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William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Rosemary Willey
Date: 1984
Part: 3 of 3
[Rosemary]
We're rolling.
[Barbara]
Is there anything we could have done differently there at the end to save
ourselves?
[Rosemary]
Well, God – that’s a very difficult question because, quite honestly, I don't think
so. But I tend to be kind of a pessimistic person. I'm not sure what we could have
done because it got to the point, we were working in an environment that was…
you know, we were going against the mainstream; we were running an opposite
course. And, I think with the way Grand Valley was moving, as a whole, there
was really very little we could do. I didn't realize that at first, I think many
students…you know, we were taught that these values, and this approach to
education was vital. It was really going to do things for us. I mean nobody went to
William James to be told that this is going to fall apart. You know, I mean they
went to William James because there was a real supportive set of ideas that
made some sense to you, and that was going to be very advantageous to me.
You felt good about what was happening. So, I think that students when they…
when there was some organizing to save the college, it was really heartfelt. We
really thought we could have an effect on a few things. I mean it came down to
simply wanting to save the name. You know, for one of the departments or
something. But so, when it became clear to me that it was a losing battle, I'm not
sure if everyone felt that way, but there was a point, I think. I saw it happen to
many people. There was a point where you felt it was a losing battle, and you
didn't go to council. I mean why get up at nine o'clock on Friday morning, get in
there to sit around at a council, you know, that's kind of digging our grave. That
was sort of the activity of the day. It was always quite depressing. The students
started to kind of, you know, we went from everybody showing up because we
were going to do something about this. To people just needing to, you know, get
back to work on their classes. I mean, some students were letting classes slide
because they felt so strongly about this movement, this organizing. So, then we
all kind of stepped back, and just had to look out for ourselves. And take care of
ourselves, and I for one didn't want to be devastated. So, I just got back to my
own ideas. This is why I… part of how I ended up in New York, was that I kind of
wanted to be sure that I was paving my way out to put myself in a new
environment where there were opportunities and things kind of bursting, things
going on that I can feel new and involved in as opposed to sliding off of this
closing of William James. So, I stepped out into New York, which was very
�refreshing, but I had my tools – so to speak – with me from this education and all
these experiences and I think I could take on the city and many different kinds of
people because William James was very rich.
[Barbara]
I’m reading a book right now on American education. Did you ever feel at James
that you were involved in anything radical? Does that seem a useful word?
[Rosemary]
William James, as an entity, which it became sometimes… I mean, there were
many times when I felt like I was going to college and I was excited to get to my
classes and I was involved in this community and I worked in the students’ files
office and it kind of became my world. And when I was really just being a part of
this community, it didn't feel radical, it didn't feel… I didn't stop and think that it
was special and different – not very often – but I do when I look at it in the terms
of education and our society today. I do see that it was a radical place only
because it was different. It moved away from the simple formulas and structures
that I think the educational process can be boiled down to these tight little
systems and because William James was so different and operating on such
different principles, it was a radical organization – radical idea – and it certainly
allowed for you to meet many different political types now because “radical” is
kind of a political word to me. I think of, you know, being able to study social
issues from a socialist point of view or this kind of thing was extraordinary and
different. Now, I made a mention of being excited to go to class and this is
something that, you know, I remember time and again and there were a lot of
little networks that were built up in the classes. You would meet for coffee to talk
about your class, these kinds of things. The excitement in the activity of learning
was really something that I felt there. And once you could grasp the process, you
know, read something, and think out something and have these conversations in
the classroom – it was very confidence building thing. Especially as a freshman
coming from high school where, you know, high school can be a kind of
dehumanizing identity crisis and certainly was for me. To step into something that
involved you and meant something to you, where you weren't afraid of what you
thought and to say what you thought. It built character, it built real character, and
there were a lot of characters there. Yeah.
[Barbara]
Do you remember any in particular?
[Rosemary]
Oh, I remember all of them. I remember all of them in particular because I haven't
met people like that since. So, they do, they really stand out to me. People that
really had an effect on me. People that I miss and people that I still write to and
I'm very fond of.
[Unknown]
Students as well as…?
[Rosemary]
Students as well as professors. I have had connections to professors that were,
�you know, beyond a student professor relationship, where they saw I wrote some
poetry and I had Roz [Rosalind] Mayberry paying attention to me as a person
who was connecting things and discovering the magic of my own words and she
would relate to me in being just as excited and involved in my process of learning
and this is something that I still can't, you know… I still write a poem and want to
know what Roz thinks and we are in touch and it certainly isn’t something that
has stopped because our class ended. That's enough, that's good enough, yeah.
[Barbara]
Okay, this is a place that was, you know, this was change, this was a changeoriented place. That’s what we’re going to have to deal with and we didn’t deal
with it, Rose. They don’t quite say that.
[Rosemary]
Change. Oh, you mean like I said something about how, you know, we were
being taught to live in a changing world, this kind of thing, and I talked about that
being valuable to me. But I don't know what you mean.
[Barbara]
Real change confronted the college, but we didn’t feel it.
[Rosemary]
Alright, okay. Yeah, that's right. I did have a way that I wanted to put that. You
know, I sort of feel like it's up to you, too. What I did was I was thinking along the
lines of all these things that were so essential to us: integration, holistic
approaches to learning, well-rounded, not only career-oriented. These things that
really had substance became like buzzwords and when we were crumbling, we
were still trying to (crumbling… I’ve got to quit saying that) but we were still trying
to hang onto these essential things. But I think quite hypocritically because we
were allowing so much to be put upon ourselves, so many compromises.
[Barbara]
Like what?
[Rosemary]
Just the whole system of getting students out and graduated became
systematized in a way that wasn't paying attention to students’ particular needs
and problems. So that when we would come up with a graduate, and all of a
sudden people realized this person couldn't write very well, the student got
stopped and nailed and I think it was simply a matter of our being so caught up in
covering our asses and that there was a lot of things at the beginning – students,
their needs, where they're at, how to build and work with them – that started to
get systematized and the very typical thing of, you know, Johnny can't read or
write, that could happen to us and it did, it did happen.
[Barbara]
I know it's hard to believe we still have a couple of people who are all William
James people who have graduated yet because they can't write.
[Rosemary]
It's hard to believe but… and it's hard to sit back and say that it’s William James’s
fault. I think, you know, here again it's difficult to place blame because if we had
�all the support we needed so that we didn't have to worry about how we appear –
the society or whatever – we could have continued to pay attention to those
things that were vital to the individuals. But it became quite clear that there were
three or four or five individuals that were really in there bantering, playing a hard
game, to keep what was essential to the college but that was really all I think
that, you know, the small things we started to compromise on. I mean, it's very
small but, you know, you start to number your courses. You start…
[Barbara]
What difference does it make if you number your courses?
[Rosemary]
Immediately students would get the impression that, gee, I better take this course
before this course and then I have to have this course before this course. Now, at
times there was a simple logic to that… to being able to sit in a class and know
what's going on, to have a little bit of history with the subject. But I think in
general, it meant that students stepped into a kind of semi-structure and saw that
and tried to move through it as though it really were a structure. It was very
confusing. I mean, I sat down with beginning students in those last years who
were concerned that they couldn't take this course because it didn’t fit their study
plan, you know, the study plan became this rock that you carved your classes
into and I think that there were a lot of students that started to feel like there was
this whole… there was a set of expectations that they've simply had to do to
graduate now. I think we handled those expectations entirely differently at first
because it fit a certain philosophy to go out, to try things, to be well-rounded, to
be sure you’ve... I mean, sometimes it boiled down to, you know, be sure you’ve
had a class with Dick Paschke especially because he will really change your way
of thinking. And I think these things were happening in a way that was much
more individualized and progressive than, you know, school by numbers and I
think we're to blame for that a little bit because we started to lose confidence in
ourselves. We started to misunderstand, perhaps, what these essential ideas
meant and how to work with them, how to use them as you know so it amounted
to a kind of model. I mean, William James was really a tremendous model for a
lot of people, and it was a surprise to a lot of people, but I think I was there long
enough to not be too surprised. Yeah, I had a couple friends that took this college
so seriously and so to heart, I mean, they were more than us, but we were
angered. Frequently, we were angered by the students that kind of weren’t
getting it. They weren’t getting it; they were taking advantage, they were only
here to do their photography and to go get a job, you know. We were really
troubled by that, but it certainly wasn't the student’s fault.
[Barbara]
Why wasn’t it their fault?
[Rosemary]
Because these were the shifts that were beginning to make sense to those young
people. These were the kinds of shifts that were setting in this sort of new logic
that I think put too much emphasis on career and much less emphasis on
�discovery of all possibilities that you can have in those few years. And, you know,
I am very well aware of the numbers game that started to set in in terms of how
many students are in what programs and if it was really mounting up in that
media program, for example, then we better pay a lot of attention to that. I mean,
the bottom line is getting students in there and getting enough money so that the
college would survive. And we had to have some kind of external measure of
value and it pretty much amounted to how successful I think we were in terms of
student ratios and numbers and things that for some of the students that were
aware would really seem hypocritical and we would get very angry and fed up
and these were the things that made us feel like it was a losing battle, and we
ought to take care of our coursework and get out.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Language
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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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16_GVSU_03_Willey
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Willey, Rosemary
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
Rosemary Willey interview (3 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Rosemary Willey 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. Rosemary Willey was a student of William James College from 1977 to 1982. In this interview, Rosemary discusses the closing of William James College, her memory of the cast of characters in their community, and the shift toward a more career-oriented education for the youth at that time. This interview is part 3 of 3 for Rosemary Willey.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Rosemary Willey
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 3
[Barbara]
Just keep talking.
[Rosemary]
I started to feel like people asking me how much money I can make as a
research assistant to an independent filmmaker. I started to feel like-- "Hey!
That's a real personal question." And I started to kind of take offense, and maybe
it's partially because, you know, I'm not making any money. But it was also
because, you know, I don't care how much money you make. But there was
really a, you know, it's just a sort of wrapped package. You graduate, get a
degree to be something, and you're going to make so much money depending on
what you've picked. This all adds up to, you know, what you've amounted to.
Now, people have asked me how much money I make, I kind of banter about it.
But…
[Barbara]
What’s the matter? Oh shit, you were perfect, Rose! You were so good!
[Rosemary]
[In a fake southern twang] Okay, we'll try it again. I'm so glitch. I'm so glad you
noticed that we'd run the whole tape.
[Laughs]
[Rosemary]
Let's see, yeah. I started taking offense at people asking me how much money I
could possibly make working with the independent filmmaker. I started to feel like
that's a really personal question. Happened many, many times. It happened in
the hallway, in my building, people, you know, just after a few questions. “Well,
what do you do? Where are you from? Well, gee, how much money do you
make?” I started to feel, of course, like that's not anybody's business. Maybe,
partially, because I'm not making much money. But then as I got to get enough of
this attitude among young, newly graduated, out in the world types. That it was
important to let people know I'm not out in the world to turn a buck. That I'm, you
know, that I'm out for experiences, that I feel like I have something to say. I mean
there…I've met many people who have, I'm going to have to stumble with this for
some reason. I'm drawing a blank.
[Barbara]
Okay. That's because you already said it. So, it's hard for you to do it again. So,
the point is that their education has been [inaudible] at the very limit, and your
education was something different.
�[Rosemary]
Yeah. Well, I went out east. Moving out east where there's a lot of young
professionals in New York, who have acquired a certain status that has to do with
where they have been to school, and what they studied. And you run into these
people frequently at parties or whatever. Gatherings where young people want to
know where you went to school, and what you studied. Their education is that -most commonly I find that these people have gone to college to be somebody, to
be something, to be a particular thing. And, if that hasn't added up in terms of
their salary, or whatever, I think that people feel pretty bad about where they're at
now.
[Rosemary]
So, at first it was kind of difficult for me when I confronted this attitude about what
you do is what you, who you are, and what you've amounted to, and I had no
simple answer for what I do and what I wanted to continue to do, and where I'd
been. And having William James College close has made it difficult, in that I can't
go on about this college that is this real happening place where people go to
really learn something and where there was an attitude, there was a real
concern, that even though they were concerned that people got out and could
find work and have careers and skills and stuff, but a real well-rounded education
that involved a lot of other things, thinking and writing, you know, that it wasn't
strictly career-oriented, that it was really kind of learning-oriented. And so, it has
really put me in a space that has, that I have found is quite unusual, where, you
know, being professional and being involved in something and having a career
means something entirely different. Well, it certainly doesn't mean how much
money you make. I think it means kind of loving what you do and being good at
what you do. You take pride in different things.
[Rosemary]
And so I stumbled with these young people and cocktail parties or whatever that
wanted to peg me, wanted to take me from some Ivy League school and that I
that I've been to law school or whatever. And then it didn't take very long before I
decided, what I have done, and what I am doing, and what I will do, and my
reasons for it, can really blow people away. Because it is unusual. And it's I think
it's a lot more dynamic approach to being a graduate and most people I've come
across, I mean, it's made me feel like an odd duck out in New York. But I've
come to take certain amount of pride in that. And I take a tremendous amount of
pride that I went to William James College and have felt a little bitter sometimes
that it wasn't sitting out there in West Michigan and still turning out people who
had an approach to their careers that was more like my own. Now I sort of feel
like stopping the tape. Okay.
[Barbara]
Why don’t you just talk about Walter?
[Rosemary]
Yeah, well, Walter Wright was an example of something I felt was really going on
there, was kind of a symbol of something to me as a student. Because I had the
unusual experience of being there when it was really a very dynamic, powerful,
�functioning place and then in my later years, I graduated just as it was folding,
and there was a lot of involvement of students and faculty and we really were
unified in a kind of “save our college” movement. And so, I experienced the
pitfalls and the hard realizations about where the support was coming from was,
you know, from within ourselves or really not within the administration, it was in
the world at large. We pretty much were up against it. So, people began to
realize this and there were a lot of very sad emotional times going on between
student and professors. And, you know, what an education that was, that in and
of itself, to be involved in this changing times. Feeling not only that we were
changing but we had promoted ourselves as a college that was going to equip its
young people to handle change, to be survivors, to get out in the world and make
change. So here was a real experience for us and I think it made a tremendous
impression on those last graduates. And you know, even though it was a very
sorry thing, I think we did end up feeling very well equipped to take on the
conservative world and to do the things we wanted to do.
[Rosemary]
Walter Wright, when I first came to William James was kind of, you know, the
happening professor. He was really very exciting for students. He really was a
great advocate of individualism and I think many students who didn't feel like they
had a niche in the world definitely could find it with Walter. And they were doing
amazing things, there was always all kinds of amazing film and video things
going on for people. And I think personally they were some of the most
interesting students at William James were the students that gave Walter a lot of
support and vice versa. And as William James started to undergo this sort of
cracking away at the foundation, the changing ideas, Walter was a person who
never really changed. He still handled his classes and the way that he felt was,
you know, was right on and he still…
[Barbara]
Like what?
[Rosemary]
Well, one thing that comes to mind is that he was a great advocate for play. That
learning was playful and that whatever you did, it was going to be fun and
expressive and yours. And for example, my very first super eight film, because I
didn't handle my camera right or something… I still don’t, I'm not sure because it
never happened again. But I came up with a three-minute roll of black film. I had
a completely black film. So, Walter said we're going to show your film, it’s a black
film, and we'll get around to what happened. But he told me I could take this film
and cut it into things where I wanted a black spot, that was interesting, that I
could scratch it, that I could make, that I could work with film and it wasn't
hopeless and I was devastated. And here Walter really wanted me to feel like it's
all part of it, you know. And so, it was all right, you know, it was all right. And then
I went on to not be intimidated by the camera, to not be afraid to make a black
film again. But he was just, you know, a very magical kind of instructor for me,
someone that I certainly had a lot of confidence to work with him, and to try new
�things.
[Barbara]
And then what happened?
[Rosemary]
Right, well what I wanted to… Okay, so, Walter was very important to me, to the
whole kind of philosophy and openness that made the college a very involved
place and he… I think as the college started to suffer some changes and
structuring, some things that were imposed upon us, Walter couldn’t maintain his
approach to classes and to students. He never really started to structure his
classes in a way that would've been quite different. Sso he kind of went from
being you know very much a part of what the college is all about to, I think, a sort
of exceptional person. He was kind of a dying breed, someone who became very
unusual. And Walter was always Walter, I mean he handled that very well, but I
always felt kind of sorry that he began to appear to be, more and more, the
exception rather than…
[Barbara]
Do you know why he left?
[Rosemary]
… a facet. I'm not exactly sure why.
[Barbara]
Because he was told he would not get tenure, that’s why he looked for another
job. It’s nothing that even he was unpopular, it’s that Walter had to go.
[Rosemary]
Well, yeah, he was driven. Students were allowed to be on faculty review
committees, which were these committees that were, you know, inside the
college that sat down and reviewed the progress and the, you know, how a
particular professor was doing, and how the students were feeling, and how they
were feeling. And I mean it was really a very good thing, but I sat on some of
those review committees, and I think that in Walter's case in particular, I really did
learn a lot about how he was kind of being forced into this exceptional, unusual
role rather than supported. Rather than supported, and rather than looked at as
an incredible asset he started to be, I think the attitude started to be “What are
we going to do with this guy that won't write a syllabus?” You know, and so I got
to see which was also another very unusual thing about William James, I got to
see the kind of internal attitudes and the real clashes and the things that made
you feel very helpless as to why, you know, why the foundation was crumbling.
�
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_02_Willey
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Willey, Rosemary
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
Rosemary Willey interview (2 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Rosemary Willey 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. Rosemary Willey was a student of William James College from 1977 to 1982. In this interview, Rosemary discusses the career-oriented attitudes of young professionals in New York City in comparison with the learning-oriented education she received at William James College, in addition to her experience learning from professor Walter Wright. This interview is part 2 of 3 for Rosemary Willey.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
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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/4a6d593c630fe11a494b948230ea3917.mp4
0779bf81f0f2c6f2e93ae65db9ded30d
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ad32fb631019cf7c9fa77b24cd44db4d.pdf
ab931513183ee456c0c53b40fc89f256
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Rosemary Willey
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 3
[Barbara]
Go on.
[Camera operator]
Rolling.
[Barbara]
Just talk. You don't have to worry about it.
[Rosemary]
He has himself… he has some kind of idea that… there's all this talk about how
we had a philosophy, and we had this, and we that going for us. I don't know. He
was saying some things about how little of that was really, you know, commonly
understood. It was interesting, like he was kind of fed up with everyone talking
about, you know, the philosophy of education, and stuff. I just think it was
interesting to talk to him.
[Barbara]
Okay, we'll do some more of that. I would like you to, first of all, start talking
about… in a sentence, say who you are, when you went to James, and what
you're doing now.
[Rosemary]
I am Rosemary Willey, and I went to William James from seventy-seven to
eighty-two, little time off, and I'm living in New York, and working with filmmaker
Leo Hurwitz. And his-- and research for his next script in film.
[Barbara]
How did you get that job, Rose?
[Rosemary]
I was studying script writing and very interested in writing for media, and I set up
an internship with Leo. Was encouraged to get out and do something in my field,
which is what the internship program is all about, and I had met Leo Hurwitz. He
was a Synoptic Lecturer at William James, so I met him through the college. And
I wrote to him myself. We talked over with the internship program was all about,
the kind of thing I'd like to do. And, you know, of course the first it depended on
where he was in his work, but I was very persistent. We kept in touch, and it
worked out very well. That I could come out, do research, and be involved in the
script writing process with him. When my internship was over, I stayed in New
York and continued to work with him.
[Barbara]
Didn't you write a poem that you sent to him, or something?
�[Rosemary]
That's right, my initial meeting with Hurwitz was that he brought a film to William
James. It was a film that I don't believe has been shown in the United States at
all. It was his new film called "Dialogue with A Woman Departed." I'd never seen
anything like it, and I was very excited by the film and by Leo. He asked for
responses to film, and I wrote him a poem I spent a little time on it and got to him
before he left. So, we had a very tremendous encounter. Where he enjoyed my
poem very much, and I spoke about his film. And we kept in touch ever since
then, so...
[Barbara]
People are not going to know what you mean by a Synoptic Lecturer.
[Rosemary]
Okay.
[Barbara]
What does it mean?
[Rosemary]
Right… the Synaptic Lecturer program at William James was a situation where
students could be involved with up with the personality, author, filmmaker, a poet.
People that they brought onto campus to spend time with the students to lecture
and visit the classes. Leo was a Synoptic Lecturer. He brought his films and
spent time in classes. Spent time meeting students, answering students’
questions. And it was a very wonderful opportunity to not only see someone's
work, but really get to know them and let them have you know real responses to
the work.
[Barbara]
People at a more traditional college environment might say: "Isn't that an easy
credit?" I mean how would you respond to this whole notion that this stuff is so
vague and amorphic that there's not really any learning going on, or something
like that, you know?
[Rosemary]
Right. I think that because William James college had no grades, no tests –
these kinds of things that create a measure or formula for learning – people
assume that it must've been something that you could slide right through, and
there was nobody checking up on you or this kind of thing. But it was quite the
opposite experience, really. Because they were small classes. You got to know
your advisor, and your professors quite well. And they got to know how well, you
know, they got you know you're writing, what you are capable of, they have
certain expectations of you that came out you know rather soon in the whole
college experience. They got you know what you were interested in, you know,
how your writing was excelling, whatever. So, there was no way to really slide
through something it was, you know, you couldn't hide from the real
responsibilities, or from the expectations people had of you. You really had to be
involved. And you know, of course, I enjoyed very much being involved. I found it
to be very difficult at times, but not difficult in a negative way. But a kind of
challenge, very challenging.
�[Barbara]
In other words, the notion that “it has to be suffering, to be learning” is sort of
beside the point. In other words, you're saying that you worked hard, but being
hard doesn't cover it.
[Rosemary]
Right. Right, well the whole idea of students being active and responsible for
their own educations made the, I think, effort that you put into your work much
greater.
[Rosemary]
But the rewards were much greater. You really could get involved in things. You
took great pride in turning in something that had real substance. That you'd really
thought about, and if what you wanted to turn in, that was substantial and
important to you, was going to take you three weeks more. You could just let
your professor know, this is what you're doing and I'm going to take this much
time and things could work out that way. So that essential things really to come
through.
[Barbara]
Do you remember when you came to James? You came out of high school,
right?
[Rosemary]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
Okay, do you remember that you had to have some transition into this
philosophy? [Inaudible] Or something?
[Rosemary]
No, it was a very stimulating place when I first came to William James College. I
remember being in classes that, you know, were no comparison to high school.
And as a freshman you worry if you're going to be able to kind of take on these
college classes. But, at William James College, you could sense there was
something going on. It was intimidating at first, but you came to realize that your
experiences, and things that you think about, and you know, experiences you've
had in your life are relevant, are important you don't have to be an expert on
something to have something to say in a class. People were interested in finding
out about you. So, you know, with a little bit of confusion from the transition from
high school to something so really sophisticated and involving. There was a little
transition in there, because in high school we were spoon-fed graded… your
goals were really quite defined. At William James College, people didn't really
define things for you. You could kind of see, you know, you made your own
decisions about what you were interested in and then there was sort of
encouragement. This whole, you know, these kind of adult issues, and adult
educational concerns where your concerns from the start. I mean there was
guidance and conversations, but it came quite clear to you that, you know, the
philosophy, so to speak, that was going on here was really to your advantage.
And something that you could really work with and become a part of. You know,
�it took me a few classes. I remember a class I took with Inge Lafleur. Um, no.
Aimee(?) Bijkerk (?). Her name was Aimee(?) Bijkerk(?) My instructor in Jungian
psychology, and it was my first year William James and I was very much
interested in Carl Jung. So, I took a course specifically about him, that was
tremendously rewarding. You'd spend a lot of time reading Jung, talking about
Jung, and getting a handle on how these things related to art, symbols, and it
was a wonderfully stimulating class. When it was over, I had a tutorial was Aimee
(?) where I asked her: "What I am supposed to do this class--with this Jungian
psychology?"
[Rosemary]
I was interested in therapy at the time, and I asked her: "How does a therapist
work with all this information?" And she explained to me, which I understand
more and more as I get older, I guess, that what you can do with this kind of
information is that it helps you develop an attitude. That there isn't just one way
to think through an idea. There isn't just one way of handling a problem. There
are many ways, and there are many ways that are related to each other. There
are things… there are ways in which schools of thought can overlap, and by
diving into something in particular like Jung, you can work on… it sort of
develops a sensitivity to the many ideas that there are in the world. Now, this to
me later became an explanation for William James College as a whole. Because
I have really developed an attitude, a way of thinking that where I feel capable of
taking many things into account because of the integration of ideas. And I found
this sensitivity added to approach to learning and to living that was very well
rounded and took a variety of things and brought them together. Was what was
happening at the college.
[Barbara]
One question on this tape. Then we'll probably change tapes and get you
something to drink.
[Rosemary]
That would be great.
[Barbara]
Can you remember a class early on, or later on that – and this is not to gossip –
but the experience where it just didn't work where you needed it to?
[Rosemary]
God, I might want to talk about that. Let me see…
[Barbara]
Because, it wasn't... [Inaudible]
[Rosemary]
Yeah. I had a class that I think was kind of an experiment. An experiment for
everyone involved. This kind of thing was allowed to happen at William James,
you know. Someone had an idea for great class, and they pulled in some
students that were really interested with a real hook. Course title, you know,
"Something in the Modern World" or whatever. So, I took a class, and I was a
freshman then, that turned out to be very nebulous, and it was at a time in my
�education where I needed to see how things fit together quite directly. I was
dealing with some very metaphysical ideas and I didn't, you know, I wasn't told
not to take this class. But anyways, I took it. Had to write papers about something
I had no confidence writing about – this was psychology. It was the history of
psychology. It was pulling together many schools of thought in a way that had no
glue. And people were very… there were some very intellectual things going on
there that were working for some people, and not for everyone in the class. I
wasn't alone, but I found the whole experience very stifling.
[Rosemary]
You know, we went through six to eight weeks before, you know, there'd be a
break where I might say to someone: "Gee, this isn't sinking in." And they say:
"Oh, I don't get it either!" You know, so we had… but, interestingly I did get some
papers out. What I wrote about was my problems with the class. I expressed why
I was having problems, and this broke down some barrier of silence I was having.
The instructors paid attention to my complaints. We talked about them. We talked
about them in the tutorial. I still feel like I didn't learn very much, but I struck up
some real conversations with people as to why. And I met a lot of people who
were going through similar experience. There was still a community, you know, a
forum for some real communication. Which was going on all the time. So, you
don't really regret experiences like that. But it was unusual.
[Barbara]
Would you like to stop for a minute?
[Rosemary]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
It's going very well.
[Rosemary]
Yeah. Juice!
[Barbara]
Okay. Something that's really important to talk about is what happened when you
went on the East Coast in terms of your education?
[Rosemary]
Right. Well, I went out to New York…
[Camera operator]
[Rosemary]
Fine.
[Camera operator]
[Barbara]
Wait a minute, let me stop this here.
Because we are almost out of tape here.
It would be lousy to stop.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_01_Willey
Creator
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Willey, Rosemary
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
Rosemary Willey interview (1 of 3, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Rosemary Willey 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. Rosemary Willey was a student of William James College from 1977 to 1982. In this interview, Rosemary discusses her time being a part of the William James community, in addition to her internship and work with documentary filmmaker, Leo Hurwitz. This interview is part 1 of 3 for Rosemary Willey.
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
Hurwitz, Leo T., 1909-1991
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Moving Image
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d768f5135cf27c6f4d086aee582ce985.mp4
ecc27c349767d0c213f88258bfa8b417
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d85e73d73d9ff5d41c0a94de60583aa8.pdf
661b43aada9cc1c12924a8b4e95dbdf2
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Scott Troost
Date: 1984
[Troost]
My year was the first year that we still had draft numbers, but it was the first year
that it was clear that no one was going to be drafted. The year before me…
[Unknown]
After the lottery?
[Troost]
Yeah. Well, we had a lottery. My year had a lottery as a class of seventy-two in
high school. We had the lottery but when we had a lottery everyone knew that it
was not going to make a difference. By that time Nixon declared the war was
going to be pretty much phased out. The class before me there had been people
that were drafted. So, when I was in high school, I assumed that I was going to
have to face that issue. My brother who was two years older than me had to go
through it. Ended up getting a deferral from a friend who was a psychiatrist who
just gave him a psychological deferral. And so that really shaped my mind as far
as…
[Unknown]
This goes on a theory that I have and that is that in the later sixties and early
seventies there was a greater need for alternative colleges because of all the
returning vets and [inaudible], you know, that weren't accepted at traditional
colleges at that time.
[Troost]
Yeah.
[Unknown]
Do you want to say anything on that?
[Troost]
I don’t know what… I'm real surprised about the whole anti-nuclear movement,
about people I meet that are younger who seem to have a lot of social concerns.
And yet they don't have anything like a Vietnam to galvanize them. So, I don't
know. Maybe there is still a population out there of kids that grow up that for
whatever reason don't accept the standards and need some place where they
can go and not feel like they're the odd ball. And because it seems like there is
still a significant group out there that have that feeling.
[Unknown]
Definitely a minority.
[Troost]
Definitely a minority. Though when you look at the… after the end of the Vietnam
War, a lot of people that were protesting ended up going back to the fold. The
�fact that the student population became Republican quite quickly, gave some
indication that for a lot of those people, it didn't stick. Whatever it was they were
feeling in the sixties, once Vietnam was over with, they went back to being pretty
much typical students.
[Unknown]
Yeah, the cause was [inaudible].
[Troost]
I remember I couldn't… I remember being so surprised to meet someone my age
who was racist. Because I thought to myself, "Well, that was something we
figured out." We figured out in the sixties that racism was bad. And so, anyone
my age should know that. I mean they went through all that, they should know
that they can't tell a racist joke and that's bad to do. And yet here they are doing
it. Where were they during that time? How come that didn't have the same effect
that it had on me.
[Unknown]
Yeah. Well and I'm twenty-six, and I'm probably the last generation, or near the
last generation that knew what was happening…
[Troost]
Oh yeah, you’re real close to being at the end of that.
[Unknown]
Yeah. And I think I’m one of the few “long hairs” that’s still left of that generation.
[Troost]
Well, now if you have long hair it's more indicative that you're conservative and
kind of a redneck. I mean, I'm scared of “long hairs” now. Like, ooh, watch out for
that guy, I'm sure he's violent.
[Unknown]
Okay, well let’s roll video.
[Troost]
Okay. Now you're going to be… were just going to be conversing?
[Unknown]
Yeah, it's the same thing. Just roll video. Is video rolling? Alright. I’m going to wait
a few seconds to get to the video. [Inaudible]
[Troost]
Okay.
[Unknown]
So, you studied Arts and Media also?
[Troost]
Well, I studied Arts and Media, I took some dance classes, I took one design
class. I just, I really literally sat down. All the milestone things they were just
phasing in when I was graduating and so I didn't have to do any of that while I
was at [William James]. I sat down in the last week and just juggled around all
the classes and thought, "Hey, I can get a double major here.” And so that's what
I did.
�[Unknown]
That's funny. You know, I got away with that, too. See, I never graduated.
[Troost]
So, you didn't have to…
[Unknown]
Well, I kept on not doing my milestone and they would either not ask me about it
or they would change the rules while I was still under it. "Well, you should have
done that four terms ago." Well, I didn't do it. "Well, don’t worry about that.”
[Troost]
Well, the greatest thing about Grand Valley was that because it was cluster
colleges, whenever there was a screw up, they always assumed they had
screwed up. Whenever I'd go into the records office and they would say, "Well,
we don't have that." Or when I was trying to get something, I'd say: "Well, it
should be there." They would say, "Well, we probably lost it." The assumed they
lost it. I was so shocked when I went to the University of Iowa where it's a
monolithic structure and so I went in and said, "Well, I already paid that." And
they said, "No, you didn’t." I said, "Well, can I get in anyway?" They said, "No,
you’ve got to pay right now." Where at Grand Valley it was, "Oh yeah, go ahead,
go ahead, you're in.”
[Unknown]
Okay, from the top. What drew you into William James College and West
Michigan and how did you get to there?
[Troost]
Well, I grew up in Oklahoma and went through high school and did the whole
thing there. I was a child during the sixties and the Vietnam thing. I had a draft
number, though I wasn't drafted. By that time the war was coming to a close. And
so, when I was out of high school, I was hot for experimental education. Also, the
schools I applied to had turned me down because I had been rebellious my
senior year and dropped all my grades. So, I wandered around for a while. I was
out in California in a small junior college out there. I went overseas on a program
called Experiment in International Living in Denmark. And while I was there, I met
a woman, Sally Norquist, who said: "Well, I'm going to a small experimental
college in West Michigan called 'Thomas Jefferson College.'" This was the first
time I heard about it, even though I had looked at literature about experimental
colleges. Never- the name of James never came up. But at that point, Thomas
Jefferson had a national reputation among a small group of people. It also was
attractive that it was a public institution and was quite cheap compared to a lot of
the other experimental colleges I investigated. And I said: "Well, that sounds
great." So, I followed her to Grand Rapids and set up household with her and
some other people and started taking classes at Thomas Jefferson. To find out
then that there was a cluster college there, several cluster colleges, one of which
was William James College. The first time I heard about William James was one
of my housemates, Paulette Rosen, came home and said that she just started
taking this class with this professor named Stephen Rowe, Ethical Problems and
Perspectives. And she thought it was the best class she had ever taken, that he
�was a wonderful professor. She also was in love with one of the other students in
the class, which made her even rave more about the class. And that whetted my
appetite to see what he was like. At that time, the classes I was taking at Thomas
Jefferson weren't that exciting to me. About that time the only thing I did at that
point was to sponsor a class myself in how to throw the Frisbee. Which fit in the
curriculum about as well as anything else fit in. I also did learn how to deliver a
baby in my Pregnancy and Birth class at Thomas Jefferson and if anyone ever
needs that help from me, I can perform that. So, there were a few things I
learned about how [?] shares in the work of some value but I started taking
classes with Stephen and found him just to be a wonderful professor, and loved
his ideas, and his conversation, and the way he conducted his class. I eventually
got hooked in with Barry Castro and had the same experience with him and I
found a little niche there. The thing that I remember when I first got to Grand
Valley was that someone said: "Well, you go to Thomas Jefferson College to get
your shit together and once you've got your shit together then you go to William
James." And that seemed to fit my experience also.
[Unknown]
So, how was William James different than Thomas Jefferson, in the people and
the classes and also from other traditional schools?
[Troost]
Well, the thing that- the main thing, the difference between Thomas Jefferson
and William James that I found was that the people at Thomas Jefferson seem to
be… the main mode there seem to be emotional. People were passionate about
this, about that, and it worked quite well for things like dance, and theater, and
other arts activities. But there was very little thought, there wasn't a lot of respect
for conversation, there was a lack of focus at Thomas Jefferson, or there was an
attempt to find focus that it never seemed they were able to find. And what I
found at William James was a celebration of ideas and thinking, at least in the
classes that I took the professors I took classes with. And the students seem to
be serious about studying, about thinking, about issues, about broader themes,
about being synoptic, to use the word that we all have to use at least once if were
William James alumnus. And the other thing I found that was… that the
difference between William James and more traditional schools I went to was
that I had always felt like an oddball or a rabble at the more traditional colleges.
And I didn't like that role. I would play it and I started… I wasn't taking myself as
seriously. And William James College was the first place that I could take myself
seriously and that other people would, too. And that I wasn't the oddball in the
class or the rebel in the class. I usually was probably one of the more
conservative people in the class. I could say things on my mind and not have
them laughed at or have to be defensive about them. And I love to talk. I love to
be in a classroom, and talk, and engage with people and it was a perfect place
for that. I found a little niche there. And I was not able to find that at other
colleges. And it seemed like William James was set up to allow people to find
niches. People that didn't fit in other places, they could come there and find a
�niche. And that's how I found it different.
[Unknown]
Okay. What of the education? Was it a good general education? A good liberal
education? How would you rate with other traditional colleges?
[Troost]
Well, I was a self-motivator. Once I find something that I enjoy, I usually work
quite hard at it. And so, I studied very hard at William James. I remember a class
I took during the College of Arts and Sciences, this is after a couple of years at
William James, and it was an Environmental Studies class, and it was one credit
class, and the professor was not going to be there one day, and it was a
discussion class. And he, by that point I had been the one that had been talking
most the time, and so he suggested that I'd be the moderator for the next class,
when he was going to be gone. And I showed up that day and no one else was
there. Once when the professor wasn't there that means there wasn't a class, in
their minds, even though they knew it was scheduled. And yet for me it was a lost
opportunity to talk more about the environment and what the issue was in the
class. And I found that kind of thinking and serious study was as rigorous as any
other place that I went. And was certainly for helping me to think creatively, it was
as good as education as I could find. Because other people that I met that would
come through traditional schools didn't do that. All they wanted to know was what
was expected of them and then that's what they would do. Now I didn't do that
very well, and I found that would be a problem later on as that once I got back
and I went to law school after Grand Valley, and it was back in traditional
structure that didn't work very well for me. The kind of stuff that I had learned at
William James.
[Unknown]
How is that education regarded at any other traditional?
[Troost]
Well, most people don't ask you or don't care too much where you've gone to
school. I went to University of Iowa Law School and they didn't know Grand
Valley from Adam. Or certainly never heard of William James College. So, it was
only after I told him, which I told him quite frequently that I had gone to the
experimental college, and that I had gone to William James College, that it was a
special place, and I wore my T-shirt, and I was having articles written by Stephen
and other professors that I was willing to hand out at the least provocation. So, I
made sure that people knew that I'd been to a different place, and that it was
unique, and that it had given me a whole different view of the world that they
should also have. I proselytize quite a bit when I first left William James. But I
found that most people didn't have a very clear conception of what that kind of
education would be like and it was business as usual for them. They were in law
school and there were more pressing matters to be worried about.
[Unknown]
I'd like you to say a little bit about the role of the educational community out there
in the support [inaudible]. A statement on that.
�[Troost]
In terms of the educational community of William…
[Unknown]
Of students, and how that was unique.
[Troost]
Well, I don't… in Grand Rapids it's rare that I don't meet someone that hasn't
been to William James. It seems like every time I meet someone in some field
either they were at Wayne James, or the person they're married to went to
William James. And there's an immediate sense of community there. Even
though we might… even though I usually don't know them. And I find that ironic
that I went to a school as small as William James and I know very few people
from Wayne James. I mentioned when we were talking before the tape started
that when I graduated in seventy-seven, I got to graduation and there was the
little room full of William James graduates and I didn't know a single student. I
had to introduce myself to everybody, and everybody had to introduce
themselves… they didn't know me. And here was a school that was, I think, sixhundred people and I had been there for two or three years, and I didn't know a
single person I graduated with. And yet there was that sense of then, and when I
meet people now, that there is a community of people and a support for, again,
for being a little bit different. And accepting that. And certainly, I think there are
certain values implied, usually more liberal. Though I'm sure that's not always the
case, but you can… you don't have to apologize about not voting for Reagan.
Things like that.
[Unknown]
Can we talk a little bit about… I'm taking off my notes right now.
[Troost]
Sure.
[Unknown]
Can you talk a little bit about the language.
[Troost]
Yeah, well that was one thing when I… a frustration I found when I left the
William James community was that we had developed a very specialized
language there, especially in the Social Relations group. I don't know… I don't
know about the other groups, whether they had their own language.
[Unknown]
I'm sure they did.
[Troost]
I'm sure they sure did. It just didn't translate. I remember giving a group of very
good friends at law school – who also seemed to share most of the values that I
shared - an article by Stephen. They didn't understand. They didn't… I mean they
literally couldn't understand what it was about. And for me it was… it summed up
my complete experience at William James. I could read that, or I can read that
article and it said exactly what I felt about the world. And yet for them it was
mishmash. And so, I had to try to figure out ways see to translate what I learned
�of William James, or just give it up entirely. I finally stopped talking about it
because I couldn't find ways to bridge that language gap. And it was also… the
other thing about the language that I learned William James was it was mostly a
language of ideas and thinking to the exclusion of emotions and that sort of thing.
Now I know that there were some other classes, I know Dick Gottlieb in Social
Work paid a lot of attention to that, but I'd never had any classes with Dick. And
so, for me, I had a whole language of ideas and I didn't have much language of
emotions. And that got me in trouble because I think I started assuming that
things that were happening to me had more to do with my thinking than with what
was going on emotionally with me. And as I later found out, that wasn't always
the case. The decision to going to law had a lot of emotional reasons. My father
wanted me to do it, my parents were getting divorced at the time, and I needed
some stability. There were lots of emotional things that were happening to me
when I made the decision to go to law school that I never talked about. And I was
able to, with ideas and thoughts, rationalize why I should go law school, when
really that was not the reason I was going. I was going because my father
wanted me to go and because I needed some stability in my life. Now I'm going
into theater, which seems to get much closer to my heart and what I should be
doing. But it took me a long time to realize like that. And I had to… I didn't learn
that at William James. I'm of the opinion now, thinking back to that age, that I
probably needed a lot more than just William James College at that point in my
life. I needed a therapist; I needed a vocational counselor. And I was under the
mistaken impression that I could get all of that at William James. And I think that
was probably a problem William James had is it held itself out to be more than it
should be, or could be. What I needed a teacher to say to me was: “That's
something you need to deal with a counselor, and I can't do it here for you." But
we had this idea that William James is a community. We could talk and deal with
all sorts of intimate issues. And maybe we could… maybe we were a bit more
ambitious than we should've been with that.
[Unknown]
Yeah, I've heard it criticized because of the fact that you develop, you know, a
surrogate family, more or less while you're in college. And the four years, and
you're out and back into your reality, as you know, is completely shaken up. Your
friends are gone, you know, everybody you can relate to. And the language
barrier. That kind of closure I think, do you think, perhaps that was one of the
things that didn't work for the college?
[Troost]
Well, the thing is… the thing that worked for me was the challenge to remain
alive and remain thinking. And to initiate thought for myself. And that's something
that has stayed with me as a strength for me. It sometimes trapped me. Like I
said, there were certain emotional things that I didn't have a handle on, and I trap
myself by my idea and my thinking. But at least I kept thinking and kept
questioning things. And that's something I still hang onto and it's something I
think I got from William James or least I got strengthened by William James. To
�feel like that was okay to think for myself and not accept what was going on, what
the status quo was. I was going to say something else, but I forget now.
[Unknown]
Why is that…
[Troost]
Oh! The community of… the community people. There was a whole group of us
that ended up moving out to Lake Michigan in Grand Haven for school year and it
was a wonderful and horrible experience. It was this whole idealism that we could
establish this community for ourselves and be self-sufficient. We even talked, at
a point, where maybe we didn't have to go into Grand Valley, we could just do
our education there among ourselves. And by the end of the year, we had come
apart at the seams. It had gotten quite incestuous. People went from one couple
group to another. I mean people… so and so and so and so split up, and then
these two people started sleeping together. And people started checking out,
emotionally. And it was a… it ended up being a very painful experience. Though
when we started it, we were full of idealism and we had some wonderful times
together. And it's an experience that still feels strong to me, that it is possible,
you know, in moments to find that kind of community among people. And so, I
still take that with me. I think in the end, I am still a committed idealist, even
though I have longer periods of cynicism now I have to weather. I think deep
down, my hunch is for most William James students, they didn't lose that. They
got a little more tempered by the society, maybe they’re a little more reluctant to
talk about it now, and they're certainly a little more cautious about jumping into
things. But deep down there's still that idealism that they have.
[Unknown]
Looking for things that perhaps didn't work and, you know, perhaps tie that in
with the demise of the college. You talked a little bit about early how you felt too
much was paid to, perhaps, the pragmatic rational attitudes than not to the
emotional attitude. And you also talked about how there's a [inaudible] that's
going to be made after the closing because William James…
[Troost]
Well, I remember when they announced the closing of Thomas Jefferson College
it certainly seemed that the trend was going away from a cluster college concept.
And that Lubbers, who initially seemed to embrace the idea, had lost his
enthusiasm for it and was starting to become convinced that there was a need to
make a more university type setting. And if that's the case, then William James
would've had to radically change to continue to exist within that university
structure. So that if a stand was to be made, it should've been made back when
they closed the first cluster college. Even though at that time I think Thomas
Jefferson College just had tremendous problems and had no educational
philosophy that was working and had not worked. But it also seemed that the die
was cast. And I'm sure everyone has their opinion about why they closed William
James College and mine is as valid or no more valid than anyone else's. But I
don't feel like we have much to do with that, that we had much power over that
�decision. I think once the decision was made at the higher levels that it was a
political decision that we couldn't have changed. We might've been able to make
more of a fuss about it or embarrassed Grand Valley more about it but my hunch
is that the trend towards a cluster college at Grand Valley had run its course and
was not going to be supporting any longer.
[Unknown]
We talked about the constitution of the William James student base. Too much
idealism, not enough idealism, too much rationalism, too much -isms
[Troost]
Too many -isms.
[Unknown]
Yeah. You know, I want to get a good picture of that because I think that was one
of the points that led to the demise that people were always reacting [inaudible]
perhaps emotional.
[Troost]
Well, for me, what worked for William James – and I suspect worked for most
William James students – is the relationship with the professors and the
classroom work they did. It seemed like people that were there found a
comfortable niche of two or three professors that they took most of their classes
from and of a subject matter that they studied. Beyond that, I'm not sure if the
institution worked for the student in any other way. I know they have the council
meetings, but I never figured out what they were talking about at council
meetings. I didn't go to very many. I was fairly antisocial in terms of the larger
structure at William James. I suspect that was the case for most William James
students. So that the power structure or what happened beyond the classroom
level was really left up, principally, to the administrators and the faculty. I don't
know enough about the politics of what happened among the faculty when things
were coming apart, to know what happened or didn't happen. Whether the faculty
could have taken certain stands or could have pressured certain people, I don't
know. It's beyond me. I think for the students, though, I never had a sense that
we had much to say about how William James worked, and certainly not about
how William James worked in the Grand Valley community… Grand Valley State
Colleges as a whole. The student I found there, like me, loved to talk. They were,
in some ways, pretty conservative folks. Thomas Jefferson College were just
wild. I mean, they were fun; they were wonderful. It was exactly the kind of
people you should be around for part of your little liberal education because they
really were willing to expand and try things that have never been tried. William
James students, on the other hand, though, we're much more willing to talk and
to think. And yet there was as basic conservatism, even though most of the
values we had and talked about were quite liberal. I think they came from a much
more conservative place in us. And certainly, for me I felt that way. I wasn't
radical or liberal because I had this expansive view of the world, it was because
certain things didn't make sense. I thought about the way our structure was… the
way our society was structured, and it didn't work right. And I thought: "Well,
�that's not right." I mean they came from thinking about these things. And that's a
fairly conservative type of view of the world, where you just see contradiction. It's
interesting, I found that in Denmark, which is usually considered a very liberal
country and very, you know, socialistic country, that the people there, basically,
were very, very conservative people. They just see things that don't make sense
and so they change that. And I had a sense in William James that was more the
way people thought. I admit that sometimes people seemed a little dull, but I
certainly didn't… I certainly liked… that was the place that I found for myself and I
liked, even though I kept playing Frisbee, and I had my hair long, and did all
those things. And I had… it was like a duality for me. I regretted that TJC didn't
work, but certainly found a home for myself at William James.
[Unknown]
Okay, got some wrap up questions here. We got most of them. Is there anything
else you want to throw out?
[Troost]
I don't think so.
[Unknown]
Okay. How would you describe William James to another person?
[Troost]
Oh, God. William James College to another person.
[Unknown]
Somebody that doesn't know about William James, and you're talking about it.
[Troost]
I would tell them it was a small college among a cluster of colleges near Grand
Rapids, Michigan, that had a very dedicated faculty. And that were dedicated to
thinking and liberal education, and that found a student body who are committed,
or willing to commit themselves to the same thing. And that attracted students,
and I suspect faculty, who have not fit in other places very well. And yet were not
radical in fundamental senses, but basically misunderstood or just needed a
place where they felt more comfortable and were among peers that they could
share things with. And that for a period of time there was created a community of
people who could talk and think in the way that they'd always felt. And it was a
worthwhile experiment. And it was probably an educational tool but that's still
needed. I don't think it was a product of the sixties, I think there was a viable
philosophy that was going on there that still can appeal to a certain segment of
kids graduating from high school. Kids that don't quite feel accepted, or have
different ideas, or want to seriously talk about the world and questions
fundamental things in the world. You know, I think William James was the perfect
place for that. The whole emphasis at William James about career education was
not so much the thing for me. I did an internship, I did all that sort of thing, that
was not as important to me as the whole celebration of ideas that I found at
William James.
[Unknown]
Okay, good. Okay, so [inaudible] question.
�[Troost]
Okay.
[Unknown]
What is the essence, you know, the bottom-line essence, using, you know, a
couple words, bottom line, the essence of William James College? You know,
take a minute to think.
[Troost]
Bottom line essence of William James College?
[Unknown]
You know, what was it? That's one of the big questions everybody asks. What
was William James, really?
[Troost]
Blue. I don't know I have to make a joke because it's an important question and I
can't think of anything to say about it. It, for me… I'm going to say…I'm going to
make… I'm going to do an intellectual answer. I wish I could come up with
emotional response to that and I can't. And it's unfortunate because I think I
could come up with a better answer if it was emotional. The intellectual thing I
was going to say was that it was the conversation was the essence. That I found
people to converse with for perhaps the first time in my education. And maybe
last time in my education. And that was liberating to me. That had a liberating
effect on me. The idea that I could converse with faculty and with other students
and have a true conversation in the broadest sense of the word was, for me, the
essence of William James College.
[Unknown]
Great. She's been telling everyone the response to the question [inaudible].
[Troost]
Yeah, I wish you… like I said, I wish I could come up with something that was
more from the heart, an image or something. I can't come up with an image.
[Unknown]
Well, maybe that wasn't the essence.
[Troost]
Whatever it is, it's the image, I mean when I think of William James I think of a
classroom. I think of either Stephen or Barry talking. A lot. Because they both
love to talk. And yet in a way that included the students. And talking about
fundamental things. And not being afraid to do that. Not being afraid to spend
time talking about very fundamental questions, and speculating about the world,
and being able to entertain any question and talk about it in a serious manner.
That's the image I have of William James College. I don't… the rest of it seems to
be blurry. That's why it's always embarrassing to me when people ask me about
William James because I like… I can't tell them about council meetings, I can't
tell them about what it was… what was happening in other niches in the in the
college. There's not many professors that I know. There's not many other
students that I know. I just know I know those classrooms and what happened in
those. And that there was something magical, for me, in those moments, in those
�classes. And Stephen and Barry and sometimes other professors, seemed to be
able to create a magic for me that just was explosive. I was in seventh heaven
when I discovered them. I thought: "This is education. I finally found education."
And I knew that it was there. I knew, in high school, and in the first colleges I
went to, I knew that that was not something that was happening, that could
happen. And when I found it, I went: "Aha! I was right all along." I suspected that
you could do this, this was possible to have a conversation like this. So that
was…
[Unknown]
Okay. Did you have class with [inaudible]?
[Troost]
No. Same way? Same kind of feeling?
[Unknown]
Yeah just real involved. He was the only person I saw…
[Troost]
He taught music, didn't he?
[Unknown]
Yeah. He's the only person I ever saw talk to everybody personally, and to the
whole class at the same time. Every time he talked, you thought he was talking to
you. Not at the blackboard, not at the class as a whole. It was just real good. The
instructors, I think that's the essence also.
[Troost]
Yeah. And maybe that's the best thing a college can offer people is a good core
of the professors that you can find one or more that you can use the mentor. And
maybe that's all William James really needed to have done. Maybe the other stuff
they tried to do was more ambitious than it needed to. I was not unhappy with my
education at all at William James, even though I kept suspecting I should be. I
kept thinking, you know, I'm not at council meetings, I should be there. I am not
really a William James student unless I'm doing all this synoptic stuff. But in fact I
was happy with the classes I was taking. And someone said: "That's all you need
to do." I was like: "This is great, I don't want to do anything else. I just want to
study with these people."
[Unknown]
Great. Anything else?
[Troost]
I can't think of anything.
[Unknown]
Okay. Good.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Language
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eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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GV016-16_GVSU_59_Troost
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Troost, Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Scott Troost interview (video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Scott Troost by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Scott Troost was a Social Relations student of William James College who graduated in 1977. In this interview he discusses what drew him to William James College and West Michigan, how he first learned of Grand Valley while overseas in Denmark, and how he switched from Thomas Jefferson College to William James due to influential professors such as Stephen Rowe and Barry Castro. This interview is part 1 of 1 for Scott Troost.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative educaton
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/eaf285fef8bbaaa63efe8e2f5de2cc8e.mp4
f65a858fd0951d1719f16ccf0f662757
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7f3e58bdae16743c8c0999882c013395.pdf
81d5000bf6060fa85b01d69f5c221445
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 8 of 8
[Barbara]
The question is: what is the quality of the education that we were giving
students?
[Tinsley]
Okay, ready for me to go on that?
[Barbara]
Yep, anytime.
[Tinsley]
Okay. The issue of quality was a real one during the life of the college. I think
looking back, I would have to say that the quality of what we did was variable.
For the good students, what we gave them was breathtakingly good, I think. We
gave them access to superb faculty. We gave them access to sort of a panoply of
resources that they would not have gotten in a conventional undergraduate
education. The students that were less good could skate and that was a problem
– and I think we did have some students skate. It seems to me that the issue of
quality was very tied into the real ethos in the college on individual energy and
individual rights. I think the college always leaned towards wanting the individual
to express himself or herself. It was difficult in the college to get a clear sense of
institutional norms; at least, those norms could not be imposed easily by
administrators. They needed to develop in kind of a more organic fashion and I
think that was a problem sometimes. For example, in terms of our beliefs about
appropriate curriculum, appropriate grading standards, and the like. As the years
went on, I think we had a lot more homogeneity about those things. But part of
what I did as Dean was endlessly negotiate with faculty. There was no sense that
I had any divine right to set standards or, indeed, to set policy. It was a matter of
endless negotiation in a milieu where, as I said earlier, the ethos was on the
individual's right rather than the institution’s necessity. Looking back, I guess, as
Dean of the College, if there is an area where I should have paid more attention,
it is… no, let me stop that and you come back to this, okay.
[Barbara]
Let me change the shot, then you can do it. That's fine.
[Tinsley]
As the college matured, we began to get a curriculum we were pretty comfortable
with. I think there were still, probably, some issues around supervision of
internships and independent studies. There were still some course titles that
remained as symbolic battles between the faculty and the administration. I think
in another two, three, four years we would probably have been on a cycle of
�independent curricular reviews with outside consultants. In the end, in terms of
the curriculum itself, I felt very good about it. I felt it was a strong curriculum. In
terms of the standards of the college, in terms of what happened to individual
students, I think we probably always let students skate a bit too much. I think we
paid for that very heavily.
[Barbara]
Say that last sentence again because I screwed up. So just the last sentence: "In
the end..." is a good time to start.
[Tinsley]
In the end… about the curriculum?
[Barbara]
No, just in the end about individual students.
[Tinsley]
In the end, I think we always erred a bit on the side of putting out a hand to
individual students to help them through. And sometimes, in some places in the
college, we did that too much; we weren't tough enough. We paid for that, I think,
very, very heavily. That's something I won't do again; it was too costly for the
college.
[Barbara]
Finito?
[Tinsley]
Finito.
[Barbara]
Good.
[Tinsley]
I guess the last thing I'd like to say about the college – after having done some
thinking about it in connection with this taping – seems to me that most of us, or
all of us, brought to the college a desire that our work have real meaning; that our
work bring meaning into our lives; that our work perhaps be the significant source
of meaning in our lives. We wanted a kind of a texture in our work; a kind of
depth in our work. Clearly not some kind of situation where we did our work and
did home in our real lives outside of work. Our real lives – our most important
lives – were in our work in the college. Sometimes this provided some stress and
strain. We made demands that our work give meaning that I think aren't very
unusual in American work life. And I think for most of us, the experience of
having the college no longer present is that it's forced us to say: "In whatever
work life I'm in now, how can I make it have that kind of meaning for me?" That's
certainly true for me. One of the things that is very interesting to me as I look at
what the faculty are doing now – and because of my position, I knew the faculty
better than I knew most students – it seems to me that there's almost a little
explosion of good work going on: research, writing, work products coming out of
people that were on the William James faculty or interesting jobs. Almost as if
some of our energy that was being used to make the college work is going right
into creative work products. And I see that as coming out of this desire to find
�meaning in one's work that I think is so important and that I think was really
critical to us at the college. Sorry I trailed off on that.
[Barbara]
[Laughter] I'm tempted, I won't do it, I'm tempted…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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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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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_33_Tinsley
Creator
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Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Adrian Tinsley interview (8 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the quality of education at William James College and how the experience brought meaning to the lives of those involved. This interview is part 8 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
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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
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4082a53062701be1ef0f139a40d64be7.mp4
6bf51067c429ce5698da83268a6142b9
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2126441a7c7ddbae8e0ccd5ab59d2336.pdf
3bf07d5bad3b1264044f6441d7f2d581
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 7 of 8
[Barbara]
Oh, I always ask you to do it when the cameras are warming up.
[Tinsley]
Alright. Okay, let’s see a piece of white paper in front of my…
[Barbara]
Okay, it’s all wound up. It's not in really great shape, truth be told. I kept it,
though, for some reason… must have something I'm supposed to do.
[Tinsley]
Yeah, you’re supposed to tell them how to allocate your TIAA and your CREF.
[Barbara]
Oh yes, I think I'll just let it set. Thank you. I didn't really plan on that saving me
anyway. Alright, we are almost good. Best thing about your experience at
James? Is that a meaningful question?
[Tinsley]
Oh, I think it is. It's like a psych quiz question, but, yeah, the best thing about it is
that it had meaning – it really had meaning – and it was important. You felt like
you were using your life for something useful. I've always liked Marge Piercy's
poem "To Be of Use." And you felt like, at James, you weren't just treading water,
you were doing something very, very useful. And that was the best thing about it.
And you were also doing it in the company of like-minded people who were
friends, and intimates, and you really had a family that you were doing it with. So,
I think those two things were the best. We weren't the only institution that was
doing this; there were other colleges like us. FIPSE, the grantmaking agency in
Washington, was very much like us. A lot of little enclaves of people doing this
kind of work and it seemed real and important.
[Barbara]
If you…
[Tinsley]
And it was! Sorry.
[Barbara]
I'm being a bad interviewer. I'm really listening to you. I am listening to you, but I
was thinking of the next question. Which is: if you had to sum up the nature of
William James College in just one sentence, what would it be?
[Tinsley]
Well, I actually frequently did have to sum up the nature of William James
College in just one sentence for a variety of public relations and mission
definition purposes. But I don't remember any of the sentences and I'm sure
�none of them were very real. William James was a place where people talked
about real things and did real work, and really loved each other.
[Barbara]
No two people have said anything resembling the same thing. They just go with
the strength of the college and its weakness. And no one has said “synoptic”
either. [Laughter]
[Barbara]
Okay, there is one question around in my head and it’s something that I wrote
down in the beginning. It has to do with power, and you sort of talked about it
when you talked about CAS and all that sort of stuff. Couldn't have we been more
political? Even though we were small, dammit, some small things survive
because they are so political, because they do their own PR so as well. Do you
have any feelings about that?
[Tinsley]
Well, let me think about it. I am myself a structuralist, and I believe the structure
of Grand Valley – not the structure of William James – worked against us. In the
back of my head is the nagging thought: "Suppose we really had been more like
them?" Because I don't think you can fudge that, because you can't go around
pretending to be like somebody when you're really not. Suppose we're really
more like them, and our values, and what we want to do, but our values were sort
of more like theirs, would it have helped? My honest answer is no, it probably
wouldn't have. Because, structurally, we just had a very difficult situation to deal
with. But that's from my perspective. I sure did everything I could. And so, you
know, maybe it's in my interest to not be able to think of anything else that could
have happened.
[Barbara]
Richard talks about a siege mentality being very useful to us, energizing us. To
go out more would have destroyed some of the energy that helped us work as
well together as we did.
[Tinsley]
Yeah, I don't think going out more on the Grand Valley campus would've helped
us a lot. I really don't. Because it would've been that painful work of trying to
make friends with CAS. And they didn't really want… it takes two to make friends,
it really does. If we would've been able to get outside into the local community
even more than we did – and we did a lot – that might have helped.
[Barbara]
Do you want to do it again, quickly, the story about… the story happened
because you were talking about how we could not… how this could not work,
how we were at a disadvantage. One example was losing computers, and you
made that bit by the anecdote of the day we lost computers. And if you want to
retell it using euphemisms, fine by me. [Laughter]
[Tinsley]
[Laughter] I don't think so, the point of the story comes from the cast of
�characters. But I will trust you not to use it on the tape.
[Barbara]
What about first part, when you talk about them being from Holland? Is that
okay?
[Tinsley]
I think.
[Barbara]
I think so, too.
[Tinsley]
I think it’s okay.
[Barbara]
Is there anything to say here? [Inaudible]
[Tinsley]
Oh golly, well there probably is, but I can't think of it at moment.
[Barbara]
It’s tiring at this point.
[Tinsley]
It is, it is tiring. No, I mean I would like to talk on about it for another ten hours,
but I don't have anything in particular at the moment.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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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
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16_GVSU_32_Tinsley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Adrian Tinsley interview (7 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the highlights of her experience at William James College and the overall nature of the college consisting of community and conversation. This interview is part 7 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bb6b0043b473fdc2973378dc4ed2ac99.mp4
5f271fddab80448de0ebc486388ae64a
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a00bd1f1e28160b998aaa9f5aeb65626.pdf
d016e24b77f01d78e6d14cf11831bdeb
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 6 of 8
[Barbara]
Come on, camera! There you go. Nope, not yet. Sorry. I’m still getting in there, so
I don’t have your finger [in the shot] and you have an incorrect white balance.
Hey, you didn’t do it! There it goes. Alright. We’re actually rolling. We can go any
time.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
We were talking about the legacy of the college as a partially conservative...
[Tinsley]
Okay. The legacy of the college… that's a really broad question. And I guess
what I'd say about that is that we were very early strugglers with some things that
now need to be struggled with less and are just a very normal part of the college
scene. The whole issue of professional programs, for example, we struggled
hard over that, both intellectually and personally within our college community.
And we were dealing with professional programs, I think, long before they
became such a very important feature of collegiate life. Nowadays it's a very rare
student who majors in anything other than a professional program. I think we
struggled with some issues around how you do liberal education in a professional
program context. I think we came to some really good solutions to that issue. And
that, you know, probably that hasn't filtered out as much into the larger
community as I wish it would. I think there are a lot of articles to be written there,
if everybody's looking for articles to write about the college. Because ninety
percent of the students who go to college major in professional programs now.
So, I think that's important. I think, for students, a lot of the things that we wanted
to do for students and with students exist in very mainstream colleges. You
know, all the way from independent study, to at least some credit no credit
grading, to certainly internships, to stress on projects related to community
needs. A lot of stuff that was very innovative when we did it is not particularly
innovative now and is pretty much an accepted thing now. So, I think we were
sort of the first wave of a lot of new stuff that was coming into higher education.
That kind of legacy certainly remains; what doesn't remain is a space, you know,
a local habitation in the name; a place where you can go to get something. I'm
not sure I how want to put this. Where you can go, where you don't have to worry
about what the meaning… I'm literally going to take this answer again. Let me
think about it a second. I've talked to some of the William James faculty the last
year or so, talked to Richard, to Margaret Proctor, to Barry. Barry, I think it was,
�has talked in an interesting way about what it means that the William James
faculty are mainstreamed now and they're part of the ordinary units at Grand
Valley. And they haven't just disappeared into those units. I mean, they have
begun, maybe this is grandiose, but they have begun a little bit to transform the
settings that they're in. I know, you know, some of the William James faculty are
doing that in the places where they are at Grand Valley. And what Barry said
about that was: "Well, you know, as long as we had each other to talk to you, we
didn't really have to talk to the other faculty." And we didn't very much. But the
place was poorer because we didn't. And that's right. So, there is some sense in
which I think Grand Valley as a whole is enriched by having William James
faculty in the mainstream. It's the same argument you might have if you were
talking about women's studies, you know.
[Tinsley]
To what extent do you want to have a special place that women can go and
totally deal with their own issues and one another, and deal with women's
courses? And to what extent do you want to say every course in the university
should contain topics of particular relevance to women and should address its
subject matter from the perspective of the new scholarship on women. What's
missing is that there is no place you can go to now where you go there, and you
know that all the people there share your values, and care about the same kinds
of things that you care about, and want to…
[Barbara]
Okay, [inaudible] we'll use the rest but [inaudible]. Okay?
[Tinsley]
Okay. No place you can really go where you know that everybody shares your
values and cares about what you care about. And I think having that space is
really important to our students and to our faculty.
[Barbara]
Why?
[Tinsley]
One answer is because it was there, and it was safe, and we didn't have to
create it every day. You had it. It gave you some identity. You didn't have to
always be creating it at all the time. It was a place where you could go, and it
gave you some identity because you shape it and it shapes you.
[Barbara]
But Barry said, in his interview, that… you know, he very much believes in this
notion of moving out into the mainstream, and that its working, and that in his
classes that he is still teaching in a Jamesian way. But he said: "Of course, I
don't know how long it's going to last. I don't know how long my energy can last
since it's not being infused anymore."
[Tinsley]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
Because that's what the places does.
�[Tinsley]
Yeah. If you concentrate the energy there and concentrate the people there, you
can go deeper, and you can replenish it. And that's what's missing because the
space isn't there. And I suppose all of us are looking to find some other similar
kinds of space out in our lives.
[Barbara]
Including the students?
[Tinsley]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
Would you put this in personal terms now. What does it mean to personally
spend the eight years you did, working very hard?
[Tinsley]
Well, I suppose… let me say what it meant to me professionally really first, rather
than talking first about what it meant personally. I went from William James to the
state… stop. Let me think about this another minute. I don't want to, you know,
falsely romanticize the period at William James; although, I personally do believe
it was a kind of Camelot. I do know that when I did go back and do administrative
work, I felt very strongly that I wasn't ready to go back to another campus. I
couldn't give my heart to another campus in the same way. And so, I took a job in
the central office of the state university system. And two things seem important to
me that I want to say. In Minnesota, I've been in a very mainstream
administrative situation. I work with seven separate state universities, with their
vice presidents, with their presidents, with strategic planning, with academic
policy. The people in that system are very good. They are very competent,
professionally. Minnesota, I would guess, is one of the very advanced states in
the union, in terms of not only its support for higher education, but the
professionalism with which their system is managed. And what I've learned is
that, although I work with an incredibly competent professional people,
professional values are not enough. The change for me was growing from a
place where, I mean heaven knows we did want to be competent, but there was
a real value beyond competence. There was a reason you wanted to be
competent. There was a reason you were doing what you were doing. So, by the
contrast that existed at William James, simply, the value of professional
competence is not enough. It doesn't keep you warm at night. It's too thin. I'm on
my way to go to Glassboro State College in New Jersey and I 'm now ready to be
back on the campus, and I am just really excited about going back to campus,
and, you know, and having a substantial leadership and management role on a
new campus now. But here's what I asked myself: I say, at William James,
everybody knew the meaning of what they were doing, so you could stand up
and so recite the litany, or you could have an external person to come in and
recite the litany and say this is what's important about what we're doing, this is
why it's important to work this hard, and this is why we're not cynical. Because
here's why we're doing what we're doing, and we really care about it. I go to
�Glassboro and I say, you know, what does the vice president do? The vice
president has got to find that thing that the institution is doing that's important and
put that in the public space and say: "This is what we're doing, and this is
important, and it's important that we're doing it and we're doing it well." And I
don't find it really easy to look at a Glassboro or at the state colleges in
Minnesota and say: "Here's what I can say about that. Here's why it's important
in the mid nineteen-eighties to be doing this." And I think that's a problem that we
are dealing with in higher education. It's hard to talk about why we're doing what
we're doing and why it's so important. And it's hard to get that into the public
space.
[Tinsley]
I remember when the colleges were about to be dissolved, and Robert said: "The
problem is that it's not that I don't want to work in CAS, I mean all those people
are fine, but I've got to have something I can believe in. I just can't work with
people who are cynical or who are apathetic." And so, what I'm saying is there
was no cynicism, or very little, or little apathy at William James. And how do you
find in a mainstream institution… how do you find, sort of, what you hang your
hat on for the meaning of it. And I think that's the question that we answered at
William James. And that's the question I want to try to answer now at a more
mainstream institution. I don't think finding that answers is going to be just real,
real easy.
[Barbara]
This is going off from that answer what we thought was important in James and
the reason that we would be energizing and uniting the kind of notions that we
had. Were they specific to the time? Are they not specific now? Why can't you
just take those notions to your new job?
[Tinsley]
No, they're not; they are specific to the time and let me talk a little bit about that
because I have thought a lot about this and I really believe it. In the midseventies, the agenda of the society was access and new opportunities. And it
was very important to open higher education up to women, and black people,
and minorities of all kinds, and older students, and people that hadn't been to
college before. And we put a lot of stress on that. And William James came out of
that milieu and that was very important to us. That is not a value in nineteen
eighty-five. In nineteen eighty-five, we talk about quality which is – depending on
how you look at it – is either a positive or negative from my perspective. I think
there is some genuinely good work being done under the rubric of upgrading
quality, but there's also some genuinely reactionary stuff being done under that
rubric. And the agenda for the institution is the economic development of its
region, science, and technology. The issues that the institutions are dealing with
are very different. In the mid-seventies, we had the federal government really
pushing access, really putting money into social services. Now we have science,
and math, and technology. I think there's no reason that we can't relate to this
�new agenda. But we haven't really thought about what it means for the values we
had in the seventies. So, I think the times are very, very different. And I think
that's why it's hard to find the spine of the institution in the eighties. I mean that's
what I learned from dealing with seven mainstream institutions in Minnesota and
the state legislature.
[Barbara]
Because my experience… I'm blinking again. My experience…
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16_GVSU_31_Tinsley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Adrian Tinsley interview (6 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the legacy of William James College and the importance of having a community with shared values, in addition to the importance of keeping the William James philosophy alive. This interview is part 6 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/21006ae57ddf7f3e23506b884642356e.mp4
f37ac2cb1e5e843082adab1b0311588d
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7e428a4e09dbdc4c76a863dedfae8083.pdf
558a57f961c0488dfb7f959fe7009be4
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 5 of 8
[Barbara]
It’s meant to warm up [the camera].
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
Okay. We are balanced.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
When you left…
[Tinsley]
When I left…
[Barbara]
Yeah. Did you think that we would…how long did you think we would survive?
[Tinsley]
When I left, I didn't think the college would not survive, but I thought it was
problematic. And the reason I thought that is that the college was getting smaller.
We were finding it more difficult to hold onto programs. I started thinking about
leaving in seventy-nine, actually the end of seventy-eight, and left in the summer
of nineteen eighty. And I left for two reasons. The compelling reason was I
needed a rest. I needed to find out who I was when I wasn't being the Dean. If I
could've gotten a year’s sabbatical, I probably would have stayed. And I
discussed that with Glenn and while he was not opposed to a sabbatical, he felt
that he couldn't spare the Dean for more than three months. And there was some
reason to that. In any case, I decided I would simply move it on. Another thing in
my thinking about that was that I did not see how Grand Valley could continue to
put the kind of money into administrative salaries it was putting into to run the
collegiate structure. I thought that the collegiate structure was getting marginal
from a financial perspective. If you think about what it cost to have at William
James, a Dean. We had – for most of our time – an Assistant Dean at least part
time. We ran the Records Office – Hank Mei's operation. We put money, you
know, modest amounts of money into Student Services – that was a lot of
overhead. If you counted that up that was probably a hundred thousand dollars a
year in the administration of William James College. We were smaller than many
departments. I mean, we were twenty-two, twenty-four faculty. If I looked at
Grand Valley – and you remember at Grand Valley at its peak was at six
collegiate units and by the time it ended was at four – that’s a lot of salaries and
�administrative overhead and that made me nervous. So, I thought that was
problematic about the college's survival and I was just tired. I thought I needed to
do something else. It's, you know, it was a long… I was Dean, what, eight years,
I guess. And that's a number of years of working very hard and cheerleading so I
needed a rest. When I left, I said to myself: "This is a window in the college’s
history. Right at this moment, I perceive us as very secure, nothing is threatening
us. It is time for me to leave and this is a good moment to leave," because I didn't
want to close the college – that was last thing I wanted to do. And so that’s kind
of why I decided to leave and when I decided to leave.
[Tinsley]
And at the time I decided to leave, I did not think we were in any danger, though I
was well aware of what the administration of those collegiate units was costing.
And I was also, by the way, well aware - and I haven't said this on this tape - you
know, if you think about it, the Deans of the two alternative colleges were
women. Women were pretty well represented at Grand Valley during the time I
was there. But we were running the alternative colleges and I said, and I
remember saying this, you know: "When we choose the next Dean, we have to
choose someone who's more like them. We have to try to get this embedded in
Grand Valley." So, I was not, you know, looking for another woman. I was hoping
that the college would get someone who could maybe do a better job than I had
of getting the college really embedded in the Grand Valley social structure. And
those were my thoughts as I left.
[Barbara]
It occurs to me that it in your last answer, you said there were two levels of
administration and you talked about Bruce Loessin. What kind of feedback did
you get from the other level?
[Tinsley]
You mean from Glenn or from Don.
[Barbara]
I don't know.
[Tinsley]
Oh, the second… once we started reporting to Glenn, I talked about getting
feedback about programs. Glenn certainly never said anything to me to suggest
anything other than he supported William James and he was working very hard
to understand William James. He found a lot of it incomprehensible, but I believe
he did work to understand it. And I believe as long as he thought it was
supportable, he worked to support it. That's not a very good answer.
[Barbara]
Okay, I understand. I was envisioning Lubbers.
[Tinsley]
Yeah. Let me talk a little bit about… you know, some question like: were there
any major threats to the college or…
[Barbara]
Yeah, what were they?
�[Tinsley]
You’ll remember that towards the end of the seventies, things starting to get –
financially – really tough in Michigan. And Grand Valley had to go through a
retrenchment and reallocation, and I believe that happened in seventy-nine. And
that was the first serious and significant threat to the college. And that one, we
came out of okay. And I guess I'd like to talk a little bit about that because I don't
think many colleges could handle that situation the way that we did.
[Tinsley]
The deans were not involved in making the decision to reduce and reallocate;
that was done at the level above us. We were simply brought together and told
Grand Valley was going to reduce and reallocate; that it was probably going to
cut Thomas Jefferson and that we had to prepare budgets. Well let me go back
because I want to get this accurate. I'm going to pick that up again. The deans
were brought together and told that Grand Valley was looking at a shortfall of
money that we were going to reduce and reallocate. And we were given targets.
We were given, I think, three levels of targets for cutting: the deepest, the middle,
and the lightest. And we were told to go home and figure out how to do that. To
go home to our college. Go home, it sounds like home, we go home and figure
out how we do that and come back prepared to meet those three levels of cuts.
And also, to figure out where the new money would be reallocated. The family
obviously didn't want to do that. I mean that is a very painful thing to do. But
when I went back to William James, and I remember that afternoon because I
went back on a Friday afternoon to say: "The news is we’re going to have to
reduce and reallocate; here are the levels we have to shoot for." I said, "How do
you want to do this? If you like, I'll just do it. If you like, you can. I am open to
suggestions; we'll do this any way you want to." And the faculty… it wasn't a
council meeting; it was just the faculty. We didn't take any votes, people just said:
"Look Adrian, let's make a committee of people that we all agree we trust and
then you guys just do it and come back and tell us what you've done, and we'll
tell you if it's okay." So, a committee was made of Robert and Barry and
Kathleen. The next morning at five in morning, the phone rang and my father was
dead. So, he died literally the next morning. And that committee came over and
we sat around my dining room table before I flew off to my father's funeral,
figuring out how to do this. And then that committee just sat down and figured
out, you know, what we could do and what they could live with. And we brought it
back to the college and nobody fetched, and nobody screamed, nobody said:
"Kill the administration." Everybody just said: "Well, you folks have done the best
you could, thanks." I was really amazed.
[Barbara]
What percentage cut did we lose?
[Tinsley]
I can't remember, but it was deep. It required a retrenching. I think in the end
three faculty. It was not clear if it was going to be five, four, or three, and my
memory is it in the end was three now. It wasn't clear, at that point, whether the
�cuts in Thomas Jefferson were going to be so deep that the college was going to
die as a result. And we had one meeting that was sort of the last critical incident
of my watch, as it were. We were all given to these nautical and military
metaphors. But I do think of it as my watch, and it was the last critical incident,
and I'm rather proud of it so I guess I want to tell it on this case.
[Tinsley]
The deans were all brought together in the Dean’s conference room and we
simply were to go around the table and talk about how we'd like to meet the
budget shortfall, and so I presented our plan, everybody did. It was very clear
that the senior administrators wanted to deal with the problem by merging
Thomas Jefferson and William James. And they thought that would take two
units, both of whom we're getting so small that they might be marginal, and
perhaps give them enough substance to be able to survive as a joint unit. I
thought that would be an absolute disaster. Just an absolute disaster. I thought
that although, indeed, the two of us we're both alternative colleges, and we both
had women deans, that didn't mean our operating philosophy is… our ideologies
as colleges were just so different. I could not see anything positive would come
of that. And I knew that it rested on me to prevent that from happening right that
moment. And I can remember taking a deep breath and remembering, and
knowing I had to get on my feet. I had to somehow get some height in the room
and to be able to speak with the kind of authority I wanted to speak with. And
there was a folding blackboard in that conference room which was closed and I
can remember getting up and very slowly walking to that thing, opening it up and
getting a piece of chalk and beginning to draw diagrams on the blackboard. And I
have no idea what I drew, but I was trying to get myself, you know, organized, to
make the pitch to show how different we were. So, I drew these diagrams and
delivered a little lecture about the differences between the two colleges. And
maybe talked for ten minutes, you know, as compellingly as I remember going
about anything. And when I finished there was a long silence. Nobody said
anything for about a minute and then Doug Kindschi – and I will be grateful to
him for this to this day – said: "You know, that's right. William James and Thomas
Jefferson are very different and if we put them together, we'll likely lose what's
good in William James." And that was it, you know, and then they passed on to
other topics. So things were tense during that last… that reduction. And then, of
course, there were further reductions to be had after Forrest had come on board
as Dean. So [Inaudible] started getting really tough in seventy-eight and seventynine.
[Barbara]
And that's the… you said, plural, the threats, buts that's what they did?
[Tinsley]
That was the most compelling one that I had to deal with.
[Barbara]
What about hostility from CAS all along, did we feel it? Did you feel it?
�[Tinsley]
Oh sure, sure, it was a real pain. I didn't feel it from my colleagues because, you
know, they weren't allowed to for one thing. And also, it was simply we were at a
level where we were kind of above that. But for the faculty it was very tough
because there was that constant grinding: "You're different, you're not as good.
We won't play with you. We don't have to. We're traditional, we're good." And it
was so ironic because our faculty was one of the finest in the country. I mean, we
didn't come from Michigan, we came from all over the United States. And we had
superb degrees from superb schools. And we had to put up with this kind of "Well
you're not good enough for us to let you, you know." We took all of CAS's
courses for credit. But CAS was always very picky. "Well, we might not take that,
it might not be up to our high standards." And so that was a constant problem for
us; and it's too bad. And it happens in all kinds of places that try to do this kind of
thing.
[Barbara]
That's true. What would it have taken for us to survive?
[Tinsley]
Well, I don't think we could've survived. And I have really given that a lot of
thought, obviously, because I've had to think: "Is there something I could have
done that would've made a difference for us." And here's why I don't think we
could've survived. It wasn't financial; although, as I indicated earlier, it was very
expensive to have four, or five, or six different deans. That was a problem, but
the reason we didn't survive wasn't because of money. And I think that was clear
when Grand Valley reorganized itself into schools or colleges. They didn't leave
faculty off, at that point, because the issue wasn't financial. The issue was
twofold. One, and they're both important, but the first issue was Grand Valley
was always fighting with itself. The problem could never be solved that the units
were competitive with one another. There was no way to make them stop fighting
each other. And particularly not if you're working in a political model. I often
thought, if the presidential just said: "There will be no more fighting. I won't have
it. The next complaint, the person will be fired." Maybe it would have stopped,
although I doubt it, because it is human nature. But it would have put the central
administration at a very autocratic position, saying: "CAS will do this, William
James will do that, and that's the end of it. I don't want to hear any more about it.”
And they didn't want to that do that. And I can't blame them. They would've come
off as tyrants, and they would not have won any friends with CAS, which was
much larger and more powerful a unit, just to kind of save us. But because they
didn't do that, everything was in a constant state of turmoil. And Grand Valley, in
the end, just couldn't afford that. We needed to pull together and put our energies
outside the institution, not with constant battles inside. And I believe that's the
reason that it couldn't work and that cluster colleges, in general, have a very hard
time working. I think, also, and I never used to believe Bruce Loessin about this,
but I think it gave Grand Valley a kind of weird image in the community. It's a very
conservative community. We always used to say that William James is really
lucky to be embedded in a community this conservative because it kind of… that
�Grand Valley protected this, really quite radical unit, in a very conservative
community. But even having the different collegiate units, in the end, was pretty
hard for Grand Valley.
[Tinsley]
It gave it a weird reputation and it couldn't afford that. And in the end, it needed to
get rid of it. So that's where I think we couldn't survive.
[Barbara]
Can you see that light? You're doing a good job knowing right when it ends.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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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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_30_Tinsley
Creator
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Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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Adrian Tinsley interview (5 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her experience transitioning away from William James College, the conversations surrounding combining WJC with Thomas Jefferson College, and her perspective on the college's future. This interview is part 5 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Moving Image
Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/14658cb13005e4c207bd82efbcb54138.mp4
ec8e601ad6311d86c6027e320ed57869
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b14e73f4cd28bbe0f70381f282ef762a.pdf
c143e2bb8723b3c16a980e7665f3bef3
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 4 of 8
[Tinsley]
Yeah, test at the end.
[Barbara]
Question will be: [inaudible] the administration at Grand Valley, at various times,
would give you, sort of, “We're not completely happy – shape up” or “You're
doing very well – this is going to go on forever.” Did you get that kind of feedback
from [inaudible]?
[Tinsley]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
That's not phrased very well, is it? Do you know what I mean?
[Tinsley]
Yeah. It's another version of "What did the administration think was happening."
[Barbara]
Yeah. Okay, anytime you feel comfortable. Let me just double-check that we’re
rolling. Yeah, we are. What kind of feedback were you getting from the
administration?
[Tinsley]
It's interesting that I'm having a difficult time answering questions about feedback
from the administration at Grand Valley and there were really two parts to the
administration at Grand Valley. The first phase was during the period that I
reported to Bruce Loessin. And I might just say, parenthetically, that one of
wonderful things about being totally greenhorn, an inexperienced dean, and
being a woman and never having served in the army, I was told I reported to
Bruce Loessin. I guess the first year I reported to Harold Colbert; I had no clue
what it meant to report to somebody. I had no notion what the term meant or that
I was supposed to tell them what was going on in the college and that was what it
meant. But from the college’s second year, up until about nineteen seventyseven, I would guess, Grand Valley had a structure which differentiated where
the colleges reported. And William James and Thomas Jefferson reported to
Bruce Loessin and the other colleges reported to Glenn Niemeyer. That function
was split. In seventy-seven, or whenever the reorganization took place… it may
be seventy-seven, maybe seventy-eight. Let me start this answer again Barbara.
Okay.
[Barbara]
No harm.
�[Tinsley]
Let me think about it for a minute first. Okay, the question that you asked is what
kind of feedback, criticism, encouragement, direction that you got from the
administration of Grand Valley. There were really two administrations at Grand
Valley during the time that William James existed. During the first administration,
I reported – William James reported – to Bruce Loessin. Grand Valley had a
structure in which the vice presidents were all equal and they were all called the
Vice President of the College.
[Tinsley]
Bruce was, at that time, the vice president of the college William James and also
Thomas Jefferson reported to him. This is not just a bureaucratic thing of interest
to administrators. Bruce was responsible for William James and for Thomas
Jefferson and so he wanted us to do well, as well as he wanted us to do good
and fight evil. And he bent his fairly considerable energies to helping us do that
and to fighting our battles. You didn't ask if I had any mentor at Grand Valley; if I
ever did, it was Bruce. He was a kind of funny mentor, you know, a little short
guy. People used to laugh about little, short Bruce and his high heels. But he
looked out for William James because it was his – it reported to him. What I got
from him was: "You’ve got to make it so it looks like the other colleges. You can't
be out there looking weird. I don't want to change anything you're doing; I don't
want to change you. I think William James is great and I think you have the finest
faculty at Grand Valley, but you have to not look weird." And that was really, to
tell you the truth, that was right. Bruce was right about that. He would give me a
little pep talk about not looking weird. I'd go back; try to get us not to look weird.
But he helped us, you know? He would fight for us when we had clashes about
who was going to offer what or were we going to be able to get our name out in
advertising brochures. Bruce was there fighting for us. So, he had an interest in
us. And seventy-seven or seventy-eight… this was a bizarre structure at Grand
Valley with these deans, the vice presidents at the college and the academic
units reporting lines split. Don changed the reporting structure and Glenn
became the Vice President for Academic Affairs and all of the collegiate units
reported to Glenn. Now, you have to understand I'm not saying anything about
Glenn or Bruce personally; I'm talking about structure. The day that
reorganization came down, Bruce took me to lunch at the Matterhorn and he
said: "I just want you to know, that I've always been on your side, always before,
and I have really busted my ass to make sure William James got its fair share
and survived, and I've been your friend, but you need to know that I'm on the
other side now." And I said: "Right. I understand that. I appreciate your just
saying that upfront, you know? Thanks for everything Bruce." And in some ways,
I mean, you could say that was the beginning of the end. When the college is
reported to a different vice president, what it felt like was you had your very own
knight. When I needed something, I went to Bruce; CAS needed something, they
went to Glenn. Then Bruce and Glenn got into their suits of armor and rode out to
go like this to one another. And, you know, sometimes one won, sometimes the
other, but the Dean just kind of sat back, you know, and waited to see who was
�going to triumph. When all the units reported to Glenn, we had entered the era of
rational planning and the emphasis went to program. When the units reported up
different lines the emphasis was on, not program distinctiveness, but
distinctiveness of mission, distinctiveness of student body, distinctiveness ethos.
[Tinsley]
When all the students reported to the same vice president – and maybe this
would have been true whoever the vice president was. I'm suggesting that I think
a lot of the issues were structural; the issue then was which college will do what?
We'll have a rational plan, and programmatically, we'll differentiate
programmatically, you know. And I think people do have to understand that this
was not an individual decision that Glenn made because he was an individual; it
had to do with rational planning with the kind of accountability that he had placed
on him. Because we were entering a time of much tighter money and Grand
Valley couldn't really afford to have computer science programs in both places. It
was confusing, it was messy, and it was expensive. So that's the apologia. What
actually happened when we started reporting to Glenn was that the whole
emphasis went on programs and on new programs. What Glenn wanted from
Williams James was that it would develop new, sexy new programs that would
attract new students and that could give us a niche that we could occupy. And we
fiddled with a lot of things there, at one point, I mean, computers was our thing.
At another point it was going to be environmental science and planning; at
another point it was going to be social work. The problem that happened there…
rational planning might've worked as a model, but the units were of such a
different size and political power. We could make all the bargains we liked, we
can say "We'll do social work and you do nursing. We'll do arts and media and
you do fine arts." But every time a decision was made, we do this and they'll do
that, and what we were doing looked interesting or looked like it was drawing
students, then the other unit wanted to do it. And we didn't have it – I don't think it
was the political clout – we didn't have the size. There were too many faculty
angry that little William James got to do this and they didn't get to do it. And so
those faculty would go to Glenn or they would go to Don. And Grand Valley was
governed in a political way. It was and probably still is on the political model.
There are books written about styles of academic governance and you can have
the bureaucratic model, and you can have the hierarchical model, and you can
have the political model. And Grand Valley was governed in the political and that
meant that we couldn't keep our gains. So, the problem for us was that Glenn
would say: "Develop some new programs." And our tongues would hang out and
we'd say: "My god, we developed a whole new college. We've got zillions of
programs. We've got three programs per faculty member." You know? We need
to consolidate some programs; we need to grow some programs; we need to
develop; you know, we need to let some programs get bigger and stronger.
When we got good stuff, we'd lose it. We couldn't hang on to it.
�[Barbara]
Like what?
[Tinsley]
Like computers. I suppose that was a real good example.
[Tinsley]
The deal was, initially, when I went to the college that the math department
wanted to do computer science. Right at the beginning, the math department had
an opportunity to hire Ken Hunter and had refused to do it. And William James
had hired Ken Hunter. Ken had a genius for understanding how to teach the use
of computers in business and applied context. And that's what our students
wanted to learn. And he built a super program in that area. It was called
Administration and Information Management. Very strong in information
management. And it was very clear where the lines were. It was rational
planning. Mathematics Department did computer science and students who did
that went to graduate school and they became computer scientist and if you
wanted to be an information managing specialist and work in business in an
applied way, you went to William James. Along about the middle or end of the
seventies, it became clear that we were in a gold mine; we were sitting on a gold
mine. We were sitting on top and what everybody wanted to do. And the math
department began to want to do it. And the math department had a lot of political
power at Grand Valley. The lines were clear, you know, there was no question
about what the agreements were. But there was a lot of political issues, so Don
Lubbers set up a task force to look into the matter. And he hired a consultant who
came and spent a couple of months on the campus one summer looking into the
matter. And then he called a meeting and we all trooped into the President's
office to have the meeting at which we were going to decide what was going to
happen with computer science. And Don VanderJagt went in from the College of
Arts and Sciences; Bruce Klein at that point was already in the College of Arts
and Sciences or maybe he was with us, I can't remember this. The punchline of
the story was VanderJagt trooped with the Dutch guys from Holland and this area
and William James trooped in with the woman, the Jew, and the Martian. And I
thought: "I think I know how this is going to turn out." In the end, you know, I
suppose I should be careful putting that statement on this tape.
[Barbara]
Maybe you need to say that again.
[Tinsley]
Yes, probably… I will say that again.
[Barbara]
Why don't I change the shot… it's accurate, but I don't think you're really…
[Inaudible].
[Tinsley]
Yeah.
[Barbara]
Okay, let’s see. So, then William James trooped in. You can go from there.
�[Tinsley]
Yeah, so then William James trooped in with a fine program, but we didn't have
the political clout of the people that had been at Grand Valley for a very long time
and we're very close friends of Niemeyer and of Lubbers.
[Tinsley]
We were a smaller unit; we didn't have nearly the potential to make trouble for
Lubbers that CAS had to make trouble for Lubbers. So, somehow we ended up
losing out. Now the way in which we lost out was not that Don said: "I've thought
about this and on the face of it the College of Arts and Sciences is a bigger unit,
it has more students, it makes more sense for the program to be there." Don
said: "I've thought about it and it doesn't make sense for me to prevent the
College of Arts and Sciences from doing it. I'm not going to prevent them from
doing it. I certainly want you to keep doing it; you're doing a wonderful job. Let
many flowers bloom." And when you broke down the trade agreements and let
many flowers bloom, it was very hard for William James to compete. So that's
why it was very hard for us to hang onto students, because we were a smaller
unit. Now you might ask me, it might be good question to say: "Why was it hard
for William James to compete, you know, in an atmosphere that said 'let many
flowers bloom.'" And that's the real question. Because we were smaller, because
we were viewed as an alternative, because as the decade began to draw to a
close, people in large numbers began to be a little afraid. Maybe they always
were, but it was a little closer to the surface of their mind, they didn't want to go to
a school that was weird. So, if you wanted a real straight-line thing, like
computers in relation to business, and you had your choice of taking it at CAS or
in William James, chances were unless you were an unusual student, you would
take it at CAS. Because we really were an alternative to that. And yet it meant it
was hard for us to hold onto our programs if they took equipment because we
couldn't develop enough students. That was a rambling answer, but you can
maybe use parts of it.
[Barbara]
It's blinking at me anyway.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
�
Dublin Core
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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
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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_29_Tinsley
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Tinsley, Adrian
Date
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1984
Title
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Adrian Tinsley interview (4 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses the two administrations at Grand Valley during the time of William James College and how the college developed over time. This interview is part 4 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
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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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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/87ae057bb80134a199788b0801fac231.mp4
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PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 3 of 8
[Barbara]
There you go. There’s a good tape… [inaudible]. Okay, we’re a go. Just tell me,
just [inaudible] about the beginning.
[Tinsley]
Well, what I really remember about the beginning – although, of course, I didn't
realize it at the time – was we were all so young. I sometimes think about the
three older faculty who are in their fifties, who were hired because the initial core
faculty had some sense that we ought to have a spread of age and experience in
the college, which was an absolutely right instinct. But I wonder what it must
have felt like to Willard and Doris and Phyllis to arrive with this entire college that
was so very, very, very young. And I look at the pictures of us from those days,
and it's kind of interesting to see us. We were very concerned to build a sense of
community in the college and that expressed itself in a lot of ways. The first year,
I recall, the first fall that I was there we decided to go on a retreat together. And
we all packed up our camping gear and we went off. I can't even remember
where – somewhere on a river. I remember being out on a rowboat with Pat and
Inge and Romano. I remember that Robert wouldn't go because he didn't believe
in going camping. And I remember that Richard expressed the sentiments that he
would not know how to pack the right food and he was hooted down for the
sentiment and told that he would have to work like everyone else. We had the
phrase – which I'm sure many people have referred to – we wanted to integrate
our work and our lives. We wanted to be an intentional community. In some
ways, as the years went on, that wore a little thin as we realize that the
integrating our work and our lives meant basically abolishing our private lives.
And spouses were not always thrilled to be part this of intimate, intentional
community. But I remember the first fall… our way of doing business was typified
by the first fall. We had a confrontation. One of the students, a black student,
whose name I have forgotten… I may be putting two or three incidents together.
But there was some real criticism of how we were doing business. I believe it
came from a black student, although I have forgotten his name at the moment.
And to deal with that, we simply shut college down for a day and all got together
to talk about it. And that seemed to be the most reasonable thing in the world to
do. Toni Cena wrote a very moving statement which she read. I can remember
us all sitting around on the floor, talking earnestly about whatever these charges
were that had been brought, and how we can do better as a college, and how
students could take more of a hand in the college. And that seemed the most
natural way in the world to do business and very, very good. And we did a lot of
�that. I remember the first year we painted the walls of Lake Superior together and
that was very nice. And I can remember – or maybe it was the second year –
Rhonda was the Assistant Dean, and I can remember people painting mustaches
on me and Rhonda and taking pictures of us.
[Tinsley]
I had a good friend that I worked with in the Modern Language Association who
visited me in the first year and I brought her out to the college and showed her
around and she turned to me and says: "You can't fool me, Adrian. I know what a
college is; this is not a college; this is a summer camp." I always remembered
that because I took that as a compliment. There was a real attention to
community.
[Barbara]
Where did that attention come from? Where did that ethic come from?
[Tinsley]
Well, I think Robert, as he did so many things and gave it articulation. We were –
this is not Robert 's formulation – we were not to be alienated from our labor.
That's not Robert 's formulation; Robert would have talked about not being
cynical. Robert would have talked about, you know, controlling the conditions of
your work life so that they were human and met your human needs. They came
from the whole movement in the sixties to make work life more responsive to
human needs. And I think most of us had felt very alienated in our graduate kind
of experiences… had felt we were part of big faceless bureaucracies. It was also
a time in American history where there were an awful lot of communes. It was
right in the middle of the “back to the commune” movement. So, I think it came
from those places. And then once we were all there, is when it kind of took on a
life of its own. And I think was, probably for me, it was one of the very, very
appealing parts of the college. That it was not only a workplace, but it was a
place where you really were yourself, and you know, in a sort of a whole human
way.
[Barbara]
Some people I have talked to acted as though there were two William James
Colleges: the early one and the late one. Would you comment on that? With the
kinds of things you're talking about, how much of that persists? Or why did it
change if it changed to something other?
[Tinsley]
Yeah. Well, I like to like think it persisted. And for me, of course it persisted.
[Barbara]
Me, too.
[Tinsley]
So I don't have the sense of their being two colleges. The college changed in its
externals. The college change in some of the externals of its organization to
reflect demands that came about as Grand Valley put them on William James,
and as the State of Michigan put them on Grand Valley. I learned as I'd gotten
older a lot more about the kind of demands that come from the outside that mean
�you don't operate as free agent, if you're looking to the state for your money. And
as Grand Valley began to get its act together. You asked me earlier what Grand
Valley wanted from William James. Grand Valley didn't have its act together, they
didn't know how they were going to develop. As they began to get their act
together, they wanted William James to fit into their structure.
[Tinsely]
And so we began to have to do some things to suit Grand Valley. For example,
we always had a great deal of flack around the title of the course, "Uptight About
Writing" – it became symbolic of kind of conflict we were always in. The faculty
thought that the title absolutely expressed with that course was about. The Grand
Valley administration thought that that course title made William James look silly
and made Grand Valley look silly. We did a lot of changing of external things so
that Grand Valley didn't feel it was looking silly. Some of that was legitimate, I
think. So, my view was that what changed a lot was our way of fitting into the
bureaucracy. The student body changed, you know. That seemed very real to me
even though I was not, myself, in the classroom often. I taught maybe once a
year. I could tell the students were changing. And the students wanted different
things. And I think that's where the sense that there were two William James'
comes from. The later students came because we had an Arts and Media
program. They just wanted to learn what they, you know, were supposed to learn
so they can get jobs in arts and media. The kind of students that really wanted to
direct their own education, we had very few of them towards the end. So, I think
that was a real change. But for me the other stuff was superficial.
[Barbara]
I would argue, being in Arts and Media, some of the guys that just graduated and
the last people to graduate… I interviewed one of them, and he's typical, okay?
And pissed off because they took James away. And he articulates and
personifies something that is far more than just a hard nose, "I now have my
professional stuff and I'm going out in the world." He talks about being in
Steven's class before William James was closed and afterwards and the
difference in the other student. You know what I mean?
[Tinsley]
Yeah, oh yeah.
[Barbara]
I'm still not convinced it's just the students changed.
[Tinsley]
Well, it may not be. But my first answer to the question: I didn't feel there was an
early William James and a late William James. Perhaps there was in a sense that
we were younger earlier and it was fresher. We believed it was a good idea to all
go camping with one another. Probably after ten years, we didn't think it was a
good idea to all go camping with one another. But that's just sort of time passes
and, you know, life happens to you. I didn't think what was at the center of the
college changed much. I really didn't.
�[Barbara]
That makes two of us.
[Tinsley]
[Laughter]
[Barbara]
Where did the seminal ideas come from? We talk about feminism – and that's
really important – but how did William James actually… it seems like a miracle. I
don't understand how James suddenly, genuinely, infused the college…
something that had been dead for X number of years, you know.
[Tinsley]
I think it came from a really happy confluence of a lot of streams of thought and a
lot of things that were happening. I think we all acknowledge we were awfully
lucky to get the name "William James" and I don't think we thought that up. I
believe Tom Cunningham named the college, so we had that to work with. We
also had that very thoughtful document that the task force had put together,
which embodied a lot of the ideas of the late sixties but pointed forward in his
emphasis on careers. So, it gave us something we could kind of sink our teeth
into. I think we came from a lot of different intellectual places. We were just Godgiven lucky that it just worked together. Robert, for example, whom I knew the
best of anyone because I had known Robert – we had been graduate students
together at Cornell. Robert was very interested in the philosophic base the
college was working off. He cared passionately about not making what he used
to call invidious distinctions between the liberal arts and practical subjects.
Roberts was a person… it was very important to Robert to view himself as,
simultaneously, a philosopher and a practical man. From his philosophic side
came many of the ideas that carried the college forward. And then in the next
year also from Stephen. For me, I didn't come to it by reading philosophy. I came
to it by teaching at the University of Maryland in the English department. The
University of Maryland had, like, fifty thousand students on the College Park
campus. There were over one hundred faculty in the English department. And I
couldn't figure out what anyone was doing there. I used to look out over the rows
of parking lots and say: "I know why I'm here; I'm getting paid to be here. But why
are the students here?" I really didn't understand that. It was the late sixties and
early seventies. All of the students who were majoring in English were paralyzed,
they didn't know what to do with the lives, their degrees we're not going to fit
them to do anything, the Vietnam War was going on. The students I knew spent
most of their time smoking dope and being very scared. And really not knowing
how to interact with the world that was going to greet them when they left the
University of Maryland with a kind of a third-rate degree in English literature. For
me to come to a college that was going to put some emphasis on being able to
do in the world was really important. I mean I cared passionately about that and
when I was interviewed, the Grand Valley administration said to me: "Well you
have a PhD in English literature, what makes you think you can be the Dean of a
college that is practical?" And I said: "You just don't know how much I desire this.
This is the desire of my heart." And then I think feminism came in also, with its
�stress on theory and practice. I think a lot of people came to the college from an
ideologically feminist perspective wanting to combine those two.
[Tinsley]
So all that came together. And I don't want to say we were just lucky, but we
were living at a historic moment where it could come together.
[Barbara]
This comes from another question that I forgot to ask you. What is a male
synoptic heavy?
[Tinsley]
Oh, a male synoptic heavy? Well, that's the men in the college and it was
interesting how it did tend to divide on gender line.
[Barbara]
Oh damn. Adrian, I just moved the damn thing again.
[Tinsley]
Oh well, we'll do it again.
[Barbara]
Keep going anyway.
[Tinsley]
One of the tensions in the college was that a compelling interest in discussing the
philosophical base of the college seemed to divide along gender lines. It divided,
to some extent, on professionals versus the liberal arts line, but really it was on
gender lines. And there were a group of men that were perceived as the male
synoptic heavies, and they carried the flame of the sort of philosophic base of the
college. The women saw themselves, in many ways, more as the doers and
tended to rely, in many ways, more with the professional faculty. And yet those
two had to talk to one another. One of the tensions in the college had to do with
one's synoptic credentials. Only on a tape about William James College could
one talk with a straight face about one's synoptic credentials. But I can remember
at faculty retreat, prior to one of our years, in which we had facilitators come in to
get us going for the year. And that's what came out – that there seemed to be a
distinction between the philosophers, the synoptians – those who were seen as
guarding the flame of those who were appropriately liberal artsy and the others. It
was an interesting tension in the college and people felt very insecure about it.
The man who did not see themselves as the liberal arts heavies felt very
insecure about it, as did some of the women. The women in the college who
have those credentials to be synoptic heavies were sometimes impatient with it. I
felt that I could really relate to both sides, and those were the strengths. And that
the college needed both… because one of the things that gave the college power
was that it did have a concept – it really did – and that gave it enormous power.
[Barbara]
Concept of?
[Tinsley]
Theory and practice. And using theory and practice to make a difference in the
world.
�[Tinsely]
And we spread out from there – the concept got broader from there. But it had
that core concept.
[Barbara]
End of tape. Good answer.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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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
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/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_28_Tinsley
Creator
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Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Adrian Tinsley interview (3 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her memories of the early years at William James College and the importance of community, in addition to how the college developed over time and the role of feminism in theory and practice. This interview is part 3 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Feminism
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Moving Image
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/354f3ad1f96b741ab62276b0aeb34e68.mp4
baa701d267c1fb3b7ffeb14aacdcabc3
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ddd97b05c966bf3ee59f9b5f4e0e1cdb.pdf
a1814268b269c8fe86f32b0836c9badf
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 2 of 8
[Barbara]
And I'm rolling.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
And I wanted to ask you: we refer to some mysterious beast called a “real
William James student.” What's a real William James student?
[Tinsley]
Well, again, you know, a real William James student – you knew one when you
saw one. We wanted students to take responsibility for their own education; we
painted it up on the walls in Lake Superior Hall… that wonderful cartoon of the
student we didn't want which was somebody having knowledge poured into his
head through a funnel. We wanted students to do it themselves. And so, a real
William James student was a person who knew what he or she wanted to learn
and took their own route in getting there.
[Barbara]
I just screwed up, Adrian; I just pulled the panhandle. Can you repeat the last
part?
[Tinsley]
Sure.
[Barbara]
I’m sorry.
[Tinsley]
A real William James student was a student who knew what he or she wanted to
learn and desired to take responsibility for learning it. Wanted to use the faculty
as resource people. Wanted to figure out how to learn and was willing to hustle
to, you know, really move their butt to get what they needed. Willing to go to a lot
of sources and use a lot of resources. Had some drive and motivation. I think in
the early days, the real William James student was somebody who was
specifically seeking an alternative education, who shared the views of the faculty.
In the areas, for example, of grading. That letter grading was at the root of all
evil. Who wanted the freedom to design their own way of studying things, who
wanted to do independent studies. And as those students became fewer and
fewer in number because we had many more those of in the early days of the
college, you know, then I think the real William James student became simply the
one with energy. The one who was self-initiating.
�[Barbara]
How did we teach them this?
[Tinsley]
I don't think we taught them to it, they came with us. They came with us.
[Barbara]
But there was a phenomenon of students who were lost for a year and then
turned it on.
[Tinsley]
Well, that's true. But I don't know how that happened. But you have to remember,
I was not in the classroom teaching the students so that I got to know the good
students and I got to know the problem students.
[Tinsely]
But I could not explain how that mystery actually happened in the classroom
because I wasn't there.
[Barbara]
Let me grab my notepad out of here. Oh, the rocking adds a nice comfortable
touch. We were profoundly egalitarian, and yet you were in a leadership role.
How does one lead a commune?
[Tinsley]
That is a very good question, and I must say what I learned about leadership in
that situation… that's probably the most important learning I took from the college
actually. I guess I'd answer that by saying I didn't go to William James; I didn't set
out to be the leader. I didn't know enough to know I was supposed to set out to
be the leader. And I think one of the things that is important about William James
and my contribution to it is that not only were all the faculty very young, I was
very young. I have never been a dean before. I didn't know, really, what deans
we're supposed to do. All of us made this college up out of we what we knew.
And all of us had a critique, but none of us really knew how to make the college
happen. I think it's important for the college that I did not arrived with an agenda.
I arrived responsive to the same social climate that everyone else was
responsive to. We had a variety of ideologies, a variety of critiques, but I didn't go
there saying "I am the Dean and this is my vision of alternative education". I think
that the role that I played… and I don't want to give the impression that I was the
colleges facilitator, because I don't view what I did in that way. But I think what I
did I think I had the gift of being able to understand what kind of vision for the
college motivated most of the people who were there. And they were very
different visions and I think my gift was to be able to find some common ground
among those visions that we could agree to and put that in the public space and
affirm it. And I think that – as I thought about in later years - I think that is
probably the quintessential quality of leadership. Pat Labone used to say to me
that what the dean should do is read the litany. She had a Catholic childhood and
there was some real truth to that. I often used to long to have a chapel and
William James that everyone was required to attend so the little inspirational
speeches could be made. I think it's important that an institution have that and I
think that I brought that to the college. And I think that I had the ability to bridge
�among the various kinds of faculty at the college. I think it was extraordinarily
important to success of the college that I could talk to heavy male synoptic types,
that I could talk that language and that I valued that. I think it was important that I
could talk to the women. And I think it was important that I could talk to the
people who brought professional skills into the college but more scared,
frustrated, and sometimes irritated at the quality of intellectual discourse that
went on because they felt insecure about participating in it. And I truly believed
there was room for everybody. And I think that I kind of could embody that. And I
think I also – in terms of leadership – was able to work with the college's peerpressure structure.
[Tinsely]
Because you can't tell people to do things and you can't make people do things,
and an administrator has to work with what's there. You can say "no" but you
can't make it happen. And so, the trick to it is to be able to mobilize the energy
that's there, give it some focus, and get people on the same wavelength. And the
college had very strong norms of behavior. I mean there was a lot of peer
pressure in the college that said, I believe, what faculty were supposed to do and
what they were not supposed to do. And I think I was able to work with that and I
think I was able to find some constructive channels for using people's energy.
Not always, but if there was a trick to operating as a leader in that kind of setting,
that's how I would describe it.
[Barbara]
But surely what you just described at the end of your answer would be true of
being an administrator at any college.
[Tinsley]
Yeah, it is, but it was more so at William James because we had a rhetoric about
– and said and really meant – that we were non-hierarchical. I think that's how
the whole critical issue format developed, which I think was a very healthy one
for the college. As inexperienced as I was – and I really was absolutely green
when I came to William James as Dean – and I remember, practically, the first
week that I was there we were drafting the governance document for the college.
And that was drafted by Robert and Inge and it was very elaborate, and it was
really a model for participatory form of governance that worked neither on
hierarchy nor Roberts Rules of Order, which was what we wanted. But even
though I was I very green and I looked at that and I said: "Wait a minute, the
Dean has responsibility beyond, simply in a consensus fashion, gathering the will
of the faculty and implementing it.” There are probably issues at the college that I
am responsible for and there are issues that the faculty is responsible for, and
yet we’re all responsible for all of this together – how can we sort that out? And
out of that came the notion of a critical issue. That most of the times we would all
be on the same wavelength about what we wanted to have happen. But because
we had different responsibilities and sat, in a sense, in different chairs, there
might be times when the college would want to do X, but I would know it couldn't.
It absolutely couldn't. And thus, was born, you know, the critical issue and the
�veto. An elaborate way of saying: "But the college says this and the Dean said
that, the Dean would say 'no.'" And then you'd go back and discuss it some
more. And you might still come out with yes and no but their would be ways so…
I didn't abrogate what was my real responsibility to make sure that in matters of
relating to the structure at Grand Valley, the college didn't harm itself. And that
the college at some basic level operated in the way it ought to: in trust from the
people of Michigan, through the Board of Control, you know, through the
President, and down to me. I had real, legal, responsibilities there.
[Tinsley]
And yet at the same time I was a member of the community and wanted to be
involved in the process of working out what the college was going to be and do.
Because I didn't know. So, I was both part of the process and outside of the
process.
[Barbara]
Presuming that some people are going to see this tape that have no direct
experience with James, would you care to give an example of a critical issue that
actually came up?
[Tinsley]
Yes. The critical issues came up around hiring issues and around money. And
two examples were: at one point the council voted to hire a faculty member and I
felt the decision was untenable, that it was made not because the person was the
best candidate, but because there were a great many…the person was known to
us, there were many personal feelings involved. And I felt it would be
irresponsible of me to let that decision go forward, so I vetoed it. Another issue
came when we had a very elaborate, as you will recall, salary administration
policy. And which I did not like, but never really interfered in because I felt that
was the faculty's business to determine. I did not approve of it. In one particular
year, it works to really the detriment of an older member of the faculty who was
going to end up with a less than a cost of living raises as a result of the operation
of this policy and I said "No, that would not be acceptable." There may have been
others that were more, you know, policy issues but I don't recall them. One of the
interesting things was that these issues arose very rarely because we have did
most of our work by persuading one another. It was very interesting; we were
frequently compared with Thomas Jefferson College because we were both
alternative colleges of sort of different kinds of stripes. I thought, and I think many
people agree, that there were very different leadership styles at the two colleges.
Thomas Jefferson was run by guru, a bearded, alternative education dean who
put his picture on the front of all the colleges brochures. And then, in fact, the
early brochures, you know, showed his face with his beard and the little legend
was: "This man runs a college." The faculty at Thomas Jefferson seem to be very
pleased to have a dean who would be their guru and who would not tell them
what to do exactly but would take care of them. That was basically what it
amounted to, would take care of them. And we had a model that was much more
political. Our model was: everybody had to understand how this works,
�everybody has to have an operator manual because we all have to understand
the political context we're working in order for to work, I guess. I don't want to
say, "We won't survive," because we didn't sit around thinking "Well, maybe it
won't survive." But we all had to understand it.
[Tinsely]
And I felt really strongly about that and I think most of the faculty felt strongly
about that. And I was not there to, you know, be there to take care of them, and
they were not there to be, you know, recipients of somebody's guruism. I think
that was real important as to how we worked. It was like a marriage, it really was.
People called me Adrian, but if they were really angry at me, they referred to me
as the Dean and I didn't like that, you know. I can recall saying: "I am not the
Dean!" or "I am Dean, but my name is Adrian!" So, there was, you know… I don't
quite know where I'm going with the rest of that answer but…
[Barbara]
Let me check on the tape. Ah, look there! See, I have this sixth sense.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
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GV016-16
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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/.
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GV016-16_GVSU_27_Tinsley
Creator
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Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
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Adrian Tinsley interview (2 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses what makes a "real William James student" and her experience as a first-time dean of William James College. This interview is part 2 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
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Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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Moving Image
Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
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eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a5ebf586a38a740256eb61c049b22f66.mp4
d85f0b989c29931c790ad3bd782d7669
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5fefd6df044f016e68be5bede9225881.pdf
e60d6081691d0d5440a0935d4297cb6b
PDF Text
Text
William James College Interviews
GV016-16
Interviewer: Barbara Roos
Interviewee: Adrian Tinsley
Date: 1984
Part: 1 of 8
[Barbara]
Hit the light. Okay, now I actually am running.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
When you came to James – you know, it would be nice of you to mention when
that was, when you actually came as Dean – what did the administration tell you
about what was expected at the college?
[Tinsley]
I came in the summer of nineteen seventy-two. The college had completed one
year of operation when I came. I can't say that the administration of Grand Valley
told me anything about what they wanted the college today. Let me just start this
again. It’s going to take me a little...
[Barbara]
Well, I'll adjust the shot.
[Tinsley]
Okay, it's going to take me a little bit to kind of warm up.
[Barbara]
I know, it always does.
[Tinsley]
It's like doing a practice interview.
[Barbara]
It is, so start again and take as many times as you want. I have an entire case of
tapes.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
What was it like? What did the administration tell you? "Hi Adrian, here's what
you're supposed to do."
[Tinsley]
Well, I came to the college in nineteen seventy-two. And I can't say that the
administration told me anything about what they wanted the college to be. The
college had completed its first year of operation. I knew that Grand Valley was
beginning a cluster college operation and that William James was the third
college and that Grand Valley anticipated that there would be more colleges.
That the decision had been taken early in Grand Valley's life – in fact, it had been
a plan George Potter's, I believe – that instead of just growing bigger, because
�Grand Valley expected to grow significantly. Instead of just growing large, they
would develop a whole series of colleges and each would have its own mission
and its own curriculum. So, William James… I understood William James was to
be part of that. And I understood that there had been a task force to set up
William James chaired by Tom Cunningham. And I understood that what was
written in the task force document was what the administration wanted the
college to be and that was a career-oriented college. What I did not understand
was that even at the point at which I arrived at William James – in its second year
– there was some significant concern in the Grand Valley administration about
the direction that the two cluster colleges, Thomas Jefferson and William James,
were taking.
[Tinsley]
And, in fact, after I had been the Dean of William James for a year, the Vice
President to whom I reported, Bruce Loessin, said to me with a big smile: "Well
you've really done a good job – the college has survived! Most of us didn't think
that was going to happen!" And that was my first indication that there was any
question in anybody's mind that the college would survive.
[Barbara]
Two things about that I didn't understand. I don't understand who Potter is… you
made a reference.
[Tinsley]
Potter was, I believe, a Vice President for Academic Affairs at Grand Valley and
the first president of Grand Valley, James Zumberge… I don't know if it was
Potter or Zumberge that had the notion of developing a cluster of colleges. They
had that idea but didn't implement it. Don Lubbers was the president who caused
that to be implemented.
[Barbara]
Why… I mean, when Loessin said that to you, you must have said whatever
[Inaudible]. Why start a college and presume it's going to fail? I don't understand
it.
[Tinsley]
And reasonably enough you don't understand it. William James was supposed to
be a career-oriented college. When the first faculty were hired by Bruce Loessin,
he took pains to hire a faculty that came from the traditional liberal arts
disciplines and were very – not traditional – but very good faculty in the traditional
sense. They had good academic degrees. They were not interested in doing
career education in the sense that I think Grand Valley had in mind. I think Grand
Valley had in mind that William James would be what they later had to start
Kirkhof in order to get. So, there was a sense right from the beginning that they
were looking for a technical college and William James was becoming something
quite different from what they had in mind. But what can they expect, given the
faculty that they had hired to found the college?
[Barbara]
Turn this off for a second. Make sure this thing is running right. I get a certain
�amount of neuroses… paranoia, that's the word I'm looking for. Tell me… Ah!
Tell me… let’s get you in the shot.
[Tinsley]
Tell me, whoever you are.
[Barbara]
Okay. Tell me what the administration said… what did you observe? What was it
in total, you know, really meshing all kinds of things? What was going on when
you arrived? What kind of place was it?
[Tinsley]
It was struggling to be born when I arrived. It had been in operation for you a
year. It had had no planning time. It had been started just immediately, crack off
the bat. After that, the task force report had been completed; an acting dean had
been put in; the faculty had been brought in.
[Tinsely]
And they had no lead time, they were just told that you are open in September
and get your curriculum together. So, they were struggling that whole first year to
put together a first curriculum and hire a new staff. There was not much
opportunity to do anything other than run very hard to accomplish those tasks.
But my belief about the college… and I knew it pretty well because I interviewed
for its deanship before it started and then did not come at that time…had other
commitments and then came a year later. So, I had a chance to talk to Robert
Mayberry and Bruce Loessin that very first summer, and then again in the
interview process for the second year. What I observed were that the faculty that
were at the college took that planning document – the Cunningham Task Force
Report – very seriously. And they were about the business of trying to make that
happen. And I observed that the most compelling part of it – it certainly was to
me and I believe it was to the faculty – was the notion of good work. We had a lot
of words for that, you know. Vocation with a "V," career-oriented, the notion of
doing something useful in the world. And we struggled a lot because we didn't
want this college to be simply career-oriented, but we wanted to have utility to do
something useful in the world – to make social change – and there were a whole
bunch of ways of talking about that. But that's what I saw when I came… that
people were looking at the college to be and that people wanted the college to
be. Everybody came to the college with a critique of their own graduate
education because we were all young. So, we were very clear about what we
wanted the college not to be and, in fact, that was kind of a problem early on. We
kept defining ourselves in terms of what we didn't want to be. We didn't want to
have grades. We didn't want to have majors and disciplines. We didn't want to
have a sterile kind of research focus. So, everybody had their own critique and
everybody, I think, also had their own dream of what the perfect college would
be, what the perfect society would be. The piece of it that was in the public space
right from the beginning was making a difference in the world and that's what I
thought people wanted to do in the world.
�[Barbara]
Change the shot here.
[Tinsley]
Does the tape pick up your questions?
[Barbara]
Yes, but what I'll do is redub them because I'm off mic.
[Tinsley]
Okay, okay.
[Barbara]
You can hear them, but you have to strain to hear them.
[Tinsley]
Okay.
[Barbara]
So I get a chance to clean up my act.
[Barbara]
James operated as a sovereign state. You would agree?
[Tinsley]
Yes.
[Barbara]
Did we seize that sovereignty or was it given to us?
[Tinsley]
Neither really. We didn't seize it. Seizing implies some kind of resistance. I think
in the early years, the Grand Valley administration did not have a particular plan
as to how they thought the college should develop or indeed what they wanted
from it. We took a lot of freedom, but we didn't really have to fight them for it.
[Barbara]
If we can just stay in this shot. How did feminism infuse the college?
[Tinsley]
Well, feminism was extraordinarily important in the college. I think… you
obviously are going to have to edit this because I will get rolling in a little bit but
I'm not yet. I think feminism was probably one of the most important social forces
that operated in the college. It's an interesting mystery why the initial first eight
male faculty turned around and hired a number of strong women faculty and the
women dean. But that's in fact what happened. I said earlier that everybody
brought their own dream to the college. I think the women, in particular, brought a
feminist dream and you have to remember this was nineteen seventy-two, so
feminism was just really becoming a significant social force. And feminism
embraced both notions of, you know, gender equity and also notions about
organizational structure. There was a lot of talk in the feminist community at that
time about non-hierarchical decision making. About rotating authority. About
everybody taking turns doing the job so that everybody got a chance to do all the
jobs. A lot of talk about how you didn't want to specialize into male roles and
female roles or faculty roles and administrative roles, you know, to go by
extension. So, the whole philosophic context of radical feminism came into the
college as in many ways as the dream – or at least the strong interest – of a lot of
�the women faculty that came. And particularly as it related to, you know, malefemale relations and organizational structures. The men were coming in with the
same kind of a dream. They may have come to it through feminism per say or
they may have come to it through some other kind of social analysis. But there
was general agreement on what our politics and then for the social structure of
the college. So, I guess I would say feminism affected the college because there
were a lot of women there. I mean we were very unusual in that there were so
many women and that the women really were in positions of a good deal of
authority, respect, and influence – both formally and informally. Whether they
were program coordinates, or the Dean, or whether they were just strong faculty
who were “Weighty Friends” in the Quaker sense in the design of the curriculum.
Feminism, I think, influenced a lot of our early attempts and organizational
structures.
[Tinsely]
The whole governing structure, the coordinator's temporum, or the notion that we
would take turns doing the college's jobs. And I think it influenced the way we
treated each other. It influenced what kinds of interactions were acceptable in the
public space of college and, indeed, in people's home lives. And I think it was
interesting in that regard the ways they interacted with each other – the men and
women in college. We never fell into sex roles – or the kinds of gender-based,
sex-based teasing – that is real frequent in other situations. The place that
feminism didn't affect the college terribly strong was we never developed a very
strong Women's Studies program. I often felt as Dean, you know, I was really
remiss in the kinds of formal curricular or extracurricular things we could offer our
women students. I often saw women students come in, you know, if they’re first
in their family going to college, with very conventional aspirations and it was
possible for women students to go through this structure that was a college and
be a little untouched about what was going on. And I thought that was a real
weakness. And I think it came from the fact that the women were so busy in their
nontraditional roles - sort of running the college, developing the curriculum – that
there really weren't people to spare for developing the more usual Women's
Resource Center, Women's Studies program, and the like.
[Barbara]
I think to me, a question that follows that when we were interviewing faculty, we
went through these long interview processes – forty-eight-hour things – and we
always knew what we were looking for. What were we looking for?
[Tinsley]
Well, I think the easy answer to that is we were looking for people like ourselves.
But what did it mean to be like us? I think we were looking for some sort of real
evidence of commitment to social change. We were looking at people's politics.
We had political litmus tests and I think there's… you know, we shouldn't blink
that fact. I can remember interviewing a candidate for psychologist at one point –
a woman – and she was asked something that had to do with feminism and then
she responded that she didn't care to define herself; she didn't care to take on a
�label. It was very important to us that people we label that they have politics. So,
I think we were looking for that. I think we were looking for breadth. I think we
were looking for people that were interested in a lot of things. And I think we were
looking for people that weren't interested in sort of narrow, discipline based,
traditional academic interest. I think we found them kind of pompous and kind of
boring. We could know us when we saw us. But how you'd write that down on
paper it isn't really clear. Except we did know us when we saw us, and we were
anti-pomposity and we were pro-politics. But our politics had a very broad
definition. We were pretty inclusive in our politics, but we demanded that people
have politics, I believe.
[Barbara]
It’s coming up to the… conveniently this blinks at me when we’re running out of
tape.
[Tinsley]
Okay, okay.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
William James College Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Videotaped interviews of William James College faculty, students and administrators by Barbara Roos. William James College opened in 1971 as the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. Curriculum was organized around three concentrations that were meant to be interdisciplinary career preparation offerings: Social Relations, Administration and Information Management, and Environmental Studies. The college was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
Alternative education
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Language
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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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GV016-16_GVSU_26_Tinsley
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Tinsley, Adrian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984
Title
A name given to the resource
Adrian Tinsley interview (1 of 8, video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Interview with Adrian Tinsley by Barbara Roos, documenting the history of Grand Valley State's William James College. William James College was the third baccalaureate degree granting college for Grand Valley. It was originally designed to be an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized college consisting of concentration programs, rather than majors. The college opened in 1971 and was discontinued in 1983 during a reorganization of Grand Valley State. Adrian Tinsley was Dean of William James College from 1972 until 1980. In this interview, Adrian discusses her arrival at William James College during its second year of operation, in addition to how feminism infused the college. This interview is part 1 of 8 for Adrian Tinsley.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Roos, Barbara (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Valley State University
Michigan
Universities and colleges
Oral histories
College administrators
Women college administrators
Women in higher education
Feminism
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/69">William James College faculty and student interviews (GV016-16)</a>
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