Richard Alexander Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

AlexanderRichard

Title

Richard Alexander Oral History Interview

Date

7 December 2016

Creator

Richard Alexander

Contributor

Susan Fiksdal

extracted text

Richard Alexander
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
December 7, 2016
FINAL

Begin Part 1 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16
Fiksdal: Okay. I’m with Richard Alexander for his first interview in the oral history project. So, Richard,
how would you like to begin?
Alexander: I would like to begin with a question that you asked me first on the telephone; that is to say,
how I came to Evergreen. And that will inevitably slide into the next things that I think people—that I
have to tell . . .
Fiksdal: Yes.
Alexander: . . . that would be of use, and we can branch off from that as we go. Okay. I was teaching at
the time at San Jose State—it’s now San Jose State University, but at the time, it was just San Jose State
College—in an experimental program for freshmen and sophomores called Tutorials in . . . Arts &
Sciences? I don’t think so. But it was the Tutorials program, and this program had been set up by a man
named Mervyn Cadwallader.
He hired me to teach in this. I didn’t know much of anything about the program, I really didn’t.
But he got in touch with me because he—this gets lengthy . . .
Fiksdal: No, it’s good, it’s good to know.
Alexander: Okay. He had been in contact with a very old friend of mine, Jack Pickering, who had been
pretty much my boss when I worked for Rinehart and Company, then middle-rank but fairly prestigious
publishing house in the College Division. I won’t go through all the difficulties of how I managed to get
that job, but Jack was an editor, textbook editor, of enormous prestige within that quite specialized
field. And he and I hit it off very well, and became quite close friends, although there was a big age gap
between us.
Subsequently, while I was working for Rinehart, Rinehart was bought by Henry Holt. And even
though Jack was a major editor, the new management really didn’t want to absorb Rinehart. And so I
was let go, rather ignominiously. It was kind of scandalous, because I’d done very good work for them. I
was a textbook salesman.

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Being a textbook salesman has a lot to do with my being at Evergreen and what I did, because,
as a textbook salesman—you know my college training was in English literature. I had to sell textbooks
in history, political science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, you name it.
Fiksdal: So you have to be able to talk a little bit about them.
Alexander: So I had to talk intelligently with the people that I went around selling them.
Fiksdal: Right. And they were, again, college-level textbooks?
Alexander: Oh, absolutely.
Fiksdal: Yeah, wow.
Alexander: So I was going—I had seven states in the Southeast, that is to say, everything from Virginia
south, and west to Arkansas, but not Louisiana. The fellow who had New Orleans in his territory didn’t
want to give it up, wasn’t going to give it up.
Fiksdal: He wasn’t about to, no [laugh].
Alexander: So I went to all of these places. I had a very short time, but that’s beside the point. What’s
really important is that I had to learn quite a lot about the current status on various important questions
in those fields, so I could tell people with at least some authority that the textbook we had would work
for them, or probably wouldn’t work for them.
Fiksdal: Right.
Alexander: In fact, one of the things that made me peculiar—and I think led to success—is that I was
willing to say, “Well, for the purposes of the course that you would want, this book might be very good
on its own, but it’s not appropriate to what you’re doing. It just won’t address those questions, but this
other one somebody else is offering would.” People, after one visit, people trusted me.
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. That would impress me.
Alexander: Right. So, at any rate, I spent a lot of time catching on all these fields, so I could actually
hold long conversations with faculty members on them. And, as you might imagine, this was
enormously valuable preparation for the interdisciplinary programs that we wound up offering at
Evergreen.
Fiksdal: Well, also, you were very current on the kinds of questions people were asking.
Alexander: Well, I was at that point.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: Later on, maybe not so current.
Fiksdal: Right.

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Alexander: But I was comfortable with it. And so it didn’t bother me that maybe, in the program, that
we were doing, we weren’t going to do any literature at all. That didn’t bother me in the least.
Fiksdal: Interesting.
Alexander: In fact, I was quite happy with that.
Fiksdal: Huh.
Alexander: On the other hand, I was quite dedicated to literature, too.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: But that’s part of it to go on. At any rate, I got fired from there. And . . . then . . . had
already decided, after two years selling textbooks, that my almost congenital feeling of antipathy for the
academic world was stupid; and that what I really wanted to do was be on the other side of the desk
that was there. So, in order to do that, I had to go to graduate school, and went for three or four years.
So I wound up teaching and getting a Ph.D.—the master’s degree very fast, and then a Ph.D.
very slowly—and wound up teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, in the mid-to-late ‘60s. So, to
give people a sense of what that time was, my then-wife—we subsequently divorced when we were out
living in Olympia—but Adrienne and I and a couple of friends went down to Selma. We would have
been on the march if the march had been held at the time we went down.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: Nobody knew when the march was going to be held. Nobody knew. They couldn’t possibly
have planned when that date would be.
Fiksdal: No.
Alexander: It made me rather peculiar in the group. The other three people were all Yankees, and
hadn’t a clue about where they were going.
Fiksdal: Wait a minute. Where are you from?
Alexander: I’m from Atlanta, Georgia.
Fiksdal: Well, see, I didn’t know that.
Alexander: No, you didn’t. Born and raised. And that was basically where I was from for 30 years. And
then, a year in New Orleans. And, in fact, my best friend’s family were from Selma, as a boy.
Fiksdal: Oh? So you knew Selma. Yeah.
Alexander: I didn’t know Selma. I’d never been there.
Fiksdal: Ah, okay.
Alexander: But I knew people who were from there, let’s put it that way.
Fiksdal: Right.
3

Alexander: I learned a great deal more about Selma, even after I had been there. Selma’s a very
interesting small city, and by no means a benighted boondocks that a lot of people imagined it was.
Certainly not. But at any rate, as a Southerner—and there are quite a few white Southerners who were
on that side of the street in Selma—we were very important. I had my beard already. I grew a beard
quite early.
Fiksdal: And why is that?
Alexander: I grew a beard because I discovered I looked good in it. And I’ve never liked—I’ve always
had an aversion to mirrors. I can’t stand to see myself in them. And after a while, I began realizing that,
as I lathered my face, I found that I didn’t look bad at all. [laughter] So I decided to keep the lather on
permanently. And this was quite early, in the early ‘60s. So very, very few people had beards. Very
few.
Fiksdal: Oh, interesting.
Alexander: Yeah. Young men, particularly, did not have them.
Fiksdal: So you stood out.
Alexander: I sure did. And I tell you, some of the television and the newspaper photographers and so
forth were constantly zeroing in on me and taking all these pictures.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting.
Alexander: No one interviewed me.
Fiksdal: I was going to say, did you get to talk?
Alexander: No.
Fiksdal: Oh, too bad.
Alexander: Nobody interviewed me. Those of us who were Southerners at Selma knew instinctively—
we knew before we got there—that our job was to do only what the people in Selma wanted us to do;
to take their instructions; follow their instructions; don’t do anything else. And it’s in the nature of
things that a lot of these instructions were coming from young teenagers, because they were the ones
who didn’t have to go to work.
Fiksdal: I see. So they were kind of the runners, and the people who would take messages?
Alexander: They did a hell of a lot more than just take messages.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Alexander: They didn’t do any—much planning. But they were in on everything, and they were the
ones that we got our marching orders from.
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s great. How long were you in Selma?
4

Alexander: We were there for about four or five days.
Fiksdal: Yeah? Wow. And do you remember the month, or the . . . ?
Alexander: Oh, no.
Fiksdal: That’s okay.
Alexander: I have a very bad memory for dates.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it’d be kind of fun to go back.
Alexander: That’s why I try to—I locate things in time by associating them with other events that took
place before or after.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s helpful. Yeah.
Alexander: At any rate, this is pertinent to how I got the job at Evergreen, by the way. Subsequently, of
course, all the civil rights agitation broke out in the North. And while we were at Galesburg, we
organized a group of students, at their request, to drive off to the march on the Pentagon. Very, very
interesting. Not at all what people who weren’t there imagine it was. It was, by far, the most patriotic
event I’ve ever been involved with.
I remember marching—walking across one of the bridges from downtown D.C. to the Pentagon
base. And there was this huge mob, and I turned to the young man who was walking next to me and I
said, “They really missed the chance. They should be passing out American flags to all of us.”
And he said, “Damn right.” [laughing]
Yeah. Literally, people were just filled with the most extraordinary pride in being there, and
being part of what we thought was a genuine American protest movement.
Fiksdal: So were the people that went with you—the students that wanted to do this—were they
African American or were they primarily white?
Alexander: There were very few African Americans at Knox. The next year, there started to be.
Fiksdal: Yeah, because that’s when I was in college.
Alexander: There were very few at that time, but the next year, the school had gotten its act together,
and recruited a fairly large—I’d say 25, 30 students—that, in itself was a problem.
Fiksdal: We don’t need to go into that. Right.
Alexander: At any rate, I got a letter from Jack Pickering. He had moved to San Francisco to work for a
publishing house there. And I don’t know how it is he met Mervyn Cadwallader, but one evening,
Mervin and his girlfriend of the moment—really fine woman named Micki Majors, who was the
secretary of the Tutorials program, a very strong presence there. At any rate, the two of them went out
to have dinner with Jack and his wife, and they got talking about students, radical students, and
5

difficulties and so on. And I’d been writing to him based on my experience with the students at
Galesburg.
Fiksdal: Oh, great. So he had that.
Alexander: And Jack, without asking me, just turned over the correspondence to Mervyn. And the next
thing I know, I’m getting this letter from Mervin. My wife didn’t want to stay in Galesburg. She wanted
to get out of there. She was a native of Illinois, and she just wanted to be someplace else. But there
weren’t any jobs.
Fiksdal: Oh, I was going to ask you about the job market.
Alexander: There were not jobs. And I did go to interview at a big college in Rhode Island. Not Brown.
[laughing] Roger Williams was the name of it. But I never came out to San Jose, and it [his hiring] was
done entirely by mail.
Fiksdal: You’re kidding.
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: So maybe they didn’t have the money to fly you out. Or what do you think?
Alexander: I’m not quite sure. I don’t think that was the problem.
Fiksdal: Wasn’t even the point. Ah, that’s interesting.
Alexander: I don’t. I think what the problem was that Mervin was planning to leave San Jose, but he
didn’t want to tell me that.
Fiksdal: So what year was this? ’68?
Alexander: It would have been . . . yeah, ’68; ’67-’68.
Fiksdal: ’67-’68. Right.
Alexander: Okay. So at any rate, my wife and I discussed it, and decided that the Tutorials program
sounded like a better fit for me than the Roger Williams job. I’m not exactly sure that that was really the
case, but that’s what we decided. And so I took the job; came out, only to discover, from Micki Majors,
that Mervyn wasn’t here. He was in New York. He was on Long Island. [laughing]
Fiksdal: At Old Westbury?
Alexander: At Old Westbury.
Fiksdal: So he had gone that year? Only that year?
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: So he was only there one year.
Alexander: At Old Westbury?
Fiksdal: Yes.
6

Alexander: Right, he was at Old Westbury only one year.
Fiksdal: He had been hired there as a faculty member?
Alexander: Yes, and he had been hired there to put together this freshman-sophomore program of the
Tutorials that he’d been running. The background to that is detailed fairly well in the book that Richard
Jones wrote [Experiment at Evergreen]. And, of course, Jones can’t be interviewed any longer.
Fiksdal: No, right.
Alexander: In fact, he couldn’t have been interviewed for some years before his death. But his book
became a kind of canonical account of the Tutorials program and the ideals of the coordinated studies
programs. It’s accurate, as far as it goes. Any of us who lived through those years know very well what
the inadequacies of the book are. But it has remained, so far as I know, the only study of the origins of
the academic program.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Charlie had a copy of a UW student’s dissertation that looked also at these founding
times, and goes into a little more detail in certain areas, because he was in education, department of
education . . .
Alexander: Right. I think that I’m one of the people who was interviewed.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: And if this is the same person, he did a lot of stuff about friendship networks amongst the
faculty.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he had some charts that Charlie showed me.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: Because I did hear about, you know, this group came from there, this group came from there.
Alexander: That, as far as he goes in the reportage—and he left out certain things on purpose that they
thought weren’t really pertinent to his research, and they were getting too close to private matters that
just were inappropriate to talk about in a book like that. But that’s a very interesting study, and it really
does—because friendship networking is a key to an awful lot of the detailed history of Evergreen, and
why certain programs survived and others did not.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I think Charlie just mentioned that the year he was born, which was 1932, put him in a
class of people for whom getting a job was really not that hard. And he felt—he’s a little bit selfdeprecating, as you know, so I think part of it was that he saw his rise to associate dean at Oberlin as
just sort of, well, he was there and he could do it. But also, it was that there wasn’t this vast array of
people to choose from. But he said that he saw that people really needed jobs when they first started

7

hiring both the planning faculty and then the next years. And so it’s great to have you next to be talking
to me.
Alexander: Well, I was born in ’34, so I’m in the same cohort that Charlie claims.
Fiksdal: But academically, you took two years off—
Alexander: I did more than that. I volunteered for the Army, because I wasn’t planning on an academic
career at all. In fact, I got out of college, and the last thing I wanted to do was to go to graduate school.
Fiksdal: And you’re one of the most academic people I knew at Evergreen. [laughing]
Alexander: That may be, but I was just determined not to do that. But at that time—the late ‘50s—the
draft was still on.
Fiksdal: Whatever for?
Alexander: Oh, it had never ceased.
Fiksdal: It just didn’t cease.
Alexander: It had never ceased.
Fiksdal: Oh, it was just policy or something.
Alexander: Yeah, it never ceased. We had a draft all the way from—they got rid of it before the Korean
War, and then suddenly had to revive it. And they kept running it all the way through the Vietnam War.
Fiksdal: Well, that part I know.
Alexander: But at any rate, even though we weren’t fighting a war at the time, the draft was on. So
companies weren’t hiring you until after—if you were male—you had to have done your service, or an
equivalent, or could in some way convince them that they weren’t suddenly going to have to give you
up, and then take you back in two years.
So I had a period of two years; and then another two years in there working for Rinehart; then
six years of graduate school. It was very tough to get academic jobs. It was very, very tough.
Fiksdal: So it must have been sort of incredible then to actually get a letter inviting you to be a member
of the faculty there.
Alexander: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Let’s see, where were we going? So I get to San Jose, and
Mervyn is nowhere to be seen. And he had thought that he had left the Tutorials program in good
hands. Little did he know. And this is something that proves true at Evergreen as well.
The coordinated studies programs are entirely creatures of the mix of the faculty that happened
to be joined in that program. And as soon as you change even one of those people, the dynamics of the
program changes, and you can’t reproduce it with a new person because they have a different training,
a different personality, different relationship to their colleagues [laughing] if it’s a real program. And the
8

only way you can do this is to restrict each individual faculty member’s work to that faculty member’s
strengths and personality, and he doesn’t interfere with anybody else. But that’s the exact opposite of
what is supposed to be going on in a coordinated studies program.
So I drop into this group. The five people I’m supposed to be working with, four of us had no
experience in doing this before. One of us had.
Fiksdal: So Merv thought he had handpicked who was going to be in this?
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: So you weren’t replacing someone; it was pretty much a new thing.
Alexander: Right. Well, we had two years of it, so there was one five-year group that had been working
already for a year. Okay, they had the sophomores. And then there was my five. We had the freshmen,
and of us, four were brand-new.
Fiksdal: My gosh.
Alexander: One was an artist who was practically crazy, well known for his wild San Francisco art and
art theory—teach you how to teach art. The Art of Teaching and the Teaching of Art is one of the things
that he wrote at one time, and it was just bizarre. We had another guy, who was an extremely
conservative historian and student of German—[laughing]—the exact opposite of Zack [the artist], and
me sitting in the middle. Well, that kind of thing is—at any rate, the conferences we had amongst each
other, trying to figure out what it is we were going to teach and how, were just insane.
Fiksdal: And was this in August or September?
Alexander: It was the middle of the summer on.
Fiksdal: Well, thank goodness it was in the middle of the summer.
Alexander: Right. But mostly, it was in August before, you know, just scrambling around trying to put
something together.
Fiksdal: Even the books. Nothing had been—nothing.
Alexander: Right, all that, all that. Nothing.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Alexander: [Laughing] Just insane! And then here come the students, and they had no idea either.
They had no idea what they were getting in for. Well, I quickly wrote a furious letter to Mervyn. And
remember, our only contact had been by mail.
And I said, “You’re the one who’s responsible for all this.” I told him long anecdotes about what
was going on. [laughing] “You’re the one who’s responsible for this craziness. We’ll get by, but you’re a
real son-of-a-bitch for having left us in this.” You know? [laughing]
9

Fiksdal: You really said that?
Alexander: Oh, yes! [laughter] Because, god, I was—it was very stressful.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I can imagine.
Alexander: And I get this letter back saying, “Thank you for the very interesting letter. Keep it coming!
Keep it coming!” Well, as it turned out—
Fiksdal: He just wanted accounts, like you had been doing about your students. [laughing]
Alexander: Right. Well, but also, of course, he was having similar difficulties at Old Westbury.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see. So he was trying to do the same thing there.
Alexander: Well, he was starting all new.
Fiksdal: But with his idea.
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: I see.
Alexander: And finding it very difficult to transplant, and having enormous difficulties with the man
who had been chosen as the president of Old Westbury. And everybody was unhappy. Everybody at
Old Westbury was just as unhappy as they could be.
But he had taken a couple of people from San Jose State to Old Westbury with him, and
recruited other people from the pool of faculty to work in this program. So the planning faculty is sort
of overbalanced with a very large group of people who had had some experience running coordinated
studies programs, and another group—slightly larger—that had no such experience. And, of course, the
experienced ones turned out to be the “C’mon, take it slow. You don’t know what the problems are
going to be. [laughing] You’ve got to make allowances for this and this and this and this and this.” And
the other ones were “Oh, what the hell. That’s all that stuff we’re trying to get away from.”
Fiksdal: Interesting.
Alexander: You know, they wouldn’t—
Fiksdal: They just wanted to go, pell-mell.
Alexander: They wanted to go hell for leather. But they didn’t know where they were going, or why.
But we’ll get to that.
Fiksdal: Let’s talk about it, yeah.
Alexander: At any rate, I kept in long correspondence, and I found it personally very useful, to me, to
have this avenue where I could lay out—let off steam to somebody who knew what I was talking about;
and also, to think through the nature of the problems that we were facing. That was part of my training
for this [teaching at Evergreen].
10

At any rate, in the middle of the school year, after this long correspondence and so forth,
Mervin showed up to see his ex-wife and his children, and to reconnect with Micki Majors. And, of
course, I invited Micki and Mervin over for dinner. And Adrienne [Richard’s wife] made this big dinner,
and she’s getting ready to bring the main course into the dining room from the kitchen, and Mervin
says, “Richard, how would you like to teach at Evergreen?”
Now, we had read a newspaper piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about the founding of this
new school that was going to be this, that and the other, with a picture of Charlie McCann there and so
forth. Adrienne and I, who were very—I was quite . . . unhappy with the prospects at San Jose State.
Fiksdal: Could you just linger on that a little bit? Was it the team you were working with, or was it the
chance for tenure? What was it?
Alexander: No, no, I wasn’t thinking tenure, for god’s sakes. We’re in the middle of the first year of
teaching someplace, and I’d gotten the impression that I wasn’t very likely to get along very well with
the English Department at San Jose State.
Fiksdal: Oh.
Alexander: And that was the alternative facing me.
Fiksdal: Yeah, but why was that a problem?
Alexander: I don’t remember now. Because things just didn’t work out that way.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you didn’t really have to think about it.
Alexander: At any rate, Adrienne, we’d already talked about how wonderful that would be to go up
there and work on founding this new college. And, wow, it was just the chance of a lifetime. And so
[laughing] Adrienne’s walking with the dinner tray, and he says, “How would you like to be on the
faculty at Evergreen?” And she dropped the dinner all over the kitchen floor. [laughter]
Fiksdal: Oh, great story!
Alexander: So by that time, I had gotten over my anger at Mervyn, and he had explained to us the
problems that he was facing at Old Westbury, and how it just wasn’t going to work, it just wasn’t going
to do. And so he had immediately started looking, and had gotten in touch with the Board of Trustees
and McCann.
Fiksdal: Oh? So he reached out.
Alexander: And there were other connections, too. So this group—which includes Byron Youtz and
Larry Eickstaedt and his good friend, the biologist who died recently. C’mon. The bug man.
Fiksdal: Oh, Bob Sluss?

11

Alexander: You got it. Bob Sluss came from Old Westbury. And Bob Sluss had been at San Jose State,
and had taught in the Tutorials.
Fiksdal: Interesting. And then he’d gone to Old Westbury.
Alexander: Right. And Richard Brian was teaching in the second year Tutorials.
Fiksdal: Was there anyone else from San Jose State that Merv tapped?
Alexander: Oh, yes. The fellow who became the Provost.
Fiksdal: Dave Barry?
Alexander: You’ve got it. But he told us all about this, and how he had recruited various people to do
this, and he thought this was the time really to establish the coordinated studies program on a firm
foundation.
Fiksdal: So when he talked to you at that dinner party, he’d already been hired then?,
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: Okay, so he was at Old Westbury, and then— yes okay, then I understand. Because he and
Charlie commuted to do the work at Evergreen.
Alexander: Right. Now’s the time to talk about just what the Tutorials were . . .
Fiksdal: Yes.
Alexander: . . . and how Mervyn imagined them, and planned them to be, and how they actually
worked. They were an honors program. That’s a very key thing. They were an honors program for
freshmen and sophomores. The assumption was that they would leave the honors program, and they
would adopt a major, and they would go on and get a standard degree in a standard way in their junior
and senior years. And this meant, because they had to get the general education requirements, that the
Tutorials program would supply them with an equivalent to the general education requirements. But
they would be given time to take the courses that were necessary for the major prerequisites, of course.
Fiksdal: Oh, okay, so they had opt-out times. Huh.
Alexander: Well, it had to go on simultaneously, so they took the Tutorials plus one course, sometimes
two courses. And we had to juggle our scheduling, to a certain degree, to accommodate the schedules
for their prerequisite courses.
Fiksdal: And it could be anything.

12

Alexander: It could be anything.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Alexander: But that turned out not to be a problem. That was a simple matter.
Fiksdal: Oh, good.
Alexander: You did have to work it out with the student and sometimes with the departments. But the
really important thing here is that his assumption always had been that the students would have to get
their prerequisites in order to major in something in their junior and senior years, and that that was
exactly what they would do; they would have a separate non-coordinated studies junior and senior
years.
Fiksdal: And yet, the Tutorial was full-time, right?
Alexander: No, it wasn’t full-time. It couldn’t be, because if it was full-time, they couldn’t get their
prerequisites.
Fiksdal: So it varied. So it a student needed two extra courses, it would vary for that person. Okay.
Alexander: Yes. But that’s something that the person had to decide whether—
Fiksdal: Yeah, so they needed to know their major right away. [laughing] I would have been sunk.
Alexander: Right, and they didn’t have to join this coordinated studies program.
Fiksdal: Were there other honors courses?
Alexander: Oh, yeah, there was plenty of them.
Fiksdal: I see. So they competed, in a way.
Alexander: Right. And it was very, very different; radically different from anything else that was being
offered on the campus. And this student who could sign up for it—because they didn’t have to sign up
for that—could decide whether they wanted to do that or didn’t want to do that. If they didn’t want to
do it, they just didn’t do it.
Fiksdal: So what was the description you must have written?
Alexander: Well, it described what we were doing, and this, that, and the other. And if you wanted to
do that, that’s fine.
Fiksdal: But there were themes?
Alexander: Oh, yes.
Fiksdal: And so was there a common—

13

Alexander: Yes. That’s what the five of us did in that month: invent what the theme was going to be
and what the common readings were going to be and so forth. That part of it—the common readings—
everybody, all the seminars, each of us had 20 students.
Fiksdal: So you did have a seminar. And you called it a seminar.
Alexander: Oh, yes. And it was the heart of the program. And we did other things.
Fiksdal: Then you had lectures. And did you attend your colleagues’ lectures?
Alexander: Yes, of course.
Fiksdal: Because you needed to know.
Alexander: Absolutely. And we had a very important thing; it was the faculty seminars. We got
together and—
Fiksdal: So he designed that, too.
Alexander: Oh, that was in the original design.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting.
Alexander: And it was enormously important, and all of us agreed about it. Even though, in my case,
they were very difficult to conduct, because the five of us were at loggerheads, in many ways.
Fiksdal: But the idea of the faculty seminar was not business. It was to discuss the books from different
perspectives.
Alexander: Absolutely. And we realized almost immediately that that’s how it had to be. And, by God,
you didn’t muck around with it; you didn’t conduct business; you didn’t put on a performance for
students to come in and watch. Any of that stuff, that was just out. We never even considered that.
The first that appeared at Evergreen, I was aghast. I thought, this is just terrible. This will have
miserable effects on the seminar itself. I’m not sure that my worst fears came true, but I was—
Fiksdal: Do you remember that a lot of people did that?
Alexander: It became more and more popular starting about, let’s say, the eighth year of the college.
Fiksdal: Okay. Well, somehow I missed it. That’s interesting. Charlie did talk about one time he did
that, and it was wonderful. But it helped stimulate the students a little more. I think it kind of helped
the seminar in that case.
Alexander: Oh, what I was worried about is its ruining the faculty seminar. [laughing]

14

Fiksdal: Yes, exactly. Well, I think it wasn’t all the time, it was just once or twice. I don’t think it
happened often. Yeah, I would agree that it could be very difficult if you did it all the time. So you had
the faculty seminar. Oh, I wanted to ask—so you had regular grades for this?
Alexander: No. As I remember, we did have grades, yes, because that was required by the school. But
we also wrote out long evaluations, and we had the students evaluate us, too.
Fiksdal: In length, like writing, not in little forms.
Alexander: At length, right. And Mervyn was very happy, he was really a bug for the students having a
portfolio that they added to as they went through the college, and that they took from program to
program to program.
Fiksdal: Now, that portfolio, what was its function?
Alexander: Well, its function was to have a record of the student’s accomplishment and progress over
the two years they were in the program—for themselves and for anybody in the future who wanted to
look at it.
Fiksdal: So it wasn’t used, for example, to go from year one to year two of the Tutorial.
Alexander: Yes, it did. People had their portfolio.
Fiksdal: So very much like the early years at Evergreen.
Alexander: Yeah. But because the same circumstances were not going to apply in their sophomore and
senior years, the portfolio was the student’s.
Fiksdal: Yeah. It just stayed with them.
Alexander: It stayed with them, and never became part of the records the . . .
Fiksdal: Like the Registrar?
Alexander: . . . the Registrar kept.
Fiksdal: How did you feel about that first year? You learned a lot, but did you feel it was sort of trial by
fire?
Alexander: It was trial by fire. Toward the end of it—the personalities of the five of us were so
different. There was one colleague that I was very close to, and he and I ran things in our seminars very
much the same way. And that was a matter of personality. We didn’t do it because anybody told us to
do it. We would have done it that way even if the other person hadn’t been around. But the other

15

three, kind of odd. See, you asked me a question, and I was thinking about another question, so I’m
getting lost.
Fiksdal: Oh, sorry. So how you made it through that year. I guess I sort of wanted to know, what was
the theme? What were you trying to explore? And how well do you think—
Alexander: Well, that, I don’t remember. It is a long time ago.
Fiksdal: You don’t remember? Isn’t that interesting.
Alexander: It is a long time ago.
Fiksdal: So it was mostly the personal relationships that were so hard.
Alexander: Right. And I remember particular students and particular conversations with students.
Fiksdal: It was a traumatic year.
Alexander: Yeah, and that has very little to do with Evergreen.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Okay.
Alexander: But I became gradually, over the years, something of an enthusiast for the coordinated
studies program as an ideal. And I thought the experience that I and my students had—and a whole
bunch of the other students, too—the experience that they had as they worked through this was so
valuable and so important that I was really quite an enthusiast for this.
Fiksdal: And I assume that means that you were learning a lot of new things as well as the students.
Alexander: Oh, god! Yes. Not as many as I would in some of the programs at Evergreen, because ours
was kind of slapdash organized. And those of us who were basically building the curriculum—that was
me and my other good friend, and we were pretty much on the same wavelength—we weren’t drawn
into areas where we would learn that much about the material. But I learned an awful lot about how
these programs would work—what could wrong; what you have to do right; what the good result is;
how you can work to do it.
Fiksdal: Let’s go back to the dinner party just for a moment. So she drops the food, and then do you
both just say, “Yes”? What happened?
Alexander: Basically, that’s what it was. But, of course, he couldn’t give us the job right then.
Fiksdal: Did he do an interview with you, or how did that work out?
Alexander: Well, as far as he and I were concerned, he and I had been interviewing each other for a
good year by mail. [laughter]
16

Fiksdal: Yes, right.
Alexander: So we didn’t need an interview.
Fiksdal: Okay. So when did you head up to Olympia?
Alexander: Well, what happened was this. The deans and the Provost and . . . I’ve forgotten what Joe
Shoben’s job title was.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he was a VP, but I don’t know . . .
Alexander: He was a Vice President in charge of something or other; and the Librarian, who was also a
Vice President; and McCann had to get their act together. When they did, they began trying to line up
people to interview. And most of the lining up took place by asking the deans and the rest of them if
they had people in mind; to come up with lists of folks that they thought would be likely faculty
candidates; and then contacting them privately to see if they were interested and so on; and then
inviting them to come up.
A small number of people wrote in and contacted the school, saying that they were interested in
coming. And this group would have included Rudy Martin and . . .
Fiksdal: David Marr?
Alexander: No, he was hired by us.
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s right. Rudy was on the planning [faculty]. Okay.
Alexander: Okay, this is just the planning faculty.
Fiksdal: What about Sid White?
Alexander: Sid White had been at San Jose State, and I think he had been—yeah, I think Zack replaced
Sid White in the . . . Crazy Zack. Zack really was . . . I don’t think he was actually crazy, but he liked to
affect it. So he worked out a wonderful type of art; that was vacuum cleaner art. It was made out of a
vacuum cleaner engine, and mounted on the wall. You’d press a button and the engine would start, and
it would inflate this large phallus, the bag. And then you’d turn it off. Okay, well, he put one up on the
wall at the office of Tutorials. [laughter] It was up there for quite a while. Micki Majors thought it was a
gas. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I’m going to ask you a question I asked Charlie.
Alexander: But that’s the way Zack was.
Fiksdal: How many female colleagues did you have at San Jose State? Were there very many?
17

Alexander: In the Tutorials program? I have no idea about San Jose State generally.
Fiksdal: Okay, let’s talk about the Tutorials program.
Alexander: None.
Fiksdal: Because we know, in the planning year, there weren’t any women.
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: So I’m just asking to kind of get a sense of the times, to try and understand it. Although I lived
through the times; I know a little bit about it from that perspective.
Alexander: Well, I think you would really need to ask the remaining members of that small group.
There are very few of them that remain. Charlie McCann is dead; I don’t know where Joe Shoben is.
Fiksdal: No, I don’t either.
Alexander: Mervyn is contactable.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we want to interview him. Someone has signed up.
Alexander: Yes, he is extremely important.
Fiksdal: Yeah, of course.
Alexander: In some ways, he’s the most important. And . . . Humphrey?
Fiksdal: Don Humphrey, yeah.
Alexander: And Charlie. And the Librarian, who’s now dead.
Fiksdal: Oh, he is?
Alexander: Right. Jim Holley?
Alexander: Yeah, Jim Holley. And the Treasurer. What was his name?
Fiksdal: Oh, Dean Clabaugh?
Alexander: Right. Now, if he’s still alive, he could tell you quite a lot. Clabaugh was much more
important than he’s ever given credit for. And I think that the Provost was already on board and up
there.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he was, I know.
Alexander: Okay. Well, if you got those people together, and then asked them—if you could somehow
or another get them to be honest about it.
Fiksdal: Yeah.

18

Alexander: But I can tell you what the attitude of the planning faculty was once we got there and
discovered it was all male.
Fiksdal: You actually did notice it?
Alexander: Oh, yeah. [laughter] What the hell do you mean?
Fiksdal: That’s reassuring.
Alexander: Yes, we noticed it, and we started making a point of interviewing women and trying to
locate women. And we managed to persuade the deans, at least—I don’t know about the rest of those
muckety-mucks—that we absolutely needed women faculty. And they were willing about some people
that you know who got on there. And then there were a bunch of others. For instance, I strongly
recommended a young woman, whose name at that time was Kathy Kempke. And she was vetoed
emphatically by Mervyn to be hired to work in the Japan program that I had planned for the next [year].
. . but without her, there was no way to run that, so it didn’t go—fly—for the first year.
Fiksdal: Well, we’re at 12:00. Do you want to take a little break?
Alexander: We better turn this off.
End Part 1 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16
Begin Part 2 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16
Fiksdal: This is the second part of Richard’s first interview.
Alexander: All right. Am I recording properly?
Fiksdal: You are. Looks good.
Alexander: Okay, I want to go back in time to how Evergreen was founded by the state, and how it got
to Olympia. There had been discussion about having a new state college in Washington for a long time,
at least 10 years. But since your parents were involved in it, I imagine it’s 15 or 20 years or something of
that sort.
Fiksdal: Could have been.
Alexander: At any rate, things came to a head in the ‘60s. I’m not sure when the debate started being
official in the Legislature, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was legislative discussion and
debate as early as ’61 or something of that sort.
Part of the reason that this all came to a head was that the state was experiencing a spurt in
population; lots of people coming into the state. The fastest-growing sector in the state was
Southwestern Washington, and it was the only section in the state that had no state college. Every
19

other section was reasonable efficiency—served by one or another of the other three state colleges—
Western, Eastern and Central.
At the same time, there was talk about moving all the state offices from Seattle down to the
State Capital in Olympia, and this put even more pressure on there being a state college somewhere in
Southwestern Washington state, to provide various services—research; interns; schools of public
administration; graduates from the college who could go to work for the state agencies and so on,
something that had previously been supplied reasonably well by the college system available in Seattle.
But now, that would turn out to be quite inefficient for most of the people who were working for the
state government who would need to have a college reasonably close.
At the same time, there were other parts of the state that were under increasing pressure to
have a state college close to them, the Vancouver-Portland area being the chief one, but there were
others as well. So there was a big debate as to where the college should be. This was finally decided on
Olympia, in my understanding, because of the proximity to the state government. There probably were
a number of other decisions as well.
The next big issue was where you would put it. And at that time, that whole bluff that overlooks
the lake.
Fiksdal: Oh, Mottman area, yeah.
Alexander: Up where the big hotel is now, and a whole lot of apartment buildings and condo buildings
that weren’t there at all, that whole thing was just open forest at that time. That was what was initially
thought to be the perfect place to have the college. But largely as a matter of real estate speculation—
and this is the kind of thing that I think Dean Clabaugh would really have the inside track on all of that.
What I had been told was that the man who owned this second- and third-growth forest area
that is where Evergreen is now really lobbied hard to put the college out there, even though this would
not have any of the advantages that a campus up on that bluff would have. And why it was chosen, I
was told, was it was basically a real estate deal, and that this would have cost the state less to build out
there. And other people wanted that bluff to develop.
At any rate, it was decided that, yes, the college would be put out there. First, that it would be
in Olympia, which took a tremendous amount of lobbying in the areas. And once it was decided it was
Olympia, there was plenty of residual resentment.

20

Nobody imagined that this place—this new college that was going to be built—would differ in
any material way from Central or Eastern or Western. It was just going to be a standard state college.
And, in fact, the enabling legislation gives Evergreen the authority to establish schools of education, and
to grant special degrees, and accreditation for public schools. It empowers them to establish a nursing
school. And it lists all the things that ordinary state colleges would have, and for which they needed
state authorization to pass the test for the accrediting boards and so on and so forth. And the college
was to be named Southwestern Washington State College.
Once that was passed, Daniel Evans, the Governor, held a press conference to announce this
great thing that was going to happen in Olympia. And in that announcement, he said, “This is not going
to be just any kind of college. This will be a special college; this will be different.” This is the first
anybody had ever heard of that.
Now, it needs a little background. This all takes place in the 1960s. In the 1960s in the United
States, every group of people that you can imagine were angry at the university and college curriculum
and the situations. The students were angry at it; the parents of the students were angry at it; the
alumni were angry at it; the business community was angry at it. On it goes. You just name your group
of people, and they all thought that the situation in higher education was terrible, and that it needed to
be changed. And the word that kept being used, over and over and over again, was “relevant.”
Everybody thought that the college education had become irrelevant to the needs and lives of the
citizens of the country. The problem is that none of these different groups agreed with each other as to
what the relevance was that it didn’t have. [chuckles] They all had different notions of what would be
relevant—very different, radically different. And many of these notions were completely incompatible
with each other.
The students, for instance—many of the most vocal students—some of them wanted it to be
totally different. For instance, there was one group who would become the hippie faction that was
growing mightily—and it was growing throughout the ‘50s, late ‘50s particularly with the Beat
Generation, and its enthusiasm for Zen Buddhism and various other things—they wanted more and
more spiritual exercises; they wanted more students defining what their studies should be, radical in
that form.
Then there was another group of students who didn’t want that at all, but were deeply
concerned about civil rights and workers’ rights and poverty and so on, the folks who would become

21

Students for a Democratic Society. And the Students for a Democratic Society, at that point, had no
interest whatsoever in drugs and utopian communities and the hippie lifestyle. They held that in
contempt. What they wanted was . . . oh, my brain isn’t coming up with the type of democracy that
they wanted.
Fiksdal: I don’t know. Egalitarian or . . .?
Alexander: Well, that could be. But they essentially wanted an anarchist in the old Kropotkin sense,
where government would be decentralized. There wouldn’t be all this big massive control in the center
and so forth. Participatory democracy.
Fiksdal: Oh, participatory. Well, it seems like those two words, isn’t that democracy? Democracy is
supposed to be participatory. [laughing]
Alexander: But representative democracy. They wanted participatory, where people were actively
participating in the government, instead of choosing representatives who would run the government.
So those two groups of students were at loggerhead, and then there were other students who didn’t
want anything to do—they were the majority—didn’t want anything to do with all this.
Fiksdal: Either one, yeah.
Alexander: And the business community were complaining right and left—just everybody complained—
that the graduates coming out of the colleges didn’t have the right training; they didn’t have the right
attitudes to work well in business; that they had to be constantly retraining people. [chuckles] And it
kept going in this direction. But as long as everybody talked generalities, everyone could agree that
colleges were not relevant anymore, and that they needed to be different.
Fiksdal: And different was okay.
Alexander: And all kinds of differences. Okay. So Dan Evans announced that this new college was going
to be different. It wasn’t going to be organized like colleges that we had been having. It would provide
a relevant educational experience.
This speech, this press conference didn’t make much of a ripple in its way, but internally, it
made a lot of difference. So Evans and his crew put together a Board of Trustees. And they selected
that Board of Trustees for people who would be amenable to this different kind of education, whatever
it would be. And then they started looking around for a President. I think that was one of the first
administrative positions that was filled.
22

Fiksdal: That’s what I heard, yeah.
Alexander: And Mr. McCann had just made a big reputation for himself. He had been a member of the
academic administration at Central State College. And he had made a big splash by giving speeches and
acting against the school of education. That was his primary target. He didn’t want any schools of
education at all. He thought that they were anti-academic and terribly . . . he was against all sorts of
other things that were characteristic of Central, and he was not one to keep his mouth shut about his
discontent.
And I am getting a telephone call.
End Part 2 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16
Begin Part 3 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16
Fiksdal: Okay, we’ll just pick up.
Alexander: Okay. So Mr McCann impressed these folks considerably, and they thought, well, why
should we go out of the state when we’ve got just the kind of person that we’re looking for to become
President?
When this seemed to be cemented, Dan Evans proposed that the name of the college be
chosen—be changed—and that it should be called The Evergreen State College because it was going to
be a new kind of college for the entire state of Washington, and the state of Washington is “The
Evergreen State.” So that’s why “The” is in the name of the college, and that’s why we call this place
The Evergreen State College and not Southwestern Washington State College.
And Dr. McCann then began going around the state making speeches—he made the same
speech everyplace; he wrote it out—about what the new college was going to be like. Of course, he
didn’t have anybody to talk to except himself, and this was his dream of what the college should be.
This is a very interesting speech. It was sent to everybody who was a prospective faculty member for
the planning faculty. And we were all asked to write our responses and remarks and criticisms of this
speech before we came, so that the deans and the assembled higher administration would know where
we stood on these issues.
Now, it’s a very interesting speech, and this is what it describes:
-

There wouldn’t be any classes.

-

There wouldn’t be any departments.

23

-

There wouldn’t be any bells ringing to tell you when it was time to change classes. Of
course, there wouldn’t be any classes, [laughter] so you couldn’t change them anyway.

-

There wouldn’t be any schedules of this sort.

-

There wouldn’t be any graduation requirements.

-

There wouldn’t be any prerequisites, except the prerequisites that a faculty member and a
group might impose upon themselves for some reason.

-

The faculty would hang out a shingle in front of their doors. That’s exactly the language that
he used. I’m not sure what it would have actually looked like, but you can think of a sign
that says “Dr. Richard Alexander, and I am competent to do work in this field, this field, this
field, this field, this field, this field.” Okay, that would be outside the door.

-

The students would go around looking for faculty who were competent to teach them.

-

There wouldn’t be any classes in this. Everything would be done by individual contract.

Fiksdal: Oh, so it was a little bit like the British system.
Alexander: Yes, this is exactly what he had in mind. Exactly what he had in mind.
-

Nothing would last longer than one month.

Fiksdal: Oh my goodness.
Alexander: You’d go; you would sign a contract—one student, one faculty member. The faculty
member would have more than one student, but the student would have only one faculty member.
Unless, of course, they worked out a deal that the contract you wanted would involve two faculty
members. At any rate, you were supposed to improvise this.
You sign a contract. You work on the contract for a month. At the end of the month, you write
these narrative evaluations. There aren’t going to be any grades. No grades. Everything would be
written evaluations. The student would write an evaluation, the faculty member would write an
evaluation. And then it’s fruit-basket upset.
Fiksdal: Again.
Alexander: Again. Month by month by month by month.
Fiksdal: Gee, I bet you had a few things to argue with in that vision.
Alexander: Everybody had something to argue with. And I had plenty. But as far as my story is
concerned, the really important thing to notice is the absolute conflict between the Cadwallader notion
of what coordinated studies are, and the McCann notion of school as an individual contract.
24

Now, in fact, every major, and most of the minor, people hired during this time had their own
notion of what they wanted to see happen at Evergreen. The Librarian, for instance, Jim Holley, his idea
was that the whole college would be a library.
Fiksdal: Oh, I kind of remember that.
Alexander: And people would go and check out what they needed from the library.
Fiksdal: The necessary resources, yeah.
Alexander: This actually folded into the McCann idea fairly well. But Holley wanted a major role for the
library to play in everything. In other words, you went and checked out what you were getting. Joe
Shoben’s idea was to have lots and lots of experiential learning, and credit for past experiences.
Fiksdal: Oh, so he was the one.
Alexander: There were great partisans for individual contracts on another basis altogether, but nobody
had any idea how these would work. This became the bailiwick of one faculty member, Jack Webb.
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. And Charlie tells it a little differently. See if this jives. He said that when he was at
one of the weekend meetings that they had as deans with the higher administration, they got pressed
pretty hard for coming up with, what is the vision of the college? And Don Humphrey—
Alexander: Who was this meeting with? The deans?
Fiksdal: He’s talking from the deans’ point of view.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: And he said everyone else was there—the President, the VPs. Maybe Jim Holley; I don’t really
know about him.
Alexander: Jim Holley was a VP.
Fiksdal: Yes, so he would have been there.
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: And the administration was pushing the deans to come up with what the college was going to
be like so they could—so then, the hiring of the planning faculty could take place.
Alexander: That’s right. That’s absolutely correct. That was my next step on here.
Fiksdal: So Merv talked about what he called “theme teams,” which was your Tutorial that he had run,
and how he’d like to do that for a couple of hundred students. And Don Humphrey, at that meeting—

25

which Charlie has listened to on tape and found the exact place where it happens—at that meeting, Don
Humphrey said, “Well, if it’s good enough for 200 students, it’s good enough for everyone.”
And Charlie then said—not exact words what I’m saying—Charlie said, well, I haven’t talked to
Merv about this prior, but it does sound like a good idea to me. And everybody jumped on it; so it
would be these theme teams. Does that seem correct?
Alexander: That’s the version I got from Mervyn.
Fiksdal: Okay. And Merv was taken aback.
Alexander: Yeah, to say the least.
Fiksdal: Oh, to say the least. So I haven’t heard his perspective, but you can say what [it was].
Alexander: Well, first of all—and you should interview Mervyn and get the story from him.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we’re hoping.
Alexander: I would probably introduce my own distortions into this.
Fiksdal: Well, we all have our own perspectives. That’s okay.
Alexander: But I wasn’t there so—
Fiksdal: Right, but you were in contact with him.
Alexander: I was in contact with him. But he didn’t share this kind of stuff with me exactly. Not early.
And why would he? But he literally thought—he had read McCann’s speech, and he’s one of the few
people who read it thoroughly, and recognized what it actually said. And he thought initially that that
sort of thing stood a great chance of becoming the thing. And he was afraid that he had to fight very
hard to get even one coordinated studies program.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: So you set 100, 200. Well, what that would have meant was two such programs. And he
actually thought that they should be on the model of San Jose; that is to say they would be honors
programs, and limited to people in the first two years of the school, and that they would simultaneously
preparing for their discipline, and on and on. Like that. So the idea, especially coming from a scientist,
that this would be the way that the sciences would be taught—everything would be taught—just
flabbergasted him. He couldn’t imagine how it could be.

26

Fiksdal: Charlie said that, too, but he said that at that meeting, Don Humphrey got most of the
comments, and most of the queries, because nobody could imagine that science could be taught that
way.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: But he argued that it could, and he gave some examples or whatever.
Alexander: Well, I don’t know what happened in that meeting.
Fiksdal: I don’t know either.
Alexander: What I know is that what happened when I came up for my interview.
Fiksdal: Good. What happened?
Alexander: Well, it happened in the middle of the winter, and I had gotten a bad cold. So Richard Brian
and I are flying up from San Jose, and we arrive. On the flight my eardrum broke.
Fiksdal: Oh gosh!
Alexander: And we arrive in Olympia, and there’s nothing out at the campus except a number of huge
holes in the ground, filling up with water
Fiksdal: Of course.
Alexander: And a slope covered with mud, and rain on it. And trailers [laughing] connected with
covered walkways and wooden walkways. [laughing] Planks.
Fiksdal: And when they’re wet, they’re slick.
Alexander: Yes. And it was cold and it was damp, and my ear was oozing all this stuff. And there wasn’t
anybody there.
Fiksdal: Nobody met you?
Alexander: Oh, yes, somebody did. And there was staff people there. Nancy Taylor was there. A group
of the librarians. Who’s the most famous Librarian?
Fiksdal: Besides Jim Holley? Well, Malcolm Stilson?
Alexander: Malcolm Stilson was there. They were busy moving everything that they had acquired so far
from the old Olympia Brewery [laughter] out to these trailers. They had no buildings. They had nothing.
Jim Holley was there walking around. And, oh, now, a fellow who worked for . . . I’ve forgotten what his
role was, but he’s the one who inspired Super Saturday.

27

Fiksdal: Larry Stenberg?
Alexander: Larry Stenberg was there. Oh, god, it was good to have Larry Stenberg there. It was always
good to have Larry Stenberg there. Very important guy. Is he still around?
Fiksdal: I’m not too sure. I looked at the list of people—
Alexander: I think Stenberg deserves an interview.
Fiksdal: Okay.
Alexander: Stenberg was one of the most important people there. And a sane and gemutlichkeit-type
guy, who spread joy everywhere, and made sure that Evergreen kept a sense of humor about it all.
Stenberg was very important for all of us.
But that’s who were there, and they kept saying, “Well, we don’t know when they’re going to
arrive. They’re on their way from New York and from”—all this. [laughing]
And Richard and I were sitting there. “Should we wait for these guys? Should we wait?”
Fiksdal: My gosh, yeah.
Alexander: Finally it got to where if they didn’t show up that day, we couldn’t stay, because we had to
get back. And they did, and we started the interview early in the morning. And I’m still oozing, and my
ear is aching and so forth. And I remember being put in one of the larger rooms in one of these trailers.
They put me in a corner. This is about the shape.
Fiksdal: Oh, gosh. Small.
Alexander: No, it was larger than this, but this is the shape—long, rectangular room. And they put me
in a corner like that, and they interrogated me and I felt like . . .
Fiksdal: . . . interrogation.
Alexander: Exactly.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Alexander: And the deans were sitting around the side and they were asking—
Fiksdal: But there were only three of them.
Alexander: No, there was a whole bunch.
Fiksdal: Oh, a bunch of other people. Oh, the admin.
Alexander: I was one of the first people to arrive.

28

Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: Richard—the two Richards, we were the first—
Fiksdal: Oh, it is funny, isn’t it? The two Richards were the first—
Alexander: Yeah, right. Well, we were interviewed quite separately.
Fiksdal: I see.
Alexander: As you would expect.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: And so they would ask me questions about how this should be and so forth, and I would try
to answer them. Finally, it would get around to—and I was getting more and more upset at the absence
of decisions. And it was obvious that nobody had any idea of—there wasn’t any comprehensive idea in
operation.
Fiksdal: So they couldn’t even ask you, “Can you do X?” Because they didn’t know what it was.
Alexander: Yes, exactly. They didn’t know what it was going to be.
Fiksdal: Oh, my gosh. That’s so hard.
Alexander: So then they asked me, “How would we do this with the sciences?” And I remember I was
getting very short of temper at this point.
I remember turning to him and saying, “You have been thinking about this, I suppose, for at
least three months and haven’t come up with an idea. And I haven’t been thinking of it at all.”
There’s this gasp in the room. [laughing] And it was late in the afternoon. I had to get into a
cab or a bus to take me to the airport in Sea-Tac. We had to get out of there. And I got up, walked out,
and Charlie Teske was right behind me. And as we walked out these wooden plankways, he says, “Don’t
be upset about this! Please don’t write us off.” [laughter] And I’m “Growl, growl, growl.”
And Brian and I got in that airplane, and we just talked. “Do we really want to get involved in
this damn thing?” And “What do you think is going to happen?”
And as far as the two of us were concerned, we allowed our dissatisfaction with conditions at
San Jose, and our . . . the only word that’s appropriate is “loyalty” . . . our feelings of . . . we felt that
Mervyn was at least being sensible [laughing] and had an idea, and that somehow or another, he would
bring it off.

29

Now, the odd thing was that McCann, at least so far as the planning faculty was concerned,
didn’t interfere very much with what we did; didn’t interfere directly. He didn’t attend the meetings; he
didn’t ask people to come up and consult with him; he didn’t write memos to us.
Fiksdal: So he didn’t push his agenda.
Alexander: No. He didn’t push positively.
Fiksdal: What do you mean?
Alexander: Because he would veto things.
Fiksdal: I see.
Alexander: Whenever anybody got close to “Well, what are we going to do about teacher training?”
“We’re not going to have any teacher training.” [pounds on table] That’s it.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow. And he was very definitive.
Alexander: Yeah. “We’re not going to have any grades.” [pounds on table] That’s it. “We are not
going to have bells ringing, and classes.” [pounds on table]
Fiksdal: He didn’t want classes all through the planning year?
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: Well, how in the world did you plan coordinated studies without classes?
Alexander: Well, we had seminars. That was fine.
Fiksdal: Well, that’s a class.
Alexander: No, no, no. You’re talking about holding a lecture.
Fiksdal: Oh, all right.
Alexander: Okay? It took a long time, like I think five years of struggle, before it was permissible for
anybody to organize a class, and to admit students into it who are not members of a program that you
were working for.
Fiksdal: One of the questions I was interested in is what thought had been given to part-time students.
Alexander: None.
Fiksdal: And that answers—
Alexander: Zero.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that answers it. And you think it took—what?—eight years, you said, more or less?

30

Alexander: This could be found. I’m absolutely certain that they must have kept minutes of the deans’
meetings.
Fiksdal: Oh, right. Well, I could try looking it up. It’s just interesting.
Alexander: Yeah. All of these issues were there at the beginning, and they kept bubbling and bubbling
and bubbling and bubbling away.
A lot of what we need to put in another subsequent thing is, for instance, the teachers college
business came up almost immediately, because Evergreen was approached by the Makahs at Neah Bay,
who wanted us to organize a teacher training program for Native Americans that would be based at
Neah Bay.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Alexander: And I began traveling up there to meet with—
Fiksdal: That’s really far.
Alexander: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: I was just there this last summer. It’s just really far. [laughing]
Alexander: Did you go to the wonderful museum that they have?
Fiksdal: Yes. It’s incredible.
Alexander: Oh, incredible. Oh, I am so fond of the Makahs.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it’s just the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.
Alexander: Right, it is. Everybody needs to go there.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: But that was just gleams in people’s eyes at that time. But they were ambitious, and they
wanted a teacher training program.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting.
Alexander: They knew exactly what it was they wanted. They wanted us to organize it, sponsor it, so
that they could award certificates, and these certificates would be good in any state of Washington
school, including non-tribal schools, if the graduate wanted—
Fiksdal: Sure. The graduate should be able to go wherever they want.
Alexander: Right. At any rate—well, we can talk about this later what happened.
Fiksdal: Okay.
31

Alexander: But that raised the whole issue. McCann said, “No.”
Fiksdal: He was against it. I really have to say, I do understand his position at that time, for what they
really were at that time. Because I had friends in college who were just—they were doing the things
they were going to teach children to do. They were actually doing the folds and making the—it was not
academic. It was terrible. [laughing]
Alexander: Well, in any case, the issue came up and was vetoed soundly.
Fiksdal: How did you feel about that relationship, where he basically just vetoed and didn’t—
Alexander: There was a lot of resentment.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s what I would imagine.
Alexander: There was a great deal of resentment. But it also had—if I can put it this way—this
intransigence had positive effects as well. But it didn’t involve discussion with the faculty. For instance,
the whole business of not having any grades, and substituting narrative evaluations, but there was no
discussion of what these narrative evaluations should be like.
Fiksdal: So you felt that there was something you could do to create them.
Alexander: It didn’t get that much discussion.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: And, in fact, the student self-evaluation, as far as I know, this was never discussed in detail.
It certainly wasn’t discussed during the planning faculty.
Fiksdal: For heaven’s sakes.
Alexander: And I don’t know of any other faculty meeting at any point—or, let’s say, the famous Lake
Quinault meeting—we didn’t talk about that. The first time anything got codified was when my friends
in the Registrar’s office and the Student Advising office—with whom I did a lot of work off and on over
the years—they asked me to write up something that could be given to students advising them how to
write a self-evaluation.
Fiksdal: What a good idea. [laughing]
Alexander: You should see what I wrote. It’s still being passed out, at least it was the last time I had any
contact—
Fiksdal: Oh, it’s on our Web site then?
Alexander: I should hope so.
32

Fiksdal: Yeah, I’ll check it out and show it to you and see.
Alexander: Yeah, see whether it’s there.
Fiksdal: It’s good enough. [laughing]
Alexander: No, I made a big case for self-evaluation. I’m one of the last real believers in it. But
students have to be advised how to do it.
Fiksdal: Yeah, of course they do.
Alexander: And the last thing they need is to have a faculty member who says, “Oh, nobody ever reads
this.”
Fiksdal: Well, we now have a system. Our system now is that every student must write a selfevaluation. However, that self-evaluation does not have to go into the official transcript. Because the
big problem we had over the years—certainly when I was dean, I heard a lot about it—was that the
transcript was just too thick, too unwieldy. It was just too much. And people were writing selfevaluations for each thing that they were doing. It was supposed to be outside the class and inside the
class—right?—originally. So that got too long. Anyway, so now, the students decide, which is probably
fine.
Alexander: Yeah. My personal solution to a lot of this was to give grades and require a self-evaluation.
Because in many cases, the self-evaluation that gets written leaves ambiguous the whole question of,
what’s the quality of this work?
Fiksdal: Well, that’s true. But the thing that I always noticed about them is that—and the reason why I
started requiring them before I even sat down to write their evaluations—was that there was this whole
different perspective on maybe how hard they had worked to achieve what they had achieved, or how
they had done this whole other study and were able to use some of that, when I didn’t know where it
came from. So that helped me a lot later to write the evaluations. But that’s very interesting.
Alexander: Yeah. There’s another piece of this that let’s do while we’ve got the thing, and then we’d
better go.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: If the vice presidents and the deans were divided over what they thought the school should
be, the faculty that got hired were just as much divided. Sometimes the divisions were broad. For
instance, as I mentioned before, you had those of us who had actually worked in a coordinated studies.
Originally, they weren’t called coordinated studies, but there was this long debate as to what the hell
33

we’re going to call these things. And, clumsy at that is, that was the term—the only thing that people
could settle on, and it works pretty damn well, really.
Fiksdal: I think it’s a good term.
Alexander: It’s a good term. It describes what we do. But everybody came with their own idea, most of
them not global ideas. Very few of us on the planning faculty had thought through what the curriculum
as a whole, or the school as a whole, should be like. A few of us had, and I’ll include myself amongst
them. But most people just had elements of the curriculum, or elements of the school that they were
committed to, and they wanted that to appear and be there.
For instance, one of my good friends on the faculty, Bill Aldridge, what he wanted more than
anything else was to have intimate, friendly…relations between faculty and students, which he thought
of in terms of therapy.
Fiksdal: Yikes!
Alexander: A therapist and his client.
Fiksdal: Right, because he was a psychologist.
Alexander: Right. And he wanted programs that took the student’s psychological condition . . . there is
a special word for that would be better.
Fiksdal: Now, there’s this kind of notion of the holistic.
Alexander: Yeah, he wanted to very holistic about that.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he wanted to be holistic. So was he the one that decreed or said that we should be called
by our first names as faculty?
Alexander: I’m not sure.
Fiksdal: It sounds like it would be part of that.
Alexander: Bill should be interviewed . . .
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: . . . and asked about it.
Fiksdal: I’ve told Sam.
Alexander: But he may be quite reluctant, because he left the school under very bad circumstances.
Same way with Mr. Webb, who really did yeoman service setting up individual contracts, and then
received damn little credit for it and a lot of kicks. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. But then,
he’s also responsible for his own fate. And I’m not sure that he’s going to want to talk with you either.
34

Richard Brian was very concerned about how the hell are they going to teach mathematics here.
And that in itself, he couldn’t—he and Fred . . .
Fiksdal: Tabbutt?
Alexander: Not Fred Tabbutt, but the older man. He may have died before you got there. There’s
some debate as to which of us, Fred or I, were the first hired.
Fiksdal: Oh.
Alexander: One or the other of us were.
Fiksdal: Okay.
Alexander: Fred is the guy who hired Betty Estes.
Fiksdal: Nothing’s coming to me right now, but I’ll think about it.
Alexander: He was a mathematician, and he was very concerned about that, too.
Fiksdal: Seems like I would know his name, too.
Alexander: Everybody had this different perspective on things. Willi Unsoeld was the weirdest, as far as
that’s concerned. Because what Unsoeld wanted was basically to set up these . . .
Fiksdal: Oh, the challenge courses.
Alexander: . . . experience, challenge, and risk, and mountain climbing and so forth.
Fiksdal: Well, we’ve got one still.
Alexander: Yeah. Unsoeld. But everybody had a completely different perspective on these things. And
you just multiply that, because the people who were hired for the first faculty—not the planning faculty
but the first faculty—they wound up bringing their own perspectives.
Fiksdal: Yeah. But I understand that you spent a good deal of your time in the planning year creating a
program that would be taught in that first year. Is that right?
Alexander: Yes. First of all, we had to decide what all these things meant. And then we turned to, well,
we’ve got to figure out what kind of faculty, and what specialties or what kind of people, and start doing
it. A good half of the work that we did was simply hiring the new faculty.
Fiksdal: Oh, you, by interviewing as well, not just—
Alexander: Oh, yes.
Fiksdal: So then it was not just the deans, it was you, too?

35

Alexander: No, no. The deans had relatively little to do with it, except to veto. For instance, Kathy
Kempke, I was just enthusiastic about her working with me in the Japan program—and she would have
been absolutely terrific—and she was all enthusiastic, too. But Cadwallader thought she was too . . . I
wish I could bring into mind the exact phrase he used.
Fiksdal: Not narrow?
Alexander: No, she was too much . . . ambitious for herself.
Fiksdal: Maybe not collaborative enough or something?
Alexander: Oh, no.
Fiksdal: Oh, it’s two separate things. Okay.
Alexander: She would have been very collaborative. Another partisan for her was Al Wiedemann. We
were so pissed off, I tell you. [laughing]
Fiksdal: It would be really hard, because that’s who you wanted to teach with.
Alexander: That’s who we wanted.
Fiksdal: And you, above all, knew that the personality and all of that—the coming together, the
planning—is crucial. You knew about that because of the horrible year you’d spent.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: So it’s too bad he couldn’t value that.
Alexander: Yeah. He saw her as the career woman type, who was really pushing to advance herself as a
woman. I don’t think it was true of Kathy, but that’s what he perceived. And it’s probably, since I’ve
continued in contact with her all these years, it’s a good thing that she did not join us. She would have
been very unhappy. Not those first two years, but . . . I mean, we got Carri Cable instead, and Carri was
perfect.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: She was perfect. At any rate, there were all kinds of small factions. Those with experience
and those without the experience. And then there were those of us who were more “touchy-feely” was
the words that got used—Bill Aldridge would have been in that camp—and those of us who were more
academically committed. And, as usual with me, since this is the thing, I was in the middle of all of these
different factions. [laughing]
Fiksdal: But that sounds like a good thing, so you could hear from different groups.
36

Alexander: Yes, but it also was kind of weird. The young man who did the study—which he went
around doing people’s networks, friendship networks—he said to me after he’d gotten it all done, he
said, “Your friendship network is just the most amazing thing that I’ve ever seen. You’ve got friends in
every faction of the faculty, along with the people that you are definitely not friends with.” [laughing]
There was a whole bunch of people that I couldn’t stand. Willi Unsoeld was one of them. So
what happened to Willi was a surprise to me. No, it was not a surprise, but it was a shock, let’s put it
that way.
Fiksdal: When he died, you mean?
Alexander: The way in which he died. And I was a good friend of the young man who was in his
program and tried to warn everybody not to go. And I forget his name, too. Really nice fellow. Very
dedicated to his students, and who did very good work, and was, as far as I’m concerned, savaged by the
Willi partisans.
And there were a whole bunch of people that I just really didn’t get along well with at all. And
then a whole bunch of others that I got along with quite well, but they were scattered all over
everywhere. I’ve always been a real good friend of Steve Herman’s.
Fiksdal: I think we have time for me to ask you, why were you in a trailer doing some planning, anyway,
for languages with Al Wiedemann? In other words, first of all, why were you mates?
Alexander: All of us were interviewing everybody.
Fiksdal: Okay.
Alexander: Does that answer your question?
Fiksdal: No.
Alexander: All of us interviewed everyone.
Fiksdal: Just go back a step.
Alexander: But he wasn’t planning languages. And in my case, it was only one language: Japanese.
Fiksdal: Okay. Well, I was sent to you because I was told you were planning languages. And I can
remember—here’s just my memory—this trailer, and this long table with almost every conceivable kind
of machine on it—things that I had grown up with, like those slides that go one by one as you turn them,
with the film in it—you had a whole bunch of things about reading, things that might help a student
read faster—that was a big deal back then—where they could shine a light maybe in the middle,
37

because the theory was that you read just the middle, you don’t read the whole, the kind of take it all in
somehow.
You had all these machines, and my big memory was you were trying to figure out how students
could learn a language with a machine. And I really remember it, because I remember that I went to see
you several times, not just once, and that you were both sort of incredible to me. You both listened—I
was a lot younger, didn’t have a Ph.D.—and you listened to what I thought would be the best way to
teach language. Whether you remember any of it or not, I don’t know.
Alexander: I don’t remember sitting in that room, but that’s a kind of giveaway. Because the only sort
of room that I could have been in would be a room in which the Library was putting together something.
Fiksdal: Ah-h. So we just met by hazard in that place. It wasn’t—
Alexander: Well, it wouldn’t have been by hazard, because the Library—remember, I said that Holley
had this vision of the whole damn college being the Library. Well, it wound up that for everything
except science equipment . . .
Fiksdal: Ah, they were buying . . .
Alexander: . . . Jim Holley and his staff were in charge of the buying.
Fiksdal: That makes a lot of sense.
Alexander: And since nobody knew what the curriculum was going to be, right?
Fiksdal: You just got it all.
Alexander: And it was going to be fruit-basket upset every . . .
Fiksdal: . . . yeah.
Alexander: . . . every semester, every quarter. They had to have equipment ready to go that could be
checked out by either the faculty or the students.
Fiksdal: Oh.
Alexander: So I think we must have been meeting in such a room. But it wouldn’t have been because Al
Wiedemann was . . . see, you have a strange bunch of people that we were all interested in more than
just one thing.
Fiksdal: Of course.

38

Alexander: Right. And he had lots and lots of interests, including his own interests that his girlfriend at
the time—
Fiksdal: Lorraine Marshall?
Alexander: Lorraine Marshall, she was interested in teaching languages, and teaching English and
teaching all these things. And her enthusiasm for this sort of thing bled over to Al. He and she talked
about everything together. She’s the one who came up with the geoduck.
Fiksdal: No, I didn’t know that.
Alexander: You didn’t know that?
Fiksdal: No, and she’s a friend. I didn’t know that.
Alexander: Oh, Lorraine, you need to get the story of that.
Fiksdal: I thought it was Al, actually.
Alexander: No, Lorraine did it.
Fiksdal: But it was Lorraine. Oh, I see.
Alexander: It was Lorraine. I mean, it’s got her sense of humor all over it. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s really funny. I’ll have to call her up.
Alexander: Yeah, by all means. I didn’t know she was in Olympia.
Fiksdal: Not now. When she didn’t get hired, she went back to Australia.
Alexander: That’s what I thought.
Fiksdal: Yeah. And she worked at Murdoch University, which was a very different kind of university for
Australia also. And her specialty became looking at how students learn, and helping them in that
process, and she actually has a really nice book out that she’s republished many times. And then she
has materials that I gave to the Washington Center, but it’s materials on how to work in groups, all this
really great stuff that Evergreen wasn’t willing to hire anyone for, to our great detriment.
Alexander: Mm-hm.
Fiksdal: But in her last year or two, they promoted her to professor, so that was pretty great.
Alexander: Okay, it’s time for us to quit.
Fiksdal: We’d better stop, yeah.
End Part 3 of 3 of Richard Alexander on 12-7-16

39


Richard Alexander
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
January 28, 2017
FINAL
Begin Part 1 of 2 of Richard Alexander on 1-28-17
Alexander: It seems to me that I recall, during our last interview—the first interview, that I had
mentioned that the deans and the faculty and most people involved imagined that the vast majority of
the students, who were enrolling for the first year, were going to be first-year freshmen.
Fiksdal: But they weren’t.
Alexander: They were not. And it was really quite remarkable how very many students, who were not
only not incoming freshmen, but were well over 30, some of them over 40.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Alexander: And everybody had been planning the curriculum on the assumption that all the programs
would be on the model of Tutorials at San Jose, that is to say 100 students, five faculty, five seminar
groupings lasting all year long. Well, this just simply had no relevance to most of these older students,
especially the ones who had already had the first year or the first two years of college someplace.
So those of us who stayed in good touch with the Registrar’s office were well aware of this.
They kept trying to warn people. And most particularly—this is a very bad memory lapse here because I
know this woman very, very well.
Fiksdal: Nancy Taylor?
Alexander: Yes, Nancy Taylor. She didn’t work for the Registrar at that time. I’ve forgotten exactly
what her job was.
Fiksdal: She might not have had a job title. That’s the way I heard it from her. She was just sort of
asked to come and help out.
Alexander: She said that was the way?
Fiksdal: Well, for that first year.
Alexander: That was the way. Okay, we won’t worry about the other little wrinkles that are involved in
that. At any rate, Nancy did her damdest to persuade people. And strangely enough, the one that
refused most strenuously to listen to her warnings was Cadwallader. And it’s now clear to me that
Cadwallader was in a terrible bind in that first year. He was the one who had suggested that there be
1

some, what came to be called, coordinated studies programs—it didn’t have that name at the time—
only to discover, to his dismay, that this was going to be taken up as a model for everything in the
curriculum. And it was most held onto by those people who had never done it.
So people like myself and Richard Brian, who had come up from San Jose, and, well, strangely
enough, the Provost at that time—but, of course, he rather scrupulously kept hands off the academic
planning, as much as he could.
Fiksdal: Dave Barry?
Alexander: Dave Barry. He knew all about it because he’d been down there. And his connections with
Mervyn through the Tutorials program down there had been a major reason why he was asked to
become the Provost.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see. Had he been teaching in that program?
Alexander: No, he’d never taught in it. He was an administrator. But he was sufficiently close to it, and
aware of what was going on there, but he recognized a whole bunch of things about those programs
that most other people just simply didn’t cotton to it at all.
And one of those things was how absolutely essential the particular mix of faculty in such a
program was. You couldn’t put one of them together just by getting five people at random and
throwing them into a room and saying, “Here, teach this.”
Fiksdal: Bad idea.
Alexander: But people didn’t realize that at all.
Fiksdal: Wasn’t that the situation when you first arrived at San Jose?
Alexander: Oh, yes, it was.
Fiksdal: Because they had everything in place, and then you came. So you experienced that.
Alexander: And they had it in place, but it hadn’t been put together by the five people who were going
to teach it.
Fiksdal: So you knew about that.
Alexander: Oh, god, in spades. [laughing] I tell you, it was a disaster. And Richard Brian knew all of
that sort of thing, too. And then there were people who had worked in a similar program at Old
Westbury, and who came over from Old Westbury in large numbers. And then there were people who
had gone from San Jose State to Old Westbury—for instance, Bob Sluss, and so on. So there were
people who knew. There were people with experience. But we weren’t listened to. No one wanted to
listen to anything that we had to say on the subject.
Fiksdal: Why do you think that was? Was it because you were forming something brand new?
2

Alexander: Yes, and people were very nervous about the whole thing. It was a function of something
that is typical of any of these large programs. They become a college in and of themselves. Nothing else
exists, and this has all kinds of repercussions. So people are myopically focused on that program—their
program, their particular problems that come up, which often turn out to be personality conflict
problems.
Overwhelmingly, personality conflict problems, and the attempt to avoid such problems, that
absorbs an inordinate of time in these large programs. And relatively little time is spent trying to—in
the early stages, before there are any students around, when you’re planning it and putting it
together—[see] how everything fits, and where it is supposed to be leading; and what are the major
questions we’re asking in this; and what kind of answers are we looking for; and what, therefore, should
we ask the students to do?
There was a tendency to simply accept the model, but the model, as understood by people who
had never done it. Amongst the folks that—Richard Jones was a major figure in the bad side of this, in
my view. And he was busy writing his little book, which is still circulating, I should think.
Fiksdal: I think so, yeah.
Alexander: And has had an enormous influence, even though it is largely not his own experience that
he’s describing. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Oh, he doesn’t attribute the stories to people? I’ve never read it; I really have to do it.
Alexander: Well, I think it’s a great disappointment. It just doesn’t really describe what goes on in such
programs. It’s highly idealistic, in the worst sense.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: There’s an idea of coordinated studies programs, which he’s pushing. But at any rate, with
all of this mess, with people trying to figure it out, I think Mervyn felt that the best thing he could do was
just hang on, and make sure there was one program that really was the model that he tried. And I think
I have to step back and say that what Mervyn had wanted—when he came up to the fatal meeting, and
they were all supposed to propose what they wanted to do; and nobody had the foggiest idea, he was
the only one who had any idea—and what he wanted was to guarantee that there would be at least one
program like the Tutorials in Arts & Sciences.
Fiksdal: That he would teach, or it didn’t matter? It was just one that really was the same?
Alexander: Well, he was going to teach it, and he did.
Fiksdal: Not right away, though, right? Oh, yeah, he rotated out of the deanship fairly quickly.

3

Alexander: Yes. And he worked with Richard Jones in that first program. At any rate, he thought that
the model, as it was practiced at San Jose, was the model that should exist; that is to say, this
coordinated studies program would be an honors program. Not everybody would take one of these
things, and they would all be students who were satisfying their general requirements, but nevertheless
were going to go back into the regular curriculum, and would therefore have to take courses . . .
Fiksdal: . . . to achieve their major.
Alexander: . . . to put together the requirements for the major that they were going to have. Now, you
see how this just—
Fiksdal: So it would be just one year.
Alexander: Oh, no.
Fiksdal: It could be two years?
Alexander: Always the idea was that it would be two years long.
Fiksdal: Okay, I think I didn’t remember that.
Alexander: Right. That pretty much disappeared within the first year. It became very clear that this
was too much of a burden to put on students; that by the time they’d gotten through a year of this,
they’d had it.
Fiksdal: I see. Let me just ask, was that the experience at San Jose State?
Alexander: No, the experience at San Jose State was that the student would enroll—if he or she
qualified—it was an honors program. It really was an honors program. And it was strictly voluntary
amongst those students who qualified for it. Of course, not anything like all the ones that could have
taken it did attempt to take it. But once they signed up, it was for two years.
And sometimes, the second year would have a completely different faculty. Sometimes it would
have the same one, same faculty, depending on how well they got along with each other, and how well
it worked. And that’s not a given. Just because it starts that way doesn’t mean it’s going to continue
that way.
At any rate, the second year was always felt that it should have certain peculiar qualities. The
key to understanding what Mervyn really wanted is to look up the old accounts of the . . . oh, boy, see,
my brain’s going out . . .
Fiksdal: Of the Meiklejohn . . . ?
Alexander: Yeah, okay, you got it. Meiklejohn, right. And the accounts of those things are really
wonderful. Very inspiring. But they required a quite peculiar set of talents and aptitudes on the part of

4

the faculty to work in those things, and a commitment that’s unbelievable as far as most people are
concerned. At any rate, he thought he would have to fight to get one such program.
Fiksdal: Right.
Alexander: And suddenly found everything was going to be that. Well, nobody had any idea what that
meant, including Mervyn. He had no idea. So I think he believed the best thing that he could do would
be to just commit himself to this Meiklejohn idea, in this year, and let everything else work its way out
as well as it could, and see what happened; and try to preserve that as a shining example that would
continue. Because there was always a chance that, well, this will turn out to be cockamamie nonsense,
and nobody will ever continue doing this. People just had no idea what they were getting in for, or what
they were going to do about it. And it was very difficult to plan these programs when you had no idea
what was likely to take place. And you wind up with a commitment to the seminar as the primary mode
of instruction, which makes perfect sense if you had the Meiklejohn idea in mind. It makes somewhat
less sense if you have anything else in mind.
At any rate, everybody was busy planning these freshmen-sophomore programs for this student
body that people believed, with no evidence, was characteristic of the folks who had signed up. Well,
we had all kinds of people who’d signed up because it was the only show in town. And if, for whatever
reason, they couldn’t leave—there was no other four-year institution in Southwest Washington. This
was it.
At any rate, when this became clear, I was still committed to trying to put together a Japan
program for that first year, which turned out to be more and more and more difficult, especially because
the young woman that I had wanted very much to hire—not Carri Cable; nobody knew who she was—
but a woman named Kathleen O’Connor, who later became a major administrator at the University of
Washington. But she ran into trouble with one of the deans, namely, Cadwallader. But it didn’t matter
how much Al Wiedemann and I argued that this young woman was exactly what was needed for the
Japan program; that she had exactly the right talents and exactly the right experiences. It didn’t matter.
They weren’t going to hire her. It was one of those rare things where the deans just dug in their heels,
or at least one of them.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Charlie did tell me that if one said no, the other two respected that choice.
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: So, for better or for worse, that’s what happened with even your hiring. Everyone’s hiring.
Alexander: Right. But I didn’t know that was going to happen . . .
Fiksdal: No, of course not.
5

Alexander: . . . until relatively late.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: Well, okay, so all of a sudden it becomes obvious that I’m not going to get my faculty hire.
And she was absolutely essential, as Carri Cable was absolutely essential. There was just no way to run
that program without her particular group of talents.
So, all of a sudden, I’m sitting there with nothing to do the next year. So I immediately began
trying to get more and more information about, who are these students that are having trouble finding
programs to sign up for? And what do they want to do, and why do they want to do it?
Remember, we’re still, in some ways, in the process of hiring a group of faculty. But these new
faculty that we were hiring weren’t going to show up to do any work until the middle of the summer. So
Richard Brian found himself in a similar spot that he hadn’t found a home someplace that needed or
wanted a mathematician. And so I said, “Okay, Richard. This is our baby. Let’s figure this out. What are
we going to do?”
And we decided pretty quickly that there was a large cohort of students in this group who
wanted to do something in counseling, social work, psychiatric stuff, or at least were interested in that.
So we said, “Okay, that’s what the subject should be.”
We called the program Human Behavior. But I was very leery of discussing in detail what the
content of the program should be without having the faculty who were going to work with it. Well, we
were stuck with the model of five.
Fiksdal: Oh, everyone had to be five?
Alexander: Yeah, that was the ideal. And so an awful lot of those first programs were five faculty. And
some of them were really disastrous, too. And strangely enough, the one that was the biggest disaster
was considered by a number of people who had run it is to be a shining example of the way things
should be.
Fiksdal: But not according to the students.
Alexander: Oh, the students loved it, because the students had no idea what this—let’s not talk about
that program. Okay. It became notorious after a while, mainly because of the evaluations that came
out of it. They were just insane. And some people, this was just exactly the lake they wanted to swim
in—for instance, Willi Unsoeld. He could sit in his chair knitting and holding forth, while people sat on
the floor around him and listened to their heart’s content. And that’s what many of the students
wanted, too, to get close to a guru. This was the ‘60s, after all.
Fiksdal: That’s right.
6

Alexander: Let’s not talk about that. Let’s just stick with . . .
Fiksdal: . . . your and Richard’s program.
Alexander: Right. Well, there was one other one. I think there were still further ones that were
designed, but Russ Fox and Carolyn Dobbs—and I’ve forgotten who the other person was—designed a
program that was aimed at community development. And this is the program from which the Cooper
Point Journal was developed. It was wonderfully successful. I think Carolyn is dead now, isn’t she?
Fiksdal: She did die, but Russ is around.
Alexander: What you need to do is get lots of detail of just how they put that together, because it was
enormously successful. As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the great programs that showed what
could be done with this odd model for advanced students, and to produce an advanced program that
really was advanced.
Well, we put together a group of faculty, and it was the oddest group that you can imagine. We
knew that we were five odd ducks. It was LLyn Patterson [changed her name to Llyn DeDanaan] and
Steve Herman and [Ted Gerstle] and Richard and me. And there was very little in common. Very, very
little.
I decided early that there wasn’t any way that I had the expertise to pull rank and design the
damn thing myself. And Richard was along for the ride, Richard Brian, which meant that he was
extremely valuable, because he was the “joker”, shall we say. I don’t mean that he cracked lots of jokes,
but he could take over all kinds of different responsibilities because he didn’t have any particular…
Fiksdal: No agenda.
Alexander: He had no agenda of his own. At any rate, I immediately proposed that neither Richard nor
I should be the coordinator, and that it should be chosen from the new people. And they chose LLyn,
which was the shrewdest damn thing that they ever did. I mean, she was marvelous. She just took to
that particular role perfectly.
Never had any problems. We knew that what we had to do was design something for the
students, and we had certain knowledge of what they wanted. So we very quickly came to the
conclusion that the last part of the last quarter of the program should be individual projects and
internships—internships, if possible. If there was a good reason why this particular student shouldn’t do
an internship, okay, that’s fine, we’ll work something out. We just stayed infinitely flexible and open to
what the students needed, as it developed.
We had very little idea going into the fall quarter what the winter quarter would be. We knew
what we were aiming at towards the end, in the spring; and we knew we had to prepare for that by
7

making contact with all these institutions—making a list of the institutions; making sure that we’d
interviewed each student very carefully to be sure that we would have internship opportunities that
would really be what they wanted. In some cases, this would be their junior year. And this was a big
deal for them. In fact, for them, this was what it was all about. They were preparing to do their
internships.
But we just improvised and improvised and improvised and improvised. And one of the first
things we all agreed was we were going to throw over the ideal model. If it turned out that the standard
book seminar wasn’t what was necessary, we would do something different. We didn’t know exactly
what that would be, but we would improvise and devise something quite different. And we did that,
and so did the Fox-Dobbs team. They just improvised over and over and over again. Of course, there
wasn’t much contact across programs. There never has been. There never has been. Each little
program is a universe to itself.
Okay. So what I really want to talk about are some of the really wonderful things that we
improvised and did. This was a different model of the seminar is the first thing. We decided that not all
the students were going to be interested—we knew that we had to, given the student pool and what
they wanted to do—that they had to have something about psychological development. Amongst the
people in the group, there were different notions of just what that should be. I think Steve Herman had
the least clear idea, and LLyn, because of her background as an anthropologist, she had some notions,
but they weren’t exactly psychologists.
Fiksdal: No.
Alexander: Richard had no idea at all. He would just do what we suggested to be done. I had gotten
very deeply impressed by Erik Erikson’s young man, Luther, some years previous. At any rate, [Gurstel]
knew lots of folks, but we realized very quickly that if we tried to settle on one psychologist, this was not
going to—either it would take up the entire program, because we’d switch from psychologist to
psychologist to psychologist, and that’s all that would be there. Or, it would become narrowly Freudian
or some crazy thing like that, which none of us had any . . .
Fiksdal: You didn’t have the expertise for that in the program.
Alexander: Well, we did. Gurstel. Gurstel could have done that, but he wasn’t a Freudian, and he had
no—you would just go on. So I came up with the idea, all right, instead of having the seminars focus on
a particular psychologist, let’s focus the seminar on a psychological problem of some sort—the
importance of early childhood, let’s say—and have a seminar on that. And then each student chooses a
psychologist that that student is particularly interested in, for whatever reason, and then goes out and
8

examines what this psychologist has to say about early childhood development, and what the
psychologist had to say about other people’s theories of early childhood development. And then we
have them write this up, and the arguments amongst the psychologists become the basis of the
seminar.
Well, it worked like a charm. They just dove in, the students did. This was just what they
wanted, a kind of broad argument and discussion and so forth. And coming out of that, we quickly
realized that many of the students would need—it would be a huge drain on librarian resources.
So I said, “Okay, let’s have them share the resources,” and we went to the Library. Evergreen, at
that point, had all this space. There were all these unused rooms. We got the Library to donate a room
to us, not just as having student carrels, but a room in which all the books that all the students would
need could be stored. And the students could go there and study and work together at all hours.
Fiksdal: That’s nice.
Alexander: And so, guess what? That’s exactly what happened. The room was crowded all the time,
people arguing with each other about the subject. It was just a massive success. And we said, okay,
they have to have something more than just someone yakking, so let’s have each students write up a
position paper on this to give to the rest of the members of the seminar, and that will be what starts the
initial discussion. And so we were able to teach them writing . . .
Fiksdal: How many students per seminar would have a position paper? It couldn’t have been all of
them.
Alexander: Yes, it was.
Fiksdal: Oh, it was? Each week they would write a position paper?
Alexander: Right. Well, there was more than one meeting a week.
Fiksdal: Oh, true.
Alexander: There were lots of meetings.
Fiksdal: Oh, so how many seminars did you have?
Alexander: I think, ordinarily speaking, we would meet three times a week. But we could improvise. If
it was clear that we needed more time than that, we would have additional seminars. People could do
it.
Fiksdal: That’s great.
Alexander: And we also designed lectures to go along with the topic, and the nature of the [quarrels]
that we were going to develop, and so on. It was wild. And pretty soon, my ideal of a seminar is that
the faculty member in charge of it, supposedly, I would do all my work in advance. And then, when it
9

came time for the seminar, then that was the student’s responsibility to take over, and I shouldn’t say a
damn thing unless it was absolutely necessary.
Fiksdal: So there was no real facilitation going on?
Alexander: Oh, there was tons of it.
Fiksdal: So the students did it themselves.
Alexander: Yes. There was lots of facilitating, but in the terms of getting prepared for it, delivering a
lecture on such-and-such topic.
Fiksdal: That’s all part of it, yeah.
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: So you weren’t all looking just at psychology that year?
Alexander: No, there were all sorts of other things. We looked at anthropology we looked at those—it
made Steve Herman grit his teeth; he hates genetics. Absolutely detests. Can’t stand it, never does it.
But he had to do some.
Fiksdal: He had to contribute.
Alexander: He had to do some, because there wasn’t any way that you could do a human development
without some notion of what the genetics were going to be.
Fiksdal: What about Richard and math?
Alexander: That was difficult. He improvised, mostly. But he was a very good facilitator for the
discussions.
Fiksdal: Interesting.
Alexander: Because he didn’t have anything at stake. He had no position he was trying to lead people
into. So it was just fine, and so on. Towards the . . . let’s see . . . I had some other things.
A particular one, this was a real success for me. I had stumbled across a book written by a
psychologist and a philosopher. The title of the book is Ego and Instinct. And the philosopher is well
known. I quickly realized that the topic of this book Ego and Instinct was just right on target for our
program. Well, we got around to the third quarter, and we had some problems with all these people
are out doing their internships, and doing this project and that project and so forth. And the program
was on the edge of just disappearing, turning into five little clusters. There, I was right. William Barrett.
[Daniel] Yankelovich is a well-known—he ran a company that did psychological surveys.
Fiksdal: Polling or . . . ?
Alexander: Yeah, that sort of thing.
Fiksdal: Well, it’s still out there.
10

Alexander: Right. And it’s a very fine book, by the way. It’s a very fine book. Especially if you’re an
Erikson fan.
Fiksdal: Well, yeah. It’s hard not to be an Erikson fan.
Alexander: Well, people find it fairly easy if they are not attuned to it.
Fiksdal: Well, that’s true.
Alexander: Their argument is that Freud made some really terrible mistakes in drafting his theory; and
that Erikson, though he tries desperately to be a loyal Freudian, finds himself necessarily correcting
those mistakes, following the lead of Ann Freud, who was his real teacher.
At any rate, it’s a fine book. It’s one of these books that keeps bringing up subjects, from
philosophy and elsewhere, that reward—infinitely reward—exploration. So I decided that we had a
group of students who basically had time on their hands here in Olympia, and were looking for
something to do. So I just organized an Ego and Instinct seminar. And in this case, I assigned students
to explore this paragraph of this chapter. “And you take this next paragraph. And you take this
paragraph.”
But at any rate, it became so intense that people would pass by in the hall outside the room we
were using, and they would stop, and look in the window. [laughter] “What the hell is going on in
there?” It wasn’t that we were shouting or making a lot of noise. In fact, just the opposite. It was really
intense, quiet, deep discussion. But it was as if a dynamo were going off, an intellectual dynamo going
off.
And after a while, the students understood that this was their show, and they were to be
running this seminar, not me. What I did was explain a little bit ahead of time what Barrett and
Yankelovich were trying to get at in this chapter, and why such and such paragraphs were important,
and said, “Okay, you do this. Write up a paper.” Again, we commandeered the little room. People went
and studied together and argued about this before the seminar. [chuckles] It was just wild. All kinds of
good things happened.
Fiksdal: The rest of the program, students did not read that text?
Alexander: No. There wasn’t any way that they could. We had a whole bunch of people who were
interning at Western State Hospital and over at Eastern State Hospital.
Fiksdal: So this was spring quarter?
Alexander: Spring quarter, right.
Fiksdal: That sounds great.

11

Alexander: Yeah. And the same thing happened with all the rest of the people. Steve decided, okay,
here’s a cohort of students who really want to get more deeply into the biology, especially the bird
behavior.
Fiksdal: He got them interested in birds? Of course he did. [laughing]
Alexander: Of course he did! And that was a big thing in the ‘60s.
Fiksdal: Oh?
Alexander: Oh, yes. Everybody was so excited about [Konrad Zacharias] Lorenz’s revision of the notion
of instinct, and his explanation of how it operated amongst birds; and the question of whether human
beings had similar instincts; and if so, how did they operate? How would you know what they were?
This kind of thing. That was a major part of our program discussion. It’s all over Ego and Instinct, of
course.
Fiksdal: Yeah, of course. So as faculty, you didn’t all know—because normally other colleagues don’t
come into your seminar, so you’re off on your own in the spring, in a sense.
Alexander: Well, we were, but that was required by the fact that we were going to have everybody
doing individual projects or internships or so on.
Fiksdal: Sure.
Alexander: And then we would go off—because we had to go visit these guys . . .
Fiksdal: Of course.
Alexander: . . . and find out how they were doing, and what problems there were, and arrange [that]
whoever was supervising their internship was going to supply something for an evaluation.
Fiksdal: Yeah, so we’ve kept that. So the whole notion of doing internships, did you develop that in
your program? Did someone come in and talk to you about it?
Alexander: No, no, no. We did it.
Fiksdal: You did it. Because that’s, of course, still the way we do it. Except now, students have to find
the internship, it’s not faculty. Well, sometimes, of course, faculty finds them. And so they go off, and
we ask the field supervisor to write something. So that’s the same. That’s interesting you developed it
then, that very first year.
Alexander: Well, we had to.
Fiksdal: Yeah, you had to. Well, you say you had to, but it still took imagination. [laughing]
Alexander: Well, yes.
Fiksdal: And grit.
Alexander: Yes, and a particular grit. You can’t believe what kind of crap we got from the deans.
12

Fiksdal: Oh, the deans didn’t want you to do this?
Alexander: No. We were not doing the kind of thing that supposedly coordinated studies were going to
do.
Fiksdal: Because you’re supposed to stare at books.
Alexander: Yeah. And we didn’t.
Fiksdal: So you didn’t clear it with the deans? Or you just told them, and you did what you wanted?
Alexander: We did. We told them “We’re going to do this.” Actually, they didn’t ask. They asked after
the fact, “What did you do?” And then sometimes they would get very upset. “What? You were doing
this?” [laughter]
But that was an enormously successful program because, as carefully as we could do it, it was
designed for the specific needs of specific students . . .
Fiksdal: . . . that you knew were coming.
Alexander: . . . that we knew were coming. And after a while, we knew who they were.
Fiksdal: Okay. It sounds fabulous. I want to ask about evaluations. Did you have some discussions in
the planning years about how you would write evaluations of students?
Alexander: I don’t recall.
Fiksdal: So do you think that you might have made it up in each program?
Alexander: I think it was left for people to invent. I do not recall there being any deep discussion of
evaluations in this first human development program.
Fiksdal: Okay.
Alexander: We had too much material.
Fiksdal: Well, certainly.
Alexander: We just had tons of things to discuss.
Fiksdal: Did you write at the end of fall quarter, at the end of winter?
Alexander: Yes, yes, of course we did.
Fiksdal: Yeah. And then do you remember, did you also put suggested course equivalencies on those
first-year evaluations?
Alexander: I don’t remember that. I think that appeared a couple of years later, at the urgent request
of the Registrar’s office, because they were constantly being besieged by registrars elsewhere for some
kind of course equivalency. And indeed, when you think about it, of course they need a course
equivalency. This ought not to be a problem. I never have understood why this is a problem.

13

Fiksdal: Well, I think sometimes, in my own experience, it hasn’t been a real problem—I’ve always done
it, and willingly, but sometimes it’s hard to name what you’re doing.
Alexander: Oh, yes. Now, that’s another matter.
Fiksdal: You name it. You might even look at other course catalogs just to—but it wouldn’t fit, because
at Evergreen, we’re doing things in a much different way, quite often.
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: Combining things in such a way that’s it’s a little hard to, I don’t know, to come up with
something . . .
Alexander: That’s right.
Fiksdal: . . . in a particular discipline.
Alexander: However, that gives you some way—material—for your evaluations of the student. In other
words, the narrative evaluation makes it its job to describe what these things were, in a language that
the person at the other end is going to be able to understand.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Did you use these narrative evaluations at San Jose State?
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: Ah, so that’s where they come from?
Alexander: I think they actually come from Charlie McCann.
Fiksdal: Oh. Not that he did them, but it was his idea. Is that correct?
Alexander: Yeah. He didn’t want to have grades.
Fiksdal: Yes, that’s right.
Alexander: No grades. No requirements. No this, that and the other. He was always vague about what
he wanted, but extremely specific what he didn’t want.
We didn’t have—the question of self-evaluation that never arose in those early programs that I
had anything to do with. But, oh my God, did it arise in other programs.
Fiksdal: You’re talking about student self-evaluation?
Alexander: Student self-evaluation.
Fiksdal: Because sometimes people might critique the program?
Alexander: No. Nobody was worried about that. If somebody did it, that would be just fine. The worst
example I can think of—the worst examples—were always from one program. One student [pounds on
table] put his hand down and traced out his hand.
Fiksdal: And that was a self-evaluation?
Alexander: That was his self-evaluation.
14

Fiksdal: Oh, my gosh! I see. So there’s no way of knowing if the student learned something.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: Yeah. I think—was it you?—someone read through evaluations in the early years. Right?
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I remember I believe that Charlie Teske asked you to think about that.
Alexander: Yes, I did.
Fiksdal: And you did it. What a lot of work. And so you came—
Alexander: Well, when you’ve [pounds on table] got something like that. And one young woman wrote
down that—this was for a whole year’s work—that she had learned to urinate out of doors easily.
[pounds on table]. End of evaluation.
Fiksdal: And this goes into their transcript.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: But nonetheless, they don’t care; it’s just going to go in there.
Alexander: No, the students often did care, after the fact, when all of a sudden, they realize this is going
to be sent to a registrar; this is going to be sent to a school I’m trying to get into. [chuckles] This is going
to be sent to this person where I’m applying for a job. But it continued to be a problem about which
there was no official, or even semi-official, advice or policy.
Now, I understand that something that I wrote up for my friends in the Registrar’s office—rather
late in the history of Evergreen, I wrote up a rather detailed description of why it is important to have
the self-evaluation, and how would you go about writing one? And I think that’s still available.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I think so, too. It just doesn’t have your name on it, I don’t think.
Alexander: That may be, but I’m the one who wrote that.
Fiksdal: That’s great. That’s good to know.
Alexander: Right. And I’m a believer in the self-evaluation. And I try, in that piece, to argue that this is
the most important part of it for anybody who will take it seriously. And this is the place at which you,
the student, get your chance to explain to the potential reader of this what really happened.
Fiksdal: Yeah, the personal discoveries. It’s just amazing what some people can do.
Alexander: Yeah. Well, I point out that the only person who knows how the entire experience adds up
in the student.
Fiksdal: And especially if you’re studying human development; you can study intellectual development
as well in these.

15

Alexander: Right, but let’s not worry about what the student is studying. It’s the same thing if they’re
studying physics. The only one who knows—who really knows—what the student learned over the
entire experience, and how it all adds up, and how it changed and so forth, is the student. They’re the
only ones who know. And if that story is to be told, they’re the ones who have to tell it.
Fiksdal: Let’s pause.
End Part 1 of 2 of Richard Alexander on 1-28-17
Begin Part 2 of 2 of Richard Alexander on 1-28-17
Fiksdal: Okay, we’re ready to go. So, Richard, you were going to tell me about your Japan program.
What got you interested in doing it, and how did it finally come together?
Alexander: What got me interested in doing it goes back to when I was in early high school, and
Japanese films started appearing in the art house, art movie theaters in the United States for the first
time ever. And it coincided with a bursting forth of enormous filmmaking talent in Japan.
The director I became intoxicated with in those early days was Kenji Mizoguchi. His film Ugetsu
appeared in the United States, and I remember seeing it, and I saw it and saw it and saw it and saw it
and saw it. It was . . . it was intensely dramatic in a way that seemed to me to be beyond anything I’d
ever seen before. And it was, at the same time, exquisitely beautiful. I was so happy to see, in a review
of the new—who’s the director of Raging Bull?
Fiksdal: I don’t know.
Alexander: You’re not a movie buff.
Fiksdal: No, I’m not a movie buff. Well, I like some movies, but I don’t know that one.
Alexander: Raging Bull?
Fiksdal: I don’t think I’ve seen it.
Alexander: It’s brilliant. It is truly a marvelous film.
Fiksdal: Martin Scorsese.
Alexander: Scorsese. Okay, Scorsese has just released his long-awaited Japanese film based on a very
fine novel called Silence. And there is a review of it by Ian Buruma in, I believe, the New York Review of
Books.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I’ve been reading about it.
Alexander: And Buruma links up—he talks about there is an earlier Japanese version of the same novel,
and he makes comparisons of them. One of the big differences is that the Japanese director had this
cinematographer [who] was the same man who had filmed the great Mizoguchi films. And their beauty
is beyond belief. It’s just staggering. If you’ve never seen Ugetsu . . .
16

Fiksdal: Yeah, I’m not sure. I’ve seen other Japanese movies, but I’m not sure that I have, so I’ll do that.
Alexander: Yeah, okay. Here. Get out your thing. The title of the film is Ugetsu, U-G-E-T-S-U. See if
you can get a clip from it.
Fiksdal: It came up right away.
Alexander: Oh-h-h that is such a gorgeous scene. Oh!
Fiksdal: 1953.
Alexander: Kenji Mizoguchi, yes. Well, just take a look.
Fiksdal: Yeah, the images are so—oh, here. Look, they show a lot.
Alexander: Yes. Well, it’s gorgeous film. And very, very moving, the conclusion. The only Japanese film
that has a conclusion more powerful than Ugetsu is another Mizoguchi film called Sancho the Bailiff,
which I personally think is a better film than Ugetsu is. Although, I mean, God, how can you choose?
These are absolutely masterful, and any number of other Mizoguchi films are almost to the level of
those two.
Fiksdal: But this, you began to recognize so young.
Alexander: Yes. Well, I was a movie fan. My father distributed films, so he used to bring them home,
and I would project them for the family to watch. So I was watching films carefully and closely at a very
early age. But these films, and several others of the same sort, just blew me away, and I became
intensely interested in things Japanese.
I also benefited from having been born and raised in Atlanta, for two reasons. First of all, the
Second World War, which was very vivid in my imagination during that time—I was quite young—but in
the South of the United States, and I think along the East Coast altogether, the war against Germany
seemed very personal, whereas the war against Japan, I mean, the Japanese were not the evil, rotten
sonsofbitches that the Germans were.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Maybe it was less understood, their culture.
Alexander: Oh, yes, it was utterly un-understood. So I didn’t develop any great prejudices against the
Japanese, whereas I have anti-German prejudices very deep.
Fiksdal: Still?
Alexander: Still. You bet. But not about Japan. I have immense curiosity about everything Japanese.
So this sort of developed and grew, and it just kept growing. Japanese culture dominates my notion of
Asian life. I’m largely uninterested in the Chinese, and have found that, on the whole, people who are
interested in Japan don’t care about China, and people who are interested in China don’t care about
Japan. [laughing]
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Fiksdal: I think that seems still true, at the college, anyway.
Alexander: Yeah, I think that’s very true. But there are similarities—they go very deep—between the
American South and Japanese culture. It’s not that they’re related in any way, but they share certain
qualities. And discovering these time after time after time is quite—
Fiksdal: Could you give me an example?
Alexander: Both of them are highly militaristic.
Fiksdal: That’s true.
Alexander: And they also place a great deal of emphasis on codes of politeness and decorum that go
hand in hand with the most unbelievably raucous, lowdown, dirty life standards. And the two are
absolutely essential. You can’t have only one; you have to have both.
So as soon as I cottoned onto the fact that no Japanese agreement can take place between
businesses unless there is, first, a highly formal meeting at which tea is exchanged, and all kinds of gifts.
But that’s not sufficient. You then have to leave—go someplace else—get drunk. [laughing]
Fiksdal: That’s true.
Alexander: And at that point, the true heart has been revealed, and you have the agreement. But you
can’t get the agreement just by getting drunk with somebody.
Fiksdal: So I didn’t know that was a Southern custom.
Alexander: Oh, yes, it’s very Southern. There also is a tendency for there to be a male culture and a
female culture. That’s true of the American South, and it bleeds over into—well, there are two strains
of American Southerner: the Virginia gentleman, which is Virginia, North and South Carolina; and then
there’s the Appalachian Scots-Irish tradition. You get that mimicked in Japan, too, most easily seen in
the difference between Samurai culture and farmer culture, farmer and fisherman culture.
Fiksdal: So you had done this work, and thinking about Japan.
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: In what year did you end up being able to offer that program?
Alexander: Well, the second year.
Fiksdal: Oh, already the second year.
Alexander: The second year, yeah, because I managed—Carri Cable showed up, and she was able to do
the things—see, one of the absolute requirements, in my mind, for this program is that after the first
year, a selected group—how they got selected is another matter; lots of different ways—but a smaller
group of students would go to Japan, someplace in Japan—in this case, Carri had all of her contacts in
Shimane Prefecture. As far as I’m concerned, that was one of the perfect places to go. There were a
18

whole bunch of others that would be just as good, but anyplace but Tokyo, Nagoya or Kyoto, Kobe.
Wouldn’t want that. Get people away from that urban core and immerse them in the old Japan. That’s
basically what you do when you go to Shimane.
Fiksdal: I bet. [laughter]
Alexander: And she had all those. [Kathleen O’Connor] would have taken them someplace else. But
she also had lots and lots of contacts, and that’s just exactly what she was ready to do is to take the
students off and arrange for internships and arrange for—
Fiksdal: Was that the spring quarter of that program, or the year after?
Alexander: No, it was the second year.
Fiksdal: That’s what I thought you were saying. Okay. So they would stay the entire year.
Alexander: Right, you bet. And for most of the students—and the only reason I say “most” is because I
can’t actually vouch for all of them. I don’t know the details about all of those students, but I think that
year in Shimane had enormous impact on those people’s lives. Not as spectacular, let’s say, as David
Keller becoming the Shinto priest, and winding up practicing the Shinto priesthood down in Iwasaki.
Fiksdal: I didn’t know that.
Alexander: Oh, you didn’t?
Fiksdal: So that was one of your students?
Alexander: That’s one of our students. He was never—he was Carri’s student, not mine, really. Very
brilliant young man, but it’s through David Keller contact that the connection with Iwasaki developed.
Fiksdal: So were you thinking of making these connections as you were teaching the program? Was
that one of the goals?
Alexander: What connections?
Fiksdal: Well, we have a connection now. We have an agreement with Miyazaki University.
Alexander: See, I don’t know anything about that.
Fiksdal: Oh, it’s for student exchanges only.
Alexander: Okay.
Fiksdal: So you didn’t develop that?
Alexander: I think it would have been in process of being developed about the time that I retired.
Fiksdal: I see. And then the Kobe exchange was also not your . . .?
Alexander: Oh, no. That happens when we’re starting to think about doing the program a second time.
But Carri’s not going to be around, and we don’t have the faculty exactly, so it has to be put together

19

again. It seemed to me that it was important for me to set up something. And Kobe’s relationship is
within—well, it’s really prefecture and state connection.
Fiksdal: Right.
Alexander: And also, to a certain degree, a Kobe-Seattle . . .
Fiksdal: So because Seattle already had that sister city arrangement.
Alexander: Yes, right. And so the good offices of Dan Evans . . .
Fiksdal: . . . and the consul from Japan in Seattle has always been involved.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: So did you bring one of those faculty members over to help teach your program?
Alexander: No.
Fiksdal: Okay, so that must have come after.
Alexander: That comes after I go over there.
Fiksdal: Okay. You do get the credit for both of those in everyone’s minds. [laughing]
Alexander: Yeah, well . . . and [Mitsuharu] Mitsui was my closest friend on the Kobe Shodai campus.
And, in fact, he and his wife lived in the other half of the duplex in which I lived in Tarumi. But it would
have been nice to have Mitsui teaching in a Japan program in this country. But that—there are a whole
bunch of reasons why that didn’t happen, and, in fact, most of them I haven’t thought about in years
and years and years. I can’t say anything sensible.
Fiksdal: That’s okay. So you did the Japan program twice?
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: But the first time was the only time that it lasted two years?
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: Okay. That’s a very good story.
Alexander: Well, I’m not sure that it’s much of a story.
Fiksdal: Well, yes, it is, because wasn’t it—to me it is, because I believe very much in teaching language
and culture programs, and it seems to me that that was the first one.
Alexander: Yes, it was.
Fiksdal: And that’s big. You made that opening.
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: And it’s interesting because you don’t speak Japanese, you didn’t study in Japan . . .
Alexander: Well, I tried.
Fiksdal: I remember that you went to study.
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Alexander: Yes, I went up into Madame [Niwa]’s infamous—
Fiksdal: And you had that very story of how you learned—didn’t you learn feminine Japanese?
Alexander: Yes, she taught—
Fiksdal: She didn’t bother to teach you the—
Alexander: She taught everybody female Japanese. And not only did she teach it that way, but she
carefully made sure that nobody would enlighten us of the fact. So in the textbook we used, there was
not mention one of the difference between male Japanese and female Japanese.
Fiksdal: And it’s so fundamental.
Alexander: Yes, absolutely fundamental. But that’s the University of Washington, and they had their
own problems with Madame [Niwa]. In fact, they had decided—the Japanese Department had
decided—that it was just going to give her that . . .
Fiksdal: . . . last course.
Alexander: No, it was the intensive course.
Fiksdal: Oh, I see.
Alexander: They were going to let her do that, and they just didn’t interfere with it and just let it go.
You’d think that everybody must have known.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: But, in fact, they kept hands off. So during the whole time that I was studying up there,
even though I knew personally one of the members of the department . . .
Fiksdal: . . . even that person didn’t tell you.
Alexander: No.
Fiksdal: Well, there’s certain things that, yeah, you can’t do.
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: I’ve understood that. Because when I became a dean, we had a Japanese language teacher
who really wasn’t doing the job in the way that I would want.
Alexander: Who was this?
Fiksdal: Oh, his name escapes me, quite frankly. But he was just strictly by the book, and going over the
grammar, and there wasn’t conversation, and he didn’t use Japanese very much in the class. The
students just didn’t learn very much. And he was just also extremely boring [laughing] in his approach.
And I happened to mention it one time to Setsuko, and I said, “It would be really good if you
would help me find someone much better. I’ve observed him, and I’ve written some things he should
do, and I’ve gone back and he hasn’t changed at all. We need a different teacher.”
21

And she said, “Well, it’s probably best to wait until he retires.”
And I said, “What? No! We need a good person here so we can get students to the second
level”—because they kept dropping out, and we’re teaching first-year Japanese. But she didn’t go into
any detail—I’ve never met a Japanese who did—but she just said, “It’s really better if we wait.”
Alexander: Yes.
Fiksdal: And so we waited, and then we got a much better person to teach. So that taught me a lot
about Japanese culture also.
Alexander: Well, Setsuko had her problems as well.
Fiksdal: Yeah, well, I imagine. I think it was tough for both of our—well, anyway, that’s a different
topic. I want to focus on you.
Alexander: Well, as far as I’m concerned, the second Japanese program foundered almost immediately
because not knowing any better, and having no alternatives, I went ahead and hired Setsuko on the
recommendation—
Fiksdal: Oh, you hired Setsuko?
Alexander: Yes. And then discovered that it was impossible to work with her.
Fiksdal: Oh, no. I didn’t realize that.
Alexander: Right. And we had totally different concepts of what should be taught, and how it should be
taught. And her way of dealing with this was passive-aggressive in the extreme.
Fiksdal: Yeah? Oh, I see.
Alexander: So it rather quickly turned into two programs that were connected with each other in only
the most tenuous sort of way. And I ran mine, and it was of necessity a program in which the language
could play virtually no role. And so I did my usual seminar method, and . . .
Fiksdal: Do you remember what it was in that program?
Alexander: Well, we happened to have inherited from the University of Washington an enormous cache
of articles and pamphlets on Japanese subjects in English. I’m sure that it still exists there. But this
meant that we had this resource in the Library that was quite remarkable. So I said, “Okay, we’re going
to use this.”
And I happened to get a group of students who were mostly not terribly interested in the
language. They either already had it reasonably well, or they were completely indifferent. That wasn’t
the reason they wanted to be there. But they were interested in business and history and political
matters and cultural matters, and so I did my usual thing of making the seminars not be about a book or

22

a text or something, but about a topic; and then asking people to explore individually some aspect of
this topic, and to write up papers that would be given to the group and so forth.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting.
Alexander: In other words, a true graduate school seminar style, which I find works very well. You don’t
have to be a graduate student to do that.
Fiksdal: No.
Alexander: All you have to do is to have somebody set it up, and then let the students go at it. They
tend to really like doing the research. [chuckles]
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Alexander: Yeah. So we had these just crackerjack explorations of all sorts of topics. And I would try to
pick the most controversial types of approaches, that aspect of a situation that was the most
controversial. For instance, I remember spending a great deal of time about the differences between
the old zaibatsu and the new zaibatsu.
Fiksdal: What is zaibatsu?
Alexander: These were the large corporations, like the Mitsui Corporation, Mitsubishi. The old zaibatsu
had gotten started during the Meiji Restoration, and during the 1920s. The new zaibatsu gets started in
Manchuria and Korea by the air force and the army, whose big project was to create this Japanese
empire out there.
The old zaibatsu didn’t want anything to do with it. They were absolutely opposed. They had
tended to be, amongst other things, more attuned to the navy, and to matters of Europe. They were all
pro-British and pro-French; somewhat less pro-German after the German army—the army had their
contacts with the German army. This gets all very complicated.
But at any rate, the air force and the army had to get a hold of some smaller corporations that
could be developed, and they designed a whole bunch of new zaibatsu, which then become Nissan and
the automobile industry.
Fiksdal: With their origins in military uses.
Alexander: Right. It’s just amazing, because the American army—MacArthur’s occupation—they were
deeply suspicious of the old zaibatsu and didn’t want to help them at all. But they latched onto these
new companies out there, and installed them as the head of the Japanese industry after the Second
World War.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting.
Alexander: Yeah. So I got people talking about all of this sort of thing.
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Fiksdal: That’s fascinating. Very interesting. And, I think, helpful, because I’m always doing institutes
about how to teach effective seminars, and I didn’t know this method.
But here’s why it’s especially interesting to me now. Because all the research I’m doing about
useful and effective pedagogy for the wide array of broad, diverse students, has to do with making
sure—being intentional about everything you’re teaching. So you had already thought that. What do
we really need to do? Do we need to have a seminar? Yes. But does it have to be based on a book or
two books or whatever?
Alexander: No, it most definitely does not.
Fiksdal: Can it have this other approach? Yeah.
Alexander: In fact, if you’re going to center in on a book, and the book is really meaty—it’s got a lot to
it—my notion is that the best thing to do is to devote several weeks to this book, not just one day.
Fiksdal: Yeah. No, I think often it is one, yeah.
Alexander: Yeah, the idea that you can’t get anywhere.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Alexander: Whereas you can do quite nicely over a longer period of time, and students will get an
enormous amount out of it. But my whole notion is that the best kind of seminar is where each student
member of the seminar has a job to do, and it’s a peculiar job, they are the only ones doing that job, and
their doing it well is essential for the operation of the seminar.
Let me give you a beautiful example of how this worked in another program, totally at the end
of my career. Dave Hitchens and I did a program that we called South, and it quickly occurred to me
that there wasn’t one South, there were dozens of them, and they were very different. And not only
that, but when you started examining in detail, there wasn’t one South Carolina, there are at least four
different ones. And then you’ve got all these different class levels and so on and so forth. And you’ve
got blacks versus whites.
At any rate, I suggested to Dave—and he, with some reluctance, agreed to it, but it worked
perfectly—I said, “Let’s have each student have responsibility for a state. And then we’ll organize the
seminars, not on a state, but on a particular topic, generally historic.”
For instance, the nature of slavery, and what was it in this state? By the way, the slavery
systems were quite radically different from state to state. And the slaves had come from different parts
of Africa. And that made a difference. It made a big difference. And in some, slavery would be confined
to a certain section of a state, and be virtually unknown in any other section of the state.
Fiksdal: Maybe like Tennessee maybe?
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Alexander: Tennessee’s a very good example—a very good example—where the slavery, you’ve got
basically three regions. You’ve got the eastern Appalachian region—very few slaves, very few indeed;
then you’ve got the middle section, which is centered on Nashville and Chattanooga; and then you’ve
got the western section, centered on Memphis. Just utterly different, those different sections, and so
slavery was totally different in each one. The slavery in the western part is an extension of the
Louisiana-Mississippi-Mississippi Delta, going north. Whereas in the part around Nashville, it’s totally
different with agriculture.
Fiksdal: Yeah, and the type of agriculture would matter, of course. Yeah, that’s a good point. So that’s
why you could have more than one student doing one state.
Alexander: Well, sometimes there were. But actually, there were easily 20 different states in the
Confederacy. It depends on how widely you want to spread it. Do you want to include Maryland, for
instance? What about West Virginia? How about Kentucky? What about Missouri? [laughing] But at
any rate, we just did this, and each student became deeply immersed in the intricacies of each one of
these states. And then when it came time to discuss the topic, she would be in charge. For instance, the
civil rights movement. How did this break out? And why North Carolina?
Fiksdal: So this is a true sharing of information.
Alexander: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: And then comparing, and trying to make broader conclusions.
Alexander: Right.
Fiksdal: I’m just struck also by the fact that you were working with Dave Hitchens, and you were both
planning year faculty.
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: And a number of years had gone by, so you’d tried various ways of teaching coordinated
studies.
Alexander: Yeah.
Fiksdal: So did you feel like you had both come to some of the same conclusions about coordinated
studies, or do you feel like, no, it was pretty still individual . . . I don’t know quite how to phrase this.
Alexander: I don’t think, you know, Dave and I didn’t have much disagreements. We recognized how
different we were in personality and approach [recording stopped].
End Part 2 of 2 of Richard Alexander on 1-28-17

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

AlexanderRichard_20161207_Transcript.pdf

AlexanderRichard_20170128_Transcript.pdf