Collegial Teaching at Evergreen

Item

Identifier

1976-07_Finkel_01

Title

Collegial Teaching at Evergreen

Date

1991

Creator

Don Finkel

Bill Arney

Rights

In Copyright

extracted text

COLLEGIAL TEACHING AT EVERGREEN
Don Finkel and Bill Arney
Members of the Faculty
The Evergreen State College

c 1991 - All rights reserved. Do not cite or quote without permission.

Table of Contents
Prologue

page 1

Introduction:
Part 1:
Part II:

Collegial Teaching

Collegial Teaching at Evergreen
Collegial Teaching At Evergreen

Conclusion

page 4
page 12
page 44
page 85

PROLOGUE

Over the past two summers, we have been writing a book
Pedagogy.

called~

Paradox 2f

This writing project grew out of our experiences teaching together in

two Evergreen programs (five years apart).

We had discovered, first, that we

differed fundamentally in the approaches we took to teaching, second, that this
difference was a key to the deep pleasure we took in working together, and
third, that this "teaching across difference" had a certain connection to the
pedagogical possibilities opened up by the creation of that relatively new
educational institution, The Evergreen State College.

We decided to write a

book together to sustain the conversation we had started through teaching
together and to try to articulate a report on our experience to others who might
be interested.
The final third of the book is explicitly about Evergreen.

In this section,

we point to a wonderful teaching opportunity that the institution of Evergreen
made possible; we also describe the looming threats to this possibility, threats
which have been made real by the very same institution that created the
wonderful opportunity.
We are presently at an unusually "open" time in the history of our college, a
time between the tenures of permanent college presidents, a time after the
recent hiring of a striking number of new faculty members and administrators,
and a time when there is much debate about the relation between the college's
founding vision and its future direction.

By circulating this section of our

book at this time, we hope to raise some fundamental questions that are being
side-stepped or ignored by the current debates about multi-culturalism,
coordinated studies, seminars, public service, and so on, questions that may
help to focus our current discussions.

For surely, our current discussions may

shape the future of our college for years to come.
What follows is a draft of the final third of Ib£ Paradox
its present incarnation as a separate essay, we
Teaching at Evergreen."

ha~e

2f

Pedagogy.

For

called it "Collegial

You will need to know a little about what precedes it

in the full manuscript, before reading it.
In the first part of the book, we examine what we take to be the item of
central concern in Western pedagogy since Rousseau:
relationship.

the student-teacher

This relationship offers a new promise for pedagogy, but only,

Rousseau implies, if it can be cultivated correctly.

Rousseau is the first

2
educational thinker to hold out this promise and to offer a map for the
cultivation of this relationship, and so we begin our exploration with his book
~.

We then construct a dialectical conversation about the promise of such a

pedagogy, by examining the thought of Freud, Paulo Freire, and the pair of
social thinkers, Ivan Illich and Michel Foucault.

We conclude, as a result of

this conversation, that modern pedagogy based on the personal relationship
between student and teacher is inherently paradoxical, and will always be, to
some degree, self-defeating.
We then discuss two different responses to the paradox of pedagogy--which we
call the "tragic" and the "progressive" response.

This discussion is both a way

of articulating our own differences as teachers and a way of developing a
pedagogical approach which is n£t centered on the student-teacher relationship.
We make concrete the two different responses by means of two lectures on
Socrates, that first and most paradoxical pedagogue in the Western tradition.
The lectures articulate two opposite interpretations of Socrates.

Through our

discussion of these differing responses, we are led to our central thesis:

that

the best response to the paradox of pedagogy is teaching that has at its heart
not the relationship between teacher and student, but the relationship between
two teachers--teachers who differ in fundamental ways.

We label such teaching

"collegial teaching," something we think is radically different from simple
"collaborative instruction" or "interdisciplinary studies."
The text which follows begins shortly after the presentation of the two
lectures on Socrates presented by authors "A" and "B.•

It begins after a brief

discussion in which A's response to Socrates (who he sees as a humorous figure),
is interpreted to be a "tragic" response, one which takes the solitary soul to
be the central concern of education, and in which B's response to Socrates (who
he sees as an ironic figure) is interpreted to be a "progressive" response, one
which takes the community to be the central concern of education.
from their responses to one

~nd

It is clear

the same Socrates that A and B are, as

educators, fundamentally different.

There appears to be an unbridgeable gap

between them.
A caution: That A's lecture was originally delivered by Arney and B's by
Finkel (in "Classical and Modern" two years ago) and the two-part structure of
this essay may invite a reader to understand this piece by identifying the parts
with one or the other author.

As we note in the text, collegial teaching

3
involves, in part, a rather remarkable identification by each colleague with the
other's point of view.

Hence, in our minds, A's lecture is no longer Arney's

and B's is no longer Finkel's.

Each of us can find ourselves in each. Likewise,

we find it difficult, after working on this book together, to firmly attribute
authorship to one or the other section of what follows.

The work is for us of a

piece, a product of collegial teaching .
One reader of this manuscript reacted with a jolt when he began reading Part
II.

He reported later that the two parts were each coherent and interesting but

seemed to him almost completely unrelated to each other.

Another reader of the

manuscript commented on this reaction by telling us, "The two sections hang
together by your having put them together!"

She referred to them as conveying

"two truths boldly told . "
A paradox generally juxtaposes two views which do indeed provide a jolt .
Moreover, the structure of the book as a whole is dialectical, and the final
section, which you will read here, maintains that dialectical structure in which
a pedagogical promise is opened up only to be deflated by a critique.

The book

as a whole, like each of its internal sections, ends on a note of paradox.

But

beyond that, this essay has been written by two people who see things
differently yet have agreed to construct a common report of their experience, an
experience which includes this divergent seeing.

The jolt that may come from

reading these two sections together is a part of the experience we are reporting
on .

It is integral to a form of teaching which makes present, rather than

mystifies or masks, the paradox of pedagogy.

INTRODUCTION:

COLLEGIAL TEACHING

[For Rousseau] professors ... represented an unsatisfactory
halfway house between the two harsh disciplines that make a
man serious--community and solitude. 1
Let us now summarize the paradox of pedagogy and then ask how A and B, two
pedagogues who view each other across the divide of a fundamental difference,
will likely respond to the paradox.
aims of education:

We can start from either of the fundamental

education is ultimately for society or education is

ultimately for the self.

From either starting point, we are led down the same

path.
If education is ultimately for society, it is also against society.

If

education is ultimately for the self, it must work also against the self.
Either way , for the sake of either end, education must radically separate the
pupil from society.

Yet as we have seen, separation is impossible.

In the new

space effected by this "impossible" separation, the personal relationship
between student and teacher becomes vital to education, yet it represents at the
same time the biggest threat to education.

In this personal relationship of

teacher and student, regardless of one's aim, the teacher's job is suicidal; it
is to make the student a student no longer, and thus to undo himself as a
teacher .

To put the paradox in one sentence, we could say that the fundamental

vehicles,

structures,"~.·

AnQ

matrices~

are the prerequisites Qf

~

liberatory education are §ll, simultaneously, fundamental preventative of its
achieving AllY kinQ of &enuine liberation.
What is a teacher to do?
paradox?

Specifically, how might A and B confront this

A and B start from different points: education for the private self

and for solitude vs. education for the public self and for the ability to
contribute to social reconstruction .
the same paradox .

Yet both quickly find themselves mired in

But they will respond to the paradox differently.

A will respond stoically.

He will nourish himself from the enhancing quality

of paradox itself, using his awareness of paradox to set ethical limits for
himself and to incorporate into his educational aims the imperative to point out
(usually indirectly) those ethical limits to his students.
B will respond progressively.

He will nourish himself from his conviction

that paradoxes are stimuli to further development.

He will find the enhancing

quality of the paradox to be the challenge to overcome it, to find his way to

5
higher syntheses where the paradox dissolves (and where new paradoxes may form
themselves).
But A and B have something in common.

Both share a sensitivity to paradox, a

commitment to facing it seriously, to looking long and hard at the implications
of paradox, and to summoning forth with integrity a response to it.

Neither

will close his eyes to the paradox; neither will deny its existence or render
its implications trivial.
These commonalities suggest a response to the paradox of pedagogy that is
different from choosing between the progressivism of B or the stoicism of A.
Broadly speaking, it is possible to be taught by both A and B at the same time.
There are two ways A and B can come together to teach .
First, one individual teacher can allow herself to be torn between these two
orientations .

She may feel at times like A and at times like B; or, part of her

may feel like A and part of her may feel like B.

Rousseau himself was torn.

Though not a pedagogue himself, as a writer and thinker, and indeed as a human
being, he seems to have lived with an elegant tension between a social aim and a
solitary aim.

Peter France claims that "the tug-of-war between solitude and
society" was Rousseau's central theme. 2 And Bloom argues in the epigraph that
Rousseau's animosity toward writers, scientists, philosophers, and scholars was
based on their general unwillingness to seriously confront this tension.
Ignoring the paradox of pedagogy is the least satisfactory response to it.
Rousseau's work shows us a man who took the two pedagogical aims which seem so
opposite equally seriously.
like our B.

At times, he reads like our A, and at other times

Over his work as a whole, it is clear that he was both.

Having someone like Rousseau as a teacher• would provide a most interesting
means of manifesting the paradox of pedagogy to students.

It would be quite

difficult for Rousseau's students ever to settle clearly on a single path with a
clear aim (society or solitude).

Whenever one path seemed to students clearly

to be the one their teacher was beckoning them down, it would not be long before

•

It should be clear that we would never endorse a pedagogy of play
acting. One can discuss, politically or collegially, these two aims. One can
play devil's advocate when one's students fall under the sway of one end or the
other. These options seem weak and flawed in comparison to having the tension
between opposed ends embodied in one person, even a pedagogue, who experiences
the tension in all its wrenching force.

6
the other surfaced as the more important path.

Such shifting would certainly do

much to combat the impulse to completion and totality that students feel as much
as anybody.

But the students of such a teacher might be forced to entertain

some serious questions about the wholeness or integrity of their teacher.
The second way of responding to the paradox of pedagogy without siding either
with A or B is more interesting.

We wish to discuss it at some length.

pedagogical arrangement is simple, yet somewhat shocking:
team up to teach a common group of students together?

This

Why not have A and B

In this arrangement the

points of view of A and B are bodily present to the students; they do not have
to alternate or be present only partially; A and B can be fully articulated and
keenly felt because each position has a personal embodiment in the classroom.
Each will have full integrity.
will be palpable.

More than that, the difference between A and B

This difference, which can be a source of pathology in a

single teacher torn between orientations, now becomes explicitly a moral and
educational object for students' attention.
Though putting A and B together in a classroom may be a simple, seemingly
"methodological" move, we imagine it involving something more ambitious.

We

mean to ask A and B to plan and teach a course together, a course on a topic of
common interest to them.

This task still seems simple enough, and it is .

But it is also difficult, because there is a gap--a silence--that separates A
and B.

When they come together a certain nervousness is created.

and B, we may say there is a nervous silence.

Each has a point of view that is

stable and reasonable, that has its own integrity.
conditioned by his point of view.
impasse.

Each acts in a way that is

But when they come together, they meet at an

There are two "sides" here.

That much is obvious.

the only question would be which side to take.
no one would have to be nervous anymore.
silence.

Between A

It would seem that

If one could only decide, then

But A and B insist on their common

They break their silence only when someone chooses a side, or when

someone tries to put a wall between them in order to get them to play
"Prisoner's Dilemma."

They speak only to insure their silence.

The silence across which A and B speak to one another is analogous to
Robert Frost's "Mending Wall."

This fence makes good neighbors by providing a

meeting place for those the fence separates.

It is across Frost's fence that

one neighbor calls to the other in the spring of each year.

It is along the

fence that the two walk the dividing line that they have in common in a

7

reenactment of that ancient ritual of marking one's territory.

It is at the

fence that they work to make repairs that importunities beyond their control
have necessitated.

In re-placing in spring the stones that winter has

dislodged, two people work together to repair that which they have in common
that separates them.

It is across the fence that the call of one person is

answered by another.
In this final section we want to turn away from the promise of pedagogy that
we have found so paradoxical.

We want to imagine a pedagogy that begins with

pedagogues turning away from students.

We want to imagine a pedagogy that,

because of its seeming indifference toward students, leaves room for colleagues
to answer one another's call to meet at the boundaries of their thoughts marked
by nervous silences.

In the turn away from a pedagogy based on one permutation

or other of the student-teacher relationship, two colleagues may find themselves
facing one another.

In that place, at the boundary which they have in common

that separates them, they may feel moved to act.
Team teaching or collaborative teaching as practiced most commonly has almost
nothing to do with the sort of educational effort are describing.

We prefer the

term "collegial teaching" to suggest we are talking about something unfamiliar
to the experience of most teachers.

What is crucial to collegial teaching is

that the two (or more) teachers join together out of a common intellectual
interest.

The two words •common" and "interest" are equally important.

What

brings the colleagues together must be a genuine interest, not an interest
invented as a pretext for creating a course.

The interest must be common

between them, not in the most literal sense that a written statement of each's
intellectual interest would be identical.

Rather there must be some common

ground in their intellectual interest, or some overlap or interconnectedness, so
that together they can formulate a question or project the joint pursuit of
which will be genuinely interesting to each--though not necessarily for the
exact same reasons . •

•

For A and B to teach really well together, each has to be able to
identify with and take the point of view of the other. We are not talking
about having a capitalist and a socialist teach economics together.
The
mutually enhancing quality of collegial teaching has its source in this ability
to sympathetically identify with an absolutely opposed position. In some sense,
then, each teacher involved in such a project will suffer the split of the
single teacher torn between A and B that we mentioned earlier. A will have a

8
So far collegial teaching sounds like a collaborative research project (which
it is), but where do students fit in?

We wish we could simply permit ourselves

the luxury of saying that students enter the project of collegial teaching
because the colleagues have invited them to enter.

The spirit of generosity and

openness that endemically informs research and intellectual inquiry sparked by
curiosity and human interest should lead naturally, or so it would seem, to the
proffering of this invitation.

Students are with their teachers because they

seek an education and what better way to get one than to witness and participate
in intellectual inquiry along with those who are more knowledgeable and
experienced, those who have a sufficient background to have the highly developed
interest that is the precondition for both inquiry and education?

The students

are there because the colleagues have invited them, and they have been invited
because they are willing to be a responsive audience, because they are willing
to help out, and most important, because they are open to developing a serious
interest in the inquiry themselves, and, subsequently, to pursuing the inquiry
themselves with their own energies and their own minds.
We wish we could say that students become colleagues because they are invited
to do so, but we are aware that most teaching occurs in institutions.
spirit which nourishes collegial teaching is dampened by institutions.
why teachers must, in a sense, turn away from students.

The
That is

The invitation they

issue is, in fact, an invitation for their students to give up being students .
It is an invitation to colleagueship.

Whether or not this invitation can be

issued and accepted in an educational institution i s a difficult question, one
we address in Part II below.
For now, we underline the fact that in the turn away from students as
students, colleagues may find one another , even though they are teaching
together.

~

relationship
founding

the

~ ~

~

2f collegial teaching, the personal

arran~ement

becomes

2f pedagogy .

~

central supporting, determining, and

But now it is the personal relationship. between

teachers rather than between teacher and student, teacher and students, or even,
students and other students, that has become central to education and learning.
At the heart of collegial teaching is a relationship between people who are
equals in all important respects.

In that relationship , without obvious entrees

subordinate B within him, and likewise B will have within him a subordinate A.

9
to relationships of domination, without obvious rules for forming their
interactions, the colleagues must invent, from A to Z we might say, what is to
happen between them before their students.
As almost all teachers know, teaching is a lonely profession.

Despite all

the pedagogical associations, in-service workshops, faculty development efforts
that are now in vogue and which only serve to reproduce and reinforce the
master-pupil relationship that gives way so easily to domination, the vast
majority of teachers know that what really counts happens when they are alone
with their students in the class.

The institutional context of virtually all

teaching in this country makes what happens when teachers are alone with their
students a matter of utmost intimacy.

It is, indeed, far easier to get most

teachers to talk openly and candidly about their sex lives than it is to get
them to talk frankly about their teaching, about what really happens when they
are alone with their students.

Given this common condition, we accept that most

people will find it hard to entertain the idea that the most important personal
relationship in the classroom could be the one between the two colleagues who
are teaching the class together.

Yet we have found it to be so.

While

ultimately there is no perfectly suitable or perfectly adequate response to the
paradox of pedagogy,

the~

response, we wish to argue, is to have two

pedagogues who differ (as A and B differ) get together out of (a) common
intellectual interest, (b) mutual respect, and (c) an openness to the potential
of friendship between them, and plan and teach a course together for a common
group of students.
·under these conditions, the relationship they form will inevitably be erotic .
This eroticism will fuel all that transpires in their course.

The relationship

between colleagues will be based in homophilia, that friendship that occurs
between people who can perceive a likenin& in the other.

Contrary to some

treasured pedagogical principles and most social policy cant, this approach
begins with the notion that education can only occur between people who perceive
a likening in the other .

But whether this means that education can only occur

among people who are alike or who might come to be alike, or whether this
suggests something about the spirit in which education and learning ought to be
approached is a question that we must leave open for now.

It serves us now to

note merely that in the turn away from the erotic bond between teacher and
student painted so vividly by Rousseau, and unmasked so dramatically by Freud,

10
love has entered the classroom in a form where its very presence is not
dedicated to undermining the development or the liberation of pupils.
We are not describing some kind of Utopian fantasy here, but rather a kind of
teaching we have both experienced in an educational institution that now exists
and has existed for nearly twenty years.
in this institution in Part II.

We intend to discuss our experiences

Let us summarize our experience in advance by

saying that when A and B become colleagues and teach together, they can provide
more and become more than the sum of what each could do were they teaching
separately.

A can become more of an A when he teaches with B, and likewise, B

can become more of a B.

At the same time, A can permit himself to be a B at

moments, and B can try on the persona of an A.

The limitations of each

orientation can be temporarily transcended by working together in relationship.
There is a mutual enhancement that arises from such a collaboration, an
enhancement that arises not from compromise or intellectual accommodation, but
from the rigorous, persistent, relentless articulation of the difference between
A and B.

This difference becomes the moral and intellectual object of awareness

for both the students, and equally, for A and B as well.
It almost goes without saying that A and B will do all that is in their power
to discourage the students from choosing sides.

The point of articulating the

differences between them could not be farther removed from any desire to create
sides in the first place.

It is rather to raise for the students, in ways

ranging from the most implicit to the most explicit, all the issues that we have
written about in this book.

It is to let them see how paradoxical their

position is as students, and to permit them to responsibly and authoritatively
articulate their own responses to this paradox.
Finally, yet still summarizing what is to come, it needs to be understood
that the friendship, the respect, and the love, between the two colleagues is
not going to end when their course concludes.
will become of it, nor any need to.

There is no way to predict what

It can take many forms.

On most occasions,

it will lead the colleagues to continue the conversation they have started in
the presence of their students, the conversation that arose out of common
interest and into which they invited their students to join.

There are many

ways they may happen on to continue carrying on this conversation, this
friendship.

Sometimes they may decide to write a book together.

not write together, nor even converse with one another.

But they need

Even in the absence of

11

words, even in silence, friendship is possible.
thrive best in silence.•

Indeed some forms of friendship

Whether the continued collaboration of the colleagues

aims toward social acts of conversing and writing or towards solitude and
silence, friendship has the last word.

This fact, it turns out, is what informs

collegial teaching from the start and has the deepest impact on the students,
though they may never know it.

• Illich and Foucault both understand this . This is from the conclusion
to Illich and Sanders' A~~: "We are children of the book. But in our sadness
we are silly enough to long for the one silent space that remains open in our
examined lives, and that is the silence of friendship" (lllich, Ivan and Barry
Sanders, A~~: ~Alphabetization 21 the Popular HinQ, San Francisco, Calif.:
North Point Press, 1988, p. 127). And this is from an interview with Foucault:
"Maybe another feature of [my] appreciation of silence is related to the
obligation of speaking . I lived as a child in a petit bourgeois, provincial
milieu in France and the obligation of speaking, of making conversation with
visitors, was for me something both very strange and very boring .
I often
wondered why people had to speak. Silence may be a mush more interesting way
of having a relationship with people."
(Foucault, Michel, "The Minimalist
Self," pp. 3-16 in Kritzman, Lawrence D., ed., Michel Foucault: Politics,
Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and~ Writin&s, l212-~. New York, N.Y.:
Routledge, p. 4.)

PART I :

COLLEGIAL TEACHING AT EVERGREEN

For a while, there, I thought that Evergreen would, like other
colleges, get around to running itself. I was wrong, and I'm glad to have
noticed it. Evergreen isn't going to run itself, ever. If it ever does,
or if it is ever allowed to, it won't be the Evergreen that has this
joyous whammy on you, no more.
-Richard Jones
-Letter of Evaluation to
Don Finkel, February 21, 1978
It is almost scandalous to talk about love and friendship between colleagues
being the grounding for teaching and learning in a college.

This is an age of

accountability, of assessable student outcomes, of individualized instruction,
of teaching by objectives, and so on.

To say that one should turn away from

students and toward one's colleagues is to invite censure for a dereliction of
duty.

But we have something more interesting in mind than the banal teaching of

students.

We have in mind the possibility of "teaching" in such a way that

students might stop being students and become, instead, colleagues of their
teachers.

In fact, we have this project somewhere else than just "in mind . "

is part of our experience.

It

Our work at The Evergreen State College has allowed

us to experience the pedagogical power of this scandalous turn away from
students.

From our experience we know the effects of inviting students to

renounce their role as student and enter into education on different terms .
Saying something about this place will give a sense of the possible in collegial
teaching. *
At Evergreen most teaching occurs in Coordinated Studies programs.
program constitutes the entire

"c~urse

One such

load" of any student who takes it and the

entire teaching load of the two- to five-person faculty team who teach it .
Coordinated Studies programs are thematic.
question.

They center on a problem or

In almost all cases faculty members from different disciplines--each

of which is expected to shed some light on the program theme--constitute the
teaching team .
be a team.

It is entirely up to the faculty team

~o

determine how they will

There are only a few expectations of every team.

There must be a

• We have heard it said that Kenneth Boulding once began an impromptu
seminar on "peace" by saying, "I would like to argue that what exists is
possible . " That sentiment informs our entire essay. Collegial teaching exists.
We experience it when we teach together. We never lose sight of the fact that
the existence of collegial teaching makes it continue to seem possible.

13
weekly faculty seminar, faculty aust write timely narrative evaluations of each
student, and there must be a process of self-evaluation and colleague evaluation
at the end of the program.

Virtually all the details of student and faculty

work and of their intellectual life together for the duration of the program is
decided by the faculty team (perhaps in consultation with students--but that too
is up to the faculty team).

Team teaching is thus the norm at Evergreen.

Everyone expects to teach on teams about 80% of the time they teach.

Many teach

on teams all the time.
But what we termed "collegial teaching" is by no means synonymous with team
teaching.

Indeed, many of our own colleagues at Evergreen may find the concept

as strange and unfamiliar as would teachers outside the college who never teach
in teams.

Collegial teaching is a particular form of team teaching.

In this

section, we shall attempt in three ways to convey how collegial teaching is
different from team teaching and why it appeals so much to us.

We first suggest

a set of criteria that differentiates collegial teaching from other forms of
team teaching, and then we present a series of "moments• from the life of a
collegial teacher to breathe some life into this notion.

Finally, by answering

some questions that inevitably arise when people try to picture themselves
participating in this particular form of college teaching, we will, we think,
suggest why a teacher might choose to turn away from students and toward a
colleague.
Criteria
The first two criteria are inseparable.
1.

The faculty colleagues must be

respect each other.

~.

This is one way of saying they must

It is not a way of saying they must have equal rank or

status, unless in their particular environment, rank and status influence
respect.

It means, rather, that .the faculty colleagues must experience

themselves as equals, and must, as a consequence, be able to act as equals
before their students .
2.

The faculty colleagues must be different.

This is one way of saying that

they must be interested in each other--in how each other sees things, thinks
about things, construes problems, poses questions, responds to dilemmas.

It

means there must be genuine intellectual differences between the colleagues.

14

In her analysis of political action, Hannah Arendt specifies the human
condition of plurality as the fundamental prerequisite for political action.
Plurality she defines as the simultaneous presence in a group of equality and
difference.

Rflurality is the condition of human action because we are all the

same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone
else." 3 The first two of our conditions correspond to what Arendt calls
plurality.

It is essential that people engaged in collegial teaching be able to

speak with their own authority (i.e., be different) and yet be radically open to
hear others (i.e., be equal) .
3.

The colleagues must function primarily as colleagues--intellectual

colleagues--and~

as members of a team whose joint responsibility it is to

deliver a curriculum or administer a program.

Ye emphasize "primarily" because,

at Evergreen at any rate, the colleagues will not be able to avoid sharing the
responsibilities of administering a program.
paid for.

This, ironically , is what we are

Ye must "deliver the goods" and there is the inevitable burden of

making sure that space is scheduled, syllabi are printed, and so on .

One of the

principal reasons people get fired at Evergreen is for not having student
evaluations in on time.

The paper must be pushed.

Some team teaching at

Evergreen and elsewhere consists of nothing more than administering a program .
But when the colleagues envisage their work in this way, what typically results
is team teaching by "division of labor . "

The teaching work is broken up

rationally into various pieces, and different teachers take responsibility for
different pieces .

Yhen the responsibilities are all added up, the entire

program is responsibly accounted for.
this conception of team teaching .

Collegial teaching is far removed from

Collegial teachers will responsibly share the

work of making sure the program runs, but they will not see that dimension as
the primary focus of their work .
4.
all.

Collegial teachers will DQ1 conceive of their program as a curriculum at
They will DQ! see the program as consisting of some domain of subjects,

topics, or methods which have to be covered .

They will instead view the program

and all its activities (assignments , lectures, seminars, tests, etc . ) as a way
of carrying on a conversation among themselves--a conversation about something

15
(where the program theme usually supplies the something).

Since they are

intellectuals who respect each other (are equals) and are interested in each
other (are different), the conversation they intend to have together will be a
form of collaborative inquiry.

By agreeing to teach collegially, two people

have agreed to inquire together into a question that interests each of them
(perhaps for different reasons).

They expect to get further in the inquiry than

each would alone because they respect the intelligence of each other and because
they are interested in the differing points of view of each other.
5.

Finally, the faculty colleagues must conceive of the students in a way that

differs from the way most faculty view most students, whether teaching in teams
or alone.

The students will be viewed in a two-fold way.

First they are taken

to be interested auditors to the ongoing conversation among the faculty
colleagues.

Second, they are viewed as potential participants in the

conversation, should they decide to enter it.

Each of these notions is liable

to misinterpretation .
To view the students as auditors does not in any way entail making them
passive recipients of knowledge delivered by expert faculty.

Indeed, the notion

of collegial teaching threatens the concept of expertise as it has come to be
understood in the academy and transforms the notion of knowledge away from
anything that could be "delivered."

By calling the students •auditors" we are

not referring to what specific activities they are called on to do in class (or
out of class); we are instead using the term to characterize the more general
and underlying relationship between the students and the faculty colleagues.
Students may listen to a conversation.

There are no demands placed on them .

An

auditor occupies, some think,* an educationally privileged position.
To view the students as potential participants in the conversation does not
mean that they must be judged by the faculty as having realized some potential
before they will be allowed into the conversation.

It does not mean that they

are required to have some prerequisite set of experiences before they are
permitted into the conversation.

All any one student has to do is decide to

join in the conversation, and she will be welcomed to it.
slippery point.

But this, too, is a

It will not do for the student to try to enter the conversation

* B's lecture makes this point explicitly and convincingly.

16
~

A student because the conversation by definition can only take place among

equals, and a student is not the equal of a faculty member.

The student who

tries to enter as a student will find her entry into the conversation barred.

A

student can only enter the conversation by renouncing studenthood--with all the
privileges of that role--and by assuming the stance of an equal and different
participant.

She must enter under a condition of plurality.

Thus, to say that

students are potential participants in a conversation is crucial.

This

potentiality is the possibility to cease acting like a student and to start
acting like a colleague--not an easy achievement for most students.
Can collegial teaching really occur?

These criteria make it clear that the

task is demanding, both for faculty and for students.
occur.

But we know that it can

Here are some often repeated scenes from teaching life at Evergreen.

These are specific moments in the work of a person engaged in collegial
teaching.
"Moments"
1.

It is the first day of class.

the class.

You face a sea of faces as you stand before

There must be one hundred young men and women--students--staring up

at you, wondering what you are going to say to them.

There is one thing that

makes this scene fundamentally different from the way it usually occurs in
almost every college or university.

In addition to the hundred students who

await your words are a few colleagues (maybe even only one) (one will do).
These colleagues may be seated among the students; they may be seated at a table
in front of the class alongside where you are standing; they may be standing
around the perimeter of the room.
they too will hear your words.

There are faculty colleagues present, and

Their presence as colleagues--and as fellow

teachers--makes typical relationships to the students impossible .

Their

presence makes the experience of that moment before speaking to a classroom
audience fundamentally different from the typical first encounter with a new
class.
Everyone knows the way this scene usually plays itself out.

When I teach

alone, when I stand before my students as their sole teacher, my students and I
exist in a pair-bond.

We each occupy complementary roles in a two-role

structure: student-teacher.

We each define the other.

They cannot be students

without me, their teacher; I cannot be a teacher without them, my students.

We

17
depend on each other for social existence, and we depend on each other for
behavioral coherence.

I cannot function reasonably as a teacher unless my

students perform the expected student behaviors (ask questions, hand in their
work, fail to hand in their work, etc.), and they certainly cannot function as
students unless I do my part, and become the teacher who does what teachers are
supposed to do.

We are locked in a dance that the school brings into being .

We

may arrange to have a lovely dance together; we may have a miserable time
together.

But we must dance and we cannot dance without our partner.

When I stand before my own class in that brief moment of silence that
precedes my speaking, I dimly feel the force of the pair-bond.

I know that a

great deal depends on my performance, on what I am going to say.

I know that my

students are hoping that I will be a good teacher, that I will do a good job .
I, too , hope that I will be good, just as I hope I will have good students .

The

having of these hopes may put one in a thrall, just as the opening strains of a
dance band put one in a kind of spell.
or I may disappoint them.

Either way I am the creature of my students .

may satisfy me or disappoint me.
teacher.

I may, in the end, satisfy my students,
They

Either way they are the creatures of me , their

Is there any way out of this spell?

other than satisfaction or disappointment?

Is there any outcome possible

Cannot each of us be freed from the

other?
In the version of the scene with my colleagues present, everything is
different--at least for the teacher.

I know the students are waiting for my

words, but now I am not so concerned with their expectations because I am not
just speaking to them .

I am not even primarily speaking to them.

Regardless of

what pedagogical function I am filling by making this talk (giving a lecture,
giving out an assignment , explaining a class activity, etc.), I am at the
deepest level speaking first to my colleagues, and only second to the students .
My colleagues are the ones I wish to touch with my words; they are the ones I am
most keenly aware of being seen by and

h~ard

by.

I am concerned with the next

step in our on-going conversation, a conversation that started, maybe, ten years
ago when we first met at a conference before we both were hired by this school
or, maybe, only two weeks ago when the other person was assigned to this team.
Regardless of how old the conversation is, it is up to me, right now, to keep it
going.

It is the responses and reactions of my colleagues I anticipate, their

appraisal I wonder about.

But this is different from the typical situation

18
alone with my students.
institutional roles.

Ky colleagues are not defined simply by their

They are one or two or three or four specific individuals

whom I respect and in whom 1 am interested.
Kirk, Nancy, Sandie, and Bill.

They are not professors; they are

They are: that well educated political

philosopher who for some reason became interested in Jung (1 wonder why he did
that?); that actress, who with a close friend, created a theatre form which
combines education with entertainment (I saw them put on a terrific
"performance" about 19th Century feminists about ten years ago); and so forth.
They are friends and colleagues, and I care what they think about me in a way
that differs from how I care about what my students think of ae.

I am not

trying to satisfy them, I am trying to contribute to the conversation in which
we are engaged together.

1 am trying to talk to them.

The students are there, too, of course, and I am talking to them, too, of
course.

But that sense of utter dependence within the pair-bond is gone.

Their

eager expectations or their sullen indifferences do not create the space in
which I speak any longer.

That space, instead, is constituted by the

conversation I am engaged in with my colleagues.

That space arises out of

shared intellectual interests, not out of social-psychological role definitions .
I am no longer the creature of my students, and they are no longer "mine."
not have a contingent identity.

To my colleagues I am who I have come to be in

their eyes over a long period of time across many different venues.
have to treat the situation as fragile (the great fear:
course and no one enrolled?!").

I do

No more dancing.

1 do not

•What if I gave a

I have room to breathe.

****
2.

Three connected moments:
A.

It is Tuesday morning.

As you approach the breakfast table, there is

just the slightest bit of extra bounce to your step.
seminar morning.
morning.

A~

Tuesday morning is faculty

you eat your cereal you wonder how the seminar will go this

You are eager to discuss this week's reading (Parts 1 and II of

Leviathan) with your colleagues after pouring over this strange text during the
two previous evenings.

You are particularly eager to question Kirk, the

political philosopher, to see how it is possible that Hobbes could ever have
construed nature as he did--as a state of "war of every one against every one."
Such a notion seems absurd to you.

At the same time, as a psychologist, you

19
have been surprised to find that Hobbes articulated a rather sophisticated
associationist psychology in his book.

And he did this several centuries before

you, with your own ahistorical training, had assumed that such a psychology
could have been developed.

You hope to explore with Nancy, the English

historian on the team, what the roots of this psychology were in England and
what effect it had on other thinkers of that time.

You can only wonder what

Sandie, the theatre instructor, and Bill, the sociologist, will make of this
text.

As you wonder, you suspect that Sandie will approach the book from her

feminist perspective, and Bill from his own interest in impersonal power,
derived from his study of Foucault.

Cereal and wonder:

a fine moment at the

beginning of the day.
B.

It is 1:30 P.M., Tuesday.

The faculty seminar, held in Kirk's living

room, was as interesting as expected, but not quite in the way you expected.
The seminar is never routine since it operates by no rules.

The teaching

team simply gathers to discuss the book they have all read.

Each team has to

invent its own way of being together, of talking together.

But this does not

mean they invent rules or procedures.

They improvise.

They discover who each

other is and how each other thinks simply by talking together in a protected
space.

The space is protected in a double sense.

It is protected from

students, and it is protected from administrative planning and decision making.
Business meetings are scheduled into the week for the purpose of planning so
that at faculty seminar the colleagues are free to discuss the text--and to do
so with no ulterior purpose other than reacting to the reading and sharing those
reactions.
This week Sandie surprised you by being uncharacteristically silent.

She

asked some specific questions about the text, but did not offer her own views on
it .

Kirk had been extremely helpful in connecting Hobbes's views to the rise of

science in general, and then to the specific science of constitution making that
was to culminate in the American Constitution a century and a quarter later.
explaining to the others about the psychological dimension of Hobbes, you had
discovered that Hobbes could be seen not only as an early associationist, but
even in some ways as a progenitor of Freud.

This insight pleased you, for it

helped you see that there was a much greater political component to
psychoanalysis than Freud had realized--a suspicion you had been harboring for

In

20
quite some time.

Bill never mentioned Foucault, though the perspective was

obvious in his brief adebatea with Nancy .
At noon, the five of you left Kirk's home to lunch together at a downtown
restaurant as was your custom on Tuesdays.

Lunch, gossip, a couple of comments

on Hobbes, an equal number on next week's book, and back to campus.
Now, in your car driving back to campus you begin to think about the upcoming
book seminar (20 students who will meet with you to discuss Leviathan at the
same time your four colleagues will meet with their groups of 20 to do the same
thing)--the normal Tuesday afternoon activity in your program.
like departing from the normal routine.

Today you feel

You play with several ideas, debating

whether to start the discussion by posing a question, whether to let the
students start it with their own comments, or whether to have them write for ten
minutes before talking.

You do not reach a decision, deciding instead to wait

'till you walk into the room to decide.

You realize that your impulse to

depart from your seminar's routine is a result of the thoughts this morning's
faculty seminar have stirred up in you .
take them somewhere.
nice opportunity.

The upcoming seminar with your students seems to present a

You would like to take advantage of it, but you haven't quite

yet figured out how .
C.

You want to stay with them; you want to

A moment of puzzled anticipation.

It is 2:30 P.M.--Seminar time.

You walk into the room.

You decide not

to have students write questions and issues from the day's reading on the board
as usual.

Instead you pose a question about the difference between Hobbes and

Plato. · You all read

~Republic

about six months ago, early in the program.

Your earlier ruminations about the latent political content of Freud's writings
have led you to think about the different ways to conceive of the proper
relationship between human nature and political organization or government .
Hobbes and Plato, you sense, have opposite notions about how this relationship
should be conceived.

You intuit that Hobbes's notion might be termed "negative"

and Plato's "positive," but you are not sure what these terms mean, or why you
think they apply.

You hope your question to the students will stimulate a

discussion that will help you sort this out; at the same time, you know that
prodding them to think about the present reading in terms of the earlier text is
good general practice, and is likely to lead somewhere fruitful, even if it is
not in the direction you are anticipating.

These thoughts race through your

21
head in that aoment you are waiting for the students to quiet down.
words for framing these thoughts will probably come.

The right

They almost always do.

In this moment, there are no colleagues in the room.

But this moment is not

the same as the usual moment before the beginning of a seminar.

Now, you are

about to engage in conversation with your students not primarily as an expert
trained in one of the academic disciplines (psychology) but rather as a person
who is a member of a faculty seminar that has just discussed the text your own
seminar will now discuss.

Your thoughts, your questions, your orientation to

the text have all been colored by the sustained discussion you had with your
colleagues on LeViatban.

You are coming out of one conversation and going into

another on the same text, and so naturally the first will have some influence on
the second.

But this new seminar will be another point in your sustained

conversation with your colleagues.

The faculty conversation is the primary

conversation; the conversation with your students is in some fundamental way
secondary.

Yet it is just as common to comment in faculty seminar about views

and ideas that emerged in your previous student seminar as it is the other way
round.

The discussions shape each other.

But, in the final analysis, the

students' perception of you will be as a member of the collegial team because
that is how you present yourself to them.

They will know that your decision to

begin the seminar differently is not just a whim.

They will know that you have

something on your mind, something that probably came from the faculty seminar
they know you attended earlier.
This stance toward the students
discipline.

replace~

the normal stance of member of a

You face your students not as someone who knows something important

about this text that they do not know, but as someone engaged in a serious
inquiry

~

others about this text.

Your conversation with them is in some

peculiar and indirect way, a "spillover" from that primary conversation.

But

this new stance does not eradicate your discipline's perspective in you; it
merely subordinates it .

Your question about Hobbes and Plato with its

empha~is

on human nature is directly connected to your interest in psychology; that
question emerged from an earlier focusing on a connection between Hobbes and
Freud in the faculty seminar.

Your question is a psychologist's natural

question and the fact that you formulated this question has everything to do
with the fact that you have been trained in the discipline of psychology.
the same time, however, you probably would not have made the connection or

At

22
formulated the question had you been a psychologist teaching alone.

Indeed, you

would never have been reading Hobbes with your students in the first place!

It

is only the collaborative inquiry, the collegial conversation, that has made
these thoughts and questions possible.
Your students then are left with a set of possibly inchoate, possibly dawning
set of questions about how they might fit into this inquiry.

But the

fundamental question is how they might relate themselves to this conversation
AmQll&

others, not how they might relate themselves to this 2D& special person,

their teacher.

And you are left happy to welcome them into this conversation,

if they want in, but you are not dependent on them to have the conversation in
the first place.

It is rather like having, along with your three children,

another adult at the dinner table.

The children will still get to converse, you

will still speak with them and respond to their questions and stories, but the
dynamics of the conversation will have altered entirely.

****
3.

It is the end of the academic year.

You spent the previous week (Evaluation

Week) writing narrative evaluations for each of your students, conferring with
them individually in evaluation conferences, and finishing up all your work with
them for the program.

Evaluation week is the most exhausting and intensive

working week of the year, and you are glad to be done with it.

Having

scrutinized the year's work accomplished by each of your students, having
written a short, detailed, evaluative essay about this work, having read each
student's own assessment of her or his work, and having discussed all of this
with each student, you are happy to put your students--each one of them--out of
your mind.

You feel finished with them.

The better part of this final week of the year is to be spent on the
program's final piece of work: a self-evaluation and colleague evaluations .
It is now Thursday, 9:00A.M.

You are alone in your office, having a cup of

coffee, awaiting the program's final meeting at 9:30 . . This will be the faculty
evaluation conference.
You spent Monday of this week writing your self-evaluation.
free-form essay reflecting on your work over the past year.

You wrote a

Each year you try

to do this piece of self-evaluation in a slightly different way.

As usual, you

never know what shape it will take, or indeed, even what themes you will select
for discussion, until you sit down to write.

By Tuesday morning, you had copies

23
of your self-evaluation in each of your faculty colleagues' mailboxes, and you
received copies of their evaluations of themselves in your mailbox.
Wednesday were spent writing evaluations of each of your colleagues.

Tuesday and
These were

frank letters written in the second person--addressed directly to each person.
You wrote about the quality of their work as colleagues and teachers in the
program.

There are no rules for writing such letters.•

There are only

traditions, norms, and precedents to guide you in your writing.

In general, one

tries to be frank, specific, and honest, encouraging and gentle, yet blunt when
necessary.

These letters are often challenging to write.

When colleagues rise

to the challenge, as they often do, they are wonderful to receive.
The conference you are anticipating, as you sip your coffee, is the final
event in the evaluation cycle.
and all are discussed.

At the conference all the evaluations are read,

Once again, it is up to the team to make up the specific

ordering of events--to decide just how they will make this part of the
conversation happen--but the purpose is clear.
discussed.

The letters are to be aired and

Though the written letter will be the permanent evaluation that

takes its place in the faculty member's portfolio and which is used as a basis
for faculty retention and contract renewal, in the life of the collegial team
the spoken word is to have the final say.

When the full discussion of each

person's work is over, about three hours from now, the team will disband .
As you drink your coffee, you wonder what each of your four colleagues will
have found to say about you this year.

You are not worried.

You know you have

done good work this year, and you are well aware that your colleagues have
appreciated your contributions.
knowledge.

But this is a broad feeling, a ceneral kind of

You are not worried, you are curious:

What specific words will each

of them have committed to paper to characterize your work, to convey their own
very personal reactions to your presence on the team?

You can only expect to be

surprised, for it is always a surprise to read such letters.

You savor this

moment, for though you are looking forward to summer vacation as much as anyone-the vacation that starts as soon as this conference is over--you realize how
rare is the occasion you are about to participate in once again, as you have for
the past fourteen years .

In its outward form, it resembles an annual ritual,

yet in its specific content it is anything but ritualistic or predictable.

*

Until recently, that is.

See the first section of Part II below.

You

24
can expect civility and courtesy, but you never know what will be written in the
letters or said in the discussions.
event to be grateful for.

The colleague evaluation conference is an

Human conversations such as those that take place in

these conferences are rare in professional life.
What is most rare is receiving the very concrete and careful attention to
one's work from a peer that is demanded by the writing of a colleague evaluation
letter.

Below are some selected paragraphs, excerpted from full letters, which

have been written in colleague evaluations over the years at Evergreen .

We

include them to suggest what receiving these letters might be like.
The first excerpt shows that you can expect to receive praise from your
colleague not in the form of bland meaningless generalizations, but rather in
direct concrete language which is powerful and convincing :
Dear
I have enjoyed teaching with you very much this year . . . . I have
really learned a lot from you . Rarely have I had a colleague I have
learned so much from . You are smart and well educated, and have the kind
of conceptual turn of mind which I long for in colleagues. You know a lot
about just the kind of material I have become thirsty to learn about
(political theory) and you have been very effective in conveying what you
know to me--through your lectures , through your contributions to faculty
seminars, and through informal talk over lunch, walking to the [Deli] to
get coffee, and on occasion, planning a workshop together.
You might also be surprised on some occasions to receive praise that is rather
more personal and less professional--in words which substantiate Richard Jones'
claim that colleagues letters of evaluation in the best of circumstances are
"professional love letters" (also see below, p. ___ ):
Dear
As you must know by now, I judge a colleague not only by his
intelligence, education, initiative, etc., etc . I am old-fashioned. I
look out and I see a person, and it is the person I seek to give an
account of, not merely his qualities. I want to say something about who
you are, and only secondarily about what you are . And so I say: You are
a mensch. The students and we were fortunate you have had you for a year.
And sometimes the affection is expressed in a different tone:
You're a smart son of a bitch, too, a fair Frizbee flipper, and the very
anti-thesis of Yossarian. If only you could sing .

25
Let's do this again sometime.
Sincerely,
Though praise and sometimes affection are to be expected, so too is
criticism.

The author of the first excerpt cited above continues in his next

paragraph to criticize his colleague very pointedly about something that
bothered all the members on the team all year long:
It has also been exasperating, at moments, to work with you. These
moments have invariably centered around program planning .... It is the
very qualities of mind and temperament that lead you to be such a good
intellectual and such a strong expositor, that in the context of team
planning, caused you to act in ways which frustrated me. There was
nothing wrong with your ideas or proposals. The problem was that you
would explain and justify them at much greater length than was necessary,
thus expending precious planning time. It felt as if you had a need to
fully finish a point, even when the issue had become moot. I mustered
much energy in order to be patient with you at such moments, though there
were times I didn't think I was going to make it.
The author continues in the next paragraph to offer a more serious criticism
to his colleague on a most sensitive point:
One other aspect of your teaching I want to critically question is
your way of talking to some students, some of the time. I haven't seen
you interact with students in seminar or in your office, but I have heard
you talk about students a great deal, and I have heard and read about (in
student evaluations of you) a number of cases where students feel you have
been unduly judgmental and downright unkind to them through things you
have said. I know that you care very much about students and that you
also work very hard at being fair and honest . But you have a
psychologist's tendency to categorize and diagnose. I fear that you
inadvertently trample on some students' feelings, some of the time, more
than is necessary or educationally useful.
Finally, from a different letter, one colleague finds an indirect way to
offer some very important criticism, even though he pretends to take it back
after offering it.

After suggesting that he is dismayed at having DQ

criticisms to offer in his letter, he continues :
I thought I had one room-for-improvement observation during your Freud
lecture . It was the only note I took during the lecture, and I stuck it
on my spike afterward, so I wouldn't forget it (being even then worried
that I might not have anything negative to say when today came). The note
says: " ___ perceives lectures as exclusively for conveying information,
and for getting the students to understand the information. He needs to
see them, sometimes, as occasions for inviting identification, by sharing
the ways he thinks as a scholar." And I was going to say to you in this
letter: " ___ , your Freud lecture was very informative, very instructive
and the students really appreciated it; but it was Ill for the students;

26
there was nothing in it form&, and nothing in it for~." And then I
, I'd like to hear you give an
was going to say: "Sometime,
imaginative, scholarly, stand-up professional lecture that is just between
you and your subject, and if the students understand it, fine; and if they
don't, O.K.; let 'em just admire you and look forward to someday being
like you." And then you had to go and give us your Kafka lecture! All
, and all for Kafka, and for ~ the sons of fathers! None of us could
be certain we'd understood you, but we all loved the inspiration of
wondering if we did. And some us ~-read Kafka with a more intimate
respect. So I didn't get to use my one room-for-improvement note.
Not much, he didn't.
In the previous case, specific criticism was offered as parts of letters that
were overall positive and praising in tone.

But how does one find a way to

write a letter when one wishes the critical spirit to dominate the whole letter?
The following is the opening paragraph of a letter from a person who found it
distressing to teach with his colleague:
Dear
Linda B. said it in her program evaluation: "
and
[the two faculty colleagues) didn't work as a team. There were two
completely different dimensions being expressed." I don't think
"dimensions" captures it, but I do know that this winter was one of the
most difficult collaborative teaching experiences I've had at Evergreen.
I want to try to unpack some of that here.
Sometimes a colleague finds it useful not only to refer to a comment
from a student's evaluation of his colleague, as in the previous excerpt, but
even to adopt a student's perspective himself in writing:
... But I think Scott C. is right in saying that you will always be more
popular with your ex-students than with your present students. You saw,
for instance, how much the students in our program came to appreciate your
ideas after winter quarter. And I would like to suggest the reason for
that: That you are dealing with such a tangle of complex ideas that the
average student can't work them out well enough to understand them until
some time after the time when he is supposed to be studying them. In many
ways, I'm a good, average student; as I've told you with my Hilbert story,
I can understand some things quickly, but I only understand important
things after spending a long time working them over for myself. That's
probably typical (except that most students never take the time to work
them out carefully). I've enjoyed a lot of your lectures, but I often
find myself confused.
In general, the most striking pleasure that comes from reading a colleague's
letter of evaluation is in discovering the careful attention with which your own
work has been observed and the detailed way in which it has been documented in

27
words.

This care expresses an appreciation for your work that can find no

substitute in the standard rewards that universities provide their teachers.
Here are some examples:
Dear
You deserve a major share of the credit for the success of this
program. So much of what we did this year was either your direct
contribution or grew out of a suggestion or idea of yours. You suggested
the use of COM 110 for program meetings, which gave us additional latitude
in our schedule. You identified and recruited the two writing tutors.
You proposed that we keep the same seminar group through all three
quarters, which has worked so well I would like to adopt it as the
standard practice; and that we add a third seminar each week during spring
quarter. You suggested the faculty panel discussions as a way of reducing
the number of traditional lectures and as a way of providing opportunities
for the faculty to be more creative with the material. You also suggested
the student panel at the end of spring quarter. You argued for the
inclusion of the module on critical reasoning and for a program retreat
It was your idea to have the students take over the responsibility
for writing their own critiques of their essays winter and spring quarter.
You produced most of the workshops which we used throughout the year.
Although, you were not the program coordinator, you paid attention to all
the little details and were instrumental in seeing that everything got
done on schedule .... All of these things have had a major impact on
making this a successful program for students and faculty alike.
The sheer length of this list, not the significance of any particular item on
it, is what gives the letter its force.

The reader, who took his own work as a

matter of course during the year, is suddenly forced to see its cumulative
impact through the eyes of his attentive and appreciative colleague.
Whereas it is the breadth of the attention in the previous paragraph which is
most impressive, in the following case, it is the discerning nature of the
attention that makes the difference:
Dear
.. . Of your several workshops, each of which I believe was quite useful to
students (both during the workshop sessions and during the seminars
afterward), I believe the one on Nietzsche turned out to be the richest
and most provocative. It helped the students sort their way through,
among other things, Nietzsche's key distinction between genealogy and
definition, which , if only they knew, lies close to the heart of much of
the recent philosophical debate in the human sciences.
In this final excerpt, written after participating in Evergreen's atypical
Native American Studies program, a teacher shows through her own expressive and

28
distinctive style of writing that she has been watching her colleague from the
very first day of the program.

The quality of the attention here is sensuous

and touches on aspects of teaching that are very different from the subjects of
the previous two excerpts, but once again, it is the concrete and detailed
quality of the writer's attention that comes across and that means the most to
the reader:
Dear
When you came into NAS [Native American Studies], you seemed a
veteran to waiting, wondering and accepting what was. You didn't struggle
as I did upon entering the program. You came to Monday meetings. You
prepared and delivered a terrific lecture. You waited in your office for
students who needed your assistance. You took your share, you said "yes"
and you seemed to love all of it. You were non-judgmental, supportive and
listened carefully to everything said on Mondays. Your attention (at
least it seems like attention, you may be body travelling or hypnotizing
yourself to do something or other, or not do it, or memorizing lines for a
play; silent attentiveness, focused eyes, a rarity) was fascinating,
perhaps even curious because I lost mine easily (attention) and wondered
"what in the world is ___ so busy puzzling over, nothing at all has
happened for at least an hour now ...
The letter from which these lines are quoted--written by a painter--is handwritten in thick, strong, black strokes and is accompanied by a black-and-white
sketched portrait of the colleague addressed in the letter of evaluation.

The

portrait of ___ is an integral part of this evaluation and demonstrated to him
irrefutably that he has had perspicuous attention paid to him for one entire
quarter.
These excerpts suggest what our faculty colleague has to anticipate, as he
sits in his office sipping coffee and waiting for the faculty evaluation
conference to begin.

This moment of silence does not include students as did

the previous two moments of silence (prior to the lecture and prior to the
seminar).

The point is that in collegial teaching the most telling moments are

not fund&mentally driven by the presence of students.

****
4.

It is lunch time on campus.

As usual, you go to the campus cafeteria, take

salad from the salad bar, and with your tray held carefully before you, you walk
around the corner from the main eating area, crowded with students, to sit at

29
the long table out in the corridor where many faculty traditionally gather
during the lunch hour.

There are some faculty colleagues you expect to see

here, because, like you, they routinely take their lunch at this table.

But

there are · always new and unexpected faces, too, as many colleagues come to this
table occasionally, for what reasons you have no idea, and then are not seen
again there for weeks at a time.
Conversation at this table can be about almost anything.

You have privately

charted the favorite topic over the past fourteen years, watching it range from
pig feed in the early seventies when everyone seemed to have a farm, through
personal computers when your colleagues first discovered word processing, to
race track and training conditions when one of your colleagues persuaded some of
her more optimistic friends to go in with her on a race-horse, to the current
favorite:

various early retirement schemes.

statistical dominance.

But your chart indicates only

On any given day, anything may be up for discussion--

Evergreen politics (always a favorite), the health of one or another ailing
colleague, events in the news (the cold fusion furor captured attention for
weeks on end, perhaps setting the record for a single topic's ability to crowd
out others), and, of course, students.
The other thing to appreciate about conversation in this setting is that,
because of the shape of the table (rectangular and rather long) and the size of
the group (ranging from about 6 to maybe 16), the conversation shifts easily
back and forth between separate local private conversations between two and
three, and one public conversation drawing in all, or most, at the table.
As you approach with your salad you sit down at the far end of the table,
start to eat, and begin listening to what's going on.

As you listen and eat, a

colleague pulls up the chair next to you with his lunch.

It is David, someone

you have worked with on committees, but with whom you have never taught.

He is

not a regular diner at this table, but his visits are not infrequent either.
At the other end of the table, the "regulars" STe discussing the recent
earthquake in Mexico.

Someone comments that it seems so unnatural that the

villagers always return to rebuild their towns at the same sites, even though
these have been sites of regular quakes throughout the centuries.

Another

person starts to say something about "natural selection," when David turns to
you and starts talking.

He says that he has always wanted to be in a program

about the theme of "nature."

He is a professor of American Studies, with

30
literature as his main interest, and has

8

reputation as a fine teacher (you've

talked to former students of your own who have gone on to work with him and know
that invariably he earns their respect).

He goes on to explain that he doesn't

mean a program in natural history or nature studies, but rather a historical
program in the humanities which examines the shifting meanings in different eras
and in different cultures of the terms "nature" and "natural."
A little bell goes off in your head, as you put together two heretofore
unrelated facts about yourself:

(1) for some years you have half-consciously

thought you would enjoy teaching with David in

8

program, and (2) you too have

been interested in this question, but from a very different point of view.

As a

psychologist, you are well aware of the old nature/nurture debate in your field,
but of late you have begun to wonder whether "nature" can have any determinate
meaning in intellectual analysis.

"Nature" itself seems to be a socially

constructed concept and hence valueless in helping one determine what does not
derive from culture.

Yet how can one do without the concept?

Without a concept

of nature, critics and theorists would seem to be at the mercy of culture in
putting together any particular analysis, especially one pertaining to
psychological development, your own interest.

But you have always looked at the

question philosophically--as one to be settled by analysis and argument.

It had

never occurred to you to undertake an historical inquiry into the meaning of
"nature.•
You realize that David was not making any kind of concrete proposal, but just
talking off the top of his head in response to the conversation he was hearing.
You mention to him about how interesting the question of nature strikes you,
referring briefly to the nature/nurture tension in psychology.

You then say,

"If you ever get serious about putting together such a program, I might be
interested in taking part."

You think he will probably register your sentiment

and continue the conversation on the abstract plane it has been on.

There is no

hurry in offering this program after all, and you are just trying to plant a
seed.
To your surprise, David pounces on your suggestion.

He begins to get

excited, and starts to talk with you about what year you might do this together,
who else might be good on the team, and what books would work in the program.
You find his enthusiasm infectious and thirty minutes later, the two of you have
sketched out a program.

You have discussed student projects, thematic centers

31
for each of the three quarters, historical eras to focus on, and have come up
with at least a half-dozen •must use" books.
the program: •states of Nature.•

You even have a tentative name for

You have also decided that you will teach this

program not the year after ·next, for you both have teaching commitments for that
year, but the year

after~.

It is settled.

Each of you meanwhile has been

given the assignment to try to recruit one more faculty member--David will talk
to Tom, a physicist who also writes poetry and likes to teach math, and you will
keep your eyes open not for a specific person, but rather for any historian who
would be interested in this theme and in working with these people.
The enthusiastic half hour of lunchtime conversation when a year-long
Coordinated Studies program is conceived is a critical moment that distinguishes
collegial teaching from team teaching.

On what does this moment depend?

First, it depends upon the fact that at

Evergreen there really is no set curriculum.

(But see Part II.)

There are some

programs that are always taught, and there are some clusters of faculty who feel
responsible to make sure that these programs get taught, but there are no
faculty assigned to teach the same programs year in and year out.

"States of

Nature" will come into existence (for one year only, most likely) not because it
is part of any pre-designed curriculum, but because you and David discovered at
a certain moment that you shared with each other an intellectual interest and
the desire to work together as colleagues.
this one program will arise

~

The specific curricular features of

A consequence of this shared desire to be

colleagues; the collegial arrangement is DQ! created in order to implement a
pre-set curriculum.
This moment also depends on the fact that you take your lunch at a table (or
more generally, that you live your working life on campus in such a way) that
mixes you up with colleagues who differ from you--colleagues from different
disciplines, colleagues with different kinds of training, colleagues with
different turns of mind from yours.

This fact probably depends on the anterior

fact that there are no departments at Evergreen and that your discipline is not
the source of your primary professional identity.
Finally, this moment probably depends on the fact that both you and David
have participated previously in many team-taught Coordinated Studies programs,
and thus unhesitatingly trust your own and each other's ability to put together
yet another one and have it work out.

It is no "big thing" you are proposing,

32
just another year's work in an ongoing life of teaching.

It is a half-hour

moment that will lead to a year-long intensification of your conversation about
"nature."
What the moment conveys is something intangible yet significant.

This moment

suggests that the decision to become a teaching colleague with someone else
might be faced at any moment, in the least anticipated of times and places, and
as an intimate part of everyday, mundane life.

It may not happen often--years

could go by with no such moments occurring--but the important point is that it
could happen at any moment.

It does not require a department meeting, a

planning group meeting, a conference with a dean, a curriculum retreat, or any
other administratively blocked-out unit of time.
least likely to occur on "administrative time."
administered, that cannot be managed.

In fact, such moments are
They are moments that cannot be

They are moments that either do or do not

emerge from the lived life together of a faculty of potential teaching
colleagues.
This moment also conveys that collegial teaching tends to burst its own
boundaries.
program.

The first three moments occur in the confines of an academic

They occur during the time the teaching colleagues are in fact

teaching together .

But the fourth moment suggests that a teacher's orientation

is changed as a result of the habit of collegial teaching.

Wonderful teaching

colleagues may be rare, but on the other hand, they may be anywhere.
know until you actually teach with someone.

You never

You will never know unless you take

a chance.

****
5.

I am in a lecture hall.

I am one faculty member among 100 students.

in the sixth row of seats in the middle with a good view of the lectern.
my colleagues, A, is about to deliver a lecture on Plato's Meno.
and Kirk, sit scattered around the room.
lectern, and I, also, had lectured on

Sandie, Nancy,

A's lecture, he has told me,

I had presented Socrates as an

ironist; he wishes to show that Socrates may be seen as something very
different: a comic figure, a humorist.

One of

Three days ago, I had been at the

the~·

will be a direct response to what I said.

I am

33

One hour later he has completed his lecture.
is, for me, a profound moment of silence.

Vhile he takes questions, there

In this moment I am allowed to savor

my immediate visceral reaction to my colleague's lecture.
Really, it is an extraordinary moment.
On the one hand, I couldn't feel more flattered.

My colleague has spent a

sustained period of thinking and writing for the sole purpose of responding to
what I said in my lecture.

None of this marvelous lecture would have come into

existence had A not taken my words and thoughts seriously enough to want to
respond to them in a serious and sustained way.

There is no more potent way he

could have found to manifest his respect for me and my work.

Moreover, this

respect has made itself felt publicly in the intellectual air of the program:
my faculty colleagues and all the students breathe it in, whether they will or

not.
On the other hand, I am startled by how different his view of Socrates is.
Yes, I had quoted Guthrie's line in my talk emphasizing that everyone has his
own Socrates, but it never occurred to me that anyone could see Socrates the way
A does.
I are pleased by this difference.

A's response to my lecture is not some

assistant professor's picky academic critique, nor is it in any way an attempt
at some kind of intellectual one-upsmanship.
vision.

It is rather an alternative

This different vision makes my own view sharper.

It outlines my own

thoughts by showing me, and anyone who listened, the limits of my thought.

It

helps distance my Socrates from me; I begin to hear--in my memory--my own
lecture as a student might have heard it.

As I think once again of A's

Socrates, his view begins to become more plausible.

Perhaps A is right, perhaps

we should take Socrates more at his own word; perhaps he does know nothing;
perhaps we should assume he means just what he says--and that he is not trying
to say something much more complex to a different audience.

Vhat a radical

idea!
But no.

I have thought too long and worked too hard to develop my own

Socrates to give him up so quickly.

But there is a touch more humility now in

my interpretation, just as there is more clarity in it.

I have begun to

consider why A would have just the Socrates he does, given what I know about his
intellectual commitments, and consequently, why I would have the one I do.

I

see now that more than "careful reading of the text" has produced my Socrates, a

34
lot more.

Like Frost's neighbor in the spring, I have been called to my limits

and have answered the call.
Finally, I wonder what the students will make of the two incompatible
Socrates that have been put before them.

They will be on their own now to work

out their own ideas in seminar discussions, informal talk outside of class,
responses to essay assignments, and perhaps in responses to exam questions.

I

hope that these two sharply differentiated figures of Socrates that have been
set before them will stimulate them not to choose one or the other--though there
is always that danger--but rather to develop a third equally sharply different
Socrates of their own.

If any individual student goes so far as to do so, and

also has the gumption to find a way to make his Socrates public in the program,
then I stand to gain still more in my own understanding of my Socrates.
no students do that, there is always A.

But if

He and I have a lot to talk about.

****
Questions
1.

What actually happens in a collegially taught program?

What would I see if

I observed such a program for a week?
It depends on how you looked at what you are able to see.

If you looked at

just what happened in and around classrooms, you would see lectures, you would
see seminar discussions, you might see workshop exercises or science labs, you
would see students reading books in the library or in their rooms, writing
papers or doing problems and exercises.

You might see students studying in

preparation for an exam or writing the exam.

If you looked behind the scenes,

you would see a faculty seminar and a faculty planning meeting.

With the

exception of the last two items, what you would see is not very different from
what you might see in almost any college course.

In the big meetings and

lectures there would be several faculty members in the room, rather than only
one, but the students would be engaged in more or less the same activities they
traditionally engage in at most colleges:

reading, writing, problem solving,

observing, discussing, experimenting, thinking, and so forth.
There is no special technique that makes collegial teaching.

We are not

concerned with new technologies, new methods, or new "strategies."

As we noted

in the Introduction (to The Paradox of Pedagogy], many schools are trying to

35
create wlearning communities,• so even seeing faculty teams having seminars and
meetings together will not be a strange sight in higher education anymore.

But

this is essentially an administrative movement, and an administrative strategy
cannot make teaching

collegia~.

The methods that are used for instruction will

not reflect what is distinctive about collegial teaching.

The methods of

instruction will be whatever the teachers on the team decide they will be; they
will be as traditional or as experimental as are the individual teachers on the
team.

But they will themselves, for the most part, not reflect what is

wcollegial" about the teaching and about the team, nor will they turn team
teaching into collegial teaching.
What is distinctive about collegial teaching is the stance taken toward one's
colleagues.

Collegial teaching is primarily dependent on how you relate to your

colleagues, which, not incidentally, affects the stance it is possible to take
toward your students.

These stances result from taking the relationships with

your colleagues, rather than your relationships with your students, as primary.
Such a turn creates a different spirit in the classroom, a different ethos.

We

presented our view of collegial teaching through a series of moments in the
previous section because there is nothing directive or technical to say about
collegial teaching.

Paraphrasing Tussman, if we could make an ethos for you, we

would; as it is, we can only help you think about creating one for yourself.
If you observed a collegially taught program for a week, you would begin to
feel this spirit of collegiality, but the activities you saw would, for the most
part, not be very different from what you might see in any other classroom.
2.

You qualified your response above twice with the phrase, "for the most

part."

Why?

There are a few things you might see that could directly reflect the
collegial nature of the teaching, and these might be somewhat different from
what you would expect to see under normal teaching conditions .

For instance, at

a lecture, you might hear a professor raise a question from the floor--a rather
sophisticated question, perhaps--and you might hear five minutes of dialogue
back and forth between the lecturer and the questioner which wouldn't resemble
the normal pattern of question-and-response at normal college lectures.
Quite frankly, you might hear a lecture that was, to your ears, too
sophisticated for the students.

In a collegially taught program, this would not

36
be the result of an incorrect, one might say, overestimation of the students'
abilities.

It would be due to the fact that the faculty member was speaking

principally to his colleagues.

Auditors have the chance to listen, but they are

not taken into consideration very much by the parties to the primary
conversation .

And there is certainly none of the "speaking down to" or

pandering to students that you sometimes see in colleges.

While you might be

surprised by the intellectual sophistication of some material in these programs,
it makes sense, if you think about the assumptions behind collegial teaching.
You might show up at the lecture hall one day to find a "faculty panel"
instead of a normal lecture.

The faculty panel would consist of the whole

faculty team seated behind a table, each with a prepared talk of ten to twenty
minutes.

The way we have done them, each presenter has come with a prepared

response to a text read by the whole program, or to a question posed to the team
(by the team) beforehand.
of the others will say.

No one on the panel has any foreknowledge of what any
A hurried whispered conference at the start determines

the order of presentation, and then each faculty member rises in his or her own
turn and speaks.

After the formal presentation there is discussion among the

panel members and between them and the students.
Faculty panels are often the occasion of pleasant surprises.

Given the

ground rule that there is no previous discussion among presenters, it is usually
startling to discover how well the talks "go together" in one way or another .
It often seems as if they had been planned as a whole rather than independently
of each other.

By saying they "go together," we don't mean that the presenters

agree with one another, but rather that there is a coherence in the presented
material--as if all the participants were involved in the same conversation.
And that is the point.

The "surprising coherence" is not really surprising

at all, because the colleagues

~

all involved in the same conversation.

They

have been reading the same books, discussing the same questions, formulating
topics and examg, and listening to each other for the duration of the program .
The fact they did not speak to each other about this one panel is a small fact
in the face of their ongoing work together .
their talks.

Of course there is coherence in

They are, over the long run, having a coherent conversation .

Finally, in a similar vein, if you showed up to observe a normal lecture , you
should not be surprised to hear it peppered with references to ideas, insights,
and questions from previous talks by the lecturer's colleagues.

Such concrete

37
relating of one's present talk to one's colleagues' previous talks comes
naturally and easily to those who teach collegially and aakes the tone of even
•normal" lectures somewhat different under the conditions of collegial teaching
than they would otherwise be.

You might also find the occasional essay

assignment or exam question which explicitly references the differing points of
view of specific colleagues on the team.
content

21 the colle&ial dialo&ue emer&es

In other words,
~ ~

2i

~

~ ~

intellectual

2f

~

pro&ram.

In some cases this dialogue is the single most important text; in others, it is
a subordinate yet significant text; and in still others, it is a latent, only
partly conscious text.
3.

You say collegial teaching requires a "turning away from students."

the students feel rejected?

Don't

Don't the students need attention and care in order

to become properly motivated?
There are several different ways to answer this question.
(i)

The simple answer to the question about feeling rejected may be simply

no, they don't feel rejected.

The snide answer may be that rejection of

students is, in the very best situations, an irrelevance in college teaching.
After all, aren't colleges premised on the possibility of rejecting anyone-through awarding an "F"?

Students begin college by being rejected.

that they have to find acceptance and make themselves appreciated.
the case that faculty members

~

by accepting students.

They know
It is rarely

(But see the

comments on Evergreen's Native American Studies Program below.)

But this is

only a snide answer.
An

example may better answer the question.

On the occasion of one

collegially taught course at a college where students could shift enrollment
during the early weeks of the semester, one of the colleagues introduced himself
to the students on the first day with the blunt statement that he was there for
the purpose of continuing an interesting conversation to be had with his
colleague.

He hoped, he told the students, that they might profit from this

conversation, but he really didn't care all that much whether they did or not.
His alarmed colleague, who had been sitting in the front row during this
announcement, was quick to express his fears after class that their enrollment
would surely drop precipitously as a result of this introductory statement.

38
"You don't keep students by rejecting them at the outset,• he said.
enrollment increased by 15\ by the end of the first week.
concluded that "greed" was responsible:

In fact,

The fearful colleague

The students sensed that something

special and vital was going on and they were greedy to be in on it.

Real

conversation, genuine inquiry, friendship (which often involves a certain
exclusivity)--these are not the normal fare served up by modern institutions-not even colleges.

Students are usually appreciative of these things when they

see them; they want to be as close to them as possible for as long as possible
once they come into contact with them.

Collegial teaching gives them that

opportunity.
(ii)

But beyond psycho-social dynamics, there is something more to say about

this •turning away."
for students.

It is

Turning away from students in no way implies not caring
a~

of caring . for students.

parent at the dinner table with her three children.

Think about the single
As the sole adult present,

her primary orientation will always be toward the children.
them and her care will be obvious.
a member of the dinner table?

She will attend to

But what happens when a second adult becomes

The first adult takes a spouse and suddenly two

adults who care about each other are dining with their three children.

Does the

fact that they attend to each other and care about each other mean they no
longer care about their children?

Of course not.

On the contrary, their care

for each other becomes one mode of manifesting care for their children.
Moreover, the fact that their attention is not focused entirely on their
children gives the children some breathing space, some room to grow in; it gives
them the opportunity to listen to adult conversation and notice what adults are
like.

It lets the children appreciate the adults, not only the other way round .

Turning away from students thus in no way entails ceasing to care for them.

It

does mean that the care will be manifested in different ways and that it will be
experienced in different ways.
(iii)
~of

It is important to add that turning away from students is done by the
colleagues.

as he or she teaches.

But each member of the team continues to be an individual
One must distinguish the teaching done by the individuals

from "the teaching" (or whatever it is) done by the collegial team.
on the team will teach as they teach.

Individuals

Some may be nurturing and attentive of

students; others may spend less time and energy on students.

Some may be

39

supportive and warm, others may be distant and cold.

All this is a matter of

temperament, teaching style, and individual inclination.
The turning away we are stressing is done by the team.

The students'

experience in a collegially taught program has at least two facets.

It is an

experience of a team and also an experience of individual teachers--particularly
the one individual teacher who is their seminar leader , adviser, reader of
essays, and evaluator.

It is thus possible for an individual student to feel

supported, nurtured and attended to by a single teacher and at the same time be
a witness to, be an auditor of, a team of colleagues who clearly care more about
their work together than they do about the collectivity called "the students"
who are outsiders to this work.
4.

O.K., you sustain a vital conversation with your colleagues and you make

this the center of your work.

But do you actually teach your students anything?

Do you care if they learn anything?
One must distinguish, once again, the "you singular" from the "you plural."
The individual teachers, in their individual teaching (their lectures, the way
they lead their seminars, the comments they write on student papers, what they
say during individual conferences in their office) may teach a great deal .
may teach in a very traditional way in their individual teaching.
separate question whether the team of colleagues
anything.

It is possible that they do.

~

A

~

They

It is a

2f colleasues teaches

It is also possible that they will

teach nothing, and yet that the students will still learn something.

It depends

on how you construe the word "teach."
The principal question is whether students can get something of value by
becoming auditors to a collegial team.

We feel they can, just as children can

get something of value listening to adult conversation at the dinner table.

We

are not interested in trying to prove that they do, because, in part, that would
requires us to turn back toward the students and take an uncollegial interest in
them as the bearers of "student outcomes . "

It is sufficient that we think they

can get something; that thought alone is the basis of our actions.
The secondary question is bow many students can get something of value by
participating in a collegially taught program.

This too is an empirical

question and there is no way we can answer it.

We can respond to this question

40
with another question:

If you knew at the outset that only 10\ of your students

would get something of long-lasting value by participating in such a program,
would you still go ahead with it?
would we find?

If we asked this question of ourselves, what

Probably only that one of us would and one of us wouldn't.

This

seems, again, not a very good approach.
Another approach to this question is to return to the point of view developed
by Foucault and Illich.

Illich, remember, criticized schools for equating

learning with teaching, that is, for making it an axiom that no one learns
anything without being taught it by an institutionally certified teacher.

We,

who are called teachers by our institution, have been trying to find ways to
continue our own learning while working within the confines of the institution
called a school, and at the same time, we are trying to provide a different kind
of opportunity for those the institution calls students--an opportunity in which
they may learn something through means other than those the institution defines
as •teaching."

This seems to us worth doing regardless of how many students

On the other hand, we must add that we have been

take up this opportunity.

encouraged, not discouraged, by our students' responses--and the more time that
elapses between the experience itself and when we hear from them, the more
encouraging are their responses.
5.

You may feel encouraged by student responses, but don't the students feel

discouraged?

Don't they get confused by hearing so many different views of the

same subject?
Thank you.

That's it exactly!

We teach them confusion.

We do, in fact, teach our students something .

We do not give them the opportunity to become

unconfused by making themselves dependent on the authority of institutionally
recognized authorities.

By having colleagues speaking authoritatively to one

another, but doing so in front of the students, they would--of course!--become
confused.

They would have to develop, in consequence, · their own authority if

they want to find any truthful answers for themselves.
them any unchallengeable thought.
collegial teaching.

We do not deliver to

Everything is disputable (and disputed) in

If the students learn anything, they learn that if they are

going to have any thought,

~have

to do

~

the thinking.

41
6.

Let's be clear.

You~

teachers.

As you yourself admit, you still evaluate

students, you still award and deny credit, you still are a cog in the
credentialing process carried on by your institution.

Maybe all your fancy talk

is just a way of kidding yourselves into thinking that you're not doing what, in
fact, you are doing.

Isn't this all an elaborate justification for your own

decision to live your lives in an institution?
Maybe.

Without question, we contribute to the institution's functioning as

an institution.

And this institution is a functional part of the larger

institutional framework of modern society.

We do, however, deny the implied

charge of being blind to this aspect of our work.
it.

We have our eyes wide open to

In the next section, we try to illuminate the paradoxical nature of our own

institution.

We argue that the very institution that has enabled and even

encouraged collegial teaching also threatens it at every turn.
All we can say is that for reasons we cannot explain, we have experienced our
teaching together as human interaction of the type that institutions
automatically erode and eventually eradicate.

We cannot justify this claim.

We

chose instead to write about the experience.
7.

There is an unresolved tension about the number of people who can teach as

colleagues.

You describe teams of four and five colleagues in many of your

examples, yet the experience you speak of

involves~

colleagues.

Can more

than two colleagues really act together in a way that satisfies your conception
of collegial teaching?
This is a

question~

cannot answer.

We are not in a position to answer it.

Your question might just as well have been:
written this book?

Could more than two of you have

But only the two us did write it; so how can we answer the

question?
We can, however, attempt some small commentary around the question.
metaphors we have used are distinctively based on two.
coincidence.

The

This is probably not a

It is certainly a reflection of our experience.

But the nature of

our experience says nothing about what else is possible.
Perhaps the image of Socrates in conversation is more useful a metaphor than
dancing or dinner with a spouse and children.

Socratic dialogues typically

42

start with two people in conversation, Socrates and his interlocutor.
the conversation itself creates opportunities for others to join in.

However,
This can

happen in many different ways, and does happen in different ways in different
dialogues.

The important point is that what starts out •naturally" as

appropriate for two can become, equally naturally, appropriate for three, or
four, or five, or many.

The metaphor is limited in that Socrates is never set

into conversation with an equal.
~

But the image presented in the Pbaedo of a

of friends gathered for a final conversation with Socrates before his

death suggests with great force that what begins with two need not be limited
only to two.
So perhaps it is best to think of two teaching colleagues starting a
conversation.

Early on, the other colleagues stand in somewhat the same

position as the students.

They have the opportunity to join in if they choose.

Nothing forces them to, but nothing prevents them from doing so either.

Of

course, they have it easier than the students, because they don't have the
institutionally imposed label of "student" to overcome.

They are already by

definition "colleagues," and the only question is whether they will really
become colleagues.
8.

Can I learn to do collegial teaching at my institution?
The two key words in your question are "learn" and "institution"?

~to

be a colleague?

to Socrates:

Can one

This question is a variant on Keno's opening question

"Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught?

Or is it not

teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess
it by nature or in some other way?"
a teacher?

Can one learn excellence of character from

Have we been interested in teaching anything by our writing?

Our A

and B had different answers to what flowed from questions such as these, and so
do we.
With respect to the word "institution," the question is about the possibility
of working against the natural grain of modern institutions.
all institutions would disapprove of collegial teaching.

We don't mean that

Quite the contrary.

Many institutions might well approve of it and want to foster it.
doing, they will inevitably make a program out of it.

But in so

They will issue memos

promoting it, offer workshops to help faculty learn how to do it, appoint
administrators to support it, appropriate funds to study it, implement it, and

43
above all else, evaluate its effectiveness.
Support is easily imaginable.

An Office of Collegial Teaching

In doing all these things which institutions do

so naturally, they will be making it difficult for collegial teaching to happen.
But probably not impossible.

We would guess that most colleges and universities

are not yet so thoroughly administered that two colleagues could not get
together and try to put a conversation between them at the center of their
teaching .
Our experience of teaching in an institution has given us a basis for a more
elaborate response to your concern.

In the next section, we examine the short

history of our institution, Evergreen, using it as a case study to shed light on
the larger question of the relationship of collegial teaching to its inevitable
institutional setting.

PART II:

COLLEGIAL TEACHING AI EVERGREEN

Earlier we suggested that there was something about our current academic life
together at Evergreen that encouraged us to write about collegial teaching now.
We write now because we feel collegial teaching slipping away from the college.
Maybe it is already gone.
In the last several years our conversation has turned to the question of what
we are losing or what we fear we will lose.
loss that occurs through a draining away.

The German word Schwund refers to a
The draining away has the peculiar

quality of not being noticeable until everything is gone.
said the person who explained the word to us.

"Think of a pond,"

"Everyday, you return to the pond

and it is still there; 'it's a pond,' you say.

You may be a little uneasy

because it seems to be changing, but you cannot articulate your uneasiness.
reassure yourself that everything is fine; 'it's a pond.'
back and the pond is gone.

You

The next day you come

As you think back, you can reconstruct the history

of the loss of the pond as a gradual, incremental phenomenon, but there was no
way to do so as the process was going on.
pond back .

.llu!.t is Schwund, that loss."

And, what's more, you can't get the
Evergreen made possible what we

joyfully experienced as collegial teaching.
we found something profoundly positive.

In all of the College's negativity,

Evergreen is changing now and we are

suffering a loss, a Schwund.
Just as we could not describe Evergreen in general, catalogue-like,
managerial terms, we cannot describe our loss in general terms.

Just as we had

to convey something of the distinctiveness of this place and of the experience
of working here by those several moments in the life of an Evergreen faculty
member, we must now try to convey something of this loss by discussing specific,
telling events in the evolution of the College.

The events are not

representative; they are not meant to "stand for" something other than
themselves.

They are simply topics of conversation.

What follows should be read as a concern about the regimentation and, more
kindly, regularization of Evergreen.

It could be read as an attack on

administration or, worse, on particular administrators, but we do not want it to
be.

There has been a lot of concern with some administrators at the College,

especially with people brought in with reputations for being effective
administrators and for "making things happen."

While we are concerned with the

fact that our collegiate life has become documentably more administered, we do

45

not wish to join in an attack on administrators per se.

We are concerned about

a loss, a Schwund, that has come with what many perceive to be a gain.
all, there are good reasons for doing away with some ponds.)

(After

We all have come

to be participants, more or less willing participants, in a new economy of
"planning." *

Behind the "moments" out of our lives at Evergreen painted in the

previous section, there lies a sense of openness to possibility, of serendipity,
of a readiness to accept one's responsibility as a member of the faculty.
had the sense that one could always be surprised by this place.
changed.

One

Things have

We are now more secure in our positions, more clear about what needs

to be done, more full of resources (a state we would distinguish from "being
resourceful") .

Life has become so regular that one generally knows what is

expected and what to expect.

The institution has come closer to running itself.

Of course, that is another way of saying that the institution now requires good
administrators to manage all the good things that we now have.

What follows is

an expression of concern about a new life that we have been invited to live , and
that we are now living, in this institution that made possible our collegial
life together, which we remember well.
Security: From Faculty Evaluation tQ Faculty Reappointment
At an especially difficult point (October 6, 1987) in the process of
replacing a Faculty Evaluation system with a Faculty Reappointment Policy,** the

* "Planning" is a new concept . It is, at best, sixty years old. Uwe
Poerksen calls it an "amoeba word," a •plastic word" that has no shape but that
can be made to encompass anything. Ivan Illich tells about talking with Jacques
Maritain "about the question which bothered me, that in his whole philosophy,
I didn't find any access to the concept of planning. And he asked me if this
was a different, an English word for accounting . I told him no . And was it
for engineering. I said no. And then at a certain moment, he said to me, 'Ah!
Je comprend, mon cher ami, maintenant je comprend.' Now I finally understand .
"C'est une nouvelle espece du peche de presomption.' It's a new specie of the
sin of presumption, planning . "
(From "Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman:
Conversations with Ivan Illich,• CBC Transcripts, 1989, p. 4 . )
** In a memo to the faculty about the changes we describe here, Guy Adams,
himself a member of the committee that wrote the new policy, insisted that we
all recognize that the new policy was, in fact, a reappointment policy, not
principally an evaluation system . He pointed out, correctly, that the new
policy focused strictly on reappointment considerations and explicitly divorced
"faculty development" from a question of reappointment. An evaluation system
would, of course, have an individual faculty member's development as one of its

46

Provost, Patrick Hill, wrote a memo to the faculty.

He explained that the

policy proposed by the faculty committee was not acceptable to the Trustees
because of "legal inconsistencies and ambiguities.•

We are here not concerned

with the legalities of the issues involved in rewriting this cornerstone of
Evergreen practice, but rather with the

~

of concerns that framed the

college's response to the perceived problems with the old Faculty Evaluation
policy.

We are concerned with the kind of transition which is marked by the

writing of this new policy.

On page 13 (I) of Hill's fading, blue-dittoed memo

to the faculty, there is a paragraph worth quoting at length because it signals
the institutional recognition of a transition from one sort of collegial
association to another.
Many of you have heard me comment on the subtle, grating
consequences of an interpersonal sort which seem to me to have flowed from
a) trying to live in a community without rank, title or tenure; b) foregoing the subtle power and status associated with the traditional grading
system of higher education; and c) cutting ourselves off at the same time
by virtue of our commitment to interdisciplinary groupings and assignments
from the status and professional recognition gained in the traditional,
disciplinary based societies of higher education. Any one of these
experiments might have been a sufficient challenge to the traditional
sources of self esteem in a hyper-competitive society. All three
together--combined with a dozen other features of the social contract-have in my judgment exacted a heavy price. We often pay that price in
subtle compensations for the absent status markers of the traditional
higher-education. Sometimes, those compensations take the unhealthy forms
of exaggerated differentiations, near desperate personal investment in the
outcomes of professional leaves deliberations or dean -searches, unopenness or 'h ostility to differences and to outsiders, uncivility to each
other, and mostly through overwork which is often experienced as
unsatisfying because underappreciated or officially unrecognized by the
institution. I know that many have handled the insecurity creatively--we
have not settled into widespread patterns of routine and repetition. But
by and large it is my view that the faculty at TESC both deserve and would
benefit from a clear message of institutional trust and recognition. 4
Hill went on to enunciate a phrase that would quickly quash any critical
consideration of the

transition~e

experienced as a Schwund: " ... the experts

agree that the TESC faculty has as much or more security as exists in the tenure
system." 5

central concerns. We will, with thanks to Adams, try not to be confused into
thinking that the faculty replaced its evaluation system with a new evaluation
system. In creating a reappointment system we lost an evaluation system.

47

7bis concern for security, which the Provost felt compelled to assure
ev~~one

that he or she now had, was an absolutely new element on the Evergreen

ho~izon.

Indeed, we can see in the confusion over whether the faculty was

writing an "evaluation policy" or a "reappointment policy" (See the footnote on
pa!-~

59) the residuum of an old era coagulating to create this new concern.

Think of it this way.

At one time, faculty members were "evaluated."

su:e, one result of an evaluation could be dismissal from the College.

To be
But the

principal focus of the system was evaluation and, in fact, improvement of
t~ching.
c~ged

The new proposal, which was approved as College policy in 1988,

the focus from evaluation to reappointment.

First, the new policy says,

coosider the possibility that you will not be reappointed.

Evaluation, as we

shall see, became a very distant, secondary matter, if it could be considered
part of the new policy at all.

The Provost wrote in his 1987 memo, "The

distinctiveness of our institution will not be threatened by the frank
recognition of a right to continuing employment on the part of our accomplished
t~achers."

We would argue that once the practice of regularly evaluating all

faculty members gave way to the promise of security for "our accomplished
~hers"

the distinctiveness of the place, in fact, dissolved.

By gaining some

security we lost an important basis of collegiality.
To get a taste of what was lost as we gained what we gained, compare the
openings of the Faculty Evaluation Policy adopted in the mid-1970s and the new
Faculty Reappointment Policy.

The Evaluation Policy began:

Faculty evaluation at Evergreen should be a pleasure. The primary
purpose of Evergreen's faculty evaluation procedures is to provide
reinforcement and feedback with respect to each faculty member's
commitment to the teaching arts, the basis on which all Evergreen faculty
appointments are made.
Unfortunately, most institutions of higher education still make
little provision for learning the art of teaching. With only the rarest
of exceptions, American colleges have no real apprentice system for
developing the teacher's craft .... There is no reason why this should
continue. Evergreen will provide members of its faculty with
opportunities to learn to teach, to experiment, to acquire intellectual
breadth and depth, and to get acquainted with students free from the usual
constraints of specialized discipline and department. 6
The Reappointment Policy began:
Collaborative, interdisciplinary study constitutes the heart of the
Evergreen curriculum. The reappointment criteria for faculty speak to

48

those academic qualities, skills, and attitudes of professional
collegiality which make for excellence in teaching. The evaluation
process, through which reappointment decisions are made, has at its heart
a concern for excellence in all aspects of the academic enterprise.
Adherence to this reappointment policy assures the college highly
competent faculty. Excellence in the faculty depends in part on faculty
development efforts, like those enumerated in the Faculty Development
Recommendations, adopted by the Faculty in 1987.
Faculty appointment at Evergreen is not based on a tenure system but
rather on a contract system. In the reappointment process, faculty must
present evaluative material that reflects high quality teaching and
collegial work at the college and warrants reappointment. In case of
denial of reappointment, the burden of proof lies with the institution (as
specified in this policy). 7
There is a clear difference between the spirited simplicity of the first
paragraph of the old policy and the forced (with its hearts within hearts),
strained, legal clarity of the new policy's opening.
The old evaluation policy spelled out how the institution was obligated to
help faculty members learn "the art of teaching."

A faculty member met each

year with an academic dean* for an "evaluation session."
the faculty were on three-year, renewable contracts.

All regular members of

In the first and third

year of each contract, the evaluation session with one's dean was to be devoted
exclusively to "aiding continued growth, the identification and discussion of
areas of strength and weakness, and ways of improving upon these strengths
and/or eliminating weaknesses.• 8 The discussions at these sessions focused on
the Faculty Portfolio, a usually substantial collection of documents derived
from one's work over the past several years.
(1)
(2)
(3)

Portfolios were to include:

Both the self-evaluation and the dean's evaluation from the
previous year;
All evaluations of you by your faculty colleagues;
All evaluations you have written of your faculty colleagues;

* In the original conception of the College, academic deans were to rotate
from the faculty and return to teaching some two to four years later. Around
1980 the college hired two deans from outside. During the eighties, there was
considerable confusion about whether these two deans were to be "Senior Deans,"
or "Curriculum Dean" and "Budget Dean," or just "Academic Deans." One of those
two people did not return to teaching at the College. When the other person
did return to teaching, the Search Committee charged with replacing him found
that twenty-two current members of the faculty had been an academic dean in the
past. Both of the deans-from-the-outside were replaced with current members
of the faculty.

49
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)

All evaluations of you by staff members;
All evaluations you have written of staff members;
All evaluations of you by your students;
All evaluations you have written of your students' work, both
transcript and informal;
Copies of your coordinated studies program covenants or group
contract agreements between you and your students;
Copies of individual contracts you have sponsored;
A thoughtful and critical self-evaluation of the current
year's work, based largely on the documentation available in
your portfolio. This essay should assess your successes and
your disappointments, and it should address the areas in which
you hope to make improvements during the following year in
your teaching, in your other contributions to Evergreen, in
your fields of expertise, and in exploring new academic
interests. 9

It was only a slight exaggeration to say that everyone at Evergreen evaluated
everyone else all of the time and that these mutual evaluations became the
substantive basis for further evaluations.

It is instructive that nearly one-

third of Richard Jones's Experiment ~ Ever~reen, 10 the first public report on
this new college, concerned evaluation.

Evaluations became the basis for many

of the conversations that occurred at the place.
A faculty member could be asked to leave the College as a result of this
process of evaluation.

The evaluation session in the second year of each

contract had to end with a recommendation to the Provost on whether a person
should be offered a subsequent three-year contract, a provisional one-year
contract (a "one-year reappraisal extension") in which teaching deficiencies
could be corrected, or should be

termi~ated

at the end of the current contract.

However, in those circumstances where a faculty member was at risk of
receiving less than a full three-year renewal, the evaluation policy spelled out
a set of institutional obligations that required the administration to help the
person deemed to be in need of help.

The Faculty Handbook said, •for those

faculty receiving one-year reappraisal extensions, the Deans will provide
consulting assistance ... to provide maximum opportunity for correction of the
deficiencies." 11

At times this assistance involved the constitution of a

teaching team geared to help a faculty member improve some aspect of his or her
teaching.

At other times, •a small, mutually agreed upon consultant team of

experienced and successful faculty" together with students who might provide
"information and support vital to faculty development" 12 worked with a faculty

50

member.

At other times, a dean would involve himself or herself closely in a

faculty member's work, attend lectures, sit in on seminars, and offer advice as
he or she saw fit.

This dean might even be the dean who would be responsible

for writing the summary evaluation of a person's experience on a •one-year
reappraisal extension" contract.

There was no concern for "conflicts of

interest" or other legalistic obstructions to providing help to those who might
be fired.

There was no effort to rigorously separate the roles of dean and

faculty member.
respects.

They were different, yes, but they were the same in important

There was the sense that everyone involved in the faculty evaluation

process was a member of a community.

Some members of the community had the

institutional authority to recommend dismissal of others.
responsibility to help others.

But even they had a

It almost goes without saying that, as in any

community, the system of mutual obligations and responsibilities sometimes
worked and sometimes did not work.

But it was a system that was down on paper,

and that paper could be invoked whenever someone wanted to recall for someone
else that "faculty evaluation ... should be a pleasure."
Richard Jones, the one founding member of the faculty who has published
material about Evergreen, summarized the spirit in which the evaluation of one's
colleagues could be approached at Evergreen.

He wrote in a pamphlet called

"Enjoying Evaluation,"
[Colleague evaluations] I find to be the most enjoyable of all,
albeit the most time consuming. With rare exceptions you are writing to a
person who has by now become a respected colleague. The two of you have
had the extraordinary (for college teachers) opportunity of becoming
intimately familiar with each other's styles. For a significant part of a
whole academic year, usually, the vitality of the same professional
venture has centered your respective work lives. You've had your
differences and have probably resolved most of them. You've learned some
things from the other and seen the other learn some things from you . It's
probably not in the cards that the two of you will soon again find
yourselves on the same team. Under the circumstances, it is as likely you
could stand on ceremony, or indulge false pretenses, as you could kiss
your wife's (or husband's) hand. It is a time, in other words; for an
exchange of professional love letters. 13
The blank page is a formidable object when one sits down to write an evaluation
of a colleague, perhaps a friend, perhaps someone you have concluded is a "nice
person" but wished would not be employed by the College any longer, in any
event, someone with whom you have spent a lot of time over the past three, six,
or nine months.

The task of filling that page becomes less daunting if one can

51
bring oneself to realize that he or she has all the richness and beauty of the
written word to fill that page.

Writing a •professional love letter• can be an

enjoyable task and the process of faculty evaluation that •should be a pleasure"
can really be one .
Our new economy of planning has changed all that.

It is not surprising that

one of the first things to be changed was the faculty evaluation policy.
longer face an absolutely blank page.

We no

We face a page that has an A priori

structure, not yet the structure of an evaluation that contains third-person
questions like, "Did he/she project his/her voice adequately to the back of the
room?" and that are completed with No. 2 lead pencils, but a structure
nonetheless.

And few people would ever imagine their task under the Faculty

Reappointment Policy as being one of writing "professional love letters.•
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that someone would even imagine he had the
liberty to do that.

We no longer engage in collegial evaluation; we are now

participants in a peer review assessment system.
There are, around the College, many narratives that explain why the change
from evaluation to reappointment/peer review took place.

One says that the

College was unsuccessful in trying to fire one particular member of the faculty,
in part, because, to an outside authority brought in to adjudicate the matter,
the Evaluation Policy was fundamentally flawed.*

In an effort to clean up the

policy, this narrative has it, the College overreacted and we got the cleanly
bureaucratic policy we now have.

Others say that, in fact, many members of the

faculty began to feel insecure in their jobs and wanted the security that the
Provost assured everyone they would get.

Other histories say that some faculty

members were not being honest in their written evaluations of colleagues, that
they were delivering their "honest" evaluations to deans orally and behind the
backs of everyone involved, and that changing the timing of colleague
evaluations would increase the honesty.

Besides the fact that none of these

historical narratives could possibly account for the tidal change marked by the

* There was some humor in the outside judge's report. He noted that the
policy contained several definitions of a "year." The definitions ranged in
length from nine to fifteen months . The report also noted that besides having
a flawed policy, people charged to administer the policy did not do their jobs
well in some crucial respects and, finally, the college had not made an adequate
case against the faculty member.

52
shift we are describing, we are not especially interested in determining the
cause of the change.

We prefer to see this particular change as emblematic of a

change in the terms under which we conduct the affairs of the College.

We wish

to describe that change so that we can know a little better where we are and
appreciate a little more what we have lost.
The opening of the new Faculty Reappointment Policy sets the tone for the
entire document.

Gone is the idealism of that first "should" [be a pleasure];

gone is the feeling of distinctiveness signaled by that "Unfortunately, most
institutions of higher education .... "
rhetoric.

In their place we get standard managerial

Evergreen, like every other institution, has a concern for

"competence" and "excellence."

Evergreen, like every other institution, is

rhetorically committed to "faculty development," but that is a matter for
another policy, just like at other institutions.

Evergreen, like every other

institution, spells out in legally acceptable terms the conditions of
employment.

The tone of the new policy is one that only a lawyer could love.

The structure of the new peer review system is given by the criteria
according to which a faculty member's "excellence in teaching" is to be judged .
There are now four criteria, and most have sub-headings.

They are:

A. Teaching
1. contribution to the learning environment in programs through
(1) subject matter expertise
(2) interdisciplinary approach to the material
(3) counseling and advising students
(4) facilitation of a stimulating and challenging atmosphere
(5) seminars, lectures, lab or field work, workshops, and
individual contracts
(6) working collaboratively with faculty and students
2. fostering students' intellectual and cognitive development
3. fostering students' communication abilities
4. the design and execution of parts of a program's curriculum
5. innovation
6. intellectual vitality
B. Meeting commitments
1. Meeting Rotation and team teaching requirements [which spell
out, for the first time, the number of different people
with whom a faculty member must teach in each contract cycle]
2. Adherence to covenants and program syllabi and specialty
area or graduate program obligations
3. Writing reappointment evaluations for each colleague ...
4. Writing timely evaluations of each student taught, assessing
specifically and substantively the student's understanding
of program material

53
5.

Adherence to the Social Contract, the Affirmative Action
Policy, and the Sexual Harassment Policy.

C. Planning Curriculum
1. Planning academic programs, contribution to program design
as well as execution
2. Participating in the development of a coherent and innovative
curriculum in a Specialty Area (or other curriculum-planning
structure) including Core programs
D.

Participating in College Affairs

There are five "grounds for non-reappointment."
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

They are:

Failure to maintain a substantially complete portfolio, as
described in this policy, and to produce that portfolio for
purposes of evaluation.
A pattern of failure to meet the college faculty's standards
of competency in Teaching.
A pattern of failure to meet the college faculty's standards
of competency in Meeting Commitments.
A pattern of failure to meet the college faculty's standards
of competency in Planning Curriculum.
A pattern of failure to meet the college faculty's standards
of competency in Participating in College Affairs.

Then the policy tells everyone what should be in a faculty member's portfolio .
Then it says where the portfolio goes and when.

Then it says who must make

decisions and write letters and when those letters must be mailed.

If the

appropriate decision-maker makes a decision not to renew a faculty member's
contract, the policy puts that faculty member on a new track that involves due
process and appeal rights and the constitution of review boards and more letters
to be written and mailed and more decision points.

And yes, lawyers are

allowed .
People who are faced with the task of writing love letters are in the same
position as were Foucault's "two men of noticeably different ages." _They are
both struggling to find the "code [that) would allow them to communicate.
face each other without terms or convenient words."•

They

They have to find a way to

* The reference here is to the conclusion of the Rousseau-Freud-Freire Foucault-Illich section. That section ends with a discussion of "friendship . "
The quotation is from an interview with Foucault that reads, in part,

But two men of noticeably different ages--what code would allow
them to communicate?
They face each other without terms or

54

talk to one another, in full recognition that, as with aost love letters, there
will be false starts, unfortunate slips, silly excesses, and much groping.
new Reappointment Policy solves this "problem."

The

If the structure of criteria

and the map of decision points is not sufficient to help one communicate
properly in this new economy, the policy is quite explicit about the terms in
which one's judgment is to be expressed.

The new policy says that an author of

a peer review of another faculty member will provide evidence in all of the four
critical areas for which she or he has evidence and that "the author shall
directly and explicitly evaluate the colleague's competency in each aspect for
which there is evidence from their work together."

In case that is not clear,

the next sentence tells you what "evaluating competency" might mean.

It means

that you will "assess the colleague's strengths and weaknesses" and that you
will "state [your] overall judgment of the colleague's competency in this aspect
of his work."

And if that is not clear, the policy gives you a sentence that

must accompany any evidence.

That sentence is, "In my opinion, overall, his

lecturing [criterion A-1-e, for example] did (or did not) meet reasonable
standards of competency for lecturing at this college.• 14

This leaves little

room for a "code" that only "lovers" can hope to understand, the very code that
grounded some of the faculty evaluations excerpted above.
The effects of this new policy are being felt by almost everyone.

One

important effect was the introduction of a two-tiered system of contracts for
regular members of the faculty.

One's first and second contracts as a new,

regular member of the faculty are now three-year contracts.
advances to an eight-year contract.

After that, one

The intention of the policy was to reduce

the reappointment decision load faced by the academic deans.

The effect was to

create a "good," in the economic sense, that was not shared by everyone.

The

existence of this good, this privilege, naturally created a sense of scarcity

convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of
the movement that carries them towards each other. They have to
invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which
is friendship; that is to say, the sum of everything through which
they can give each other pleasure.
"Friendship as a Way of Life," interview first appeared in~ Gai Pied, April,
1981. Reprinted in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-1984), New York:
Semiotext(e), 1989, pp. 203-209.

55
around itself and became the basis for a new kind of fight.

In the two years

following the implementation of the policy, there have been several vicious
fights over the wording of peer review letters and over the advancement to
eight-year contracts.

These fights did not occur under the old system since

everyone shared the same privileges (or lacks); there simply was no basis for
this sort of fight, the sort that is familiar to anyone who has worked under a
tenure system.

Evergreen, like every other school, has come to the point where

the truism of the academy, viz., that the fights are so vicious because the
stakes are so small, is becoming true for us.
Another crucial effect of the Reappointment Policy was, at once, to elevate
and downgrade the academic deans.
point in a renewal decision.
privileged.

They always were the first decision-making

But structurally they were not especially

Now they are in a privileged position §DQ they have been turned

into high-level clerks.
Most deans, as we said, rotated from the faculty for terms of two to four
years.

They held evaluation conferences with faculty members and, usually,

during those conferences dean and faculty member would exchan&e written
evaluations of one another.

The faculty member would have read the dean's

portfolio (which included the dean's evaluation of many of the faculty member's
colleagues, the colleagues' evaluations of the dean, self-evaluations by the
dean, and so on) just as the dean would have read the faculty member's
portfolio, and both would have written letters in response to what they found
there.

The new policy does not require a conference except when a reappointment

decision is to be made.
exchange of evaluations.

The policy specifically does not include the mutual
Consequently, the deans are marked by this new policy

as a locus of decision making with not even a bow to the reciprocity that was
the definitive feature of all evaluation in the past.
Academic deans have become clerks because their job, under the new policy is
to ensure the completeness of the faculty member's portfolio and to
judge how well and how consistently the faculty member has in the time
since this faculty member's last decanal evaluation maintained a portfolio
and met the college's generally acknowledged high standards of teaching,
meeting commitments, planning curriculum, and participating in college
affairs. 15
Even deans are sentenced by this new policy.
sentences.

They have a choice of three

They can write at the conclusion of an evaluation, "Were it

56
necessary on the evidence before me to make a recommendation regarding your
reappointment, I would say, 'Most certainly, reappoint' or 'Most certainly, do
not reappoint' or 'Reappointment uncertain.'" 16 Then, at the point of making a
reappointment decision, they must make a decision, write their reasoning and
forward everything to the Provost.
We are still at the point where some incumbents of the dean's jobs can feel
the pain of the new system in relation to the old.

For example, one dean wrote

in a self-evaluation after the first year of working under the new policy:
[Under the new policy] the deans are restrained from becoming involved in
faculty development. [The fault of the new policy is] that the evaluation
process is based narrowly on the portfolio of the faculty member and in
many respects does not assess the team and its teaching. The most
important result is the separation of the Deans from the faculty. This
separation is a function of a lower level of involvement in the actual
teaching life of the faculty. While the old system might not have been
great, the new one invites the deans, especially in the course of
reappointment evaluations, to withdraw almost completely from the actual
practice of the faculty and [to] be concerned with the paper record ....
The objective of this separation--"fair judgment"--may have been laudable,
but the reality is a potential and actual breakdown in the level of
interaction of faculty and deans around the central activity of the
institution: teaching and learning.
He commented in December, 1989:
The legalistic, bureaucratic nature of the system invites both faculty,
especially new faculty, to see the deans as bosses to be manipulated and
cajoled, and tempts the deans to see faculty as functionaries, as
difficult political issues, but not as colleagues.
A dean cannot be collegial when he is so severely bureaucratically marked.
The most profound tragedy of the situation, which this dean's comments
suggest, is that people will quickly adapt to the new system because it is such
a common-sensical system.

We all know how to manipulate and cajole the boss.

All bosses know how to deal with functionaries, even when they become "difficult
political issues."

Even though the job of the deans may .have become a little

more difficult, they no longer face the task of finding •the code [that] would
allow them to communicate."
handbooks.

They don't have to find the code; it's in their

Only two weeks after the comment above, another dean wrote a

commentary on the new policy that argued, in part, that everyone must now work
to solve the problems created by the new policy:

57

I hope that we will review and revamp what deans do so that the door
between the deanery and the teaching faculty will be a wider and more
inviting passage in both directions. ~deans must not be isolated frQm
the faculty. A significant number of faculty must find the prospect of
serving as dean an inviting one. But revising the deanery isn't the whole
solution. ~ faculty ~ &ot ~ fi&ure ~ ~ tQ welcome ~ in!Q
their teaching lives. Probably this means fixing, or trashing, the new
reappointment policy. 17
While he did admit the possibility of "trashing" the new policy, this dean had
already accepted the terms of the new structure in which deans and faculty are
no longer "equal but different," as faculty and deans were when rotation between
the two statuses was an accepted fact of institutional life, but in which deans
are just different.*

A kind of institutional plurality, to recall Arendt's

term, has given way to a standard bureaucracy.
Stability:

Ib&

Development

2f

A Curriculum

Just as faculty evaluation at Evergreen has moved faculty members away from a
confrontation with a blank page toward becoming a participant in a process that
begins with a structured format for one's thinking, so the academic offerings of
the college changed from an anarchic collection of "programs" to a more
structured curriculum.
transformation.
coherence.

The College, again, gained something in this

It gained stability, predictability, some consistency and

It also lost something in that transition.

Ye can try to re-

member- that loss even though we might appreciate what we have gained.
As we said in the Introduction [to The Paradox 2f Pedago&y], Evergreen was
founded in negativity.

No grades, no departments, no ranks, no tenure.

curriculum in any traditional sense of that term.

And no

Richard Jones wrote to a

friend in February, 1971,
my main reservation at the top is the probably unreasonable one that
McCann is not a Meiklejohn. He has shaped a quite modest legislative

* The new policy also gave greater legitimacy to a growing number of
•directors" on campus. For example, the directors of graduate programs came
to have review authority over any faculty who worked, however briefly, in their
programs.
** This with thanks to Bob Romanyshyn of the University of Dallas. He
speaks of the neurotic as the dis-membered body, of the symptom as a cutting
off of one's past, and of therapy as the re-membering of one's past, of the
re-calling of one's repressed past into one's present.

58
mandate of purely local reference (to build a new State College which is
not a carbon copy of others existing in the State of Washington) into a
sweepingly innovative effort of national significance. But in this McCann
is more negatively than positively inspired. 18
Out of this negativity, the planning faculty had to make something positive
because 1,000 students would be arriving in the fall following the luxurious
"planning year" enjoyed by the founders of the college.
One of the first academic deans of the college, Mervyn Cadwallader, a
disciple of Alexander Meiklejohn (the founder of the Experimental College at the
University of Wisconsin in 1927), had the planning faculty read Joseph Tussman's
Experiment

~

Berkeley.

Tussman had tried to reproduce the Meiklejohn

Experimental College at Berkeley in the mid-1960s.

His book recounts the

difficulties and the joys of teaching in teams in a most traditional university.
But for the small group of educational reformers assembled at the southern end
of Puget Sound in the post-Kent State era, the book became a nucleus around
which the diverse ideas and agendas of that group could coalesce.

Jones notes,

"The experience [of reading Tussman] was to have a decisive influence on one of
the most revealing experiments in the history of American higher education.• 19
Into the void of the new academy that was shaped by the negative thinking of its
first president, Charles McCann, the planning faculty placed a curricular
structure of team-taught, interdisciplinary, year-long, theme-centered, socalled Coordinated Studies programs.

When the first group of students arrived

on the unfinished campus in the fall of 1971, instead of being met with a
catalogue of departmentally organized courses that could be permuted in many
different ways through the free choice of every student (constrained only by the
requirements of departmental majors and minors), they were met by a choice from
among

only~

programs of study to which they, along with a faculty team of

between three and seven people, would devote a year of study.
Cadwallader had had a positive agenda in mind when he recommended the Tussman
book to the planning faculty.

He wanted the college to develop a "moral

curriculum" modeled on the content of Tussman's experiment at Berkeley.

It is

crucial to note that the planning faculty rejected this idea and seized only
upon the structural aspects of the Experimental College: team teaching,
thematically organized, long-term programs with seminars at center-stage.

59
Evergreen would have a generally agreed upon way of teaching and learning.
There was no agreement on what was to be taught.
The early College catalogues are charming in their arrogance.

The early

catalogues tell the student nothing about what he or she might expect to learn;
they focus instead on how hard the student will have to work. · "The faculty of
Evergreen believes that all students should plan to do a great deal of work and
learning in both Coordinated Studies and Contracted Studies."

will be pressure.

2f activities ....

~

Studies program has a comprehensive design and A reguired
The program has a logical structure.

"A Coordinated

And it is demanding."

In seminar, "There

It will come from the other members of your seminar who need

your help and from the urgency of the problems at hand.

If you aren't willing

to take responsibility for this kind of hard academic work, then you should
seriously question whether Evergreen is the college for you."

The catalogue

promises help to those who find the going rough, but it also says,
fails to meet
leave." 20

~

responsibilities to the pro&ram,

~

will

The college enjoyed its no-nonsense attitude .

~

"If

A student

reguired tQ

But it also ran the

risk of being accused of having no content.
This accusation was met with bold, self-confident rhetoric.

The 1973-74

catalogue, for example, listed the "Programs in Progress" for academic year
1972-73 with the notation that,
At Evergreen, we seek to offer a variety of new Coordinated Studies
programs and new opportunities for Contracted Studies each year. A
Coordinated Studies program will be repeated only with a modified design
and with changes in the faculty team leading it.
You should not expect, therefore , to find the 1972 programs in
operation next year . Even if some of the program titles appear again and
even if some of the same faculty team members are involved , the programs
will have been largely altered by the experience of the first years. We
shall continue to value growth and change over mechanical repetition
within hardened categories.
The summaries which follow describe work in progress; they are
presented here for the sole reason of giving you some idea of how we go
about the enterprise of higher learning. For if you choose to join us,
you will be enrolling in the College, entering our particular climate,
rather than signing uf to take one specific program or prearranged
sequence of programs. 1
A student did not come to "be a pre-med" or to "do sociology."
only "choose to join" the College that was "in progress."

A student could

60
A student who wanted to know what was available in this "particular climate,"
this "enterprise of higher learning," had to wait for the publication of the
Catalo,ue Supplement late in the summer just before the opening of school.

The

1972-73 Supplement listed eight basic coordinated studies programs and nine
advanced programs.
Supplement.

Each program had a one-page or two-page description in the

The descriptions sometimes listed books that would be read,

sometimes not.

All the descriptions gave the themes or the questions that were

at the heart of the program.

For example, the year-long basic (entry-level)

program "Learning About Learning" was introduced this way:
This is a basic program for all students. Its purpose is to explore
the nature of the learning process. Since intentional learning forms but
a small part of all learning in one's life, the scope will be much broader
than classroom settings. Some questions to be considered might be: What
are the different learning theories? How does learning take place a) in
structured/unstructured settings? b) in institutional/non-institutional
settings? c) among different age groups? d) in different organisms,
particularly primates, e) in different cultures/ethnic groups in the
United States? Are learning and education the same? What is the purpose
of schools? How do l learn best? How can I help others learn? What
kinds of environments, both human and physical, seem conducive to
different kinds of learning? How do different people and setting affect
what and how I learn?
The description carried on for another page and a half.

It gave a student not

only an indication of what would be taught; it gave the student a taste of the
teacher who had, after all, written the program description.

In the place in

the Supplement where one might expect to find a guide to departments, there was
a concordance that thematically related courses from the previous year to the
courses being offered in the current year.

One column was headed "Were you

interested in one of these [1971-72 programs]?"; the other column was headed
"Then read the descriptions of these:".
was "Human Development."

Under the first column, for example,

Opposite it was "'

Roles in Society,' 'Human

Development II,' and 'Learning About Learning.'"
The attitude of the catalogue was colored by that phrase, "if you choose to
join us."

The faculty seemed to think of itself as engaged in something into

which the students might be invited.
The blank page of the catalogue of courses that got filled at the last minute
was, in the very first years of the college, mirrored in a blank page given to
each faculty member to fill out and insert into a document called, "The Class of

61
[for example] '72."

The faculty filled these blank pages n21 with reflections

about students or with commentaries on the classes they had finished teaching;
they filled these blank pages with words and images about themselves.

There

were pictures of the faculty member, sometimes pictures of the faculty member's
family.

There were standard biographies .

handwritten commentaries.

There were line drawings and

One faculty member scrawled her name in broad-tip

marker, wrote the word "Adequate," and added her social security number.

The

faculty thought of itself, not the students, as the "Class of ... • at Evergreen!
The beginning of regularization of the academic structure was marked by the
inability to sustain this irreverent academic guide.

"The Class of '72" was the

last document of its kind even though there was a desultory effort to revive
something of its sort in the late 1980s.

By 1976, the College was publishing

"An Academic Advising Resource Guide," soon dubbed the AAARGI, that contained
sober commentaries on how to proceed through Evergreen, complete with a
delineation of the "advising roles" played by the various offices and officers
of the college and grievance policies for those who felt wronged.

The AAARG!

concluded with standardized biographies of each faculty member and each person's
current "teaching assignment."

In a bow to the College's origins in serious

humor, the AAARG! did have a glossary called "Evergreen as a Second Language,"
showing that this College would rather invent a new word than suggest it was
part of the higher education establishment by drawing on the vernacular.
example, "module" became Evergreen's term for "course."

For

But the trend toward

absorption was clear.
Actually, the appearance of "modules" (courses) and a dramatic rise in
independent study provoked the first major debate about curriculum, such as it
was, among the faculty in 1977 .

Some people, Richard Jones among them, felt

that the curriculum proposed for 1978 - 79 had gotten too far away from
Coordinated Studies programs.

Jones said in a faculty meeting and then wrote to

all who had written to him in support and in opposition (and eventually to the
whole faculty) that Evergreen would become a second rate institution if it
persisted on the course indicated by the new curriculum .

He said,

A college which has no grades, no majors, no courses, no requirements, no
departments, no rank, no tenure, and no rules as to faculty scholarship
must have an identifiable center which ~. That commitment has so far
been provided by our commitment to teaching one interdisciflinary set of
things at a time, full time and doing it collaboratively.

62

Jones was concerned that the "set of things" that got done by each group of
faculty that got together was taking on more and more structure.

He was

concerned that less and less attention was being given to the central fact of
educating at Evergreen: that teaching provides the arena where one encounters
one's colleagues.

Like those concerned with declining enrollments, he too

wanted to debate numbers, he said, but he would only debate the question of what
number of faculty members made a coordinated studies teaching team an
intellectually vital arena in which to work.

He felt particularly anxious, he

wrote, when he had "to dream up those damned 'equivalencies,'" "course
equivalencies," now another commonplace at the college, that let future
transcript readers know how the education that transpired in a program could be
translated into the courses of the standard college catalogue.

Jones echoed the

old arrogance of the faculty as he concluded his letter with this barb:
My guess is that we haven't [given proper attention to the issue of the
size of an effective teaching team for Coordinated Studies and, therefore,
have allowed "downsizing" of programs) because we've been scared into
trying to give the students what they think they want, instead of giving
what we know they need--which is hard to say without feeling either
arrogant or confused, because that's what the universities used to do,
isn't it?D
The structureless curriculum of the early Evergreen permitted the appearance of
many different teaching structures.

Jones's objection was that these new

structures were appearing in response to student demands, not faculty wisdom.
For him, the wisdom of the planning faculty was reflected in its decision not to
have a curricular structure to which everyone would be beholden but to have,
instead, a center to the work of the faculty.
Structure came to the curriculum as the 1970s became the 1980s.
invented "Specialty Areas" that would offer clusters of programs.

The College
The 1989-90

"Evergreen Student Handbook" said,
Evergreen's unusual curriculum is organized into specialty areas.
These are themes around which study is organized. Faculty within the
specialty areas plan curriculum and often teach together. You are free to
work in any specialty area as long as you meet the prerequisites for the
program in which you are interested. 24
An Evergreen "Specialty Area" is not quite a "department."

They have names like

"Health and Human Services," "Political Economy and Social Change," "Native
American Studies,• "Environmental Studies."

The faculty in each area often come

63

from a number of different disciplines, but the structure brings with it certain
obligations and expectations.
years in one specialty area.

Faculty are expected to teach a certain number of
Each specialty area has a •convener" (not exactly

a department chair since these people have no budgetary authority) who is
responsible for ensuring that the area offers an appropriate introductory
program, a fair sampling of advanced programs, and can handle students in need
of opportunities for individual study.

Increasingly over the past several

years, the specialty area conveners have been responsible for making a case to
the academic deans for hiring new faculty members so that the area is adequately
staffed.

They have also been faced with pressures from the ranks of their own

specialty area faculty to ensure some regularity in the introductory programs so
that those teaching advanced material could be assured of some base of knowledge
in their students.
In the early 1980s all the specialty areas were asked to prepare brochures on
•career Pathways" toward which study in each area led.

So, for example, the

"Health and Human Services" area published a two-page document that listed three
•career Pathways" for those studying in this area.

People could get on a

•Health Sciences" track by taking inorganic and organic chemistry, "Foundations
of Natural Science," "Matter and Motion," and "The Aesthetics of Healing."
"Students in [the Human Services] pathway take the program 'Human Health and
Behavior'" and then select from other programs in this area or other areas.
There are also instructions on how to prepare for a career in "Psychdlogical
Counseling."

"Health and HYm!n Services studies prepares you for graduate work

in psychology, health services, social work , counseling, management, educations
and community services .

Careers can include counseling, community advocacy,

program development and administration," says the brochure, illustrated with a
couple of cliched, open {read "helping") hands.

The fact that a brochure could

list programs that could be taken as a "track" eliminated much of the
spontaneity that the earlier approach to the "curriculum" encouraged .
Not all of the specialty areas gave into such standardized ways of thinking
about themselves.

The "Native American Studies" Career Pathway brochure, for

example, lists no careers.

This specialty area, about which more below,

published a two page piece that begins,
The Native American Studies area is concerned that students develop
a sense of:

64

Identity
Group Identity
Personal Authority
All programs are presented from this viewpoint and examine our
relationship to:
The Land
Others
Work
The unknown
The Native American Studies area operates from a philosophy that the
educational needs of people are best conceived as reciprocal
relationships involving communities, educational institutions and
individuals. Native American communities are at the center of the Native
American Specialty area.
And then the Career Pathway went on, in the spirit if not the expansiveness of
the old "Class of
biography.

" documents to name each faculty member and give a brief

It is this kind of resistance to the trend toward standardization

and regularization of the curriculum that puts the changes in the rest of the
college in such high relief.
In retrospect, the step from a college with no set curriculum to a college
with an orderly, relatively predictable curriculum was a short one.

The first

dean hired from outside the ranks the College's faculty was hired to oversee the
curriculum.

She remained in office for twelve years, the longest term served by

any dean at the College.

When she left office, the call for nominations to

replace her took it as a commonplace that this dean "has primary responsibility
for organizing and implementing the curriculum."
clear.

The nature of the change is

The original faculty of the college had, in effect, rejected the very

idea of a curriculum .

They had accepted a few structures within which teaching

and, they hoped, learning would occur.

Now the College has a regular curricular

structure that is different from but not wholely unlike the structures at other
institutions.
Certainly, teaching and learning at Evergreen is different from teaching and
learning at many universities and colleges.

But just as certainly the arena in

which teaching and learning occurs at Evergreen has changed.

As an indication

of that change, compare these two excerpts, the first from the College Bulletin
of 1973-74, the second from the 1989-90 Student Handbook:

65

1973-74:
... In order to keep abreast of the changing world and to capitalize
quickly on our experience, ... our academic programs include their own
self-destruct mechanisms. Although we certainly retain our concern for
the immense and significant problems implied by our programs now being
studied, we have committed ourselves to critically modifying each year the
ways in which we attack these issues. Thus, as the current academic year
unfolds, we're busy planning for the new programs we will offer in 197374.~

Plans for Coordinated Studies programs are formulated by faculty
members. The next series of proposals for year-long programs will be
formulated and submitted during the winter quarter, 1972-73. After a
proposal has been approved, each team designs its own program, makes its
own experiments in curriculum design and teaching, arrives at its own
agreements for governance, and evaluates its own effectiveness. The team
asks for a mandate and gets it. It is up to the team to use its
resources, its energy, and its mandate to do something memorable and
something significant. 26
1989-90:
Planning the curriculum begins nearly two years in advance of the
academic year in which it is offered. Several months before the planning
retreat, faculty within specialty areas begin to assess curriculum needs
and who will be available to teach. Informal discussion begin about
teaching teams, and ideas for program themes are born. Then, in the
spring, faculty go on a short retreat at which they formalize the
curriculum plans for the year after the upcoming academic year. The
curriculum planning process is long and complex. Not all proposals are
accepted. In making overall curriculum decisions the deans must consider
faculty resources, balance and other factors. 27

On the one hand, the faculty is concerned with being responsive to the world and
to its own experience.
years ahead in planning.

On the other, the faculty is concerned about being twoOn the one hand, the aim is to use a mandate from the

college to present something memorable and significant .

On the other, the

process is long and complex and the considerations go to concerns about
resources and balance.

On the one hand, it is a collective "we" who are busy

planning, critically modifying and presenting

mate~ial.

deans who are making overall curriculum decisions.

On the other, it is the

There is no question that

Evergreen now has the stability that a well-managed curriculum can provide.
There is a question of whether something in the nature of collegiality is lost
in that gain.
Sanctity: "Multiculturalism" and "Diversity"

§§

Planning Concepts

66

The coming of a curriculum to Evergreen may have undermined the basis for
collegiality.

But there remained cracks in the structures, cracks in which

collegiality between or among people who were different but equal could become
the driving force of teaching and learning.

In the late 1980s a new and, in our

view, more substantial threat to collegiality appeared.

Instead of viewing the

various kinds of differences (in knowledge, in experience, in training, in
background) on a faculty team as an essential resource that might prove useful
as a program pursued its thematically organized questions, something called
"diversity" appeared on the curricular scene as a scarce resource .

"Diversity"

in a teaching team became one of those "other factors" the academic managers
called deans took into consideration in formulating and balancing the
curriculum.

"Multiculturalism" became a "planning concept" around which

programs for the promotion and protection of the scarce resource called
"diversity" would be organized.

Evergreen, like other schools of its time,

boarded the multiculturalism bandwagon and made "multiculturalism" into the
principal agenda item of the whole college and the organizing axis for
structuring the curriculum.

Concerns about social justice and about

differential suffering across race, gender and class divides that had informed
(via the life-long commitments of faculty to these concerns) teaching and
learning at Evergreen since its founding gave way to a concern for developing a
new liturgy called "multiculturalism" that would legitimate the use of scarce
resources and that would sanctify the actions of those recognized as the elect .
That the College had, from its inception, a commitment to studying social
justice and to including issues of race, class and gender in its programs is
undeniable.

The excerpt from the program description for •Learning about

Learning" made it clear that students would be expected to think about cultural
factors in learning .

Many of the autobiographical profiles written by faculty

members for "The Class of '72" included statements of concern about cultural and
economic differences .
the "things that

One person, a member of the Colville tribe, wrote about

move~

profoundly":

Attending medicine dances; hearing the graveside Indian death chants;
listening to tribal elders--from all tribes--speak ; they are our
historians, our orators, our story tellers, our philosophers and our
educators ; they truly know what life is all about; among them I am humble ,
although I am arrogantly proud of being an Indian.

'

67

A man wrote, "My living taught ae more, infinitely more, than my 'education'
ever did.

My blackness was and is a fundamental aspect of my experience . •

He

concluded his statement with something about the nature of his commitments and
concerns about human survival generally, about his concern that "unless man
fundamentally altered his institutions, any kind of survival that mattered was
impossible," and about his ambivalence "about the likelihood of his doing that."
Another person introduced herself by saying, "Part of ay role these days is to
do a lot of thinking about women, necessarily about myself as a woman."
While many of the faculty shared common concerns about social justice,
differential privilege and world peace, there was no standardized idiom in which
they expressed those concerns.

There seemed to be an implicit notion that once

these people of obvious differences got together, something might happen that
would lead each to a better understanding of the problems he or she faced.

As

the faculty member who was ambivalent about the prospects for •a kind of
survival that matters" put it,
the great stone has to be pushed back up the hill yet again .
come to Evergreen.

So I had to

I came here to teach and to learn in hopes that I'd find others,
regardless of rank or title, who were like-minded. So far, I've managed
to find some of them, and I expect to find more. If they and I stop
finding each other, if the lightning goes, so will I .
Parenthetically, we should note that he had to do his searching and finding
among a diverse group of faculty.

Of the 96 faculty members in "The Class of

'72,• 21 were women, 16 were what we would call today People of Color (and five
were in both categories).

For the time, the faculty of the college was

remarkably diversified across the categories that now matter.
We do not know if the "lightning" of the place has gone, but the orientation
to faculty finding one another has been superseded by another concern .

This is

how a memo titled "Strategic Planning Statement: Multicultural Diversity" issued
by the College's Planning Council put one of the "Issues/Concerns" that informed
the new debate about "diversity":
Cultural studies need to be organized into identifiable segments of the
curriculum in order for prospective students to finQ them, and in order to
provide the support that a separate community of learning can provide. On
the other hand, cultural issues should be critical to the whole
curriculum. These appear to be conflicting needs. 28

68

Now the task is to establish structures that will enable students to find
courses of study and "support," not to allow faculty to find one another.

The

only question is what kind of structure is best suited to that simpler,
managerial task.

The only conflict is with the wish that cultural studies would

become a global good, not something "located" somewhere in particular.

The

problem is how to plan for structures that will permit the proper people to find
the proper resources at the proper time.
The principal resource to be managed in the new economy of planning is
"diversity."

Another concern heard by the Planning Council was that

Individuals need to be able to find support from others who share
similar experiences, issues and problems. Sometimes that support is hard
to find because there is no organized location for it, because there is
not yet enough cultural diversity in the community, because the time of
people of color is spread too thin over a wide range of campus activities
where their representation is needed and because there is some resistance
to activities which can be interpreted as "separatist."~
That is a packed statement.

Now people of color are "representatives" whose

representation "is needed" in many arenas of the campus.

It is not a question

of whether we would like to have people on the campus who are different from
those already here; the question is whether there is enough "diversity," a
statistical concept that detracts one's attention from the people who constitute
the faculty as a whole.

In 1990 there was no precise analog to "The Class of

'72," but there was a listing of faculty in "The Evergreen Student Handbook."
Of the 180 faculty members named there, 51 are women, 32 are People of Color
(and 12 people are in both categories).*

There has not been a dramatic change

in the statistical "diversity" of the faculty over the past eighteen years.

But

there has been a dramatic change in the rhetoric with which the issue is
addressed.

The Planning Council worried about the fact that there is little

agreement on the campus about the definition of this new notion, "diversity."
"The danger," the Council editorialized, "is that 'diversity' becomes whatever

* This is not a scientific accounting of the situation at the College.
Many people listed in the "Handbook" are visitors or people on leave . Neither
of these categories were heavily represented in "The Class of '72." But we do
not wish to pretend to scientific accuracy. That would only invite scientific
rebuttal and debate about "the facts." Such debates are a symptom of the new
economy of planning in which we are called to exist as faculty members at
Evergreen. This, we remind the reader, is a report on a conversation and we
offer this impressionistic "data" as something we talk to one another about.

69
the speaker wishes it to be, or

whatev~r

is least threatening, and that it

becomes, therefore, meaningless~~ planning concept . • 30
This "planning concept" has broad implications for the organization of the
college.

The Planning Council said that, as a College, •we are attempting to

establish a new world view .

Such an undertaking is a long and arduous process

demanding an expenditure of significant mental, physical, emotional and
financial resources.• 31

The Provost, in 1990, charged the faculty

to act--not just talk but act--on its own declaration of last spring that
inter-culturalism is its own agenda . . .. The faculty needs to bring into
existence immediately a planning process, the membership and charge of
which is such that all faculty and students and staff at Evergreen are
convinced that this is a serious intellectual and pedagogical and communal
commitment. Faculty of color in particular need to be convinced that this
is a serious commitment. 32
The life commitments expressed on blank pages filled with faculty members'
autobiographical sketches are , apparently, not sufficient evidence of
"commitment" anymore; commitment must be marked through the establishment of a
"planning process."

And the whole process must be subject to public approval;

especially must the process receive the approval of those who are the raw
material behind the new scarce resource in the planning arena.
Two proposals that surfaced as the 1980s became the 1990s indicate the
extensiveness of the financial commitment that this new notion of "diversity"
commands.

A report on International Studies at Evergreen calls for a commitment

of 20%-30% of the entire faculty to an "International Studies Project . •

A new

initiative of the Board of Trustees calls for spending $1.5 million on a "Center
for Multicultural Studies."

These are not proposals for trivial •commitments"

in a College with an annual budget of less than $35 million .

This is the kind

of money that provokes fights in the academy ; these stakes are not low .
Administrators seek to see new administrative initiatives that come under the
rubric of "multi-culturalism" as continuous with past values of the College .
Thus, a dean preparing a memo to justify the $1.5 million expenditure for the
"Center" wrote, "Evergreen's increasingly 'multi-cultural' curriculum can be
seen as a development that has grown from a long-standing determination to make
the curriculum more inclusive."

He writes that "multiculturalism" is, in some

important ways, just a new way of doing old business.

He writes, "Where

disciplinary difference was once the essential ingredient in the most inventive

70
programs, cultural difference has now become critical.

Collaboration was, and

is, modeled for students by cross-disciplinary conversation, but now
collaboration is being modeled by cross-cultural conversation."33

This

reconstruction of the immediate past as smoothly continuous with the College's
history ignores the fact that most faculty members came to the college, in part,
out of a rejection of disciplines, out of a desire merely to find "like-minded"
people willing to push big stones up steep hills yet again, but to do so
together.

The image one has of the early Evergreen is of a social place where

different faculty members would meet with students to work on problems they felt
they had in common.

It is only from the vantage point of the present that the

conversation that occurred then can be understood as being intended to model for
students any sort of collaboration.

People talked because they had to.

"Multiculturalism" seeks to structure a conversation.
they are compelled to talk about the correct topic.

People might talk, but

In deciding how to spend

some surplus summer money one year, the academic deans decided they would fund
three kinds of activities: (1) "a series of two-week on-campus institutes on
topics related to multicultural studies," (2) sending •teams of faculty to some
conferences on multicultural issues," and (3) projects proposed by individual
faculty members or groups of faculty members "to promote their professional
development in the area of multicultural studies."

Again, the dean justifying

the "Multicultural Center" using the idiom of the modern manager:
Of course "multi-culturalism" isn't an event; it's a process, a way of
extending the vision of what being well-educated encompasses. The term
itself might someday be defined, and the definition might turn out to be
useful. What we need, however, is less the definition than the
conversation that the development of a definition could inspire.~
And, of course, to engage in this proper conversation, •Faculty need support to
converse with one another outside the classroom ....

Faculty need a period of

intensive research and development on how better to take advantage of the intranational and inter-national differences that already have been round to have
such great potential in a radically inclusive curriculum and institution of
higher education." 35

Hence, the $1.5 million that will (probably) be spent on

this major re-tooling of human resources.
It is difficult to find fault with such high-mindedness and bureaucratic good
will.

But we do not wish to find fault; we wish to try to suggest that

multiculturalism, the planning concept, and diversity, the scarce resource,

71
structure the College in a way that undermines collegiality.

In introducing his

thoughts on multiculturalism, the Provost wrote in 1990,
We are as a faculty in a strained and fragile state. Many feel
marginalized, confused, anxious, fearful about their jobs, and unwilling
to take the risks which so rich an environment might under other
circumstances invite . No group of faculty seems pleased with where we
are . ~

One faculty member said that she has heard faculty who are People of Color say
that they are not able to work with her anymore because they have to "save
themselves" for the students.

"Some faculty of color have to spend so much time

educating whites that they have little time left to teach and support students
of color who need their mentoring . "37

But these symptoms seem to us to be the

traces left by the effort, successful so far, of creating a curriculum that has
its own demands (which now go principally under the name of multiculturalism) to
which everyone must submit.

People who must serve the needs of a curriculum--as

opposed to engaging in a search for people who might help them in their quests-will be fragile, strained, confused, anxious .

There is in a "curriculum"--as

opposed to "like-minded colleagues"--nothing to grasp.
Bureaucratic structures turn people into resources that will serve the needs
of the structure.

People who are viewed as "human resources" can be (and will

feel) used up by that which

~

them .

And they will not have the kinds of

unstructured conversations that can occur when two people are pushing the same
stone up the same hill; . they will spend all of their time and energy (other
scarce resources under this kind of economy) making sure they have found the
right words for talking about the right things.

They spend this time speaking

and inculcating in others these ritualized words that make the College, if not
the world, a more pure place, even if this means not being able to listen any
more to others.

One member of the faculty wrote in response to the report on

international studies:
In our rush to adopt inter-culturalism as a program we will run the
risk of no longer being able to hear the pain of those who suffer in the
linguistic limbo created by being in classes and on a campus where only
one culture is present, spoken, embodied . Think of it this way : Without
a program, a curriculum, a Director, a staff, a budget, a ... , I must
listen to the student who says to me, "You talk differently than my
grandmother. She once said .. . and I cannot understand you," and I am
compelled by these words of suffering to struggle together with this
student to find a common idiom that will link me with her with her
grandmother so that education can proceed .

72

When we have a curriculum, a budget, a program, and a Director, I
have an out. I can say (and the very existence of the program tempts me
to say), (Bureaucratically:) "Grandmothers' Discourses is being offered
next quarter; come back then," or (Therapeutically:) "Yes, of course, I
speak only ml culture; others speak the cultures of their grandmothers;
perhaps you would be more comfortable in their classes," or
(Negotiatingly:) "We should go see the Director; he can be the
intermediary/therapist/negotiator between us; after all, neither of us
wants conflict, and perhaps we will find a way to better communicate with
one another; and wouldn't that be education!" In our rush to embrace good
ideas for solving difficult problems we may lose our capacity to
appreciate our common lot of suffering which enables us to listen to
everyone, not just those who speak like us, and which enables us to
imagine good education.
Once the open space of the social encounter that can develop around "our common
lot of suffering" is filled up by curricular structures, once the conversations
with no aim (but with the purpose of hearing an other) give way to conversations
aimed at formulating definitions, once enduring and difficult problems admit
bureaucratic "solutions,• the very basis for an education through collegial
teaching is undermined, if not lost.
One member of the faculty finally became tired of the casual but deadly
serious way in which "multiculturalism" was being invoked with all the ritual
that can come to surround any mystery like "culture" and with all the threats
that can accompany ritualized behavior.

After a withering attack on the way

racially based or imperially imposed terms ("African-American," "Arab") were
being invoked in the name of purifying our discussions of contamination from
racially loaded terms, he wrote (in the campus newspaper),
It has always been an essential and conspicuous part of Evergreen's
predominant political culture that a relatively small but
disproportionately vocal and influential group of moral/political
guardians has roamed the College seeking the ruin of the Incorrect. And
their standards of Correctitude have in recent years become increasingly
stringent and more finely calibrated. I have tried to show in the
foregoing [analy,sis of the use of "multiculturalism") that one of the .
results of this hyperinflation of the discourse of Correctitude is that
the resulting rococo terminology lapses, under the weight of its own
convolution, into self-defeating incoherence. It is as if your home
thermostat were calibrated to a hundredth of a degree. This kind of
exactitude is vicious, as it would make of our furnace an impossible
object: it would turn off as soon as it turned on, and it would turn on as
soon as it turned off. Similarly, the increasing refinements in the
prevailing discourse of Righteousness is incoherent and racist in the name
of ... anti-racism!

73

This criticism is on target if the "discourse" is taken to be an essentially
rational one.

But this writer knew very well that criticizing the rhetoric that

developed around "multiculturalism, the planning concept" for being convoluted
is like criticizing any religious ritual for being convoluted.
was developing in the way a religious language develops.

This "discourse•

"Multiculturalism" is

a liturgy that has its own altars (at which a tribute of 20-30% of the faculty,
or $1.5 million is to be paid) with their own guardians who know the right
ritualistic words to invoke to protect the mysteries.

.

And, indeed, the writer

was taken to task for missing the point entirely, as, it seems, the non-elect
always must.

A rebuttal in the College newspaper argued, essentially, that

racism is the result of the invention, in the nineteenth century, of the concept
of "race" as a way of talking about color differences.
of the existence, in truth, of races.

Racism is not the result

So People of Color say there can be

racism without, in fact, there being any such thing as race.

In a college, both

arguments could be correct and the disputants could become discussants and,
maybe, colleagues.
sacrifices.

In a religious world, this kind of argument demands

It is no wonder faculty members are anxious.

The Provost of Evergreen concluded his overview of the College's
administrative efforts to improve "diversity" by saying, "Some have observed
that the issue is like that of perceiving the glass of water as half-empty or
half-full.

I do not see it that way."~

Like any good administrator, he wanted

to think about what the state of affairs ought to look like in the future (as
the Planning Council put it, "What do we want the College community to 'look
like' in the year 2010?" 39 ), and then he wanted to think about the resources
that would have to be mustered and the programs that would have to be
implemented to get from here to there.

He wanted to protect the water in the

glass and, if possible, add more, because you never know how much you are going
to "need" when you start down this future-oriented path.

Nowhere in this kind

of thinking is there room for using what you have to respond to humanly felt
problems in the present, for using the stuff in the glass to slake a thirst.
Holy water has its rules for use and can only be used in the context of a
properly sanctified structure.

74

Assurance: Giving

in~

Assessment

Those who are sanctified nevertheless sometimes need assurance .

During the

late 1980s Evergreen jumped on board another bandwagon that was rolling through
institutions of higher education, the assessment bandwagon.

Again, there are

reasons for the College having embarked on a large assessment project (many of
which have to do with pressure from outside the College, most notably from the
recently constituted Higher Education Coordinating Board), but, again, we are
not interested in why the College has changed .
it

~

We are interested in noting that

changed .

When word came from administration that the College would have to engage in
some formal assessment of its "product," there was a ripple of the old
arrogance.

"What we do is not suited to 'assessment,'" some people said with

their noses ever so slightly upturned.

When word came that all the institutions

in the state would have to subject some of their students to standardized tests
(and when the suggestion was made that it would not be unreasonable to link
future funding of each institution to test results), there was a ripple of
panic .

Then there was communication among the schools in the state,

organization among the administrations, and some months later Evergreen's
administration came back to the faculty to announce , proudly, that they had
saved the school from mindless, standardized evaluations and that they had
struck a deal with the state's Coordinating Board that would allow each school
to devise its own assessment scheme .
of enthusiasm.

This was greeted with more than a ripple

Especially after the administration was able to secure from the

state legislature a non-trivial sum of money dedicated specifically to
assessment projects, many faculty members became committed to telling the
"Evergreen story" to anyone or any institutional authority that expressed any
kind of interest .
Assessment of students at Evergreen had been structured very much like
evaluation of faculty.

Faculty members placed themselves before a blank piece

of paper and filled that paper with their thoughts about a student's
achievements.

In some programs, faculty members wrote "letters of reflection"

to their students mid -way through a program or at quarter breaks.

These letters

of reflection were informal evaluations in which faculty members tried to
encourage those who needed it, tweak the better students to superior work and,
in general, to find the words that would make the program "memorable" and

75
•significant" for each student.
evaluations.

End-of-program evaluations were formal

They became, along with program descriptions, parts of each

student's formal, college transcript.
"boiler-plate" quality to them.

Some faculty wrote evaluations that had a

Others wrote letters to the student that were

not unlike the informal letters of reflection.

Others wrote individualized,

third-person accounts of what the student had done in the program.

Richard

Jones, worried that he was writing something for an audience he did not know,
wrote letters to a student's next instructor and told that instructor what to
expect from this student based on his or her work in the previous year.
blank page could be filled however the faculty member chose to fill it.*

The
The

only constraint placed on the faculty member was that failures could not be
formally noted.

The faculty adopted the practice of including in the transcript

only assessments of the work actually completed.

In addition to the faculty

member's evaluation of a student, each student had the opportunity to include a
"self evaluation" in his or her college transcript.

The student also faced a

blank page and filled it however he or she chose.
Under this system, there was no concern for what is called in an economy of
planning "summative evaluation."

There were no grade-point averages to

calculate, since there were no grades.

There were no class ranks to be awarded,

since there was no dimension for ranking.

There was not even an academic major

recorded on a student's diploma that would confer the kind of rank that is
culturally associated with the various disciplines.

Once students accumulated

180 credits (the total of those "damned equivalencies" at the bottom of each
evaluation), they were awarded degrees and excused from the college at the next
commencement.
Assessment, as that term has come to be understood in higher education,
requires summative evaluation.

Evergreen committed itself to assessment, first,

in its "Strategic Plan," a planning document adopted by the College on August 7,
1986.

The plan called

f~r

the development of "an evaluation system which

provides us with systematic evidence about the effects of an Evergreen education

•

Legend, and perhaps fact, has it that one faculty member included in
each evaluation an appropriately chosen, instructive toy. He broke even the
bounds imposed by the blank page . He subsequently normalized his behavior.

76

and which challenges us to remain committed to student outcomes which are
consistently excellent.•

The rationale for this said,

we need to subject our impressions [of students' development of skills] to
documentation because such documentation will assist us in refining our
programs, as well as informing others of their effectiveness. Documented
knowledge of the effectiveness of our teaching strategies will help the
State Legislature and the Higher Education Coordinating Board, both of
which are increasingly concerned about educational outcomes, to understand
the sources of effectiveness in our style of education. For ourselves, we
need continually to sort out those practices that are most effective and
those new directions that we should develop. 40
This kind of rhetoric--brutally planning-oriented rhetoric--takes us a long way
from a college in which teaching teams requested and received from the College a
mandate to do something memorable and significant.

This kind of rhetoric says

that the only thing worth remembering is that which will help one refine the
future, and the only thing that is significant is that which can be documented
in a way that responds to agencies that are "increasingly concerned about
educational outcomes.•

This is the first time that the College had been

concerned about the "excellence" of "student outcomes."

In the past it had been

concerned about teaching and learning, and when a student left the College with
a thick transcript full of pages filled by faculty members and by the students
themselves, that was that.

The student was gone and the faculty was left behind

to teach and learn again.
The scheme proposed by the Strategic Plan was rigorously concerned about the
future effects of present actions.

To the extent that it was implemented, this

scheme would create a situation in which everyone would have to think carefully
about the future in every choice of teaching scheme or teaching material he or
she made.

Faculty members would not be free to "keep abreast of the changing

world and ... capitalize quickly on our own experience."

The assessment scheme

cast a long shadow of future "student outcomes" over present teaching efforts
and faculty were left to titrate ("continually to sort DUt those practices that
are most effective ... ")their teaching methods in response to the demands of
"documented knowledge."
To assess "student outcomes," the Strategic Plan called on the officers of
the College to
Seek planning funds to develop an evaluation system that will:
1.
Determine the effects of our programs on our alumni (our
outcome measure).

77
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Generate information that compares them with alumni from
similar colleges and universities.
Develop a component to the system that will examine our
processes for their effects on our current students as well as
alumni.
Continue to cooperate with the Outcome Assessment project of
the Washington State Center for the Improvement of the Quality
of Undergraduate Education.
Continue high quality program reviews involving the
institutional Curriculum Review Team, external visitors and
cooperation with the Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Develop a faculty and administrative exchange program with
Alverno College, the institution which has develof.ed the most
expertise in the evaluation of liberal education. 1

The old arrogance of the College was gone.

While the College had participated

in external reviews and prepared internal documents for accreditation teams,
this scheme institutionalized external comparison, the acceptance of external
standards for assessment and cooperation with external institutions in the
formulation of internal practices.

The wall that Evergreen had erected around

itself was breached by the assessment scheme.
The scheme that eventually developed, with the help of many faculty at the
institution was handsomely funded and had many facets.
secured $140,000 to do assessment.

The administration

This was about the same amount available for

all other "sponsored research" projects proposed by the faculty and was by far
the largest pot of money available to faculty for designated work.

One group of

people seized on the cognitive development model of William Perry, began doing
overall assessments of student development, and made comparisons between
Evergreen students and students at other colleges and universities collecting
similar data.

Others began planning the administration of various psychological

measures to selected groups of students.

The Office of Educational Research

hired an ethnographer to write about the College with an anthropologist's eye to
provide a context for other assessments.

Another group of faculty began a video

project that included not only filming of classrooms and the compiling of
Alverno-inspired video logs of student achievements, but also filming of a
critical discussion of the overall assessment project held at an all-faculty
retreat.

It is a sure sign that you are participating in an economy of planning

when criticism of a project becomes part and parcel of the project itself.
One of the most curious projects proposed under the assessment umbrella
sought to bring the old blank-page approach to assessment into the new economy

78

of planning.

In a memo to the Assessment Study Group (November l, 1989) two

administrators proposed collecting wstudent portfoliosw for assessment purposes.
A •student portfolio" used to consist of all evaluations written by and of a
student, all letters of reflection, and significant pieces of the student's
work.

In the early days of Evergreen, students carried this material in red

vinyl brief cases.

Faculty members would often ask to see a student's portfolio

before admitting the student to a program.

The cost of keeping a •portfolio•

was $2.50 for the vinyl brief case and a little effort from the student to make
sure that all the right papers got put into it.

Now, for the assessment

project, two administrators were proposing the expenditure of just under $40,000
to collect portfolios on 50 students, to store those portfolios in the Office of
Institutional Research, and to analyze them.
undertaking was this:

Part of the justification for this

wNational and regional assessment meetings increasingly

reflect a growing disillusionment with standardized tests.

Among the major

criticisms of standardized tests is the absence of a clear connection with the
curriculum." 42

In one stroke, this proposal makes a commonplace out of

something that was, for so many years at Evergreen, disputed territory, the
•curriculum."

But it did so in terms that are completely acceptable under an

economy of planning.

Collect data under the assertion that the collection

effort has a "clear connection" to something, the curriculum in this instance,
that was rejected at the outset of the endeavor.

Then, of course, the thing to

which the collection effort is connected must exist, or must be made to exist.
In the name of doing one good thing (collecting "documented knowledge"), we get
another good thing (the stability of a curriculum).
economy are neatly sewn together.

The pieces of the new

The whole begins to make sense on its own

terms and the past becomes very hard to re-member.
There is one sector of the College that stands in contrast to this rush to
assess in summative terms.

The Native American Studies Program is a part of the

College that, as one faculty member put it, "called Evergreen's bluff."
Assessment, like teaching and learning in this Program, remains studentcentered, student-driven, and difficult to aggregate .
while evaluation is holistic but non-summative.

Learning is cumulative,

In the major program in this

specialty area, students are asked to give their answers to four questions:
What do I want to learn?
How do I plan to learn it?

79

How will I know that I have learned it?
What difference will it make?
There are no right answers for these questions.
answer them authoritatively.

Students are asked, simply, to

They become a matter of discussion between student

and faculty, but faculty are obliged to accept a student's answers to these
questions as the student's answers.

These questions and the student's answers

then become the basis for assessment throughout the program .

Institutional

assessment that has an external orientation always has implicit in it a RNo"
that it speaks to students.

"No, you don't know that . "

"No, you have not

progressed up the cognitive development scale, despite what you might think.R
"No, you have not achieved good student outcomes."
you think you are."

"You are not the authority

No matter how nice and unpunishing an institutional

assessment scheme is , it always holds a "No" in reserve.

The Native American

Studies Program begins by saying "Yes" to students and it persists in its "Yes."
It accepts students' various definitions of what might constitute learning for
each of them in the circumstances they find themselves.
answers to those four questions .

It accepts their

When teaching and learning begins with a RYes"

and concludes with an evaluation of a student's achievements, the students will
never hear a "No" and their learning will never be brought into an economy of
planning.
Of course there are administrative efforts to bring this part of the college
under the planning umbrella.

The College's self-study report, prepared

for its

second ten-year accreditation, said of the area,
.. . the program has been very successful in providing a vehicle for
independent work that allows for self determination by students. It has
not been as successful in recent years in providing a vehicle for helping
Native American students move into the on-campus curriculum, nor has it
been the locus for a great deal of teaching about Native American
cultures . . . . There has been a significant resurgence of interest in the
area in the past three years and it is being seen as an important locus
for the college's efforts to become more ~eaningfully multicultural . To
take full advantage of this interest the area will need to emphasize its
value to the campus as a cultural center, not simply as an alternative
pedagogy. 43
So far, the area has resisted the demand that it "emphasize its value ... ," that
it contribute directly to some college -wide agenda of multiculturalism, that it
teach about Native cultures (one of the founders of the area emphasized that
this was a place for Native people to study, DQ! a place for them to be

80

studied), that it get on the bandwagon that will allow it to assess the quality
of its products alongside everyone else.
Is this kind of resistance useful?

We think it is important.

In another

context, Wolfgang Sachs has written about the way in which the Planning
Discourse sooner or later sounds "the wailing sirens" of a "kind of lifeboat
ethics."

In the name of survival (in the face of the State Legislature or the

Higher Education Coordinating Board, or in the face of our own lack of assurance
about the value of our educational endeavor), we have embraced an economy of
planning that aims to penetrate every crevasse of the College in order to refine
it, improve it, to make it aim for excellence.

Writing of the ecology and

development movements, Sachs said, "An ecocracy which acts in the name of 'one
earth' and aims to get the world out of its criminal rut and make it fighting
fit can soon become a threat to local communities and their lifestyles.•

In a

similar way, an economy of planning in higher education that is driven by an
obsession with assessment of the excellence of student outcomes, and with an eye
toward making students fighting fit for the world they live in, threatens to
root out any truly educational alternative that might otherwise find its way
into an institution of higher education.

Sachs asks, "How is it possible to

reinvent economic institutions that allow people to live gracefully without
making them prisoners of the pernicious drive to accumulate?"

He concludes

that, perhaps, among the peoples of the Third World there is some creativity
that will be useful to this end because, "in spite of everything, many people
there still remember a way of life in which economic performance was not
paramount."~

We would ask if it is possible to reinvent educational

institutions that would allow people to teach and learn gracefully without
making them prisoners of the pernicious drive to be "excellent" according to
today's standard?

And we would conclude that perhaps it is in little pockets

like the Native American Studies Program that there remains some hope, simply
because some people there remember a way of educating in which learning was
paramount and assessable performance was not.
Summary; Characterizing the Change
In all these aspects of the college there has been a similar movement.

In

faculty evaluation, in the curriculum, in the assessment of students, there has
been a move away from the blank page toward the well-structured, even the

81
ritualistically structured, page.

Taking our cue from this movement, we are

ready to essay a characterization of the overall change of The Evergreen State
College that, we think, has resulted in a Schwund.
In its early years Evergreen had many of the characteristics of a ghetto .

It

was well bounded, poor, often under siege; it sheltered those who were in a
distinct minority with regard to the dominant "culture" of higher education; it
had its own internal language and practices; and it had a kind of arrogant
vitality.

The College had its own ethos, a term that classically referred to a

dwelling or a specific

~

that called on its inhabitants to practice a

certain stewardship with regard to it.
structured, bureaucratically managed

Now the College is a fairly well

~·

It is manifestly part of the higher

education system of the state and, as such, it is concerned about its public
image, with managing communications across its interfaces with the rest of the
system.

It is an ethical space, if we may use that word "ethical" in it most

modern sense that involves the proper drawing of proper lines that keeps
everyone in their places within a well-managed space.
"Ghetto" is an apt term to characterize the early years of Evergreen.

The

first college-wide assembly one of us ever attended (in 1981) had the College's
president, later U. S. Senator Dan Evans, telling the convocation that there was
yet another bill in the state legislature proposing to close the college.
"But," he said, "unlike previous bills, this one has the backing of some
Democrats, so it is more serious."

The College had gotten so used to being

attacked that the president had to remind people to take an attack seriously.
Because of its image as an "alternative college" and because of low enrollment
in the early years, there was constant speculation in the nearby state capitol
about turning the place into a State Patrol training academy or, simply, about
using the buildings to house the expanding state bureaucracy .
always under siege.

Aiding the development of a siege mentality was the near-

· starvation budget allocated to the College .

There was no separate budget for

"sponsored research" or "faculty development."
among 20 or so faculty members.
conflicts .

The place was

Program secretaries were shared

There were very few material resources to cause

All of the conflicts of the College were with "the outside."

There

was the legislature, of course, but there was the rest of higher education as a
convenient "enemy" as well .

One of the most common forms of discussion at

Evergreen until very recently was about the way Evergreen differed from "Brand X

82

University.a

This language that cast all other institutions of higher education

into a melting pot was very useful for building a sense of internal unity, as
long as it was heard only internally.

Evergreen is the only place where either

author has been interviewed by a college-wide hiring committee.

One author

commented to the group that it was clear that this group thought of themselves
as a hiring filter and that they gave the impression that their primary task was
to allow only the right sort of people to come over the wall to join them.
As with any ghetto, Evergreen had its own ethos.

Even though many of the

teaching practices of the College were similar to what you might encounter
elsewhere, you could taste the place.

There was an audacity, a spirited,

playful seriousness, a respect-full impertinence that we became part of when we
came to this place.
Now, like the space of the blank page of evaluations, the place has become
structured.

Small managerial details that left major marks on faculty members'

psyches started to appear in the 1980s.

Faculty members were sent computerized

records of their long-distance phone calls.
forced into a block scheduling scheme.*

Scheduling of programs had to be

A "Faculty/Staff Lounge" was installed

(after a debate about whether it should be just a "Faculty Lounge") so that one
could lunch with one's own kind.

"Security" became a fashionable concern** and

the College seems to take a perverse pleasure in fighting with other state
agencies over whether we should have a Security Force or a Police Force.
is a curriculum.

There are schemes for accountability.

that everything is balanced.

There

The deans make sure

And the College pretty much seems to run itself.

* \lith the one dramatic effect that no longer would everyone at the
College have the same lunch hour.
** There are still some humorous aspects about Evergreen, but not everyone
gets the jokes. The President commissioned a study of asecurity" on campus.
A long questionnaire about what makes people "insecure" was formulated,
distributed, analyzed and written up. What makes people feel most insecure?
Not lack of security lighting. Not the "indecent exposure" incidents on the
path to the beach that get regularly reported to the campus community. Not
drugs or drink in the dorms. The cause of the greatest sense of insecurity was
the red brick square that gets powerfully slippery in the incessant winter
rains. As with any datum collected in a serious way in a planning economy this
one had immediate effects.
Some of the red bricks were ton up.
Non- slip
concrete pathways were installed across the square on the statistically most
frequently traveled courses.
Even walking on campus is becoming more
structured. But we are more secure.

83

The new Evergreen is now a resource-full place.
was issued a personal computer and printer.

Every member of the faculty

The third President established a

large pot of money for "sponsored research."

(This at a college whose rules,

even still, prohibit consideration of research and publications in a
reappointment decision.)

Enrollment soared in the late 1980s to the point that

the Admissions Office closed its doors to applicants who did not submit their
applications earlier than seven months before the beginning of the next academic
year.

New pots of money to sponsor conferences and institutes (on, for example,

"multi-culturalism" and "gender issues") appeared and faculty found that they
did not have to teach summer school to keep their bankers happy.

Faculty who

were, by the new situation in which they found themselves, invited to spend more
time writing proposals to get more money from the academic money managers
necessarily had less time to spend finding "like-minded folks" to talk to.
"Talking to" turned into "talking about."

And people found they could get paid

for "talking about."
Evergreen was founded as an unethical institution.

Ye use that term in the

strictly modern sense where "ethics" means the placing of boundaries of
propriety.
normatively.

We use that term descriptively, somewhat pejoratively, but not
We mean only that at Evergreen's founding there were very few

boundaries that told people the proper, ethical limits of their actions.

There

were none of the usual institutional categories to tell people who they were.
This is just another way to say that people had to face the problem of inventing
ways of talking to one another, of "finding the code."

We suggest that

Evergreen has gradually become an ethical institution.

That is, the College has

erected many of the usual university boundaries and structures by which people
come to know who they are and who everyone else is.

This ethicality takes all

the ambiguity out of our "relationships" with one another and lets us learn to
"communicate effectively."

And when we fail to communicate effectively, there

are, on the one side, communication therapists and, on the other, masters of
Correctitude ready to tell people how to communicate and what should be
communicated about.
We think that it would be useful to remember that this modern trace from the
"unethical" as a cleared place to the "ethical" as a properly delimited space is
almost exactly the opposite of the trace from the ethical to the unethical as
those terms were understood until roughly the middle of this century.

Ethics

84

used to entail the clearing of a place into which human meaning could be
projected.

It involved the creation of an

"ethical," we may have lost our ethos.

~.

In our move toward becoming

The possibility for people to engage in

collegial teaching may have evaporated like a lovely pond, unappreciated until
the day when it is there no more.

CONCLUSION
Part II sounds a sustained note which is bleak, and may, to some, be an
invitation to despair.

Moreover, it invites the critique that the very

collegiality of this writing project refutes the claim that collegiality is no
longer possible at Evergreen (a claim we would never make) .

Part I, on the

other hand, sounds an enthusiastic note, and may, to some be motivating and
exciting.

It would be easy to read these two sections as voicing opposing sides

to a debate about the nature of our college.
We urge you not to read them this way .

We each wrote them both, and we each

find our experiences mirrored in both sections.

Both sections describe one and

the same institution.
One of us recently wrote a public letter in response to a memo about the
presidential search process in which he invoked the spirit and language of John
Dewey to argue that
we need to be thinking about our future in the language of aims, not as
'things to be accomplished'; moreover, our aims are not things we sit
around and choose--they are already inherent in our practice and our
history. It is crucial that we become aware of them and that we act
intelligently by means of them--but we do ourselves damage if we imagine
that we sit around in a vacuum at any moment and 'choose' them. 45
We would like this essay to be read as an attempt to articulate some of the aims
of our historical practice at Evergreen, and, at the same time, some of the
impersonal "aims" of that historical drift which seems inevitably to move modern
bureaucratic institutions.

The question that faces us is whether we can direct

our own practice intelligently enough by means of our own aims so that we
continue to resist the currents as defined by modern institutions of education
(including our own).

To say "continue" implies that Evergreen began by

resisting such currents, a claim which is both debatable and optimistic.
let it stand.

That debate is not worth having.

But

What is worth doing now is

self-consciously recovering the aims which have guided us in our best moments
and vigorously resisting the institution's tendency to smother them.

To do

this, we must recognize that each of us carries the institutions' tendencies
within us; at least half the struggle will take place within ourselves .

We will

need to separate within our own thinking and feeling what is "rational," what is
"fair," and what is "inevitable" from what we know to be important and worth
preserving.

In our own struggles to effect this separation, we have discovered

that our most important experiences, those most worth preserving, have arisen

86
out of what we here have called "collegial teaching."

87
NOTES
1. Allan Bloom,
1987, p. 299.

~Closing

2f tb& American

HinQ, New York:

2.
France, Peter, "Introduction," Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Solitary Yalker, New York, N.Y. : Penguin, 1979, p. 15.

3. Arendt, Hannah,
1958, p. 8.

~Human

Condition, Chicago:

Simon & Schuster,
Reveries .Q.f Ib.!l

University of Chicago Press,

Hill, Patrick, Memorandum on Faculty Evaluation, The Evergreen State
College, Olympia, Yashington, October 6, 1987, p. 13.

4.

5.

Ibid., p. 14.

6. The Evergreen State College 1984 Faculty Handbook, sec. 4.3000, pp. 1-2,
YAC 174-128-050, since repealed.

7.

The Evergreen State College 1988 Faculty Handbook, sec. 4.3000, p. 1.

8.

1984 Faculty Handbook, sec. 4.3000, p. 2.

9.

Ibid., p. 5.

10. Jones, Richard M., Experiment at Evergreen, Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman
Publishing Company, 1981.
11 .

1984 Faculty Handbook, sec . 4.3000, p. 3.

12.

Ibid . , pp . 2-3.

13. Jones, Richard M., "Enjoying Evaluation," The Evergreen State College,
n.d . , p. 46.
14.

1988 Faculty Handbook, sec . 4 . 3000, p. 5.

15.

Ibid., p. 8.

16 .

Ibid.

17 . Memo from Chuck Pailthorp, December, 1989.
18.

Jones, Richard, Experiment at

19.

Ibid., p . 21.

Ever~reen,

op cit., p. 26.

20. The Evergreen State College Bulletin. 1973 - 74, Olympia, Yashington, pp .
29, 39, 42, 46.
21.

Ibid., p. 100.

88
22.

Jones, Richard, letter to Richard Alexander, November 28, 1977.

23.

Ibid.

24.

~

Eyer&reen Student Handbook. 1989-1990, p. 13.

25.

~

Ever&reen

26 .

Ibid. p. 120.

27.

~Evergreen

~

College Bulletin 1973-74, p. 4.

Student Handbook 1989-1990, p. 20.

28.
"Draft--Strategic Planning Statement: Multicultural Diversity,"
Evergreen State College, April 17, 1990, p. 4, emphasis added.
29.

Ibid.

30.

Ibid., p. 2, emphasis added.

31.

Ibid., p. 1.

The

32.
Hill, Patrick, Memorandum to the Faculty on Multiculturalism, May 25,
1990 .• p. 11.
33. Pailthorp, Chuck, "Draft--Evergreen's Model of 'Multi-Culturalism,'" July
24, 1990, p. 3.
34.

Ibid. , p. 5.

35 .

Ibid., p. 6.

36.

Hill, op. cit., p. 2.

37.

Planning Council, op. cit., p. 3.

38.

Hill, op. cit., p. 6.

39 .

Planning Council, op. cit., p. 5.

40.
"Final Report of the Strategic Planning Council," The Evergreen State
College, August 7, 1986, pp. 20-21.
41.

Ibid., p. 21.

42. Memorandum to the Assessment Study Group, "Portfolio Project Proposal,"
November 1, 1989.
43 .
Memorandum from "Matt Smith for the Deans"
Accreditation Report," January 5, 1990, p. 39.

to

the

faculty,

"The

89
44. Sachs, Wolfgang, "On the Archeology of the Development Idea: Six Essays,•
State College, PA: STS Program, Penn State University, November, 1989, pp. Vl7, IV-9.
45.

Don Finkel, Memo to the Presidential Search Process DTF, February 8, 1991.

Source

The Evergreen State College Faculty Publications, Accession 1976-07

Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty Publications

Media

1976-07_Finkel_01.pdf