Nancy Allen Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

AllenNancy

Title

Nancy Allen Oral History Interview

Date

29 March 2017

14 April 2017

13 September 2017

Creator

Nancy Allen

Contributor

Nancy Taylor

extracted text

Nancy Allen
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 29, 2017, Part ONE

FINAL

Taylor: it’s Wednesday, March 29, 2017, and Nancy Allen and I are here to do a first interview. The first
thing is to talk a little bit about your family, your upbringing, your childhood; any stories that you want

to tell that might signal or point to why you made the choices you did in your life.
Allen: Okay. This is the story I always tell about this, and it’s very clear. When I was little, when I was, I
don’t know . . . because supposedly you only start really remembering things when you’re maybe four or
something? So this all must have happened around the time I was four. I really loved my dad—he was

definitely my favorite parent—and sometimes I would get up late at night, later, after my bedtime—to
go to the bathroom. Then I would go into the living room and I would see my dad, and he’d be sitting in
a chair, and he’d have a book in front of him. He’d be looking at this book. He wouldn’t be saying
anything, he’d just be looking at this book. And he seemed to love to do that. He really seemed to love
to look at books, and turn the pages.
Taylor: And you can remember from age four?
Allen: Yes, I can remember seeing him do this, and thinking that he really loved it. So I just wanted to
learn to read. I wanted to learn to read so bad, and I begged my parents to teach me to read. My mom
was the one to do it, because she was the one who spent most of the day with me. But she didn’t want
to teach me to read. I think she was scared that she wouldn’t do it right, and then I wouldn’t read right,
or something.

But what she did do was—I was born right on the line to go either way when I got into school. I
could get into kindergarten when I was four and a half. Or, if I waited till the normal age that they
thought I should be, I wouldn’t get into kindergarten until I was five and a half. I wanted to learn to read
so much, and I wasn’t even going to get to learn to read in kindergarten. I wasn’t going to get to learn to

read until first grade, so I had to go into kindergarten at four and a half. And my mom pushed all the
people at the school to let me into kindergarten at four and a half. So they did. So then, I was able to

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learn to read when I went into first grade, and I just learned to read—I can’t even remember it being
hard. I just learned to read immediately.
Then, I just loved reading. That was my main thing. I would have huge fights with my mother
about reading too much, like reading when she thought I should be socializing, and doing domestic
chores.

Taylor: “Why don’t you go out and play?”
Allen: Yes, exactly. But my dad supported me in liking to read, because he liked to read. My mom
certainly was literate, but she never read for pleasure. She subscribed to McCall’s magazine, and Ladies
Home Journal, and she would sort of leaf through them and look at the pictures.

But my dad would take me to the library, and let me borrow books. Then when I had gone
through all the kids ’books, he told the people at the library—when I was eight or something—he said,
“Okay, now she can have adult books. She can take any book out in this library that she wants.”
So, I was just hooked on reading, and then school. I thought school was a much preferable place
to my family. I could do what they wanted me to do in school. I got lots of positive reinforcement at
school. So, school was what I wanted to do. And I never, ever had another job in mind besides being in
school, and being a teacher.
I remember when I was in third grade in school, we had rotating lunch monitors; kids would go
and be lunch monitors for the grade underneath them. So when I was in third grade, I was lunch
monitor a few times for the second-graders. I would find myself thinking of activities that we were
going to do during lunch and stuff. And I said, “Oh, so now I can see that I want to be a teacher. I think I
want to teach second grade.” And then, when I was in fourth grade, I would say, “Oh, I think I want to
teach fourth grade, or third grade.”
Taylor: I always wanted to teach fourth grade. That was my favorite grade for some reason.
Allen: With me, the grade I wanted to teach just went up the older I got. It was always the grade I

happened to be in. When I was in college, I wanted to teach college. [laughing] And that’s what I did.
But there were other positive things that happened on the way. I don’t think it would have been
as easy for me if it weren’t for other things, besides just my family background. It was just totally clear
to me that I did not want to be like my mother. I did not want to be a housewife. I did not want to be

cooking and cleaning all day. My parents didn’t have much money, and they only had one car. My dad
drove the car to work, so my mom had no car, and no mobility at all during the day. And I did not have
any interest in that lifestyle, so I was going to do the thing that I saw that gave me an alternative to that.

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Taylor: Usually, one of the things that is really common is that girls want to be teachers, and girls do
well in school. Were you aware of that at the time? That girls were sort of channeled into a direction,
and that girls always do better in school?
Allen: No, I was not aware of that at all. I thought it was all my choice.
Taylor: So, high school? And how you chose where you were going to go to college, and college years?
Are there stories there? Or, is there more that you want to talk about, about your parents?
Allen: Probably sometime, I want to talk a lot more about my parents, but not necessarily right now. I
went to Glendale High School, which is right next to Hollywood, and Pasadena, where the Rose Parade is
and all that stuff. But Hollywood was the key factor. Girls in my high school wanted to be in the movies.
They wanted to dress like movie stars. My mom was like this, too. We actually had a starlet in our class
afterwards, after we graduated.
But I didn’t have any of that interest. I had three good friends. There was this little band of four
of us who were interested in school. We wanted to study, and get good grades. We wanted to do well

in school. We didn’t care so much about football games, and cheerleaders, and all that stuff. Although
we went to the football games, and we went to Bob’s Big Boy to get burgers after the football games.
[laughing] But we went as a group of four brains. I guess now we would be geeks or nerds or something
like that, but I think we thought of ourselves as brains. But we all went around together, and so we
didn’t feel like we were out of it, in terms of social life. None of us had any dates. None of us. But we
felt like we were socially acceptable, because we saw the football games and we went to Bob’s.
An interesting story. When I was thinking about choosing colleges, everybody encouraged me
to apply to several colleges, but they didn’t have any doubt that I would get in. They thought I was a
shoo-in for college because my grades were so good. I ended up applying to Stanford and Berkeley and
Occidental. I really wanted to go to Stanford, because it had this beautiful campus, I thought, which I
had seen in some pictures, I guess. I’d never seen it in person. And it had the most prestige of these. Of
course, Berkeley was a state school, and somehow I thought I should sneer at that, because the state
school was my third choice, really.
A couple of my teachers said that I really should go to Occidental, because if I went to
Occidental, I would find more personal attention. But I didn’t care. I wanted to go to Stanford.

So when I got my letters back from the application process, I didn’t get into Stanford. I got into
Occidental and Berkeley, but not into Stanford. My dad knew somebody who had graduated from

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Stanford, and thought he could pull strings. He said, “Oh, honey, don’t worry about it. I can get you into
Stanford.”
I said, “No, Dad. I’m not getting in because anybody pulls any strings for me. I’m not getting in
because you know somebody. I’m getting in on my own merits. So, if I didn’t get into Stanford, I can’t
go to Stanford. That’s that. I’m going to Occidental.”

Actually, I think that was a very good thing. Because a really key factor for me was having a
woman teacher.
Taylor: In high school?
Allen: No, in college. A woman who would—actually, I got a lot of mentoring from men, too, in the

literature classes I took. There were only two women on the Occidental faculty. One was in art, and
one was Gabrielle Benton, who was in the Spanish department. She was the only teacher in the Spanish
department, really, except for a few people who taught the first year and second year. She was a
Viennese-Austrian woman, and she had a really thick German accent in her Spanish, so it really wasn’t

the greatest model for me to have of Spanish-speaking.
But she took a real big interest in me. She said, “Look, you are really good. You can go
anyplace.” And she gave me all this advice about graduate school.
I was smart enough that I didn’t major in Spanish, because majoring in Spanish meant that you
just had this one teacher. So I majored in comparative literature, which meant that I had about three or
four other teachers, and I got to include Spanish in that.
Taylor: What brought on Spanish? Did you just like this teacher?
Allen: No, no. I just did really well in Spanish. In junior high, I started Spanish. I guess that’s
characteristic of Southern California or something. It wasn’t that they were really great about getting
onto teaching Spanish, but when I was in junior high, I had that option. Oh, I know what it was. You had
to take a language, I think, but the only choices were Spanish and Latin. Everybody thought the Latin

teacher was terrible, and really hard. I didn’t want to take this terrible Latin teacher, so I took Spanish.
And then, I was just super good. I think any of the reading and writing parts of languages, I’m quite good
at. And memorizing grammar rules and verbal conjugations.
Taylor: You just had a facility for language.

Allen: Yeah, I had a facility for language, which fit nicely into being a comp lit major. I also love to read,
and I love to read literature.
Taylor: Did you do another language besides Spanish?

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Allen: Yes, French. I never spent enough time in French to really speak French well, but I can still read
French. I got up to third-year French at Occidental.
Taylor: Because in comparative literature, by definition, you have to read two languages.
Allen: Yeah, you have to have two languages. You take almost the entire English curriculum, and two
languages.
Taylor: Do you want to go back and talk about your parents more, at this point, or do you want to go on
to talk more about college, and stories of success? And then you went on to graduate school at
Columbia, and the difference between Occidental and Columbia.
Allen: The thing about my parents is my parents had a great deal of impact on my teaching, I think. I
just got done rereading almost all my self-evaluations, and I was constantly talking about my family, and
my growing up, and how it influenced the way I was teaching. I think it will be when we get further into
Evergreen that I’ll talk some more about my parents.
Also, they kept having this whole drama that was developing that I needed to take care of,

because they were very old. I guess the key thing about my parents is they had me when they were 33.
That was old compared to most people. They had my brother when they were 40, so I got the aging
parents thing. My parents were aging, and having all kinds of old people’s problems when I was
relatively young, compared to the other people around me. That impacted my teaching, too, but I don’t

want to talk about that right now.
Taylor: Let’s go back to college. Occidental and Columbia.
Allen: Okay, because of Gabrielle, because of this mentor I had, I chose Columbia. When I applied to
graduate schools, I got in everywhere. I got into Harvard, Columbia and Brown. I probably really should
have gone to Brown, because Brown gave me a full, complete scholarship for my entire work toward my
doctorate.
Taylor: The program was comparative literature, or Spanish?
Allen: It was Spanish. I was applying to Spanish departments. I didn’t have any idea, except for what
Gabrielle told me, about what Spanish departments were like, or anything. She was convinced that the
most famous Spanish scholar in all of human history was teaching at Columbia. His name was Angel del
Rio. He was teaching at Columbia, and so therefore, I should go to Columbia.
I think I looked up and read some stuff about who was teaching at Harvard, because part of me
said, my god, you are crazy to turn down Harvard. Who would not go to Harvard? You know? But she
said the person at Harvard was just not really up to snuff compared to Angel del Rio. So, I ended up
going to Columbia.
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I’m not sure how much this is true of other universities, but I’m sure that it’s true of Columbia.
When you are in graduate school, you are just a student of your department. There’s no college.
There’s no institution. There’s just your department. It’s a row of offices on a few corridors in maybe
one building, and that’s what you’re going to school. And the Spanish department happened to be in
terrible shape.

Taylor: Physically, or do you mean the people?
Allen: The building was okay. They were all sort of old, clunky buildings, but the building was okay. No,
the people were terrible. The teachers were terrible. They were terrible, because they were refugees
from the Spanish Civil War. They had left—this is the early ‘60s—and so these are people who had left
Spain in the ‘30s. They were kind of liberal, intellectual people from liberal, intellectual families, who, if
they had stayed in Spain, would have had professional careers of some kind, but they didn’t necessarily
even want to be university professors.
Taylor: Do you think Gabrielle Benton knew that?
Allen: [Sighs] I don’t know to what extent. I think she probably did know it. I don’t know to what
extent she didn’t just take it for granted, that this is how the world was. Anybody who took Spanish
around the time that I was taking Spanish would be dealing with refugees from the civil war.

Taylor: They would be at Brown as well?
Allen: Maybe so, or Harvard. I have no idea what the background was of the people at those other
places. All I know is that the department was full of these Spaniards, and they had all been there for
about 30 years now, and they were getting ready to retire. And Angel del Rio had retired. [laughter] I

think he retired the year before I got there.
So, I am left with all these tottering old Spanish refugees. And all of them—every single one of
my teachers—had pre-prepared lectures. I think each class was like a two-hour session per week. You
only had three or four classes, so you didn’t have much class time. But the class time would always be

this guy reading his old lecture notes. [chuckles] It was just awful.
Taylor: Were there other graduate students that you could . . .
Allen: No.
Taylor: Was there any energy?

Allen: No, there was no energy. [sighs] Well, no. I had some friends who I met in International House.
I stayed in International House my first year of living in New York. The thing I’m getting to, the
wonderful thing, was New York.

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Taylor: That was one of the things I was going to ask you.
Allen: Being in New York was the whole payoff from this experience. But there was no energy in the
department. A lot of the other graduate students were from the local community. They were people
training to be Spanish teachers in the schools, and they weren’t particularly interesting, I didn’t think.
I also managed to distinguish myself on the very first day of my master’s program. I managed to

get in a fight with the chairman of the department. Because the chairman of the department had us
all—all the new master’s students were sitting around a table. There were maybe 10 of us. On the very
first day of class, he went around the table, and he asked us what we were going to write our master’s
essays on. He absolutely thought we should have had this figured out before we ever came to the

department.
He called on me first, because my name is at the beginning of the alphabet. Oh, god. This was
so terrible. I said, “Well, sir, I have no idea what I want to write my master’s essay on. I don’t think we
should be starting, on the very first day of our master’s efforts, already knowing what we want to do. I
thought that I would have at least a week or two to figure out what I think I want to do.” He just said,
“All right. If you don’t want to do this . . .”
He went around the rest of the table, and everybody else could cough up something. [chuckles]
He had given me a lot of trouble about it, so everybody else came up with something that they wanted
to do for their master’s essay. I don’t know to what extent that turned out to be what they finally did.
So when he got to the end, he said, “We’ll see what we have to do with you, because you just obviously
are not where the program is.” [laughing]

Then, the next time we had class, he told me that he would not sponsor my master’s essay; that
my master’s essay would be sponsored by this man named Gonzales Sobejano, who was their new hire
in their department. Who was my only savior!
Taylor: Sounds like a blessing.

Allen: Oh! He was a young Spanish professor, from Spain, and smart. The head of the department was
an Irishman named James Shearer.
Taylor: He was a little old and tired, huh?
Allen: Well, he wasn’t smart. I don’t know where he had learned his Spanish, or how brilliant he may
have been at some point, but he hadn’t written anything, and he knew only the most standard names,
dates and facts. And he had no interesting analyses of literature to talk about.

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I thought it was hopeless, and I considered—I pursued—the idea of going back to Comparative
Literature. Dropping the idea of being a Spanish teacher; going back to comp lit, and going to Yale.
Because Yale was the Comp Lit program at the moment. I think I made a few phone calls, trying to
figure out what would happen to me if I did that. They said I would lose the entire academic year. I
couldn’t get in, even if they took me, and even if I could get money. Because I did have a scholarship at

Columbia. Just for my first year, but I had a scholarship, and there was no guarantee that I would get
that at Yale. I would have to, I guess, give back my scholarship, and do nothing for a year. I didn’t want
to face that, so I stayed where I was.
Taylor: The irony is that the other graduate students were interested in teaching Spanish. You were

interested in getting a Ph.D. in Spanish literature. That’s very different.
Allen: Yes.
Taylor: They were the ones who were coughing up things to do. You were the one who wanted to take
some time to think about it.

Allen: Yeah. I had some intellectual ambition. But they may have, too, and they may have only decided
that, look, you had to say some standard thing, because that’s how it was going to be, just from
watching my example going up against Shearer. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say they were all . . .
Taylor: Have you kept track of these people?
Allen: No. I never knew any of them.
Taylor: Even though you were there three years?
Allen: No, I was there taking classes for two years.
Taylor: And you pretty much made no friends in the department?
Allen: Yes, I made no friends in the department. I made friends outside the department, through my
living situation. I had a friend who was in international political science. I can’t remember what the
other person was in. I had apartment mates who were my friends.
Taylor: If you had it to do over again, would you have done anything different, do you think?
Allen: [Sighs] Well, not given that I stayed at Columbia. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone
to either Harvard or Brown. I always tell myself I should have gone to Brown, because I didn’t finish my
Ph.D. Basically, I didn’t have enough money to pay me for the year when I would have been writing my

dissertation. I had to start working.
Taylor: Yeah, and Brown would have given you more money.

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Allen: Brown would have given me money for four years, all the way through the Ph.D. I think I should
have done that. Who knows? That would have been a whole different situation. I think I made an
unfortunate choice of dissertation topic. That, in large part, happened because of my thesis advisor,
who was the young guy. [sighs] But he was concerned about what my Ph.D. was going to be, and not
what my master’s was going to be. He wanted my Ph.D. to be something that would really contribute to

the field.
And in his understanding of where the field was, there needed to be a book about the poetry of
this man named Manuel Machado. Manuel Machado was the brother of Antonio Machado, who was
the most famous Spanish twentieth-century poet. This family was famous because these two brothers

had ended up on different sides of the Spanish Civil War. Antonio, of course, had been on [laughing] the
good side. But Manuel Machado—his brother, and also a poet—had been on Franco’s side, and had
written propaganda poetry for Franco.
And I was getting all leftist political, so some part of me just didn’t want—I just didn’t think that I

should be writing about this right-wing poet. That kept undermining my work [laughing] the whole way.
I did a lot of work on it.
Taylor: That was going to be your Ph.D. thesis?
Allen: Yeah, but first, I did my master’s essay.
Taylor: Your master’s essay wasn’t on that?
Allen: No. My master’s essay was on the idea of honor (a man killing his wife if he suspected her
infidelity) in the 17th Century Spanish theater. My master’s essay won the award in the department for
the best master’s essay in the department that year. So, I obviously was able to write at graduate level,
able to put a dissertation together, but I had the wrong topic, and I didn’t know how to get out of that.
I wish that I’d had the courage to say to my dissertation advisor, “Look, I know that Manuel”—I
mean, his point was that a new biography had just been published about Manuel Machado. So here is

all this new information we have, and so somebody has to take this and put this together. Also, poetry
wasn’t really my first choice.
Taylor: But you didn’t feel like you had the . . .
Allen: No, I didn’t. I did not feel like I had the guts, especially since he was great. He was my savior in
the department, and especially since he was the one who was telling me I should do this, it was really
hard not to just follow what he said. But that got me in trouble when I needed energy. I needed to
think it was significant, and I didn’t.

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Taylor: And you needed money.
Allen: Yeah. If I had had money, and then if I had gone to Brown, I probably never would have gotten
into this Machado thing, because that was probably Sobejano’s obsession. I don’t know.
Taylor: Was there any talk at that time about feminism, and about anything that was either preventing
you, or encouraging you? Or, it just wasn’t even a topic?

Allen: No, not in my head.
Taylor: Probably not in Columbia in 1965.
Allen: No.
Taylor: There was racial—

Allen: Yeah. The ‘60s [laughing]—my first experience of a sort of ‘60s student action was at Occidental.
It was so, so silly. But it was what a bunch of white, middle-class kids in California could think when
something really moving was going on in the South, which was the sit-in movement. At Occidental, a
bunch of kids got together and decided that we should take action to support the students in the sit-in

movement in the South. What we did was we stood up at dinnertime. We had dinner in the dining hall,
and it was served as usual, and we stood up while we ate. One time. [laughter] That’s what we did.
That’s pretty lame. It’s really, really pretty lame.
I have always seen myself as not a political organizer. I will follow political organizers, if there
are any. But that’s not a skill I have.
Taylor: No, but it was also the times. You and I are the same age. We’re a little bit old. Five years later,
we might have acted.
Allen: Yeah, I think so. Five years later, I was in Spain. That was ’68-’69. That was the hot year, and I
was in Spain on the Fulbright that I had, so I missed—and Columbia was a hotbed. In ’68-’69, they took
over the administration building, and held it for a long time.
Taylor: That’s when I was in Berkeley. Let’s go back and finish. What happened when you left? You

must have left Columbia to get a job?
Allen: Yeah. I left, but I still had a few classes. I left to teach at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, which was
50 miles down the freeway from New York City.
Taylor: That was still a private school at that point?

Allen: No, it was a state university.
Taylor: It’s now a state university, but I didn’t know when that happened.

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Allen: No, it was always a state university. It was a state university, and it had a women’s branch and a
men’s branch. The women’s branch was called Douglass, and the men’s branch was Rutgers University.
I taught at Rutgers. I lived in a big high-rise apartment building, right near the Douglass campus. There
was a cross-town bus system to take people from Douglass to Rutgers, so I rode that bus all the time. I
didn’t need to have a car. But I was right on the road, the main highway into New York City. So I just

needed to go downstairs and take a bus, and I could be in New York in about an hour.
I still took a couple of different classes when I was teaching at Rutgers, because I’d go into the
evening classes. I was still enrolled at Columbia, but I wasn’t living there, and I wasn’t going there very
often. And I still had to take my orals. I had written my master’s essay, but I still had to take my orals. I
took my orals on my way out of town, to go on the Fulbright.
Taylor: How did it happen that you got the Fulbright? That wasn’t a part of your Ph.D. Or was it?
Allen: Yes, it was. It was to continue my Ph.D. research. Because I taught at Rutgers for three years,
and I didn’t make any progress on this Ph.D. I would get it out dutifully, and I would work on it in the
summertime, but I wasn’t really making any progress. There were things I thought I needed to be in
Spain to do, like go to his birthplace, and go to his house.
So, I applied to the Fulbright to do that, and I got it. I’m really lucky that the Fulbright gave me

that, I think, given that I hadn’t been making any progress on my Ph.D. for all these years. [laughing]
Taylor: Somebody had faith in you.
Allen: Yeah, yeah. Virginia Wesleyan had faith in me, Evergreen had faith in me. Because I had a really
hot-looking resume I think, in some ways, even though I was bogged down on getting the Ph.D.

Really, Rutgers—I guess one of the things I wrote in one of the self-evaluations, those people in
the Eastern intellectual places didn’t do me any good. They didn’t have any authority with me. I didn’t
care, I didn’t believe them, I didn’t like them. Except for Sobejanu. He was the only one. Except for
him, I could have done without all of them. And that had never happened to me before in my academic
life.
Taylor: So the Spanish department at Rutgers was no more inspirational?
Allen: No. Oh, no. Well, I was teaching undergrads, I was teaching freshmen all day.
Taylor: You were teaching Spanish language?
Allen: Yeah. I was teaching beginning language classes.
Taylor: But you didn’t have any connection with the Spanish department as an intellectual base.
Allen: No. But I doubt that it was, to tell you the truth.

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Taylor: What happened in Spain?
Allen: Well, in Spain, I got involved with a guy. That’s one thing that happened.
Taylor: You were in Madrid?
Allen: I was in Madrid. I spent an entire year living in Madrid, and traveling around, to some degree, to
see these Manuel Machado places. They were both born in southern Spain. I saw the house where they

grew up. Then, when he was old, and he was writing propaganda poetry for Franco, he lived in Burgos.
Burgos was in the north. There’s a big cathedral there, and Burgos was the center of the fascism of
Franco. I went there, and I spent, I think, three weeks in Burgos, living in a little hostel. There was a
Manuel Machado library there, which had all of his works, all the books he had when he died, and all

these documents to look at. I went there, and studied that.
Then, while I was in Spain I was hired at Virginia Wesleyan.
Taylor: So you were there a year, and at that point, you decided you weren’t going to be a full-time
student and finish. You weren’t going to finish your Ph.D.
Allen: No, I didn’t know.
Taylor: But you decided that?
Allen: No. But all that needed to be done—I’d passed my orals, I’d done my master’s essay, I’d done all
my major research. I was all done, except for finishing my dissertation.
Taylor: You’d done the writing?
Allen: Yeah, some of it. I think I had done half the writing, I think. I didn’t decide, until I came to
Evergreen, not to finish.

Taylor: Was it a decision not to finish?
Allen: Yeah, it was a decision. But I guess I decided that I should just have—there was like a . . . I don’t
even know what you call it . . . a job search office at Columbia. You just had to contact them, and they
would send all of your stuff.

Taylor: A placement office.
Allen: Yeah, a placement office. They would send all your stuff to whatever place you wanted.
Somehow, I heard about this job at Virginia Wesleyan. God, we didn’t have computers then. What did
we do? I don’t know where I would have seen this job announcement, but maybe I called the placement

office at Columbia and asked them.

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But anyway, they sent my credentials to this place in Virginia. The place in Virginia was run by a
person who’s still a really good friend of mine, who had just been hired as dean, to do all these
innovative things at this brand-new little college in Virginia.
Taylor: And you were making all these arrangements from Spain?
Allen: Yeah. So I have a phone call with him in my apartment. [laughter] Well, no. Out in the hallway.

Because I lived in a hostel, and it was a bedroom, and then a bathroom down the hall, and a dining room
where we all ate meals together. I think there were two phones in the whole place. One was in the
back hallway, and one was in the living room. They were in like wood cabinets.
I was inside this wood cabinet in the living room of this place in Madrid when I get this call from

Garry Hays, who is the dean who is hiring all these people at Virginia Wesleyan College. We just liked
each other right away, and he just gave me the job. But I was the only person with anywhere near a
resume like mine. Garry had just hired the other person in the Spanish department when he was about
to call me up. The other person in the Spanish department, and Garry, had looked at my resume and

said, “Oh, yeah. She looks really hot.”
We found out, from him looking at my resume, that we had the same birthday. The exact same
birthday. The same year, too. So we felt like we were astral twins or something. He said, “Oh, yeah, get
this woman in here.”

Garry called me, and Garry and I really hit it off, and he offered me the job over the phone. I
was going to make $10,000, which seemed like a huge, huge amount. I think at Rutgers, I had been
making, at the highest level of my earnings, I had been earning something like $6,500 or something.
Taylor: This was 1968, ’69 maybe?
Allen: Let’s see. I was at Virginia Wesleyan ’69 to ’71. Two years. Yeah, so I got this great salary. I was
so impressed with the salary. And I got my first car, because I didn’t live that close to campus. I had to
have a car. That was fun. Do you want to hear more about Virginia Wesleyan?
Taylor: Yes, I think we need to hear about Virginia Wesleyan. Is it the time?
Allen: Sure, I guess so.
Taylor: We should talk about your experience at Virginia Wesleyan.
Allen: Well, it was abundantly mixed, let’s put it that way.

Taylor: When you were hired, did they have departments?
Allen: Yes, it was an old-fashioned, I mean, it had a regular organization of a regular college, with
departments. This friend of mine, who’s now my friend, Ed Flynn, was the one with the same birthday

13

as me. We were the only people in the Spanish department. We both were working on our PhDs, and
hadn’t quite finished our dissertations.
He was Irish from upstate New York, and quite the little rabble-rouser. He was a person with
some political organizing ability. But the first year we’re there, what we’re doing is we are organizing
the Spanish department the way we want it to be, and we are teaching Spanish, and we are deciding

what the whole Spanish curriculum is.
Taylor: How big is Virginia Wesleyan?
Allen: Virginia Wesleyan was very small, because it was very new. It had only been in existence for
maybe five years. When they originally started it, it was really teeny. I think they had 10 faculty, or

something like that.
Taylor: Religious?
Allen: Methodist. Private, but religious affiliation. The year that they hired Garry—because they
wanted a way to show they were different from other colleges in the local community so they could get
students, because it wasn’t that clear what the reason for them was, I think—somebody in the
administration got the idea that, well, we could do innovative things. It is the late ‘60s, you know. We
could get some hotshot dean in here, and he could make the place a lot more innovative, and that
would be how we attract students. So, they hired him.
When he was hired, he said, “I don’t know if it’s a problem for you that I’m not a Christian.”
And they said, “Oh, no, it’s no problem that you’re not a Christian. Of course not. What we want from
you is all your educational ideas, and those are really hot. And, no, we don’t care if you’re a Christian or

not.” He said, “Okay, then.” And so he came, and he was dean.
He hired a whole bunch of us. He hired me and Flynn, who had the same birthday, and he hired
maybe 12 or 15 other young faculty about the same age. Some of them were a little bit older than we
were, but around the same age and tendencies. So we really bonded as a group, and we really liked

each other. We would have parties constantly. Every weekend, we would be having a party at
somebody’s house.
Taylor: Were these all humanities people?
Allen: No. Well, it’s mostly a humanities college.
Taylor: But they weren’t all in Spanish.

14

Allen: No, no, no. No, they weren’t at all. Like history, and sociology, and political science and drama—
I remember the drama guy—and English. I think we probably only had two languages, Spanish and
French.
Taylor: And other women?
Allen: Yeah, a lot of women. Well, not 50-50, by any means. But I think at least 25-75, something like

that. So I thought it was great. It was my ideal situation, actually. The only thing was that it was very
quickly over. Because at the end of that school year, it was necessary for the school to become
accredited, and the accreditation team was coming to campus. When the accreditation team came to
campus, they chose to get very, very, very rigorous with the school about the fact that it was a

Methodist college, and where was the Methodism? Where was the chapel? Where were the religious
faculty members?
Taylor: So the accreditation was not by a regional accreditation board, it was by a religious board?
Allen: No, it was by a regional accreditation board. But the college’s statement of purpose was about

Methodism. So the accreditation board said, “Okay, all this innovation stuff, this is really cool. But how
does it fit in with your Methodism?”
That was very uncomfortable for the president, whose name was Lambuth Clarke. He, I think,
was a Presbyterian minister. But we, the Young Turks among us, thought that he had made a deal with

the president that the college would only be accredited if they got rid of this un-Christian dean they had.
Taylor: Who made the deal?
Allen: The president of the college and the accreditation team. Of course, they couldn’t make that deal
publicly, but we think they made it behind the scenes with the president. So, the president then
promptly fired the dean who had hired all of us. This is at the end of the first year that we’re all working
together.
Taylor: This was Garry?
Allen: Garry Hays, who went on to make—well, his next job is interesting. So, Garry was fired. He still
had time left on his contract—they had to buy out his contract—which meant that he got an entire free
year, with no teaching. He didn’t have to teach, because he was getting paid.
He went back to Minnesota, where he had been before. He was originally from Kansas, but he
had been living in Minnesota. He went back to Minnesota, and at the end of his free year, when he
didn’t have to teach —he was doing his job search, and he was doing research— he was Chancellor of

15

Higher Education in the whole state of Minnesota, so he apparently was quite a good college
administrator. But we were abandoned. We didn’t have any protection anymore.
But we were ready to carry on. I thought things were fine. I had a whole bunch of friends. The
students really liked me; I really liked them. I got to teach whatever I wanted, because I designed my
own curriculum.

Taylor: And you had enough students.
Allen: Yeah. But Garry said to us—we were Garry’s disciples, basically that summer after he had just
been fired, and we had many parties that summer.
He sat us all down and he said, “Now, many of you are not going to feel comfortable staying,

because I’m going to be gone, and you’re not going to like it here. I would recommend—I know about
this place called The Evergreen State College. It’s in Olympia, Washington. There’s a bunch of planning
faculty up there right now, planning a school. Some of you are going to want to go there.”
I said, “Okay, I believe you, Garry.” And I sent off my credentials the same week he said that to
us, the same summer.
Taylor: The summer of ’69?
Allen: Yeah. No, wait. No, the summer of ’70. So then we start the year. The year is going along, and
right before Christmastime—I’m going to fly home to see my parents in California—it must have been
the Friday, right at the beginning of Christmas vacation—I get a call early in the morning. I’m going into
classes, but I get a call from the president’s secretary, and she asked, would I stop by and see the
president before I go to class?

So all the way to school, driving to school in the car, I’m thinking, hmm, wonder what the
president wants to see me about? I bet he wants to ask me to chair a committee. I get there, and he
tells me he doesn’t want me to work there anymore. He wants me to resign. He wants me to finish out
that school year, but then he wants me not to go for another contract.
Taylor: Completely out of the blue?
Allen: Yeah, completely out of the blue. Nothing. I have done nothing. I have gotten no evil
evaluations. I have done nothing.
Taylor: And you don’t know this man very well.
Allen: No, he didn’t ever associate with us. He says, “We’ve decided that we need a really big-time
Spanish scholar in this department. We don’t really have the money for a big-time Spanish scholar, but

16

if we get rid of both of the people in the Spanish department, then we’ll have twice as much money, and
then we can try to get a really important Spanish scholar in here to run the department. That’s what
we’ve decided to do, and I would advise you to resign, because it’s going to look much better on your
record.”
I stood up and I said to him, “Lambuth, I consider it an honor to be fired by you.” And I turned

around and walked out the door, and slammed the door really hard.
Taylor: It was your first action of defiance.
Allen: Yes, it was! I think it probably was. Then, I went and found out that Flynn, my colleague, had
been fired right before me, so everybody knew. We had told all our friends, and there was already a

party planned that night. I think it was at the Hayes’s house.
Taylor: Garry Hays was still there?
Allen: No, there were two sets of Hayses. There was Garry Hays and there was Larry Hayes. Larry
Hayes and his wife, Barbara, were both on the faculty. Larry was the football coach, and Barbara was
the history teacher, I think.
Anyway, there was already this party, and so we go. And the students know, and the students
start rebelling. The students are really mad that we’ve been fired. They print up T-shirts, and they start
doing all this stuff. They start cutting class, and striking and stuff. This is all very interesting. That’s
what happened in the succeeding days, but that very same night, I’m at the party. [laughing] This is
probably my best story of the whole thing, because it’s so incredible, actually.
I’d been fired that morning, and then I’m at this party. I get a phone call in the middle of the

party, and they say, “Nancy, it’s from some college out west.” It was from one of the secretaries.
Taylor: Claire Hess?
Allen: It was from Claire Hess, yes. She is asking me can I come to my first interview for Evergreen. It’s
the one with Merv in New York. She’s asking me can I go to that interview. I don’t what she’s going to
say to me, but I know she’s from Evergreen. And I’m drunk! I’m like, Nancy, think a minute here. You
must not tell this person that you have just been fired today. [laughing] It would not be wise for you to
tell her that you have just been fired, and that you are at your firing party. Shut up, Nancy Allen! I know
you’re a very open person, but do not say this.
So, I go, and I have a talk with her, and we set up the time for the initial interview in New York,
when I’m on my way flying home for Christmas. And that’s that. So my first contact with Evergreen

17

happened the very same day that I got fired. I think it’s because of AAUP rules. The AAUP would say
that you have to be fired by a certain date if it’s going to be normal process. You have to be fired by a
certain date, so that you have time to find a job. Evergreen would also know this is the time when
people are going to become available, if they’re available.
Taylor: I think the firing probably is true, but I think the Evergreen hiring was much more random.

Because what I remember is that there were something like 9000 applications, and they were just
frantic.
Allen: That’s interesting. Or maybe they just already thought, okay, the Christmas season is a good time
to interview people.

Taylor: That’s what MLA is, so you probably interviewed at the MLA meeting in New York.
Allen: No, I didn’t.
Taylor: Because that would have been a common thing, to interview between Christmas and New
Year’s.
Allen: Right. And I never was part of it. I never did that.
Taylor: But I wonder, if Merv was in New York, maybe MLA was in New York at that time.
Allen: Yeah, and he was interviewing there, too.
Taylor: He was interviewing, but he had nothing to do with MLA. That could have been.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: But what a coincidence.
Allen: I know.
Taylor: And in your mind, you say, oh, that’s okay, about the firing. I got this other opportunity right
here.
Allen: Yeah, I just thought it was like my fairy godmother. It was just like, okay, I had no job. I had only
applied to two places. One was Evergreen, and one was this other college called Richard Stockton State

College in New Jersey.
Taylor: I’ve heard of it.
Allen: It also was an innovative state college that was starting at the same time.
Taylor: Did all of the people at Virginia Wesleyan leave?

Allen: No, they didn’t.
Taylor: Just you two?

18

Allen: Well, I didn’t keep in touch with them that well, which is kind of a failing of mine, except for
Garry. I kept in touch with Garry. I think, I have a hunch, that they started peeling off, in later years.
But the first couple of years, they were all still there.
Taylor: And Garry never applied to Evergreen? I wonder what—
Allen: He did. He did apply to Evergreen, but he applied to Evergreen way later. He applied to

Evergreen when we got Jane Jervis as president.
Taylor: That was like 10 or 15 years later.
Allen: Yeah. But he had done something different in the meantime. He had been chancellor in
Minnesota for a number of years. And then, he had decided, I think—I don’t know why, because I never

talked to him about this, but I think he just wanted more money—he had decided to get involved with
student loans, and to work for the banking industry, pursuing student loans for students. He did that for
a number of years, at least five or six.
He didn’t have much credibility as a presidential candidate at that point, because he had been

working in the student loan industry. I actually wrote him a letter of recommendation, and I said, “Look,
you have to look at this guy, and you have to look back through his record. Because he was a really
hotshot administrator, and he has his heart in innovative studies, and he’s the exact person that you
should hire for this place,” is what I said.
Taylor: But he wanted teach, or wasn’t he in an administrative post?
Allen: The president. He wanted to be president.
Taylor: Oh, he tried for president?
Allen: Yeah, along Jane Jervis.
Taylor: Oh, okay.
Allen: And they didn’t even give him an interview.
Taylor: Yeah. I was on that committee, too. I chaired that committee.
Allen: Yeah, well, Jane—
Taylor: Of course, I don’t remember the name, but . . .
Allen: That was a sad story, because he would have been a great president for Evergreen. But he
waited too long. And, I think, partly, it’s jumping from being a dean at a tiny little school in Tidewater,

Virginia, and then going already, in one leap, going to chancellor of an entire state education system.
Taylor: But that meant they saw something in him, I guess.

19

Allen: Yeah, they did. Sure. But, I mean, him having—now, he’s at this level, way up here, he’s not at
Evergreen’s level anymore. He’s like . . .
Taylor: Yeah.
Allen: And then, he even leaves academia, and becomes a banker. Then, he applies to Evergreen. He
decides now he wants to be a college president. But probably if he had applied to be a historian or

something, he might have gotten a job. But you know how quirky Evergreen openings are.
Taylor: Well, that’s true.
Allen: They don’t come up with any regularity, and they’re not in any definable thing.
Taylor: Yeah. The funny thing about Jane is, when you were there were 12 people on the committee,

and we were divided, and had about 350—a lot of applications. We were divided into reading groups.
Lila Girvin, who was on the Board of Trustees, was reading applications in her little group, and she came
into me and she says, “I found her. I found our president.” That was in the first reading of the first
reading group, and she said, “I found her.” She was so excited.
Allen: And it was true.
Taylor: It was true. But it was just one of those lucky things.

20


Nancy Allen
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 29, 2017, Part TWO
Final

Taylor: Okay.
Allen: Okay, so I got hired, in due course, after having two interviews in New York City with Evergreen
deans; first, Merv Cadwallader, and then Charlie Teske. Apparently, people who got hired had two dean
interviews, and then they had an interview on campus. Then, all the people on campus decided
whether or not to hire them. So I had these three interviews, starting Christmas of 1970. And then,
probably there was maybe another interview in the spring? No, another interview, maybe sometime in
the winter of 1971; and then, a visit to campus in the spring of 1971, I guess. And that’s how I got hired.

When school started in 1971, I was there, and I was teaching in a program called Human
Development, which was designed by Richard Jones, who was a Freudian. He had a doctorate in Clinical
Psychology, and he was quite a Freudian thinker. He, and, I think, Bob Sluss, who was a biologist on the
planning faculty, had designed the program pretty thoroughly. There wasn’t much left to include in it,

like none of my ideas. So, I was a little bit put off from the very beginning, because it was all designed in
place for us to go. And I had already, in my previous job, been designing my own curriculum. So I felt a
little disappointed by that. [Added by Nancy Taylor: There were six faculty in this program: Richard
Jones, Bob Sluss, Chuck Pailthorp, Eric Larson, Nancy Allen and Nancy Taylor.]

But I also heard that other programs on campus were not like that. I think our program might
have been the most pre-organized of any of them. Actually, when I read over some of my paperwork, I
realized that even though it seemed to me to be quite organized—and I didn’t get along with Richard
Jones particularly well—boy, there were a lot of things we just kept completely blank. Like we
apparently started the year with no idea what the students had to do for work—what they had to do for
written work, what they were supposed to hand in. There was no syllabus with any of that. We just sort
of thought we would make that up as we went along, I guess.
Taylor: The idea that I remember is that students should want to work, so they will just do it.
Allen: Right.
Taylor: So they don’t have to have any requirements, and you don’t have to have any suggestions even,
because the students came here because they wanted to learn. So, of course, they will do it.
1

Allen: They’ll just do it. Well now that I think about that, as a principle, I’m surprised that Richard Jones
held it. He also, in the early years, advocated this stuff called co-counseling, where he was saying that
the college wasn’t going to need a counseling center, because we were all going to learn to give each
other therapy. He had a workshop that was up at Alderbrook, on Hood Canal, and I sat with another
faculty member, whose name shall not be mentioned, and listened to his entire romantic history, while

knowing his wife, under the full assumption that I would keep my mouth shut forever about it, because I
was a co-counselor, and I was sworn to secrecy because I was operating in a co-counseling situation
now. And that surprises the hell out of me, too, that people would think that ordinary people could give
therapy to each other with no training.

Taylor: And we probably could do it with students.
Allen: Yeah. He also thought that we could counsel our own students in this fashion. I don’t remember
that he thought that they could counsel us in the same fashion. [laughing] But anyway, there were
quite unusual ideas operating in that first year, which were a little far out for me, even me. But the

program definitely was not far enough out in many ways, because there was almost nothing by women
on the reading list. I remember being really frustrated by that.
The discussion that Richard and I got into was, we were all talking about authority all the time,
because we wanted the teaching to be done out of authority, and not out of power. We didn’t want to
be teaching just because we were the ones who wrote the evaluations, and actually granted credit. And
we didn’t want to ever use credit as a sort of way to force students to do their work. We were very
purist about that.
So, I said, “What is authority?” I had a hunch that Richard and Bob Sluss did not think I had any
authority.
Taylor: Or me.
Allen: At all. Yeah, or Nancy. [We were considered just one person.] We didn’t have any authority. So I

thought, well, god, whatever this thing is, I’ve got to get it. I’ve got to know how to get it. So I asked
him for his account of authority, and what he said was, “It comes from a father figure. In the family, the
father has the authority, and that’s how kids learn about authority, from their fathers.”
I said, “Well, I guess I can’t ever have any authority then, because I can’t be a father. It’s just not
in the cards for me, so I guess I’m doomed.” He just would not say anything about how he thought
women could have authority. So, I certainly wasn’t going to get any help from him. And I know he
didn’t ever think that I had any, actually.

2

I decided that I had to figure out for myself what the answer to this question is: How do women
have authority? Over maybe 10 years or something, I developed a theory about it, and I kept working
on it every time I had a new group of students. I tested it out with co-ed classes, and with all-women
classes, and basically, I decided that women’s authority was always going to be a combination of a father
and a mother; and that women had to learn to go back and forth between the father and the mother, as

needed. And sometimes that was really difficult, because some students would need your father side,
and other students would need your mother side, and you would not know what to do. It was kind of a
complicated theory, but I developed that for a long time, and it was all simply because of Richard Jones
and I having this debate about authority, which he really wouldn’t participate in too much.

And Nancy, you said, on the thing you sent me by e-mail, that you wanted to talk about the
retreat in Human Development?
Taylor: Do you remember that?
Allen: Yes, I remember the retreat. Well, the other issue that happened in Human Development, the

one I remember the most, has to do with a student, Regon Unsoeld, Willi Unsoeld’s son, who was in my
very first seminar at Evergreen. But this issue I had with Regon started on the retreat. I cannot imagine
this retreat. I would never, ever do this retreat. And I knew, immediately afterwards, that I would never
do a retreat like this.
The retreat was in Camp Wooten, in Eastern Washington. I can’t even remember what was
there. I just remember there were some barracks-like living quarters, and some grounds, and picnic
tables and stuff around there. We stayed there for two solid weeks, with the entire group of faculty and
the entire group of students. Is that true?
Taylor: That’s true. And the reason we did it was that there were no buildings on campus. Do you
remember? There were no buildings on campus, and so we went there.
Allen: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: It’s way over by Walla Walla.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: And Bob Sluss hired a cook that was [unintelligible 00:10:26].
Allen: I didn’t know that part.

Taylor: You’re right, I think we were there two weeks.
Allen: Two weeks.
Taylor: It was a sixth-grade environmental camp.

3

Allen: Hm.
Taylor: So, when we got there, Ranger Rick said, “Boys over here and girls over there.” It was really
cold, so everybody went and got their mattress, and brought it to the main cafeteria, big hall. So 120
students were there for two weeks, eating horrible, greasy food, sleeping on mattresses.
Allen: Yeah.

Taylor: I remember we were reading Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. And why I remember that, I don’t
know.
Allen: I do remember the reading.
Taylor: Tell the story about Regon. There must have been something about Regon.

Allen: Well, there were no activities planned. I mean, basically, as far as I can remember, all that
happened was we had our daily classes. We had our seminars, when we were supposed to have them,
during the week. I think, at this point, each faculty had two seminar groups. We probably had four
seminars during a given week, and then maybe we had—no, we didn’t have lectures, so maybe we had

something besides just these four seminars, but I can’t remember what it was.
So there was a lot of free time, let’s just put it this way. And Regon was Willi Unsoeld’s son,
after all, and he had been involved in lots of outdoor education exercises. So he knew some kind of
encounter-group tactics that you could use in the outdoors. So he organized this thing once, this
exercise for us to do during some of our free time. I remember that seminars were supposed to
compete, and there was a barrier—there were two posts on the school ground, as it were, and then
there was some kind of a wooden barrier, which you could raise and lower, and it would screw into the
two posts. So you could put it as high as you wanted.
So Regon got, what seemed to me, to be pretty high. And seminars had to organize themselves
to get everybody in their group across the top of the barrier. And I think there was maybe some rule,
like you couldn’t put your feet on the barrier, or you couldn’t jump off from the barrier, or something.
Basically, what happened was my seminar organized itself to get over the barrier. What they did was
some fairly big guys made like stair steps of their backs—they bent over and their backs were stair
steps—so other people could climb on their backs, and then boost themselves over the barrier, and sort
of fall down on the other side.
So, the most active, agile people went to the fore, and they climbed up the staircase of the
people’s backs, and they jumped over. And pretty soon, almost everybody’s over. There’s just me and a
couple of other people. Then, there was just me. Okay, now, I am weak. I am not very strong.

4

[chuckles] No, there wasn’t just me. There were maybe three other people. So, I am weak, and I’m not
doing very well, and I cannot imagine how I’m going to even climb on the backs of these people to get
myself over. I guess the people left on my side must have been the ones who were using their backs as
stair steps.
Anyway, what happened was everybody saw the problem. I was the weakest person there.

How was I going to get over? And the remaining people picked me up and threw me over, and I landed
rather hard on the other side. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but I was really pissed. I was really outstandingly
pissed, and ashamed of myself, and ashamed of everybody, and just hostile as hell. So then, of course,
the other people got themselves over really fast, and the next thing you do in this exercise is you have to

discuss it all, and you have to have to analyze it. We have to re-tell each other the story of how it went,
and how it happened. And, did you like this process, or did you not like this process?
So I was just sort of shrinking into myself. And the students were discussing it, and they were
telling their stories, and they were talking about how the organization went, and nobody’s mentioning
me, or anything like that. So everybody gets pretty much talked out, and I’m just sitting there, trying to
fade into the background. Finally, Regon turned to me and said, “Nancy, what did you think?”
[laughing] And I just couldn’t even say any words. I just burst out crying. I said, “Ah-h-h!” I just
screamed, and started crying. I could not articulate anything about how I felt about this process. So
then, there has been a demonstration in front of my entire seminar that I am over-emotional, physically
weak. I can’t get it together.
So then, we had these weird—Nancy says we were all sleeping together in the dining room on

some kind of mattresses and sleeping bags. But one night, my seminar—it must not have been my
entire seminar, but some people in my seminar, who, I think, were all guys, designated themselves to
help me out. [chuckles] They came and picked me up, in my sleeping bag, and took me outside to sleep
with a group of them, who were all out there. I guess maybe they were sleeping under some kind of

shelter outside, but they were all huddled up in a group of sleeping bags on a tarp or something, and
they were all sleeping together.
And they brought me, and put me in the middle of this, and said, “We just wanted you to be
with us, and we wanted you to know that we support you, and we think you’re great. So we’re going to

take you out and have you with us, as a group.” And I just thought that was so awful. I mean, the
whole thing was such a demonstration of having no power. Just having my body thrown around, picked
up, moved, at the will of the students. I just thought it was so horrible.

5

Taylor: And this was after Richard said you had no authority.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Wonderful starting point.
Allen: Actually, it might have been before that. Did we have the discussion about mother figures and
father figures in the first week?
Taylor: No, I’m sure we did not.
Allen: I think this was before we actually talked about it openly, but I’m sure that made me feel like I
don’t have any authority. So, I had to start leading a seminar in that situation, where I had been shown
to be completely at the physical will of my students. And that was really tough. Really tough.

And then, Regon turned out to have very serious problems, which, I don’t know, this kind of
sounds like standard depression to me. He was in my seminar group, obviously, and he would come to
seminar during the first quarter of that year, and sit at the table with his head on the table, and
completely unresponsive. He wouldn’t talk to anybody, he wouldn’t say anything, he wouldn’t do
anything. He would just bring his body there, and sit down and put his head on the table. And that was
very hard to do anything about. I had to try and grab him outside of class, and try to talk to him about it.
I don’t think he wanted to be there. He didn’t seem to want to do any assignments, even
though the assignments that there were, were fairly minimal. I mean, all I wanted was to get some
interest out of him, and to get him working on something. He just wasn’t willing to do it. I cannot
remember how it worked out. I just remember it being stuck in this situation where I couldn’t get him
to do anything.

Actually, I’ve seen him around town. Until at least recently, he still lived in Olympia. I think he
became a high school teacher, and I’ve heard he’s a very good one, actually. But we have kind of joked
about what a difficult student he was. I really don’t think I ever experienced as difficult a student as he
was in that seminar. And that was my introduction to the whole process.

Taylor: Do you remember, in that program, we had three seminars a week. One was a book seminar,
which was the least important one, according to Richard Jones. The next one was to be a self-study.
Allen: Yeah, I remember there were self-study seminars.
Taylor: You’d look at the mirror, and tried to find out who you were. And the third was an internship
seminar.
Allen: That’s the one that you did.

6

Taylor: That’s the one that I was supposed to do; at least I was supposed to do the organizing of it. I
remember—maybe you remember this—it was in our program, but it was across the college—in March,
there was a rebellion across the whole campus, because nobody was doing any work.
Allen: I do!
Taylor: The faculty said, “Well, you know, you can’t require work because the students are supposed to

want to do the work, and so if you require it, you have un-done the whole motivation that they brought.
They wanted to come because they wanted to learn, and that was the only reason they were admitted,
and so you couldn’t compromise that and require them to do something.”
So, there was going to be this big symposium for the whole campus. It was in March, and we

were going to close the college for three days, and have this—
Allen: Is that when Richard gave his lecture?
Taylor: I don’t think so, because it snowed, so the college was closed because it snowed for three days.
So, when we came back, everything started up again, and we never had the symposium. But I do

remember—I always think of it as sort of like a Shakespeare timeout. We had these three days where it
snowed, and when we came back, people started requiring things.
Allen: That’s very good!
Taylor: When we started up again, we had requirements. They had to write a certain amount, and
there was no more thought that, well, you only did it because you wanted to do it. You did it because it
was required. I think the college changed its requirements after that March of 1972.
Allen: I think that was a very good thing to do.
Taylor: Maybe I’m making up a story.
Allen: No, I think that’s quite possible. But what I remember is that there was still a lot of the same
ethos around. For example, for a number of years, there were certain number of quarter hours of credit
in a program, and when students finished a program, they got academic credit. But for the longest time,

there was this rule that you couldn’t quantify the academic credit they got. There were 16 quarterhours in every quarter, and if a student was part of the program, and acting like part of the program,
then that student had to get full credit. And if a student wasn’t part of the program, even though the
student might be there, if the student wasn’t doing stuff, and acting like part of the program, then the

student got no credit. It was either all or nothing.
Taylor: Yes, that happened for several years.
Allen: I thought so.

7

Taylor: And it wasn’t even 16 credits. They got four credits, I think. We didn’t even have the numbers
set up, because it was awhile before we got that thing called course equivalencies. I don’t know when it
happened, but you’re right, it was several years.
Allen: I think a lot of students got by with doing almost no work, and still got full credit, because faculty
couldn’t stand to give them no credit. Or, there was some kind of an idea about what no credit was that

was just so extreme. It’s like you had to be a hermit.
Taylor: I remember being advised in that situation, and I couldn’t do it either, but they said, “Well, you
write an evaluation, and in the evaluation, it’s the equivalent of a D. You did the evaluation based on
the quality of the work, but they got the full credit. It’s like passing a course with a D. But, since the
evaluation—
Allen: But that’s not a good thing to do.
Taylor: Some people, I remember, used to say, “Would you rather get no credit, or do you want a bad

evaluation?”
Allen: Right, I remember that, too.
Taylor: It wasn’t a very good system. But it has its problems now, or after that, because people sort of
nickel-and-dime credits, so you might get 14, or you get 13.

Allen: Right.
Taylor: And that wasn’t a good solution either.
Allen: No, I know.
Taylor: So then, it became a big thing. “Well, I got full credit.” So you had no choice. You were just
assigned to Human Development, right?
Allen: Yeah, I had no choice in where I was the first year.
Taylor: Back up a bit. When you arrived on campus, before we ever started teaching, what did you
know about the college, and what were your expectations? And then, how did they get either . . .
Allen: I don’t think I had thought through much of anything, or had anything very clear. But I had come
from a place that was being “innovative,” and my authority figure at that place had said that I should
come to Evergreen. So, I certainly expected Evergreen to be innovative.
I liked the people who I knew. I knew the group of faculty who interviewed me—which included
Al Wiedemann, and Rudy and Gail Martin, and Bill Aldridge, I remember. And, of course, there weren’t
any women on the faculty at that point. Except you were around there, but you were not faculty yet.

8

Taylor: No, I was not.
Allen: I liked everybody, and I knew somehow—and this actually has proved to be true—I knew it was
the place for me. I knew I would be very involved in making it work. I never, ever, ever, in any single
moment, thought about going to teach somewhere else, or thought about, well, I hate Evergreen and I
want to leave. I never, ever, ever entertained such a thought. I had maybe two or three super-bad
experiences with faculty members I was teaching with, and they didn’t make me have a less positive
view of the college. I always just thought, this is the place that my fairy godmother has put me in. This
is the place I need to be. And it turned out to be, in the long run, a super-super-good place, for me.
Team teaching, and written evaluations, no grades, and no departments, all of those things

were wonderful innovations, in my view. I think it made it so that—like I have a hard time talking to
people, or I did. I am what you would call an introvert. And now, I’ve read a whole book about being an
introvert, which is very interesting, and makes me feel extremely confirmed in a lot of reactions I have.
But I have not had an easy time in my life talking to people, and Evergreen was perfect for that. I had

small group, upon small group, upon small group proliferating small groups of people to talk to, and
interesting issues to talk to them about. I don’t think I could have ever been in a better place. When I
read over all my self-evaluations, I realized that I was always like believing. I was like a true believer
about Evergreen, like I really had these principles, and I really—

Oh, actually, I think I just said I never thought about leaving the college, but I did think about
leaving the college once. It was in a faculty meeting when people had decided that we needed to get rid
of written evaluations, and we needed to go to a grading system. I was sitting there in my seat, and I
was thinking, nope. Not going to do it. If this happens, they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater,
and I’m not staying here. But that’s the only time.
Taylor: Did you come with a mission yourself?
Allen: No.
Taylor: Or did you come with an open mind, and found out what the college was doing, and bought into
it?
Allen: Yeah. [sighs] Yeah, I bought into it, but I also helped create it. I mean, if I had wanted to do
something different, I would have advocated doing something different. I certainly was not a flaming
radical, but I made it very clear that I didn’t like Human Development. And I made it very clear that they
weren’t accepting my points of view, I wanted to do more about women, blah blah blah. So, the second

9

year, I was coordinating a gender roles program. That was Merv Cadwallader’s doing. So, to some
degree, I formed the college that I wanted to be in as well.
Taylor: Do you want to talk about that second year? Are we ready to do that?
Allen: I guess.
Taylor: Maybe back up a bit, because I think, while you came and bought into what was there, you were
forming it. So, during the first couple of years, and continuing, there have been constant tensions, and
maybe you could talk about what you fought for, and what the tensions were.
Allen: I’m not even sure—I mean, I think you always had a bigger picture vision. One thing I said, in a
very early self-evaluation about myself, is that I’m a kind of miniaturist. I see little things. I analyze one

paragraph of a book. I take a little thing, and I show it to people, and I make it mean a whole lot for
them. That’s one of my main teaching techniques. So, I don’t think I was always aware of the bigpicture issues about Evergreen. I knew that a lot of Olympia people thought Evergreen was a school for
basket weaving, or just a hippy-dippy school. I knew that there were threats to shut down the college in

the Legislature.
But the issues I experienced had a whole bunch to do with gender, and they were about my
sense that I had no authority, because I wasn’t a father, and trying to create some authority for myself.
And doing women’s studies as a sort of way to go about all that, and to get the students used to that set
of ideas. And there’s something about the M ‘n M Manifesto. I remember being at the meetings for the
M ‘n M Manifesto, which was when Rudy Martin and Dave Marr put out this document, which
everybody had to get together and discuss. But I don’t remember, except that one of things was about

work. Like people not doing enough work, and how the work was supposed to happen, and how it was
supposed to be organized, and how it was supposed to be credited. I think that was part of the M ‘n M
Manifesto.
I wish I remembered more about the issues of that. I think it’s in the college Archives. I think I

should probably go study up on it.
Taylor: I don’t remember either. But I do remember the tensions—and you bring up one—about,
should we keep evaluations or grades? That was from day one. The easiest thing to do would be to
stop evaluations and do grades. That would be the easiest thing to do. And to constantly have to fight
that battle. Team teaching. We have had to fight that battle for years, and it’s under constant pressure.
How to do advanced work without creating departments?

10

So, in my mind, from the very beginning, there were what would be called traditional college
practices; that’s sort of the default position. And what we were doing was always balanced by, well,
should we go back to the default position? So you always had to fight for these tensions, these things.
And I think they are values that you hold dearly.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: And I do. Things like coordinated studies.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Things like teams that are at least three people. I can remember Richard Jones standing up and
saying, “It’s got to be four. It’s got to be four.” And it’s fewer and fewer, and less and less full-time now.

Allen: Right.
Taylor: One of the issues I think we’ll get to with you is the foreign language issue, because that’s been
an issue forever.
Allen: Yes, that’s true.

Taylor: We’re going to get to that. We won’t get to that right away, but that was a direction you went.
Allen: Yeah, that’s about the middle of the ‘80s.
Taylor: Okay.
Allen: I had remembered that I had spent 10 years at Evergreen without ever teaching Spanish, which is
not true. But I did spend something like seven years at Evergreen without ever teaching Spanish.
Taylor: That is so strange. Is it because you didn’t have a chance?
Allen: No, it’s very clear to me what the reason was. The planning faculty was stone dumb about
foreign languages. They wanted no such thing as a foreign language. Susan Fiksdal found out something
talking to Charlie Teske. She found out an astonishing detail about Charlie Teske’s attitude toward
foreign languages.
Anyway, I was the only person on the faculty trained in a foreign language department. I was

trained in the Spanish department at Columbia University, and there was not a single other such person.
So I just said to myself—and also, I had taught nothing but beginning Spanish for three years at Rutgers,
and I absolutely hated it.
So I said, “Okay. All right. I have it. This is my way out of Spanish. I will just be a literature

person. I will teach literature in coordinated studies programs, and that’s what I will do.” And I was very
happy doing that.

11

But I think it had to do with time. Because I think that the first time I taught a four-quarter-hour
Spanish class at Evergreen, it was because I was a Danforth Visitor. I was spending three-quarters of my
time visiting people, visiting faculty, and consulting with them about their teaching. I was spending a
week at a time with different faculty in their classes. And then, I had a little bit of time left over, so I
taught this four-quarter-hour Spanish class. That was about seven years into the life of the college, and I
loved teaching this little Spanish class at Evergreen, because I just felt so much freer about what I could
do, and we didn’t have to stick to the book all the time, and I could give funny tests, and we could joke
around. I thought it was really great.
That’s what gradually got me started into developing a language program. But really, Susan

Fiksdal was the person who did more in it than I did. We finally got repeating programs, in both
Spanish and French. First, they happened every three years, and then they would happen every two
years, and the students would get a really intense language experience. But that didn’t happen at the
beginning at all, because nobody wanted it. Nobody had any understanding of different kinds of people;

languages they might speak; how language might shape your reality. None of the above did anybody
ever think about.
Taylor: The only way it got really going strong was when it was combined with study abroad.
Allen: Right.

Taylor: You would do language because it was scheduled as a full-time program, and you were doing
the language and the culture, and you were going to end up going to Spain or France or South America.
Allen: Yes.
Taylor: And then, the other thing that happened, which—Susan was hired quite early . . .
Allen: I know, by Andrew Hanfman.
Taylor: . . . by the second year. But Andrew Hanfman was hired the second year, I think. And we used
to laugh. We would say he was the foreign language department, because he spoke like 11 languages.
Allen: I know.
Taylor: He had experience, and knew the language, but he wasn’t . . . he hadn’t had the training for
teaching. So, his point of view about how to do it was you just do it. I think there was no notion that
there was any particular training or skill to teach language.
Allen: Yeah, but . . . well, but the training there was, would be if you were in an education department,
and nobody—okay, if you were in a Spanish department, for example—not Columbia, Columbia didn’t
do this—but lots of places would use their graduate students as TAs in the beginning Spanish classes.
So, you would get teaching experience, but nobody would teach you how. Unless you just happened to
12

have another faculty member in the next class over, and they decided to give you some hints or
something, you would just be on your own in class with the beginning students.
Taylor: But there was a language lab, probably. Evergreen had none of that. They had no support.
Allen: No.
Taylor: And no notion—
Allen: But at the beginning, it wasn’t even the days of language lab.
Taylor: Maybe not. But the other thing is that if a student came from high school wanting to continue
their French, or their German, or their Spanish, they had no way of doing it, because they had to do
whatever they did full-time. And if you wanted to stop and just do Spanish full-time, you could do that.

But then, after going to Spain, you couldn’t do anything more.
Allen: You couldn’t keep it going.
Taylor: That tension happened with math, it happened with foreign language, it happened with music.
That’s never gone away, and it’s never been resolved, because it’s really not compatible with the fulltime studies team teaching kind of philosophy. And that’s been forever, and it’s going to resolve. But
that doesn’t mean that it’s good. It just is the problem. It’s still the problem, I think.
But, back to your second year, with Female—Male Roles in Society.
Allen: Yeah, it was called Female—Male Roles in Society. [laughing] Which is the most clunky title I can
imagine. I hate that title.
Taylor: That was 1973.
Allen: No, that was—yeah, ’72-’73. That was a five-person team. [laughing] I can’t believe that.
Taylor: You were the coordinator.
Allen: I was the coordinator.
Taylor: Who was on that team?
Allen: On that team, oh my god, what an amazing team. The team consisted of Larry Eickstaedt,
probably—definitely—the most rational person on the team. Then, there was Betty Kutter, who was
recently hired. It was her first teaching experience at Evergreen. And, of course, she was a very hard
scientist, and had never imagined herself teaching anything related to gender roles. Plus, being married
to a guy named Sig Kutter, who also had a faculty position. Then, there was Ron Woodbury, who was

one of my better friends ever at Evergreen. Okay, and me. Betty, Ron, Larry, and Naomi Greenhut. Her
name, when she was hired, was Bonnie Alvarez, but her name, when she was a little Jewish girl, growing
up on the East Coast, was Bonnie Greenhut. And then, she had married a Latino guy, and her name was

13

Bonnie Alvarez when we hired her. During the course of at least a couple of years at Evergreen, I think,
she dropped her husband and went back to Greenhut, and then changed her first name back to her
original first name, which was Naomi. So, she was Naomi Greenhut.
We were in a feminist class, and I was always presenting myself as a feminist, and she told me
that feminism was an outdated concept, and I really needed to be a Marxist, because she was a Marxist
now, and she was a thoroughly convinced Marxist. So, she was always after me to start believing in
Marxism, and she had an extremely religious way of promoting it.
It was a very, very, very difficult team to get organized to do anything. [laughing] And I don’t
think that I had any real authority, probably mostly with Betty. I had a lot of authority with Ron, and

Larry was fine. I guess I didn’t have authority with Naomi either, probably. So, the two other women
[laughing]—the two men are supporting me, and the two women are not. Undermining me in various
different ways. It was kind of crazy.
Taylor: And you didn’t choose the team. The team was just put together? Or, did you and Ron talk

about it?
Allen: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know exactly how the team came together. I certainly didn’t choose all
these people. I may have chosen Ron, and I may have chosen Larry. But I don’t think that Ron was in
the first year of the college.
Taylor: I think that was Ron’s first year as well.
Allen: Yeah. Okay, so there’s Bonnie and Betty and Ron. So there’s only Larry and I who are veterans of
one year, and then there’s three brand-new people. Crazy.

Taylor: When I thought back on it, I didn’t realize you did it the second year. But it was the second year,
huh?
Allen: Yeah, because Human Development was a two-year program. It was designed to run for two
years, and I did not want to be in it.

Taylor: Neither did I, so we both left.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: And Leo Daugherty joined it.
Allen: Yeah. And Winnie Ingram. When did Winnie come?

Taylor: I don’t think Eric Larson stayed in it. I think Chuck Pailthorp did. So, it was Winnie and Leo and
Bob and Richard and Chuck.
Allen: Oh, geez.

14

Taylor: They probably had a better second year than a first year.
Allen: Yeah, they probably liked it better, that’s for sure.
Taylor: So that was just the second year?
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: How was the whole content and the whole program received by the college, or by the students?

Allen: I can’t remember.
Taylor: Because feminism isn’t very out front at this point, I don’t think, in 1972.
Allen: Well . . .
Taylor: Was there a demand?

Allen: Well, wait a minute. Yeah, feminism was around. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have existed. Because
when the planning faculty turned out to be exclusively male, the college got all kinds of criticism from
feminists in Seattle. At least this is what I heard. So, the guys—I don’t know if it was any guys outside
the deanship, or what it was—but anyway, the guys decided that therefore they needed to go on a
woman hunt. So, they specifically went looking for women to hire, and they found eight. And how big
was the rest of the faculty at that point?
Taylor: Fifty altogether. The women were less than 10 percent—no, less than 20 percent.
Allen: Yeah. So, yes, there was some feminism going around. And I had done a women’s studies class
at Virginia Wesleyan, so I already knew some books to read, and things like that. There were some kind
of seminal texts coming out in the first years of what we have come to call ‘70s feminism. So, yeah, I felt
like there was some basis for it.
Ron, in particular—Ron had two daughters, and Ron is the first guy I ever knew who was such an
avid male feminist, and would go around mouthing feminism to everyone he met. So, he was very, very
supportive, and pretty much free of the most blatant, worst kinds of sexism that other people were
practicing all the time. And so was Larry, actually.
Taylor: How about the students?
Allen: I don’t remember the students having any trouble with it at all. But I should go back and look at
my self-evaluation for that year, because I don’t remember myself being very explicit. I think that I read
that self-evaluation, and I don’t remember being very explicit about it. I think I wasn’t very explicit about

it because of the faculty problems, which I didn’t want to get into addressing. But I think the students
were fine. I think there were way more women than men. I don’t remember it being a problem for the
students.

15

Taylor: Do you remember how the curriculum was developed? Did you do it as a team?
Allen: Yeah, we did do it as a team.
Taylor: And everybody stayed for the full year, right?
Allen: Yeah, I think they did. Yeah, I think so. Unless . . . you know, when I read my self-evaluations, I
noticed that I had more times when I was not teaching in coordinated studies than I remembered. I
think it’s the third year I taught a group contract called Women and Literature, I think it was called. That
was an all-women group of students, and it was just women’s literature.
And then, there was that year that I did the Danforth, and I got a sabbatical. And there was a
bunch of time that I was not actually teaching coordinated studies, even though that’s what I remember

I was doing the whole time.
Taylor: Because those are the memorable ones. Although this Women and Literature program that you
taught by yourself . . .
Allen: That was really thrilling for me. I loved that. The other thing I really loved was invented by LLyn

De Danaan, and that was called the Ajax Compact the first time—
Taylor: I didn’t know that you did that. I did that, too.
Allen: Yeah, I did that. I did it a couple of times. I did it once with Susan Smith, Susan Perry. And I did it
once with somebody else, too. I can’t remember.
Taylor: I did it with Helena Knapp, just once. That was like 1975. I think that was the second year,
because when it was started, it was started by LLyn and somebody named Mary Moorehead. It was an
older woman—probably not really that older—and they called it Ajax Compact, and nobody understood
why, because it had nothing to do with the Greek Ajax, it had to do with the cleanser.
Allen: Oh, I understood it perfectly.
Taylor: But then, it changed names.
Allen: Yeah, nobody could understand it, so we started calling it Reintroduction to Education.
Taylor: For women, Helena and I had 50 students, I remember.
Allen: Yeah, it was very, very popular. And I still know one student from there, from the one with Susan
Smith. She is a state worker, and she is older than I am. She is in her eighties. And she loved it. She can
still tell me all about it, and how important it was.
Taylor: That’s true. I found the article in the newspaper about it. That was a very, very successful—
because we got women who hadn’t written anything but a Christmas card for 20 years or something,

16

and didn’t have confidence that they could do anything. But, they were so motivated, and so willing to
do whatever.
Allen: Yeah, right.
Taylor: And it was education in the best sense. It wasn’t training, it was education. They just wanted to
read and think and talk. We did that for a number of years, and then the thought was, well, we just sort

of used up the community. But there’s probably those same people still out there.
Allen: I’m not sure. I mean . . . [sighs] . . . hm. I think maybe what was interesting about those women
is that they had made—they really expected marriage to work out for them, and to be it. Marriage and
raising kids, that was going to be their life. Then, it turned out not to be, and they needed something

different to do. And I think there are probably many fewer women who have that initial sense that,
okay, this is the way my life is going to be, and I don’t know how that affects the population for Reintro.
Taylor: That’s probably true. Talk about—in terms of the early couple, three years—teachers that made
the biggest—that were your mentors or friends who were people that you learned from, and what you
learned from them.
Allen: Hm. Well, I thought it was really interesting looking over my self-evaluations, because this place,
where team teaching is supposed to do so much for you, and you’re supposed to be a co-learner and all
of that stuff, I’d have to say—first of all, I found myself thinking, okay, who were the most important
people I taught with, in terms of my development. [chuckles] I think the two most important people I
taught with were Thad Curtz and Ron Woodbury. So then, I thought, wow, isn’t that interesting? I
didn’t have any women. But the women were actually probably Peta Henderson and Stephanie Coontz.

I taught a lot with Peta and Stephanie.
And I was so appalled at myself, how much of a little ideologue I was, when I read my struggles
with feminist theory, and my struggles with combining Marxism and feminism, and all of that stuff,
which all happened within the first—because I also taught a program with a lot of Marxism, right after

the Women in Literature thing. It was called Working in America, and it had Tom Rainey teaching me
Marxism.
Taylor: So, it was Tom and Stephanie and Peta and Ron.
Allen: No, not Stephanie. Not yet. Tom and Naomi were the Marxist voices, and Ron was the feminist

voice.
Taylor: And Peta and Stephanie, eventually.

17

Allen: Yeah. But also, Peta and Stephanie got turned—I mean, I noticed that in maybe the last 15 years
or so of my time at the college, I was almost always not in a program that I had designed myself, unless I
was teaching alone. If I was teaching my Spanish program, I was teaching that either alone, or with Alice
Nelson.
And if not, if I was teaching in a coordinated studies, it was usually those people’s content. I was

filling in as two things: the person who knew the most about teaching writing, and who would handle all
the writing workshops, and the person who would have good literature to think of. And you wanted
literature because it wasn’t the main thing that you were valuing, but it would be necessary to
understand the historical period, or it would be kind of a rest for the students to read a less-demanding

book.
Taylor: The exception was the one that you and Argentina Dailey and I taught.
Allen: Oh, that’s true.
Taylor: Which was all literature, pretty much. We did have to share that forefront of writing with

Argentina.
Allen: Oh, god! I completely erased that from my memory bank. [laughing]
Taylor: It wasn’t a bad program.
Allen: No, it wasn’t.
Taylor: But it was a totally unplanned program, because I don’t think we did any planning until we
started.
Allen: That was my content.
Taylor: There were two things about that program. There was Argentina. We helped her get through
the year. She did some good teaching, actually.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: The other thing is that we were given all the basketball players. And that was so bizarre.
There’s three middle-aged women teaching classics, and we get all these basketball players. [laughter]
Allen: That is very bizarre.
Taylor: I don’t know who pulled that string, except for I think Advising had confidence in you and me, in
terms of our being able to do it. I guess.

Allen: How funny.
Taylor: Why would they—they certainly didn’t choose it.
Allen: What was it called?

18

Taylor: It was called Classics and Context.
Allen: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: And we were reading Antigone.
Allen: No, they wouldn’t have chosen it.
Taylor: And we read all of Don Quixote.

Allen: No, they wouldn’t have chosen that.
Taylor: But we did all right by them.
Allen: Yeah, of course. Everybody should read Don Quixote.
Taylor: Anyway, I think we should probably quit for the day.

19


Nancy Allen
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
April 14, 2017, Part 3
Final

Taylor: We didn’t talk very much about what you expected when you came to Evergreen, and what you
found, in terms of what the college was going to be. One of the things Sam said people should talk
about is what they expected, what they found, and how it changed, in terms of atmosphere, in terms of

philosophy, in terms of people, in terms of students. Any way you want to talk about that.
Allen: Okay. Well, I came to Evergreen under considerable pressure, because I had no job. I only
applied after getting fired from my previous job. I only applied for two jobs. One was Evergreen, and
the other was Richard Stockton State College in New Jersey, which was a brand-new, innovative state

college that was opening the same year as Evergreen.
My thinking was that if I didn’t get either one of those two jobs, I would go start a free school
with a bunch of friends. I was just in the mood to totally drop out of education, if I couldn’t be involved
in changing it in some way.
I really needed a job, and I certainly didn’t expect the sexism that I found. But I don’t think I had
many expectations. I got fired on the same day I learned that Evergreen was even a possibility. Because
I had already applied, I had already sent my stuff off, but I wasn’t at all thinking about it on the day I got
fired. And then, I was talking to Claire Hess, who was the person from Evergreen, that very evening, so I
didn’t have time to build up a lot of expectations. I guess my expectations were mostly formed by the
people I met from the college.
Taylor: But you knew nothing about Evergreen?
Allen: Well, yes, I did. I knew that it was going to have some kind of team teaching, or at least I thought
it was, and I had already been doing team teaching. Let’s see, what else did I know? I may have known
about written evaluations, which we did not have at my prior place, the place I got fired from. So, I
certainly expected team teaching. I think I had heard, in some publications or something, about no

grades.
I did not know that the entire planning faculty was male. I did not know about that controversy.
And I was extremely surprised when I found that to be true, because my prior teaching experience had a

1

much better ratio between men and women. There were a lot of women teachers at Virginia Wesleyan,
which was this funky, conservative little place. So I was extremely surprised by that.
Taylor: How did that play out, when you actually got here? The sexism?
Allen: Well, it played out in that I was teaching with Dick Jones—I was in Dick Jones’s program—and he
was a Freudian psychologist. He, in my mind, had a very traditional view of the world, based on

Freudian psychology, although apparently, he was really far out in that he didn’t think there needed to
be any set curriculum at all. He apparently thought that teaching anything was as good as teaching
anything else.
Apparently, he thought that one of the main things that happened was that when you were in

college, you learned to respect authority, and get along with authority, and know what authority was,
and eventually, have authority. I mean, I think that’s what he may have thought. Also, he told me
numerous times that authority emanated from father figures. I kept wondering, well, okay, if you have
to be a father figure to have this thing, which is so important in being a professor, how can you do that

when you’re a woman?
He was either completely incognizant of what the importance of that was, or didn’t think there
was any difference; thought a mother figure was the same as a father figure, which I can hardly believe.
At any rate, he didn’t take my questioning at all seriously, or help me at all to figure out how I could
have authority. And it was a very big problem. I talked last time about the very beginning of the Human
Development program, the retreat where students had basically used me as the victim of their Outward
Bound experience, and thrown me over a log. And then, picked me up in the middle of the night, carried
me off bodily to sleep with them. And so, I was already being pushed around by students, so I really
needed to have authority, and I really needed to understand how to have it.
The men on the team were absolutely no help at all. You were also on the team. Both of us
were on the team of Human Development, and neither one of us talked, hardly at all. We just sat there
and let the guys talk. I don’t know, that was very difficult.
Taylor: Was your relationship, during that first year, pretty confined to the team, or did you have
relationships with people on other teams, and in the college as a whole? Or, did you feel like you were
shoved into this team, and this team was pretty much your whole life?

Allen: Yeah, I did. I felt like I was shoved into this team, which I didn’t approve of. I didn’t like what
they were doing, I didn’t like the books, and I would have never wanted to be there. When I was hired, I
thought—this is one of my expectations—I thought that the planning faculty knew that I already had

2

experience doing team teaching; that I was interested in women’s studies, and had already taught some.
I thought I was being hired because I already had some experience they needed, so I thought I would be
part of a planning process, and I would help plan this new program we were teaching. But when I
arrived, I found that, of all the programs, that program was one that was already set in stone.
Taylor: That’s true.

Allen: So I was really insulted that I didn’t get to have any input, and I didn’t like what was happening,
and I wasn’t getting any support. But I never thought about leaving, or anything like that.
Anyway, the question was, who did I know? The person I knew the best was Chuck Pailthorp,
who was another person on the team. He lived right down the road from me, and I knew him and his

wife, Mickie, and their kids. They were probably the friends that I had.
And then, my boyfriend, in the winter, after fall quarter was over—I guess around New Year’s,
or maybe even in February, because I don’t remember exactly when the semester system broke—but
my boyfriend came to town, and was living with me. That made things a lot better. I remember we had
a party called “Help Us Make Friends” party, or something like that. We invited a bunch of people we
thought we wanted to be friends with. I didn’t really feel socially isolated, but then, I’ve never been a
person with a huge social circle.
Taylor: Do you remember having conversations with either the other women, or other people, about
the situation in terms of sexism, in terms of educational philosophy, in terms of how students should be
treated, in terms of how the college was going?
Allen: No, I’m surprised. I’m actually surprised at how completely unconscious I was about a lot of this

stuff. I can’t remember when . . . there was one year . . . the year that I remember something really
feminist coming from a bunch of faculty women was when LLyn De Danaan was dean. I don’t know
what year that happened. But it happened in my house, so I kind of remember that really well.
I actually also felt quite put down by some of the women—well, specifically, scientists—and

there were some women scientists on the faculty early on. They seemed to really think that science was
just the best of all possible fields, and they really didn’t have any . . . well, some of them may have, but
they certainly weren’t showing it . . . much concept of interdisciplinary studies involving science.
I felt like I was all into learning about the students, and helping the students at their level, and
figuring out what the students were up to, and adapting the curriculum to the students, and the science
women were all about “We are doing astrophysics.” And if they had any issues as women, it was all
about how we have to prove we can do astrophysics just as well as the guys can.

3

So, I didn’t only feel like I was getting a rough shake from the men. I also felt like that I didn’t
have common cause with all of the women.
Taylor: Do you remember common cause with the students? Or, do you remember what was going on
in the ‘70s about—well, I think of it in terms of consciousness-raising groups, and meeting with women,
and meeting with students.

Allen: Yeah, I did know. I was the person who did it.
Taylor: That’s what I wondered. And how receptive were people to it, and how much resistance was at
Evergreen, and how much of a leader was Evergreen in doing that outreach?
Allen: Evergreen was absolutely no leader in any of it. I don’t see Evergreen as having lifted a finger in

that direction.
Taylor: Did that ever change?
Allen: No, I don’t think really it changed. But I think what happened was—I don’t know how, it may
have been in a small number of individual actions over a long period of time—but ultimately, I felt like
women took over the school. [laughter]
Taylor: How did that happen? I think that’s true.
Allen: But it certainly didn’t happen as a group effort, I don’t think. I don’t know. Maybe you know
more about it than I do. But I remember the time that I thought women had taken over the school was
probably when Sally Cloninger was . . . I think she was Convener of Expressive Arts maybe? I don’t know
what her actual position was. But she was also teaching film. She was the teacher of film. All of these
students wanted to work in Hollywood, and wanted to do film, and she was being very feminist about

the kinds of videos she made. Apparently, women in her classes were expressing a lot of feminism. It
was kind of difficult for the men sometimes in her classes, I kind of heard, and I thought, well, wow!
Good! Finally we have a critical mass, and finally there’s something really important going on that
women are running around here.

But I think it was always . . . the women didn’t have any—except for the Women’s Center, which
was for students, and where I would go to hang out, and have consciousness-raising groups—except for
that, there was no focal point for the women to be getting together. One of the things that Evergreen
always has been, you feel like you’re married to your faculty team, because you have to work so hard to
drum up the programs new every time and all that. So you’re working really hard with a little group of
people, and you get to know those people really well. But you don’t have much cross-campus

4

connection, except for faculty meetings. And the faculty meetings are not a place to have a women’s
subcommittee, probably.
Taylor: Can you remember enough to describe what happened when you had the meeting at your
house with LLyn De Danaan, when LLyn was dean? It was a support group, as I remember it.
Allen: Yes, it was. But I don’t remember what the issue was. I just remember that LLyn—who is very

dramatic, by the way—just said, “I’m going to resign the deanship. I’m dean now, and I hate it, and
they’re doing the wrong thing in this and this and this way. I’m going to get out of here, unless you guys
support me.” [laughing]
Taylor: I remember that. She was what was called a “baby” dean, or a “little” dean.
Allen: Oh, my god. I’d forgotten that.
Taylor: They had the deans, and then the first baby dean was Oscar Soule, and LLyn, in my memory,
was the second. She was treated horribly. She was treated as . . .
Allen: . . . baby dean.
Taylor: She was treated as a servant to the deans. As I remember it, she did not have equal authority.
Allen: Wow.
Taylor: And she blew up. I think there must have been 30 people at that meeting, or 40.
Allen: Yeah, there were. Yes, it was a huge meeting.
Taylor: And it was an airing of grievance. I remember it as really being significant. Also, after that, we
had meetings at Kathleen O’Shaughnessy and Pat Labine’s house. And we had meetings at Janet Ott’s
house. I remember there were a bunch of meetings. Maybe it was eight, 10 years in, though. It didn’t

happen right away. But it started with LLyn.
Allen: I don’t remember these other meetings. The only thing I remember is a pizza group. Thursday
night pizza at what’s now Brewery City Pizza. I thought it was just a social get-together, but a lot of
science women would go. That’s where I got to know K. V. Ladd. She was not as bad about astrophysics

[laughing] as some of the other scientists were.
Taylor: Did you ever seek out and teach with other women, because that’s what you wanted? I know
you taught with Alice Nelson a lot, and that was natural because you were both doing Spanish—
Allen: Yeah. I was sought out. Let’s put it that way. I was sought out a lot by other women. I was
sought out by Peta Henderson and Stephanie Coontz, because they wanted somebody who knew some
Marxism, and wasn’t going to give them a bunch of crap about Marxism all the time, I think, but

5

somebody who could do a different thing from exactly what they did. I didn’t seek them out, but that
was a good thing. Usually, I wasn’t the active partner in doing the seeking, I don’t think.
But I did teach—I mean, this is one of the things that made me comfortable, I suppose—I did
teach on a whole bunch of all-women teams. I wish I remembered exactly when this was. I remember
that—oh, I know what it was. There was a period where the deans seemed to be concerned that there

be a gender balance on teams; that the teams should be half-men and half-women, or something like
that, or as close to that as possible. And they didn’t want all-women teams, or all-men teams.
One friend of mine had an absolutely terrible experience being the one woman on, I think, a
team with three men. It was just a terrible experience. And so she started saying, “I want to work with

women.” And a few other women started trying to work with women. All of a sudden, there’s all kinds
of all-woman teams just everywhere. And somehow, we overrode the deans ’reservations about it, and
it became really possible to have all-women teams. It must have gone along with a big increase in the
percentage of women on the faculty. But in my latter years there, I taught—and you and I taught this—
Taylor: We taught with Argentina Daley. That was a three-women . . .
Allen: Yeah, but we taught in this other program with Elizabeth Williamson and Kathleen Eamon.
Taylor: Oh, I wasn’t in that team.
Allen: Oh, you weren’t. Jin Darney was.
Taylor: I was in the team called Friendship, with you and Jin and Elizabeth.
Allen: Right.
Taylor: That was really recently. That was just after I retired.

Allen: Oh, after you retired?
Taylor: That first year, yeah.
Allen: Yeah, so I must have retired later than you.
Taylor: Here’s another topic that has to do with how the college was run. I mean, you said something

about the deans wanted balanced teams or something, and they didn’t support these all-women teams.
So how did you see the relationship between the faculty and the deans, and what the faculty role was at
the college? There’s a lot of conversation about who runs the college.
Allen: Right.

Taylor: And whether the deans have some grand plan, and run it, or whether the faculty have
autonomy and do as they please; whether specialty areas, or how that whole thing of not departments,
but some kind of groupings happened, and how you were affected by that.

6

Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: And what leadership the faculty provided, or didn’t provide. Just how the whole college
worked, in your mind.
Allen: [Laughing] Don’t ask me! Let me see. It was clear—this is one thing I don’t remember, but in the
beginning, I think all of the deans were faculty who rotated into the deanship, or something. Or, maybe

those were the baby deans and the senior deans. I don’t know. But there was a time when—I’m sure
there were years when every single dean had been a faculty member. There was a term, when you
were a dean, and then you had to rotate out, and rotate back into the faculty.
Taylor: It’s still true.

Allen: Okay, well, that’s good. [laughing] Because that was one thing I liked about it.
Taylor: I think that’s still true.
Allen: There came a time when there was a different kind of dean. Like wasn’t Barbara hired as a dean?
Taylor: Barbara Smith and John Perkins were the only exception that I know of that were hired as
deans. John Perkins went back and joined the faculty; Barbara never did. But that’s the only time, as far
as I can remember.
Allen: Okay. Anyway, if you had that sort of a deanship, if you have a team with new people rotating in,
maybe every year—every other year, probably, every two years. If you have something like that, you
can’t have a plan to run the college, and make it always be the same.
Taylor: Was that good?
Allen: Yeah, I think it was good. I liked that. I didn’t want the college to always be the same. That’s

what gave faculty—I mean, in that sense, that’s the way faculty ran the place was becoming deans. And
then, it depended on the person. Like maybe a person is really hard-nosed, and wants it to be a certain
way, or maybe a person really likes you or me or whoever, and promotes me or you or whoever.
Taylor: How did your teaching, I guess, your assignments, or your teaching choices, come about? Was it

mostly because you just got together with a group of people and said, “Let’s do this”? Or, did someone
ask you to do this? Or, did you feel an obligation to do this?
Allen: All different things. Mostly, it was other faculty would call me up and say, “We’re going to do a
program on X. Are you interested in having a meeting with us?”
When I wanted to do something, I would usually teach by myself. Like when I decided I needed
to develop a Spanish language program, the first time I did it, I did it all by myself. And then [sighs] I’ve
learned a few things. Actually, from these interviews, I’ve learned about some of the stuff about
7

language teaching, about some of the college’s attitudes toward language teaching, which were
incredibly stupid. They were so stupid, and so retrograde, that it is almost impossible to believe. I was
the only language teacher on the faculty the first year. The only teacher of any language. I don’t know
how they let me be there. It was not because I was a language teacher; it was because I had all this
other experience. But basically, they intended to have no languages.

Taylor: Did you and Susan Fiksdal ever talk about language?
Allen: Yeah, after—yeah . . .
Taylor: Because she was part-time the first year.
Allen: . . . about seven years in. Anyway, when [sighs]—yeah, when I was teaching my own material—

which, I would say, was usually women’s studies, or something involving Spanish language—then I
would do it myself first. Sometimes it would turn out well, and be popular, and then there would need
to be somebody else to do it with me. That happened a couple of times in women’s studies, but mostly,
it happened in language.

Taylor: And you were an advocate for language. At some point, we hired Alice Nelson, and we hired
Evelia Romano. You had some significant role in our moving in that direction, it seems like.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Because of your role in hiring, but also, in choice of hire.
Allen: Yeah. But also, another significant thing is that Patrick Hill’s hiring priorities were very specific to
him, and very autocratic, in certain ways. But he imposed a foreign studies dean —an international
studies dean—on the institution. We had no international students. There was no reason for an
international studies dean, but all of a sudden, Patrick decides that he has to hire an international
studies dean, so he did. It turned out to be Jose Gomez.
Once Jose Gomez was there, and was a dean, believe me, it was a lot easier to get stuff about
Spanish done. [laughing] I don’t know if he ever specifically intervened, but you just couldn’t badmouth
language differences and language learning around Jose Gomez very easily. I always have to be grateful
to Patrick for doing that, also because Jose was a really wonderful friend of mine.
The story of Alice and Evelia is that Alice or Evelia needed to be hired, because we were going to
do—my program was called Spanish Forms, and then it was going to be called Hispanic Forms. Only it

was terrible when it was called Hispanic Forms, because any Latinos wouldn’t come because they hated
the term Hispanic, because it was a Ronald Reagan term, and they would have none of it. So, it was a

8

terrible mistake to call it Hispanic Forms. Although, Hispanic was the proper form, because it’s the only
word that really combines Spain and Latin America, and that’s what the program was about.
Taylor: Who came up with the term?
Allen: I came up with the term. When I taught it by myself, it was Spanish Forms, and it was about
Spain, and it was not about Latin America. But when it was going to get bigger, and have another faculty

member, then it needed to combine Spain and Latin America.
Taylor: What would be a better name?
Allen: We called it Memory of Fire. After we called it Hispanic Forms, and that didn’t fly, we thought
we needed to get something more vague. Also, it was more radical, because it was the title of a book by

Eduardo Galeano, who was a very radical Latin American studies writer.
Taylor: That makes sense.
Allen: Anyway, I was in Spain with students when Alice and Evelia were hired. But there was only one
Spanish position announced, and both Alice and Evelia were there. And Russ Lidman—who knew

Spanish, and had a lot of interest in Latin America—was Provost, and he somehow found money to hire
both of them, instead of just one. So, all of a sudden, I have a surplus of Spanish-teaching help. I
remember, I was in Granada, and Jose called me in Granada to tell me about Alice and Evelia being
hired. So that’s how there turned out to be enough Spanish teachers.
At some point, before all this, French and Spanish and Japanese—meaning, Susan Fiksdal,
Setsuko Tsutsumi and I—got together and regularized what we thought should be the procedures for a
Japanese program, a Spanish program, and a French program. Susan Fiksdal was really the one who did
it first. She went to France, and she found families for students to stay with. And she set up a program
that would be—the idea of it was that instead of just having a four-quarter-hour Spanish class attached
to it, it would have eight quarter-hours of Spanish. So, there would be twice as many Spanish classes
involved in the curriculum, and then the rest of the curriculum would be in English. The books that we
read would all be in English, and they would be about history and culture, and students would take halftime Spanish language. Then, spring quarter, students would go to the country of choice.
And especially if you started as an intermediate—the Spanish classes were only offered at the
beginning level and intermediate level—that was kind of a source of a lot of problems, because nobody’s
language background was ever the same. [chuckles] But if you were an intermediate student who
started that program, and went through that year, and took it seriously, and then spent spring quarter
abroad, you had a whole lot of what qualified as a major in another college.

9

Anyway, we did that. And we decided we would have that kind of program, and they would
rotate regularly. At first, they would happen every three years. Not the same three years. There would
be a French program, and then the next year, a Spanish program, and the next year a Japanese program,
and then start over. That’s what was going on at the beginning. And then, the Spanish program got
popular enough that it could go every other year for a while. Since I have not been there anymore, I

really don’t know what’s happened, but I know people don’t spend spring quarter in Spain anymore.
Taylor: But they often spend spring quarter in some Spanish-speaking place.
Allen: Yeah, they do. I think they do.
Taylor: When you think back about your legacy at the college, is that where you think it is, with the

Spanish program?
Allen: Oh, no, I don’t. [laughing]
Taylor: What would you say is your legacy, and maybe what are you proudest of?
Allen: I’m proud of a lot of the hiring that I did, because I . . . there were some needs that I seemed to

perceive before other people perceived them. The biggest example I can think of right now was
comparative religion.
The reason that I perceived that need is that in my Spanish program, students would get this
heavy, heavy dose of Catholicism, medieval Catholicism, and they’d have all kinds of problems with it,
[laughing] and the Spanish Inquisition, particularly. What’s that about? [laughter] So we would read all
this intercultural stuff, trying to figure out what happened between the Muslims and the Jews and the
Christians before the Spanish Inquisition.
So, that just brought up the subject of religion, and comparative religion in particular, all the
time. I remember one time in my seminar, things were so acrimonious. I think it was kind of a
fundamentalist Christian older woman. She just got up and stamped out. She just left. And she
wouldn’t come back. She left the program, she left the school, she left it. [laughing]
So I thought, well, somebody needs to help us talk about these religion things. I made that
argument one time when I was on the hiring DTF, I guess, and we did advertise a comparative religion
position. I chaired the committee that brought that guy to campus. His name was Lance Laird.
Taylor: That was a big loss when he left.

Allen: Yes, it was a huge loss.
Taylor: Did you ever get to teach with him?

10

Allen: I did teach with him. I taught a program [laughing]—the college evolved from titles involving two
things to titles involving three things. [laughter] So I taught with Lance Laird in a program called
Crescent, Cross and Cupola. It was about Islam and Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church.
And Pat Krafcik, who belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church, was the person who taught that. Crescent,
Cross and Cupola was the program where I taught with Lance, and I learned everything I know about
Islam from him. And I thought that was very, very good. I was very proud of that.
Who else did I hire? Oh, I can’t remember very much about this, but I actually hired Stephanie
Coontz. And that was coming out of, in the very first years, being the only woman who worked with the
Women’s Center. The young women in the Women’s Center wanted some more faculty doing women’s

studies, and so we somehow promoted a position to teach women’s studies, and Stephanie was hired.
And I remember calling her up—I think it was after she had been offered the job—and asking her if she
was going to accept. So, I actually did that. That turned out to be very significant for the college.
Taylor: That was about the third year?

Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: At the most. Maybe it was the second. Third year, probably.
Allen: I think third.
Taylor: The other person I connect you with is Leonard Schwartz.

Allen: Oh, definitely!
Taylor: That’s later, but you had to go to bat for him.
Allen: Oh, yeah. That is a story, I think. Because I was singlehandedly responsible for getting Leonard.
Singlehandedly. Because this is what happened.
We had a subcommittee that was reading the files. The files were for a creative writing position,
specializing in poetry. I don’t think I was involved in anybody deciding that that was a priority or
anything, but I was on that subcommittee. We had a huge—you can imagine, a creative writing position
for a poet. There was a huge pile of applications, over 100. We had divided them up, and I was
supposed to read one-half of the alphabet—I guess I was supposed to read the top half of the
alphabet—and other people on the subcommittee were supposed to read the bottom of the alphabet.
It developed that I was so busy that I didn’t have enough time during the week to read these

files, so I would go into the deans ’area on the weekend and read files. One Saturday or Sunday, I went
into the deans ’area, and I took the wrong stack of files. I took the second half of the alphabet. I was
reading through, and I didn’t even notice. [laughter] I was really wiped out, for some reason, so I didn’t

11

even realize I was reading the wrong stack. And I came up on Leonard, and I said, “Well, this guy is really
impressive. We need to put him on here.”
So, I singled him out. And the people who were assigned to read that stack did not single him
out. So when we had a meeting of the whole group, I had to confess that I had read out of line. I was
sorry that I had read out of line, but I had found this great guy. So then I had to convince the other

people who were supposed to be reading that part that he really should be invited.
I don’t know, I think I had a special fondness for Jewish people from New York, because I had
been so blown away by Jewish people from New York when I lived in New York. I thought they were so
wonderful. [whispering] I thought, god, there’s no way that a school like Evergreen could ever get a

Jewish person from New York. People like that just wouldn’t want to come here. But here was a
person, a specific individual, who had a real-life reason for coming here; namely, that his wife was
Chinese, and they wanted to be closer to China was a big part of it. Plus, they wanted to get out of New
York City, because they had a daughter, and they knew they couldn’t afford to send their daughter to
school in New York City. That worked out really well.
Taylor: I think he’s not only been successful, I think he’s been happy.
Allen: Yeah, he has.
Taylor: A real contribution. Where do we go from here?
Allen: I don’t know. What time is it?
Taylor: Let’s take a little break.
Allen: Okay. A while back, we were talking about what I thought my heritage at the college was, or

what I had given the college. I think it was mostly a certain kind of teaching, but it’s hard to say whether
it’s still there or not because it’s a very personal thing. I developed a way—because at the very
beginning, the very first year, I felt really, really close to my students, probably much more close to my
students than I felt to any of the faculty. I was really noticing them, and figuring out how to help them

as individuals, and really crashing when I couldn’t. Like with Regon Unsoeld, for example. [laughing]
That thread remained in my teaching through my whole career, I think, that student-centeredness. Even
though I learned a bunch more material—I learned from everybody I ever taught with; I learned how
they thought; I learned what kind of things they read, and I read the same kind of things that they read.

I learned all about Marxism, and a lot about Freud, right at the beginning of Evergreen from people I
taught with.

12

Anyway, I did develop my command of material, and I developed my ability to lecture. But I
always stayed a very student-focused teacher. It changed a lot over the years, because I grew up. At
the beginning, I was very close—well, not that close in age to my students. I was 30 when the college
started, and so my students were maybe approximately 10 years younger than I. But then, I had older
students, too. There were always a few students in their twenties, and later, there were reentry
women, who sometimes were older than I was, so the age relationship between me and my students
changed, of course. That just would happen normally.
But I got very, very good at being a non-directive teacher, I think. At first, everybody wanted me
to be more directive. Everybody wanted me to tell them what to do. I just kind of really believed, like in

seminar, that I shouldn’t be providing the subject matter for seminar. I shouldn’t be raising all the
questions. I should maybe let the students start a question, and then try to focus the question a little to
help them out, or something like that. But they should be running where the seminar was going,
because they were the ones who knew what their own learning was like, and were inside their own

learning, and could figure out what to do about it. And I really couldn’t, I thought.
That’s the kind of teacher I came to be. It got a lot more effective as the years went on,
[laughing] probably because I wasn’t so . . . I was still involved, and I still was very, very attentive, but I
wasn’t personally wounded or something if some student didn’t get it. I just knew finally that not
everybody was going to get it, but the people who got it would get something good.
I was amazed when I looked at my self-evaluations. I wrote something like a six-page, singlespaced self-evaluation that was all about teaching all-women classes, composed of people who were like
my mother and people who were like my daughters. And talking about how I had to switch back and
forth when I was with such a group. I had to switch back and forth between my mother’s suit and my
father’s suit from time to time. But all of the whole thing that I wrote is based on two incidents that
didn’t even happen in class. They weren’t about learning material, they were about stuff that happened

in the hallways.
I was just amazed at how closely I watched my students, and how I thought about them, and
analyzed them, and critiqued them. I really wondered how many other people did it like that.
Taylor: One of the things that would be useful, I think, is if you want to read what Ryan said. Does that

make sense?
Allen: Okay. Yeah, I can read this.

13

Taylor: And the other thing is that when we first met, you said something about you wanted to—I asked
you about your parents, and you said, “I want to bring them up when I talk about students and teaching.
Because it happened much later.” You said that at your house a couple of weeks ago.
Allen: My parents? I don’t remember what I said.
Taylor: It was something about how your growing up, and your relationship with your parents,

impacted the way you taught. You said you wanted to delay it until now. I don’t know what it was.
Allen: Oh, okay. Well, I can think of one possibility. Okay. So this is an evaluation that I got from a
student in 2001. This student’s name was Ryan Grayson. He was my student in a core program, and he
wrote this third person. He didn’t write me a letter, but he wrote about me. I think it’s just beautiful,

and probably the nicest thing anybody ever said about me.
Nancy allows our seminar freedom. She is evanescent in this manner. There were times when I wished she would
appear and tell us what to think, and how to grasp hold of our material. But it was when she didn’t that I found myself to
reason on my own behalf toward a logical end. Nancy allows you the space to work through these moments, personally and
publicly. When it was I failed to make sense of things—and it was often—she was ready with an austere compassion, selflessly
attentive like shade.

I think that last part is incredible.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s good.
Allen: But, if I was going to say something about my parents, I said a lot at the very beginning of this
interview. I said a lot about my father, because the first story I told was about when I was four, and I
would watch my father reading at night. He would be sitting in a chair, holding this book in his hands,
and just turning the pages. He wouldn’t know I was there. I would just watch him, and he would be

completely silent, and he would be turning pages, and he would obviously be so satisfied. That’s what
made me want to learn to read. Undoubtedly, I have always been an extremely bookish person. And
being such a bookish person is what made me love school, and want to go to school more, and want to
go to more and more school. I wanted to teach school. That’s my father’s influence.

But my mother’s influence, I guess, was much more complicated, because she was not my
favorite parent, and she basically tried to hold me back from school in whatever way she could. When I
was a junior at Occidental, I applied for a study-abroad program through Princeton to spend the summer
between my junior and senior year in Europe, doing research. Occidental used to call itself the
“Princeton of the West,” but it actually did have some connection with Princeton, which was apparent in
this program I went on. I went with students from Princeton, and Columbia, and Harvard, I think, and I
don’t know exactly where else.

14

Anyway, on the day I learned that I was accepted to go to this program, I called up my mom. I’m
so excited. I’m just wildly excited. I’m going to tell her that I’m going to go to Europe this summer, and I
got this scholarship to go to Europe, and I’m getting this free trip, and I’m so happy. So I start babbling
on the phone, and I tell her this stuff.
When I got done talking, she said, “Oh. Oh, dear. Do you really think you should do that?”

[laughing] I couldn’t believe it! It was like she was worried about my taking too many risks, or my
health, or something. And she was just so far from understanding what I was about, or what I had at
stake, or what I wanted to do.
Taylor: That’s sad.
Allen: So, I was always motivating myself. Really, nobody in my family was pushing me. My dad kind of
trusted that I was going to do what I wanted to do, and I would be fine. But my mom was not helpful at
all. However, the reason my mom was some of these ways is she was a very serious depressive, and I
knew that from the time I was six. I was six when she had her first real horrible depression.
So, when she’s an old woman, and she has recently put my father in a nursing home because he
has Alzheimer’s, she needed me to rescue her. She was kind of incapable of surviving in Southern
California on her own, and so I had to bring her to Olympia, because I was literally all she had at that
point. I brought her to Olympia, and got to know her again in her seventies, so this whole theme
appeared in my thinking about my students, and my reading and writing about mothers and daughters.
The mothers were the ones who needed to be rescued. I thought the mothers needed rescuing a lot
more than the daughters did. So I have a whole lot of writing about mothers and daughters, and it

mostly is about me trying to rescue my mom, and keep her from being depressed, and help her live
longer, and all that sort of thing. So I think that’s probably what I said I wanted to talk about later.
Taylor: Do you think that has anything to do with changes in women, and women’s consciousness, and
sexism, and changes in perception? I mean, the situation that mothers are in, and your understanding

of them. Is that a result of women’s roles?
Allen: What a mother is, is a result of women’s roles, I guess. I’m not any authority on motherhood in a
physical sense, because I never had any kids. Any mothering that I ever did was always of people not
biologically related to myself. Actually, I like it much better that way. I really am not at all sad that I
never had kids.
If you’re a mother in the sense I’m talking about, you get to do a lot more of it, and you get to
have a lot more different chances with different individuals. Because sometimes it takes, and

15

sometimes it doesn’t take. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your genetic heritage, which I really, as a
member of my family, with the mental health problems in my family, I really would not have wanted to
have those succeed me because of my actions. So that’s what I know how to say about that, I guess.
Taylor: I think the women at the college who are mothers, or were mothers, have a very different story
to tell about their experience at the college, and how they were treated, than we do.

Allen: You mean the faculty who are mothers?
Taylor: People like Carolyn Dobbs, or . . .
Allen: . . . Sandie Nisbet.
Taylor: Sandie. I don’t know, it could be the younger ones.

Allen: What would they say, do you think?
Taylor: I think the expectation of the college to live the college, and spend your whole life, your whole
waking hours worrying about the college . . .
Allen: Yeah.

Taylor: . . . and helping students, and being there for students, and being involved in the planning and
all that. And mothers saying, “That’s all fine and good, but I have two little kids at home, and you’re
designing a college that doesn’t account for that.”
Allen: Yeah. Well, that’s true.
Taylor: And the men saying, “Women aren’t doing their—they’re going off, they won’t do this and that
because they have their families.” Anyway, I think that was an issue.
Allen: Hm. That’s interesting.

Taylor: I don’t know. I only remember talking to Carolyn about it.
Allen: So that’s one of the reasons that they didn’t want to hire any wives of faculty members for so
long?
Taylor: I don’t know. That could have been. I don’t know who made that decision.

Allen: Because I really was meant to be a teacher, and not a mother, I think. But I think a lot of people
are not like me.
Taylor: Yeah. I feel the same way.
Allen: There has to be some ability for people to have families.

Taylor: This is a side note, but I remember, years and years ago, having a conversation about Richard
Jones; that he was meant to be a teacher and not a father.
Allen: Oh, yeah.

16

Taylor: He was a much better teacher than he was a father.
Allen: Interesting.
Taylor: Another conversation that we might have next time is something about your intellectual
interests, and what you thought about, and did, and how they changed, and how they developed. It fits
with this part, about . . .
Allen: I can talk about the St. Teresa of Avila phase.
Taylor: Well, or just what you were interested in, and what the college supported, and what kept you
intellectually alive? I know, for me, it was the joy of—faculty development was teaching these
programs, where you read things that you couldn’t imagine reading, and saw the connections with

them, and taught with people that allowed you to have these good conversations.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: In a sense, even though you weren’t doing research on Teresa of Avila, you were having this
intellectual experience.

Allen: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: That, to me, is the greatest joy.
Allen: Yeah, that was the main thing. I had a sabbatical really early, and way before I did anything
about Teresa of Avila, I thought I was going to be Christina Stead’s biographer. I spent two months in

Australia, going to visit this famous woman novelist every single day, and sitting with her, and talking to
her. That was an enormous intellectual interest that was developed through a contact at the college,
Stephanie Coontz knew her. Stephanie Coontz’s mother, in particular, knew her, and got me access to
her. And then, I was able to get a sabbatical.
That kind of support, just kind of getting out of your way and letting you do stuff, was always
there at the college. You couldn’t have it every year, obviously, but there were . . . yeah, we had a good
leave program, I think.
Taylor: Good support for that.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: You had one sabbatical in Australia, and then you had a sabbatical in Granada?
Allen: Yeah, I did.
Taylor: Did you just have two?
Allen: I can’t remember. I may have taken unpaid leave for a quarter once. But I cannot remember
more than two. I’ll think about it.

17

Taylor: Sort of connected to this, in terms of faculty development, think of experiences you had where
the college either did something or didn’t do something that helped you, or paid attention to you.
Allen: I have a perfect example, because I think it’s something that doesn’t ever happen anymore.
There used to be—I mean, it’s probably crazy now. I think people probably wouldn’t do it anymore, but
we used to have these retreats. The faculty would go away for a weekend. Or maybe it was Thursday

and Friday, I’m not sure. It might have even been Saturday or Sunday.
We would go to Camp Wooten, or someplace fairly close by, and sleep in sheds, or whatever we
slept in, or tents or something, and eat in the dining hall, and do nothing but talk about curriculum
planning. Do things like . . . oh, I remember there was this kind of way of starting a workshop, where

you’d have two circles, one inside of the other, of faculty. One circle would be walking in one direction,
and the other circle would be walking in the other direction. There would be some music playing. We’d
walk around in these circles for a little while, and somebody would stop the music. Then, you had to go
and plan a program with whoever you happened to be next to.
Basically, we had to do curriculum planning exercises with random other people. And I think
that was very helpful. Probably the most helpful thing about it was a push in that direction, just a push,
saying, “The college supports this. The college wants you to know how to do this.” And then, letting you
do it. I really got a lot out of certain things like that that we did.
And then, I remember a phase where nobody wanted to go on them anymore. You couldn’t put
your family through that. I don’t know. But I was always up for it. I always wanted to do it.
Taylor: Barbara Smith was the real key to that, I think. She loved retreats.

Allen: Huh.
Taylor: I liked them, too.
Allen: Yeah. Except for that very first one that lasted two weeks.
Taylor: That one was with students.

Allen: Yeah, I know.
Taylor: And now, people won’t do them.
Allen: Yeah. Even on campus. I mean, in my latter years, they came to all happen on campus.
Taylor: I think one of the serious problems now is that people don’t know the new faculty, they only

know their little circle.
Allen: They don’t know each other, yeah.
Taylor: So how in the world can they plan a program when they don’t know anybody to plan it with?

18

Allen: Exactly.
Taylor: So you see these plaintive messages going around, saying, “Help! I need somebody to teach
with!” And there’s no opportunity to make it happen.
Allen: Well, that’s how to make it happen.
Taylor: Yeah. So I think we should quit for today, because we’re going to do another day.

Allen: Yeah.

19


Nancy Allen
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 13, 2017, Part 4
FINAL

Taylor: It’s Wednesday, September 13, 2017, and this is our third interview. I think we came to a point
where we could move on to life after Evergreen, and sort of a retrospective look back. But there was
one story I wanted you to tell, because I think it ought to be available, and that is the whole story of the
Danforth—what was it called?—the Danforth Position?
Allen: The Danforth Visitor Program.
Taylor: Do you know how it started? And then, can you describe what you did?
Allen: Yes. The Danforth Visitor Program was the idea of Peter Elbow, who’s a nationally known writing
teacher. He’s probably retired by now. I think, actually, he lives in Seattle. But he taught at Evergreen
for, I don’t know, five or six years? And while he was at Evergreen, he got a grant from the Danforth
Foundation to do some faculty development work.
It was the simplest, and most elegant, idea imaginable, I think, anyway. I just think it was
brilliant. The deal was that to do it, you needed one faculty salary—you needed enough money to pay
one faculty to not teach for a quarter, but to get their salary—and that person would be the visitor. The
main idea of the visiting program was to be able to have someone observing you in your seminars and
your classroom situations who was not a faculty member on your team. So, it should be a way of getting
observation by another trained teacher, and getting feedback about your teaching, and having it not be
connected to the administration of the college in any way, and it wouldn’t go into the evaluation system
in any way, I guess, unless you chose to put some of it into your self-evaluation. But nobody would ever
evaluate you on all this, and there wasn’t anything written down.
Once a visitor was named—a person to be not teaching for a quarter, and visiting other faculty
members—once that person was named—the first one was Peter Elbow himself—that person would
work with 10 faculty members, because there are 10 weeks in a quarter. First, the group would meet
and kind of discuss things, and discuss what they wanted to get out of it, and maybe—maybe—come to
some common ideas about what they wanted to talk about in their meetings, or maybe not. It could be
completely individual what you talked about when your visitor came.
1

What I remember is that before the start of the week when the visitor would be in your
classroom—a given faculty member’s classroom—they would have the meeting, the visitor and the
faculty member, and they would decide what part of the teaching needed feedback, and how the visitor
was supposed to get that. Most commonly, people wanted feedback on their seminars, so the visitor
would attend seminar and watch the seminar maybe twice, or three times, or however many times it
happened. Also, you could have the visitor visit workshops, or come to lectures, critique lecturing,
anything like that.
That would happen for a week, and at the end of the week, the visitor and you would sit down
and talk about how things went, and you would get the feedback that you wanted, orally. Oh, yeah, and
also there was—I don’t think I invented this, but I think I formalized it a little bit—the visitor could call
together your students, and talk to your students about stuff they might be scared to put in evaluations.
Because I think it is true that there’s a fair amount of intimidation that goes with having the power to be
a faculty member and give credit, and students being completely honest with you in your evaluations.
The visitor could get together with your students, and give them feedback—or, get feedback from them
that he would then present to you without name, anonymously—“Well, some students said that they
think this.” I made up a questionnaire that I would give the students to kind of get them thinking about
what they might want to say about their faculty. That was the contribution I made.
Peter Elbow was the first visitor, and he visited 10 people, and it all worked really well. I don’t
even remember who the administrators were who decided to perpetuate it, but since it was such a
simple idea, and it only involved one faculty salary for one quarter, some of the deans just decided to
perpetuate it. I think Bill Aldridge was the next visitor. I was visited by Bill Aldridge, and then I got to be
a visitor, either the third year, or maybe the fourth year. When I was a visitor, I just loved it. [laughing]
I just thought it was so much fun to observe other people teaching, and talk to them about their
teaching.
I think that’s a wonderful program, and it helps faculty get to know each other. If you’re a
visitor, you get to know 10 people’s teaching really quite closely over that quarter. I think the feedback
the faculty got was very valuable, because they kept signing up for the program.
Taylor: Do you know how long it lasted?
Allen: No, I don’t.
Taylor: I was in the first group, with Peter, and it was wonderful. He came to everything. He even did a
video recording, and then we talked about it, a seminar. But he was totally supportive, and it was one of
2

the best things that happened, in terms of my gaining confidence in being a teacher. Just no question
about it. It mattered that it was absolutely voluntary, and it was—you’re right—no report, so it was
completely outside of the evaluation system. I think people accepted that, and lots of people wanted to
do it.
Allen: Yeah, they did.
Taylor: It sort of depended on who was the visitor. You probably got people who wanted you, and Bill
Aldridge would get people who wanted him, so it was people you trusted.
Allen: Mm-mm.
Taylor: But I don’t think it lasted more than two or three years, at the most. Because it took a faculty
line.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Was it once a year for one quarter, or was it all year?
Allen: It was for one quarter.
Taylor: It was for one quarter each year for maybe three years or something. I think LLyn De Danaan
did it once.
Allen: I think they kept it going for longer. I would say it couldn’t possibly have been more than 10
years, but it might have been five or six years.
Taylor: Yeah. I think they got a grant for it, at the beginning.
Allen: Yeah, Peter Elbow got a grant for it.
Taylor: They continued it after the grant died.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Because it was during that time there were lots of interesting faculty development happening. I
remember, I think, Rob Knapp got a grant for Each One, Teach One. Do you remember that? It was the
same time.
Allen: Did that happen during the summer? Yeah.
Taylor: It happened during the summer, and it was to learn a skill. I remember Kirk Thompson, as a
photographer, worked with some mathematician, and they each taught each other some skill. It was
Each One, Teach One, and you got paid for doing it.
Allen: Yeah.
3

Taylor: There was just so much more interest, it seemed, in helping faculty be better faculty. I don’t
know if that still goes on, but the interest in faculty development was stronger.
Allen: I know that nothing like the Danforth thing goes on, because when Michael Zimmerman was
Provost, I tried to pitch this Danforth Visitor idea to him, because I thought it was a way to strengthen
coordinated studies at the college. I told him about it, and I thought he might not have ever even heard
of it; that it just went underground, and nobody even knew. I told him all about it, and he absolutely
was not interested. He didn’t tell me at the meeting we had, but somebody told me later that the
reason he was absolutely against it was because it was paying faculty not to teach, and he didn’t think
there should ever be anything where faculty were paid for anything else but their classroom teaching.
Taylor: Did you ever have a stint in the Library?
Allen: No.
Taylor: Or an advising office?
Allen: No.
Taylor: Because there were two places where faculty served, and did really good things, by serving in
the Library and serving as—
Allen: Yes.
Taylor: Maybe it’s a luxury, but the faculty accepted it. It was a luxury, but it meant class load could be
higher because you chose to do that. But the Danforth was paid for with the grant, originally. So, I don’t
know. I thought it was a great thing.
Allen: It was a great thing.
Taylor: Are there other stories of that sort, in reflection, that you want to make sure get known, get
down in writing; reflections about things that you did at the college, or that happened at the college,
that made it be the place that it was, that you were involved in?
Allen: Well, at some point [phone rings].
End Part 1 of 3 of Nancy Allen on 9-13-17
Begin Part 2 of 3 of Nancy Allen on 9-13-17
[Interview begins 00:00:48]
Taylor: You were going to talk about the college, and treatment of the retired.
Allen: Yeah, we’d just got done talking about something that the college did that was really, really good,
but then let slide, actually, and this is something that I don’t think the college has done, and I think the
4

college really needs to think about this. Although [chuckles] it’s probably not the primary thing they
need to think about right at this moment.
When I retired, I had a really, really, really difficult transition. I think it may have been more
difficult for me than for lots of other people, because I don’t have a family. I mean, I have some cats and
dogs and stuff, but the college was my life. The people I saw—my students, the people in my seminar—
were the people I thought about all the time. I’m sure that I worried about them something similar to
the way parents worry about their children, but probably it was a lot less intense, because I wasn’t a
parent, and there were more of them. But it was incredibly involving for me. It was my life.
The other thing that I perceived as very important when it got taken away was that lots of
people on campus cared about what I thought. Especially, the evaluation system certainly promoted
that. Your students would definitely care what you thought, because they would want to learn from
you, and they would want to know what you thought about them, and it would be part of their future
academic career, too, what you thought.
When I first stopped teaching, I just didn’t have any of that. It’s like it was all gone, just
completely gone. And nobody cared what I thought about anything. I was just another little old lady.
Nobody ever asked me my opinion. Nobody ever listened if I expressed my opinion. [laughing] [sighs]
That was very discouraging. And I didn’t have a certain context around me that I had had before, where
there were a lot of smart people that I met on a daily basis, and would talk to. I just didn’t have any of
that, and so it took me a very long time to get a life that was satisfying outside of Evergreen.
One of the first things that happened was I went through one fall quarter, the first fall quarter
after I retired, I felt so awful, because everybody else was going back to school. I still had mostly
Evergreen friends, and they were all going back to school, and I wasn’t. I just felt so terrible, and so left
out, and so homesick that I decided that I would have to start traveling more, so I would be getting some
new experiences, and I wouldn’t have to go through this all the time.
My first big trip—they weren’t my biggest trips—I took a trip to Argentina in spring quarter after
that. I just said, I have to start getting out of here. I have to start getting out of here. So, spring
quarter, I went to Argentina. Then I started to travel a lot to Spain, which is a place I had lived before,
when I would take Evergreen students abroad to a language school there.
I would tend to be spending spring quarter about every three years in Spain, and I got to know
this one neighborhood in Granada really well, so I would go back there. I went for three or four years in
a row, I think. I would stay at least three months, but one time, I stayed six months. The last time I
went, I stayed nine months. It was really wonderful to live there. There are certain things I miss so
5

much from there, mainly the kind of social lives that people have, where they interact with each other
so intensely, kind of all day long. I would get up in the morning, and I would go down, and I would
have—everybody in Spain goes to breakfast in a café, nobody seems to ever have breakfast at home—a
continental breakfast. I would go to the same café every day, and I would be having breakfast with the
same group of people that were always having breakfast at that café. You could be private if you
wanted, or you could start a conversation if you wanted. It was completely up to you. And it was a
great place to observe what was going on in the town.
I did that, and then I would go and do my grocery shopping. If you go to open-air stands, you
sort of have to talk to each grocery person about what the groceries are today, and what they’re like,
and which are best. I just loved that kind of social contact, which here, I hardly ever go out for
breakfast, and if I do, I don’t talk to anybody. And I don’t ever talk to people when I’m shopping. I just
go through the checkout counter once, and I don’t have to communicate about every single product or
anything. So, I loved that about Spain. I loved that about living there.
Taylor: Were you doing any research or work there, or were you just enjoying living there? And you
had friends?
Allen: The first time I went, I was still thinking of myself as writing this book. [chuckles] I knew that
writing was going to be involved in this conversation in some way, but . . . [sighs] . . . oh, dear. As I
remember it, I started teaching Spanish again at Evergreen. I was a Spanish teacher before I came to
Evergreen. There was no language program when I got there, so there was no way to be a Spanish
teacher. And I was not about to start the whole language program by myself, so I didn’t. I just taught
literature in English with other people.
But, about eight years into Evergreen, I started teaching Spanish again, which, I guess, was like
’79, or ’78 maybe. First of all, it was just a four-quarter-hour beginning Spanish class. I just kind of got
back into the classroom, and then I started to have ideas about a bigger program I would want to have,
and how it would be. I ended up starting this program, which was originally called Spanish Forms in Life
and Art, and then was called various different names, and included Latin America. But the first time I
taught it, it was only about Spain.
I was really interested in St. Teresa. St. Teresa of Ávila was one of the people I thought I might
want to do my doctorate about when I was in graduate school, but my faculty at Columbia did not want
me to do my doctorate about St. Teresa of Ávila. [laughing] So I didn’t get to do that. I wasn’t a
traditional scholar of St. Teresa, but I decided that I wanted to learn all about St. Teresa, because she

6

was the first woman writer in Spain, for sure, and is still the most important woman writer there ever
has been in Spain, and probably wrote more than most Spanish writers have written.
So, I was studying St. Teresa of Ávila, but I was convinced that I was not going to be writing
academic articles, because I don’t—I’m not going to go into the whole history of what was going on in
literature departments in those days, but it was supposed to be okay at Evergreen to not do scholarship.
You didn’t need to do that to be able to continue in your job. I thought that was so wonderful, because
it meant that I did not have to write these tacky, dry, unreadable [laughter] articles that most people
were writing in literature departments.
Taylor: Right.
Allen: So, I decided I needed to write something different. The kind of writing I admired, and really
liked, was literature. So, I decided I would write a novel about St. Teresa of Ávila, and it would have two
plots. It would have a historical plot about St. Teresa’s life, and then it would have a contemporary
detective plot. There would be these two women, in particular, who were trying to find out who stole
St. Teresa’s hand. St. Teresa’s hand disappeared from the place that it is, where I have seen it, in Spain.
It’s in the cathedral in Seville, I think. Anyway, it’s in some town in southern Spain, which is not
Granada. It’s in the cathedral, in a special little room, a special little reliquary room, where you can go in
and pray, just because you were so bedazzled by the wonder of St. Teresa’s hand, and it’s her real
bones.
Taylor: It’s still there. It wasn’t stolen, you were just going to have it stolen.
Allen: Yeah, I imagined that it was stolen, and one American woman and one Spanish woman were
trying to find it. That was the detective plot.
So, I was working on that. Of course, because Evergreen teaching is incredibly consuming, I was
not able to work on it when I was teaching, so I would work on it every summer. I would kind of get it
out, and I would do something on it every summer. It was very unsatisfying, and it went on and on and
on and on. I think I had been working on it for about 15 years, but about the 12th year that I was
working on it was right when I retired. I was planning to do a bunch more on that, get that really up and
running during the first time I went to Spain after retirement. Later, I dropped it entirely, but I went
there to research and write that first time.
I think one other time I went, and I was going to write another book. I was sort of deciding,
okay, that book’s not going to work. Now, I’m going to write another one, and it’s just going to be a
contemporary mystery set in the Albaicin, and I’m going to work on that. [laughing] During that time,

7

those months I spent doing that, I discovered I just am terrible with plots. I couldn’t think of anything
that could happen. [laughter] St. Teresa gave me the first plot, but I’m not very good at plot.
So, there was some writing and some research sort of connected to it, but later—I think after
the first two times—I sort of decided I’m just going to live there. I’m just going because I love to live
there, and it’s okay for me to just go and spend a few months in Spain. After I bought this house that
I’m in right now, my house was always super easy to rent, and I could rent it to people who liked pets,
and then I could give them a really good deal on the rent, and they would take care of my pets in return.
That was all very nice, and it was a good way to travel and pretty much have my rent covered when I
was in Spain, so that was good.
It got to the point where I had lots of friends in this little neighborhood. I was thinking, well, I
really can’t go and live in Spain for good, because I don’t know what kind of volunteer work I can have. I
know that I’m going to need some volunteer work, and I don’t know what it could be in Spain. So, I
decided that I would try teaching some gitanos, because there’s a big—well, I guess I can call them
Gypsies, because the Spanish Roma people really do like to be called gitanos, which is translated into
English as Gypsy. In English, it’s supposed to not be appropriate to call them Gypsies, but in Spain, they
call themselves that. So, who knows?
I managed to get myself into a classroom in Granada in one of the very poorest neighborhoods
in town, and I met this teacher who taught a class of gitanos. Basically, it was like a GED program,
where they would take classes with her, and then they would get a certificate that said they had gotten
their high school degree. Then they would be eligible for all sorts of jobs that they weren’t otherwise
eligible for.
There were quite a few women from early twenties to mid-thirties, I would say, or maybe early
twenties to forties, who were in these types of classes, which were free, and which were taught in the
community center. I met the woman who taught one of them, and she knew a little bit of English, but
she didn’t know much English, and she was very happy to have me teach English in her class. So, I did
that, and I was there for nine months. Doing that taught me a lot. [laughing]
Meanwhile, while I’m teaching this, I’m making more friends. I made a friend of one local Gypsy
woman, who lived on the next street to me. She was pushing me to come and live in Spain, and the
teacher whose classroom I was in was pushing me to come and live in Spain, and they all wanted me to
come and continue to teach gitanos, and continue to teach English. They said they were looking for an
apartment for me. They were looking for a place I could afford, and maybe just rent continuously, like

8

maybe be renting it when I went home to the U.S., and just be able to go back there whenever I wanted
to.
So, we were thinking about something like that, and I started to think, oh, my god, what if they
find a place? [laughing] If they actually find a place, then I’m going to have to do this. Do I really want
to do this, or is this just something I’m talking about? I realized that the English teaching was not really
very productive, because I had to be a Spanish person’s class. Therefore, I had to be teaching English
the way they teach languages in Spain, which, in my view, is abysmal, and completely the wrong thing to
do, because it’s all based on grammar and workbooks, filling out sentences with blanks in them and
stuff. I tried to introduce a little bit of talking into my English class with the gitanos, and a lot of the
gitanos were not capable of speaking Spanish in public, not capable of participating in class in Spanish,
and had never really been asked to do a bunch of talking in class in any language, and were just pretty
freaked by the whole—and didn’t have much self-esteem to begin with. I thought they were going to go
nuts. They would clam up, and they would crawl into the corners practically.
It was just really that I couldn’t do my own kind of language teaching. And I could tell that
wasn’t going to change, because in Spain, they are incredibly concerned about credentials, and I don’t
have any credentials that say I have training in teaching English, or anything like that. So, I could never
get a classroom of my own. I would always have to be in somebody else’s classroom, and I would have
to use their methods. That just felt like kind of an endless cycle that wasn’t going to be that satisfying,
and I knew it would be different here.
The other thing was having friends in Spain, which is very much different from having friends
here, because family is so much stronger in Spain. What would happen in Spain would be that when I
became friends with somebody, I’d usually—I think I made a couple of male friends, but mostly I’d
become friends with women. And when I became friends with like the mother of a family, her family
would adopt me, essentially. I would be like “Aunt Tilly,” and I would go to all the family dinners on
holidays, and Sunday dinners and that kind of thing. I never could reciprocate the invitations because I
couldn’t invite the whole family. I would have a little apartment, and I didn’t have space for the whole
family.
Plus, it wasn’t very interesting, because they would all talk about family stuff that had been
going on for years, and I wouldn’t know the context of things that were being talked about, and I
couldn’t get much out of those conversations.
I tried telling myself for a while that it would be different among different groups of people, but
the last person I rented from was a college professor, and he told me about some other friends of his
9

who lived around the neighborhood. I met them, and they all conducted their lives exactly like the other
people, in terms of family. So, I thought, okay, so I will have friends here, but I won’t get to do anything
fun with them, like we won’t go on trips, we won’t even go to the movies. They don’t even go to the
movies with their friends, they go to the movies with their family. I thought, well, that is not going to be
very satisfying.
The next time I came home, after that time that I stayed nine months, I was thinking all of the
above. I walked into this little restaurant downtown, and I saw bine, who was also a retired Evergreen
faculty member. She looked at me and she said, “You’re not here.” I said, “What do you mean I’m not
here? I’m standing right in front of you.” [laughter] She said, “You’re not here, you’re in Spain. You’re
supposed to be in Spain. Didn’t you buy a house or something?” [laughing] I said, “No, not really. I’ve
been thinking about moving there, but now I’m not even so sure I will.”
All of a sudden, it just occurred to me, Nancy, you don’t live in Olympia anymore. [laughing] I
mean, nobody here knows that you live here. They all see you as being somebody different, and maybe
it would be a good idea to inhabit your hometown for a little while, and see what that’s like. So, I
started doing that.
Along the way, when I decided to live in Olympia, I thought, okay, what am I going to do for
entertainment around here? Well, there is a college that I used to teach at, and maybe I could take
something at this college. So, I signed up for a drawing class, and I got to audit the drawing class. I got
to do all the work, and the teacher critiqued me and everything, but she just didn’t write me an
evaluation. That was very good.
Taylor: Who was the teacher?
Allen: Judith Baumann. She was in charge of running the print lab, but I think she was only part-time.
She was not permanent faculty. But she was very good, and I learned a lot about drawing. Then, I was
wandering around thinking, okay, I have this little bit of drawing talent that I can now exercise, so what
can I do? I saw a pastel class announced on a bulletin board downtown, so I thought, hmm, maybe I
want to do pastels. Anyway, I got into this pastel class, and I started painting with pastels. Now, I’ve
had a whole solo show. I guess maybe three or four years, I’ve done that.
That’s been very satisfying, and I’m really glad that I finally realized that I’m not a writer, that
I’m a painter instead. [laughing] I kind of wish I’d figured it out a lot earlier, but I didn’t. But that’s
really great to do now, and it comes from having decided to live in Olympia for a while. So now, it’s
even kind of hard to go back to Spain because of all these people who were expecting me to go and live
there, and tutor gitanos. But I decided not to do that.
10

So, I’ve come full circle back to Olympia, but not Evergreen. I still have lots of ideas about what
should happen with retired people. [chuckles] I don’t know if I’m the only person who thinks this,
though, that’s the problem. But what I think is that retired people should have some real authority and
decision-making power—not all by ourselves, but in conjunction with the other people. I think maybe
there should be something like a retired person on every DTF, or at least the opportunity for people to
say if they wanted a retired person to be on their DTF. People like me are here, we don’t have a lot to
do. We’ve got all this free time we didn’t used to have, and I think I know a lot that could be valuable to
people at the college.
I also think that sometime before I retired, which was in 2006, there had been a period where
the younger faculty resented the founding faculty, and didn’t want to hear all these ideas about the way
you were supposed do things anymore. But my impression is that that period was over by the time I
left, and that that kind of feeling is probably not terribly strong now. I’m not sure, but I hope there’s not
a lot of prejudice against retired people.
But what happened before, when I retired, was that there was only one thing that retired
faculty were asked to do, and that was to go to tea, I guess, once a quarter. There was this woman in
the Library who decided she wanted to set up a tea for retired faculty members. You could go one
afternoon and have tea and cookies. [laughing] Eventually, she got a little smarter about it. If there
was a retired person with a new book out or something like that, she would have them read, or she
would have them give little talks about what they were doing. To me, that just felt condescending in
some way.
Taylor: Did you attend the meeting that I think maybe Betsy organized? It was out at some—I don’t
remember, outside of the college somewhere.
Allen: Yes, I do.
Taylor: All the women. And it was to talk about . . .
Allen: . . . retirement.
Taylor: Talk about retirement.
Allen: Yeah, it was.
Taylor: Typically, it was the women who organized this, and it was all women who were there. There
were all kinds of ideas of how retired women could be involved in the college. Nothing happened from
it.
Allen: No. No, I know. One idea out of that meeting that I had was . . . [sighs] . . . it must have been
before I got this house. I decided that I would like to get a house near campus, and that I would maybe
11

upon my death, I would donate this house to the college, and the college could use this house as a bed
and breakfast for retired people who wanted to come to town to spend some time. They could come
and live here. My house is probably about three and a half miles from campus, and there’s a bus line a
block and a half away, so it’s really easy to get there.
I thought it would be a great place, though off campus, it’s a great place to have a guesthouse
for Evergreen people. But now, it just seems ridiculous to even think about it, because I know there
would have to be something like a half-time staff person to be running it, and nobody would want it.
What’s been very sad for me is that neither has the college extended itself to ask for any more help—
well, they now put on cocktail parties instead of teas. [laughing] Now, the Provost does a cocktail party
for us every year.
Taylor: Yeah, that has happened the last couple years, I guess.
Allen: Michael Zimmerman started that, actually.
Taylor: But I always thought that it’s a waste, too, because if they would reach out—now, I did hear a
good thing recently. Do you remember Stone Thomas?
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: He’s been invited to come back to the college.
Allen: Wow.
Taylor: I think he was some high-level administrator in California. I think he’s there now, as just an
advisor/consultant.
Allen: Cool.
Taylor: I think he came to the college maybe the third or fourth year, and he stayed for a good long
time.
Allen: Mm-mm, he did.
Taylor: He was a friend of Rudy Martin. He was very instrumental in kind of setting a mood or tone for
the college. Maybe he can help get us back to that place.
Allen: That would be great.
Taylor: Yeah, that was good. Are there any other things that you want to talk about? When you were
talking now, I was just thinking that we started this conversation with your waking up at night, and going
out into your living room when you were four, and seeing your father reading, deciding that you wanted
to learn to read right then, and making up your mind—probably about at that point—that you were
made to be a teacher.
Allen: Well, it took till third grade. [laughing]
12

Taylor: Looking back on what you’ve done in your life, you knew, and you did.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: That strikes me that it worked out. You knew what you wanted to do, and you put yourself in a
situation, and got recognized. You have never changed on that score. You knew. Even up to teaching
the Gypsies in Spain, that was your instinct, to teach.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: That’s who you are.
Allen: Yeah. In that regard, I guess that’s the thing that I remember most about Evergreen, it’s almost
like it was some supernatural event that happened. There were really huge coincidences surrounding it.
Like the fact that I had my first contact with Evergreen on the day I was fired from my previous job.
[laughing] That was just incredible! Even though I knew I had submitted my application and everything,
I had no idea that anything was going to come of it, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be on the same day
that I got fired—which I also didn’t expect. That came out of the clear blue sky when I was teaching at
this place in Virginia.
The whole way that Evergreen came into my life was just . . . the first person who said the name
to me was one of my really good friends, who was the dean who had hired me at the last place I taught
before Evergreen. He is the person who told me about it first. Certainly, I thought there were many
drawbacks in the beginning, and I was mostly focused on the sexism of the place. But, as it worked out
over the decades I taught there, it was really exactly what I needed to be doing in my life. I needed
exactly to be team teaching, because I was really shy, it was hard for me to talk to people. I could do
that much easier if I was around people I knew and saw all the time. That would have been much
different from a regular college. My writing would have been completely different from a regular
college, and I would not have been learning and teaching with people of different fields all the time.
Those things were amazing for me. I’m really glad they happened.
And, I haven’t stopped teaching. That’s another thing. Here, there’s a completely different
environment than Spain about doing volunteer work. There’s people who need my particular skills, and
who want to be taught to talk, for example. I don’t have to be in somebody else’s classroom. I can just
have individuals to tutor, or I can have my own classroom. I tutor Latina women, and my most recent
students have been doing GED programs. That’s very satisfying. I have lots of good friends because of
that work. It’s getting more difficult for those people because of Trump, so I’m going to stay involved
with that community.
Taylor: Okay.
13

End Part 2 of 3 of Nancy Allen on 9-13-17
Begin Part 3 of 3 of Nancy Allen on 9-13-17
Taylor: It’s still September 13, Wednesday afternoon, and Nancy Allen and I are here at Nancy’s dining
room table. We decided that we would just have a conversation, the two of us, rather than it being an
interview, since we started at the college almost at the same time, and our experiences go together, and
diverge in different ways. It’ll be kind of fun to just talk about what our reactions were, rather than just
asking questions of one person. This seems to work. We decided to start with the whole notion of,
when we arrived at Evergreen—I arrived in 1970, you arrived in 1971, I think.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: It was an interesting time, in terms of women, and Nancy’s first response was she was
absolutely flabbergasted that she came to such a sexist institution. I don’t know that I had that same
reaction. I guess I want to know what you meant by that. You might have to repeat it, but you might
say something about the macho Willi Unsoeld’s style, but I don’t know that that was going on.
Allen: Oh, of course it wasn’t all.
Taylor: I mean, that was sexist. It was just one part.
Allen: Okay, how many parts can I think of? [chuckles] The part that affected me the most, I do think
that a considerable amount of machismo that went on at the college had to do with outdoor stuff—
climbing Mount Everest, rescuing people from mountains, things like that—and that that was promoted
by Willi Unsoeld. It’s what he wanted to be doing in his programs, and he, I think, was instrumental in
hiring several other people of this type, who were interested in the same kind of things. That’s a
particular kind of macho, though. That’s not just sexism in itself. That’s some kind of outdoor heroism
idea, which I think was prevalent. Or, at least I felt like it was prevalent, because when I came to
Olympia for the first time to go to the first meeting of all the new faculty that had been hired with the
old faculty, I had heard so much about Willi Unsoeld making people repel off cliffs that I expected I was
going to have to repel off a cliff probably, and I was scared to death about that.
That, I think, is one of the casts that there was to the sexism, but the part of the sexism that
really influenced me was that I just wasn’t taken seriously as a teacher. I remember being quite mouthy
about this. Richard Jones, who was the coordinator of my first program, had some ideas about
authority. He would be kind of telling us about these ideas, as if he’s encouraging us to be this way, and
have this kind of authority.

14

I said to him at some point, “Well, Richard, where does this authority come from? Is it just born
into you, or where does it come from?” He said, “Authority comes from the father.” [laughing] I said,
“Well, Richard, I’m never going to be a father, so does that mean I can never have authority?” He said,
“I don’t know.” [laughing] He really wouldn’t discuss it with me, and he was just completely
uninterested.
So, I went through a whole lot of struggles about whether I had authority; whether I could have
authority; how you went about having authority. Did I have to act more masculine? Could I be an
authority as a woman? If I was an authority as a woman, did that mean I was a mother? [laughing]
Taylor: Did you have conversations with other faculty that first year? I think there were eight women
hired the first year. I don’t know if you call it sexism, it was just, to me, the beginning was the men
seemed oblivious to think that they would start a college with 17 planning faculty, and not a single
woman.
Allen: Exactly! Somebody from outside would have to tell them this.
Taylor: Yeah. But there was a recognition that they needed to hire women, and so they hired eight the
first year. I remember Jolene Unsoeld saying, very publicly—I don’t know if you remember this story?
Allen: No. I think I probably heard it.
Taylor: She was very public. It was the planning year, before you came, and when we were having
people come in for interviews. She said, “What Evergreen needs is we don’t need to hire women—you
don’t need to hire women—you need to hire men with strong wives.” [laughter] That was her
sentence.
Allen: Yeah, okay!
Taylor: That was where the college—well, not where the college was, but where she was. So then,
there were these eight women, and I know that I got hired, not as a faculty, but as an admissions
person, because Joe Shoben, who was the Vice President for everything but academics, whatever that
would have been.
Allen: Business . . .
Taylor: . . . admissions and registration and financial aid and student services. He went through
applications looking for women, and found my application. It was just a written application, and he was
looking to hire women. So, he was aware.
Allen: That’s interesting.
15

Taylor: The other person who was aware was Larry Stenberg. But that was on the student services side,
it wasn’t on the faculty side. I don’t know whether Evergreen just was out of it, and behind the times, or
whether—this was 1970—were we a backwater? I don’t know.
Allen: First of all, whoever hired the planning faculty was able to hire a group of all men without
questioning it, and wasn’t looking for any women. That would suggest that consciousness hasn’t risen
very far about this issue in the early 1970s, maybe anywhere, except that I was already teaching
women’s studies at my former institution. That was Virginia, so you would definitely not expect Virginia
to be that far advanced in any way. But I hadn’t gotten those ideas in Virginia, I had taken them there.
Taylor: The planning faculty was made up of cliques, of friends of friends, almost all. But why they
didn’t . . .
Allen: That’s what I think is the main explanation. First of all, those guys had been given complete
freedom, and they had hired in ways that would never be acceptable now. They had just hired their
friends.
Taylor: Right.
Allen: Here’s this whole group of guys on this campus, which isn’t quite built yet, having theoretical
discussions about what kind of a college they want, and not noticing they have no women until women
tell them this. [laughing] I think it was just that they were probably really wildly excited, and had no
idea what they were doing, and were just sort of muddling around.
Taylor: Actually, the same thing was not just with women, but with people of color. Rudy was hired.
Allen: And Gil Saucedo.
Taylor: He wasn’t in the planning. Only Rudy.
Allen: I thought there was a Native American guy.
Taylor: No. Mary Hillaire was hired, but she didn’t come for the first year.
Allen: That’s right.
Taylor: But Rudy, the planning faculty were planning the curriculum for whatever for the opening year.
At the very end, Rudy said, “We’ve got to have some acknowledgment of students of color.” So, he
designed a program—it was real last minute—it was called Contemporary American Minorities, and he
hired two people, Merdardo Delgado and Darrell Phare. So, there was a Native American, there was a
Hispanic, and Rudy. Three men. But that’s the only reason they had that program. It was just right at
the very beginning.
16

I think it was both the planning faculty was cliques of friends, and they were interested in
pedagogy, or innovation having to do with curriculum, but they weren’t interested in social issues, or
any of that, it seemed like. Later on, there was a lot of talk about social justice, but there wasn’t at the
beginning.
Allen: No, yeah.
Taylor: There was educational conflicts, but women were just afterthoughts.
Allen: Yes.
Taylor: I don’t know when it changed, but it changed dramatically. By the time Barbara Smith came, or
Jane Jervis came, women were running the place.
Allen: That’s what it felt like.
Taylor: I don’t know. Did it become less sexist? Did it become more welcoming? Did it change its
attitude? I don’t know.
Allen: No, I don’t think it was anything organized at all, but I think that women caused it, having more
women. I’m sure that after the first year, when there were eight, the second year there would have
been more, and the third year there would have been more. I don’t have the statistics about how
quickly that went up, but what I remember very clearly about when I stopped thinking that it was
terribly sexist, and started thinking that, although nothing was official and recognized and written down,
that we were okay, and that women were running the place. [laughing] This is a step on the way to
that. When there was a big enough critical mass of women on the faculty that a lot of women started
deciding that they wanted to teach with other women, and there were all these all-women teams. The
deans got very concerned about it, because the sexes were not teaching together. Surprise, surprise.
They tried some programs where there was a consistent effort to make sure the faculty team
was gender balanced, and women didn’t always like those programs very much. [laughing] But it was
very clear that women preferred to work with women a lot, and I’m not sure that that’s ever changed,
actually.
Taylor: That changed for me. For the longest time, I didn’t teach with women, and then at some point, I
switched, and I only taught with women. Maybe that was true of a lot. I don’t know when that
happened, but my last teaching was almost all with women.
Allen: Yeah, right. Mine, too. Part of that was that I was teaching in core programs. The last three
years that I taught before retirement, when I only taught one quarter a year, I would always teach fall
17

quarter, and I would always teach a core program, and there would always be some new faculty in it.
Every time, I think, those were women. I don’t think they put any male new faculty [chuckles] into my
teams. I liked doing that, because it meant I had friends among the younger women when I left.
Taylor: By now, I think it’s almost 50-50, so there’s a lot more opportunity to teach with women.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: And women got stronger, and took a stronger leadership role in the college. When we had the
meetings at your house for LLyn De Danaan, that was when LLyn said something like “Nobody’s taking
me seriously, and unless I get support, I’m quitting.” That was the first, I think, acknowledgment that
maybe there was something. But once Barbara was hired, I don’t think people talked that way anymore.
I don’t know.
Allen: Well, probably not in groups where Barbara was. [laughter]
Taylor: I mean in terms of hiring, I don’t know if women were privileged, where women would be more
likely to be hired than men at some point, but we certainly did hire a lot more women starting about
1979-80.
Allen: Yeah, I think we did.
Taylor: I don’t know now if there’s an underground affirmative action about hiring women and
minorities or not.
Allen: I don’t know either. Now is quite different, because now there’s a question about whether it’s
even legal to have affirmative action.
Taylor: But now, there’s a lot of pressure to hire. We used to have, in hiring, this thing called a
multicultural statement, which I thought was kind of a worthwhile exercise to go through, but I don’t
know if it made any difference. There’s talk now about making that have more teeth in it, and whether
it means that you have to have had experience, or whether you have to be a person of color to get
hired. I don’t know. That’s one of the threats that people are saying is happening.
Allen: Wow.
Taylor: I don’t know if that’s true or not. I have another sort of question that doesn’t have to do with
sexism, doesn’t have to do with social justice or any of these things.
Allen: Oh, wait. I just wanted to say one more thing about the sexism. The mountaineering stuff, the
not taking women seriously at all stuff, and then the other thing was a huge amount of sexual
harassment.
18

Taylor: That’s right.
Allen: What we would now call sexual harassment, like many male faculty who were carrying on with
students, so many who had married successive students. [chuckles] It was pretty clear that male faculty
saw women who happened to be around them on their job as sex objects a lot of the time.
Taylor: Do you remember when we had the really long faculty meeting discussions about sexual
harassment?
Allen: I do.
Taylor: It just went on and on, because it the men didn’t get it.
Allen: Yeah, they didn’t get it at all.
Taylor: They didn’t get it. I think it finally did get passed.
Allen: I remember Mark Levinsky standing up and saying that we were trying to deny that education
was an erotic activity, and it always would be, and it was just silly to try to stand in its way. [laughter]
Taylor: That was the same time when Joe Olander was President, and no women—I certainly wouldn’t,
but I think no woman would get in an elevator with him by himself.
Allen: Oh, my god! [laughing]
Taylor: I sure wouldn’t. He was blatant.
Allen: Wow.
Taylor: That was another case.
Allen: I thought it was only about Asian women. [laughing]
Taylor: No, it was about any woman.
Allen: Wow. Yeah, I remember a story. Susan Perry was the head Librarian. She had to bend over for
some reason to get something off of the floor, and he was peering down her shirt. [laughing]
Taylor: That was 10 years in, at least.
Allen: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: But you’re right. The sexual harassment, the education that had to go on. They were men of a
certain age that just didn’t get it. I don’t know if that’s still known or not.
Allen: But I interrupted you.

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Taylor: I was just going on a whole different track. There are whole lot of things about the college that,
I think, you and I hold dear, and think without these things, it isn’t the college we know. I just wonder,
when you think back on it, which ones are really important, and which ones would you go to bat for, and
which ones do you think are threatened? It’s all about keeping us from going to Brand X. It’s everything
from no departments, no grades, interdisciplinary study, team teaching, full-time teaching, no breadthdepth requirements, no hierarchy of faculty—no professor, full professor, whatever. There’s a bunch
more even. It used to be credit/no credit in the sense of all-or-no-credit.
Allen: I remember.
Taylor: The kind of community. You said earlier, you could be coordinator of a program, right at the
very beginning, with faculty that had a lot more experience that would have been full professors
somewhere else. But at Evergreen, it was whoever did the organizing was the coordinator. It wasn’t a
place of hierarchy and status. Faculty salaries were equal. That’s something that Susan Fiksdal said that
when she was hired, she was flabbergasted that she got paid the same as the men, because she had
friends at UPS or PLU that weren’t, and we were paid the same.
So, all of those things that equalized things, which ones of those are most important to you, and
if we lost them, the college would be lost? Or maybe they’re kind of all of a piece.
Allen: Yeah, they are. It wouldn’t be too hard for me to pick out my least important. But my most
important, I have this very clear memory of one faculty meeting, when we were debating getting rid of
evaluations, and going to some kind of grades. I sat there, and I thought, if they do this, I am leaving.
[chuckles] I just felt it that strongly. I feel like the evaluation system is such an important part of the
college. Yes, it’s a lot of work to write that many evaluations, but it also really helps you to know your
students better, and it makes sure that you keep good records on them during the quarter. And getting
evaluations from them is important, even if they don’t always tell you everything they think.
I almost would say that’s more important than coordinated studies. Interdisciplinary team
teaching would be the one I would put second. Maybe salary equality according to years of experience,
too.
Taylor: All three of those have been threatened. They’re still there, but they’ve been threatened in the
sense, well, if you want to get computer scientists, you’re going to have to pay them more. Now, I don’t
know if they’ve compromised on that or not, but that’s one place. We said earlier that women weren’t
respected as much, but we were at least paid the same.
Allen: Yeah, except our experience years might have been counted a little bit differently sometimes.
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Taylor: I don’t think so.
Allen: That’s great.
Taylor: It might have been different early on, but when I was dean, actually, in some ways, women
benefited, because what was counted as experience was everything. If you had taught preschool, that
counted as experience.
Allen: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: So, as long as you did that. Otherwise it would have probably gone against women, because
they had different kinds of experience. High school teaching counted, any kind of experience. So, I think
that was okay. They might not have been respected, but they were paid the same. [laughter]
Allen: That’s very significant!
Taylor: The team teaching has been threatened a lot.
Allen: I think it’s been threatened the most.
Taylor: I think the narrative evaluations, as a system, hasn’t been threatened, but the quality and time
spent on evaluations, people just aren’t doing it.
Allen: Yeah, I know. When I left, there were lots of faculty who basically had templates. They would
have blanks you could fill in with adjectives or something.
Taylor: Sort of saying, “This is a B- student,” and that’s what you’d fill in. I knew one guy who didn’t
even change the pronouns.
Allen: Oh, my goodness.
Taylor: Now they have special things about pronouns.
Allen: There’s a lot of issues about pronouns! [laughing]
Taylor: He wrote the same evaluation for everybody. It was identical.
Allen: Oh, my god. Who is that?
Taylor: Oh, I shouldn’t say. But that’s the only thing I didn’t like about being dean is you found out
things about people that you really didn’t want to know. But, there were grievances about whether
people did evaluations, and whether people teach on teams.
Allen: Right.

21

Taylor: I think they still have that rule that you have to teach on teams, but it doesn’t look like they’re
teams. I’m such a purist on it, and when you teach on a team, you teach on a team. You don’t have five
people teaching who are under the umbrella of a team.
Allen: Yes, right. You meet with each other, and you go to each other’s lectures, and you have a
seminar once a week.
Taylor: Faculty seminar in that first thing that we had was a joke.
Allen: Yes. [laughing]
Taylor: For me, faculty seminar was the only reason I could teach. The faculty seminar was sacred. It
wasn’t to talk about how to teach it, it was to feel confident enough that when we were reading Don
Quixote that I understood what in the world was important, and had a chance to talk about it.
Allen: Right.
Taylor: My best memories are from faculty seminar, so that’s another one of those sacred ones. But I
suspect that if we talked to faculty today, they wouldn’t have the same feelings we do, certainly about
team teaching, and about interdisciplinary focus.
Allen: Mm-mm.
Taylor: I don’t know what they would value the most.
Allen: I just don’t know what’s different about Evergreen, if anything is anymore. Maybe it just is Brand
X, only it thinks it’s different in some way, or it has a different history or aura or something. [chuckles]
But I really don’t know how different it is. Student talking might have something to do with it. I bet
students still have seminar more than they do in other places.
Taylor: Yeah. I still think the faculty-student relationship is significantly different from other places, the
ones I know of. I think you and I are not unique, although we both had the same approach. We knew
our students really well, I did and you did.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: When we wrote evaluations, it wasn’t boilerplate, because we knew, and the students say that
about us. We invested our lives in those students.
Allen: Mm-mm.
Taylor: When I talk to my relatives, who are now freshmen in college, they talk about faculty as “Oh,
that’s a good one,” or, “That’s a good one.” But it’s not because they know them. It’s because they’re
22

learning something. Just like my connections with faculty from my own experience, not a single one
would recognize me if they saw me on the street, and I probably have a thousand students who would
recognize me if they saw me on the street.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: I’ve run into people. “Didn’t I know you at Evergreen?” they’d say, and find them in Anacortes
or somewhere.
Allen: I’ve had people I don’t even recognize come up and say, “I went to Spain with you.” [laughing]
Taylor: I think that still is the case.
Allen: Yeah, that’s good.
Taylor: I hope so, but I think that still is fundamental.
Allen: Even Michael Zimmerman, of not very great fame in this discussion, I was talking to him about
what I thought was the nature of the college these days, and he just blew. He said that he thought it
had less community than any other campus he’d ever been on; that the faculty knew each other less,
and were less friendly, and had less to do with each other. I was quite amazed by that.
Taylor: I wonder if that’s true now.
Allen: I don’t know. He said it was. He said it absolutely blew him away; that he’d been on lots of other
campuses that weren’t like this.
Taylor: But maybe it has something to do with him.
Allen: Well, I don’t know.
Taylor: Joe Olander used to say that, too.
Allen: He did?
Taylor: He said, “Nobody ever invited me to dinner.”
Allen: Oh, well, this wasn’t like that. These people don’t invite each other to dinner.
Taylor: I don’t know. Eventually, there were cliquish groups, but early on in the college, I think we had
a lot of friends in the college.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: Back to the sexism thing, I think the women bonded.
Allen: Yeah, I think so, too.
23

Taylor: We can name people, a lot of people that left, but a lot of people stayed for their whole career.
Allen: Yeah, they did. I wonder if they still do, though.
Taylor: Maybe we’re nostalgic because we were so much part of the beginning.
Allen: Yeah, and we loved it so much.
Taylor: I’m just like you. It was pretty much my life. Even when I got married, the thought that I would
live in Seattle didn’t enter my mind. There were people that commuted from Seattle.
Allen: A lot of people.
Taylor: That’s not the kind of relationship I wanted with the college. I couldn’t punch the clock.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: I don’t know if there are people like that now or not, and I don’t know if that’s more women
than men.
Allen: I don’t know. I just feel really out of it. I’m very ignorant about what’s going on. Oh, I was
involved in one thing that the college asked retired faculty to. There’s two things. Since Ernestine had
the teas, there have been two things. One is that we’re invited to read scholarships.
Taylor: Oh, yeah, and I do that.
Allen: I do that every year. The other one is that they asked me last year to go to a writing workshop
that was being held for students who wanted to apply for scholarships. There was a writing workshop
about how to write your letter of application, and explain how wonderful you were, and why you
deserved this scholarship. So, I went. It was supposed to have a breakout period, where we could take
some students and advise them on their own. They wanted a bunch of people there to do it, and they
never broke up, so I never did talk to just students.
Taylor: Would that have been something good? Would you go back to do that if they did it right?
Allen: Yeah, I kind of thought it was useful, because I thought that my take on how to do the workshop
[laughing] was much better than the instructor’s. There were some student interns from the writing
center who were doing the workshop. It was all nuts and bolts. It was all about how you’ve got to have
an introduction and a body and conclusion. [chuckles]
I put up my hand at the end, when we were sort of debriefing, and I said, “You know, if you’re
trying to convince me about a scholarship, I want you to knock my socks off in some way. I’m not going
to comb over it and see if you have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. I want you to really
24

impress the hell out of me. I want you to tell me a story. I want you to tell me something about you and
your involvement with whatever you want to study that’s really impressive.”
I would have had everybody writing stories about the best thing they ever did in school. I don’t
know.
Taylor: If they asked you to do that again, would you do it?
Allen: Yeah, probably. I love reading the scholarship applications, actually.
Taylor: I do, too. You always want to give them all, because they are people who have nothing, and
need help and deserve the help.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: I wonder if it would be a good idea, or even an idea worth pursuing, if a bunch of us went and
talked to the new Provost.
Allen: Yeah. I’m going to go talk to the new Provost, but I think a group would be even better. I don’t
know who else should be on it.
Taylor: I don’t either. And it’s not only about offering to help, offering to be involved in some way with
the college that we were part of for so long. It’s genuinely helping, genuinely giving some advice about
what it ought to be.
Allen: Yeah, like do they accept our authority at all anymore? [chuckles]
Taylor: Or, what advice would we give them that might improve things? Because the college is in
trouble.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: It’s in trouble in lots of ways. It’s in trouble in enrollment, it’s in trouble with retention, it’s in
trouble with curriculum.
Allen: What’s the retention? It seems to me that the thing to look at the most would be the retention.
Right now, there’s a clear and obvious reason that you might have retention problems, after this
incident.
Taylor: Yeah, I think a number of people aren’t coming back. But also, I don’t think the faculty is very
together about . . .
Allen: . . . pushing for anything.
Taylor: . . . about what the college is, and why people should come.
25

Allen: Exactly.
Taylor: I think they have lost community.
Allen: The main thing I would want to say to the faculty is “This is an innovative institution. You don’t
have to have the innovation that we did, but you need to have an innovation. What’s your innovation?”
Taylor: I thought that, too. We were in a time when it was an educational organization and principles
that were threatened, I mean, relevance and change and all that. We responded to that, and I think you
still should respond to that. But there’s different pressures now. If they would dream up a college that
somehow served people whose parents had never gone to college—there’s this whole population—and
if they decide that, okay, this is who we’re going to serve, and we’re going to figure out the best way to
serve them, and we’re going to be known for doing something special. That’s just one example.
Allen: Yeah. I told Helena Knapp this story that I got from a Return to Evergreen. I went to Return to
Evergreen maybe four years ago, and it’s the first time I’d ever gone.
Taylor: I’ve never been.
Allen: But it was very interesting. One thing they have at Return to Evergreen is they have scholarship
students who are graduating speak to you, and tell you what it meant to get this scholarship at
Evergreen that they got. There are only three or four of them, and they speak for 10 minutes apiece or
something. But this one guy, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room when this guy was talking. We were all
just weeping, because he was a black guy, and he had been in prison. He had been in prison one
weekend before starting Evergreen. When he was in prison, he had finished up his high school work,
and took his GED, and got everything together. He was very good. He was very bright, and he was
determined to be very bright by the people that were teaching him in the prison. [chuckles] So, he got
out of prison, and he had one weekend at home, and then he went to Evergreen for his first day.
He was in Matt Smith’s seminar, and he went out of Matt Smith’s seminar for the first seminar
of the year, I guess, and he came out and thought, I can’t do this. This is just awful. I can’t be with these
people, I can’t do this. He was sitting up on the grassy knoll, thinking about how he was going to leave,
and Matt comes walking by. Matt says, “Hey, come talk to me a little bit.” So, the guy goes down and
talks to Matt, and Matt says, “What are you thinking?” He says, “Oh, I just can’t stand it. I just can’t
stand it. It’s just too different. I can’t get along with people like this. I just can’t do it.” Matt says, “Yes,
you can. You’re going to be great. Show up tomorrow, and bring you’re A-game.” [laughter]

26

That’s all he said, and the guy did. From then on, he was hooked, just because the teacher
encouraged him to stay. That’s just such an amazing story. And he was graduating and heading for
Eastern, or I don’t remember what other college. Maybe WSU. He was going and study biology.
Taylor: But he did it.
Allen: Yeah, and he was great.
Taylor: It was just that little acknowledgment.
Allen: Yeah, and a little personal contact with your teacher, which doesn’t happen.
Taylor: I think that’s the same thing with Trelton. “Are you in college, or aren’t you?”
Allen: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.
Taylor: It’s just that same. Make contact. “I care about you. You can do it, just give yourself a chance.
We’ll be here for you.”
Allen: Yeah. I told that story to Helena, and Helena said, “You know what? I actually think that
Evergreen does its best with students like that, with students who are untraditional students in most
colleges, and couldn’t get through. But you can’t exactly advertise. [laughing] “Send us all your excons.” [laughter]
Taylor: But it’s true. I guess a student that’s going to do well no matter what does well, and you don’t
hear their story because they do well.
Allen: Yeah.
Taylor: It’s true that, at least any student that I had as a freshman, there’s no way in the world they
couldn’t have talked with the faculty. We had conferences all the time.
Allen: Right.
Taylor: You didn’t have to be brave and say, “Okay, I’ll go talk to the faculty at office hours.” That was
not an option. That’s another thing, it seems to me, if they did program planning—I don’t know if they
do program planning anymore—but faculty teams that are relatively new, or people that could ask for a
retired faculty to be a consultant.
Allen: Yeah. Like we could be the visitors.
Taylor: Yeah, we could be the visitors. We even could be the visitors in the regular Danforth way. But
just in team planning. We used to have those Washington Center meetings, where they had a kibitzer.
Do you know that term?
27

Allen: Yeah, I know the term.
Taylor: Yeah, they had teams from all the different community colleges that were planning—
Allen: Pat Labine used to use that term.
Taylor: They would have maybe 10 people from Evergreen that would go off on these retreats, and you
would be a kibitzer in a community college team, just because we have had a lot of experience. If
they’re receptive to that, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just the idea of having a conference
with every student within the first couple weeks for 10 minutes. I don’t know when I hooked onto that,
but I did that almost always, and it just started people off.
Allen: That’s about small student-faculty ratio, and it’s requiring students to talk—so, having seminar,
so you can pick up something about what’s going on with them in other ways than their writing. Yeah,
those are good things.
Taylor: Because, in the end, it’s about motivation to learn. If they feel that you’re invested in them, it
works. That’s one, and the other side of it is the program has to be well designed. There has to be
something that’s worthy of being taught.
Allen: It has to be coherent, and if it’s a team, the faculty need to really be a team.
Taylor: Yep, and I always said—I learned this from Hiro Kawasaki. Did you ever teach with Hiro?
Allen: No.
Taylor: Hiro is wonderful to teach with. Hiro was the one that would dream up programs. He genuinely
believed in having a question that he didn’t know the answer to that was really substantive, and that
didn’t have an answer, but had an answer that had to be worked on for a year.
Allen: Wow.
Taylor: And it had to have input from lots of different disciplines in order to get at it.
Allen: Can you give me an example of such a question?
Taylor: The one that I taught with him was: Can Japan be modern without being Western? It was a
content question.
Allen: Yeah, that’s really good.
Taylor: It was puzzling to people. It meant that we learned Japanese, we did Japanese literature, we did
history, we did all this stuff, and he kept asking. The question was genuine to him. He came to it

28

genuinely wanting to know. Can a country be modern in this day and age without being Western, or are
they synonymous? It worked for a whole year.
I also taught with him in a program that wasn’t quite as good, but it was: What is the
relationship between love and work?
Allen: That’s a little more obvious. It’s a little bit like Freud and Marx or something.
Taylor: Yeah. I ended up not liking programs that had “and,” and you talk in glowing terms about when
you learned Islam.
Allen: Crescent, Cross and Cupola. [laughter]
Taylor: That was an “and” with three things connect. But three things connected, or two things
connected, don’t bring a question.
Allen: That’s true.
Taylor: You need a question rather than just a topic.
Allen: Yes.
Taylor: I think it matters to have a theme that is intriguing, and that works.
Allen: Yes, and that is relevant to . . .
Taylor: So I’m going to turn this off. I think we’re finished, don’t you?
Allen: Yeah.
End Part 3 of 3 of Nancy Allen on 9-13-17

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

AllenNancy_20170329_TranscriptPart1.pdf

AllenNancy_20170329_TranscriptPart2.pdf

AllenNancy_20170414_TranscriptPart3.pdf

AllenNancy_20170913_TranscriptPart4.pdf