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William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Ingrun (Inge) Lafleur
Date: 1984
[Lafleur]
A few weeks ago, Adrian Tinsley asked me to be a consultant for their general
education program at Glassboro, where she is now provost. And during my day's
activities we both noticed that a lot of my rhetoric and a lot of my behavior and
actions were really reminiscent of and greatly influenced by my days at William
James College, where I was a faculty member from nineteen seventy-two to
nineteen eighty. And in nineteen eighty I became Dean of General Studies at
Stockton State College in New Jersey. And now I'm Associate Vice President for
Academic Affairs at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh,
which is a beautiful, magnificent campus in the Champlain Valley, near the
Adirondack Mountains and the Green Mountains of Vermont with Montreal
nearby. And it has a really exciting faculty and student body. And many of the
things that I do here are directly related to my work at William James. I remember
a lot about William James, and I remember some of the things that I do not use
anymore, but I also remember the things that I have carried with me since those
days and have become a part of me. I think our days at William James were very
intense. Everything seemed to be important, everything mattered, everything was
related to everything else. And it was very important to be trying out new things,
to have alternative perspectives, to be socially conscious. There was a sense of
the importance of community, of doing things together, of relating one's work,
and someone's life, and one's personal life, to one's work life and public life as
well. Some of these things, I guess, I have since discarded. For example, I no
longer think that everything matters. I tend to prioritize in order to concentrate
and conserve my resources. And that may be a function of being older. I have
also come to the conclusion that everybody does not have to be in on deciding
everything, but it's important for everyone to know and to help decide who
decides what. And I think I've got a more critical view of both the counterculture
days of the nineteen sixties and seventies, and also a more critical view of
socialism, although it is still one of the foundations of my beliefs and behavior. I
also wish that Grand Valley hadn't felt ambivalent about William James College. I
think that if Grand Valley had put William James on center stage that it, too – like
Evergreen State College or like Brown – would continue to be thriving because
some of the things that we did at William James are continuing at institutions
throughout the country. I do not think that it was necessary to close it down or
fold it into Grand Valley as a whole. I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the
things that I still use that remain with me from William James College. And I'd like
to focus on three things. First of all, I remember very well the phraseology that
�was repeated by people like Robert Mayberry and Stephen Rowe, and I don't
know where they got it, but the phrase that has really shaped a lot of my activities
is the one that went: "The liberal arts are practical and professional studies can
and should be pursued in a liberally educative manner.” Now, very often, at
William James, I think we did not focus in as much detail on technical knowledge
or assess our own performance. But I think we fostered an entrepreneurial spirit
and a creative spirit that really made it possible for students to do things when
they left us. The phrase, "The liberal arts are practical and professional studies
can be pursued in a liberally educative way," has been very useful to me at other
places where I have taught to show the faculty that they can work together in the
liberal arts, and in the professional and technical education, and that indeed
public higher education has a civic and a social mission. That the liberal arts are
not an ivory tower, that ideas have consequences. I remember team teaching
with Kenny Zapp and going through the ideas and the books in our courses and
Kenny always asking the students and Kenny and I asking each other, "So what?
Why are we studying this? What is the meaning of this? What are the
implications of this?" So, in other words, the liberal arts are practical. They have
an impression on us. And similarly, in looking at career education, we didn't look
upon it as simply technical training, but as preparing students for a variety of
careers and for an entire lifestyle. I think we wanted to provide ourselves and our
students with a real sense of context, of moral, ethical, and social context for
professional studies. So, I think this sense of relating the technical and career
areas to the liberal arts was extremely important and I think that we, as faculty
members, learned from each other. I learned about the design from Roz
Muskovitz and she and I discussed the sociological and ethical implications of
different kinds of designs. I learned about chemistry from various people who
taught that as well. So, in addition though to the relationship between the career
and liberal arts, what has remained with me and has shaped my working life and
my personal life is the feminism which developed at Grand Valley and at William
James College. I think feminism pervaded the entire ethos of the college and our
personal lives as well. In part, it was because of the times that we lived in the
nineteen seventies, but also in part it was because of the faculty and staff that we
hired. We hired… the people who founded William James hired a woman dean.
And back in nineteen seventy-two that was much more unusual than it is today.
And that gave a sense of strong leadership by a woman. We also hired a large
proportion of our faculty who were women and who are very strong and diverse
women. They were… not all necessarily call themselves feminists, but they were
present on the campus. And this sense really pervaded not just the women
faculty members, but I think the male faculty members, as well, the secretaries,
and the students. I think that this sense of feminism influenced our curriculum,
our student body, our sensibility, our values, and our behavior. And that feminism
really seem to be in harmony with a lot of the other things we were trying to do at
William James, and the kinds of values we were trying to propound have been
values that were… are not genetic certainly, but values that have been
�associated with women and feminism. And these values include a sense of
cooperation rather than competition. That is, we didn't have grades, we didn't
have rank for faculty, we didn't have tenure. A sense of emphasis on
conservation rather than exploitation. Conservation has been considered a
feminine or feminist value. And there was a great deal of emphasis on
environmental studies, for example. And thirdly, a sense of participation and
nurturance, rather than hierarchy or bureaucracy in informing our academic
community. And these were values of the college as a whole, but I think they
came in part out of the feminist movement of the nineteen seventies. We were
also influenced – that is, the feminism at William James – was also influenced by
people at Thomas Jefferson College. Although from our point of view – or from
my point of view – they tended to be more, what I called "cultural feminists." They
tended to be more flamboyant and focus on the cultural rather than the social
and political aspects. They had their Purple House, their temple in Grand Rapids,
they talked about the Goddess, they talked about mythology. However, we all
were influenced by each other and worked together to develop a Women's
Studies program. And wherever I have been since then, I have been associated
with women's studies programs. And I believe that some of the best things that
have happened – in scholarship in the last fifteen years and in education – are
things that have been related to the methods and processes of women's studies
and the women's movement. Finally, I think what I carry with me from William
James is really a wealth, a cornucopia of ideas, a power generator of ideas about
teaching and learning. A sense that we teach and learn from each other, and that
we teach students, and not just history, or chemistry, or subject matter. A sense
that we learn at the point of inquiry, that a course evolves because of the student
in it, because of the subject matter that happens to arise. A sense that the
curriculum evolves because of the way that people work together. I still have with
me this little pamphlet from the William James Synoptic Program which lists the
series of questions that we ask students to respond to. And even now, when I'm
trying to refine and develop the general education program at Plattsburg, I want
both students and faculty to focus on common questions. There are certain
things that seemed like daily bread and water to us at William James that are
considered new ideas in higher education today. And practices… some of the
very best things that we did at William James are still the best things that are
being put into practice in education today. It seems as if it were in response to
national reports on higher education, but we did back at William James. We were
the ones who insisted on active learning, as William James said, "No impression
without expression" – that you are not really learning unless you produce a
product. At Plattsburg, we are having… we are pursuing an emphasis on active
learning, on getting students and faculty to work in groups and pursue projects.
We are still continuing writing across the curriculum emphasizing the use of
writing in the middle of a particular class. We still emphasize advising as a form
of teaching. And the Living and Learning course we had at William James and
the milestones or ideas that some of the very best colleges are pursuing and
�trying to advise freshman and having special freshman seminars for them.
Interdisciplinary and team teaching are still at the cutting edge of higher
education. And finally, I would say what has remained with me is a sense, still, of
the interrelatedness of things. That everything is really learning and teaching.
The administrative work that I do is related to admissions, is related to teaching,
is related to the curriculum. The work that we do inside the classroom is related
to what happens in the dormitories, and concerts, and plays, and the co-ops, and
internships that students do. I think that William James College was really a
quintessentially American college. Part of one of the finest traditions of America.
And that is the tradition of pragmatism, of practical activity, and working together
with others. And William James also have an entrepreneurial spirit and
encourage people to be creative and to produce. We made a lot of mistakes, and
we were a little flaky, and we have changed a lot, but I think that all of us – the
students who went there (many of whom I'm still in touch with) and the faculty –
retain a sense of entrepreneurial spirit, a sense of creativity, an obligation to work
together in a community to create and make knowledge meaningful, and also a
commitment – a public commitment – to civic and social betterment. I think these
things still remain and I think they could have remained at William James College
had it been allowed to continue. And that's it for today folks! That's all I’ve got to
say.
[Videotape recording ends and begins again]
[Lafleur]
One of the things that was most important was all of us doing things together as
a community. Having common readings, usually related to a guest speaker, such
as Tilly Olson or Kenneth Bolding, or reading the works of Piaget and William
James together. This idea of a college theme and common readings is
something that other colleges are now trying as well. And that helped to create a
sense of community. I also remember the trips – the opportunities – that I got at
William James to take groups of students to Yugoslavia and have a integrated
experience of travel abroad. And I remember, as well, the last days of some of
the classes that I had when students would bring in their projects in a history
class or a media class. And then you would look at these projects, and then
several weeks later, or even a year later, you would see students in various
careers. You would see, for example, Mary Cramer, with her byline in the Grand
Rapids Press and now being an editor of the Ann Arbor News. I think, therefore,
that while the college no longer exists physically, in the lives of those of us who
are faculty and students who were there, that our thinking and our behavior was
very much shaped by it. And I think that the things that are happening in higher
education today and that will recur again when there are future reports on higher
education, that the things that we experimented with will continue to be ideas that
will help to make education worthwhile and meaningful. Because we always
answered that question: "So what?" and we tried to make it integral to our very
own lives and our work. Okay, that's it for now, can't think of any more to say.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_49_Lafleur
Creator
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Lafleur, Inge
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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Inge Lafleur interview (video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Ingrun "Inge" Lafleur 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. Inge Lafleur was a faculty member of William James College and in this interview she discusses the importance of the college in her life experience, how the feminist ethos of the college shaped her personal and professional life, and the wealth of ideas about teaching and learning that she carries with her as a result of being a part of the William James community. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Inge Lafleur.
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
Feminism
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>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Sanford Fried
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 2
[Barbara]
The question is: a lot of people I talk with – students – did not have anything to
do with Council, or anything to do with governance, or were not involved in the
college. And you and Sheila [?] were, and I would like your evaluation of how
really important that was to the education.
[Fried]
Boy, I was just thinking about that whole thing. I was running through the Castro
question, and that whole statement, and in that phrase, you know, that you
weren't a part of the college. And I thought, wait a minute, there was a whole part
of this college that happened… was happening in Council and it was happening
in the committees. I try to remember all the committees that I was on…
everything from the Community Life committee that probably isn’t even around
anymore that died a long time ago, Academic Life and Faculty Review and all
that faculty hiring. And, you know, the leadership quality and the building
leadership quality in our students – it was never really discussed as an upfront
thing of what the college was about, but it was, and it was underlying, I mean, it
was obvious because there were what fifteen seats for students on the council,
right? And so, it was intentional that people were going to get involved but there
wasn't much of a dialogue of how that really integrates into your education and
how that really helps you when you get out. And I've done various things since
I’ve graduated that I’ve thought right back to my Council experiences, where
when I sat in that room, I tended to listen more than talk because it was the first
time I had ever been in that sort of a setting. But from going out from there, I've
been able to put those experiences into my head and into use and think about
how we did things at James and, in fact, I got a real concrete example of that,
too. At my current job, my yearly job evaluation off my Board of Directors, they do
a shitty job. They’ve just done such bad evaluations on me; I mean, you know,
I've gotten really upset with it and I think back on how we did evaluations the one
year that I was on Faculty Review and how we did some good evaluations then,
so that was one specific thing that really…
[Barbara]
How were their evaluations bad?
[Fried]
Oh, well, for one thing they were unfair. I don’t want to get into personal gripes
about the, you know, things about the job, but they were unfair and that it was an
unbalanced evaluation. Any good evaluation stresses positive and negative
aspects of your job performance. Okay. There wasn't enough information for the
�board to make statements on various things and they weren't able to go around
and collect the information. They chose not to go around and collect the
information in the way when we were reviewing if a faculty member… of course,
we look at all those crazy course evaluations that were done and then there was
a general sweep of data from the community at large. And so, it was a very
serious attempt made to get as much information from people and as much
opinion and fact from people because jobs were at stake; because raises were at
stake; it was an important thing to do. And in this last evaluation, I was so
disgusted I just I blasted the board for it, and it didn't endear me to them in any
way; it added to me wanting to get out of the job sooner and I’ve got two weeks
to go. [Laughter]
[Barbara]
Okay, okay. Because its curious how many people I’ve interviewed that have
said, of course, I didn’t have anything to do with Council, I just went on the bus
and came back home. And Council, to the ethos of the school from the faculty
point of view, was real important.
[Fried]
I think Council was real critical because, first of all, there's probably only a
handful of schools in the whole country, undergrad and graduate, where you can
actually… where you could have any access to any of that decision making,
okay. And so, in James it was just… it was part of the daily routine or the
biweekly routine, I think it was, and sure the committees got crazy, and they got
out of hand. But how many of us got into jobs that we are going to be having
committee time with? Surely almost everybody in Social Relations and almost
everybody in Arts and Media. Anybody who's doing any producing work, you’re
always on committees; you’re always doing meetings. So, you know, meetings
aren’t just a couple people sitting around – you’ve got to learn how to read those
meetings; you got to learn how those politics work. And they were working! They
were working the Skylight Room and plus I learned about good facilitating
watching Kenny Zapp and watching Pat [?]. They were some of the best, they
were very good facilitators. I tried to draft Kenny to do facilitating for the Co-op
while he was still in town here. It only worked once – too busy.
[Barbara]
Okay good, solid answer. I’m going to try going wide here [camera zooms out].
[Fried]
I’m glad you asked that because I was going to work it in anyway.
[Barbara]
Okay, then I want to go back to a question we didn’t talk about which is, oh yes,
you said James was half of your education. You’ve been out of school
approximately as long as you were in James, so tell me about how it was half
and what wasn’t there and all that.
[Fried]
Okay, should I do a little background on that now?
�[Barbara]
Sure.
[Fried]
Okay, let’s see. So, I attended James for approximately three years (seventyseven to eighty). Full-time, more than full-time in a lot of ways in Arts and Media.
And now I’ve been out from eighty to eighty-five, so it’s been like five years that
I've been a graduate and what I've done mostly in that time has been retail
management… had very little to do with Arts and Media. I’ve been doing
photography semiprofessionally and just to keep, you know, the skills sharp, but
the… oh, God, I just lost my train of thought.
[Barbara]
Don’t worry about it.
[Fried]
Okay.
[Barbara]
Okay, so that’s what you did in terms of your history. Now, how do you
characterize your education as having contributed to what you did after school?
After you got out of school?
[Fried]
Okay, the way the education I received and the experiences I received there
contributed towards what happened from nineteen eighty to eighty-five for me is
that, for one thing, there was a social ethics value that I came out with. Working
for a food cooperative was important to me because how food makes it way
around from farmer to plate is an important issue for me and I was involved with
co-ops before I came to William James, but I saw a greater opportunity to do
things that were important to me and my life and to be able to affect my
community a little bit. So, I took the steps of getting on the Board of Directors and
wound up being able to get a hired position through there, and it was at the time
that I thought, “Now I can try and put some of this stuff to work. I can try and put
some of these management principles that I heard of and read of and put them
into play.” And it was real gratifying for me when I could hire William James
people, too, of which I was able to hire a couple and it was always fun. And more
than that, it was also reminiscent of there’s now two experiences happening
here, and we can talk about the Jamesian way in which we would, you know, try
and sell bananas. Or try to do something in real specific context that was not
talked about in James. You know, retail was just not talked about in James; that
was not one of our areas. At least, it wasn't one of my areas. But, okay, so it
helped me to do… to work that side of my… kind of my life commitment of
service. You know, everyone has their way of service – if it’s a service to their
dollar or service to some community or other or some population and visually I
tried to make things happen there, too. I knew that the more exciting you can
make things be visually that it would draw people in. It would be… the
psychology is wonderful; it just keeps them in and then they don't know why. Of
course, that can be used the way it’s used in the grocery industry is really kind of
schlocky. I just tried to use it in the food co-op to make things exciting, to make
�them dynamic. And, of course, the idea of using video was gone through many
times, but for lots of reasons that just couldn’t happen, so I just let that one go.
But the other half of the education that I didn't receive was the management and
how to run a business. And I know those things were taught at James, but I
never would have taken them. That was not in my head when I was there; I was
learning to be a creative person in visual arts. That’s what I wanted to do, that’s
why I came there. And for me to be studying management principles would have
required a great leap for me and one that I was unable to do at that time. And,
also, one that was not impressed upon me as being an important one to do by
my peers, by my faculty and that. So, it came later. And I’m glad for the way it
came because I'm the kind of person I need application for that stuff. I can’t, you
know, learn about profit margins in a college context; it wouldn’t have done
anything for me. But when I sit there and look how much money we lost this last
month because the profit margin dropped all of a sudden it becomes more real.
So being able to apply the information really was important to me. And what I
maintained all through my education at James, once I really saw what was
happening there, the essence of it was that I was learning to be a learner. I was
learning to be a lifelong student and I think lots of other people had that same
thing. Those of us who really tried to get the most out of James got that… got the
ability to learn. And I taught myself just an incredible amount of things and gave
my… engendered the confidence in me to know that I don’t need a college to
keep on going with my education. It helps to have a community, you know, and
that community aspect of James I miss. I miss that sorely. And I wish that was
still around. And for me it is, in some ways; I still have a couple of friends that are
still around, and we talk but it's just so great to… I’ll just drift off, there’s a cut
right there anyway.
[Barbara]
Okay, okay. This is almost one, I’m not sure… I’m just trying to make sure I hear
you. In other words, the way you answered that, it was not that we were elitist,
it’s that, why didn’t you do business in school? In other words, you were
encouraged to, but it was available. Why didn't you do it?
[Fried]
Okay. Well, there was some, I think there was some elitism about doing business
in school. There was certainly for the art students, for the musicians, the media
people, the dancers, and that. You were there to learn your craft, and hopefully
you learned it enough - with enough of your own soul – that it could become art.
To study something like business seemed to be hypocritical but it really wasn’t
because it really does employ some of the same kinds of things in your mind and
in your creative person. There are…since I’ve done both now, I see the overlaps
and the overlaps are more than not. They are quite a bit. But we were better than
that, right? We didn’t have to spend that time studying business because we
were learning how to make statements about, you know, what was important to
us. But for the most part I felt a lot of people didn’t know what was important to
them. They were learning the craft, but they weren’t learning, they weren’t
�developing their own voice and what to say through it. So, being articulate isn’t
enough unless you have some ideas, right? And business skills were only
another way of looking at your ideas, it was just another perspective and I think
we suffered a bit, suffered quite a bit by ruling it out, by not saying that this was
an important thing for us to be doing because it’s just another way at looking at it.
You know we all had to do some science, we all had to do some math. And that’s
just another perspective of looking at the world; business is just another one of
those ways. And I know a lot of people in the media world who have gone out
and started studios here in town have mentioned that same sort of thing to me.
You know the business college came later, I had to go to JC, I had to go to
Davenport, or I just picked it up myself. Or I just lost a lot of money and I learned
how to do it right. That’s a tough way to do it, but you pay your tuition one way or
the other way, I guess.
[Barbara]
Good line. [Laughter]
[Fried]
That’s right. [Laughter]
[Barbara]
Sheila [?] just came, do you want to talk to her for a minute?
[Fried]
Okay.
[Barbara]
Alright, that was very good.
[Fried]
I left the college in a rage. And I was raging from actually one of my most
memorable experiences in that one – I won’t mention the faculty’s name – one
person, we’ll identify him as male, who I was talking to in the later part of my
senior year. I had even asked him to serve on my committee as far as seeing the
rest of my paperwork through and kind of giving me his blessings and just in the
course of conversation he said, “Well, what courses did you take with Stephen,
Stephen Rowe?” And I said, “I think I sat in on one of his courses, I don’t think I
took anything for credit though,” and he kind of knitted his brow and said, “Well,
let’s see you’re a media student. Did you take anything with Mayberry? With
Robert?” I said, “No, I never took any of Robert’s courses, but you know I
listened to him a lot in Council.” You couldn’t help that, you know, you did a lot of
listening. What about Richard Joanisse? Well, no, I didn’t take anything with
Richard either. And he just got this awful expression on his face and looked at
me with disgust and said, “You never attended this college!” And I’m not… I don’t
have violent tendencies but I could have at that moment because I was just so
mortally insulted after being such an involved student and I thought a very
responsible student for three years. And going through lots of stages of anger
after that and coming back to him and confronting him and saying you’re just
really unfair, really unfair, and you really angered me a lot by saying that and I’m
taking back my invitation to be on my graduation committee, I will get out of here
�without you. And then I thought about later on, I think years later, that comment
has haunted me for a long time, I can still feel anger. But since then, I thought
about them, the other experiences of being on Council, for example, being in the
student governance that James wasn’t strictly about anything but encompassing
the academic inquiry, the scholarly pursuits of the social issues which this faculty
was heavily invested into. And I thought, no way, you can’t do everything there,
you just can’t do it all. It would take you five years, six years, and I just didn’t
have that kind of time. But I learned my craft well, and I learned about leadership
in Council and I learned about working through committee process and that was
one of the strong things about what the college was about. So those experiences
I realized are very valuable to me and valuable, I think, to anyone else who was
in on them. That guy was just off base, he was just seeing things from his own
angle, his own perspective. And I think that that created a real split, too, among
the students and faculty. Because there were “us” and “them,” there were the
camera heads and the chemical fingers and those of us who spent our times in
the basements and over in the TV studios and there were those people who
spent most of times in the libraries and other places. Our libraries were just
different, you know, there’s lots of ways to do that. And I think that we were… it
was a real unstated… in some ways unstated division within the college. In some
ways it was antagonistic, I think the comment that I shared was “majorly
antagonistic.”
[Barbara]
Okay. I’m going to stop because I’m going to put a new tape in because I have
another question to ask you, one more, and I hate to have you start it.
[Fried]
Okay.
[Barbara]
You know?
[Fried]
Yeah. Do you want to set up another angle?
[Barbara]
I’m going to, yeah, I actually have dominated this tripod so I should be able to
change the shots slightly.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
Oral History
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_48_Fried
Creator
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Fried, Sanford
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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Sanford Fried interview (1 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 his involvement on council and his committee work, and how his involvement was critical to his educational success at William James College. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Sanford Fried.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Student councils
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A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7bc10ca36c87103e5d847537d0002494.mp4
3389952cc9a5c472ecd04993bca176e6
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/52659b18946217b719f10feba4aebfa8.pdf
b2e45ffb1db38ed59ed54fb01414f2fb
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe
Interviewee: Arend Lubbers
Date: 1984
Part: 3 of 3
[Conversation between President Lubbers and Professor Stephen Rowe]
[Rowe]
Was that characteristic of College IV as well as Thomas Jefferson and James?
The model was this distinction among and between units about pedagogy. You're
suggesting that underlining that there was a deeper distinction between the
traditional education and the experimental. Is that a fair understanding of what
you are saying?
[Lubbers]
Yeah, I think so, I think it was. The experimental education with its structures – its
evaluation structures and its curriculum – were just not acceptable or respected.
The College IV, later the Kirkhof experiment, I don't think that the ire of the faculty
in CAS was directed so much to that institution as it was to Thomas Jefferson
and then to William James. But I think the criticism by that time was, "Well, we
don't… this organizational structure is inefficient and there's no need for us to be
this way. And it would be so much better if we're offering similar kinds of
education." That is, I mean, we're offering English everywhere, languages. We
should be putting the faculty together and doing departments the traditional way
and have stronger departments. And so, there was not only the antagonism
directed toward the experimentalism of the institutions, and that was the great
part of it, but also toward the inefficiency. And then in the struggle for credits and
courses, who's going to get the students, and can we get them, or do they get
them?
[Rowe]
Did the traditionalism learn anything through contact with James and the other
colleges?
[Lubbers]
I don't know. I would, as I said, I think the heritage left is what I described, is the
way we are organized in professional disciplines and the liberal learning
disciplines together. I don't know to what degree people accept that, endorse it,
or grudgingly accept it. I don't know… that you'd have to take a vote of the faculty
to find out. But at least that's the heritage. I would say most of the faculty who
were opposed to the experimental colleges would probably say good riddance.
You know, I'm not sure that there is any cherishing of the past in any way. I think
this is about time that this was put aside. That's the way I view it. I haven't taken
any scientific surveys to know how people really feel.
�[Rowe]
Changing the subject a little, can you comment on legacy or heritage in relation
to the larger community? Perception of William James’ alumni or with the college
in the larger community?
[Lubbers]
You mean, how the larger community viewed the experimental colleges? Or?
[Rowe]
You're right, and its products, the students.
[Lubbers]
No, I really don't have anything to base a judgment on. I do think that the
community had a difficult time understanding our structure at that time.
[Rowe]
Grand Valley's?
[Lubbers]
Grand Valley's. And the public, generally, was not too sympathetic to the
experimentalism that went on here. Well, there are always exceptions and
pockets of people who liked it. But, I think, generally in this this area of the United
States, experimental education is not looked upon with great favor. And we
weren't looked upon with great favor for indulging in it. So far as graduates are
concerned, I don't know. Like you, I run across graduates of William James or
Thomas Jefferson, who are very… seem to be happy and pleased with what
they're doing and respected the education they received in those colleges. So,
there is that heritage, too; the heritage of the people who enjoyed and benefited
from it. I think, again, as I look back on the '70s – maybe period from seventy-one
to seventy-three or four – was the high watermark in terms of Thomas Jefferson
College. William James might be a little bit later than that – maybe seventy-five,
seventy-six – where both colleges had their best students, the largest number of
good students, and those people have done very well. And after that, there were
fewer good students attracted to that kind of education. And I don't regret having
done it. As a matter of fact, I think in a crucial stage and I believe there was
something happening to people, to young people, whether it was the Vietnam
War or what it was. But, from the late '60s into the '70s, well into the ‘70s. This is
a generation cut from a different cloth, I think. You know, in all of my experience,
they're different. And that kind of educational approach saved a lot of people a lot
of difficulty and agony. They would not have fit into the traditional mold. And they
did have places to go, other places in the country, too. But they had some places
to go here, and their older brothers and sisters and their younger brothers and
sisters have gone in the traditional route, but they were that group that needed it,
needed something different. And that was a great service to them.
[Rowe]
Here again, we're back to the term that emerges from this discussion, is really
basic, and that is: experimentalism, which so far has been characterized as this
certain kind of evaluation and this certain kind of flexible, if not loose, curriculum.
And now as a refuge, that seems in this whole discussion to be the one term that
needs one level deeper. Or can you say more about what this experimentalism is
�or was at its best? In some ways, all of the characterizations we have so far are
negative. Lack of evaluation, overly flexible curriculum, refuge from the society.
[Lubbers]
Well, of course.
[Rowe]
What is the positive?
[Lubbers]
The negative… the positive is the other side of the negative. These people who
flourished in that kind of environment were those people who flourished best
when there was no traditional curriculum and no traditional evaluation system.
They did flourish very well for a small period of time.
[Rowe]
Self-motivated was the term that you used earlier.
[Lubbers]
They were self-motivated, and they were in a state of rebellion, too. Now, if
you're rebelling, you have some idea about what you're rebelling against. But
then where do you channel your energy? What do you do with that energy that is
born out of rebellion? Where do you take yourself? Where do you take your body
and where do you take your mind and what do you do with it? If you have a place
to go where you can do some positive things, where you're not restricted by that
which you are rebelling against and you can find another object for your
attention, you're likely to not waste so much time.
[Rowe]
What was the object of attention?
[Lubbers]
The object of attention was the learning in these institutions. And they could take
themselves and go to a curriculum and work with some faculty members to do
what they wanted to do and move on.
[Rowe]
The study plans and riddling people to do what they want to do and become
entitled or empowered, except for individually, was certainly something that was
important to James.
[Lubbers]
Yes, it was.
[Rowe]
Perhaps to all experimental education, I'm not sure.
[Lubbers]
I think it is to all, I think it characterized experimental education of that era – of
the late '60s and '70s.
[Rowe]
So this was basically a vision. This experimentalism was a vision of perhaps a
very modern vision or a revival of the very modern vision of the independence
and development of the individual person.
�[Lubbers]
Right. Yes, I think so.
[Rowe]
And what was the social or communal or cultural implication of that or was there
any? Was it merely individual, as so much of modernism has been in ways
problematic?
[Lubbers]
It may, I think, more individual than I thought it would be at the time.
[Rowe]
Then this is a question for me as well. What was the communal vision that
accompanied that individualism? What was it?
[Lubbers]
Oh, I think, again, a more egalitarian society where the hierarchies would no
longer exist, where there would be decision by consent of the group. I think there
was a lot of that at that particular time. And I don't know exactly why except,
again, a reaction against the Vietnam War and a government that was waging
war and not always telling the truth. And that became obvious and here you are
where power is. You know, power is far away from you and it's coming in on your
life from that distance that you can't get at. You can't get at it. You can't influence
it. And I think that at that particular time, the experimental education carried the
communal vision of "we're going to be small groups deciding our own destiny."
And we begin in our experimental college by governing our experimental college
that way.
[Rowe]
In retreat from or separate from the larger communal structures, not in a way that
would reform them?
[Lubbers]
No, I think the hope was that they would be reformed, that the experiments would
work, and that out of this would come a new age. And certainly, the campuses
would be democratized and that was a hope. But, we Americans, when we have
our objectives and hopes, and we usually solve our problems as quickly as
possible. And we're not… we usually think that our vision will become reality
within our lifetimes. And I think I'm finding out that when you do experiment, you
maybe make a small step towards realizing what you want and what you hold is
ideal and as desirable. But then you don't get there all at once and you don't get
there in one lifetime.
[Rowe]
Rats, well this is just getting started.
[End of Lubbers Interview]
[Start of Rowe Interview]
�William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos and Arend Lubbers
Interviewee: Stephen Rowe
Date: 1984
[Conversation between Professor Stephen Rowe and President Lubbers]
[Lubbers]
[Inaudible] everyone, there are no students here. I mean, some may come back
or their students, but really there's no student tradition anymore or there are no
students here who talk about William James or Thomas Jefferson.
[Rowe]
Or in the community, for that matter. This William James association about which
I was nagging you about this plaque and not letting them paint the wall, it ceased
to exist. I mean, they can't even get a damn plaque on the wall, you know. They
don't…
[Lubbers]
It's interesting. It is almost as though it hasn't happened. And as we go about our
daily business, as I go about my daily business, that which was so important in it
during the decade of the '70s, it's almost as though it never existed.
[Barbara]
Hey, could you ask a question… rephrase your question about the communal
side of James? That's one question I would like to have on camera. It was just in
this last part of the interview.
[Rowe]
If the college was… if the experimentalism was essentially about the
enhancement or development of individualism, what then was the communal…
the accompanying communal vision, if any? Anarchism, some sense of the
individual fully developed in such a way that he or she is able to be in community
in the way that their ancestors weren't?
[Lubbers]
Is egalitarianism more than…[Inaudible]?
[Rowe]
What does that mean?
[Lubbers]
People living equally and sharing equally, deciding the fate of their lives as
equally as possible?
[Rowe]
Yeah, but see, that's a term in the modern period like "freedom" that everybody
uses and that means different things. I would say basically in the modern
orientation, there's equality of sameness and equality of difference. In our best
moments, the communal vision that accompanied this particular sense of
individual development, at the best, argued for an equality of difference; at the
�worst moments, it became an equality of sameness. That makes sense, right?
[Lubbers]
Yeah, the right. Yeah, which then comes back on itself as individualism, doesn't
it? It's, in a sense, the equality of difference is really… it's a kind of individual who
"I have a right to be different and work out my destiny than say we have a right to
be different and work out our own destiny." But then it's every little we… it's kind
of like Protestantism that it breaks up finally because everyone has a right to be
what she or he wants it to be.
[Barbara]
I'm sorry, I know you want to follow this through, but I just have a certain amount
of tape. I need to ask one more question… ask some sort of intro question to the
notion of the cluster college. You asked very early in the first…
[Rowe]
An intro to what he said?
[Barbara]
Yeah.
[Rowe]
I'm trying to remember.
[Barbara]
Well, the answer is that [inaudible] had to do with the difficulties of that structure.
[Rowe]
Okay. Developing out of your and the founders of the college's notion of small
educational communities, Grand Valley became, in effect, a cluster college. What
were the difficulties that were related to that kind of model in itself? And how is
that different from the Oxford model of small communities? I think the answer to
that is at Oxford, the pedagogical differences developed sort of willy-nilly over a
long period of time. Whereas, here in America, in some ways we tried to make
them. Arend [Lubbers] wouldn't talk about the problem we're making at that point.
[Lubbers]
That’s true, well we took a single institution and broke it up into pieces and it
wasn't ready to be broken up into pieces. Whereas universities, many
universities, people came, they did their little thing, and the other people did their
little thing side by side. And then finally, it develops… a kind of unity evolves.
[Rowe]
A more organic rather than made.
[Barbara]
It's now eleven o'clock, 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
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_47_Lubbers-Rowe
Creator
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Lubbers, Arend
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
Arend Lubbers interview (3 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Arend Lubbers by Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe, 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. Arend "Don" Lubbers was president of Grand Valley State University from 1969-2001 and served as president during the lifespan of William James College. In this interview, President Lubbers and professor Stephen Rowe have a conversation about William James College and its place within Grand Valley history, its legacy and heritage within the larger college community, and the positive elements of experimental education. This interview is part 3 of 3 for Arend Lubbers.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Rowe, Stephen (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
College presidents
College administrators
Lubbers, Arend D.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2bea94e0a171b2bacf29bb52309c8590.mp4
cdba35c0a98053d349ce1cbc09926850
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5e5df6ee3903a50ff1948b0341f2ecd1.pdf
0bb3d864084af5090388f6d4f9931c31
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe
Interviewee: Arend Lubbers
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 3
[Conversation between President Lubbers and Professor Stephen Rowe]
[Rowe]
Could you comment on the connection there?
[Lubbers]
Well, I'm just talking experimental education, you know, you can have many
different pedagogies. You can have colleges, or schools, or courses, that are
different from the traditional. You can have very different kinds of pedagogies.
There is not, in my definition, experimental education does not have a pedagogy.
[Rowe]
And yet so much of it fell into problems with evaluation and curriculum.
[Lubbers]
Right.
[Rowe]
Why was that do you suppose?
[Lubbers]
Well, I wonder if that was more the spirit of the times. In other words, when
people were ready to experiment, and wanted to experiment, and maybe
accompanying an experimental era is this desire for freedom and individualism.
In other words, an experiment is a breaking away, of doing something different
from the way most people are doing it. So, there is a freedom about that. I want
to break away and be free. Well, what do you want to be free of? You not only
want to be free of the traditional curriculum, you want to be free of the way it's
delivered.
[Rowe]
Or, as many people put it, they tend to be very clear about what they be free
from, but not very clear about free for.
[Lubbers]
So often, experimental education has so much rebellion built into it. And
rebellion, you know, finally has to be, I suppose, consummated. I mean you have
to have your rebellion, and be done, and move on. And so…
[Rowe]
How would we have that here?
[Lubbers]
Oh, I would say we had, again, that desire to be free of the usual constraints.
And that was built into William James College, as it was into Thomas Jefferson
College. And I don't think… and that led to a way of evaluating, or not evaluating
�very well, and it led to a way of putting a curriculum together perhaps in too
haphazard manner. But I think that here – and maybe in most universities – the
experiments that were tried were not accepted by an overwhelming majority of
the faculty. And I think that's a problem. It's almost insoluble. And it's a problem
that I think experimental education will always have, because if you set up a
freestanding experiment, that is very difficult. Most experiments need the
strength – at least the financial strength – of a traditional university or college.
Maybe Evergreen State is an exception to that and that's why I would like to see
them… see how they've done it. And at the same time, it's very hard to get a
large majority of the faculty to support the experiment, to really be enthusiastic
about it. If the majority of the faculty or if the CAS faculty, for instance, had a high
regard for William James College, it might have survived. Though, we were in a
real financial crunch and things had to happen. We couldn't afford to do some of
the things that we had done. So, the reorganization of the institution might have
taken place anyway, but certainly it was the financial crisis that triggered the
changes. But if there had been a high regard for what was going on at William
James College by the rest of the faculty, they might have fought to keep it.
Because they would look upon it as a distinguishing part of Grand Valley that
they liked, but that was not the case.
[Rowe]
What do you think they understood William James to be?
[Lubbers]
Just, low standards, low academic standards. And no comprehensive,
comprehendible curriculum.
[Rowe]
Did they understand the pedagogy or the basic approach?
[Lubbers]
I don't know whether they did or not. If they did, those who did might have
respected that to a certain degree but didn't feel that it was being carried out well
enough to save it.
[Rowe]
Some people noticed that the very first sign of trouble in William James was
when the nation, as a whole – “Change Magazine" identifies this as seventy-six –
became involved with the “New Vocationalism” was the term. So that everybody
suddenly became interested in integrating career and liberal education, even on
the campus as a whole.
[Lubbers]
Uh-huh.
[Rowe]
Some people reviewing the history of William James notice as early as seventysix we were, in some ways, co-opted by a much larger national movement.
[Lubbers]
Yeah.
�[Rowe]
Could you comment on that?
[Lubbers]
Well, I think co-opted and maybe that is one of the great values in William James
College: was that it was before its time in terms of philosophy. And I think that the
heritage that William James College has left to the campus as a whole, is
probably this integration… this attempt to integrate the professional and the
liberal learning. There's been the two tracks, of course, in education and the
synthesis between the two is essential. But as we are now organized with our
professional schools living intermixed in the divisions with the arts and sciences, I
think is a good illustration of what William James meant and has been that part of
the William James heritage that continues and is a major contribution to this
institution. Again, I think maybe faculty accept it, the ones that do accept it, not all
do, but the ones that do accept it, some will do it because they believe in it
philosophically, but many of the arts and sciences professors have had to face
the unpleasant reality for them that many of their students are majoring in
professions. And therefore, they have to live together with the faculty in the
professional fields. And for whatever reason, it's happened, and is happening,
whether the motive is high or low, I welcome it because it does mean that people
have to… educators have to live together and have to work out some of the
problems that exist between professional curriculum and an arts and sciences
curriculum.
[Rowe]
Do you have any frustration or concern about what developed as the
understanding of "career" in this new vocational movement? Some of us in
William James felt that the definition of career that developed was precisely the
more narrow form that you and others, at the founding, tried to avoid.
[Lubbers]
Well, I think that it has come to that. And I don't think that every student, or all
faculty, or every program, is narrowly career. The narrowly career programs can
exist side by side with the ones that are broader philosophically. And yet this
happens to be the day of the narrower career approach. But those things begin
to change some. Although we are facing a time when jobs are so specialized and
require such carefully honed talents that I wonder whether we're going to
continue to need places in our educational system where people are, in a sense,
trained but at a very high level. If you're going to be, well, on our campus for
instance… if you're going to be a physical therapist, you can't just take a general
major in health. There can't be a general health vocations major, and then
practice that profession.
[Rowe]
You still need the terminal bachelor’s degree which I suppose they may have to
assume. We've mentioned seventy-six as the time when the new vocationalism
became very popular in the country and on the campus, and the reorganization in
seventy-nine?
�[Lubbers]
It was after that wasn't it?
[Rowe]
Eighty?
[Lubbers]
Eighty, eighty?
[Barbara]
Eighty.
[Lubbers]
Was it nineteen eighty? Is it that long ago?
[Rowe]
Can you say anything about the lay of the land between seventy-six to eighty in
terms of what happened to William James, both internally and externally?
[Lubbers]
Well, I think that there was a growing problem for William James. Students – high
school students – were not quite so interested in experimental colleges, or they
were much more interested in the traditional educational institutions. And in the
more narrowly defined professional fields. And so, it was becoming a problem to
attract students. And I think that was a major reason, too, for the demise of the
institution finally. There just wasn't the student interest in it anymore and it was
declining. And, well, I think those of you who are on the faculty worked very hard
to recruit students and try to gain interest. And there were several older students
who liked the style of William James. And, maybe again, if the institution had
been well-respected, by all the faculty, it might have survived and became a real
haven for older adults. But, again, the financial crunch and the declining interest
of students in the eighteen-year-old group, or the high school group, and really
the lack of appreciation for William James by the faculty, and the financial
crunch. And I think you begin to put all those factors together. Often one factor
will not bring about the demise. But they were pretty strong factors bunched
together working against William James’ continuation. And I really don't see that
it could've survived, probably not even in good times. I'm not sure.
[Rowe]
Because of?
[Lubbers]
Because of the faculty really working against it.
[Rowe]
In terms of evaluation?
[Lubbers]
Yeah, I think so. The failure of the cluster college system to survive… I think,
really, the single factor that was maybe most important of all these clusters of
factors was the inability of faculty and students on one campus like this one to
ever have a real feeling that though they were a part of an experimental college
or they were part of the traditional college, they also were part of Grand Valley as
a whole. That never could be done. And I guess I did not foresee that at all at the
beginning. I never dreamed – and that was probably my own naiveté – that the
�competition between and amongst each of those colleges would be almost… or it
was really, more intense than our competition – Grand Valley's competition – with
other institutions outside. But I suppose, one should understand that possibility
and I don't know why didn't. Because in my experience, like probably yours and
everyone else's, we need to have our enemies close. And if we don't, we really
have… I've noticed, if you're with any kind of an organization, maybe within a
church. I've often enjoyed watching denominations; they fight internally more
than the enemy out there. And we were fighting ourselves all the time. And…
[Rowe]
The drift of things that I'm hearing from you is that the fight was primarily…
[Barbara]
I'm going to have to stop you. Finish your question…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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eng
Oral History
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_46_Lubbers
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Lubbers, Arend
Date
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1984
Title
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Arend Lubbers interview (2 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Arend Lubbers by Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe, 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. Arend "Don" Lubbers was president of Grand Valley State University from 1969-2001 and served as president during the lifespan of William James College. In this interview, President Lubbers discusses the "spirit of the times" that played a role in the experimental education of William James College, the perception from the faculty outside the college, and how WJC was ahead of its time in terms of philosophy amidst the "New Vocationalism" movement. This interview is part 2 of 3 for Arend Lubbers.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Rowe, Stephen (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College presidents
College administrators
Lubbers, Arend D.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/07edd5efb603db138c71cac791e42647.mp4
6828e9a45f67f210afb89cd25b1a4693
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e5e1a0f15123015c693818c7363d4739.pdf
dd537ed0e7e5b1fe20e6efeb0802a7b2
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William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe
Interviewee: Arend Lubbers
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 3
[Conversation between President Lubbers and Professor Stephen Rowe]
[Lubbers]
You can just… you’re going to just kind of edit and put comments in?
[Barbara]
And it should be very informal and if you say something you don't like you can
say: "I don't like that, let’s do that again." Okay?
[Lubbers]
Alright. Did you want to start with a question or?
[Rowe]
Yeah, it seems that the basic question would be that in the wake of rebellion and
confusion and break up of what some have called a “traditional model” of our
education in the late sixties, there was this period of so-called innovation and
Grand Valley, in that period, adopted the cluster college model. So, it seems to
me, the first question for you to characterize the deliberation within which Grand
Valley made that decision.
[Lubbers]
Well, of course, the college when it was established had a concept – or the
people who established it had a concept – of a cluster of colleges. As I remember
the original plan called for…
[Rowe]
This was sixty-three?
[Lubbers]
Yeah. Four colleges of fifteen hundred each. Thinking that that would be a nice
educational unit.
[Rowe]
This was Oxford inspired?
[Lubbers]
I don't really know. I’ve talked to Bill Seidman about it, but it's been such a long
time ago that I don't remember how it came about. I think that there were some
who felt fifteen hundred was a large enough group for a college and that if you
wanted to keep personal contact and tutoring, you had to keep it at that number.
No one did much planning about the time the first college reached fifteen
hundred. What do you do then? Do you start another college with the two
hundred more that you might have? So, it was an original concept, but it was not
one that was clearly thought out in detail. But when I arrived, there was the talk of
having this School of General Studies. And so that was in the works by the time I
�came here. And then I noticed the plan, of course, the original plan and thought
that this was a movement towards that objective.
[Rowe]
Did the alumni give the idea to get it more from the culture or from the original
plan? You suggest that it was the latter… or the former.
[Lubbers]
I don't know whether people like Dan Clock and Gil Davis was here. I assume
that you talked with Gil, maybe not, but Gil was here, and he might remember
more about the origin of that School of General Studies.
[Rowe]
That was seven… what was the date on that? Sixty-seven?
[Lubbers]
They were talking about it… I came in January of sixty-nine. And I know it went
into effect, I think, then in the fall of sixty-nine. And it's terrible how these things
kind of… the past blends together, and I can't remember the dates exactly. But I
know my own thoughts at that time were sympathetic to the original concept. And
I also felt that there probably were different ways to learn, and if we can establish
colleges with different pedagogical approaches and styles, that might be useful in
higher education rather than to take it on a number’s basis. In other words, you
have your first fifteen hundred and then you set up a parallel college with the next
fifteen hundred. I thought it would be more useful to students and higher
educational experimentation to establish the schools on the basis of pedagogy,
rather than the numbers.
[Rowe]
At what point did you or the college become aware of cluster college as
something distinct that we were doing, say, like Santa Cruz or other places that
were similar?
[Lubbers]
Well, really from the time I arrived in January of sixty-nine and saw the formation
of the School of General Studies, I was very much interested in the cluster
college concept and worked toward it. And then, of course, then the School of
General Studies became Thomas Jefferson College.
[Rowe]
Can you characterize the moment at which the College III task force was
founded. College III, of course, became William James.
[Lubbers]
William James. I recall a conversation that I had with Tom Cunningham about the
concept of a William James College.
[Rowe]
So named?
[Lubbers]
I don't remember calling it anything else or thinking about it.
[Rowe]
Seems likely.
�[Lubbers]
I do remember the ideas that I had at that time. I was very much interested in the
vocations of the future. What were they going to be? What were people going to
be doing with their lives? And concerned a bit about the narrow vocational
direction. And of course, we have many of these schools now that are
professional and choose a profession and educate for it. We're more into that.
But I was concerned about the narrowness and that there ought to be a place
where you educated for broad fields and that the approach to communications
was a very broad one, in my view anyway, and then we had the computers and
the social relations. And I can remember some of the literature in that period
pointing in directions… jobs are going to be in these general fields. And so, there
was that professional aspect of it, but a broader based professional approach.
And so that appealed to me a great deal. And how you educate for professions
and at the same time keep the liberal arts core was the part of the experiment
that I liked. And an attempt to bring a synthesis between the professional
approach and the traditional liberal learning approach.
[Rowe]
What was it about Tom's idea or James' philosophy that made the fit there,
between your thinking…?
[Lubbers]
I think it was the pragmatic approach. In other words, let's try to educate people
to do things that work, that function, that will serve them well. I think that was
probably it. But, again, you know, you have… such as William James College
and Thomas Jefferson College, in a sense, cut out of whole cloth. In other words,
you come at it with a strong sense of pedagogy. This is what it's going to be. And
then to see how it works out, and it never works out the way the plan calls for to
work out.
[Rowe]
How did James work out?
[Lubbers]
Well, some people, I think, were very well served by it. I think there's a problem in
the experimental education. I think that's been true throughout the country. Was
true throughout the country in the nineteen seventies, particularly late sixties into
seventies. Accompanying most of these experiments, of course, was a different
evaluation system. They didn't have the traditional A through F grading, nor the
traditional examination. And I have a feeling that one of great problems was
really quite simple: that experimental education never did work out a very good
evaluation system. And some people do not require evaluation, they just are selfmotivated. And I think that we saw a group of students – particularly in the middle
seventies – who were more inclined toward independent study and had the kind
of motivation to carry through a sensible educational program with the assistance
of faculty. But for the most part, and certainly on into the eighties, I think we find
people needing more traditional evaluation structures. They like to have "A’s,"
"B’s," "C’s," and "D’s," and as much as they don't like examinations, they need to
�have examinations. And I believe that what happens is that the standards begins
to be relaxed. And then a lot of students who are really not inclined to be
students pass through a system and are not evaluated.
[Rowe]
How is that problem with evaluation, which you associate with experimental
education, related to the basic model: integrating vocational and liberal? Is there
any connection? Is there some integral connection?
[Lubbers]
I don't think so. Are you asking whether that kind of a model for William James
required a different kind of evaluation system from the traditional one?
[Rowe]
Yeah. Well, you mention two things that seem separate: one, the basic pedagogy
and the philosophy of education, integrating liberal and career studies, and
secondly, the experimental orientation, which had this problem with evaluation. I
don't see what you say about how the two are connected.
[Lubbers]
They're not connected.
[Rowe]
So they just happened to…
[Lubbers]
They came together and one of the reasons I think that experimental colleges
have changed, closed, or merged is because they did not have a more traditional
evaluation system. I think that there would have been a better chance of William
James College surviving, if the evaluation system had been similar to the
evaluation system that was in the College of Arts and Sciences, which of course
was the more traditional evaluation system. I think that it would have been…
because a comment was made about people not liking William James College. I
think that's true. I think that a large number of people in the College of Arts and
Sciences did not think highly of William James College.
[Rowe]
Because?
[Lubbers]
Because they didn't believe that the quality of work was a college level. And
whether that evaluation is correct or not, that was the perception.
[Rowe]
And you're suggesting that perception was related more to the evaluation and
experimental orientation than it was to the basic pedagogy?
[Lubbers]
I'm saying that I think that is one of the contributing factors to it. And you know,
again, the curriculum was put together, somewhat as you go, and I think that was
probably another reason why people in the more traditional institution did not
respect William James College.
[Rowe]
In that sense it was experimental?
�[Lubbers]
I would say yeah. I would say it was in that respect. I wonder if there could have
been a more fixed curriculum, and also whether there could have been a more
traditional evaluation system, whether that might have made a significant
difference in the survival of all experimental colleges. I think this is a
characteristic of experimental colleges, and not a fixed curriculum, and not a
traditional evaluation system. It might have been possible to have a different
pedagogy, a different approach, and still have those two traditional elements.
[Rowe]
Or to not have those elements and have a different pedagogy. For example, TJC.
So, maybe the question is: was the pedagogy of TJC more consistent with the
experimental approach in evaluation and curriculum?
[Lubbers]
I don't know whether it was or not. But I do think that it's possible, a least I… this
is again, conjecture, but I think that some of the pedagogy of the experimental
colleges was valid, and is valid, but I don't think the systems that were used, or
the lack of system, served the experiments very well.
[Barbara]
Steve, we have to stop and change tape.
[Rowe]
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
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
Oral History
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_45_Lubbers
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Lubbers, Arend
Date
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1984
Title
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Arend Lubbers interview (1 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Arend Lubbers by Barbara Roos and Stephen Rowe, 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. Arend "Don" Lubbers was president of Grand Valley State University from 1969-2001 and served as president during the lifespan of William James College. In this interview, President Lubbers discusses the cluster college model that was utilized at Grand Valley from the time he arrived in 1969, the origin of William James College which was previously known as College III, and his impression of the college's performance. This interview is part 1 of 3 for Arend Lubbers.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Rowe, Stephen (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College presidents
College administrators
Lubbers, Arend D.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/892daa01be0d58ca2e155127a4c65b0c.mp4
963dd92afca4133b0b7b14718c29dab5
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3e456dd3eb84a9acfcb9d5d124bd8207.pdf
a3ad50f8ce12abc300e55bdcc6206ca4
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Michael DeWilde
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 2
[Barbara]
Anytime you want to start. You could talk about where your education failed you,
and where it worked for you, or whatever you want to talk about.
[DeWilde]
Maybe I should do a thumbnail sketch first and go from there. Yeah. My name is
Mike DeWilde, I was at Grand Valley… I was at William James from seventyseven to eighty-one and came originally to do Arts and Media. And took about
two classes with the Liberal Arts people and I never did get around to Arts and
Media. I've since gone on to do a couple of years of graduate work in Boston and
I’ve just come back visit.
[Barbara]
Are you sorry you went to James?
[DeWilde]
There were a number of interesting… it was a roller coaster ride and I tend to
view it more dispassionately now than I did when I was there, of course. But I
think I have a sort of love/hate relationship with it that when it worked, it worked
very, very well. And I felt that the collegiality that people talked about was
happening and was possible, and that it was very inclusive, and you could do
what you needed to do and you could do that with support. And when it was bad,
it was very bad and there was no such thing as collegiality, and that the rhetoric
was just that. Not just rhetoric but empty rhetoric, and that it was perhaps not
unlike Christianity in that it kept vision alive of something very grand, yet was
unable to structure itself in a way that could reach any sort of possible fulfillment.
So that it did some empowering and gave people some confidence, but when it
didn't work, all the empowering and confidence were not helpful because it
wasn't…you weren't being educated.
[Barbara]
Can you speak about it in terms of specific experiences? In other words, classes,
or tasks, or something, you know? What were the variables? When did it work
and when didn't it?
[DeWilde]
So long since I've thought about that. Trying to think of… I think for me, I ended
up doing a lot of independent study my last couple of years, with a couple of
different people. When I got here, I was very gung-ho, I did all the committees,
and history of the college, and what was William James about, and it was very
exciting and I was very involved. Through, I think a certain disillusionment with
perceiving the unable to do advance sort of work in classrooms and there wasn't
�the possibility. The kind of students that were filling classrooms, and this is the
classes I was taking my last couple of years here, it was just impossible to do
any sort of advanced work that faculty was teaching to, if not lowest common
denominator, then certainly a very common denominator. And that was very
frustrating, so I was doing a lot of independent study and working with a small
community of friends who were all looking beyond college to work or graduate
work and with two or three faculty people. And those were the relationships that I
really treasured. It was no longer so much the relationship with the school as an
institution as it was with those individual folks and spending a lot of time in
people's offices talking, you know, putting bibliographies together. And that sort
of thing became the focus of my education which once I got to [inaudible] and
Harvard, both worked for me and against me. I knew how to interact with those
people, I knew how to ask the right sorts of questions. I didn't have the kind of
basic nitty-gritty skills. I didn't have a lot of the broad general education that a lot
of my colleagues had. I didn't have CIV 101 and all that sort of thing that was
picked up through primary sources and through reading other revolutionaries and
counterculture people. And it was… so I think my perspective was somewhat
different. I found it very hard to find a community – I think, well, probably until I
got to Harvard – that was interested in broad questions, that was interested in the
underpinnings of an institution, that was interested in the assumptions upon
which institutions were based, that was at all interested in challenging
methodologies and pedagogies and it was very hard to fight that. I had a couple
of faculty people in graduate school who at times would yell at the classroom:
"This is religious education, why are you people allowing yourself be to graded?”
And of course, I was right there at the forefront, I said "Of course, you know,
that's absolutely ridiculous!" At the same time there was a resignation and I
wonder sometimes if it wasn't at James too, among the students, if not among
the faculty. That, well, we are playing a bit of the game, that you do get graded,
and money is important, and this is nice and its safe, and I can do what I want for
a while. But essentially what I need to get out of it is a career skill because my
performance and how much money I make is finally going to be of importance.
It's very hard in a few years in an alternative college isolated in western
Michigan, I think, to erase protestant, capitalist work ethics and all that sort of
thing. And I don't think there were enough students. I think William James worked
very well for a relatively few people. Because of the discipline involved and
because of the assumptions made about students, that students would take
responsibility for such a large part of education; because it was difficult to get the
faculty because of committees and meetings; because the place spent half of its
waking life defining itself. There was… if you weren't in class talking about
alternative education, then you were on a committee talking about alternative
education. And how to present yourself and what the image was. The changes
that took place in William James from – in the four years that I was there – are
not unlike the changes that I see in the skyline in Boston. They've taken what's…
it's charming, it's livable, it's old world… let's just say that about William James.
�But and it dumped a lot of concrete and steel on it and the changes have been
dramatic in a few short years. And William James got dumped on a lot in the…
when I was there. I think it existed one year after I left, as a separate entity. It got
dumped on by students who didn't understand alternative education, who weren't
interested in philosophy or the theory behind alternative education. It got dumped
on by burned out faculty. And it got dumped on by the institution. And there are
times that… that pissed me off an awful a lot at the time because I'm committed
to alternative education. I mean, I keep an eye out toward what Goddard is doing
and what Evergreen is doing, because that's important to me because I never
would've made it through college if it hadn't been for a place like William James. I
can survive at Harvard taking tests when I'm there – I’m not there right now, but
when I'm there, when I go. I can survive there because they're secure enough as
an institution to let people do different sorts of things. You can… you don't have
to do regurgitation. I mean they're not, for all the other nasty things you can say
about them, they're not insecure. There's an intellectual freedom there. Which
certainly gets interpreted and gets manifested differently than it did at William
James. But there's a kinship, nonetheless, I think. And if it's elitist, then it's elitist.
[Barbara]
Excuse me, can I ask you a question?
[DeWilde]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
You're going along beautifully, but you said, something I've heard from most
students, and I want you to explain it: "I wouldn't have survived at another
institution." What do you mean by that?
[DeWilde]
High school was a very, very bad experience. I was the editor the paper and had
to deal with lots of censorship issues. And I was not necessarily the part of a
clique. I was not the genius math type and science type and the people who are
on the four-year college prep program – I wasn't that. I wasn't among the people
who are going to be janitors, you know, for the rest my of life – that was clear.
But there seemed to be no place to go. There were some of us just in the middle,
and there wasn't anybody addressing people who are profoundly dissatisfied with
education but couldn't be shipped on one hand into vocational school, or shipped
into… you know, and that's [inaudible]. I don't mean to sound pejorative about
those but those were looked at pejoratively, certainly in the high school I was at.
But there was a certain number of people you had to get rid of, there were certain
people that were going to go on and do professional stuff, and then there were a
few of us who said: "Wait, the whole thing is wrong.” Your premise… start by
rejecting the premise and then have nowhere to go because there isn't anybody
there who's equipped with dealing with premises. So, I went to a community
college for a year and just looked through the catalog and anything that said
alternative or non-graded, I went to that. I had no idea what alternative meant or
any of that, but it certainly sounded right. If it was an alternative to what I had
�experienced so far then I had to go on and do that. And through them heard of
William James. And, I don't know, I had trouble with authority. I mean, there was
no way I was going to… I knew that I, you know, in a dorm situation, in a typical
college dorm where people are… I just didn't feel like I was interested in the
kinds of things that those folks were interested in. And that may again be elitist,
and I just have to plead guilty I suppose. But, doing tests and multiple choice,
and regurgitation and reading nothing but secondary sources, and all my
assumptions about what I would be doing at a major university, and getting lost in
shuffle, and that sort thing, was not all appealing. So that William James was a
beacon and when I read all the catalog and the rhetoric, you know… this place is
run by God, you know? That was the feeling from the catalog. Certainly, that
impression changed quickly, also. It's clear to me, without the freedom to pursue
the interests that I had, and without the support. That was most amazing thing to
me when I got here was that if you were serious, if you seem to be able to think
at all, people took you seriously. And people were tolerant, people were forgiving,
and supportive. And it all worked – especially faculty and students across the
board. When I first came here, I was absolutely astounded. People who had
been here for four years, and who knew far more than I did, were taking me
seriously when I talked. And this was the first time that had happened. So, I
began to take myself seriously and began to take your sources seriously, and
you begin to do more serious work. I think that's what made it possible for me to
not just survive through four years of college, but to cherish it. And I think that
even if it's not William James… and I say sometimes, I'm ambivalent about the
closing because I don't know when I left how many people it really was working
for. But the idea and the ideal seem to me absolutely necessary. Because I'm
sure that there are younger people, like myself, who, again, are outside the
clique, and outside the mainstream, and have fewer and fewer places to turn.
There are fewer William James; there are fewer alternatives altogether culturally.
Certainly, you can see it in Boston, as the crowd grows more homogeneous all
the time. And so, I don't know if I feel, at this point, more angry or sad. My
commitment, right now, is to… I'm working as a carpenter and there's a
commitment there. And when I go back to school my commitment is to my
graduate work. But I don't see myself shaking the William James. It's not like
giving that up, I've not become reactionary about it. I'm still committed, like I said
to that idea and that ideal. And even if it only works for relatively few, there have
to be options like that… that vision. Same way I feel about Christianity. You
know, even if it doesn't always work, that vision has to be kept alive. Because
that's an important part of who we are, it's an important part of Socratic method.
[Barbara]
Can I stop you for a minute because it’s about to run out of tape? That's totally
lovely. Would you go on for about another five minutes? Is that all right? Do you
feel that? I have a question.
[DeWilde]
Sure.
�[Barbara]
If my crew shows up. [Inaudible]
�
Dublin Core
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
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1984
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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eng
Oral History
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GV016-16_GVSU_44_DeWilde
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DeWilde, Michael
Date
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1984
Title
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Michael DeWilde interview (1 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Michael DeWilde 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. Michael DeWilde was a philosophy student of William James College who went on to become a longtime professor at Grand Valley State University and the Director of the Koeze Business Ethics Initiative in the Seidman College of Business. In this interview, Michael discusses his experience as a student of William James College from 1977-1981 and his commitment to alternative education. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Michael DeWilde.
Contributor
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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>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ff7d4527e5cccca66b8168e0d07a150b.mp4
77076d503ff97403daa7d31654f0070d
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f6e68d3175eafc9f048f3887f166718e.pdf
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PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Michael DeWilde
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 2
[Barbara]
When you speak, you know, it all makes sense except it sort of doesn't because
you started out in one frame of mind and then changed to another by the end of
the tape. Do you have a comment on that? Did you feel a [inaudible] of anything?
Do you know what I mean?
[DeWilde]
I'm not sure, like I said, it's been a long time since I’ve thought articulately about
William James.
[Barbara]
Yeah.
[DeWilde]
What was your sense of the change?
[Barbara]
Well, I guess, I'm not really asking a question, don't worry about it. It's just that
when you started talking, over the process of twenty minutes, the school seemed
to have become more, well it did become [inaudible], but it also became more
valuable, in the way you were talking.
[DeWilde]
I think it… well, it was valuable and that's just the…
[Barbara]
I guess you can record anytime. Record anytime.
[DeWilde]
Say more.
[Barbara]
I was talking to them [inaudible]…
[DeWilde]
I guess, I really do feel a strong ambivalence about its continuation. That the
spirit, the [inaudible], the rhetoric which was prevalent, strong, and had
something to do with the practice of the place when I first got there, seem to be
diminishing and weakening and that was taking its toll on everybody. And it’s not
that the faculty were any less committed. I didn't sense that they were less
committed. I felt that there was just less understanding and less interest in
understanding what it was that the place was going to be about… what it was
about, what it had been about. But at the same time, feeling a strong
commitment to alternative education, to alternative pedagogies, and that I don't
know how you get back to that given this tenor of the times and all that.
�[Barbara]
Okay, I guess my real final question is something about… my presumption and
my personal program in life is that alternative education keeps cycling, and you
keep hopefully learning a little more each time and doing it better the next ten
years when it cycles up again and you get an opportunity to participate. Do you
have any views on what we could do better or what we did wrong? Or was it just
the tenor of the times? Which is so amorphous, it just frustrates me [inaudible].
[DeWilde]
[Laughter] Yeah. The tenor of the times was actually a bit before my time. I'm
more a child of the seventies, I suppose. So, I understand, you know, times being
tolerant of experimentation, alternativism and things like that. But I can't get a
handle on when people say this a gestation period or if people say, “Well it's
going around, it's coming around again.” I don't know what that means. It doesn't
make sense to me. I don't see that. I don’t see it coming around. It doesn't look
like it's coming around. I mean, perhaps it will. What it did well, it seemed to me,
was this [inaudible] attitude… was manifest an attitude of genuine commitment to
educating the individual as a whole. Educating the individual to be an individual.
To a commitment, not just to learning a lot – any number of disciplines – but to
be Socratic and to teach individuals about themselves. It sounds a little corny,
but I think when it worked and when it was doing… when William James was
being William James, it did that and people experienced that, and it was real.
You could see the consequences in the people you talked to; that you knew
when somebody was from William James and when they weren't.
[Barbara]
But what could it, in the next era, what could it better do? Because you’re also a
Grand Valley professor. You also didn’t get enough.
[DeWilde]
Well, I was…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_43b_DeWilde
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
DeWilde, Michael
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
Michael DeWilde interview (2 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Michael DeWilde 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. Michael DeWilde was a philosophy student of William James College who went on to become a longtime professor at Grand Valley State University and the Director of the Koeze Business Ethics Initiative in the Seidman College of Business. In this interview, Michael discusses how the spirit of William James College diminished over time and how the "tenor of the times" affected alternative education during that period in Grand Valley history. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Michael DeWilde.
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>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2c998017ef75ab39833000f1ecc58b9e.mp4
cc8ff28dfbd512ff8231ad2055d8347a
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a3facaaaf8044d6072fba7dcfccd1346.pdf
17cea6ad179836c64aca9c38ff4f5093
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Stephen Rowe
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 2
[Barbara]
Alright. I guess the one thing we should really start talking about is if you could –
Oh, I would say, tell me one or two of the main thrusts of James's philosophy that
were manifested in the college.
[Rowe]
Okay. I think in terms of the college, the most important thing about James, as
tends to be the case with the other great figures in the twentieth century, is that
he wound up taking on the central cultural problem, which for some people is a
problem of ideal and actual. For other people, it's the problem – beginning with
Descartes – of the separation of mind and body. For others, it's fact and value.
And for James, it tended to be the problem of theory and practice. In other words,
there's fairly widespread agreement among the great figures in the twentieth
century that our culture is dichotomous or it had become unstuck in such a way
that you get two elements that are not related. An extreme expression of that, of
course, in our time is Heller's "Catch Twenty-Two.” Here's two choices, neither
works, pick one. Gregory Bateson's “Double Bind” – same idea. But for James,
the problem tended to be – or the manifestation of that deep problem tended to
be – in terms of theory and practice. Such that, he observed, that without
intervention, the situation would develop where your thinkers would drift to one
end of the room and create grand theories that were related to nothing real. And
your actors would drift to the other side and mindlessly act out whatever
procedure or undertaking was going. So that, again, all things being equal, and
there being no intervention, there tends to be this split between theory and
practice, or ideal and actual. And with William James College, we tried to take
that problem on. And hence the integration of theory and practice, stressing the
importance of internships, and the consequences of what one is learning on one
side, and the implications on the more technical side – or career-related side – at
the same time. Now there's more to be said about James, but it seems to me that
in an era of alternative education, many of the examples and instances of
alternative education – perhaps even on our campus – failed because they
lacked coherence or they failed to achieve sufficient intellectual discipline. And
they simply became schools of doing your own thing, which is what happens over
and over again with progressive education… a history for progressive education.
And we were most fortunate with William James College then that we had really
the discipline of a great thinker with whom we could be in dialogue. So, it seems
to me that with William James College we have at least three things. It's an
instance of alternative education, which in some ways is the same tradition as
�progressive education, which as I say fails over and over again because it lacks
discipline and coherence, and it devolves into a situation where people are
merely doing their own thing. Secondly, the college was a manifestation of the
human potential movement and, unfortunately, that movement in many respects
suffered the same fate as has progressive education, which is to say that it failed
to find sufficient articulation and hence in the worst forms became helter-skelter
or nearly do your own thing. And to me, the history of the modern period,
generally, I mean the whole of the modern period displays that problem, that
there's some great idea about the dignity of the individual and a certain kind of
relationship in which the individual can mature. But – and here I place most of the
blame on intellectuals – we have had an enormous difficulty finding the
articulation that can remind us and provide the appropriate forms of discipline for
that intuition about being human and the relationship between being fully human
and being in community. And as John Dewey, William James later colleague,
points out in many respects our failure has been fundamentally intellectual in that
philosophy has failed to serve its function of reminding us and pointing us to
those experiences and moments in which we are being fully human. And
unfortunately, so much of philosophy or thought generally became co-opted to
the superficial, mechanical, laissez-faire notions of both the individual and
community that they effectively were absent in terms of reminding us of the best.
So, in my view, William James College – as an expression of a period, as well as
an institution in itself – was an attempt to institutionalize the best of the modern
period, which is to say, again, a view of the maturity and fullness of the human
being that is not antithetical to community. That, in fact, depends on and leads to
a certain quality of relationship that is very difficult to give voice to in the
Cartesian mechanical, even hydraulic, modern vocabulary. Where the
assumption tends to be that if I do something for myself, that's necessarily at
someone else's expense. And if I do something for someone else that
necessarily involves sacrifice. There is, it seems to me, at the root of the modern
period a vision of individual and community related in something like what we
these days call synergy. That, again, is very difficult to articulate in intellectualist
either/or categories. And so, here with the human potential movement, and the
college as an expression of that, was a surfacing of the attempt to embody that
ideal. And it just happened that it was a fortunate circumstance in that the
namesake provided help on that, rather than as with so many alternative projects
– educational and otherwise – the intuition appeared, was healthy for a time, and
then the failure of articulation began to take its toll in terms of people drifting off
into who knows what. And so, it seems me the relationship and the really
continuous dialogue with James the figure throughout the period was most
deeply significant in terms of that issue of having discipline and a coherent view
of what we were doing that tended to center around the problem of theory and
practice and the integration of the two. But it really went deeper than that in terms
of the capacity to affirm both the individual and the communal dimensions
simultaneously and in a way where each is enhanced, rather than one being
�enhanced at the expense of the other.
[Barbara]
I'm going to stop the tape for a second.
[Rowe]
Okay. Molly, get lost. Go lie down.
[Barbara]
No, don't tell… tell her not to do that. [Inaudible] how we managed to just attempt
to engage in genuine conversation with James is just… what techniques were
important, as versus just having him has a figurehead or something, you know?
[Rowe]
Well, I think dialogue or conversation with vision in two particular ways. One in
the structure of the college itself, which hopefully on an ongoing basis with
students is alive. And it seems to me that the central elements of structure were
the organization of the curriculum not around the traditional disciplines, but
around problems and issues in the world. And secondly, the organization of
individual student work around individualized study plans and individualized
advising. Such that the student – him or herself – had to take responsibility for
their education. And a second kind of institutionalizing of dialogue was the
synoptic lecture program, in which we tried to emphasize the significance of
vision – James’ and others – and on an ongoing basis put the college in contact
with figures who are genuinely visionary. And then a related element was that we
saw the need to do some basic socialization with students in terms of an
introductory course that went through many incarnations. I think the longest one
was called “Living and Learning at William James College,” in which we studied
James. But from the students’ standpoint what's even more important is what we
enabled them to make the transition from a more passive orientation to education
to a more active mode. And in the context of that dealt with a Jamesian vision.
Hence got it into the college on an ongoing basis.
[Barbara]
Let me stop it again because I'd rather we talk about the questions than me
just… Can you comment on the phenomenon we agree that we’ve both seen,
that when students would come to the college they would have a real… there
would be an adaption period before they were really functioning. And yet when
they started to function within the college – function well – we always said there
was a James student. "Oh, that's a real James student." It wasn't that we taught
them how to behave, it’s like they recognized some process. They learned to
trust it. Can you just talk about that?
[Rowe]
Yeah, I think perhaps best in James' own terms, James and his…
[Barbara]
There we go. See I wasn't talking nicely to him. Okay, now open wide, woah!
[camera zooms out and refocuses on Rowe] Alright. Okay. There was similarity
in backgrounds for a lot of us that came to the college and there was sort of an
understanding between a lot of us, I think. Do you think that's the most important
�aspect to what you refer to as activism within the history of the college?
[Rowe]
Yeah, I think that our faculty tended to share a history in common. Now there
were all kinds of variations, but I think in the broad terms there was a common
history that goes something like the following: we were committed in the sixties to
social and political change within the system. At some point – sixty-eight, sixtynine, in that area – for most of us, there was a terrible realization and that is that
quote "change within the system," or social and political change in and of itself
does not get at the problem. For example, nineteen sixty-nine is when Pogo said:
"We've met the enemy and they are us." Nineteen sixty-nine is also the time at
which the Beatles sang: "You say you want a revolution; you better change your
mind instead." Or, to put it another way: there's a point, historically – in our
shared history – at which social and political change became impossible without
cultural change. In other words, social and political change by itself is rearranging
deck chairs on the Titanic, unless one can get to the deeper level of cultural
change. And whether it was through the consciousness movement, the women's
movement, the sensitivity movement, various ethnic-cultural movements, there
was a shared sense, again, that the changes that need to occur need to occur at
the level of transmission of cultural value. Deeper, underneath the social and
political, at the level of the value transmitting institutions: religion, family,
education. Hence, most of the faculty sharing that history came to education with
an understanding that education – if it's to work – is not simply about
enfranchising students that hadn't been enfranchised before, though that was
important. The fact that we were teaching at a public state institution that was
making education available to quote "the new student" – the student to whom
education had not been available before. That was a significant social and
political intention of the college. But at this deeper level, there tended to be this
shared concern that education could develop and facilitate the emergence of the
kind of value change that's necessary in order for the culture to heal. So, at that
deeper level there was a concern with value in the faculty and hence in the
college and value of a relatively specific sort. Now, there were times in the history
of the college when there were conflicts over articulation of the value. I can
remember intense conflict, for example, as between the feminists and the, say,
new culture/ new consciousness types. That became most vividly present, I think,
with the synoptic lecture with William Irwin Thompson. But the point is that, at
some… that the agreement upon which the faculty and hence the college was
founded, was an agreement deeper than the social and political level; it was an
agreement about the need for change at the cultural level. And that agreement
was not without its disagreements internal to it, but it seems to me significant that
we have that shared history, the activist zeal, and a sort of a loose consensus
about the need for cultural change. Good?
[Barbara]
Now can we pet the dog?
�[Rowe]
Oh Yeah! Hey Moll! Molly! Now the dog's asleep. Moll! Come on over here.
Come over here. We're going to pet the dog.
[Barbara]
What's going on? It’s suspicious. I don't believe you!
[Rowe]
Okay, here's where the guy pets his dog.
[Barbara]
Sit down, the way you were dear.
[Rowe]
Sit, Moll. That's good, there’s a nice dog.
[Barbara]
I promise you I won't use it unless I have to because its corny.
[Rowe]
Yes, it is corny. That's a nice dog.
[Barbara]
Alright that's enough petting the dog.
[Rowe]
Good. Alright, as you were.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
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1984
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
Oral History
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GV016-16_GVSU_43a_Rowe
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Rowe, Stephen
Date
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1984
Title
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Stephen Rowe interview (2 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Stephen Rowe by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Stephen Rowe was a faculty member of William James College and a longtime philosophy professor at Grand Valley. In this interview, Stephen discusses how William James's philosophy manifested in the college and the unifying qualities of the faculty that were tied to a sense of activism within the history of the college, in addition to ending the interview with a brief interruption by his pet dog, Molly. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Stephen Rowe.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9034b5f1c6e3d5633f917bbf867187e7.mp4
c0e15153b46a8cc6de240a16df923b96
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/77869612840f9882bb63369a9f81d1e3.pdf
6ad642aec9d470c4f6852947cc364648
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Stephen Rowe
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 2
[Barbara]
Okay, whenever you feel comfortable, if you could just comment on that notion of
students adapting to the college.
[Rowe]
Well, I think a theme that comes up again and again… perhaps the central theme
of progressive education hinges on the distinction between the active and the
passive mode. Now James' way of putting that was, I think, what he said in the
talks to teachers that he gave in Boston which is really his only sustained
statement about education. The center of that statement was something to the
effect that in education there's one maxim, and that is no impression without
expression. Now, the point is that education continuously runs the cycle of
impression and expression and that the problem with most of education is not
that it's wrong, but that it only runs half the cycle. In other words, it tests… it gives
the students a certain set of impressions and then tests to see if they've gotten
the impressions. Now, again, the point is not that that's entirely wrong, but that
runs only half the cycle. From James' standpoint, and from the standpoint of
progressive education generally, that is frequently called active as opposed to
passive education, one for every unit of impression there has to be some
expression. One has to do something with it. One has to do the kind of… engage
in the kind of doing that enables the student to come into possession of the
material. Not simply into the possession of the certificates that says that they
have temporarily gotten the impression. And there are empirical studies and point
out that that kind of learning, take the test, which certifies that you've gotten the
proper impressions. That kind of learning disappears very, very fast. I mean the
retention curve with that kind of learning, as compared to the more active
learning, shows the initial retention higher, but the curve drops off very rapidly.
Whereas in the more active mold, which is to say that impression has been
followed by expiration – in this case in writing, or internship kind of work, or what
we in the early days call project-oriented education – the retention initially is a
little lower, but it remains far after the test material has been forgotten. So, with
most of our students coming out of traditional high schools and colleges, they
have come to us frequently with some notion about what they want at the
college, but mostly habituated to this passive mode. And I think one of the basic
events that we see over and over again with students is this kind of crucial
moment of awakening to the more active mode. And so frequently – and
especially entering students – there will be this very distinct process of engaging
education in the more active that is initially perceived as frustrating and indeed it
�seems to me that to enable someone to make the transition from the passive to
the active mode, there is a certain amount of turbulence and frustration. In fact, a
good curriculum should induce a kind of frustration that leads to crossing over
this threshold. And it seems to me that the, quote, William James students – the
ones who are sort of self-evidently reflective of the college at its best – are those
who have made that transition and who are able to participate in this active mode
of learning. And I perhaps should say that one of the reasons for the demise of
the college was the difficulty, late in college, getting students to do that. The
influence of career, careerism, as well as the conservatives and the culture,
meant that more and more students were resistant to that process and more and
more were willing to defer to authority and to wish to be told. And the more
survival became the issue, and the more insecure people became, the more we
saw real resistance on the part of students to cross that threshold and enter into
the more active mode. But the point of contact, again, with William James was
the central statement: "No impression without expression." And when we worked
well, I think we continuously ran that whole cycle.
[Barbara]
Perfect!
[Rowe]
Good, good, good, good. Next question.
[Barbara]
Is this a useful question? I'm concerned… I'm sorry. Whenever you're ready to
go.
[Rowe]
Okay, I think that James the person is difficult to understand, William James
College was difficult to understand, and what both the college and the figure
representative are difficult to understand. But I don't mean it is difficult to
understand in the sense of being abstract, or many concepts, or it takes a great
effort in the intellectual sense. The difficulty in understanding, it seems to me, is
perceptual. It's a little bit like the faces and vases diagram that you get in
Psychology 101. In other words, the diagram shows that as you look at it one
way it's a vase and as you look at it another way it's two faces looking at each
other. It's a gestalt, it's a question of perceptual angle. Now James, the figure,
again I think is useful in understanding the college, James, another way to say
what the opposition was… the two parts of the culture, neither one of which was
sufficient, and the brilliance of the figure James… William James coming to a
third orientation that was sufficient. James needed to do philosophy. He needed
to make sense of things. He needed to understand life as one whole thing, and
the schools of thought they were available to him were both insufficient. On the
one side there was the German Idealism, which was precisely that theoretical
detachment and ivory tower construction of brand theories that don't relate to
anything real, on the one side. And on the other side, the reigning British
Empiricism, which was enormously superficial, which literally stood around on
street corners and counted things. Neither of those world views or perspectives
�he found adequate. And one way to explain his genius is that he met that
fundamental position, and move through it, and was able to construct a more
adequate philosophy. And I think from this standpoint the- a way to articulate that
is in terms of a statement he made its end of his career, when he said: "If this
culture is to achieve health and vitality, once again, we must turnover, lie face
down, and look into the thick of things." In other words, the traditional orientation
represented by the German Idealism tended to understand life by taking a
transcendent perspective out there. And that became very problematic in the
twentieth century. Nietzsche's famous "God is dead" is the most dramatic and
very confusing statement of that. That the way of understanding life through a
transcendent principle that's out there seemed to no longer work, going to eclipse
or be mysteriously absent, et cetera. The second orientation which we see
throughout the twentieth century, which corresponds to the British Empiricism,
more or less gives up on any larger sense of meaning or value and is happy to
count things and expresses itself and materialism and consumerism, et cetera.
Now this third orientation, which is not difficult to understand, again in the
conceptual or intellectual form, it's a matter of what James called "angle of
vision," of worldview, of perspective, of gestalt, involves an orientation to the
depth of the present and to the in here, rather than the out there. And that, it
seems to me, is the basic problem with understanding James the figure or James
the college. It's a problem of world view. It's a problem from the mental
perspective. It's a problem, not of rearranging concepts, but rather of stuff just
ever so slightly to the side and seeing everything in a slightly different way. Now
this is too complicated.
[Barbara]
No.
[Rowe]
No?
[Barbara]
But I'm going to stop and make sure we got it because… It's really whenever you
feel comfortable starting, just talking about where William James College fits into
the history of progressive education and/or the alternative education
efflorescence.
[Rowe]
Okay, well I think in some ways, it's very important that the college was founded
as it was in nineteen seventy-one to seventy-two, more or less on a cusp
between two distinct movements. On the one side, the alternative or innovative
education movement – roughly dating from, say, sixty-eight to seventy-one,
seventy-two, on our campus – to the demise of Thomas Jefferson College, which
was a fairly good example of that. And on the other hand, the career orientation,
which began, I think, about seventy-four. So, we were fortunate at James to have
had the experience really of some of the excesses and confusions of the
innovative education movement, on the one hand, and to have done some
serious thinking about vocation and career before the nation became obsessed
�with careerism in higher education. Now, it had occurred to me that at one point,
one way to understand William James College at its best was that we tried to
integrate elements of three distinct educational movements. There's the
traditional orientation, which in America came regarding critically by about sixtyeight. Then there's the innovative education movement, as I say, from sixty-eight
to seventy-one, and then the career education movement. It seems to me that
William James College, in some respects, can be understood as a synthesis of
the best elements of each of those three movements. And for each of those
movements there's a distinct coinage, or it's coin of the realm, or what passes
between people. In the traditional movement, the coinage tended to be quantities
of abstract knowledge and the innovative or alternative movement the coinage
tended to be richness of personal experience. And in the career the coinage
tended to be jobs and engagement with the world, primarily in terms of financial
success and career. It occurred to me at one point, that if you take each of the
three of those elements, the best of each of the three, you have a view of what
we were doing at William James College. I think, fundamentally, we were trying
to enable people to understand their commitments and to identify, develop, and
interact with their most basic commitments. The identification, corresponding to
the alternative innovative movement, where identifying what one is basically
committed to requires some degree of self-awareness and some capacity to
know what one's own experiences is. The development of one's commitment,
with appropriate resources – academically, historically, et cetera – corresponds,
it seems to me, to the best of the traditional education and the enactment of
one's commitments corresponds to the best of the career orientation. So, the
foundation of the college, as I say, on a cusp between the excesses of the
innovative or alternative movement on one side, and the superficiality of
careerism on the other, seems to me is very significant and fortunate fact about
the history of our college. Now I think something else should be said about the
ambitiousness of doing what we were trying to do. William James College, if
nothing else, was enormously ambitious. I remember a day in the mid-seventies
when I read in the "Chronicle of Higher Education," some private college in the
east – Bennington, I believe, it doesn't really matter - was having to go because
of financial difficulties from a student-faculty ratio eleven-to-one to fourteen-toone. At which point I practically expired of sheer exhaustion and realized the
ambitiousness of what we were trying to do at a ratio of about twenty-three-point
four-to-one. And in some ways, that fact, twenty-three-point-four-to-one is one of
the fundamental significant facts about the college. To try to do small classes,
individualized advising, internships, project-oriented education, all of that, at a
ratio of twenty-three-point-four-to-one, is an enormously ambitious undertaking.
And hence sustaining that for ten years is incredible. And we knew about burnout
and related matters but the fact we were able to sustain that for a decade seems,
to me, incredible. Now this isn't much about progressive education.
[Barbara]
Well, it's been a different answer.
�[Rowe]
Yeah. Yes, the college can be understood as a manifestation of the progressive
education movement. I think I've already spoken to that in the previous… Is there
another angle on that that you want?
[Barbara]
… comfortable. [?]
[Rowe]
Okay. Something needs to be said about this word "commitment." It seems to me
that one of the most significant studies of higher education in the period of
William James College was the famous William Perry book called "Forms of
Moral and Intellectual Development of the College Years" and what he really
pointed out, as a social scientist, is that higher education, when it works well,
enables the student to move through nine stages of developmental process
wherein they enter what he calls the commitment stage. Of the word itself,
"commitments," has been in some respects a cliché of that period, so that there
are understandings of the term "commitment" that are nearly clichéd. But Perry
points in a simpler form of his statement that the deep curriculum of the college
years involves the student moving through three stages: the absolutistic stage,
where they think that there's one right answer, black and white, right and wrong.
Secondly: the relativistic stage. Everything is relative in the sense of outer space.
I mean everything can become anything else. Pure protein is in flux, and so forth.
And if things go well, they emerge from that stage, and through that stage, into
the commitment stage, where they are able to commit themselves, both in terms
of beliefs about the cosmos or religion and philosophy, and in terms of particular
people and projects. So that term "commitment," indicating the culmination of a
crucial developmental process that Perry, and his successors, have argued was
the deep curriculum of the college years. I think is the way that I want to
understand that term and hence the significance… significance is a word I use
too much… the necessity to identify what students are really committed to and
provide them with the context and a curriculum through which to develop their
commitment in terms of awareness, perspectives, what the academy can do at
its best. And third: to at least have some experience with the enactment or
embodiment or living of that commitment into the world as we find.
[Barbara]
What I just asked you about coping with the changes that happened…
[Rowe]
Okay, the future-oriented part of it, it seems to me, was in some ways a sham. Or
a reflection of the society perceiving, I guess, the general term is rapid social
change, so not a sham but a cliché. I think that at a deeper level there was
significance to future-oriented and this is a quality that tends to be present in
alternative education, generally. And that is the emphasis, the realization that
education involves two elements. It involves a substance and a process. And
another way to say what the problem with tradition, much of what traditional
education is that it concentrates entirely on the substance and doesn't attend to
�the process of learning. To emphasize the process of learning is to emphasize
the importance of learning how to learn, quite independent of what the particular
subject matter or substance is that the student is being required to master. So
that many people in the present… in fact, many of the reports on higher
education that we're seeing now – especially the Bell report, for example, and the
American Association of Colleges report – emphasize the importance of a
student learning how to learn as an essential part of the experience with higher
education. So, it seems to me that at its best, what the future-oriented meant was
attention to the process and to enabling the student to learn how to learn. At its
worst it was a cliché…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_42_Rowe
Creator
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Rowe, Stephen
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Stephen Rowe interview (1 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Stephen Rowe by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Stephen Rowe was a faculty member of William James College and a longtime philosophy professor at Grand Valley. In this interview, Stephen discusses how William James students adapted to the college, how the perception of the college was difficult for many to understand, and how William James College fit into the history of the alternative education movement. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Stephen Rowe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3332e020fc383ca7fb5d778ccebdd3fc.mp4
f06de20bdc516c26989c8ee847ba7b53
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e224af6b706927cbd127bc6da306d990.pdf
647876f24c2708041c0b6c041f1d7bb6
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Deanna Morse
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 2
[Morse]
So, you're going to ask me about the students?
[Barbara]
Yeah!
[Morse]
The qualities of the William James students that you don't see…?
[Barbara]
Or what kind of quality did we really appreciate in some of the people?
[Morse]
Well, I think one of the things about William James students was that they knew
why they were there – and they were there to learn. And my feeling is that some
of the students that are there now don't know exactly why they are except that it's
a transition point between college and something else… life elsewhere. The
qualities that I saw in people were sort of self-initiative, willing to follow things
through, willing to take risks, willingness to fail, and a desire to really do what it
took to get the job done. Which in many times meant a lot of work and a lot of
redoing. And I find that part of the grading systems, I think, is what keeps people
from being willing to do that. And I was really surprised… this term I used the
technique of giving people very low grades with the idea that they would then
redo their work to get the higher grades. And it surprised me that in several
cases people accepted their low grade and just stopped right there. They
accepted Ds, they accepted D minuses, they accepted C minuses and Fs. And
they just said: "Well that's what I'm used to getting in education." And, you know,
that's it and then didn't redo the work. Even with my constant prodding saying: "I
believe that you have something good there. It's worth redoing. I believe your
tape, you know, could use some re-editing, some restructuring." And still people
just said: "Well, I'll accept that grade." And I didn't hear that in James. In James it
seemed like people were more willing to continue redoing the work. Also, though,
I think part of it is the fact that students are juggling six or seven classes right
now, too. And what they're learning from education is…I don't think that they’re
real-life skills particularly. What people are learning is what they need to do to get
the minimum level grades in all of their classes and I really don't see where that
translates into real life and learning later on. I had the same kind experience in
my own undergraduate experience, and I don't see where that has taught me
anything in adult life. I mean, I don't have that kind of experience in jobs where I
go into a job and I say: "What's the minimum that I can do to get this paycheck?"
It's just not the way that it works in the real world. Yet, in education that's
�something that we teach our students is what you have to do to get the minimum
grades to get by. And the students at their own level – whether the minimum
grades are a B, an A, or a C – and they do whatever it takes to get to that level,
just to get by.
[Barbara]
How do you motivate them? What makes the miraculous change? Why don't they
just do the minimum to pass a pass/ fail system? Which is what we had. I mean
everybody always said that's what's wrong with a pass/fail system. They'll all just
do the minimum.
[Morse]
That just wasn't my experience that people would do the minimum. It seemed to
me that something about not labeling it as C, D, F, B, A… something about not
having that label ever put on it made people strive for excellence. And, also, in
the pass/fail system, you could require people to redo. And I guess you can in a
graded system, too, but somehow it doesn't seem to fit as well as it did in the
non-graded structure.
[Barbara]
What else… comes after a terrific interview question?
[Morse]
Well, the other thing that I guess I was saying before the tape ran out about my
own education… which I understand some of the students now, which is that you
do in an educational situation where you are in control of what you're doing. What
you get is this sort of a self-affirming kind of feeling that then makes you want to
work. And, for me, my graduate experience had that effect on me. Going to
Goddard college – which was a similar experience to James – where you were
able to define what it is that you felt was important to you, and then you had
guidance from an instructor that would lead you on some roads or some paths to
reaching whatever that goal was that you determine. Well, you feel then that you
are the person that's responsible for your education. And within the more
traditional educational structures it's hard to get that because instead it's more an
assembly line in a factory or something like that; where you're trying to tell people
I've packaged some information which I feel is important and you need to
process that information to get out of this course. It's a much different kind of
structure saying: "Come to the course, tell me what you feel like you need to do
in this course, and then I will help you facilitate being able to do that through
taking media production, or art, or whatever the course was.” And you can't just
do that… you can just teach that way in a traditional structure because the
students don't come with the same values and same expectations. If you try to
teach that way now students come in and say: "But I expect you to define what
the activities are, what the studies are for the course." And, of course, when I
define them they're a different set of activities than if they were defined
individually by the students, and their my priorities rather than the student
priorities.
�[Barbara]
It's a combination of two things. I think one is an almost Calvinistic sense that
there's sin, you know, that you can't trust people. Okay? In the conventional
educational. And also, the notion that the knowledge that's being imparted is real
knowledge, you know, in the most Biblical sense. "This is the truth, so you learn
it, kid." As versus saying: "This was the truth, but look at the mess the world is in.
Let's find out together what we can do better."
[Morse]
Right and the students come wanting to learn what that truth is. They want to
learn: "What are the things that I must know to get a job." Whereas what we
teach them are more strategies to facilitate them once they've decided what the
job is that they want to get. I mean it's sort of different… it seems in some ways
like it's the same, but it's not, for it. I mean if someone comes and they say: "I
want to learn media because I'm interested in working in the health care
professions." Then you teach the media to try to help and reach that goal. If
someone comes and says: "I want to learn media because my high school
teacher told me that it might be an interesting thing for me to do." It's just a
different… you know, you're talking on a whole different level of approach of
education. The students come with different expectations.
[Barbara]
Can you do an introduction of yourself using your name, please?
[Morse]
Well, yes. I'm Deanna Morse and I came to William James in 1979. And before
that I had done artist in the schools work for about four years and had gotten my
master’s degree through Goddard College – which is an alternative school in
Vermont – and had done commercial production work before them.
[Barbara]
Can you name the students that you feel the proudest of in all these years?
[Morse]
Well, it's hard to name just one. But some of the people that I feel good about are
some of the recent graduates that I've stayed in touch with like Susie Zach and
Maggie Anareno [?], who are people that are working commercially, locally, and
had a sense of questioning when they came into college and are still questioning,
somewhat, what they're doing working commercially in media. Some of our
current students have a lot of the same qualities and I still feel real good about
them so I don't mean to say that when James closed, you know, it's like a whole
different ballpark. I really don't see a total difference in terms of the number or the
quality of students. But it does seem to me that entering students are coming for
a different reason than they came when they were at James.
[Barbara]
I can think of just one more question right now. When I was interviewing Rose
Willey, she was talking about… she almost got accusatory and she stopped
herself. She said: "The school… one of the explicit goals of the school was to be
change oriented. Future oriented. When real change came, and they tried to
close us down, what did you have, what did you have to teach us?" Do you feel,
�like, guilty because we didn't save the school?
[Morse]
Oh, no. I thought that at the time the college was threatened, the discussions
around the college were really interesting and also reflected the nature of the
college a lot. I remember endless council meetings that we had at that time
where there was discussion of Dick Gottlieb, and some other people, about
moving the college downtown, off campus, you know, this kind of thing. And
there was also, I remember, we had faculty workshops where we talked about
how we would teach using some of the William James philosophies within the
new system. You know that kind of thing. And so, I know that the students
probably felt much differently about it than the instructors. And, also, I think in
some ways and students… I guess the one thing I do feel guilty about is that it
seems to me that at that time some of the instructors, myself included, saw the
change with somewhat of a sense of relief because at least it meant that we
would be moving into what we perceived to be as stable environment. And that
we wouldn't be spending our lives feeling threatened at all times and feeling on
the defensive at all times. And I think some of the students were responding with
anger towards faculty. And I felt a bit like I was one of the people that was
justifiably hit with that anger at that time. Because I just felt that the continued
threats were not worth it, at that point. It seemed to make more sense just to
have the college be closed.
[Barbara]
Do you have anything?
[Inaudible]
Check back in.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_41_Morse
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Morse, Deanna
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Deanna Morse interview (2 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Deanna Morse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Deanna Morse was an Arts and Media faculty member in William James College from 1979 to 1981. In this interview, Deanna discusses the qualities of William James students and her personal journey that led her to teach at WJC, in addition to her final thoughts on the college's closing. This interview is part 2 of 2 for Deanna Morse.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5e80ee69ef712a4f112bc4bcf5477244.mp4
30939aaf18cd7d979b21ef5c88c4f704
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e8e53bdf1ad792dc8608871ef80622e5.pdf
648450292db4b289bcda02d23097fc5b
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Bruce Klein
Date: 1984
[Barbara]
… So, Bruce, those are the things I want to know.
[Klein]
So you want to know why I came to James?
[Barbara]
I wonder if I can do it on this shoulder. Yeah, why… you know what I mean, we’re
not into big biographies, we’re into what James was. So, when phrasing your
answer… you know what I mean? Hey, that looks nice. That looks nice. Now we
got you. Make sure we have you focused. There. Anytime you want to start
talking, you're really clear.
[Klein]
Okay. Why did I come to James? That's an interesting question. I think you have
to do a little biography: I was at Virginia Tech. for five years teaching and before
coming up here. And Virginia Tech. is like Michigan State and I didn't like that. I
didn't like the movement towards one hundred, two hundred, three-hundredperson lectures and movement away from when I started there. It was a very
personal place because I was the only faculty member. There were two of us.
And by the time I left there were twelve of us with a PhD program and all of what
that implied. And it's a long and funny story about how I got to James. I applied at
Thomas Jefferson because I felt that any college for advertising in "The New
Republic" couldn't be all bad. And they correctly sent me back a letter saying:
"We're not interested in you; however, we've sent your material over to William
James." And that was the year before William James… that was the year when
James was being founded. So, I actually applied to William James before it
existed. Ken Hunter was hired instead of me. And two years later – I think it was
two years later – the circle came around and I was added to the staff. And it was
really, in a lot of ways… coming to James was a reaction against a standard
mega-versity type education.
[Barbara]
Okay, let me shift here. Okay. Now would you like to talk about… I just did
something, sorry. Talk about the movement of computers.
[Klein]
Okay, I think…
[Barbara]
Let me change the shot just a little.
[Klein]
To talk about the movement of computers from James to CAS is… I think there
were two reasons. One had to do James itself. And that was the students we
�were attracting were less and less interested in a linear kind of thing that
computing implies. And at the exact same time, a very powerful person on the
Grand Valley campus, Don Vander Jack, saw finally that computing was going to
be a very important curricula item and waged a campaign to move it. And we
were vulnerable because of dying enrollments in that area.
[Barbara]
That's real clear. Okay. Let me just check focus here. Okay.
[Klein]
It was interesting. When I came, there was a core of about twenty students, I
think, from roughly the first year or two of James that were really interested in
computing. And when I left – or when it was suggested I apply for an open
position in CAS by the Provost, let’s put it that way – there were probably fewer
than ten.
[Barbara]
Because? Well, you already said.
[Klein]
I already said. I don't think we were attracting… I think the message of James
was not the thing that was going to attract students interested in computing. And
the students that were attracted to James were turned off by "you can't take the
fourth course until you've taken the first three." I think there was some real
problems with that.
[Barbara]
Real clear. From the position of both an insider and an outsider, I was never an
outsider, you know what I mean, for James…
[Klein]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
Would you care to comment on its final demise? I mean, could it have been
prevented? What should we have done differently?
[Klein]
I don't think anything could have been done, not in the context of Grand Valley.
Grand Valley was going to make itself look like every other college in the state.
Because I think, at that time, there were some serious enrollment patterns
though James was doing just fine. If you want to look at James vis-à-vis
Seidman, the enrollment in James was – to my recollection – just as good as the
enrollment in Seidman. But I think the powers that be wanted Grand Valley to
look like every other college in the state because they were taking enough flak
for not being like every other college in the state.
[Barbara]
If you were to sum up James – the key to what we were trying to do or were
doing – in a sentence, what would that sentence be?
[Klein]
Wow. That's a hard one, Barb. Well, something that my wife and I have been
talking about a lot lately – and that's growth. Personal and intellectual. And I think
�to my mind that's what James was more about than anything else.
[Barbara]
You're a great interviewee. You say it!
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_40_Klein
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Klein, Bruce
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Bruce Klein interview (video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Bruce Klein by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Bruce Klein was faculty member in William James College who worked at Grand Valley from 1977 to 2001 and later became Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Information Systems. In this interview, Bruce discusses his personal journey that led him to William James College and the movement of the computer program from WJC to the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). This interview is part 1 of 1 for Bruce Klein.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Lectures and lecturing
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/56647999b9f4cbdb4332832a55e5dfaa.mp4
6ad6be9be8fe13dee38b7a79a3e4752c
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fcd18884ee0436786d5ff2fc5f9248db.pdf
199ab49ab84f708d8f4e7f348944b43e
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Deanna Morse
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 2
[Barbara]
Okay, if you would just start out, wherever you want, talking about the difference
of teaching at a conventional situation and teaching at William James.
[Morse]
Well, one thing for me is the observation about studying both places because I
studied at a conventional school and then I got my master’s degree from
Goddard. And for me the difference between the two was like night and day.
Because what I found in conventional school was that a lot of the emphasis is on
grades and how one would perform. And at Goddard a lot of the feeling was what
you can do with that… whatever the learning is. And I guess I've seen that at
Grand Valley, too. The most obvious thing for me is that when I give students…
after students turn in films, I write comments to them on their films, you know,
with long comments… a page or two. And what would happen at William James
is people would read my comments, and they would take it in, and they would
respond to it. And in grade situations, what I find, is that people immediately turn
to the last part of it, see what their grade is, and then factor all those comments,
you know, on the basis of what that letter grade was. And to me that's the least
important part of the learning. The important part is the feedback. But what I find
students do is they just look at the grade. And even some really good students in
this term, in fact, came to me and said: "Well it's getting near the end of the term
and I wonder how much, you know, how much my grade would go up if I redid
this project." And it's totally unimportant what the grade would go out. The real
important thing is how well they can do the project. But the incentive to do it well
seems to be not there in the graded system.
[Barbara]
But that's the opposite from what people who advocate grades… what most
people say. They say you have to have grades or else people won’t work.
[Morse]
No, I didn't think that was true at all. At James what happened was people
worked because then they enjoyed the work and it had nothing to do with how
you evaluated that work, in terms of A. B, C, D, or F. But they did the work until
they felt the work was right. And in the graded system I find people will say: "Well
I was only a C student in high school, so I don't have to do any better than a C
now." Or: "I was only a B student in high school, so I’m satisfied with a B." Or: "I
was only a D student in high school, I'm satisfied with a D." And then don't try to
make themselves better. And that for me has been the biggest frustration… is
moving back to grades.
�[Barbara]
Okay. What other differences in teaching are there that seem important? If there
are any… excuse me.
[Morse]
Besides the grades? The grades is the big one, for me. The other stuff… it's
harder for me because I always thought James' requirements of the milestone
were a little wacky anyway. And I never quite got a sense of what a student had
to do to complete their study plan. And I feel, hearing Richard, I feel part of the
difference is really a difference of a nontraditional school within a larger structure
versus a school that's nontraditional all the way through. I don't think those
questions come up at a place like Goddard or a place like Evergreen. But within
William James what happened was it seemed like people trying to sort of mold
the alternative ed. to make it fit into what people could see as parallel to
traditional requirements. So that part of it to me hasn't been a real difficulty. But
the grade/non-graded aspect has been the biggest one. And the fact that at
James the nature of the students were different. We got people that were older
and were coming back that really wanted to learn this area and now it just seems
like we're getting a lot of eighteen-year-olds that just want to go to college and
someone told them that film was interesting and they're studying it. And a lot of
that kind of thing.
[Barbara]
What would you say, in your experience at James, was the thing that was most
valuable to you or to, you know, the most valuable to the universe? What was the
best thing about being there?
[Morse]
Well, I think the feeling that you were participating in something that was looking
for answers, rather than just fitting into a structure that people accept as the norm
for no apparent reason for it. That's really for me… and there's no reason that we
should accept the fact that traditional education is the answer. It, you know, just a
thing… "Well, I did it, so other people should too" or something like that. It has
nothing to do with really questioning what students need to know or what
students need to learn. It just seems to me that traditional education is based on
tradition, basically. And it just sort of comes out of that need of knowledge.
Whereas at James what people were doing was saying: "Maybe there is a
different way to approach education, what would that way be?" And everyone
was sort of seeking that answer. And participating in that environment was the
most important overriding aspect of what made it special to me.
[Barbara]
I think that's a wonderful answer, because I agree with it; however, I wonder if
there's something… a specific manifestation of the kind of things we were doing
that you could also mention. That's an attitudinal one, and I agree – it’s basic –
but is there something we did in classes, or in council, or something, that you can
mention that you really miss now or that you think made things work? Because
you were in such a pragmatic place, it wasn't just attitude, things were worked
�out.
[Morse]
I don't know. I think it really, for me, it was just that sort of overriding attitude
which manifests itself in counsel and all the discussions. And I remember sitting
in rooms, and looking around, and saying: "People have such a variety of
attitudes and opinions about things. I can look at these people. I can see their
opinions, I can see their attitudes, I can see how they manifest, I can accept their
different viewpoints as all being valid.” And somehow, within this new system,
you don't have that same… it's not that same sort of flexibility towards accepting
that there are different approaches. That's really… it's very fundamental and
basic.
[Barbara]
Do you think we failed?
[Morse]
Oh no, no. And I get real angry when people say that the college was an
experiment because to me the sort of connotation of that is: if it is no longer
existing and it was an experiment, an experiment failed. And I just don't buy that
at all. And I always tend to jump on people or call in, you know, when people say
that it was an experiment and it failed and that's why it's no longer there. That
wasn't it at all anymore.
[Barbara]
Why isn't it any longer there?
[Morse]
I'm not totally sure why it wasn't there. In fact, when I came it seemed like the
college was on the verge of folding. I remember the first faculty meeting that I
came to, Adrian started the meeting by saying: "If we make it through the year,
we'll be glad." And I went up to Adrian at the break and I said: "If this is true, why
am I here?" You know? I mean why did I bother coming to school that's already
on the decline? And I guess… I don't know how many years. Let’s see, I've been
at Grand Valley five. It must have lasted about three years after that… after I
came.
[Barbara]
What year was that?
[Morse]
Seventy-nine when I came. When did it close?
[Barbara]
Eighty-one.
[Morse]
Eighty-one. So yeah, it was just two years. Not long.
[Barbara]
And that was supposedly the bad two years.
[Morse]
I think I missed the hay-day of the college and I think I did come in at the tail end
and the part when I came in was… I was hired in the week that they took
�computers and management out and all that stuff. And TJC was closed. The day
that I interviewed I think they announced that TJC would be closed, so I came at
a real down time for it. But I remember when I went back to Denver after the
interview, I knew that I would take the job if it was offered because I knew that
working in this place would be a once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity. And, you
know, that was why I came.
[Barbara]
What was the thing that didn't work most, in your experience? What was the
worst thing?
[Morse]
At James?
[Barbara]
Yeah.
[Morse]
I had the most problem with study plans, and I always felt that there was some
sort of a hidden agenda to what would be expected on the study plans. And I
remember having many long debates with Barry Castro, and other people, about
why we just didn't articulate what we were looking for on study plans because it
seems like we were. And that was the biggest area of dissatisfaction for me with
students… was trying to help them design a study plan that I felt other people
would accept. That was my biggest problem.
[Barbara]
Why do you think they closed us?
[Morse]
I don't know. I think that… I'm not real sure. I don't think it was politically
advantageous for them to keep the college open because they had gotten a lot of
bad press in the community and people in the community didn't understand – not
so much with James but with TJC. And they put James, sort of, into the same
ballpark as TJC. It's alternative ed.; it doesn't make sense. We can't articulate it.
We can't say in one sentence what it is at the college, what it means. So, I think
that was probably why it was closed. But it's not totally clear to me why it was
closed. It's also, in some ways, not clear to me why it held on as long as it did.
[Barbara]
You came here and felt very comfortable here. Had you read a lot of William
James philosophy?
[Morse]
No, no I didn't know anything about William James.
[Barbara]
Why do you think you felt so comfortable here?
[Morse]
Well, I think that my own background in alternative ed. had the most to do with it.
What happened to me was that I went to an undergraduate school that was very
traditional and when I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I said that there was
no way that I would go on for, you know…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16_GVSU_39_Morse
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Morse, Deanna
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Deanna Morse interview (1 of 2, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Deanna Morse by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Deanna Morse was an Arts and Media faculty member in William James College from 1979 to 1981. In this interview, Deanna discusses the differences in teaching at William James College and what she valued most about being a part of its community. This interview is part 1 of 2 for Deanna Morse.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng