Susan Aurand Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

AurandSusan

Title

Susan Aurand Oral History Interview

Date

13 September 2021

26 September 2021

Creator

Susan Aurand

Contributor

Susan Fiksdal

extracted text

Susan Aurand
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 13, 2021
FINAL
Fiksdal: I’m here with Susan Aurand on Monday, September 13, 2021. This is Susan Fiksdal. We’re
going to start Susan’s oral history. We’re going to begin with a question about your childhood and
where you grew up. I’m really interested to know about your years in high school, and how you might
have thought about college, whether your parents graduated from college, that sort of thing.
Aurand: I was born in 1950 in Indianapolis, but then we moved to central Ohio, and I grew up in central
Ohio just north of Columbus.
My parents had both graduated from college. My mother was, first, a speech therapist, and
then later went back and got her master’s degree as a school psychologist. They were the first
generation of their families to go to college, and college was a big deal. My dad waited to retire until
the last of ultimately was eight kids got through college. For him, that was his job was to get us through
college.
That was an expectation, although for women, for the girls—we were mostly girls—there was
not expectation that you did anything with a college education apart from being a support to your
husband, temporarily working if he wasn’t the fulltime breadwinner that a man should be in that era. It
was a very conservative, religious upbringing. The ‘60s passed way overhead over my area of Ohio, I
vaguely knew that that was happening, but it did not impact me at all. I was very sheltered. Nice—a
very sheltered and safe feeling childhood.
Fiksdal: Were you in a small town?
Aurand: We were in a small town. First, Reynoldsburg, which is a suburb community, and then
Worthington on the north side of Columbus. But mostly, it was just that my parents were both quite
religious. My dad was working as an aeronautical engineer with government contracts, and impressed
on us that if we ever got in trouble he would lose his job, so we were squeaky clean kids. What can I
say?
I loved school, and I was the second child. I was in that fortunate position in the family where
my older sister tested all the limits, got in trouble, thought she was paving the way for freedom, and all I
had to do was do the opposite. I got what I wanted by being sneaky second kid. She made me look
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good. I was the star kid because I wasn’t rebelling. I got what I wanted by conforming. I liked school. I
liked all the subjects and was able to do well. Most of school is showing up and doing the work on time.
I loved the tasks. In high school, I was one of those geeky kids who would go home, and in
advance of a test in French, would make up a test for myself.
Fiksdal: That’s impressive. That never happened to me. [laughter] The idea never even occurred to
me.
Aurand: I would make up the whole test and then I would take the test. My grandmother had been a
schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Michigan—my dad’s mom—and I think I was destined to
teach. I liked the organization of it, the papers. When we would go to my grandmother’s house, I would
love to go get into her old desk where there were rulers and tape and pencils. It was exciting. I
remember as a kid conscripting my younger siblings into a “school” that I made up where I got to be the
teacher and they had to be the students.
Fiksdal: You had so many, that must have been quite easy to organize them. [laughter] Corral them.
Aurand: The upshot was that I did well in school. Once you start getting a bunch of As, it becomes kind
of a game to see if you can get As, and so I got all A’s throughout high school. Then it was a game of
let’s see if I can get all A’s throughout college, which I did.
Fiksdal: Where did you go to college?
Aurand: My first year, I went to Ohio State, and then transferred to Kalamazoo College, which was a
small, private, liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where my mother had gone undergraduate
studies.
I was interested in many subjects. I didn’t know what I wanted to study. I thought I’d be an
archeologist that collected fossils, all that stuff. Then I thought I’d be a psychologist like my mother,
because that was completely fascinating. She would read books to us when we were driving about
psychology.
I loved French. I loved learning a new language, and I always liked art. I could have gone to
school on an art scholarship, and I was headed to the University of Michigan as an art major. But my
mom passed away suddenly in my senior year in high school, and that changed the direction of my life
dramatically. My dad quickly married because he was left with five kids and didn’t know what to do, so
he married this nice widow who had two kids, and then they had other kids, so that’s how we wound up
with eight.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness.

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Aurand: My family suddenly dramatically changed, so I scrapped my plans to go to the University of
Michigan and wound up going to Ohio State because I wanted to be closer to this new family that
appeared.
And I scrapped plans to be an art major because my dad wasn’t particularly supportive of it. It
had been my mother who would drive me to art lessons and help me apply for art scholarships. I took
art through college—a couple of things through college—but Kalamazoo was known for its language
programs, and it was a pioneer school for foreign study and had a very tiny art department, so I thought,
well, I’ll do what it does well.
My dad said, “You should do something where you can get a job,” which meant French teaching,
so I became a French major. Studied abroad in France. Kept doing art as a minor. Prepared to teach
middle school French. Did my teaching certification. Got married. That was the other expectation in
my family is that you got married, either before you got out of college or the instant you got out of
college. [laughing] I did it the quarter before I got out of college. I tried to get out of it. Personal life is
a whole other thing.
Anyway, I lived at home the quarter before I got married. I did my student teaching and realized,
this is not my demographic, middle school kids, who really are not interested in learning a foreign
language at that point. No. I could do it now. I could enjoy that energy now, but I was too serious. I
was a very serious, straitlaced, naïve young woman.
I had this conundrum. What do I do with a major in French when I don’t want to teach it? I
applied to graduate school in art, and I had a good enough portfolio—marginally good enough—and all
these As, so I got accepted at Ohio State for graduate school. I had to make up some classes the first
semester of graduate school.
Fiksdal: I think it’s extraordinary, though. That was your minor.
Aurand: Yeah, it was a leap. It was both a leap in terms of career, and then a leap for them. They said,
“This is a risk, but obviously, you know how to learn stuff. You’ve got A’s in calculus and A’s in this and
A’s in that.” “Oh, yeah, I can learn stuff,” and I was a hard worker, so I caught up.
But graduate school is supposed to be your wonderful experience and get you connected you to
this network of people that you stay in touch with. It wasn’t that for me. It was just an unhappy—I was
back in Ohio. I was still trying to process my mother’s death. The program there was a great technical
training, but it was all male professors, one of whom was sexually harassing me and others—
undergraduate students. It was a miserable time.
Fiksdal: And you were married.
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Aurand: I was married.
Fiksdal: What was your husband doing?
Aurand: He was doing graduate work there in theater.
Fiksdal: So, you had some support. You were both in school.
Aurand: Yeah, and I had a fellowship. I had financial support. I was not happily married. I hadn’t
wanted to get married, but I did it to please my dad, to please my family. They liked him. They thought
we should. That’s another story. Anyway, my relationship wasn’t much of a support.
I was enrolled in the MFA program. I did my thesis. I did all of that stuff. What I had left to do
was one quarter of humanities, and I said, “I’m out of here.” I was so unhappy that I quit the program
early and took an MA, and they said, “You won’t get a job if you don’t have the MFA.” I said that I need
to be done. I had done all of the MFA requirements, and I had this whole background in French and
literature and other stuff. I didn’t have any shortage of humanities. I said, “That’s okay.”
I was applying for jobs and the deal I had with my husband was first one to get a job, we’ll go
there. How I wound up at Evergreen is astonishing to me because it was like the universe pointing. My
sister, two years younger, when I was just graduating from college, had gotten the very first Evergreen
catalog—which was hand calligraphied—and she read it to me. She was so excited. “There’s this new
college. You can study game theory. They do these things called programs.” I was going, “Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. I’m trying to do my student teaching. I’m trying to get ready to get married.”
Then my aunt, my mother’s twin sister—identical twin—had moved to Olympia about that time.
With my mother gone, there was nothing holding her in the Midwest anymore. She had always wanted
to move out here. She’d come out as a young woman. She moved out and she said, “You should come
out and see. They’re starting this college.”
Fiksdal: That is extraordinary. She must have been close to you if she was a twin sister.
Aurand: Oh, yeah. They were so identical they could trade places as adults.
Fiksdal: What a relief, in a way, to have someone like that.
Aurand: Yeah, and so she was living on a piece of property that backed up to the college property. I
came out and looked at it and I thought, okay, fine, I’ll apply here, among many other places.
Fiksdal: What year was that do you think?
Aurand: I came in ’73 and then applied.
Fiksdal: Because we were in the same cohort when you got a job.
Aurand: Right, so I applied. The other thing was that the year I applied, LLyn De Danaan, then LLyn
Patterson, was the Hiring Dean, and she had gone to Ohio State, and she was very disposed—it was also
4

they wanted to hire young women. On the faculty the first couple years had been an older woman
named Peggy Dickinson who taught ceramics.
Fiksdal: She was terrific.
Aurand: She was great, and she wanted to retire. So, there was a gap in ceramics, which was what my
master’s work was in, and they wanted to bump up languages, so they needed somebody in ceramics
and French.
I came out and did the whole three days of interviewing, which was a hoot. That alone is an
amazing story how they used to do interviews.
Fiksdal: You might have to explain it a little bit because actually, I was never interviewed, and I don’t
know about a three-day interview. I know all about the two-day interview. What in the world did they
do with you for three days?
Aurand: They handed me a schedule that just said this hour, go to this office. They didn’t say who I was
seeing. One time, I go into one office. I knock on the door, and I walk in, and Andrew Hanfman starts
speaking to me French. Conducts the whole interview in French. We chitchat for a while. He says,
“Thank you very much.” We’re done. I get up. I go out.
Fiksdal: That was your test, apparently.
Aurand: Then I go to the next room. I knock on the door. I walk in. Here’s Chuck Nisbet, Craig Carlson,
and Paul Sparks.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness! [laughter] What a strange mix of people.
Aurand: Right. Paul has a terrible cold. He pulls out a giant bowie knife and starts cleaning his
fingernails.
Fiksdal: Oh, my gawd. How horrifying!
Aurand: I’m still this uptight young woman—
Fiksdal: Anyone would find that gross!
Aurand: Craig Carlson asks me whether I dream in color or in black and white, and what I think of Anais
Nin. Chuck is asking, “Tell us about your experience.” I thought, this is a really interesting school. Okay.
It went on like that for three days. I never knew who I was seeing. Was this person a faculty member?
Was this person a dean?
Fiksdal: Did you get to meet any students?
Aurand: No, no students. It was the middle of summer. I don’t think they had—
Fiksdal: You and I didn’t meet.

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Aurand: No. It was the beginning of the summer, I think. Maybe students were gone. I don’t think
there were students. I don’t think there was a summer school at that time.
Fiksdal: No, there wasn’t.
Aurand: There were faculty. I’m not sure what time of year it would have been. But anyway, there
were no public presentations. It was very unlike the hiring process later. It was just, go and talk to this
person and see if what they think.
Fiksdal: Did we have a ceramics studio at that time?
Aurand: Yeah, we did.
Fiksdal: Was there a staff person in charge?
Aurand: No, so when I came on and Peggy retired, I was the staff person also, driving the lab truck up to
get 500 tons of clay.
Fiksdal: Oh, how horrible.
Aurand: Servicing the kilns. Installing the burners. All the technical stuff. I told this story the other
night because we were talking about Mount St. Helens in 1980. I was up there on a Sunday night
finishing up firing one of the big gas kilns that we had outside at that point, and the security guy comes
around and says, “Young lady, you have to go home. The ash is coming.” [laughter] Okay!
I became the technician when I came on. The ceramics studio was different than it is now. It
hadn’t been remodeled. The kilns were outdoors.
Fiksdal: But we had kilns.
Aurand: Oh, yeah. We had a big gas kiln. We had a rack—
Fiksdal: I wonder where those came from. Peggy was in ceramics then.
Aurand: Peggy was in ceramics.
Fiksdal: But she must have helped get that there.
Aurand: Yeah, she built those.
Fiksdal: Here’s a story of Peggy. She’s terrific, just a wonderful person. She’s in her office, but a whole
bunch of women are standing in there. I don’t remember why we’re all there, five of us around her
desk. She is trying to talk to us, but the phone starts to ring, and she’s just argh! We’re all just pulled in
500 directions, so I was glad to see that she was annoyed. She tries to continue talking, the phone keeps
ringing, and finally, she picks up the phone and shouts into it, “No!” And hangs up. [laughter] I never
had the guts to do something like that, but I understood the feeling completely, and I loved her
instantly.
Aurand: She was something, and she was one of the people who I walked into to interview.
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Fiksdal: But she left before you really were hired, or do you remember her being there?
Aurand: No, she left. She was there, I think, the first year that I was hired—maybe a year or two
more—but she knew she was going to retire. She was basically the one that looked at my ceramics work
and said, “I like your work,” which is interesting because one of the other troubles I’d had in graduate
school—I quickly gravitated to making sculpture, and everybody else was doing pots of one kind or
another, so nobody had anything to say to me about my work, so that was an interesting experience.
But she liked it, and even though it was a little on the dark side—I was still processing grief—
Fiksdal: How big were these sculptures?
Aurand: Some of them were six feet big.
Fiksdal: Oh!
Aurand: I had just leave it off, break it up and leave it.
Fiksdal: Oh, how awful. But you had pictures.
Aurand: Yeah, yeah. Amazingly, I got hired. There was no tenure, so it was like, well, this will be a good
first job and then I’ll figure out what I want to do with my life. Then, after the first three-year contract,
it was, this is okay. I’m really liking this. After six years, I thought, I’ve got this figured out now!
It was perfect for me because I loved that it was a chance to keep going to college, keep learning
all this new stuff. I remember having one really terrific quarter in college when all of the classes that I
took seemed to magically connect. I was taking cultural anthropology, and a psychology class, and an
art class, and a French class, all of which were about how we conceptualize the world, how we make
these models of the world, and how your language breaks up reality into these different categories, and
what the mythologies are of different cultures. It was perfect, and then you get to make art about that.
That’s really what I wound up doing most of my career at Evergreen was teaching art, not as this
thing apart from culture, but as a language that allows you to look at all of these different models of the
world. The notion of translating, I was so glad to have that language background, even though I stopped
teaching French at Evergreen, because I was good at translating one discipline to another discipline.
Teaching with a geologist, and then saying, “Okay, what about this can you think about in terms of your
own life, or your own place in history, or your own stuff?” And making connections, because it’s like
when you have a term in one language, you try to find the equivalent in your language. Just doing that
and showing people what the equivalents are.
Fiksdal: That’s a nice way of putting it. I think you’re right. I think our job was to constantly learn.
Because we had to learn something about geology so that we could do that work of coming up with
some questions and some themes and some ways of teaching.
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I wonder if we can go back for a moment to your French teaching at Evergreen, because my
memory is quite vague. I remember teaching an awful lot of French for several years.
Aurand: Yes, you did.
Fiksdal: I didn’t teach programs until something like 1979, because, in fact, we didn’t know how to do
that. No one did. Not me, not anyone else. I did corral you into a summer class on year, which was just
so fun.
Aurand: It was a summer intensive. That was really fun.
Fiksdal: We just really enjoyed it. I don’t know what the students thought, two Susans teaching
French. [laughter] It was really kind of funny also. But we were both quite serious. I remember giving
the second-year students a history book to read in French, and I made sure they did it. They were not all
that advanced, but it was fabulous. We had such good students. Tell me about the other French
teaching that you did there.
Aurand: I’m trying to remember. I was trying to remember whether that was the only French teaching I
did. Let me see.
Fiksdal: I remember that I found that you had French in your background. I asked you, and you were a
little unsure of whether you wanted to do it or not.
Aurand: I think that may have been the only one. Because that was the summer of 1975.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s it. There was a summer quarter by then, apparently.
Aurand: There was.
Fiksdal: I’m so glad I got to teach with you then because it was my first team teaching experience.
Aurand: Right. But right after that, by ’76, I was the ceramics person.
Fiksdal: I see, so Peggy had then left.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: And there you were. For me, I knew ceramics was your background, but all the work that I’ve
seen and loved of yours has been painting, so you’ll have to tell us that story.
Aurand: I took art through high school and did painting, and I can remember spontaneously doing this
painting that kind of scared me because in my family, you weren’t supposed to be unhappy, or if you
were unhappy, you certainly weren’t supposed to show you were unhappy or anything. I did this
painting where two people were clearly having this argument or something, and I thought, oh, no, that’s
too revealing. Let’s not do that.
Plus, my art teacher was a potter, so he I learned ceramics in high school as well, and I thought,
this is safe. But I kept gravitating toward more narrative things, which is why I wound up doing
8

sculpture in ceramics. Then I thought, I need a warehouse to store it! This is hard. Let’s just do this two
dimensionally because where are you going to put all this big stuff? I thought, maybe I need to switch
back to 2 - D; use the same ideas but do them two dimensionally, because it would be a lot easier.
That’s what happened. It was 1980, especially when I had a first sabbatical and went to France
to study symbiotics and contemporary French art.
Fiksdal: Where did you go in France?
Aurand: I lived in Paris for almost a year. Got a studio. Worked.
Fiksdal: Interesting.
Aurand: But I didn’t have any facilities. I had been doing ceramics up to that point for my own work.
Fiksdal: Were you in the Beaux Arts there?
Aurand: No, I was in up in the 19th arrondissement. I had a converted studio in a big building that was a
converted sugar warehouse. It was all artists of every stripe you could imagine. It was a whole
community of artists. It was wonderful.
But I couldn’t do ceramics, so I started doing drawings, works on paper. I’d had one painting
class in college and had to basically teach myself to paint.
Fiksdal: That’s just extraordinary.
Aurand: Read a book and teach yourself to paint. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah, why haven’t I heard that yet? Interesting. No, Susan, it is extraordinary. It is. So, you
were around a lot of other artists. Do you remember any collaboration?
Aurand: I had good friends. We didn’t do any collaborative work, but I had a printmaker who was a
good friend, and I learned monoprinting from him. Another friend was a book artist, both of which I do
now, monoprinting and book arts.
Fiksdal: Wow. Was it international or were they mostly French artists?
Aurand: The printmaker was a Dutch artist.
Fiksdal: What about your husband?
Aurand: I was divorced by then. I was single. Back to the French teaching, no, I didn’t do much with it.
I always encouraged students, and because I knew a lot of the French history, especially the French art
history, I did a lot of teaching of that as part of any program.
Fiksdal: I think you came as a guest lecturer a couple times to my program. That was a big help.
Aurand: I don’t know why I didn’t teach French. I think because other arts faculty were already taking
students to France and Europe—Gordon Beck and then Bob Haft—that I didn’t. I think I shied away

9

from the responsibility of taking students overseas, especially after your stories about taking students to
Mexico. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I have so many stories, yeah. To Mexico, yeah, that was big. That was in the ‘70s, and I had
even more adventures with the French students. I agree. Not only a huge responsibility. You just don’t
know what’s going to happen.
Aurand: Yeah, you don’t know.
Fiksdal: I’m thinking, let’s take a break.
[recording stopped]
Okay, so here we are back. I wanted to ask you, Susan, let’s go back to when you first came to
Evergreen. In languages, I didn’t team teach for quite a while, but apparently, you did, so I was
wondering if you could talk about those early years of team teaching, and describe your programs.
Aurand: In the early years, the fashion was for large programs. The very first quarter, I taught with Earl
McNeil and Jovana Brown. She was hired as Dean of the Library, but they required her to teach a
program before she took up her deaning duties. It was called Self-Exploration Through Autobiography.
We all had to write our own autobiographies and the students wrote autobiographies. Peter Elbow was
the fourth, who was a writing instructor who wrote Writing Without Teachers. Famous book.
At the end of the quarter, we went to do our faculty evaluations at Peter’s house, and I think
Jovana was very nervous. She was very uptight. This whole team thing was not her schtick, so she
pulled out four joints and passed them around. [laughter] I’m maybe the only person in the whole
country who has never done drugs of any kind—nothing—so I thought, okay, now I know really where I
am. We all declined, but some people took them for later.
The second program was also a big program. That was just one quarter, and then the rest of the
year was Interplay of the Arts, which was also four faculty. It had me as the visual artist, Ainara Wilder
in theater, Bill Winden in music, and Bud Johanson in dance.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness! It sounds fabulous.
Aurand: It was about finding the connections between those disciplines. I was scrambling because I
didn’t have a background in performance art. We did installation stuff that I’d never done myself, but I
knew about it, so why not try it? It was wonderful because it was free rein. Did all kinds of odd
performance things. And the students were so game. They were so ready to try stuff. It was great. It
was very good.
At that point, the COM Building hadn’t even been built, but they were doing theater
productions. Ainara was doing these great theater productions in the lobby of the library.
10

Fiksdal: I remember. It was right up there in the middle of the foyer.
Aurand: Right. The following year was a year-long program with Craig Carlson, a poet.
Fiksdal: Well, you must have impressed him in that initial interview.
Aurand: Craig was smart, he was lovable, he was like this elf. But I couldn’t figure him out, and every
day he would leave me this odd little note or some cartoon or something that I just didn’t get. He would
come to campus in camouflage because he thought, if we’re really going to revolutionize education, it’s
like a war against these ingrained ideas, so he came dressed for battle. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Craig was a poet, right?
Aurand: He was a poet. Wonderful poet. I was still just like, I don’t get this. I was still very, very
serious. Then he was sick for six weeks, and I didn’t even know you could ask for help, so I was teaching
my seminars and his seminars, supervising my students’ projects and his. But we got through it, and we
had a good time.
Here’s a remarkable thing. His booklist for that program had 100 books on it. He made the
bookstore order all of them.
Fiksdal: I can’t believe they did it.
Aurand: I said, “Do you expect the students to read them all?” He said, “No, but they should know
these books.” For me, it had everything from the Tao Ching on it to . . . it was a remarkable . . . I’m
blanking now on some of the other books, but it was like everything you wish you had read—novels,
philosophy, all kinds of stuff. Because he just thought everybody should in their lifetime read these
books.
Fiksdal: It was almost like a Great Books list?
Aurand: It was like a Great Books list.
Fiksdal: You only had one book a week as usual, right?
Aurand: Yeah, we had one. [laughing] I said, “Which one?”
Fiksdal: Thirty out of the 100 that you read.
Aurand: The thing is, I held onto that. I’m sure a number of students did. I hung on to that list and
chipped away at it for years. I’m still working on it. I thought, this is great. Because it trusted that what
the students really wanted was to be educated. It had the Tibetan Book of the Dead on there. These
things that, okay, open your mind, find out about other cultures, find out about philosophy, read this
great book of poetry, read this novel. Understand, so you can make your own mind up. That was the
premise of it, instead of, “Here, I have all the knowledge, and I’m just going to spoon feed you this.”
Fiksdal: Do you remember, were the students writing poetry and doing ceramics?
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Aurand: I was a little bit of an idiot at that time, so I think at that point, was I doing ceramics? I can’t
remember. I was running a photography workshop and I was running maybe a drawing workshop and
maybe a ceramics workshop, plus the seminars. He was doing the writing, a poetry workshop, I forget.
Because I just wanted to do all these different things. I know, we asked the students what they wanted
to learn. That was it.
Fiksdal: Always a good idea.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: Then you’re really stuck. [laughing]
Aurand: Then you’re stuck with teaching six different things.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Aurand: I was running my tail off that program, but it was great. Then I taught with him years later a
program on Rumi. It was the ecstatic poems of Rumi, and it was called I Want Burning, which is a line
from a Rumi poem, and realized that if you want to have a happy program, make the topic a happy
topic. [laughter] We had not a single complainer or whiner or depressed student in the Rumi program.
They came in. They were like, I am ready to be ecstatic today. I’m ready to make wonderful, happy art
and read ecstatic poetry all day long. [laughing]
Fiksdal: That’s just fabulous. I was just listening to a podcast this morning that Rumi was born in, I
think, northwestern or northern Afghanistan before he was in Turkey. But back then, there weren’t the
same borders as today.
The earlier experience with Craig was good, and so you chose to teach again together.
Aurand: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: Did he do the same thing? Leave notes every day?
Aurand: No. By then, I got it. What he was trying to do was get me to think a little bit outside my very
conservative Ohio upbringing and have a sense of humor, so we had a wonderful time the second time.
It didn’t bug me, these little notes.
Fiksdal: Do you miss him?
Aurand: I miss him terribly.
Fiksdal: He died.
Aurand: He drowned. He was on vacation with his family in Costa Rica and got out too far swimming,
off the beach.
Fiksdal: There was this rumor that he might have killed himself.
Aurand: No.
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Fiksdal: It was terrible to think of that.
Aurand: No.
Fiksdal: I’m glad it wasn’t true.
Aurand: No
Fiksdal: Were there other memorable programs in those early years?
Aurand: The next year was the first Foundations of Visual Art program, which then became a repeating
mainstay program for a while, and then it changed names. But in the visual arts, it was an attempt to
just start organizing—that was, I don’t know, 1976-77, and people were starting to make noises about,
well, how do we build skills in some sequential way? Should we have something that is entry-level in
this area, and then a middle thing, and then advanced work? Because at the beginning, nobody worried
about, how do you follow up on building skills in a particular discipline?
That was me, Paul Sparks, Stan Klyne, and Phil Harding. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Quite a cast of characters there.
Aurand: Of course, they made me be the coordinator. It’s like the woman gets to be the coordinator.
That was a crazy program. Paul was great at coming up with these brilliant ideas and then getting me to
do the work. He says, “We should have a Beaux Arts ball.” Like they did in Paris. “We should have a
Beaux Arts ball.”
The next thing I know, I’m hiring steel drum bands from Seattle to come down, and we rented
the fairgrounds. I’m teaching a printmaking class to make posters. I taught silk screening to make
posters. They were making radio spots to publicize. And costumes. On top of all the regular work in the
program.
Fiksdal: This wasn’t part of the program?
Aurand: It was part of the program. When was it supposed to happen? I think it was in the spring, so
we’d done drawing and painting and sculpture and all kinds of stuff. I think it was the last quarter. I
hope it was.
Anyway, it was quite the event. It got so well publicized that people came from Vancouver,
Canada, and we were turning people away at the door, and I thought, I’m going to jail because we’re
way over the limit.
It was quite the event, but it was an example of the kind of chutzpah and energy the faculty had
in those early years, and the sense that this is part of the educational experience. Let’s try it. The whole
culture was so much less litigious, so you could try stuff that now you’d go, oh, no, the liability risk on

13

that is way too great—no, I will not do that. But then it was like, this would be great, and it’ll be great
for the students. We managed to pull it off and have a great time.
Fiksdal: That is quite a memory. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Paul Sparks. You taught
with him again, or was that the one time?
Aurand: I taught with him again. The second time I taught with him, he was having a very hard time. He
was going through a very not-fun divorce, so women were not high on his list. He was very
unsupportive. He was demeaning—he would call my teaching into question in front of the students.
Fiksdal: Oh, no.
Aurand: For example, I was teaching the life drawing section, and he’d say, “Who needs to learn life
drawing?”
Fiksdal: Oh, for heaven’s sakes.
Aurand: It wasn’t my teaching. It was just teaching basic drawing. “Well, you don’t need to learn basic
skills.” Dadadadada.
Fiksdal: Which is the foundation, I thought.
Aurand: He also didn’t believe. He just needed to do something in art meetings with the arts faculty
during that period. If we would debating these different ways of structuring the arts curriculum, and if
he proposed an idea and it was recognized as a good idea, he would come around 180 degrees. Then
he’d disagreed with it, even though he had proposed it, because he couldn’t stand to have people agree
with him. He needed to be in attack mode, and he was definitely in attack mode. I’ve even repressed
the name of the program we taught.
Fiksdal: That’s fine.
Aurand: But it was one quarter, and after that, I said, “Paul, I love you. I’ve learned a lot from you. I
respect you as an artist. I will never teach with you again.” I wrote him an honest evaluation. He was
really good with certain students, but I got tired of having young women students come crying after
talking to him about wanting to get into his programs, and he would say, “You clearly don’t have it.”
Fiksdal: He’d have a portfolio review?
Aurand: Yeah, and he’d just tell them that their work was shit.
Fiksdal: Oh, my gawd. I remember him by reputation that he was very difficult, and that young women
had difficult with him.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I remember him just being unpleasant in faculty retreats and faculty things as well.
Aurand: Yep.
14

Fiksdal: And not for good reason. I just don’t remember. You talked about how intelligent he was.
Aurand: Oh, yeah, he was brilliant.
Fiksdal: I’m sure he was, but that didn’t come across to me.
Aurand: He’s a brilliant guy, but he was just so unhappy in himself that he really had to just tear other
people’s ideas down. It made it very difficult among the Visual Arts faculty to get coordinated and have
a direction.
I was the convener of the Visual Arts four or five different times over the years, and there were
times when I left meetings in tears after losing it and just yelling at him, because he could blow up a
meeting faster than anybody I ever saw.
Fiksdal: That’s so difficult. So divisive.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Here we are, trying to collaborate with people that are quite different than us in very many
ways.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: But someone who just sabotages, that’s really hard to hear. I’m sorry.
Aurand: I think at the beginning, there were many, many strong personalities, especially male faculty.
Fiksdal: Yes, there were.
Aurand: It was mostly male faculty. And it was good and had challenges. They were passionate about
their beliefs. The early discussions, all of those early faculty meetings, they were not about budget.
They were not about, how do we recruit students? They were about issues of pedagogy and philosophy
of education, and what are we really trying to do here? It was wonderful.
People would get up and give these sermons, inspiring sermons, about trying to educate the
whole person for a world in which the information is going to change so much that what we need to do
is we need to teach them how to learn, and how to take initiative, and how to pull together stuff from
different disciplines, because the problems are going to be so complex and multifaceted that if we’re
just doing blinkered, discipline-focused education, they’re going to be lost in the 21st Century, which is
true.
Fiksdal: You are such a good person. You went to those faculty meetings.
Aurand: Oh, yeah, they were great.
Fiksdal: I never went because they were 3:00 to 5:00. They were this impossible schedule. I had a
child and there’s no way I was waiting until 5:30 to pick her up. I just skipped all of them. Didn’t go.

15

Aurand: It was good. I never said anything. I was young, plus shy. Even at Evergreen, there was this
sort of hierarchy where the arts are looked down on, so I just stayed in the back and watched, but it was
inspiring. Richard Jones would get up and talk.
Fiksdal: When you arrived, I was so excited to meet you because you were a year younger than me.
[laughter] I was not the youngest. I was a little sorry to lose that designation, but not entirely. Because
when you’re young, and both of us just had a master’s degree, it meant that people—“people,” meaning
the men—didn’t listen to us, even when we had great ideas.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: Sometimes our ideas would come up again but voiced by a male voice.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: I just remember that time as being so, so difficult. I wonder if you remember some of the
women’s meetings that we had.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I remember joining seminars, and we read all this women’s history and women’s literature.
Aurand: I didn’t join those. Later, there was a group for women who were past 40—and I thought, well,
dang it, I’m not eligible—where they got together and just talked about issues of being a woman faculty
and aging—not aging, but getting older, and so on, and had a good time and was mutually supported.
But you had to be past 40 to go.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting. I don’t remember that at all. Missed it. But in those early years, in the
‘70s, when there was a Women’s Movement going on in the world, that’s what I really latched onto, and
I remember learning so much.
Aurand: I think I learned it from particular women, from Marilyn and Sally. But again, it was all news to
me, coming from the background I had. [laughing] I felt fine about being in a prominent role within the
arts, which is why I was coordinator for the whole area a couple times. Then, when the Visual Arts sort
of seceded from the rest of the arts—because we had our own issues and building issues to deal with—
being the leader for that. I knew the personalities—it was a smaller group—and knew what the issues
were.
I don’t think I ever spoke up in a larger faculty meeting. But they were great because there was
an excitement about it. There wasn’t the sense of, oh, everything’s in crisis, even though in the ‘80s,
there was a big recession, and the college practically went into financial exigency. Faculty members are
standing up and saying, "I'll donate quarters of my pay so we don’t have to cut staff.”

16

Partly, it was an issue of scale. The college was small, and everybody could talk to everybody. It
was before the union came in, which really, in a damaging way, separated administrators from faculty.
Everybody was in the same pot and trusted—they weren’t always polite to the deans, but they trusted
that the deans were working with them for them, that the provost was. It was like, let’s sort this out
together. They were not passive about it. It’s our college. They knew it was their college.
Fiksdal: You’re making me remember that the staff that were hired in those early years were
encouraged to teach.
Aurand: Yes.
Fiksdal: We saw them as co-teachers. Some of them had actual classes. Others just taught by
mentoring students in whatever their job was. I want to go back to the ceramics studio and ask you,
when did that start getting staffed by a staff person, and how did that work out, and how did you
connect with them?
Aurand: Oh, gosh.
Fiksdal: Maybe you don’t remember all of the details, but I’m wondering, especially when you say the
Visual Arts seceded because you had building issues, that the studio space has to be in the mix. The
reason I’m asking you this, as you remember, I was Parttime Studies Dean, and it turned into Evening
and Weekend Studies.
Aurand: Mm-hm.
Fiksdal: I was always trying to figure out what we should be teaching, and who should be teaching it,
and trying to find out from the faculty what they thought.
Aurand: I was still running it, I think, up till about 1979. Then I think it was about then because I wanted
to be able to teach other stuff than just ceramics. I think the college had grown enough at that point
that we hired—it would have been Mike Moran—to be the technician. That was great because I was off
teaching more drawing and painting and 2-D work.
The Leisure Arts thing that had existed at the very beginning of the college—had been an
informal ceramics studio where over in what is now the daycare center—it was called the “Messy Arts”
Building that people could just go and make pots and stuff like that. They closed that, and there was a
lot of demand. Ceramics is always very popular, so they hired a staff person. He was the first—they had
the woodshop down in the basement of the library with Doug Hitch running that, and the photo staff,
but then the ceramics staff.
Fiksdal: Then we must have gotten a print studio.
Aurand: Yeah, very soon after that. When Lab II was built, it went down in the basement of Lab II.
17

Fiksdal: Then those staff people taught.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: And this, you saw as a help and not a problem.
Aurand: No, it was great. That whole time of trying to figure out, how are modules—they were first
called modules—going to relate to the fulltime curriculum? Do we embed them, and have the staff
person teach that as part of the program, or do the staff teach them as separate? There was a real
reluctance to start having a second parttime curriculum that students could pick and choose and cobble
together something. But it helped. It took off the load. But it did ultimately compete with fulltime
programs, for sure.
Fiksdal: I remember that students couldn’t get into those classes until they were a senior, and it was so
difficult. There was so much demand.
Aurand: Yeah, there was a lot of demand.
Fiksdal: And so sometimes in their last quarter or their last year, they would be taking a lot of art
courses, so happily. They could finally get their hands on in those studios.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: The woodshop would only accept 13 students or something? Really hard.
Aurand: Yep.
Fiksdal: Such small spaces, and such dedicated staff. Amazing.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: Thanks, that’s great. I wonder if you remember much about Evergreen—that’s still in the early
years for just a minute more—how it started growing before our eyes?
I remember one time coming out of the Library Building, and there was a lawn that hadn’t been
there before. [laughing] You were talking about the building of Lab II. Remember just the
surroundings?
Fiksdal: That must have been shocking, coming from Ohio State and even from Kalamazoo.
Aurand: Yeah. Ohio State is maybe the biggest undergraduate, or biggest campus. At least it was in the
US at that time.
Fiksdal: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Aurand: Yeah. I don’t think I was as struck by—I was aware that the buildings were being built, and I
was involved with the Visual Arts, what was called the VEG—the Visual Environments Group or
something—that was trying to get art into buildings and stuff, in advance of the State passing the One
Percent for Art law that uses some money, whenever a state building is built, for public art.
18

We had gotten the college to start setting aside that money when they were building these new
buildings. Paul Sparks and I were on that committee together, and we went up and went shopping for
art and started Evergreen’s art collection. Went around to artists’ studios in Seattle and started buying
art that is now invaluable. He really knew what he was doing. He bought photographs that are so
valuable now, the college can’t afford to exhibit them.
I was aware in that sense that things were being built. The COM Building getting built, Lab II
getting built. I helped with the design of the Arts Annex. But it was both good and bad. On the good
side, we could actually have a space that was designed to make art in. That had sinks that didn’t get
plugged up, and light. [laughter] It wasn’t a converted classroom where you had to suddenly scour
everything off the floor at the end of every quarter. Or a converted science lab where you couldn’t
move the lab tables or something.
That was nice. But the other thing was that suddenly everything’s off. You’re not seeing things.
For example, for many years before, there was a dedicated gallery. We would just have critiques when
we were using what are now science rooms and what were just classrooms, we would do our critiques
in the lobby of Lab I, because there was a big wall to hang work on. We’d have the class out there, and
faculty and other students would have to walk through the space, and they got to see student work.
Fiksdal: I loved it. I would try to go there often.
Aurand: Right. So, people who never otherwise wandered into an art space would suddenly see these
weird drawings and these contraptions that students made. I thought it was great because it was hard
to get to see what was going on in other programs.
Mainly, as the college grew, it got to be a little harder to have a sense—people started getting
more departmental yearnings. Well, we’ve got one of these and one of these and one of these, but we
could use an X to fill out our curriculum. When it was small, you had to teach with somebody outside
your discipline because there just weren’t that many people. Later, it was just harder to do the mixing to
make interdisciplinary programs. I think when Merv Cadwallader first conceptualized doing
interdisciplinary teaching, he proposed it only for the upper class.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he never wanted it for the whole college.
Aurand: He never wanted it to be for the whole college. It may have worked better had that been true.
Fiksdal: It was always something that was a dream, in a way. I don’t know how much we were able to
really do it. In other words, I had to teach French programs in order to be able to hire an adjunct and be
able to teach French on several levels. For us, it was interdisciplinary, because it was literature and
culture, ethnography, and history. But some people didn’t see it that way. They didn’t see it as truly
19

interdisciplinary because it wasn’t cross-divisional. When we had Bob Haft teaching with us, then we
were including the arts, so that was better. But it was always a big question— what is an
interdisciplinary program?
Then, how can you manage to do it with all these students? You get 65, 75 students, with three
faculty, and they all are doing French. Only two of us could teach French, so you have to hire someone.
And then there were budgetary problems, which have ended up being the demise of long-standing
language programs now, as we speak.
Aurand: I’m sorry to hear it.
Fiksdal: Except for perhaps Spanish.
Aurand: Oh, gosh.
Fiksdal: It’s really sad. In your perspective, what was going on with interdisciplinary programs? Why
do you think creating them got harder?
Aurand: Especially in the early years, and I think up through the ‘80s, for a long time, I think there were
a lot of good interdisciplinary programs. But it really was dependent on the faculty. The sciences are a
good example where there are some faculty who’ve never taught with a non-scientist who have been
there decades.
Fiksdal: Oh, really?
Aurand: And have never done a seminar, let alone a faculty seminar, on top of that. They just said, “No,
I’m going to teach what I teach.” They’re good, and it’s great that they’re doing that, but they just didn’t
buy in. Compared to somebody like Dharshi Bopegedera. I taught with her three times. We had such a
good time. She’s teaching next with Martha Rosemeyer in a program on Chemistry and Agriculture.
Perfect.
We did the Chemistry of Ceramics. I got back into ceramics at the end. When I taught with Ken
Tabbutt, the geologist, I said, “Okay, the earth. We’re back in the ceramics studio.”
Fiksdal: Very nice.
Aurand: That was good. That was fun. But she really is interested. I was the first person she taught
with who wasn’t a science faculty, and she had such a good time. But it took her another six or seven
years to get a chance—a quarter free—to teach with a non-scientist, because they got so busy making
grids. She got locked into teaching chemistry because they have a BS.
It was about that tension, and it’s an understandable tension between wanting to provide
curriculum for students in a particular area, as opposed to wanting to do the discipline. But there are
remarkable people there, like Don Morisato.
20

Fiksdal: I know him, yes.
Aurand: We taught a program on vision, The Biology of Vision. It was so good. Such a fun program. I
had to learn all of the psychology of vision. Why the mind sees what it wants to see. See what it
expects to see.
Fiksdal: Because you were teaching it?
Aurand: Yeah, I taught with him. He did the neural pathways, the chemical signaling, and all of that,
and I taught drawing, which will teach you about what you’re trying to see. I see that thing, but why
can’t I draw it? It’s about how your expectations override what you’re actually seeing. Your experience
of three-dimensional space prohibits making this thing this odd shape on paper in two dimensions, and
all this stuff about illusions. Also, memory, and how that interferes.
He could be a literature faculty. He was almost a literature major. His house is full of books. He
reads more than anybody I know, and he always, always does literature in his programs, but the other
science faculty, he’s sort of isolated from them. Is it okay to talk about faculty like this?
Fiksdal: Absolutely.
Aurand: Okay. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think he feels kind of isolated because none of the
other science faculty have that. But that’s why he came to Evergreen.
Fiksdal: He wanted that interaction with other disciplines.
Aurand: Yeah. He and Bob Haft have taught together a number of times.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I knew that. Bob always thought I should teach with him.
Aurand: Even though neither has a literature degree, they always do a whole bunch of literature in any
program that they do, so they get three disciplines going there.
Fiksdal: You have to have seminars, too, and it helps to have literature tying everything together.
Aurand: But you would be surprised at the programs that don’t have seminars. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I’m struck by something you said, and that is that you taught something that was new to you,
The Psychology of Vision. I think that’s all that we did in those early years especially.
Aurand: This is the last program I taught, actually, when I came back after retiring.
Fiksdal: Are there other instances that you remember where you had to suddenly teach something that
you didn’t know?
Aurand: Yeah, most of them. [laughter] Gosh.
Fiksdal: Teaching literature is unusual, and the French have a particular way of doing that, but you
don’t usually do it until graduate school.

21

Aurand: Yes. There were specific skills where I was one chapter ahead of the students. Printmaking,
for example, I mentioned, and I’d never had a printmaking class. But I read up on it, went down to the
studio, experimented. This works. Okay. Here’s the safety things. Here’s all that, and it’s not that hard.
I was very interested in, as I said earlier in world mythology, and I’d had a little bit of
introduction to it. But that became a topic that I read up on and I taught it. Also, the development of
consciousness. I taught a program with Beryl Crowe that dealt with that. Theories about that. Theories
about the role of art in developing human culture, civilization, consciousness, and so on.
I liked that kind of philosophical inquiry into what happens in the brain. For example, I taught a
program with Mark Levinsky where the question was, what can you understand about the experience of
someone who lived 14,000 years ago by looking at their art? That was the starting question of the
program. [laughing] I became kind of an expert on cave art.
Fiksdal: I remember when you taught that because I had found an article in the Christian Science
Monitor that I was so excited to share with you because I knew you were teaching that program. I even
remember where we were when I shared that, because we used to eat lunch, everyone together, at this
what I think ended up being called the “dinosaur table.”
Aurand: Yes!
Fiksdal: But I’m not sure it was called that then. I think it was just where we ate lunch. I said I didn’t go
to faculty meetings, but I learned a lot there. I remember Leo Daugherty telling me, “I’ve got to go
teach.” I said, “I thought you had contracts.” He said, “I do.” And I thought, oh. I saw it more as
guiding or pointing things out, not teaching exactly. I knew it was teaching in general, but just the way
he said, “I’m going to go teach.” [laughing]
I think people helped me a lot by just the way that they talked about teaching. We were
passionate about pedagogy.
Aurand: Right. Leo was great. He taught me how to get students out of my office. [laughing] You
know, the student who will never leave.
Fiksdal: How did he do it? He stood up from the desk, walked them to the door as he was talking? I
think I know that story.
Aurand: With the hand on the shoulder. Which was great for me because I was young and trained in
politeness, and I could never—they’d sit there and talk at me for hours and tell me their whole life
stories, and I was late.
Fiksdal: They had such problems.
Aurand: They had such problems.
22

Fiksdal: And that never ended, of course, all those years.
Aurand: Anyway, Leo was great.
Fiksdal: A question that ties in with all of this is, what else did you learn from colleagues? Do you
remember specific things that either maybe you avoided doing in your life, or that you chose to adapt?
Aurand: Gosh. I learned everything I know about teaching and most of what I know about art from
colleagues. [laughing] I feel so fortunate because they were, some of the times, irascible and
sometimes nuts, but brilliant, wonderful people who really cared about education.
I learned specific teaching methods. Here’s how to workshop a topic instead of just presenting,
or talking at students, here’s how to structure the same set of information such that they have to work
together to really reinforce what they were learning. In my education, you’re competitive with each
other. And I just watched people do this amazing teaching and said, oh, okay, that’s how you do that.
Got it.
Early on, I taught with Marilyn Frasca, who is brilliant. We taught a program called Studio
Projects. It was all about the skills. You learn how to draw, and you learn this and you learn this and
you get this stuff, and then somewhere—because most of art education in America and at the Beaux
Arts, where I went and watched them teach, is that; this assumption that once you have a bunch of
skills, you know what you want to do. It’s not until you’re a senior in college or maybe in graduate
school when you’re even asked, “What do you want to do?” You’re given, here’s the next assignment.
Now do this to demonstrate you have a mastery of color theory. Do this to demonstrate that you
understand perspective.
That’s why the majority of students who graduated, even with MFAs, failed to go on be artists.
They stop because they haven’t been taught how to think about how to connect that skillset to realizing
their own imagery, their own interests.
Marilyn started the other way around. She’d say, “What do you want?” And they’d go, “Tell me
what to paint.” She’d go, “Paint my grandmother,” and they’d go, “That’s ridiculous.” She’d say, “Okay,
then what do you want to paint?” [laughter] She’d point out to them that they are the only expert on
what they want. She is not the expert on what they want. Then they would have a need to learn a skill,
so the urgency of “I need to learn how to make this shadow right,” came out because, “I need to make
this image that I’m thinking about, this thing.”
So, it changed out how to teach. It changed this thing that was in, at least the visual arts, the
perennial problem of, how do you build in skills? And made it much more integrated, so even within
that one discipline, it meant that if they weren’t sure, they started hunting through all of art history until
23

they found something that resonated; that maybe what they really needed to connect to was Egyptian
art of the 4th Century BC, or they needed to find this weird surrealist and they’d go, “That’s it! Now I
know!”
Fiksdal: You would give them time to search.
Aurand: They would search. And time to develop themes, we did journal writing with them. They were
open to that. They were very open. By the end of my teaching, the students weren’t.
Fiksdal: They were a different type of student.
Aurand: They were. They knew why they wanted to learn how to do this thing with paint, or that thing
in clay. Or that it needed to be done with glass. For me, both for teaching and for my own work in the
arts, that was so important to me.
Fiksdal: Yes, it sounds revolutionary.
Aurand: Yeah, it was revolutionary. And that art is just a visualization of all of these ideas that come
from all these other areas in life—political ideas, and ideas about what it is to be a human being, and
what’s the body? Where does the body stop and start? What’s our relationship to the natural world?
What’s our relationship to the invisible? Basically, art is the picture book form of it. [laughing] It’s the
illustrated version of life.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Aurand: That was great, because then I realized that any discipline, you can connect art to it, because
there’s going to be a visual history of something.
Fiksdal: That’s so interesting. There’s some form of art there, even if it’s graphs or something.
Aurand: Yeah. One of my post-retirement programs was called Kitchens. Stephanie Kozak asked if we
could do a program together, and I said, “Okay, fine.” I didn’t know her, and I really didn’t know what
her discipline was. [laughing] I just said, “Okay, fine.” She said, “Kitchens,” and I thought, okay, now
what do I do? But it turns out the representation of food is not just about food. It’s this amazing,
complex symbolism throughout history where paintings that look like just a picture of a table have all
this religious significance. The walnut is Jesus. Oh, my gosh.
Everybody at the time understood that. We look at it and we go, wow, that guy could really
paint a walnut. [laughter] They were obsessed with food. No, it’s actually this whole allegory about
death and resurrection.
Fiksdal: That’s fabulous. I was thinking of the Dutch masters.
Aurand: That’s 17th Century food painting.

24

Fiksdal: It just came to me immediately, but then I couldn’t come up with a body of work about food
after that. Except when you said something about a walnut that I got still lifes in my head.
Aurand: But it goes back to the Greeks and the Romans and everything.
Fiksdal: All the mosaics.
Aurand: Yeah. Turned out, that was another example of having to research this whole new thing. You
look back through art history, and instead of looking for the famous, you say, show me all the food
pictures, and all the kitchen pictures, and what’s that about? It’s so interesting.
Fiksdal: It’s all on Google now, when you think about that.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: We couldn’t have done it earlier in our teaching.
Aurand: It was a lot harder.
Fiksdal: We have a great library. An amazing library. But still, that would have been work. Okay, let’s
stop for now.

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Susan Aurand
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 26, 2021
FINAL
Fiksdal: It is September 26, 2021, our second interview. I just wanted to pick up where we left off,
Susan. One of the things I was thinking is that it sounds like you may have certain phases in your career
at Evergreen of teaching art.
Aurand: Yes. In the early years, I taught a combination, or alternately, studio programs with other
visual arts faculty or performing arts faculty, and programs with humanities faculty. Those were great
experiences.
In the second half of my career, probably the last 15, 20 years, I taught with science faculty,
which was an interesting challenge. For example, I taught three times with Dharshi Bopegedera, a
chemist. We decided to teach together partly because she was struggling to get out of being locked in
to teaching only science. Once the science faculty decided to offer a Bachelor of Science degree, they
had a fixed rotation of disciplines that had to be taught. She was at Evergreen, I think, for seven years
before she taught with a non-science faculty.
Fiksdal: I thought people were encouraged far before that.
Aurand: No. Some were locked in to area offerings, and she’s not the only one. We were pregnant at
the same time and there were few women faculty having kids then, so we became friends around that,
and decided to teach together.
The theme of the first program we taught was Light. It came out of the fact that her daughter,
Alokia’s name means light, and my son’s name, Lucas, means light. We thought, okay, there’s our
theme, and we’ll make it kid friendly, that is, we will stop activities at 3:00 in the afternoon so we can be
home when our kids get home.
Apart from the personal part, it was terrific, because Light is a huge topic, and a topic in
chemistry that I didn’t know anything about. In chemistry, light is a tool. Basically, you bombard matter
with different levels of energy of light to learn what it is by boosting elections into higher energy states,
and then analyzing the radiation that comes out when the substance returns to its ground state. It was
a whole different way of thinking about light than how an artist thinks about light. In art it is about
value, color, and sight itself.
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We had so much fun, and it convinced me that science and art are very close. I knew that
already. In both science and art you’re making hypotheses. Then you try things, you experiment, in the
lab or in the studio. Both are very hands-on, but in art, you have more latitude about what the
experiments are, and a different set of materials. But there is a lot of science the artist has to know: the
chemistry of paint, the physics and chemistry of ceramics, for example. It’s not just monkeying around
with stuff free-for-all.
The science students were terrific in terms of learning art skills because they were already good
observers. They were methodical and they weren’t afraid of materials. They were in it for hard work.
You gave them homework and they did it. And the art students loved getting into the science labs.
Dharshi was absolutely brilliant about coming up with chemistry labs for the students that
taught scientific aspects of light but were also creative. The labs covered different kinds of light such as
radiated light, absorbed light. For example, we did the chemistry of sparklers and the chemistry of dyes.
And we had a terrific texts that covered the history of theories of light, optics, bioluminesence, light and
health - all kinds of stuff.
Dharshi was constantly amazed because, within the structure of the of the labs, the art students
would always take an extra step in terms of creativity. Instead of making a straight sparklers, they’d
make sculptural sparklers. Instead of just, okay, I’ll just make this simple tie-dye, they made really
inventive ones.
Fiksdal: Creativity in the lab. Wow.
Aurand: Yeah, within safe limits. And Dharshi and I took seriously something that was more common in
the early years, which was that we worked alongside the students as master learners. For example, I did
all of the labs and all of the homework and turned in lab reports.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness.
Aurand: And stayed up till 3:00 trying to remember my high school algebra! And Dharshi did all of the
studio projects. She learned oil painting and stayed up till 3:00 in the morning painting. We exhausted
ourselves, but we had a blast. That’s what was key in early programs, this commitment of faculty to
step out of their comfort zones and try a new discipline. The programs where faculty actually did that
were invariably the best.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I agree, and I think that idea of putting yourself in the students’ shoes helped you also.
Because I remember I did some of that, too, all through my career, and I was able to say, “Look, I just
don’t understand this. Help!” By having to help me, my colleague would be able to explain things in
several different ways to the students as well.
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Aurand: That’s right. Because a lot of times students won’t say anything until the last possible moment
when you’re moving on and they didn’t get it.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Aurand: I did the work along with the students all the time, I think in almost every program, because for
me, that was part of the fun of getting to teach at Evergreen. Getting to actually try a new discipline,
learn a new discipline, read the books, try the labs. A lot of the faculty I worked with were less willing to
try the art stuff.
Fiksdal: Isn’t that interesting, that it’s harder to put yourself out there in the name of creativity?
[laughter] “Let me just stay in my confines here.”
Aurand: It says more about our culture and this silly notion about talent—that you either have it or you
don’t—when just like most things it’s really just a set of learnable skills.
Dharshi and I also taught a second version of the Light program. The first one was a whole yearlong program.
Fiksdal: Oh, was it? And did students stay in for the whole year?
Aurand: They did. It was junior-senior-level, so it really worked well. It was a case of really proving that
interdisciplinary programs worked best when students already had some skills under the belt. Although
we did have one student who was a freshman. The first day, we said, no, no, no, but he refused to go
away. Finally, we let him in, and he was terrific. That was an example of the kinds of students we had in
the early years. They were really passionate about learning, knew what they wanted, and saw that they
could take advantage of Evergreen to learn it. In the Light program students ended the year by doing
large individual projects. They could pick any topic under the general theme of light and research it.
This freshman made holograms! We hooked him up with staff support, he got the tools, and he made
actual holograms. Then he went on to have a career in that. It was amazing!
One of the great things about those programs, too, was that a broad theme like Light allowed
students to find and pursue their own particular passions under the large thematic umbrella. For
example, we had students who were interested in health—the relationship of light and health, for
example, the difference between exposure to full-spectrum light and artificial lights. They developed
research projects on that. Other students were interested in light and vision, or in animal vision. The
funniest one was a research project on the history of reported cases of spontaneous combustion in
humans and on whether they had any possible scientific basis. At the end it was this amazing carnival of
diverse, creative projects, combined with scientific research.
Fiksdal: Students were asked to do both, I imagine?
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Aurand: Absolutely. They did both all three quarters, but the third quarter, in addition to the labs and
studio projects that they were doing, had their own research project that had to have a creative
component, not necessarily a lab component, but a scientific component in the sense of reading
scientific papers. Then, a big presentation at the end. They presented their projects, I think, for the
Science Carnival.
Fiksdal: You mentioned oil painting. What other kinds of art did you teach in that program?
Aurand: We started with drawing, just black and white, progressed into color using pastels, and other
water media, and then into oil painting. It was basically, within the context of that program, the same
curriculum I would have taught in a regular studio art program over the course of a year.
When Dharshi and I taught together the third time, it was a program called “From the Fire: the
Art and Science of Ceramics”, because ceramics is all about what’s happening chemically when you
subject different earth minerals materials to heat. The clay itself changes chemically and the various
minerals in glazes, like cobalt, copper, nickel, all oxidize and change color in the silica matrix. It was
perfect.
Fiksdal: That was a completely different topic.
Aurand: It was a different topic.
Fiksdal: In both of those topics, for Dharshi, who is used to teaching also in a sequence of theorems and
ideas and approaches to chemistry, she must have felt okay at the end that the students did learn
chemistry.
Aurand: In each program we taught, about half the students started with a science background and
half had an art background. She correctly guessed that the students coming in with an art background
might be terrified of the chemistry. So she always started at the very beginning. She said, let’s review.
Atoms. And went from there. But she designed the lab work and lectures so that by the end, we were
doing the same lab that they were doing in the straight science program Matter and Motion.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Aurand: She brought students along quickly, really.
Fiksdal: So, she did do a step-by-step process, but still concerned itself mostly with light. Matter and
Motion or Molecules to Organism?
Aurand: I think it was Matter and Motion. I forget exactly now, but she told the students they could be
very proud of themselves because the last lab that they were doing was the same one that the serious
chemistry students were doing.

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Fiksdal: That sounds also like she may have been able to borrow a couple from her previous teaching.
Creating labs is very time consuming.
Aurand: Exactly.
Fiksdal: You have to test it.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: You mentioned that you did three programs with her. What was the third?
Aurand: We did a year-long version of Light—a second, shorter version, where we had to really say,
how do we take this and condense it? What can we do in a quarter? And then we did “From the Fire:
The Art and Science of Ceramics.”
Fiksdal: Nice. Fire and light. Sounds great.
Aurand: Yeah. Teaching with Dharshi is great because she always, for fun, blows stuff up at the end of
the program. She’d say, “Okay, c’mon. We’re going to make a big noise.” Pretty fun.
Fiksdal: If that word gets out, that’s going to inspire a lot of faculty and students to take her program.
That’s helpful to understand how you might work with a science faculty. In that case, it started with
friendship, but I think there can be times when you come up with an idea or question and you want to
explore it further.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: I am sure she enjoyed that a lot. Do you know if she was able to teach with other faculty
outside the sciences?
Aurand: Not sure.
Fiksdal: That’s fine. I just was wondering.
Aurand: I think she’s going to again. I think she’s going to teach with Julia Heinecus, who is the fine
metals teacher. But I know that for the last couple years, she’s been back just teaching in the science
rotation.
Fiksdal: You’re probably only allowed so much to rotate out, if that’s the problem. Okay. You feel, in
your career, that you were able to choose what you wanted to do. You weren’t constrained too much.
One constraint I can think of is that we did have studios, and they had to be used, and I know that we
had staff covering that, but that would just be a course. In order to make it more interdisciplinary, that
must have weighed on your mind a bit.
Aurand: Yes, in the studio arts, like in other areas of the college, as the college grew, there was a push
to try to have a more predictable, sequential slate of programs so that students could develop specific
skill sets. It was always a challenge. How do you do that and still allow faculty the freedom to go off and
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try some new crazy idea? There was always tension between the need to teach straight skills and theme
exploration.
Then also in the visual arts area we had faculty who just really hated teaching the entry-level
skills programs. I enjoyed it. I always liked that part, so I would often rotate it in. The entry level visual
arts skills program was either called Foundations of Visual Art or Studio Projects. The name would
change. It was for students hoping to focus on studio art. I regularly taught that. I enjoyed it but I
didn’t want to do it every year. If I had been teaching at a regular university I could have easily done
that year in and year out until I was a senior faculty. Ugh.
But even in the foundation art program —I think I talked about this before—I made it so that
students got connected to personal themes for their own studio work, because then they would feel a
drive, an urgency to develop skills. I learned that from teaching with Marilyn Frasca. Students then
knew why they were developing skills. It wasn’t just, well, once you get really proficient at X, then you’ll
know what to make. Instead, you want to make that thing? Then you need to learn shading or how to
run wood through the table saw and miter a corner, or understand color theory.
Fiksdal: That was the opposite of your own experience.
Aurand: Yes. And I didn’t feel locked in. I felt like I was the luckiest person on earth to have the
amount of autonomy I had in teaching.
Fiksdal: Yeah. One place where we had a little less autonomy was governance. We were expected to
devote part of our time every year to sometimes really big projects and sometimes smaller. I wonder if
you want to speak a bit about that.
Aurand: There are faculty to whom I will always be grateful who took on these giant governance tasks
of reviewing the college and making a new plan, etc. I did governance work primarily in two areas. First,
there was an ongoing visual arts group. It changed names, but basically, it was about public art on
campus and building the college’s art collection. As buildings were built, money for art on campus was
generated through the Percent for Art law. I think I was on three of those committees over the years,
which is a series of meetings and reviewing artists’ proposals. Also, as the college art collection was
built, there were acquisition meetings and then there a long battle to try to get a real gallery space on
campus and a gallery director. For a long time we just used a classroom, and I also ran the gallery for a
bit, before we had a dedicated space.
Fiksdal: Where was that?
Aurand: We used the fourth-floor space in the library—there was a room down the hall from the old
cafeteria on the fourth floor of the library. I did that for a year and then helped with it for another year.
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The other major governance that I did was being on the Hiring DTF. That was fascinating,
reading people’s resumes and essays. It was self-interest, too. because but when we hired somebody,
at least in the early years, we were hiring them to the college as a whole.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Aurand: And you wanted a good, interesting colleague.
Fiksdal: And you might want to teach with them. [laughing]
Aurand: Right. Gosh, I don’t remember how many years, but it was a lot of years I was on the Hiring
DTF, which was pretty time-consuming.
Fiksdal: It is. And all those dinners. [laughter]
Aurand: I kind of liked that part.
Fiksdal: We used to do potlucks, and then suddenly, we were in restaurants. That was kind of fun.
There was a certain camaraderie in those hiring groups, too, and/or you really saw where their interests
lay if they weren’t collaborative.
Aurand: Right. I did other governance stuff, such as being on the Sponsored Research Committee. And
I was Convener for the Arts area five or six times.
Aurand: The Hiring DTFs were very time-consuming, but it was worth it. I liked it.
Fiksdal: All along during your career of teaching, I’m sure you were making art. I’m wondering how
satisfied you were with your ability to have time to do that. Naturally, there are other things besides a
career that intervened, because you had a family and there are all kinds of other things that intervene in
that. But you were an artist, and are an artist, so I’d like to know if you can think of the same kind of
thing as your career. Was there a trajectory, or were there mostly ups and downs, or was there any kind
of line that you can [draw]?
Aurand: I think that I, like many of the arts faculty, found it a constant challenge to —and I don’t think it
was unique to the arts - to carve out time for my own studio work. The teaching was so creative in
terms of coming up with curriculum. You couldn’t just pull the same lecture out of the box and deliver
it. So, when I was teaching, my own work often ground to a halt. During the summers, I’d get started
again, and then right as I was getting into the rhythm of it, school would start again. It made for a very
jerky art career. It meant that I had to choose where to put my energy. I had gallery representation in
Seattle in the early years and had to let it drop. I could not keep up with what the gallery owner wanted
in terms of production. It was too much stress. I wasn’t one of those people who wanted to be super
famous. It was not part of my sense of self. I loved making art, but I didn’t feel that my self-worth was
measured by how many exhibitions I had, or by whether I got collected in museums and stuff like that.
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I really liked teaching, and I stayed active as a professional artist because you have to.
Otherwise, you’re teaching from no fresh experience. But I know it was a frustrating thing for many of
my colleagues, and I think maybe not just in the arts. I don’t know. There are some science faculty who
are still doing original research projects, but a lot of people aren’t.
Fiksdal: In the early years—we should say this—the first faculty to form the college and for several
years after came because they wanted to teach, and they did not want to do research. So, in fact, there
was no support for research at all for quite a while, except there was always support for the science
faculty. When I decided to do research in the 1990s, I started to get going, connecting my work to
Evergreen with seminar work, analyzing the discourse analysis of seminars. Some money was found, but
it was for anyone who wanted to come and talk about their research. I remember Sally Cloninger was
there, who’s an artist, so there were a lot of different people in the room, but there wasn’t any
sustained effort to help us with research, or with work that we were doing.
I can see, though, that in your own work, there would be problems that you wanted to solve,
and that those might be something you would want to put into your teaching.
Aurand: In the early years, there weren’t even art studios. We were working in lab rooms or just in
seminar rooms. I don’t know if science faculty, when they were hired, were given labs, which is a
normal thing at a regular university. And artist faculty at regular universities are given studios, but there
was no space like that. Finally, with the remodel of Lab I, we carved out one room—that is, we
commandeered one science lab—and it became the art faculty studio for those who wanted it. I worked
in there for a number of years. By that time, though, most of the arts faculty had just given up and
made studios off campus. But that meant that students couldn’t see your personal work on campus,
they couldn’t come by. It was really a loss.
I don’t remember when the summer faculty development grants got started, but those really
helped. I got a number of those.
Fiksdal: That was what I was talking about in 1990. I almost think it was maybe then.
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I’m not sure.
Aurand: That was good, and I got several of those. Which was nice because I would have done work
anyway, but it was nice to have it recognized and to have some compensation for that.
Fiksdal: I think the recognition is important because we had to write proposals, and then our colleagues
would read them, and then know a little bit more about what we were doing. I think that so much of
our work was just known to us.
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Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: Really recognizing us, and talking to all my colleagues about their oral histories, we tried in a
number of ways to get to know each other better. There were a lot of different structures for that.
Aurand: Right. But I did continue to do my own artwork throughout. Originally, I was doing ceramics
when I came to the college. Then I had a sabbatical in Paris in 1980, and I couldn’t do ceramics there. I
got a studio there and started drawing, so that marked the shift from 3-D work into 2-D work. After
that, I was doing mostly drawing and painting. And some printmaking.
Fiksdal: Space really matters to an artist. [laughter] You’re impressing that upon me here. It changed
your life.
Aurand: Access to space and tools.
Fiksdal: Yeah. So, you’ve retired now. I’m wondering how you’re creating your life after Evergreen.
You were so busy, and you were very creative in your work, and you did all the work that students did,
so you must have had a bit of a respite now that you’ve stopped teaching.
Aurand: I expect you know that when one retires, there’s first the honeymoon period where every day
is Saturday, and you think, I’ll go out to breakfast. Let’s go out to lunch. Let’s go here. Let’s go there.
Then it’s, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I never thought I would have any
trouble, and I haven’t, in terms of what to do, because I just shifted into spending more time in studio
and doing other things that I like that are creative.
But the loss of connection with other faculty has been a big blow. Since retiring, it’s made me
realize how a rich and intellectual environment Evergreen was. Even not teaching with someone, you’d
have these little, short conversations on campus. What are you doing? What’s your program? How’s
your program doing? There’s a brilliant bunch of people out there. I miss that. I miss that camaraderie,
the collegial interactions.
Fiksdal: Just a short walk across Red Square could change your life for the next two years.
Aurand: Right, it sure could. [laughter]
Fiksdal: I do miss that, too.
Aurand: Even just reading people’s program descriptions, catalog copy. I was on the catalog review
DTF. I was on that for a long time.
Fiksdal: That’s governance.
Aurand: Yes, I forgot that. I’ve probably forgotten 50 percent of what I did. How to rebuild that sense
of community in retirement is more of a challenge, especially because many of the friendships that I

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made, those folks were 10 to 15 years older, because I was younger. Maybe some were 20 years older,
and many have now died. Yeah, that’s hard.
Fiksdal: That’s very hard. Tell me about the public art that you worked on. You had to apply. I know of
one piece that you did because I happened to stumble upon it one day when I came on the wrong day to
your house. [laughing] At an elementary school in Eastern Washington. But you may have done more.
Aurand: I did three large public projects, all for schools, and would have done two more but had to
backout because life was too crazy at the time. The way public art in Washington works is that artists
can apply to be in a registry held by the Washington State Arts Commission. When A committee from
that institution or agency decides what they want. They develop a set of criteria and then a project
manager from the Washington State Arts Commission matchmakes between the committee and artists
from the registry. The committee reviews the work of 100 artists—flash, flash, flash, slides going by like
this. Then they winnow it down to 30, and then to one, and the selected artist gets a phone call saying,
“You’ve been selected. Do you want it?”
Then there’s a two-stage process where the artist meets with the committee, goes back over
what they’re hoping for, the artist listens, and then makes a proposal. There’s a contract just for the
proposal phase. If the proposal is accepted, then there’s a contract for the execution phase. Then the
artist makes the work and installs it.
I loved those because I loved the idea of having art in schools. I liked working to try to have the
artworks connect the students and staff to their environment, the history of the place, and the native
species, to get people connected to place.
I did one for the Olympic Middle School in Shelton. I did one in Othello, at Wahitis Elementary
School. The last one was in Quincy, Washington, for another elementary school. In each case, I did a lot
of research—it was really fun—on the natural history, the Indigenous peoples, the geology, the native
flora and fauna, etc., and then tried to come up with something that would spark imagination, engage
kids, but also make them curious about where they lived. It was really fun.
Fiksdal: That must have been a lot of collaboration, because you’d have to talk to people about your
ideas, and then they would talk to you about that, right?
Aurand: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Do you feel that your original vision was adaptable enough to fit in those situations?
Aurand: Yes. I think generally I got picked because I’m fairly realistic in my painting style, and, I think,
because I tend to do that, tend to reflect nature back, and try to make people feel engaged and fall in
love with where they live.
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But also, I think my teaching at Evergreen made me a good listener, able to really hear what the
committee was telling me about what their hopes were. I didn’t have a big ego need to make it about
my own ideas. I felt, in those situations—in a public art situation—that I have a skillset and I’m happy to
put it into service of these people. It always comes out with my weird tweak to it anyway, but I feel like
I’m successful when they feel like it’s their work. The principal over in Othello, I got such a kick out of
his reaction. I had just finished the installation on the day when the school was registering new kids.
The principal had called up a bunch of his principal buddies, and he was touring them up and down the
halls. There were six pieces—no, eight pieces—down both sides of a long hallway, and he was saying,
“Now, look at our art. Come and look. Do you recognize this? You know, we went fishing there. Look
at this.” He was taking ownership. “Our art.” I thought, yea! I got it. He didn’t say, “Oh, this is the art
that the artist gave us.” Instead, “This is ours.”
Fiksdal: That’s terrific. It must have really made you feel good.
Aurand: It did.
Fiksdal: You achieved your goal. And somehow, you were able to show them, like you said, that sense
of place, but it’s a little different when you have one person saying, “This is where we did this. This is
where we go to fish,” or whatever. It’s really good to include those spots. I think you’ll be busy for
years to come.
Aurand: I’m not doing any more public art right now.
Fiksdal: That takes a lot of time and effort.
Aurand: Yeah, they’re too big and too stressful.
Fiksdal: I think we can turn now—I wanted to ask you about Evergreen’s future. There was an article in
the newspaper this morning about the fact that we have—they now have, I always say “we” when I’m
talking about Evergreen—2,100 students registering in the fall, which is better than in the last few years,
but way lower from when I left Evergreen. I’m just wondering what you think Evergreen’s future is as an
interdisciplinary liberal arts four-year college out in the woods in Olympia.
The vision changed from the very beginning, where the founders thought it would be this
residential college, and students would all live on campus. Almost from the beginning, practically no
students wanted to live on campus, and that was logical because it is in the woods, and it is cut off from
town. You have to have money for a car or get on that bus at certain times of the day.
Obviously, it has changed, but those of who were there since the beginning—you’re one of
them—might have some ideas about that.

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Aurand: I think it’s a very different college than even when I left a few years ago. I think you can still
call it an interdisciplinary college, but barely, I guess. In the last couple of years, I have made myself
stop reading e-mails and stop tracking, partly just because I found myself grieving [at] what I saw as
mistakes that were being made.
I don’t remember what year it was, but I was driving back from Seattle listening to an
advertisement for Evergreen that came on, and it said, “There’s this arts and sciences college.” I
thought, wait a minute. Where’s “interdisciplinary”? Where’s “innovative”? Where’s “liberal arts” in
that advertisement? Language counts. Change the language and everything changes.
Fiksdal: And where’s the humanities?
Aurand: Right. Somebody, without asking the faculty, had decided that the marketing needed to be
changed. I felt that Evergreen blew it because it failed to recognize that, yes, even if the culture is
changing, and even if students are changing, there are plenty of students who would trek across country
to come to a college where they can do genuine interdisciplinary arts/science or arts/humanities or
humanities/science programs.
When they stopped advertising it that way—it was like shooting themselves in the foot, in my
opinion—they failed to hire people who really could do more than one thing, who genuinely came in
with an interest in cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary work, and had strength in at least two disciplines.
It has gradually become just a small college. Not to say that it isn’t still doing some of that terrific work,
but it seems—from talking to friends, colleagues who’ve retired, and those who are still there—it’s less
and less interdisciplinary, it seems.
I don’t know. I feel very fortunate to have been at the college when it was this bold experiment.
Its future, I don’t know. It seems very unsure to me. When the leadership is concerned about the
money instead of about ideas about education, instead of having a vision, inspiring boldness and
creativity in faculty, then you’re just going to get these makeshift solutions that really don’t fix anything.
And the culture has changed. As you know, in the early years, you’d ask students, “How did you
come to Evergreen?” and somebody would say, “This friend of mine told me about it and I hitchhiked
across the country.” Students don’t do that anymore. [laughing]
Fiksdal: No, it really was a Mecca. I remember I had a student after the first quarter she was there, she
said, “This isn’t perfect. I thought it would be perfect. I thought it was a utopia.” I said, “We’re working
on it, but I think that’s what utopias are all about. You work. You don’t achieve it. Maybe it’s not
achievable.” She left anyway. [laughter] But I did try.

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I remember that feeling. I think we were all working towards that vision. But the thing you said
about faculty really struck home. I think that for most of us, from the very beginning, the college was
faculty driven in the sense that the work of the faculty really mattered. Staff and students were part of
all of that, but the curriculum was what brought students to the college. We used to open it up, so they
got to participate in the program planning.
Aurand: I think some of it was a function of trying to grow the college beyond where it should have
gone in terms of size. There’s a big difference between what you can do with 2,000 students and what
you can do when you are supposed to grow to 5,000 students. It’s just structurally more complicated
and that engenders hierarchy. It engenders more layers of administration.
But it was also when the faculty union came in. For me, that was a turning point philosophically
from the vision that we were all in this together. We were all equal. The administrators, bless their
hearts, were faculty who would take on an extra job and then were glad to rotate back out of it. But
soon we had professional administrators in opposition to faculty. It changed the tone of the college, in
my opinion, as did the kinds of more narrow discipline-focused hires we got later. I don’t know. The
future, I don’t know. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Good. Let’s pause.
[recording turned off]
Aurand: We started talking about the future of the college and how it’s changed over the years, and I
talked about the union coming as, in my opinion, a watershed. But I think what happened, quite apart
from the union and Evergreen’s failure to hire people from inside for the administration, was this: you
can have a first generation and maybe a second and even third generation of faculty who say, “We’re
making this new thing.” But I remember that by the ‘80s, new faculty would be hired, and they’d say,
“Okay, I’m trying to understand the Evergreen way. The Evergreen tradition.” And I’d go, “No, no, no,
no. There’s no Evergreen tradition. There’s no Evergreen way. The whole thing is that the faculty are
making this college anew all the time.”
That sense of ongoing experiment where all faculty had equal footing got lost. By the end, I was
trying to persuade faculty of their own power. They did not understand that they had power as faculty
to make the college. By the time I retired, they didn’t, but for most of my time there, they did.
Fiksdal: Absolutely.
Aurand: The faculty could say, “This isn’t working. Let’s throw it out and start over.” Yeah, it’s a lot of
work to be continuously re-working a college, but then, the faculty are invested. You’re not just, “Okay,
just tell me what to do and I’ll go do it.” That sense that we could throw the whole thing wide open
13

again and try something new, and that each faculty member had exactly the same amount of power and
responsibility for making the college as everybody else. That got lost somewhere along the way. That’s
when it stopped being experimental, I think.
Fiksdal: I like this point, and I think this whole notion that you yourself can have a vision of the college,
and you have to join with others, obviously, to make any changes, but that that is part of your work.
Aurand: I’ll give you an example. In the ‘80s—I forget what year it was, I can find it—we were sitting
around in one of the visual arts meetings, and everybody was complaining about—it was ’86-’87, around
in there—“It’s too hard to get our own studio work done.” So Marilyn Frasca said, “Let’s just make our
own work at the center of the next round of art curriculum.” She gave this little talk about how in the
Renaissance artists had studios and take on apprentices who wanted to learn. They’d learn a whole
bunch of good skills and the artists could get some work done. [laughing] So she persuaded the whole
arts area, including the music and performing arts faculty, to make their own work the center for that
was the kind of freedom faculty felt they had early on.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s so renewing.
Aurand: We could just try a whole new thing for a year. So, we all declared ourselves “artists in
residence” for the year in our own programs, and it worked. [laughing]
Fiksdal: That’s great.
Aurand: That ability, the ability to at least think that way, that we don’t have to do it the way everybody
else does it, and we don’t have to do it the way we did it the last five years. We could come up with
something new. Somehow, that gradually went away, because incoming faculty felt like there was this
Evergreen history, this tradition, a single Evergreen way of doing it, and that was inhibiting to them, and
disenfranchising.
Fiksdal: I used to tell people, “There isn’t one way.” When I first arrived, I taught in the very first year of
the college—it was just parttime—I would hear arguments still going on and people argued basically for
the first five years. And then they stopped arguing so much, but they would try in different ways to get
their own way supported.
That was the best thing is that people disagreed, and talked it out, or tried it out. If no one
listened to them, they just tried it on their own, and then reported, “This worked. Let’s do it.” I think
people don’t understand that evolution of the Evergreen way, if there ever was one way.
But it certainly had to do with knowing your colleagues, talking to them enough so that you
could plan programs, coming up with either a theme, as you said, or a problem or a question, and then
letting it go and see what happened. I don’t know how many times the trajectory of what I thought we
14

were doing changed because of the fabulous students, or some great idea one of us had. We would just
change it then. That was fine. If anything, that’s the Evergreen way.
Aurand: Right. I just think about the faculty retreats. I don’t know if they even do them anymore, but
in the early years of the college, it wasn’t about planning curriculum, it was about getting to know each
other. There were retreats, for example, up at Fort Flagler where the fact that faculty were out there
playing Capture the Flag on the lawn and staying up all night on the beach to look at the stars, and
having poker games that went on all night – all resulted in friendships, and it made for teaching
partnerships, and it made for an exchange of ideas.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I think those retreats were three days long. They were long. I remember because it was
difficult for those of us with children. But I still went. Somehow, we were there. I remember one year
being so uncomfortable in my sleeping bag in a dorm room of some sort at Fort Flagler or Fort Worden
or something that I was talking to people about how I needed to get out of there. Nancy Allen said,
“You can share my room. I have a hotel room.” [laughter] So, we drove off to her hotel room. That
was just such a cheating, exciting thing to do.
This makes me think of retreats in our programs, and that was also a time to get to know the
students better. I remember helping to cook. I remember cooking with the students. All of that really
pulled us together, too, and made the program better. I know later on, we had to reduce those, and I
remember having seminars at my house, for example, as just a way for them to get off campus, see
another space, understand a little bit who I was just from my surroundings. But mostly, just being more
comfortable in a comfortable chair.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: That was fun, too, but I think a lot of those things have gone.
Aurand: The budgets were very ample in the first years.
Fiksdal: They were.
Aurand: And the larger culture was less litigious. There was not all the worry about, can I take students
on this fieldtrip, or is something going to happen, and I’ll get sued? It did start inhibiting what faculty
did, I think.
Fiksdal: My last fieldtrip to France for the quarter was in 2003. That was a long time ago.
Aurand: I remember in the early years being sent as a representative of the college, along with, I think,
Phil Harding. There were three or four of us who were sent to a conference in higher education where
faculty from different colleges were getting together to talk about problems in teaching. We’re sitting

15

there with these faculty from other universities in the state and they’re saying, “How do you get
students to talk in class?” And we’re going, “How do you get them to stop talking?” [laughter]
They looked at us, and I realized that in my experience at Evergreen, we were so lucky because
we could make these little learning communities. People talked and argued and were engaged. That
was remarkable.
Fiksdal: It was remarkable in those first years, too, because people did their work, students did their
work. In the last probably five to 10 years, there were fewer students who did their work, in my
experience, and that was harder.
I remember trying an idea. We gave them one credit in consciousness if they filled out a little
survey every week and talked about what they read, in a very brief way, and told us how many hours a
week they devoted to their study. It was very revealing, because all my life, I had been telling students,
“This is 40 hours a week of work, at least. You may go over, but that’s the job, it’s fulltime study.”
But as students started working more and more parttime, it became harder and harder to really
even say that because I knew it wasn’t true. If they were working 20 hours and maybe had a child, and
then were trying to go to school, there’s just no way they were doing 40 hours of work, and the data
showed they weren’t doing that. I found that the mean was 20 hours for fulltime work.
But the consciousness idea was just to get them to think about what they were doing, to reflect
on their learning a little bit by filling this out. Some students still didn’t do it and lost that credit.
Aurand: In the early years when the percentage of out-of-state students was higher, they all looked like
they dressed at the Goodwill—raggedy and stuff like that—and you couldn’t tell who had money and
who didn’t have money. Since many were out-of-state students, they were affluent, and many were
older, returning students who had tried traditional colleges and weren’t having it, and were really ready
to go.
When the recruiting shifted toward in-state, direct-from-high-school students from southwest
Washington, and the culture changed, we started getting students who weren’t ready for college, who
didn’t know much about Evergreen except that it was handy. They didn’t have a clue about
interdisciplinary studies. They hadn’t chosen Evergreen for that. And many of them would have done
better in a traditional college where there would have been more hand-holding and a very structured
curriculum.
It also seemed that over the decades the level of preparation in terms of work done in high
school dropped. In one of the last programs I taught, the Consciousness program with Don Middendorf,
a junior/senior-level program, too, I was bemoaning the fact that you couldn’t ask students to read a
16

book a week anymore as in the first years of the college. Don said, “Watch this.” He asked students
how long it had been since they read a complete book. Some of them had to go back to kindergarten
since they’d been asked to read a whole book that wasn’t a graphic novel or a comic book!
Fiksdal: In 2017, I helped out in a program, and I just had charge of seminars for a colleague, and things
were not going well. Students were not talking much, and it was the third session, so I decided to ask a
similar question. I said, “How many of you have read a whole book in your whole life?” Not everyone
raised their hands. This was 18 students. I’ve forgotten the exact number, but it was pitiful. It was
eight, maybe, who raised their hands, and some of them partially. So, this idea of reading a book has
gone by the wayside somehow for some students.
Aurand: They weren’t asked to in high school, unlike in my high school experience. Instead, they are
given worksheets and handouts, or they only read chapters of books, or excerpts of books. To come to
Evergreen where, in the early days, it was a book a week, and it was a tough book a week, plus all the
other lab work and studio work and stuff like that, it was a big jump for many students.
Fiksdal: But losing a whole book a week doesn’t bother me so much. It’s just understanding where they
are, that they don’t have the idea of that perseverance that goes along with going from the beginning to
the end of an entire work. It is possible to design the reading in such a way that students can get to the
heart of the matter. They can read different chapters and then talk together. There are a whole lot of
ways, but understanding that was a shock, even though I had been reading about it and I knew the
students had changed a lot. But still, it’s a huge change for us because we had seen this long trajectory.
Aurand: Right. I don’t know whether it’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but the students really did change,
and the kind of work you could plan to do, expect to be able to do, then had to change.
Fiksdal: Yes.
Aurand: Yes, you could still do really good work by the end, but the range of students was much, much
broader. We still had some brilliant, high-achieving students who would just take the work and run with
it, but also, I felt more and more that I was doing remedial work, work I wasn’t trained to do. Because it
was also that more students were coming in with large emotional problems.
Fiksdal: That came to my mind as you said that, not being trained.
Aurand: Not just disabilities.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Aurand: I felt like, okay, I’m not trained as a therapist, but it seems to be about 50 percent of my work.

17

Fiksdal: And you’re not sure what you should be asking them to do given their various disabilities. That
was always very hard also. Yeah, so I don’t know. That’s part, though, of what the college has to
address now.
Aurand: Right. Of course, it’s fun to teach just the smart, accomplished, ready-to-go students, but it’s
an open question now. What should education look like and who is it for? I have strong feelings that
everyone should have access to higher education, so it’s a tough call. [laughing] Just financially, it’s
going to get harder and harder to have access.
Fiksdal: Do you feel there should be better access?
Aurand: I think there should be better access all along to good quality education. I think, for a First
World country, we really are not doing a good job in education all along. It’s partly because we don’t
pay teachers well. We don’t respect teachers at any level in this culture. But that’s a whole other issue.
Fiksdal: Yeah, but I do think that’s part of the problem, too, is that students are coming to college in
order to get a degree so that they can get a job so that they can make a lot of money, and they’re more
interested in what that degree will do for them. It’s a little more transactional than what we were
talking about with the love of learning.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: I think that’s a big hurdle for the college as well.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: I’m going to pause again.
[recording stopped]
Aurand: Did I mention earlier about seeing the advertisement, and suddenly, liberal was gone as a
word, interdisciplinary was gone? Now, social justice is in. If you look at how the college is described on
the first page, it comes up and there’s something about commitments to social justice, which is great.
We all should be. [laughter] But when you put that upfront as an advertiser, then what you’re saying is,
okay, we want to announce that we’re politically liberal. What about students who want to go to a
really good college who maybe don’t want to be identified as such, or who perhaps are coming from
more conservative backgrounds? My point is that nobody asked the faculty as a whole whether they
wanted to suddenly have that be the defining attribute of the college.
Fiksdal: I haven’t looked at that, I have to say. I should.
Aurand: Yeah. It’s a very different thing to say this is a liberal arts college. That tells you something. A
liberal arts and sciences college. Innovative. But there was not an announcement of a political agenda
in any of that. You could think what you want to think.
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Fiksdal: It’s an important thing to think about now, especially now that we’re just such a divided society
in every way.
Aurand: Especially because of the hullabaloo that happened, was it two years ago now? With Bret
Weinstein, who is still actively blogging now against the college. In such a divided country right now, I
was concerned when I saw that. I guess my point is not so much about any particular term used to
describe the college, but that in the early years, any shift in language would have been brought to the
faculty meeting as a whole and talked about. It would have been the faculty’s choice as to how to
describe the college, not made by a marketing consultant.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Aurand: What do we want to say about ourselves? What are we really trying to do here? What’s our
philosophy?
Fiksdal: It calls up how you structure yourself, what you’re doing in your discipline, and what you’re
doing with others outside of your discipline when you’re teaching cross-disciplinarily. That’s a good
point. Is it a mandate or what?
Aurand: Right, so at some point, the faculty stopped having ownership over the language that
described their work.
Fiksdal: The marketing became more important.
Aurand: The marketing was contracted out.
Fiksdal: Maybe they have decided on social justice.
Aurand: Maybe they have. That’s true. [laughter]
Fiksdal: We’re talking about various types of colleagues.
Aurand: Right, and when I think about Evergreen, I think about what was wonderful for me—as
somebody who came with just a little teaching experience in graduate school, so I really grew up as a
teacher there—was the exposure to all these different approaches to teaching. I taught with some
faculty who would have the whole quarter, every class session, planned out, every reading chosen
before we started. No room for shifting. And next I’d teach with people who had a completely
different approach. For example, Marilyn Frasca would have a general plan for a quarter, but she would
come in and she’d actually look at what the students were making and change it if it was clear that
something needed to shift. We might be in the middle of a drawing class, for example, and she’d and
look at the students’ drawings, and she could see that they were not really engaging with seeing, but
instead drawing what they thought they knew. So on the spot, she’d make up some whole thing to
wake them up, like she’d make them only make a mark every time she clapped. And suddenly, they’re
19

waiting for the next clap, and then they could make a mark. It was brilliant - to come up with a new way
to work on the spur of the moment—because she could see the students needed it.
Then there also were faculty who were so attuned to the students’ emotional needs, too, that in
the middle of something, and they’d say, “Okay, let’s just stop and take our temperature. How is
everybody doing? Do we need to talk about what’s going on in the world right now?” You could feel the
air clear. These faculty had confidence; they were these master teachers. I was constantly learning.
We had the freedom to try stuff.
The early faculty, too, came from such diverse background. I taught with Beryl Crowe, and in
the first class, he would always make what he called his “up against the wall” speech about the rules and
expectations. But then he’d tell the students how he first got educated. He was in the Merchant
Marines having been a poor kid from Oklahoma. He didn’t have a formal high school education, but he
knew where the library was, so each time he’d come into port, he’d go to the library and take out as
many books as would fit in his seaman’s chest. He didn’t know what to read, so he just started at A and
started reading. [laughing] So he told the students, “If there are gaps in my education, it’s because I
only got to S.” [laughter] His point was that there’s lots of ways to get an education and that it was up
to them. It was their responsibility to figure out how to take advantage of what the program would
offer.
In the early years of the college—I don’t know if you had this experience—I had students come
to me asking me to dock them credit so they wouldn’t have to graduate yet. It happened almost every
quarter. They’d say, “Please, could you just take off four credits, because they’re going to boot me out
of here because I’m over my limit on credits.” I’d ask, “Why don’t you want to graduate?” They’d say, “I
have this project I want to do.” And Photoland. And the Digital Imaging Studio. Students had access to
these amazing resources that would vanish the minute they graduated. Or they’d say, “Oh, this
program’s being offered next year.”
Fiksdal: I do remember letting people have less credit in a program for those same reasons.
Aurand: Exactly, so they could stay on. Right.
Fiksdal: I do remember that. But not docking credit. They’d just say, “Oh, I’ll just be in here for eight
credits.” I’d say, “But you have to do everything because I can’t keep track.” They said, “All right.”
Aurand: Exactly. I had a lot of that, where they’d enroll for less than full credit. But that was the deal.
They still had to do all the work. But it was that recognition that they were in this enriched environment
with access to these faculty and these resources and they wanted to take advantage of it.

20

Toward the end, that went away. It was, “Let me out of here. I want to just graduate and get
out.” That’s when I felt like, okay, something we’re doing is not catching them.
Fiksdal: In the case of Beryl, I’m reminded that we often hired people that didn’t have PhDs.
Aurand: That’s right.
Fiksdal: We hired all kinds of different people. I remember Hap Freund, who came as an attorney. He
was an attorney, and he had to learn to teach. Other people like him, who grew in their jobs, like Gil
Saucedo, who just had a master’s degree, I believe, but really worked hard and learned a lot more
history than he had probably done in graduate school. I can’t think of lots of examples here, but I came
in with a master’s degree, you came with a master’s degree. A lot of people.
Aurand: There were people who came in one field and quickly migrated to teaching in a new one.
Fiksdal: Switched. That’s right. Kirk Thompson. He was a photographer and turned into a psychologist.
Just taught himself. Many, many people did that.
Aurand: Right.
Fiksdal: He was unusual because he never went back to photography that I know. Most people kept
both things going.
Aurand: But I don’t know how much of that happens these days. There was the push to have the
college accredited, so that caused people to be released who didn’t have PhDs, or you needed to have a
certain number of PhDs.
Fiksdal: Oh, I don’t remember that.
Aurand: I’ve forgotten who. There was a faculty member in the very early years whose main credential
was that he had been in prison. Who was that?
Fiksdal: Oh, yes, I do remember. I had his name on my mind a while ago. Jim something.
Aurand: Right, so folks like that suddenly were no longer there.
Fiksdal: He also sort of . . . left on his own.
Aurand: For whatever reason, a number of those people weren’t there, because the college became
concerned about being an accredited school.
Fiksdal: I don’t know if I asked you already about staff teaching, and your attitude or feeling about that.
I think in several cases in the arts, they were hired in order to do that. But I think that became
contentious after a while, so now, that’s not happening.
Aurand: I always thought staff would, of course, want to teach, and should be allowed to teach. I was
glad when there became a mechanism for that, because they deserved the same opportunities for
development as faculty did. And they’re good teachers. They’re people who have a lot to offer.
21

Fiksdal: There were so many.
Aurand: I didn’t get to teach with any. Yes and no. I worked with the printmaking staff. Don Jensen in
the woodshop saved my life a number of times. He is brilliant at teaching skills. Not just skills, but how
to conceptualize a project from beginning to end. He was a terrific sculptor himself. He could have
gone on and done that, but he just liked being there.
I was always so grateful for the support of the staff and wanted them to feel like they were
being valued and have the chance that they wanted to develop. I don’t know. Maybe it was different in
other areas.
Fiksdal: I think it was different in other areas because in the humanities, we didn’t have staff. [laughter]
[Although] there were staff around. Later, in Parttime Studies and Evening and Weekend Studies, some
staff taught, and that was very good. That was an opportunity for them. But otherwise, I don’t know.
Aurand: In individual arts, we were heavily dependent on staff to just keep the studios going. Almost
always, they were very willing to work with fulltime faculty to embed workshops in programs or
modules, and courses and classes in programs. There were obviously a few tensions and stuff.
I suppose in the area of tension, there were the photo staff, Hugh Lentz and Steve Davis. Steve
developed Photoland. He did a brilliant job, and thank God for him and Hugh. But there was some
tension about how they developed and taught a regular rotation of photography classes, but then the
full-time photo and arts faculty wanted to teach in the darkrooms, they sometimes had difficulty getting
access. By and large though, it just amplified the studio offerings and photography was so in demand, it
was very attractive to students. We had one of the best photography programs, not just in the state but
in the whole region, and one of the last wet darkrooms. When everybody went digital, the stuff that
students could do at Evergreen was phenomenal.
Fiksdal: Thanks to Bob and Paul, who worked every summer doing that, I think, with students. Right?
Aurand: In terms of programs, yes. But the development of the facilities was due to Steve Davis and
Hugh Lentz.
Fiksdal: I see what you mean.
Aurand: They ran it, and they kept it going. They trained all the aides and made it so that any student
could go down to the Digital Imaging Studio or down to Photoland, and use the facilities. It was
astonishing.
Fiksdal: That is something that Evergreen offered from the beginning. You could rent out incredible
equipment from Media Loan, and there weren’t a lot of rules attached to that. They still, I believe, are
still open. That was very usual.
22

Aurand: yeah.
Fiksdal: I remember in the sciences, to have access to an electron microscope when you are a
freshman, that was unheard of in the state, probably in the country. I think we’ve always had a lot of
accessibility. That’s something that the first deans made possible in their design of new buildings.
Aurand: Yes. Whoever conceptualized the library—I’m not sure whether that person was a Dean of the
Library—but the story I heard when I came was that that person thought a library should be someplace
where you could go to a drawer marked H and check out a hammer. Books and hammers are both
tools, and libraries should be repositories of tools for learning. Sometimes it’s a written text, and
sometimes it’s a hammer. That’s why Media Loan wound up in the library, because a camera was
considered a tool.
Fiksdal: I can’t think of that person. I don’t think he stayed long. He was there and then he left, but
that was his idea. I just can’t think now of his name. I’ll have to think about it.
Aurand: Yeah. But it was things like that that I came from teaching in graduate school where I had to
practically hock my car to get to use a slide projector to show in my classroom. The automatic response
was “No,” instead of the default being “Yes, let’s see what we can do here.” I loved that about the early
years at Evergreen. Again, we had budgets, we had money, and we had a sense that education should
be about empowering students.
Fiksdal: Yes, because at its founding, they were hoping to go up to 10,000 students really fast.
Aurand: Oy. [laughing]
Fiksdal: There was money. There were resources.
Aurand: Yeah.

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

AurandSusan_20210913_Transcript.pdf

AurandSusan20210926_Transcript.pdf