barbara] Why didn't we? [Poitras] My excuse is, I think, I didn't see any… who was going to fight. A lot of the students weren't and I just didn't think it was there. I think maybe the time had passed and it just wasn't there. [Barbara] Good, I'm glad that happened… [Inaudible]. � 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_14_Poitras Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Poitras, Ronald 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 Ronald Poitras interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Ronald Poitras 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. Ronald Poitras was a Community and Environmental Planning faculty member in William James College and longtime professor at Grand Valley. In this interview, Ron discusses the philosophy of William James College and what attracted him to teach there, in addition to his experience working on the Prospect House project in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Ronald Poitras. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/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 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_64_Bell Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8482dff385f7964cdb4999ee0c5f36c2.mp4 1c1856a5524d2908535ce4ba1c41c3b3 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/33fa2fdc73ff050c87a8a1589643907b.pdf 1a36a40f651db91011c7c3fee162b2ad PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Steven Laninga Date: 1984 [Unknown] People have their William James t-shirts. [Laninga] Is that right? You know, I never had a William James t-shirt. [Unknown] No? [Laninga] They don't make them in my size, so I never bought one. And it always bothered me and I couldn't really be a part without a William James t-shirt. And then I decided that was going to be my own little private experience: the William James student without the badge. My own mark. [Unknown] Okay, let’s go from the top, your history, why you came to William James College, kind of go over again what we just talked about. [Laninga] I started at William James in, I believe, the fall seventy-four, after two years of Calvin College, here in Grand Rapids, and a year of stopping out and private introspection. I bummed around a lot. The fall of seventy-four, I went back, intent on studying photography at William James. And I was attracted to the rather broad offerings of photographic training at the school, as it was clustered with the other schools. And because of Willy Jay's lenient attitude towards students, I felt that I could slip in and out of William James, and across to TJC, and over to the regular school, to get all that I needed to study photography without having to cope with the superstructure of a traditional liberal arts education undergraduate. So that was the reason I came out there, and my intention when I arrived on campus. A couple of things happened when I got there. I met my future wife about the first week and we really haven't been separate since. It's been almost ten years now. That's very nice, and that's a little present from William James to us, I think. I, also, after pursuing photographic chemistry, and darkroom, and cinema, and a number of other photographic classes, began to become aware of a greater, more profound aspect of the photographic image making process. And that was what happens after pictures are viewed. What goes on in the mind of the viewer? What goes on in the mind of the creator, and how that is transmitted through this piece of material? So, I began to be distracted by that whole topic area and ended up a good ways from where I started when I wanted to be a photographer. And I became, instead, someone who, mostly, thought, talked, and wrote about the process of communicating through media. And my degree is still a media degree, a Bachelor of Science �from William James. But a lot of my course work was really in the Social Relations department at William James. [Unknown] Can you talk a little bit about the educational experience? What you did at William James? How or what you perceived the college to be? [Laninga] Okay. [Unknown] [Inaudible] Something that it was? [Laninga] Well, I was a commuter student for the entire five years that I was at William James. A part-time commuter student. I arrived on campus about five minutes after I was supposed to have gotten there. And I would leave as soon as I had done everything I came on campus to do, whether that was attend a class or attend a class and go to the library for an hour, what have you. As a matter of fact, I used the bus to get there, for a number of years. So, my experience of William James is, perhaps, a little different than many William James alumnus in that I was not really ever caught up in the community of William James. I had almost a business relationship with the school. It was a transactional relationship. Very, very clean in that respect. I would pay for the class, I would show up, I would talk, I would think, I would write, we would interact, and I would leave. And all the stuff that went on the Skylight Room, all the committees, and task forces, and all the other stuff that I heard about and read about went right past me for a very tumultuous and colorful five years. And I was almost as unrelated to it as the people in Grand Rapids that only heard about it from associates. Still, in all my… there are some things about William James that I think cannot be taken away in that it was a school that was focused on the individual and permitted the individual to find his or her education. That was what originally attracted me to the school in the first place. And that part I really did take advantage of. I don't think that the Skylight Room and all the goings on in there was necessarily what I came to the school for the first place. I got what wanted out of school and the school gave that to me and generous quantity. I pursued my own course, and I came away fully satisfied with what I got. As I said, it was a transaction relationship. And I came away a much better person for having been there. [Unknown] We talked a little bit about how the school dealt with failure. Can you say something about that? [Laninga] William James had a pragmatic approach to education. And caught up in that is an understanding that in order to achieve worthy goals, there are risks that must be taken, and one of the clearest risks is the risk of failure. And failure was always real at William James. It was something that everyone lived with, from the lowliest new student, right on through the administrative offices. Everyone dealt with failure on a daily basis around here because much was tried and only a �portion of that was accomplished. And everyone understood the realities of stalled projects and fizzled ideas. And I have since then come to understand that one good idea is worth a hundred ones that seem to be good, and it's worth weeding through a hundred possible ideas to come land on one good one. And that means a lot of failure. That's ninety-nine failures. So, I probably… that's one of the most valuable things I learned at William James. I'm not sure that that is so readily accessible at other schools, where failure is completely different in its meaning for undergraduates. [Unknown] Moving on to how do you think… what do you think William James was as an experiment? Do you think it failed? Do you think, you know, we talked about not being allowed to fail or something…? [Laninga] Let me say it again, William James, the experiment of William James College, did not fail. I firmly believe that the experiment of William James College was not permitted to succeed. The school is a part of the community around it, and it serves the community, and the community is supposed to nourish and feed the school. And the two of them grow together. That takes a long time, it takes generations in most cases. This school was not permitted to grow for even a full generation. There is no way of knowing what kind of contribution, ultimately, the school could have made because it was not allowed time enough to bring its… they're no longer students, they're almost children, to adulthood. It's alumni we're not permitted to reach places visibility and influence in the community that are typical of a situation where a school and a community have grown up together. And that's really a tragic loss for this community, and obviously for the school, and all of those of us who felt that it was an important place to keep around. [Unknown] In five years? [Laninga] I think that if the school had been permitted to live on for a few more years, four or five years, that it would have to been impervious to any kind of administrative reevaluation. It would not have been quite so easy to simply pull the plug on the school that had fifteen years of roots in the community. I think by that time, there would have been enough reason for the school to stay around, for it to stay on and continue. [Unknown] What did survive the experiment? [Laninga] The people survived William James. And the people are scattered all over the world, but there are a great many of us still in the West Michigan area. And the school may be closed, and the books may all be scattered, and the files filed, but what the school accomplished is still here, it's a living, it's breathing, and it's making its presence felt every day, every year. And there's no telling what real contribution was made, yet, because we're not finished yet. �[Unknown] Was there anything of the philosophy that survived? Do you think West Michigan is now without a William James philosophy, entirely, because the school went away? [Laninga] No, I think the philosophy preceded the school. I don't think that's something so graded and timeless, and profound as that kind of… William James thought, originally, is already eighty or ninety years old. And I don't think he was the first… he may have been first to verbalize it, perhaps in English, but I don't think that the philosophy is gone. I think it was here before the schools here, and maybe it will return in another form for future. I'd like to think so. I know I would support any effort along those lines because I still think it's the most humane way to educate people. [Unknown] Excellent. Okay. This is Barbara's question: what is the essence of William James? [Laninga] Define essence. [Unknown] That's just what she told me to ask you, so I have no idea. [Laninga] No more help than that. What is… what was the essence of William James? [Unknown] What do you feel was the essence? [Laninga] Well, I don't want to talk about failure again, but I think that the essence of what we knew as William James was an agency. It was an agency available for those who pursued, frankly, whatever they wish to pursue. I saw a number of students out there pursuing something other than education. The school was big enough to accommodate them. It was free enough to accommodate them and was flexible enough to accommodate them. There were… part of the essential quality of the freedom of that type of curriculum is that you must allow people to… how can I say this is less than a blunt form? You must allow people to not do anything at all. You must allow people to not contribute, to not participate. They've had twenty years of a more structured regimen and built up all kinds of blocks and obstacles to a direct link to the education process. And it takes time for people to break down all those old barriers and realize and understand that nothing stands between them and what it is they want to be and what they want to achieve but themselves. So, all of these self-defeating habits, regimens, have to be cleared away. And no one can do that for you. No one can come in and reorient you, you have to do that for yourself. It worked for a great many of us. It didn't work for all of us. And probably the essence of William James was willingness to allow people to go their own way, whether that meant going out the door or not. A lot of people drifted in and out of the school, and that's not wrong. That's exactly what �the school was for. [Unknown] Great, beautiful. Alright one [inaudible] the tape. How was the William James Association formed? [Laninga] William James Association was formed in the wake for William James and out of the grief and the bitterness of the moment. A feeling a need to respond to this administrative cruelty was expressed. And the only thing that not the only thing but the thing that probably is most typical of that particular group of people, our age group, our mentality, our culture, is collective action. We almost knee jerk react to any kind of challenge in a collective manner. So, the Association was originally formed as some notion of an influence group for the preservation of some aspects of William James. And I think as that it's probably failed. But like I said before, failure's a reality for our community. And something bigger than that, I think, was realized by many people. That we’re all alive and well. We got together, we saw each other, and felt of each other. We were fine. The school was dead, we were fine and we knew that things are going to be okay. [Unknown] Crazy. Anything else you want to wrap up with? [Laninga] No, I think you've pretty well gotten it all on there. [Unknown] Alright. Thank you, Steve. [Laninga] You're welcome. [Unknown] It's going to be good. [Laninga] When do I see it? [Unknown] Well, I think there is going to be a… � 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_63_Laninga Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Laninga, Steven 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 Steven Laninga interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Steven Laninga 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. Steven Laninga was a student of William James College and a member of the class of 1979 at Grand Valley. In this interview, Steven discusses the personal journey that led him to William James College in the fall of 1974, studying photography and incorporating Social Relations coursework, and how the William James Association formed in the wake of the college closing. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Steven Laninga. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8e22232efcabe3929759797f054049eb.mp4 47b7df9f5ca4d0691fb04e364c3907ec https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/53ea654a5e96c36a514e912f28315dd0.pdf a7f705d10a5a6e720fca27df0a537511 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard Paschke Date: 1984 Part: 3 of 3 [Barbara] Final question that we have here is… oh, I don't like the wide shot. We don’t need the palm tree in the way. That's better. You were talking about James is over, but you read in the newspaper stuff that suggests that James [inaudible]. Can you comment on that for a while? [Paschke] Well, it makes me angry. It’s always that saying, "You can't be a prophet in your own lens," has always upset me. It just seems like you should be able to. It makes me angry to see those articles now. I don't know quite why. Maybe to think that I, you know, should have fought harder to keep it. I still have this sense that if we had continued it right to the present moment, they'd kill it off and redo it again from the beginning somehow. Just couldn't work. That it could be like it was and then suddenly come into its own and be right. I don't have a sense of that being able to happen. In some ways what we did at James, I think, is what the good teachers all over in other kinds of schools have always done. Sort of, maybe they might be thought to be eccentric in their department or sort of an interesting person to have around, but there has always been people, I think, who did the kinds of things that we did at James, they just didn't have whole colleges to do it in. Whole department in colleges to do it in. I think it's right. I mean part of me claps and says: "Well, I'm glad that people are finally realizing in the national committees and task forces what's important." I'm glad that we did it. [Barbara] What are some of those things that are going to be reinvented? [Paschke] The idea of transdisciplinary approaches to, you know, take a problem, make a course focus on a problem area rather than on a topic or a content area. And then bring to bear whatever you need to bring to bear to solve the problem and cross disciplinary lines in that way. I think people are reinventing those kind of things. I just attended a meeting where they were trying to talk about how all the behavioral sciences together could teach certain class courses and certain problem issues. And I think that's important. The importance of critical thinking, learning critical thinking, which is I think one thing that our students learned, a lot of them. The better ones learned. Probably because you had to develop critical thinking to figure out what was going on, sometimes, at the college. So, it was already the real world in terms of problem solving a complicated organization. But also, because people asked a lot of questions. There was a lot of the Socratic, you know, method was used a lot in teaching. Asking questions, not �having answers always. That kind of an approach to a liberal education, I think, was important. [Barbara] To pick up something, I would appreciate it if you would say again what you said in our pre-interview, just a sentence. You said something about that the founding of the college, it was your impression, that what it was… [inaudible] a lot of us were sixties people and we took that energy and directed it. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but could I please put words in your mouth, and would you say something around those lines because no one else has? [Paschke] Well, when all of the faculty were in college, it was the sixties, largely. And there was a kind of an energy then, I think, that had to do with the questioning, andand reacting, revolting, if you will, or whatever. A kind of an energy which was still there in the seventies, for the faculty. And, you know, I think that they brought that energy to bear on what they were doing, you know, in a different way than they would have in the sixties, in a lot of cases. In some ways and sometimes not so differently than they would have done in sixties. We had some sort of sit-ins and protests, too. We would bring things to the central administration and what not. I think the energy had to do with not accepting things as being finished and in inevitable categories. Saying: "Hey, I'm a person. I'm just getting myself together. I don't want to have a whole structure laid on me without having anything to say about it." And so, the idea about equality, the emerging idea that was I think was there already in the sixties, and certainly in the seventies, and the feminist movement. Ideas in general about equality. The student should be voting members of this committee, the student should have things to say, they're people, too. A lot of our students were older than we were, coming back to school. And there was that kind of a feeling of… it’s romanticizing it too much… I think of Martin Luther King, and I think of Selma, and people holding hands, and being passively aggressive, you know, and their protests and their certainty, and being sort of a cloistered community that we were, and, you know, going against the outside world, and being, sort of, flower children. Somebody went to a wedding recently, I heard, of a William James student and described it as being like the old days. And what the old days meant was the part of the sixties that carried over into the seventies. Where they went out and picked wildflowers for the bouquet, where people were into organic foods, and, you know, all that kind of sort of natural, you know, corduroy, and whatever, flannel. I mean a lot of that was a carryover from the sixties. And we looked a lot, I think, like people going to college in the sixties and were now teaching and didn't change a lot. But I think what the sixties tapped was a kind of a thing that's there in recent United States during adolescence for everyone, at some point. They’re starting to say: "Who am I, what can I be, what's out there?" You start reacting against established institutions, you start trying to find a voice. And to find a whole faculty that, in some ways, was going through its adolescence right in front of your very eyes over a period of ten or fifteen years was unusual. And again, maybe it couldn't �happen again today. You can't take a group of people in the eighties that went to college in the seventies and have that same magic or charisma, a kind of a… remind me, what is that mythological creature that has a lot of heads? [Barbara] Medusa, no. Hydra? A Hydra? [Paschke] Gorgon? Was that it? I don't know. Anyway, in some sense, it was always a problem for our administrators, at least within the college for our dean, to really feel like things were under control. Because it was like a group of people, again, emerging from this equal, everyone should have a say, kind of mentality of the sixties moving into the seventies. It was sort of a structure that went like this, it wasn't hierarchical. It was more people at the same level trying to make decisions, wanting to have something to say, thinking they had a right to have something say to say. Made a heck of a time for somebody trying to administer that. It was more like a band of people who were moving along, more or less, you know, in the same direction. That seemed like a sixties kind of a thing to me. I mean we had crowd mentalities and that kind of thing. [Barbara] So what you really see is some of the things that we were doing that are valuable coming up in completely different contexts in different forms? [Paschke] Uh huh. [Barbara] There's a question that I ask everybody, I think you already answered it but I'm going to ask you anyway. A one sentence answer, two sentences max, to you, personally, the one key thing that was William James, that characterized William James. In a word, in a sentence, two maximum. [Paschke] The man or the college? [Barbara] The college. [Paschke] Oh, personal freedom, whatever that means. [Barbara] Good. � 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_62_Paschke Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paschke, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Paschke interview (3 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard Paschke by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Paschke was a faculty member of William James College and longtime Grand Valley professor who retired as Professor Emeritus of Psychology. In this interview, Richard discusses the interdisciplinary nature of William James College, the Socratic method approach to liberal education, how the spirit of the nineteen sixties inspired the teachings of the William James faculty. This interview is part 3 of 3 for Richard Paschke. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f6a0aaa812667b4a163b47dbcfa9364b.mp4 3bea9c7be7f2f4c41d7e7b53dac310d4 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/66d9b1e4b0e895437a3943fc27bd5be5.pdf 782feff71eba389772e2f041b08c3df9 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard Paschke Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 3 [Barbara] Cameras warmed up yet, so you don't have to stand in an odd position while it warms up. [Paschke] Okay. [Barbara] Okay. Check my focus. I like head shots, which gets risky because you can't cut as well. Do you have one last comment on, like, our core that has to with pedigrees? [Paschke] I don't know if it has to do with the sort of the sense of community and communal thinking that was worked out in the first few years or if it has to do with the people, but something that was at the core James, I think from the faculty point of view, was the sense that you didn't have to be pedigreed in an area. The idea that you could be curious if you want to learn. That if you were a professional reader, if you ready for a living, you could read books, and you could talk to people, and you could learn things, and teach about things that you hadn't had a master’s degree in. That's sort of a unique notion that's not like that in many other places in the world, I think. And somehow, we transcend the usual way in which people get on one another's case about whether they're really prepared, or whether they really ought to have a right to teach certain things, or talk about certain things, from the front of classroom. And I think that's too bad. I think that when I talked before about community or how the students and faculty fit or what they had in common, I think the kind of curiosity the students have and the kind of hunger for new material was a hunger that was promoted. That was allowed and it was even promoted in the first five, six years of the college. People would go off and you didn't have to talk about faculty development. People would go off and prepare new courses on their own. You didn't have to set aside special time to do it. If you look at the numbers of courses… the numbers of different things that people taught, new preparations, it's incredible. It's a burnout kind of pace. But it didn't feel like that to people. I think, certainly, not in the first five or six years. Because it felt like they were doing what they wanted to do. The lid had been taken off, somehow. They were able to explore and expand. And that was really neat. And you don't find that in traditional departments. I'm going to meetings now in which people are talking about how to do trans-disciplinary teaching and whatnot. And you can't just get together a group of three people to team teach a course and have that same sense of wanting to read, and the other �person's part of the library, and wanting to have something to say about the things that they teach, and you're wanting to learn about, and teach about. [Barbara] That's fine for us, but what did it do for the students? [Paschke] What it did for some students is provide a really rich culture in which to find things out about themselves. Other students it blew away. Other students ran away and went to more traditional forms of schooling that had more structure. Identifiable traditional structure and expectations. And so, it didn't do the same thing for everyone. [Barbara] Changing the shot. Nice shot. You had a career before you came to James. [Paschke] Right. [Barbara] And you still have a career today. James came and went, and we devoted enormous amounts of time to it. How did that work in your whole life pattern? [Paschke] You mean how did I keep the same career? [Barbara] Yeah, if you did. [Paschke] Well, I don't think I did. I think I really changed careers pretty drastically. And several times while I was here, although people probably didn't know about it. One thing that's important is, I think, is that I think I am a pack rat. I really carry around too much stuff with me because I'm afraid to lose some sense of history and some place. I want to make sure I've got something in the drawer that connects me to other parts of my life. I don't let go of things very easily. In one sense, I think I like to explore a lot of and be curious a lot, but I need a really solid base, like some sense of continuity, someplace in my life. And I guess my identity as a psychologist was important to me and that way. That I maintain some connection with the literature at the national and international level; that I go to a few meetings now and then and be in touch with what people were doing. That was probably driven by the sense of not wanting to be seen as a sham either. The sense of how important it was to let other people know that we were professional, that we did know what we were doing, we weren't just dabbling. So, I did stay in touch with the literature, but I had a whole career in music. I didn't really know what I was going to, you know, do. Where I would end up. I guess I still don't. And that I made several readjustments in my career from a research psychologist to sort of an applied psychologist, to a sort of environmental psychologist. And then we hired people who really did that in a more pedigreed way, certainly. And so, I sort of… I moved around. And as we hired different faculty, I think what I did changed in response to where they were. And I still don't feel finished yet. But I guess there is some sense in which I'm still a psychologist. �[Barbara] You were in or you interviewed in the CAS Psychology and then you went to James for fourteen years. Come back to CAS… [Paschke] Psychology. [Barbara] …psychology, essentially, how did that work? How did it feel? [Paschke] Well, it was hard because after the first few months at William James I tended to ignore my colleagues who were psychologists on the campus. Felt like they had a very narrow visions because they were just being psychologists. And I didn't really feel that I had a lot in common with them, a lot to talk about. It sounds really egotistical to say, but it felt to me like I knew what they knew, plus I knew some other things. I had been outside of psychology and so where it fitted into other things. Coming back was hard because some of the same people are still there that were in the first department. And I had to deal with being, sort of, a snobbish kid, you know. Back fourteen years ago. But it's gone relatively well, I think. Staying low-key, not trying to act like I know everything. And not bringing my William James experience into what I'm doing now. Eventually, you know, the dust has settled. Plus, I wasn't the only person that came into the Psychology department now. There were three of us who came in from other units and we sort of deluded, you know, the going medium there. It felt like a relief for a while, to teach only a few courses, predictably the same courses every year. The same courses every fall, same courses every spring. I've already started to get itchy though. And I feel sort of constrained by the fact that in order to do a new course, I would have to go through so much rigmarole. Not just think it out, not just know what books I wanted, not just know what concept should be in the course, not just be able to defend the course, but all the paper stuff that goes with it. The ego stuff to goes with it. Making sure I'm not touching on someone's personal area of expertise. That I've decided not to do that, I guess. And I've changed my reading, my personal reading, still runs pretty freely around a lot of areas, and it just doesn't show up in preparation for classes anymore. The adjustment wasn't impossible. I do feel like I have to stay low-key in order to fit. Because in some sense it feels… this is a terrible thing to say… in some sense, it feels like I've been to, you know, to Jerusalem or something and come back and other people haven't been, and I know some things that they don't know, but I can't tell. [Barbara] But isn't part of that being older than some of the colleagues? Or isn't it? I don't know the department. [Paschke] No, the department is generally about my age. [Barbara] I have personally been accused by a student just this summer of having sold out. "Where did James go? You guys were teaching us about being future-oriented �and then the future came, and it wasn't any [inaudible] and went, “Hey! I'll take my paycheck!'" Have you had that kind of experience or do you recognize it, or do you think we sold out? [Paschke] No, I don't think we sold out. I think people tried really hard and they fought with everything that they had. We were not people who had lived through corporate mergers and things like that before. We didn't know how to do that. But I think everyone tried to handle that in the best way that they knew how. I think it was inevitable that James would be re-assimilated, you know, into the large college. I think that started right from the beginning of the college. It's like the death of James began as soon as the college was in place and people realized various things. That they would like to have been in the thing that they created, but they weren't. That the thing that they had created was sort of a thankless child that almost immediately after its birth turned its back on its parents. Even stuck its nose up in the air, I suppose, in some ways at the parents. That it was scary. It broke traditional kinds of boundaries. That it did things that sort of like having a rebellious teenager, I suppose, around. Sometimes the things that James did embarrassed the parent, you know, entities. Sometimes they got to places first. The parents: "Gee I wish I thought of that. Should've been doing that." But it was a competition almost right away. And the fact that the college didn't do exactly what its planners hoped it would do, made a kind of a chaffing kind of effect. You can see if you looked, I think, back five, six years before the college change, the reorganization changed everything. You could see a kind of inevitability. There was a kind of, a natural progress leading toward the end. Actually, surprised me that it lasted as long as it did with people fighting as hard as they and being as clever as they were about, you know, dancing and getting out the way or whatever because it was inevitable. It had to go down, I think, for the whole college to live. [Barbara] You mean Grand Valley? [Paschke] Grand Valley as a whole, yeah. [Barbara] Why? [Paschke] Well, I guess for the reasons that I said. If it's true that people who were there were there because they weren't quite finished, that they were always becoming something and trying to figure out what they were going to be when they got big and grew up and sort of finished up. They're always pushing the limits, testing limits, asking questions, being provocative, being gadflies, whatever. Their job, their sense of self, lead to keeping things in suspension. Sort of up in the air, sort of thing going… people might go out in and they might march in Grand Rapids with the placards or something, and embarrass people, write articles in the newspaper, or do things that, you know, didn't quite fit. Their job wasn't to �maintain complacency, and when you are the gadfly there's always the flyswatter there, right. Eventually going to get that damn fly. [Barbara] Surely then, we did do a bad job of preparing our students for this inevitable end. [Paschke] Well, I think student cycling through, although some of ours were on longer cycles than four years, certainly. The normal cycle for the student was shorter than the faculty cycle, certainly, by the end. Faculty that have been there for fourteen years or twelve years. I think there were, in the lifespan of the student, there would be a time in which they would really discover what William James, you know, was or what it was supposed to be. They couldn't really get it, always, right at the beginning. But they would start to appreciate that by the time they were in their junior year, I'd say, in a lot of cases. And they didn't want that to go away. And I think some of the students who were so negative and feeling that the faculty had been irresponsible about keeping the college alive, were, in a way, being idealistic. In a way being selfish. Saying: "Keep this around for me at all costs!" And in a way, it was contrary to the whole thing that James had, which was to change. In some ways, for its whole period of time, we added people, we added programs, we change programs around. We were responsive and it just kept changing. There was a way in which there was a mystical golden era in which that students didn't want to change, I think. That's part of it. But I think we weren't very good. We didn't build the kinds of bridges that you would normally build and to make sure that you come out with your piece of the pie in a mergerin a corporate merger. We didn't really know how to do that. But I think in the sense of inevitability was obvious to a lot of people. There were people that left. Everyone who came to William James on the faculty didn't stay the whole time. People came and went. Some people would see the frustration, would see the inevitability, I think, of the end. Even some people on the faculty would see that you couldn't keep doing what we did during the time when everything in the country got more conservative. Students were more serious about: "I, you know, I want a job. I want a certain kind of paying job. I want certain kinds of courses." There was a more of a rigid kind of feeling that wasn't there at the beginning. That students wanted some different things. They wanted a kind of a tightening up. And the more we went from being what we were toward being like what the rest of the campus was like, I think the more threatening it was for the rest of the campus some ways, too. I don't know, there's a lot of levels to that, I think, to try to understand. I don't think I understand all of it myself. But I knew that I had the feeling that the end was inevitable, and it was only because there were people who were literally willing to throw themselves in front of the train at the eleventh hour, like Robert Mayberry, that kept it going as long it did. [Barbara] Okay. Tape out. � 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_61_Paschke Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paschke, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Paschke interview (2 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard Paschke by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Paschke was a faculty member of William James College and longtime Grand Valley professor who retired as Professor Emeritus of Psychology. In this interview, Richard discusses the communal thinking that was at the core of William James College, the rich culture provided to the students, and how he transitioned to working in the College of Arts and Sciences. This interview is part 2 of 3 for Richard Paschke. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ef7fbfe0b9779c9fc2a36ef89888f2c7.mp4 58d4ffa3216b069047733e0fc2960793 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/02866acb1ce9c1da7dc5f827b8623ca3.pdf b7310fae9324fd3e901b037d81eb6b83 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard Paschke Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 3 [Barbara] You’re right at the beginning because you need to hold that in front of your face. It's called white balancing; it gets the camera to read whites correctly. Okay, you’re done. Yeah, that looks nice. If we could begin where we began before. You were at James at the beginning, and how did we manage to not just use the name William James like someone would use, you know, Woodrow Wilson High School, but really to become Jamesian? [Paschke] Well, I think there were a number of things involved. One was that we had already planned for us a synoptic lecture series with people that were so various that all of us had to scuffle around, and read, and learn about these people, and then we had to interact with these people. And it forced us outside of our training. It really pushed us in all kinds of ways. So, I think in that way, by “Jamesian” it means to have a hunger for knowledge and a non-departmentalized kind of a style of thinking that just the synoptic lecture series forced us to do that. That's how we started that first fall, with almost every other week having speakers come in and talking to people from all over the country that we never would have talked to before, I think. There were lots of incentives to break categories, to look at things in a broad way, since we were given, what we thought, was a blank check to create a college and do the best thing we could for a liberal arts, and sciences, and liberal education. Again, I think that pushed people beyond themselves, to broader perspectives. I don't know that everyone read William James, but certainly a lot of us did. A lot of us reread William James, and went off and found things to read, and were sharing articles and whatnot even about William James, so that kind of feeling was in the air for a lot of people. Thinking about community, I think back to the very first meetings that we had in the college which we spent, I don't know, six to eight hours a day for several weeks, every day, meeting [firetruck sirens] to work out everything. [Barbara] Why don't you start again? [Paschke] Thinking about community and the history of the development of the community of William James, I think back to the original meetings when, I can't remember when exactly, during a two- or three-week period, before the beginning of the fall semester, the original faculty sat in a room, or various rooms, pretty much all day. Six, eight hours a day, sometimes at evening meetings, working out everything that had to be worked out for the college. We had to decide on �grading policies, we had to decide on all that administrative stuff that people usually have in place when they start teaching at a college. But we also had to decide on how to implement a philosophy, which meant a lot of talks with one another about how we saw things. Sort of at a less than… a higher level than a paperwork level, but personally, philosophies of things. We literally, maybe this is an incorrect recollection, but I think we didn't pay as much attention to the original planning documents that were around as we should or we could have. I guess a lot of things had been worked out in task forces and whatnot before we got there. We pretty much redid all that stuff. Sat down and figured it all out and in that process worked out a really close sense of community. And again, it may not be an accurate recollection, but I think we got… by the time the classes started, we started meeting with students, there was already a sense of community. We were living, literally, in one another's hip pockets during that whole time. Working out ways to talk to one another was very strange, you know. I had never talked to a person who was as close to a Buddhist monk, I think, as Ken Hunter was. As anyone I had ever seen, you know. To talk to a person who knew about all that stuff and then try to figure out how to negotiate decisions with a person like that. And someone like Robert Mayberry, who was so careful and so, you know, articulate in the way he thought about things and spoke about things was a really intense kind of experience. A sort of trial by fire for that…those first meetings were sort of a rite of passage in the community. After that I think we insisted on it. Our hiring included a lot of times where people would sit around and talk. I think that's where the real interviewing went… not interviewing, but the real screening went on to see how people handled themselves in answering questions, and how they thought on their feet, and what they were like when they had a few beers in them, and those kinds of things were real important. There was a real sense of operating, intuitively, from something that was a sense of community. At level though I think there really was a real community. At another level there wasn't because some people lived in Grand Rapids and some people live in Grand Haven and it was always a joke from the beginning that there was the Grand Haven group and the other group. And the sense of community was really obvious when, I think, people from either the Grand Haven group or the other group would wonder why they weren't invited to a particular event or I mean it was a sense of being left out after the first year. You lived together so intensively so you had a sense of loss, almost. So, I'm not…how did it happen… the original meetings, past the administrative meetings, started including students. We would meet in Lake Huron Hall, with one hundred and thirty, or forty, or however many students there were in the student body, and there were these big town meetings, or whatever. And no one really seemed to be really self-conscious about that. Everybody seemed to sense it was an opportunity to speak up, to become known in the community, to have your voice heard, to work things out, to be in on the ground floor. And so, it was a really big community by the time September rolled around, I think, of a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty people. And again, that whole group of a hundred and fifty people meeting every �two weeks for a synoptic lecture series, meeting with the speakers, meeting in small groups exchanging ideas. There was just a lot of interaction. It would be, I guess I've used that example before, but it would be like the kinds of survival courses that they do for inner-city kids during the summer when they send them out to the wilderness, and they have to learn how to live together and talk to one another. And in some ways the rest of the campus was a wilderness. Not many of us went out and explored very much and talk to other people very much to think there was more than enough to do in trying to get to know those hundred and forty, or so, people that were right around you. [Barbara] Okay, that's at the beginning, that's a good [Inaudible] answer, but when I came in or when the students who had been interviewing came in, that was much after the beginning, and the community was still so very strong. What were some of the mechanisms for that intensity? [Paschke] Well, I think the way council meetings went on were a mechanism. People could still, not a hundred and forty anymore, but anyone could come and could either contribute to or tie up a whole group of people for hours and hours in discussion. That kind of continuing discussion was almost an addiction to discussion. I think in the hiring that went on, everyone had their eye on one another. Again, a sense that the people who are being hired could talk. I think the word of mouth spread quickly among students. There were students all over Grand Rapids are who were looking for a place like that to emerge and then when they found out about it would come in. And they were sort of prepped already for that kind of community life and expectations of interacting and contributing. We drew very heavily on students, I think, from the Grand Rapids area who had been around, who had been in other kinds of school, who were just ready for something like that to happen. [Barbara] Let me change that shot. Nice. When we were doing hiring, it was, indeed, an interesting experience where you really pushed people, to pushed all of ourselves, but it seemed as though we all understood what the criteria were for somebody we would hire and somebody who wasn't right. What the hell were those criteria because we never talked about them explicitly. We never drew up a list. [Paschke] Well, when I think about it now, the closest experience I have today is when I'm talking to someone that's seventeen or eighteen and I can understand what they're saying, with the part of me that hasn't gotten to be forty yet, I guess. A part the of me that wants to break the rules, that doesn't want things to go on forever in a really conventional way, to have people tell me what I have to do. There's a part of me that resonates, even now, with, you know, seventeen-year/ sixteen-year-olds. People who are going through searches for self-identity, going through, sort of, a personal crisis, trying to figure out who they are and what their �voice means. I think everyone that came here, students and faculty, felt that way. It partly had to do with coming off of the sixties, and where people were, and that kind of stuff was in the air. And you didn't want to go sit in at the U of M, but you wanted to be given a little peace that you can call your own; make something out of it that really counted, that really made a difference. Idealism, I guess. And I think we looked at people, and people who are sort of dreamers, and idealists who weren't afraid to have dreams… weren't so worried that they might not be practical dreams. That's a weird mix. That's a weird mix to have people… well on the one hand, we're all very pragmatic, I think, too. People could all do things that were very practical but were dreamers and idealists, in a way, I guess. And I think you could… we thought we could recognize that in other people. People came in… I remember one person… people we would interview, we would look at their style of writing, and their letters, or other applications, that was one thing. But when they came in, when we talked to them, if they seemed to have scripts that they were running out, that didn't seem to work. If they weren't really listening to us. If they didn't seem excited by what we were doing, it was sort of a self-centered approach. This a really neat thing we have going on here and if you're not excited about it you probably are not going to work out very well here. I think age has something to do with it because I can think of one person in particular who when we interviewed, we felt was quite a bit older than the other people and felt would not have the same kind of vision. I can remember going through something with that person. When I look back on it now I realize that we put one another on the spot in ways that people probably would be mortified by if they were interviewing at Old Kent Bank or some other corporation. I mean, we asked some very personal kinds of things. I don't mean like: "What kind of pillow do you use when you sleep?" About like: "What do you really think about whatever religion?" Those kinds of questions. The kinds of questions that, you know, when you're seventeen and eighteen you might spend all night, sitting someplace, you know, smoking, and having intense discussions about… those kinds of things usually drop off when people get into their twenties and thirties. And they didn't drop off for the people that were around James, it seemed like. [Barbara] Do you… when you check that tape, would you go on…I think, to me, the follow up to that has something to do with: we recruited the kinds of students we were. Is there any way to get to that from what we've just been talking about. The misfit thing that you said. We were recruiting in our own image, not only faculty but students, we were talking about before. [Paschke] But the image didn't have anything to do with how we looked, I guess, but had to do with how we felt, maybe, or how we thought. And I do think the people that came to William James saw it was sort of like California, you know, in the eighteen-hundreds or something. You would come to William James, thinking that you would have an impact on it. Somehow your voice would be heard. Something about a whole bunch of individuals, together. The similarity had to do �with this idealism, or hopefulness, whatever words you want to use there, I think. Kind of a youthful idealism. I don't think that we saw sought it… because we didn't screen students the same way we screened faculty. Students would apply, and they did write letters and things, and people did read those letters, but I don't think everyone knew each student came in so well when they were first coming in as they knew the other faculty. But there was something just about the same thinking that would draw students who are a lot like the people who were doing the thinking. We were, in many ways, if you think about the teaching style. People who had gone through educations in which they were one of two hundred people sitting in a lecture hall we're now sitting in a circle on the floor with a bunch of people. And if an administrative person were to walk by, they might not be able to single out who the faculty person was in the group, because the age differences weren't really that great. They seemed big to me then, but I realize now the difference between a seventeen-year-old, or an eighteen-year-old, and a twenty-five-year, or a twenty-six-year-old, were really not that great. And so, we looked a lot like the students, I think, and dressed a lot like the students. We didn't have uniforms. And certainly, talked and taught like the students, in lots of ways. So, it was a kind of a situation in which there was a community with faculty and among faculty and students. [Barbara] Would we then, even if they hadn't closed us, would the mere fact that we all got older have diminished the community? [Paschke] I think it could of. I think maybe it did, in some ways. You know, I think maybe you can't go back to that kind of thing as an older person. But I don't know. We did bring in older people. We brought in Leo Hurwitz, who obviously had a big age difference. And people understood him, and he seemed to understand the students. They're talking on the same wavelength. Like there has to be a part of you that didn't grow up as far as, you know, totally buying into a really narrow vision. You had to be curious and want to explore, you know. And you would sense that in other people. A person could come in who was thirty years older, I think, and you could understand within a short time, within a paragraph, that they knew what you were talking about. They have been there themselves, maybe never gotten out of it, in some ways. [Barbara] We're running out of tape. � 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_60_Paschke Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Paschke, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Paschke interview (1 of 3, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard Paschke by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Paschke was a faculty member of William James College and longtime Grand Valley professor who retired as Professor Emeritus of Psychology. In this interview, Richard discusses the "hunger for knowledge" that unified the William James College community, how searching for self-identity bonded the faculty and students, and the youthful idealism of that place and time. This interview is part 1 of 3 for Richard Paschke. 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 Identity Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d768f5135cf27c6f4d086aee582ce985.mp4 ecc27c349767d0c213f88258bfa8b417 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d85e73d73d9ff5d41c0a94de60583aa8.pdf 661b43aada9cc1c12924a8b4e95dbdf2 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Scott Troost Date: 1984 [Troost] My year was the first year that we still had draft numbers, but it was the first year that it was clear that no one was going to be drafted. The year before me… [Unknown] After the lottery? [Troost] Yeah. Well, we had a lottery. My year had a lottery as a class of seventy-two in high school. We had the lottery but when we had a lottery everyone knew that it was not going to make a difference. By that time Nixon declared the war was going to be pretty much phased out. The class before me there had been people that were drafted. So, when I was in high school, I assumed that I was going to have to face that issue. My brother who was two years older than me had to go through it. Ended up getting a deferral from a friend who was a psychiatrist who just gave him a psychological deferral. And so that really shaped my mind as far as… [Unknown] This goes on a theory that I have and that is that in the later sixties and early seventies there was a greater need for alternative colleges because of all the returning vets and [inaudible], you know, that weren't accepted at traditional colleges at that time. [Troost] Yeah. [Unknown] Do you want to say anything on that? [Troost] I don’t know what… I'm real surprised about the whole anti-nuclear movement, about people I meet that are younger who seem to have a lot of social concerns. And yet they don't have anything like a Vietnam to galvanize them. So, I don't know. Maybe there is still a population out there of kids that grow up that for whatever reason don't accept the standards and need some place where they can go and not feel like they're the odd ball. And because it seems like there is still a significant group out there that have that feeling. [Unknown] Definitely a minority. [Troost] Definitely a minority. Though when you look at the… after the end of the Vietnam War, a lot of people that were protesting ended up going back to the fold. The �fact that the student population became Republican quite quickly, gave some indication that for a lot of those people, it didn't stick. Whatever it was they were feeling in the sixties, once Vietnam was over with, they went back to being pretty much typical students. [Unknown] Yeah, the cause was [inaudible]. [Troost] I remember I couldn't… I remember being so surprised to meet someone my age who was racist. Because I thought to myself, "Well, that was something we figured out." We figured out in the sixties that racism was bad. And so, anyone my age should know that. I mean they went through all that, they should know that they can't tell a racist joke and that's bad to do. And yet here they are doing it. Where were they during that time? How come that didn't have the same effect that it had on me. [Unknown] Yeah. Well and I'm twenty-six, and I'm probably the last generation, or near the last generation that knew what was happening… [Troost] Oh yeah, you’re real close to being at the end of that. [Unknown] Yeah. And I think I’m one of the few “long hairs” that’s still left of that generation. [Troost] Well, now if you have long hair it's more indicative that you're conservative and kind of a redneck. I mean, I'm scared of “long hairs” now. Like, ooh, watch out for that guy, I'm sure he's violent. [Unknown] Okay, well let’s roll video. [Troost] Okay. Now you're going to be… were just going to be conversing? [Unknown] Yeah, it's the same thing. Just roll video. Is video rolling? Alright. I’m going to wait a few seconds to get to the video. [Inaudible] [Troost] Okay. [Unknown] So, you studied Arts and Media also? [Troost] Well, I studied Arts and Media, I took some dance classes, I took one design class. I just, I really literally sat down. All the milestone things they were just phasing in when I was graduating and so I didn't have to do any of that while I was at [William James]. I sat down in the last week and just juggled around all the classes and thought, "Hey, I can get a double major here.” And so that's what I did. �[Unknown] That's funny. You know, I got away with that, too. See, I never graduated. [Troost] So, you didn't have to… [Unknown] Well, I kept on not doing my milestone and they would either not ask me about it or they would change the rules while I was still under it. "Well, you should have done that four terms ago." Well, I didn't do it. "Well, don’t worry about that.” [Troost] Well, the greatest thing about Grand Valley was that because it was cluster colleges, whenever there was a screw up, they always assumed they had screwed up. Whenever I'd go into the records office and they would say, "Well, we don't have that." Or when I was trying to get something, I'd say: "Well, it should be there." They would say, "Well, we probably lost it." The assumed they lost it. I was so shocked when I went to the University of Iowa where it's a monolithic structure and so I went in and said, "Well, I already paid that." And they said, "No, you didn’t." I said, "Well, can I get in anyway?" They said, "No, you’ve got to pay right now." Where at Grand Valley it was, "Oh yeah, go ahead, go ahead, you're in.” [Unknown] Okay, from the top. What drew you into William James College and West Michigan and how did you get to there? [Troost] Well, I grew up in Oklahoma and went through high school and did the whole thing there. I was a child during the sixties and the Vietnam thing. I had a draft number, though I wasn't drafted. By that time the war was coming to a close. And so, when I was out of high school, I was hot for experimental education. Also, the schools I applied to had turned me down because I had been rebellious my senior year and dropped all my grades. So, I wandered around for a while. I was out in California in a small junior college out there. I went overseas on a program called Experiment in International Living in Denmark. And while I was there, I met a woman, Sally Norquist, who said: "Well, I'm going to a small experimental college in West Michigan called 'Thomas Jefferson College.'" This was the first time I heard about it, even though I had looked at literature about experimental colleges. Never- the name of James never came up. But at that point, Thomas Jefferson had a national reputation among a small group of people. It also was attractive that it was a public institution and was quite cheap compared to a lot of the other experimental colleges I investigated. And I said: "Well, that sounds great." So, I followed her to Grand Rapids and set up household with her and some other people and started taking classes at Thomas Jefferson. To find out then that there was a cluster college there, several cluster colleges, one of which was William James College. The first time I heard about William James was one of my housemates, Paulette Rosen, came home and said that she just started taking this class with this professor named Stephen Rowe, Ethical Problems and Perspectives. And she thought it was the best class she had ever taken, that he �was a wonderful professor. She also was in love with one of the other students in the class, which made her even rave more about the class. And that whetted my appetite to see what he was like. At that time, the classes I was taking at Thomas Jefferson weren't that exciting to me. About that time the only thing I did at that point was to sponsor a class myself in how to throw the Frisbee. Which fit in the curriculum about as well as anything else fit in. I also did learn how to deliver a baby in my Pregnancy and Birth class at Thomas Jefferson and if anyone ever needs that help from me, I can perform that. So, there were a few things I learned about how [?] shares in the work of some value but I started taking classes with Stephen and found him just to be a wonderful professor, and loved his ideas, and his conversation, and the way he conducted his class. I eventually got hooked in with Barry Castro and had the same experience with him and I found a little niche there. The thing that I remember when I first got to Grand Valley was that someone said: "Well, you go to Thomas Jefferson College to get your shit together and once you've got your shit together then you go to William James." And that seemed to fit my experience also. [Unknown] So, how was William James different than Thomas Jefferson, in the people and the classes and also from other traditional schools? [Troost] Well, the thing that- the main thing, the difference between Thomas Jefferson and William James that I found was that the people at Thomas Jefferson seem to be… the main mode there seem to be emotional. People were passionate about this, about that, and it worked quite well for things like dance, and theater, and other arts activities. But there was very little thought, there wasn't a lot of respect for conversation, there was a lack of focus at Thomas Jefferson, or there was an attempt to find focus that it never seemed they were able to find. And what I found at William James was a celebration of ideas and thinking, at least in the classes that I took the professors I took classes with. And the students seem to be serious about studying, about thinking, about issues, about broader themes, about being synoptic, to use the word that we all have to use at least once if were William James alumnus. And the other thing I found that was… that the difference between William James and more traditional schools I went to was that I had always felt like an oddball or a rabble at the more traditional colleges. And I didn't like that role. I would play it and I started… I wasn't taking myself as seriously. And William James College was the first place that I could take myself seriously and that other people would, too. And that I wasn't the oddball in the class or the rebel in the class. I usually was probably one of the more conservative people in the class. I could say things on my mind and not have them laughed at or have to be defensive about them. And I love to talk. I love to be in a classroom, and talk, and engage with people and it was a perfect place for that. I found a little niche there. And I was not able to find that at other colleges. And it seemed like William James was set up to allow people to find niches. People that didn't fit in other places, they could come there and find a �niche. And that's how I found it different. [Unknown] Okay. What of the education? Was it a good general education? A good liberal education? How would you rate with other traditional colleges? [Troost] Well, I was a self-motivator. Once I find something that I enjoy, I usually work quite hard at it. And so, I studied very hard at William James. I remember a class I took during the College of Arts and Sciences, this is after a couple of years at William James, and it was an Environmental Studies class, and it was one credit class, and the professor was not going to be there one day, and it was a discussion class. And he, by that point I had been the one that had been talking most the time, and so he suggested that I'd be the moderator for the next class, when he was going to be gone. And I showed up that day and no one else was there. Once when the professor wasn't there that means there wasn't a class, in their minds, even though they knew it was scheduled. And yet for me it was a lost opportunity to talk more about the environment and what the issue was in the class. And I found that kind of thinking and serious study was as rigorous as any other place that I went. And was certainly for helping me to think creatively, it was as good as education as I could find. Because other people that I met that would come through traditional schools didn't do that. All they wanted to know was what was expected of them and then that's what they would do. Now I didn't do that very well, and I found that would be a problem later on as that once I got back and I went to law school after Grand Valley, and it was back in traditional structure that didn't work very well for me. The kind of stuff that I had learned at William James. [Unknown] How is that education regarded at any other traditional? [Troost] Well, most people don't ask you or don't care too much where you've gone to school. I went to University of Iowa Law School and they didn't know Grand Valley from Adam. Or certainly never heard of William James College. So, it was only after I told him, which I told him quite frequently that I had gone to the experimental college, and that I had gone to William James College, that it was a special place, and I wore my T-shirt, and I was having articles written by Stephen and other professors that I was willing to hand out at the least provocation. So, I made sure that people knew that I'd been to a different place, and that it was unique, and that it had given me a whole different view of the world that they should also have. I proselytize quite a bit when I first left William James. But I found that most people didn't have a very clear conception of what that kind of education would be like and it was business as usual for them. They were in law school and there were more pressing matters to be worried about. [Unknown] I'd like you to say a little bit about the role of the educational community out there in the support [inaudible]. A statement on that. �[Troost] In terms of the educational community of William… [Unknown] Of students, and how that was unique. [Troost] Well, I don't… in Grand Rapids it's rare that I don't meet someone that hasn't been to William James. It seems like every time I meet someone in some field either they were at Wayne James, or the person they're married to went to William James. And there's an immediate sense of community there. Even though we might… even though I usually don't know them. And I find that ironic that I went to a school as small as William James and I know very few people from Wayne James. I mentioned when we were talking before the tape started that when I graduated in seventy-seven, I got to graduation and there was the little room full of William James graduates and I didn't know a single student. I had to introduce myself to everybody, and everybody had to introduce themselves… they didn't know me. And here was a school that was, I think, sixhundred people and I had been there for two or three years, and I didn't know a single person I graduated with. And yet there was that sense of then, and when I meet people now, that there is a community of people and a support for, again, for being a little bit different. And accepting that. And certainly, I think there are certain values implied, usually more liberal. Though I'm sure that's not always the case, but you can… you don't have to apologize about not voting for Reagan. Things like that. [Unknown] Can we talk a little bit about… I'm taking off my notes right now. [Troost] Sure. [Unknown] Can you talk a little bit about the language. [Troost] Yeah, well that was one thing when I… a frustration I found when I left the William James community was that we had developed a very specialized language there, especially in the Social Relations group. I don't know… I don't know about the other groups, whether they had their own language. [Unknown] I'm sure they did. [Troost] I'm sure they sure did. It just didn't translate. I remember giving a group of very good friends at law school – who also seemed to share most of the values that I shared - an article by Stephen. They didn't understand. They didn't… I mean they literally couldn't understand what it was about. And for me it was… it summed up my complete experience at William James. I could read that, or I can read that article and it said exactly what I felt about the world. And yet for them it was mishmash. And so, I had to try to figure out ways see to translate what I learned �of William James, or just give it up entirely. I finally stopped talking about it because I couldn't find ways to bridge that language gap. And it was also… the other thing about the language that I learned William James was it was mostly a language of ideas and thinking to the exclusion of emotions and that sort of thing. Now I know that there were some other classes, I know Dick Gottlieb in Social Work paid a lot of attention to that, but I'd never had any classes with Dick. And so, for me, I had a whole language of ideas and I didn't have much language of emotions. And that got me in trouble because I think I started assuming that things that were happening to me had more to do with my thinking than with what was going on emotionally with me. And as I later found out, that wasn't always the case. The decision to going to law had a lot of emotional reasons. My father wanted me to do it, my parents were getting divorced at the time, and I needed some stability. There were lots of emotional things that were happening to me when I made the decision to go to law school that I never talked about. And I was able to, with ideas and thoughts, rationalize why I should go law school, when really that was not the reason I was going. I was going because my father wanted me to go and because I needed some stability in my life. Now I'm going into theater, which seems to get much closer to my heart and what I should be doing. But it took me a long time to realize like that. And I had to… I didn't learn that at William James. I'm of the opinion now, thinking back to that age, that I probably needed a lot more than just William James College at that point in my life. I needed a therapist; I needed a vocational counselor. And I was under the mistaken impression that I could get all of that at William James. And I think that was probably a problem William James had is it held itself out to be more than it should be, or could be. What I needed a teacher to say to me was: “That's something you need to deal with a counselor, and I can't do it here for you." But we had this idea that William James is a community. We could talk and deal with all sorts of intimate issues. And maybe we could… maybe we were a bit more ambitious than we should've been with that. [Unknown] Yeah, I've heard it criticized because of the fact that you develop, you know, a surrogate family, more or less while you're in college. And the four years, and you're out and back into your reality, as you know, is completely shaken up. Your friends are gone, you know, everybody you can relate to. And the language barrier. That kind of closure I think, do you think, perhaps that was one of the things that didn't work for the college? [Troost] Well, the thing is… the thing that worked for me was the challenge to remain alive and remain thinking. And to initiate thought for myself. And that's something that has stayed with me as a strength for me. It sometimes trapped me. Like I said, there were certain emotional things that I didn't have a handle on, and I trap myself by my idea and my thinking. But at least I kept thinking and kept questioning things. And that's something I still hang onto and it's something I think I got from William James or least I got strengthened by William James. To �feel like that was okay to think for myself and not accept what was going on, what the status quo was. I was going to say something else, but I forget now. [Unknown] Why is that… [Troost] Oh! The community of… the community people. There was a whole group of us that ended up moving out to Lake Michigan in Grand Haven for school year and it was a wonderful and horrible experience. It was this whole idealism that we could establish this community for ourselves and be self-sufficient. We even talked, at a point, where maybe we didn't have to go into Grand Valley, we could just do our education there among ourselves. And by the end of the year, we had come apart at the seams. It had gotten quite incestuous. People went from one couple group to another. I mean people… so and so and so and so split up, and then these two people started sleeping together. And people started checking out, emotionally. And it was a… it ended up being a very painful experience. Though when we started it, we were full of idealism and we had some wonderful times together. And it's an experience that still feels strong to me, that it is possible, you know, in moments to find that kind of community among people. And so, I still take that with me. I think in the end, I am still a committed idealist, even though I have longer periods of cynicism now I have to weather. I think deep down, my hunch is for most William James students, they didn't lose that. They got a little more tempered by the society, maybe they’re a little more reluctant to talk about it now, and they're certainly a little more cautious about jumping into things. But deep down there's still that idealism that they have. [Unknown] Looking for things that perhaps didn't work and, you know, perhaps tie that in with the demise of the college. You talked a little bit about early how you felt too much was paid to, perhaps, the pragmatic rational attitudes than not to the emotional attitude. And you also talked about how there's a [inaudible] that's going to be made after the closing because William James… [Troost] Well, I remember when they announced the closing of Thomas Jefferson College it certainly seemed that the trend was going away from a cluster college concept. And that Lubbers, who initially seemed to embrace the idea, had lost his enthusiasm for it and was starting to become convinced that there was a need to make a more university type setting. And if that's the case, then William James would've had to radically change to continue to exist within that university structure. So that if a stand was to be made, it should've been made back when they closed the first cluster college. Even though at that time I think Thomas Jefferson College just had tremendous problems and had no educational philosophy that was working and had not worked. But it also seemed that the die was cast. And I'm sure everyone has their opinion about why they closed William James College and mine is as valid or no more valid than anyone else's. But I don't feel like we have much to do with that, that we had much power over that �decision. I think once the decision was made at the higher levels that it was a political decision that we couldn't have changed. We might've been able to make more of a fuss about it or embarrassed Grand Valley more about it but my hunch is that the trend towards a cluster college at Grand Valley had run its course and was not going to be supporting any longer. [Unknown] We talked about the constitution of the William James student base. Too much idealism, not enough idealism, too much rationalism, too much -isms [Troost] Too many -isms. [Unknown] Yeah. You know, I want to get a good picture of that because I think that was one of the points that led to the demise that people were always reacting [inaudible] perhaps emotional. [Troost] Well, for me, what worked for William James – and I suspect worked for most William James students – is the relationship with the professors and the classroom work they did. It seemed like people that were there found a comfortable niche of two or three professors that they took most of their classes from and of a subject matter that they studied. Beyond that, I'm not sure if the institution worked for the student in any other way. I know they have the council meetings, but I never figured out what they were talking about at council meetings. I didn't go to very many. I was fairly antisocial in terms of the larger structure at William James. I suspect that was the case for most William James students. So that the power structure or what happened beyond the classroom level was really left up, principally, to the administrators and the faculty. I don't know enough about the politics of what happened among the faculty when things were coming apart, to know what happened or didn't happen. Whether the faculty could have taken certain stands or could have pressured certain people, I don't know. It's beyond me. I think for the students, though, I never had a sense that we had much to say about how William James worked, and certainly not about how William James worked in the Grand Valley community… Grand Valley State Colleges as a whole. The student I found there, like me, loved to talk. They were, in some ways, pretty conservative folks. Thomas Jefferson College were just wild. I mean, they were fun; they were wonderful. It was exactly the kind of people you should be around for part of your little liberal education because they really were willing to expand and try things that have never been tried. William James students, on the other hand, though, we're much more willing to talk and to think. And yet there was as basic conservatism, even though most of the values we had and talked about were quite liberal. I think they came from a much more conservative place in us. And certainly, for me I felt that way. I wasn't radical or liberal because I had this expansive view of the world, it was because certain things didn't make sense. I thought about the way our structure was… the way our society was structured, and it didn't work right. And I thought: "Well, �that's not right." I mean they came from thinking about these things. And that's a fairly conservative type of view of the world, where you just see contradiction. It's interesting, I found that in Denmark, which is usually considered a very liberal country and very, you know, socialistic country, that the people there, basically, were very, very conservative people. They just see things that don't make sense and so they change that. And I had a sense in William James that was more the way people thought. I admit that sometimes people seemed a little dull, but I certainly didn't… I certainly liked… that was the place that I found for myself and I liked, even though I kept playing Frisbee, and I had my hair long, and did all those things. And I had… it was like a duality for me. I regretted that TJC didn't work, but certainly found a home for myself at William James. [Unknown] Okay, got some wrap up questions here. We got most of them. Is there anything else you want to throw out? [Troost] I don't think so. [Unknown] Okay. How would you describe William James to another person? [Troost] Oh, God. William James College to another person. [Unknown] Somebody that doesn't know about William James, and you're talking about it. [Troost] I would tell them it was a small college among a cluster of colleges near Grand Rapids, Michigan, that had a very dedicated faculty. And that were dedicated to thinking and liberal education, and that found a student body who are committed, or willing to commit themselves to the same thing. And that attracted students, and I suspect faculty, who have not fit in other places very well. And yet were not radical in fundamental senses, but basically misunderstood or just needed a place where they felt more comfortable and were among peers that they could share things with. And that for a period of time there was created a community of people who could talk and think in the way that they'd always felt. And it was a worthwhile experiment. And it was probably an educational tool but that's still needed. I don't think it was a product of the sixties, I think there was a viable philosophy that was going on there that still can appeal to a certain segment of kids graduating from high school. Kids that don't quite feel accepted, or have different ideas, or want to seriously talk about the world and questions fundamental things in the world. You know, I think William James was the perfect place for that. The whole emphasis at William James about career education was not so much the thing for me. I did an internship, I did all that sort of thing, that was not as important to me as the whole celebration of ideas that I found at William James. [Unknown] Okay, good. Okay, so [inaudible] question. �[Troost] Okay. [Unknown] What is the essence, you know, the bottom-line essence, using, you know, a couple words, bottom line, the essence of William James College? You know, take a minute to think. [Troost] Bottom line essence of William James College? [Unknown] You know, what was it? That's one of the big questions everybody asks. What was William James, really? [Troost] Blue. I don't know I have to make a joke because it's an important question and I can't think of anything to say about it. It, for me… I'm going to say…I'm going to make… I'm going to do an intellectual answer. I wish I could come up with emotional response to that and I can't. And it's unfortunate because I think I could come up with a better answer if it was emotional. The intellectual thing I was going to say was that it was the conversation was the essence. That I found people to converse with for perhaps the first time in my education. And maybe last time in my education. And that was liberating to me. That had a liberating effect on me. The idea that I could converse with faculty and with other students and have a true conversation in the broadest sense of the word was, for me, the essence of William James College. [Unknown] Great. She's been telling everyone the response to the question [inaudible]. [Troost] Yeah, I wish you… like I said, I wish I could come up with something that was more from the heart, an image or something. I can't come up with an image. [Unknown] Well, maybe that wasn't the essence. [Troost] Whatever it is, it's the image, I mean when I think of William James I think of a classroom. I think of either Stephen or Barry talking. A lot. Because they both love to talk. And yet in a way that included the students. And talking about fundamental things. And not being afraid to do that. Not being afraid to spend time talking about very fundamental questions, and speculating about the world, and being able to entertain any question and talk about it in a serious manner. That's the image I have of William James College. I don't… the rest of it seems to be blurry. That's why it's always embarrassing to me when people ask me about William James because I like… I can't tell them about council meetings, I can't tell them about what it was… what was happening in other niches in the in the college. There's not many professors that I know. There's not many other students that I know. I just know I know those classrooms and what happened in those. And that there was something magical, for me, in those moments, in those �classes. And Stephen and Barry and sometimes other professors, seemed to be able to create a magic for me that just was explosive. I was in seventh heaven when I discovered them. I thought: "This is education. I finally found education." And I knew that it was there. I knew, in high school, and in the first colleges I went to, I knew that that was not something that was happening, that could happen. And when I found it, I went: "Aha! I was right all along." I suspected that you could do this, this was possible to have a conversation like this. So that was… [Unknown] Okay. Did you have class with [inaudible]? [Troost] No. Same way? Same kind of feeling? [Unknown] Yeah just real involved. He was the only person I saw… [Troost] He taught music, didn't he? [Unknown] Yeah. He's the only person I ever saw talk to everybody personally, and to the whole class at the same time. Every time he talked, you thought he was talking to you. Not at the blackboard, not at the class as a whole. It was just real good. The instructors, I think that's the essence also. [Troost] Yeah. And maybe that's the best thing a college can offer people is a good core of the professors that you can find one or more that you can use the mentor. And maybe that's all William James really needed to have done. Maybe the other stuff they tried to do was more ambitious than it needed to. I was not unhappy with my education at all at William James, even though I kept suspecting I should be. I kept thinking, you know, I'm not at council meetings, I should be there. I am not really a William James student unless I'm doing all this synoptic stuff. But in fact I was happy with the classes I was taking. And someone said: "That's all you need to do." I was like: "This is great, I don't want to do anything else. I just want to study with these people." [Unknown] Great. Anything else? [Troost] I can't think of anything. [Unknown] Okay. Good. � 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_59_Troost Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Troost, Scott 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 Scott Troost interview (video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Scott Troost 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. Scott Troost was a Social Relations student of William James College who graduated in 1977. In this interview he discusses what drew him to William James College and West Michigan, how he first learned of Grand Valley while overseas in Denmark, and how he switched from Thomas Jefferson College to William James due to influential professors such as Stephen Rowe and Barry Castro. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Scott Troost. 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 educaton Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/06bb48251d361d6f6b04cfd819be3557.mp4 8d813da1e92fef375f3809556aade9d2 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6c7906d6d0ef0dc1361dba6e848e1c73.pdf 78ff12cc35ee6de93d1d935ed3a90f2c PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Margaret Proctor Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] Let’s get started. If you had to sum up the essence of William James College in a sentence or two, what would you pull out of it? [Proctor] Well, there are two things really. I guess a liberal education for a practical world and that doesn't really say it very well. I think the liberal education is extremely important and for graduates I've talked to it was and it made them much broader and better workers in the real world. And that combined with the – you might say – more practical, real life education they got here was really what it's about. And the two were not separate because the liberal fed into the practical. And the other thing would be the sense of community. Which I think helped, well, more than helped, it was part of the education and made them able to go out into the world and be entitled, as Barry Castro used that term. I was going to talk about that more in another question, though. But the sense of community. [Barbara] Have you had any feedback from people who have gone out in the world and have been so disturbed by the lack of community out in the world that they’ve, essentially, blown their education? Have you ever had that? [Proctor] No, I haven't. I keep hearing that that must happen. I haven't had that from anybody. [Barbara] Would you talk about the liberal education aspect of James and the liberal studies program now. Is that a direct outgrowth but what's the difference? [Proctor] It is a direct outgrowth. It really is. When we knew that James was going to close… I was talking with Barry Castro in the hall, and he said, "Why don't we get a bunch of people on campus – James people, but other people on campus – who’d be interested in liberal studies." We had a liberal studies major, you see, at the time he said, "Why can't we keep the liberal studies major going?" Well, actually, I'm not sure he even said the major. We got together… let me back here. Let me back up. [Barbara] Yeah. Start the question again. [Proctor] Okay. �[Barbara] Start it again. [Proctor] It is a direct outgrowth of James. Not of the liberal studies program, per se, but of James. Let me start over again. I need to figure out how I'm going to start this. It really is a direct outgrowth of the James idea of a liberal education. We had a Liberal Studies major here already, but that wasn't the main thing. What happened is by chance. Barry Castro and I started talking in the hall one day and he said, 'Why don't we get together a liberal studies committee and keep liberal studies – liberal education – going at Grand Valley. Not using just James people, but other people on campus who support a broad liberal education." So, he came up with some names out of what was going to be the divisions. And we said, "Hey, yeah, Bill Balm. Hey, yeah, this person and that person. Hey, yeah." And so, we just handpicked the committee. [Laughter] And I don't know how… that's right, I chaired the liberal studies program here, so I happened to chair it. And we called up the people and just said, "Do you want to meet?" And we met. I said, "We want to keep this program going." They wanted to keep it going and we started meeting. We had about fifteen people, twenty people. And it started to get kind of official because it became clear after talking to Glenn that we could keep the problem going. He did want to keep going. And so, the committee got cut down in size for a while, and now it's back up to what it was because we decided it was too small. But what happened, as it turns out, there's a lot of people at Grand Valley – not the majority, but a lot of people – who really do want this kind of education. And they were tucked in out there in the various departments and a very fine bunch of people. I think if we tried to do it with only James people it wouldn't have worked because it would've been seen as a James thing. And now this thing is firmly in place. There's a William James synoptic speaker every year, through the Liberal Studies program, there's Liberal Studies majors from all over the campus. The various people in their departments kind of find people who want to have a little broader education than just the narrow. And they take a certain number of courses maybe in that major. But, for instance, in business. Barry recruits them like crazy in business. A number of people who want to get the business courses but don't want a very strict business major and have some broader interests. He says, "Well, maybe a Liberal Studies major is the thing for you." And they get an individualized program, and a very broad program, and they get their business courses, too. And it's working. There's not tons of students in it, but it's working, and the faculty are working together. It's going very well. [Barbara] It sounds wonderful. [Proctor] Yeah, it is! [Barbara] I'm envious. �[Proctor] [Laughter] I made sure I stayed on the committee. I wouldn't let anybody kick me off after Steve Rowe became chairman. It's one of the more… actually, I consider it one of the most important things around here. I really am excited about it. [Barbara] Does this at all actually go into the discussion you wanted to have about study plans? [Proctor] Yes. One thing that struck me at William James… the thing I was worried about most with the breakup of William James was that the education of the students would become very compartmentalized. And they would take a course in sociology, and a course in history, and a course in mathematics, and they'd study for the exam, and ten weeks later, two weeks later, it would be gone, and they'd get out, and they wouldn't connect the things. And they would think that the major, especially with the tone in the United States now, they would think the major was the only important thing and the rest was just, kind of, you had to take it. And you see as Liberal Studies [?], I had read an awful lot of study plans. And after about a year of reading them I realized, too, you know, what a traditional education looks like having had one, and knowing what the distribution requirement was in CAS at the time. And I remember telling people at the time, after about a year of reading study plans, I remember getting very excited saying, "My golly, some people…" The idea is, maybe, that this college has too much individualized instruction, people take what they want only, and they're too narrow, and they take only subject courses in their major, very technical subjects and they end up with too technical an education at William James. That's just not true. And my estimate, you know, very rough, was that two thirds of the students get a broader education than they would – a more interesting education, in terms of the types of course they took – than they would let’s say in CAS, or a traditional distribution where… because I actually looked at the number of credits they were taking in Liberal Studies and at least two thirds of the cases they were more beyond the requirement. Which was already higher, I think, than CAS. But they didn't just take what they had to take, like, they knew they had, if they were a media major, they didn't think: "Oh I have to take a course in sociology, so I'll take media in society just to get by." They didn't do that. They would take, maybe, two or three courses in sociology or resembling that, or something about the Arab World, or a lot of totally unconnected things. And they would get… you could tell they would get interested in these things and would pursue them for a while. Several courses in other fields unrelated, supposedly, unrelated to their own. And I got very excited in reading these study plans. I would say a third of them were really good – that type I've been talking about. Another third were better than the CAS equivalent. Another third were kind of just… they were the ones who wanted to squeak by. So, you know, but I was impressed and I think that was a loss that we don't have that anymore. [Barbara] I know you made a reference, just now, to the fact that you had quite a traditional �education yourself. Let me just change the shot here, sorry. And I was wondering how you came to be teaching at such an untraditional kind of place. [Proctor] Well [laughter] it was by accident. I met Robert Mayberry on a Greyhound bus and there was only a window seat available, and Robert Mayberry doesn't like to sit by the window I found out later. He doesn't like airplanes either. Anyway, there was one window seat on the whole bus, and I asked if I could have it and the gentleman next to me said, "Fine." So, he was reading a book on wines and I was interested in that and I had pulled out an article on oral literature in Africa and he kind of looked over my shoulder and he was interested in that. So, we got talking and he said that he taught at Grand Valley and… actually he didn't say, he said he taught at William James College. And I said, "Oh" and we got talking about that and I was teaching in Chicago at the time. We got talking about black English, which I been studying, and he said, Why don't you come up and talk to us?" Because I had started to look for jobs in this area. And I said, "Fine." So, I came up and talked and that was an informal interview, and then there was a formal interview. And there I was. So, kind of by accident. I would've accepted a traditional job in this area if it had come about. My husband was teaching at Hope College at the time. I ended up here and I didn't have any problem coming here, the teaching is the main thing to me. And the working with the students, and some sense of community I wanted. I didn't want just isolation from everybody. But I had no problem coming here; I didn't feel any problems. And there was one thing that happened, I remember, in the interview. I remember saying to Adrian at the time, that I would accept a job except that I wanted her to realize that I wouldn't be here twenty-four hours a day, as some of the people seem to be. That was a time I think of transition in the college where it had been very intensive and people had been putting their whole lives into the college, there were divorces, there were all kinds of problems. And I could see that in some of the people that interviewed me, that they wanted that commitment and I told her straight up front, "If you want to hire me, I won't make that. I will be here the four or five days a week, but I have a family and I'm not going to mess that up, and I don't want to anyway. It's not me to be." So that aspect. But then after I came, people seemed to be, you might say, moving my right direction. I'm not saying because of me, but there was a move away from the totally intensive, twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week thing. That was the only thing that might have kept me from taking the job. Once here I was very comfortable. I had no… I think part of what made a difference, I think, in my own education – probably in high school and in college, certainly in elementary school – I had a sense of community with the people I was being educated with and with the teachers. Not as much in graduate school, but certainly in college. And that's what was important about William James. And I think wasn't as true in the larger Grand Valley and in a lot of more traditional big schools. I had gone to a small school and I wasn’t actually always part of the community of my small school, but I knew it existed and in the long run I am. I think… well the other thing is more an �answer to another question. I don't know if you want to get into that now, Barbara. [Barbara] Well, I don't know what you are about to say. [Laughter] [Proctor] Well, okay, I'll get into it now and then we can do it over if you want. Where are we here? I think the sense of community – well I mentioned it earlier – is one of the things... [Barbara] Okay, start that over. [Proctor] Start that over. Okay. I think the sense of community – which I realized only after a few years James – is extremely important to the education. Because Barry Castro came up with a term for it, he came up with the term, "entitlement," where students come in and instead of receiving an education from the professor… [phone rings] I think I'll leave the phone… instead of receiving an education from the professor, they… well, I'll answer it. It's bothering me, I can't go on. Margret Proctor? Yes. [Proctor] Go ahead. [Barbara] Okay, let me make sure my framing… oh, it's still beautiful. [Proctor] Okay. [Barbara] Just go ahead. [Proctor] Well, anyway, how I happen… why I seem to fit in here, I think – or had no problem, even came to like it much better than a traditional college – was the sense of community. And I realized after about a year here that I had had that in my education; a sense of community. And that, maybe, a lot of the students who normally come to a school like Grand Valley don't because they're of a different social class, different group, different… they're outsiders, they're not part of the of the academic world, or even the professional world. And they're coming here to receive an education from the professor and to go out and try and get a good job. But what I had had in elementary school, and in high school, and in college… I went to a small college, Wellesley College, it was a fairly small college. I wasn't totally part of that Wellesley community, but I did afterwards, years afterwards, I knew that it wasn't just the information and the courses I learned, but because the professors there saw me as someone who would become like them. Not a professor, necessarily, but was of their same group. Was an intellectual equal, or almost anyway, something on the… where there was a real conversation going on. And I had that in high school, pretty much in elementary school, I'd been part of the group you might say. And after a while here and after having taught in �Chicago, too, at a ghetto college, essentially, where that was not so true. Where the faculty, though many tried, there wasn't a concerted effort by the faculty. Although individuals tried, there wasn't a concerted effort by the faculty to make it a place of community. But this place gave students the opportunity to become part of the mainstream, you might say. The main… people who are going to go out… and Barry Castro used the term “entitlement” or “entitled.” They would become those who were expected. Yes, you are on an equal basis with us, intellectually, at least you know you don't know as much, but you're learning, and you will go out and do these things. You're becoming part almost of a different social class. I think of it in class terms, actually. You're changing social class. And I saw that in students and I’ve talked to them since graduation. And that did happen very drastically with them. And I just know it wouldn't have happened with a traditional education. They might have dropped out of it, they might've stayed with it and gotten low level jobs and been bored. And many, many students – the ones for whom this education was most successful – are the ones who became part of the William James community. And with faculty and other students, were changed – their lives were changed. They didn't just get courses that taught them information, their lives were changed. And I hadn't had such a drastic change in my own life because I was already part of that when I was born, you might say, or the way I was brought up. But for them it was very moving. It was a change. It was a change. [Barbara] I'm going to stop you for a minute because the tape will run out within the next minute and I don't want to be in the middle of a… � 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_58_Proctor Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Proctor, Margaret 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 Margaret Proctor interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Margaret Proctor 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. Margaret Proctor was a faculty member of William James College and a longtime communications professor at GVSU. In this interview, she discusses the essence of William James College, the continued importance of liberal education at Grand Valley, and the chance encounter that led to her faculty position within the college. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Margaret Proctor. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/38e3bfba29674cef2e7b1cc07cd17a0f.mp4 62ac586eb8c25224f8f3b97deedd0dba https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0d41424735974ddad2b71653573b4099.pdf 81d4f8740b9124c6da0b315927a479e2 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Sanford Fried Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] Yeah, but sometimes we were not as interdisciplinary as we thought we were. And then when we were talking the other day in the co-op, we started talking about the way the process of learning really worked was not so much that you just took from everybody, but that you…something else. So, describe it. [Fried] Oh, how we took from the few, the mentor…the mentor thing? [Barbara] Yeah. [Fried] Well, one of the problems about what was good at James was that there were many good people. And as you got over your, kind of, freshman fright, and started to see what the value of the resources there were, you knew there were a lot of people that you wanted to study with and then came the time problem, you know? How long were you going to be an undergrad student? And it would take you ten years to study with everybody. So, you gravitated towards those people who were most important in your field, or who had the most to say to you, in terms of your own human development. And I think that the mentor idea worked real well in James. And I hope it works in other colleges. I'm not that familiar with other colleges to know. But by going with mentors, of course, the problem is that you sound like them, you start to look like them, you… in some cases you may start living with them. And that just becomes awkward because then you’ve got to go through this embryonic process to get rid of it, you know? And you’ve got to shed it and become your own. You know, I was affected by that because I was affected by some people who aren’t there anymore. They were there at the time. And it affected me good, and it affected me real harshly, as well. And I had a lot of things to go through with that, personally. I think interdisciplinary… in the interdisciplinary method that we would like to talk about there, at James, we couldn't always do it the way the catalog listed it. It always looked so good in a catalog, and all those people in those pictures always looked so interested, you know? And I still find myself looking at those pictures now and then and thinking: "Gee that would have been a great place to go to, I wish I went." [Laughter] But it was happening for us, in our own way, you know? After about my first year, when I started to realize what was going on there. I always maintain that this college works best for the people who do their bit to get out what they want to get out of it. And if you're passive, your education is passive. In the way of getting a crossbreeding of disciplines – that won't happen for passive student, you know? �Or a passive individual. That only happens to people who are going to say: “I demand that because I refuse to work through life any other way. I refuse for my career to be in a very strict mode." And that wasn't all of us, you know, that didn't work for all of us that way. Some people, you know, James wasn't for everybody. We all knew that. And in the same way, some people who were employed there – the faculty – weren’t for everybody as well. You had to have good direction to get the interdisciplinary aspects. And when it didn't work, maybe it was advising, maybe it was your own, you know, your own pursuits, your own motivations that it didn't work for. I don't know, I guess I'm not being clear for you, as to what… [Barbara] You're saying things, they're not coming out linearly. [Fried] Yeah. [Barbara] They're coming out tick, tick, tick, which is why I wanted some kind of [Inaudible]. The sentences are clear and well formed, and then they go off, and then they come back. [Fried] Yeah. [Barbara] That's how you're talking. That's alright, I accept that. [Fried] That's how I'm thinking of it, too. [Barbara] Yeah. No, that's alright. [Fried] Floating through me in images. Let’s see, some of the beauties of the interdisciplinary approach, though – there are some of those. And I've seen those most graphically by not working in my field, by working in retail. And I'm seeing things that require you to be – of course, it’s also the uniqueness of my job – but require you to be a social activist, to get people to think about things in a larger context and not just such an “I” centered context but in the world center. And then to be narrow about it, too, and to be very managerial. Which may be unfair to call it narrow, but in some ways I think it's a real narrow way of defining stuff. If you didn't take advantage of the interdisciplinary, if you didn't take advantage of the people who are talking that way and the readings, then I don't know how it would happen. That kind of stuff didn't seem to happen by osmosis. It really seems like it had to happen through thinking under fire and being challenged. The challenge is what worked well. I still seem to be going around like that. [Barbara] Its alright. Briefly…see, I thought Isaac would be up and I was going to plant him in your lap and say: okay, big dilemma for all of us at this stage of our life is what kind of education do you want for your children? �[Fried] Boy. Yeah, I want to talk about that; I thought about that. You know, being that Sheila [?], my wife, is a James grad, too, and now we have a two-year-old – I’d love to show you him but he's asleep. We think about what's, you know, what's in store for him, educationally. At this stage, we don't do things like get him into twoyear-old swim and that kind of thing. I have friends who do that; I think it's really wrong. But certainly the…I don't want to say, “hands on approach,” that phrase seems to have been ground into nonexistence anymore. But being able to embrace your education and embrace your experiences by touching them – literally touching them – is such an important learning tool for me. And when I teach somebody a new job at the co-op, I use that to teach them (one of the things I brought with me from Allendale). And with my own son, I want him to be able to grasp it that way. Because he seems like that kind of a kid. He has enough of me in him that way. That's how he's going to learn. There's real parental dilemmas in things like in kindergarten or public school / private school, you know? You want the best quality education for him or is it important that he be with all types. I'm sure every parent sees this, you know, deals with those things all the time. And we all come to different decisions on that. [Barbara] What should his college be like? [Fried] What should his college be like? His college should be the world for a time. Nobody should go to college right out of high school. And I didn't and I learned a lot by traveling for that time. I strongly encourage Isaac to travel. He's alreadywell, he's already been to Canada, his second country, several times, okay? And he travels well, and as he gets older and more empathic and more cognitive, he's going to travel more. And he's going to learn about that. And he's going to learn the way of bringing in lots of experience to teach him about the world. He's going to learn that books, and instructed journeying through books, is a very valuable way to learn. But he's also going to learn that it’s not the only way to learn. But it sure helps to have a mix. It sure helps to be able to have everything around there and be able to sit back with friends, in a comfortable environment, and talk about how these things are mixing together, and how it makes you feel, and how it makes you think, and how it makes you react. We did that James, you know. We had that time, and that social part of the college was real important, real important to me, to be able to integrate that. [Barbara] You said you were having visual images. What, you know, if I say: sum up James in a visual image, what is it? [Fried] Oh, Mona, the dog. Remember Mona? [Laughter] The best visual image for James is a round building in a square frame. [Laughter] It's just so perfect, you know, because we were, you know, we were so traditional on the outside. We tried to look that way, but yet when you get inside, and you couldn't find those corners, you couldn't find where the dust hid, you couldn't find, you know, your �easy way around the things. And that damn building was a maze. It was always a maze; you never really knew what end you're coming out on. And I guess, you know, you could say that about the education to some degree if you wanted to. But I thought the building was perfect, you know. It couldn't have been any better for that college, I suppose, unless it was one long hallway that always had windings within it, too. Other images of things at James… I don't know. I remember people bustling a lot and I'm not sure if they were bustling because they were busy or if they were bustling because they were just overwhelmed with a lot of different things. And maybe not busyness, but just sorting. Lots of sorting that went on. We sorted for a long time in there and hopefully for a long time afterwards, too. And certainly, what would happen with James closing, a lot of us started to get more emotion involved with it, you know? Either saying "good riddance" or saying, you know, “how can the bastards do that?" And I went through the latter for a long time and was real angry about it. And even didn't even see the value of this tape for a long time and thought it's stirring things up too much. And the college can't be reconstructed, hopefully somebody can be motivated by it, either a student or somebody who comes into contact with it in some way to try and do something like that when it's appropriate in a setting where it can be protected and nurtured. But, you know, the college brought me across the state to come here and wound up making this my home for other reasons. But, you know, I wouldn't recommend that people do that now. I wouldn't recommend that people come across to Grand Valley because aside from the few good people that are left that are teaching, I don't know if the college is that different than a lot of other places, and it's a long schlep just to be in the cornfields or downtown if they wind up downtown in the near future. [Barbara] That was a great answer, that was an absolutely terrific answer. I'm just going to stop this for a second. Finish the analogy, the round and the square is a…? [Fried] Okay. The round and the square is, of course, is that round peg in a square hole. T.J.C. [Thomas Jefferson College] was the same way, though they seem to be a little more vocal about it. And, you know, I don't remember about Lake Michigan Hall. I think Lake Michigan probably was the same way, too. So, what started out as some designer's idea became a real fitting analogy for what was going on in the building. [Barbara] Terrific! [Laughter] [Fried] That's a cut. [Barbara] That was a wonderful take. [Barbara] Okay, let’s start. Okay, go. �[Fried] Okay. It was almost like the outside of the building was almost a buffer. In that when I worked with you, Barbara, and I was in your office all the time, and you had an exterior office, and the damn thing was never heated and was always cold. And it was almost as if they take the hearty people, the people that wanted to be in view, you know, and put them out there, and face the library, and face the campus center, and face the tour buses and those things. And so much, but so much was hidden. And there were things that went on in the core of that building that I, you know, kind of media experiments I don't want to talk about. But they were great. I mean it was really exciting stuff that happened, I'm sure. I hope it goes on today. I don't know if it does, but I hope it does. You know, I will always remember that painting of James, too, that painting right in… I never remember which entrance it was, but that double stairway, you know. And it was the painting, the logo that was on our T-shirts, and probably on the letterhead, if I remember. And I still have my T-shirt, you know. The gray ones, not the new ones, the gray ones with the brown. That was the important one to have, I felt. That was the official card. But whenever I see any of James’ books around here or I see them in a bookstore or something, you know, I always flash to the face. And I don't think I've seen any photographs of him. I don't remember seeing any. But I almost don't want to because he was this ethereal spirit, in more ways than one, around the college. And being there as a visual student, that embodiment was comforting after a while, after it became home. It was real comforting to see it, you know, done that way. [Barbara] What are we going to do for cutaways? [Fried] I don't know. [Barbara] I'll probably shoot your hands, which is so draggy, but I don't know what else to do? What else can I do? [Fried] Yeah, hands are good. Not my shoes. You don't want my shoes. [Barbara] You better talk about something because it's weird to do hands. Tell me about… [Fried] Let me tell you about… I know what I'm going to tell you about! I'm going to tell you about my first videotape. Okay? Want me to take the mic off? [Barbara] No, just keep it… unless you want to say something you don't want… [Fried] No, no it's nothing like that because my first… I get real graphic describing that. But, well you remember Kim Bemen [?], okay? Kim, back a few years ago. In that first Video One class we had to do a tape, it was a self-portrait. And at the time, I didn't have a car, and I was hitchhiking to Detroit a lot, going back to family and, you know, trying to ease through that transition of leaving the family-stead. And �so, for my tape I set up a camera in the AV studio with one light on me, two seats, and I did a monologue with his imaginary driver as I hitchhiked on the way back to Detroit. And it just so happens that I had some sixteen-millimeter footage of birthday parties, old birthday parties and that. And I ran that, and we did a fade onto the screen and put some of that onto the tape. The tape is gone, I don't know where it was. It was real crude, and it was just totally spontaneous, and it just worked really well. I was real pleased with it. Kim was there when we taped it and she was really surprised that anybody was going to do something like that. And it came off real well. Does this…[inaudible]? � 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_57_Fried Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Fried, Sanford 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 Sanford Fried interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Sanford Fried 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. Sanford Fried was an Arts and Media student of William James College who was active on the WJC Council and various committees during the years 1977-1980. In this interview, Sanford discusses mentorship among the William James community, the interdisciplinary approach of the college, and reflects on what the WJC education means to his family and his son's future. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Sanford Fried. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Interdisciplinary approach in education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/445d9eee3ff43444fafbc62e115b3351.mp4 70f24478c72a6d6f368dba8a7676db4b https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/41fd411b327926d4c9e6fa22a08deb4a.pdf 26410adfc8510213a04e92ddb237a864 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Margaret Proctor Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Barbara] Is there any way we can talk about that briefly? When did we close the college? [Proctor] Now wait a minute, though. See I didn't have this information on the funeral and the commune now. Is that being brought in some other way? [Barbara] Yeah, yeah. I was… okay I want to ask a different question then. When we closed the college… [Proctor] Yeah [Barbara] When the college closed, some people have said that we – the faculty – should have fought the closing. Do you agree with that? [Proctor] I don't know, I think we fought it. I don't know, if… I went to the President, other people went individually, maybe we should have done something as a group. I don't think it would've made any difference. I think we did fight it. I mean, I don't know. We sent off… we tried as best we could to work, you might say, somewhat within the system to change it. I remember Robert, we had a whole about a tenpage memo to whatever committee it was on campus trying to explain why the new divisional structure wasn't good. I think we talked to people, there was lobbying going on. I don't know that they could've done much more. [Barbara] Let's stop and I just want to take the tape. If you were going to join another alternative college modeled on what William James was, is there anything based on the experiences that you've had here that's central – that you would like, that you think should be done differently – to give a better education experience? In other words, is there some way we were weak that we should've been remedied? Do you think? Is there anything? [Proctor] Sometimes – here’s my traditional background showing – there wasn't enough rigor in the courses. I don't know how you get at that, though, without making standard requirements. I'm not sure you can get at it. I think it's an atmosphere created in the faculty. And I think things were getting better over time. I think there was more of that at the beginning, and I think things were getting better. I think that faculty has to have a sense among themselves, not just individually, but as a group that we're going to require this, and this, and this. And I think by �the time the college closed we were as a group. There might have been a few that weren't, but we were. That was the main thing I saw that was a problem, and about solved itself by the time the college closed. I can't think of anything else major that is worth mentioning. [Barbara] Can you talk a little bit of the flip side of that? What was most valuable in the James experience? What- what worked best? [Proctor] What worked best? Designing your own study plan, I would say. Maybe because I saw all those study plans. And see, a lot of the students we had were rebellious. And a lot of students are rebellious now I bet still, only they're keeping it down more and so they just don't learn as much. They sit in the courses, and they go through routine, and they get C’s or B’s or something, but anyway that's another issue maybe. And I don't think they would have gone to college or they would have learned as much, certainly, if they had to take Sociology 101, okay? Now, at William James they didn't have to take Sociology 101, they had to… they knew that they had to have something to educate them broadly about people in the world, and people outside their own little narrow group. So that seemed more reasonable to them. It wasn't Sociology 101, and they worked with their adviser, and they came up with the course, and they got in the course, and they really enjoyed it. "Oh, this is interesting,” they would say to themselves. And they had chosen the course in consultation with the adviser, but they had really chosen it. So, then they'd say, "Oh this is interesting" and they get into the course, and they learn the stuff. They were really got excited about it and they'd read about it outside the course. I want to say one thing in here. I think there may be an impression that there's very few kind of "super William James students" who did beautifully and maybe the majority kind of just squeaked by and had a mediocre education. I don't think so. I think this experience of really making their own education and doing well is true for more than half the students. Of really going beyond what they had to do and learning more than they would. I’ve said that in other contexts, but it wasn't just a few super students that gave an image to the college of this thing – it was a lot of students. Again, I came across this in the study plan. Study plan after study plan, I would read like this and oh courses in the Arab world and they took a Shakespeare course here, and they were, I don't know, a computer major here, they had a Shake… oh my golly! And they chose these on their own and it was very impressive. Yeah, I think you asked me what worked well. I think I answered that already. Let me see if I can… [Barbara] I'm unhappy with… Probably the earlier part is alright, but that little clicking means it might not come across the head smoothly. Yeah, it fixed it. I fixed it! [Proctor] Yay! [Barbara] Okay, let’s do rigor. [Laughter] �[Proctor] You better ask me the question, or I won't be able to answer. [Laughter] [Barbara] If we could recreate William James tomorrow, what…was there anything that we should do differently this time around? [Proctor] Well, I think that we did pretty… I think by the time the college closed we were just about where we wanted to be. I wouldn't say perfect, but in the earlier… when I first came, I think that we didn't have enough rigor in some of the courses. There wasn’t enough… I think we were liable… right on everybody whether they liked… you know, everybody could say that the… let me start the whole thing over! I did better the first time. Goddamn it! Why is it when you say something first and then you try and say it again you can't get it? Anyway, I think some of the courses should have had more rigor. I think we were liable to that criticism and sometimes that was justified. There wasn't required of the students so they could get through without learning very much in some courses. No, the idea that students can take whatever they want, do whatever they want, and I don't think that necessarily produces a good education. And that was more a stereotype of us than it was the truth. I think that wasn’t as true by the time the college closed. I think what it takes is the… I don't think you can enforce it. I mean, you can say: "All the faculty members have to give two exams every term or three papers." And what's that going to produce? The faculty member doesn't have to grade the exams or look at the papers, and they can be hogwash. You can't enforce that in that way. I think it has to be a feeling among the faculty – in the community of faculty – that we're going to have hard requirements and courses. Certain requirements and courses, and a lot of rigor in the courses. And I think if you have that it'll work. And if you don't have it, even if you have all these other requirements or assume that everybody's going to give exams and all, then that's not going to work either. But I think by the time the college closed we had that, I think, with very few exceptions. I mean, there were a few courses here and there, but the fact that… and that changed in the years I was here. Faculty were getting a sense of we'd maybe allowed students, I would say, actually allowed students too much freedom to do only what they wanted in the classes and found that they aren't learning enough and now we're tightening up, and we're saying, "No, you've got to do more work in this class, or you don't get credit for the class." And I think by the time… yeah, anyway. [Barbara] What about the other question? I have managed to absolutely space out. Let’s see if I can remember where I was. What was it? [Proctor] My memory is going. [Barbara] Oh, damn? Where did it go? �[Proctor] What should we have done differently? No. Oh, Barbara, this is terrible. Don't tell me your memory is going. [Barbara] Oh! Fighting, fighting, fighting! [Proctor] Oh, thank you! Should we have fought more. I think the faculty did fight. I went to see the President about it, I made an appointment with the President. And a lot of people did that. I know, I found out later that many had done that. We had that long thing Robert Mayberry mostly drafted. Ten-page thing to the committee on why the reorganization was not good, and why we should have the individual colleges. And we did fight, you know, in an organized group way. We didn't go marching around. I don't think that would've been any more effective. I don't… I think it just would of alienated us from people. I think, frankly, Robert and a few others were in… if anybody was going to persuade other faculty administrators, it was going to be Robert and a few others in their way. And they did the best they could. And they fought the whole way, in their way, which was the way that was going to work – if anything was going to work – and it didn’t work. And I think we fought as much as we could. � 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_56_Proctor Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Proctor, Margaret 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 Margaret Proctor interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Margaret Proctor 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. Margaret Proctor was a faculty member of William James College and a longtime communications professor at GVSU. In this interview, she discusses the faculty's reactions and efforts regarding the closing of William James College, in addition to her thoughts on the college's strengths and weaknesses. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Margaret Proctor. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Women in higher education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/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 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_55_Castro Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/21073b8a354436b292bff74ec4010b47.mp4 4b3f1f2f0e0752d5bb9f305f0cf7dd33 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2a43de6ab2a3ec1c1cd8ab5202ef1d6e.pdf ee0c5aef308a0fc8638903524ea5407f PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard (Dick) Gottlieb Date: 1984 Part: 2 of 2 [Barbara] Something about the… you like teaching, so talk to me a little tiny bit about the teaching process and how it was Jamesian and how it wasn't… [Gottlieb] Oh, God. [Barbara] I'm getting criticism but there was positive because you miss it, and you haven't said why. You haven't really said why. That's it. [Gottlieb] Each class was an attempt to create something. I'm not an academician, I'm a therapist, and I would try to come into class hoping something would happen, without planning for something to happen. And I would have a general sense of what we were covering. Maybe, by the time I was there four years, I was even doing outlines for the term, with probably twenty or twenty-five lines to cover the description of the term. And sometimes I would even follow the outlines and I would sort of have a general sense of what going on… what I was trying to cover. But I would not read lectures, or write lectures, or anything. I would try to respond to the material as it generated in class and I got better at that. That's a clinical skill, too, and it helped me practice development of creative interaction, each class. And the students who were there during that loved it, and learned a lot, and are good clinicians, some of them now. And there are people… I guess, I get some confirmation about the quality of my teaching in that there are some people now who are well past their master’s now doing work in the local area, and all of the ones I find disgustingly horrible in their work are the people who had terrible problems in my classes. And I smile a lot about that, that seems right. And the ones who are lovely and helpful, didn't… or didn’t have prolonged trouble in my class. [Julie] You… [Gottlieb] What? [Julie] Loved you. [Gottlieb] Yeah or loved me. Okay, the only other thing I want to say is that I think that having a William James College in Western Michigan in the seventies and eighties was a mistake from the beginning. Interesting notion and interesting �experiment but idiotic. The idea that it would last even ten years, seems to me, was incredible and it should've just been moved to the east coast and allowed to grow. It certainly could not survive here. Ever. Only if it stayed small and manageable. And if it stayed small and unmanageable or large, I think it was doomed. And I think that was true from the beginning. [Barbara] Do you think we should have put up a fight, though? [Gottlieb] A fight? For what? [Julie] Yes, you did. [Gottlieb] For what? What kind of fight? What do you mean? [Julie] Do you think the students should be raising hell? [Gottlieb] Oh, the students, yes, but when you say "we" I think faculty. Yes, I think the students should have burned down the damn campus. But they didn't and that's why we closed. Students will get what they want, and they did, and they do. And so now Grand Valley is more populous than it ever was before. They have more students than they know what to do with. They're rich, they're happy, they're fat, they're ridiculous, they're horrible. And there's still good faculty there, teaching good courses to good students, but there's not that magic combination that was there before. [Barbara] Julie, you have to say something because we have you… he's talking to you and if we don't see you, it’s absolutely ridiculous. [Gottlieb] If you excuse me, I'm going to him. [Unknown] Mosquito on your left leg. Good shot. [Barbara] That’s a good shot. [Unknown] You can tell she's loving it. [Julie] I'm not… [laughter]. [Unknown] I know. [Barbara] You’re going to ask the second question. I’m going to ask the first one. You know her very best. You know what to ask her. [Gottlieb] Oh, okay. �[Julie] Well, you said I should say something about the essence of William James. [Barbara] Yes, I would like to hear it. [Julie] It makes me sad to think about it. I think, for me, the essence of William James was the people. The sense of community and learning, of people coming at things from different directions, and with different vocabularies, and coming to a common understanding. And that's what felt real important. [Barbara] Stop playing with the microphone cord! [Everyone] [Laughter] [Barbara] [Inaudible] Dick, do you have a question? [Gottlieb] How did you feel about… how do you fell about the way you were made part of the community, or not made part of the community? [Barbara] As an adjunct. [Gottlieb] As an adjunct faculty. [Barbara] Good question! [Gottlieb] Thank you. [Julie] It varied. It seemed that there were some people who were committed to not seeing me as a part of the college. But, generally, it seemed like I could be there, as much as I was willing to work to be there. And I felt accepted by the students. I felt like it could be my school, too. [Barbara] Were you accepted by the institution? [Julie] No, I don't think so. [Barbara] Because? [Julie] I don't know. It was always difficult for me to tell how much of that was me being reluctant to fully enter in, and how much of that really was the institution not being real welcoming. And… yeah, I don't know, I'm… [Barbara] I have one more question, which might draw a blank, but I'm going to ask it. Talking to Stephen, it's so clear that William James College really did embody the �philosophy of William James. Did you catch… how did catch that philosophy? Did you study James when you came? In other words, there was something that made the college work, which indeed embodied James's philosophy. I'm trying to figure out how we all learned it so fast when we didn't read James. [Julie] I don't know. What I think of when you ask the question is that we were asked before we interviewed, each of us, to write a statement of our teaching philosophy. And we did that knowing nothing about what the college was about. And it was a perfect match and that just felt real nice. It's like we discovered William James College and William James College discovered, or collected, people who already had that sense of William James philosophy within them. [Barbara] Indeed. The selection process was very important. It really was. It was absolutely critical. [Julie] We came to William James and we loved the faculty. When we came for that first interview, and it felt wonderful to be with those people. [Barbara] Perhaps we can stop so that we can let that stuff [Inaudible]. � 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_54_Gottlieb Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gottlieb, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard and Julie Gottlieb interview (2 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard "Dick" Gottlieb and his wife Julie Gottlieb by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Gottlieb was a Social Work faculty member at William James College and a co-director of the Social Work program at Grand Valley. In this interview, Richard discusses how the future of William James College was limited in West Michigan and his thoughts on the college's closing. Richard is later joined on camera by his wife and fellow social worker, Julie, who worked as an adjunct faculty in William James College and discusses the essence and importance of the William James community. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Richard Gottlieb. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Gottlieb, Julie Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Social work education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b6a635ab2dfd6f5046b3dd5c4310e447.mp4 cc09890d51a0b38e57b42dab60a8acb8 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/12eb6f940205cc7664f037b084a39445.pdf e3b41bea686fbef9dae004be762cf2f2 PDF Text Text William James College Interviews GV016-16 Interviewer: Barbara Roos Interviewee: Richard (Dick) Gottlieb Date: 1984 Part: 1 of 2 [Gottlieb] Here we are being informal, yes. [Barbara] Are we still rolling? [Unknown] Yes. [Julie] Um yeah, I was just wondering Barb… [Barbara] Okay, just a minute. [Unknown] Stop tape. [Julie] Of the kind of subject matter that you were teaching and not having this power to… [Gottlieb] Yeah, let’s see if she asks about that. [Barbara] Well, I am asking. Yes, please tell me what you guys are saying. [Gottlieb] Yeah. Teaching therapeutic process in a college classroom leads to certain kinds of reactions in students, lots of powerful reactions in students. And as long as there was institutional support for that to happen, as long as a student who would be upset by the material that is talked about in class, like, if we're talking about psychosis and a student either has a relative or they themselves have been severely disturbed, it brings it out. And as long as you have institutional support, you can teach it, and the student goes through that experience of stress, and realizes that they can survive and still learn about this material and not have to be crazy. If there isn't institutional support, then you get, yeah, you get crazy reactions. You get the craziness acted out. And I don't know if examples are a good idea, but probably not. [Barbara] Well, could you tell me what you mean by institutional support, because it just sounds like… [Gottlieb] Well, if a student is upset by something that happens in class and they talk to other faculty or they talk to the administration of the college and the message �they get is: "That's a serious issue, take it to the faculty and work it out.” I'm here, you want me to help, fine. But that's a serious educational question, take it back to your faculty. But if what they get is, "Oh, God, that sounds horrible! Write that down and complain about it," then what you have is students demanding to be comfortable in class and my experience is that teaching psychology or psychotherapy – specifically psychotherapy – you can't be comfortable and learn. You just can't be comfortable. The process of psychotherapy, even at the bachelor level, teaching psychotherapy is teaching something that will be bringing on stress if its ever practiced and to teach it in a stress-free environment is impossible, in my view. [Barbara] So, you did… you were able to teach it with institution support for a while? [Gottlieb] Yep, for long while. And when that changed was when the deans changed. There was not a sudden shift, it was a shift that flowed. It flowed in the direction away from support of faculty, in my experience, in the direction of making students experience Chevrolet-like. Acceptable to a wide range of students and… let me finish my thought. Acceptable to a wide range of students and not bothering anybody ever. And the sparkle went out in my view of the college at that point. What Julie? What? What? [Barbara] If you want to say something, say it loudly so the mic picks it up. [Julie] Well, it seems like a reflection of a conflict in the society, generally, about who should be doing what kind of work. People were saying that this kind of material shouldn't be taught on the bachelor level at all, but we’re reaching students now doing treatment throughout the city and facilities that hire bachelor level people to work directly with clients who are severely disturbed, but they're… [Gottlieb] Do you want me to say that? Or something about it? [Barbara] Yeah, use it. [Gottlieb] Okay. That's disgusting. [Barbara] That time we got it. [Gottlieb] Well, what you were just saying is whether or not it's legitimate to be teaching bachelor level people about psychotherapy and I think our experience in the last ten years in mental health indicates that it clearly is because bachelor level people provide therapeutic services all over. And increasingly do so. [Barbara] So why the change? Was it a decision on somebody's part or was it personalities or what? �[Gottlieb] No, I don't think it was personalities or a decision about whether or not to support. I think it was a decision at high administrative levels on the campus, that it was time Grand Valley State Colleges (newly called College) shall henceforth not piss anybody off. And I think at all levels of teaching that philosophy infected us. William James, I don't think, raised people's anxieties terribly much as a college, except people who were bothered by what seemed to be the enjoyment people had in their mission. And I think that kind of anxiety was untenable in the new Grand Valley, which was a place where nobody was supposed to be tense about anything. Everybody should be kind of copacetic. And they had undone Thomas Jefferson, and they had undone any sense of accomplishment – experimental accomplishment – on the campus. And everybody was trying to look as gray as possible so that nobody would take them out of the picture. And William James couldn't quite look gray enough and I think that's why it was closed. [Barbara] Um… [Gottlieb] So what I've just outlined is a kind of progression from the question I had to face there in teaching courses which encouraged nervousness to a college which encouraged nervousness. And there were advantages to being at William James and there were disadvantages to being at James and there were advantages to being in my class and disadvantages. And I think that in the five years I worked there until there was this shift I'm describing, I think I was getting to be a much better teacher. I think in the two years following that shift, I think I got to be a much worse teacher. [Barbara] That's my experience, okay. That's parallel to it exactly. Some people have said on tape that there were certain turning points in the history of the college which made it have to be closed and that one of the turning points was losing social work. Would you comment on that? [Gottlieb] Losing social work? When I was hired, I was asked to be the Director of the Social Work program and there were a lot of people at CAS… thank you Rich… a lot of people at CAS who were teaching in social work. So, I made the proposal that there should be co-chair with CAS, instead of just myself, and put that together and a woman, Ann Johnson [?] (she has long since disappeared) from CAS, and I became co-chair. The following term was shifted to CAS because that was seen as clearly duplicating services, somehow, that there were co-chair running the program. And or the following year, I guess, that was moved to CAS. The effect on the school, I thought, was minimal, actually. Professional education, as defined in the program, then moved to CAS, was limited and, I thought, bankrupt. �[Julie] We lost a lot of students because of the move. [Gottlieb] Yeah, but losing students isn't what caused the end of William James College. [Julie] No, not the end of William James College. [Gottlieb] That's what I'm commenting on. I don't think that Social Work going to the College of Arts and Sciences was at all a turning point for the school. I think we developed a social work curriculum within William James College that was really fine and… [Julie] The students didn't go to it? [Gottlieb] The students went to it! I don't know why you think students didn't go to it, my classes were filled. All of them, all the time. [Julie] Until the end? [Gottlieb] Julie, Social Work went to CAS in nineteen seventy-nine. Okay? We're talking two different stages here. When social work went to CAS, we sat up our own social work program, students came to it, it was fine; worked beautifully. The problem was that we were then being disallowed to be teaching some of the courses because that was, again, duplication. It was not simple to… it wasn't simple enough somehow to have two colleges teaching courses that had the same… somewhat similar content, anyway. And our students were being told not to take courses at William James. They were being told to take courses at CAS. It was not moving of the social work program; it was, I think, again, the administrative response which told students that William James was not the place to get their education. They were telling students who were currently enrolled, and they were telling incoming students. Just… testimonials don't mean diddley squat, but one student who came to me and said: "I came to the admissions office. I asked for a school that didn't give grades, I asked for a school that had a community in it, I asked for a school where you individually set up your own curriculum, and they sent me to CAS." And that was going on all over the place. I think movement of Social Work was symptomatic of that. I don't think it mattered… made any difference. [Barbara] I ask you to please summarize the essence of William James college very briefly. Like one or two sentences. [Gottlieb] Bob Burns, Robert Mayberry, Stephen Rowe, Margaret Proctor, Barry Castro, Wil Walko, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. [Barbara] Okay, no two people – I ask this question to everyone – no two people have �given anything remotely resembling the same answer, which is wonderful. Whether it be… [Inaudible]. Why did you come to James? I don't mean your personal history; I mean, what was there for you? [Gottlieb] Julie and I were invited to interview. They wanted social workers. We were living in Detroit, and what we saw when we came here was a group of people… one of the people who interviewed us had his zipper down, couldn't uh…[laughter] and we found a group of people who were excited about something and I was working in a hospital at the time. Julie was not working, but we were both committed to the provision of services, and here was an opportunity to impact other people who might be providing service in the future. And I think we just got very excited by the kind of contagious quality of the place. What it had to offer us? A chance to do something meaningful. [Barbara] What do you miss? [Gottlieb] The most amazing thing is what I don't miss… about the campus. It's the only place I've ever been in – only physical environment I've ever been in – where after seven years (that's a long time), I had no attachment to the physical environment at all. Nothing. There wasn't a corner that I remembered fondly, or a stairwell that I remember sitting on. The place was so well designed as to be totally unattachable. It was wonderful, it was a marvelous place. What do I miss? I miss teaching. And so I don't exactly miss the students, I don't exactly miss the faculty, and I don't exactly miss classes but I miss teaching and that's all part of that. I liked teaching, and so that feels like a real loss. I still see a lot of people who were the faculty, and I still see a lot of people, actually, who were the students. Or people who might have been students. It was a quiet community. That's all I miss. A lot of things I don't miss. The sense of deterioration, the sense of being co-opted, piece by piece. A little chunk here, a little number there. Let's just change that rule. Let's just move that piece of… I hated it. You agree? [Barbara] Let us stop for a minute. � 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_53_Gottlieb Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Gottlieb, Richard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Title A name given to the resource Richard Gottlieb interview (1 of 2, video and transcript) Description An account of the resource Interview with Richard "Dick" Gottlieb by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Richard Gottlieb was a Social Work faculty member at William James College and a co-director of the Social Work program at Grand Valley. In this interview, Richard discusses the closing of William James College, the movement of the Social Work program to the College of Arts and Sciences, and the essence of William James. Richard's wife and fellow social worker, Julie Gottlieb, can be heard off camera while joining in on the conversation. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Richard Gottlieb. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Roos, Barbara (Interviewer) Gottlieb, Julie Subject The topic of the resource Grand Valley State University Michigan Universities and colleges Oral histories Alternative education Social work education Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/774593335ddb9e80faf89dac3073ee19.mp4 69cd74e2febec959b57d4fda97d738f8 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cd91137d7e8ceea8fce90566721f3ebe.pdf a0d465b18c2f7a11a2fc4f18d759bfe8 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 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_52_Armstrong Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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 (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 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> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/770aaa0d6bde37f836fe39853679f294.mp4 276ad35bef6ac8cb04e44a029d2411d6 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4d796fbd2887157259a1ce2134871c42.pdf 21bb2dccf1cab8a356c8dc7a4ac32b0d PDF Text Text 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 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_51_Armstrong Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0a5c25b79dd65c053371d6d9118ceecd.mp4 f9db2b5b3c2675157f81876d63b121f5 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f4fed114d7057b01883f4824648eaf61.pdf dc7119787fa60602b2874d711706968f PDF Text Text 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 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_50_Armstrong Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource 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 (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> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 application/pdf Language A language of the resource eng Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives