Pris Bowerman Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

BowermanPris

Title

Pris Bowerman Oral History Interview

Date

11 May 2023

18 May 2023

Creator

Pris Bowerman

Contributor

Susan Fiksdal

extracted text

Priscilla (Pris) Bowerman
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 11, 2023
FINAL

Fiksdal: This is Susan Fiksdal with Pris Bowerman on May 11, 2023. Pris, I wanted to talk to you a little
bit to start your oral history interview about how you grew up, where you grew up, about your family. If
you could talk to us a little bit about that.
Bowerman: I was born in New York and lived in Queens, New York for nine years. Then my parents
moved out on Long Island to Centerport, which is part of the township of Huntington.
I have two sisters. They’re both older than I am, so I’m the baby. We all went to Catholic school
when we were in New York, the local parish school.
My father was an electrical engineer. He went to NYU. He also had a professional license, so he
could approve electric systems. My mom was a legal secretary until she had her first child, and then she
was a mom.
My parents always brought all of us up as though, of course, we were going to go to college,
which was really interesting. In fact, my surviving sister and I still wonder how my father went to college
in the sense of paying for it and so on, because NYU is a private university, and both his parents were
immigrants.
In fact, they were from northern Italy. My grandfather came first. Once he felt comfortable
financially, he went back to Italy, and he brought Grandma over. My other relatives are from Belgium,
and my mother was born in Belgium. She was about two and a half when she came with her mother
three months after her father came.
Very different backgrounds. They all came through Ellis Island, so the records are available now,
and I got them all. [chuckles] The manifest will show you what occupation people had before they
came. My grandfather, Valesio, on my father’s side was a chef, although he was put down as a cook. He
eventually became the chef at a well-known French restaurant in Manhattan.
A family story about that is that he was asked not to show up in the dining room because he
looked Italian, and they would know that the chef was not French. My parents would always say,
“Northern Italian cooking and French cooking are very similar.”
Fiksdal: Plus, the people look the same.
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Bowerman: For both of them, education for their daughters was extremely important, so that was just
understood.
Fiksdal: Did your mother go to college for her secretarial work?
Bowerman: No, she went to a secretarial school. She was a legal secretary, which she was quite proud
of.
Fiksdal: That’s what I was wondering how you get trained in legal. But maybe there, you have a track.
Bowerman: She got trained in that. She used to tell us about carbon copies, and you can’t make a
mistake and correct it on a legal document. It has to be correct all the way through, and you had four
carbon copies. [laughing]
Fiksdal: It sounds like the evaluations at the beginning of Evergreen where you couldn’t make a typo.
And I remember different colors of correcting ink.
Bowerman: She just remembers having to start all over.
Fiksdal: Oh, yes awful!
Bowerman: It was very precise work in any case. I guess my father had always, always wanted to have
his own house with some land just so he could have a garden. We looked for years for a place on Long
Island and went farther and farther out on the island to find what they were looking for.
My father finally found a house he really liked, but he didn’t like the quality of the construction.
Then he found a builder he really liked, and the builder was planning a new development. He showed
my father his plans. My father didn’t like them, and he showed him his plans. The builder agreed to
build that one on the corner, even though he didn’t want to give up the corner to a new design.
My parents’ house got built first. They allowed it to be shown by the builder, and all the other
houses down the street were copies of that house because that’s what people wanted.
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s fabulous! He was an excellent designer.
Bowerman: I should back up a little because he did win an award from the architectural organization
for his designs of the lights of either the Hudson Tunnel or the Lincoln Tunnel, I don’t remember which.
But he did the electric work for the lighting of the tunnels, and the award was not just for the
effectiveness of the lighting, but for the aesthetic design. He was into very, very simple, almost
minimalist-type design. The lights have been changed in both tunnels since then, but we did see them
before I left New York.
When we went to Long Island, we all had our choice of what type of school we wanted to go to.
We all chose public school. My oldest sister, because the Catholic school was starting in February, well,

2

it’s September. She had to catch up six months’ work because she didn’t want to go back six months to
get into the public school as a junior. My other sister was starting high school, and I was in fourth grade.
There were embarrassing times because you had these habits from Catholic school that didn’t
apply in public school. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Like what?
Bowerman: The one I remember most was every time you raised your hand and were called on in
Catholic school, you stood up and you answered standing. At the public school, people giggled, and I
didn’t know at first why, but it didn’t take me long. It took me about two weeks to learn to stay in my
seat. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah, because it’s ingrained in you, and the kind of respect you showed, too, probably.
Bowerman: Yes, probably. I don’t know about that difference because it’s more subtle.
Fiksdal: You don’t remember parochial school as well?
Bowerman: No.
Fiksdal: Like how much it might have affected you.
Bowerman: No. I do remember the sisters were strict. My oldest sister went through more than eight
years of it, and the other went through eight years. They had their sisters who were terrible, and the
sisters who were softer.
I do remember the first day of school. I remember there were about 60 kids in our classroom.
Talking about ratios of 30 to one being too high. Well, some people could manage it. [laughter] What
you need is a good ruler.
So, it was actually a really nervous, nervous time, and I think I carried that over a lot. You
couldn’t make mistakes. At a spelling bee, when you did stand around the room because, first, your
hand was slapped, and then you sat down.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness.
Bowerman: Yeah, it wasn’t hard, but it was very strict. But I loved public school. The first year, I walked
to school. It was half a mile away. The following years, we went to different schools in the district, so
we were always bused. My sisters were off to different schools, senior high, so that was different, too.
We lived half a mile in any direction, once we were out on the island, from swimming. It was all
downhill, so it was only tiring when you came home. [laughter]
Fiksdal: When you were already tired.
Bowerman: My father had taught me how to swim in New York. That’s a real strong memory for me,
too. But all the kids went to swimming lessons at the Yacht Club In Centerport. You didn’t have to
3

belong to the Yacht Club. It was a Red Cross class. I did that for several summers, and then we were off
swimming whenever we wanted to.
I had a great, fun time growing up because there were a lot of kids my age—exactly my age—in
my grade who lived in the area we were in. The woman across the way from us came over to introduce
herself to my mom, and she said, “Oh! You have a nine-year-old! I have a nine-year old! She must
meet Martha,” who was two houses away.
Martha lived on an old Vanderbilt estate, which was now a museum site. Her father was the
curator. That Vanderbilt not only had his house, but he had a marine museum, so they needed a curator
to maintain the exhibits as well as the buildings.
His four kids—one was my age—had the run of the property, including down to the hangar
where we would swim. In the winter, the golf course was where we would sled. We were out all the
time. I used to say to my mom, “How did we know when to come home for lunch?” She said, “I don’t
know. You just came home when it was about the right time, and you went back.” That was how we
played until well into our teens.
Fiksdal: That sounds idyllic.
Bowerman: It was so much fun.
Fiksdal: What about language? Did your mother teach you any?
Bowerman: No.
Fiksdal: What did she speak?
Bowerman: She spoke English. My parents both spoke very good English.
Fiksdal: She came at such an early age.
Bowerman: Yes, and her parents spoke English. I remember both of them, but my grandfather most
because he lived till the 1960s.
They learned it when they came here. My grandfather on my mother’s side came and he only
waited three months to call his wife and daughter over. Partly because he had two brothers-in-law in
New Jersey, his wife’s brothers. When he came, they had the sponsorship money, and he had saved it
up, too. They said, “No, no, no, you keep that.”
And they had a job for him. He got placed very, very quickly. But he learned English very fast—
he was a very smart man—so then he felt ready for them to come over very quickly. My mother said
she understood Flemish, but she couldn’t really speak it. She’d heard enough of it that she could do
that.

4

My father’s parents were Italian. His mother would always say to my mother, “Julietta, I no
speak-a the English.” Then she would turn around and continue reading The New York Times. [laughing]
They did not have the best relationship. My mother loved her father-in-law, who I never met because
he died of cancer before I was born. But I guess he had to have some English to hold his job and so on.
Fiksdal: That was a time when generations lived together, I guess.
Bowerman: Yes, that’s right, and they continued to live in Manhattan when my parents moved out to
the island. But by then, my father’s father was dead. My mother’s mother was dead, and my father’s
mother wouldn’t move. She was real happy where she was. And grandpa on the other side, he was
happy where he was, too in Queens. He would come out quite often to visit and spend weekends and
things like that.
My sisters went to different schools because there was a township called Huntington that our
little community was part of. But they had warned several small communities two decades ahead, that
they would drop our students because the school will be too big at that point.
Centerport knew that was coming and the neighboring Greenlawn knew that was coming, so
they planned a new high school together. They already had their own elementary schools, but they
planned a new high school and junior high. My class was the first one to go all the way through, sixth
grade to senior year. There were obviously graduates before because kids came in in later years.
It was called Harborfields High School because the old name of Greenlawn was Oldfields, and
the old name of Centerport was Cow Harbor, and they didn’t choose to call it the Old Cow School.
We were kind of a brand-new school, proving itself, and did real well in sports and academics, so
it was nice. I think it was different because it was a new school and faculty were new to each other.
Fiksdal: And you were well supported. You had a lot of friends.
Bowerman: Oh, yeah. I had a huge cohort of friends. Where we lived in Centerport, you had to go up a
hill, and then there was this plateau that lasted quite a while, and then it went down to the beach. I
swear there were 30 kids in my grade who were there. The others were Greenlawn kids, pretty much.
We would play in gangs, and the dogs ran as gangs, too. [laughter] I remember they were
always happy. “Oh, there’s Nicky and Frisky!”
Fiksdal: What year were you born, just to situate you in time?
Bowerman: ’44, December.
Fiksdal: It was expected for you to go to college. You did well in school. Where did you go to college?
Bowerman: I went to Vassar, which is just upstate New York in Poughkeepsie.
Fiksdal: Wasn’t it kind of expensive to go to Vassar?
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Bowerman: Yeah, it was then. But not like today!
Fiksdal: A private women’s college.
Bowerman: Yes, it was a private women’s college, part of the Seven Sisters. I guess it was. I had a small
New York State scholarship. You got it based on need. You got it because you passed the exam well
enough, and then it was based on need.
My parents were into saving. That was part of their background, I think. Also, my mother’s
father was. He played the stock market a lot, and so did my father. They did really well. So, my father
paid for all three of us to go to college. My oldest sister went to Barnard in New York City. My other
sister is an artist, and she went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. None of them were cheap.
Fiksdal: No, but they’re well-known places.
Bowerman: Yeah, but my parents paid our way through. We didn’t have any worry about that, which
was really nice.
Fiksdal: What was it like to be at Vassar? Suddenly, you were plunged into an all-women’s school.
Bowerman: Exactly. It was fun, actually. I had applied to a lot because back then, you applied to a lot
of schools to be sure you got one you really liked. I think it was the only all-women’s college I applied
to. One was Radcliffe, but they shared classes already with Harvard.
But it was very comfortable. It was a very warm, caring environment. I don’t know that co-eds
wouldn’t be also, but that’s the way it was. It was small. It didn’t feel that small, but it was 1,500
students, total.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s small.
Bowerman: The entry class was 400 and then there would be some attrition. It’s a beautiful, beautiful
campus. Just gorgeous. I was back a couple of years ago. They’ve built a lot more buildings but it’s still
a beautiful campus.
I didn’t find any trouble acclimating to it. They had lots of things organized for the weekend.
There were buses every weekend to Yale, to Princeton, to Boston, and to New York City. They cost you
something, but it was nominal. They would come back on Sunday evening or late afternoon, so you
could easily spend the weekend if you had a place to stay. I did that fairly often, and I had mixers with
those schools, either there or on campus.
We knew the routine by senior year. On that campus, all the underclassmen were in different
dormitories, and you stayed in that dormitory for three years, unless you had a special reason, so you
got to know the women in that dormitory really well as well as some others you saw in class a lot.

6

Senior year, everyone moved to the oldest main building, so then you hooked up with your
good, old friends close there, whether they were from classes or from the old dorm. I thought, we have
a whole week of sitting around before classes start with nothing to do. And it’s a lovely time of year.
I got five friends together and I said, “Let’s go to New York and just have a good time for two
days.” They were all up for it, so we went to the Dean of Students, who arranged the buses, and she
goes, “Really? You have hardly been here three days.” “Yeah, but we want to go.” She said, “I’ll see
what I can do.”
She came back and said, “I couldn’t get you a bus because there are so few of you, but I got you
a limo, and he’ll be with you all day. You’ll like it because he’ll drop you off and then pick you up when
you say.” [laughter]
Fiksdal: Yes, I think I would like that.
Bowerman: We had a wonderful time. That was really fun.
Fiksdal: That’s quite a memory.
Bowerman: That’s how we started senior year.
Fiksdal: The infinite resources of Vassar. What did you study there?
Bowerman: I had applied for a program where I took two minors and one major. It doesn’t leave you
much room for spreading out. But it turns out that the minor requirements were very minor, so I was
able to take most of what wanted anyway. Actually, it was very lax, because if they knew you were in
that program, they didn’t stick you with every requirement for the major either.
I did econ as my major, and then philosophy, which I loved, as a minor, and math as a minor,
which went along with the econ.
Fiksdal: You must have been really good in math.
Bowerman: I loved the philosophy most, so I spent a lot of time thinking . . . well . . . what do you do
with those two things? And I thought all I can do with philosophy is teach it, and I’m not sure I want to
teach.
That’s how I made econ my major and stuck with it. I could have gone either way for graduate
school, but philosophy then in the graduate schools was very analytical, and I was not interested in that
kind of philosophy.
Fiksdal: When you were thinking, all I can do is teach, you were thinking of a career.
Bowerman: Oh, yes.
Fiksdal: And you were around all these career-minded women.

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Bowerman: Mainly. There were a few who were just going to go home and marry an old friend, but
most people were going on to something.
Fiksdal: All these mixers and all this, this wasn’t just to get married. You were beyond that period of
women going to college to get married?
Bowerman: It was to have a date, have a boyfriend. [laughing] Maybe get married.
Fiksdal: That was still there.
Bowerman: Yeah, but the ones who were hooked up and going to get married after college early in the
four years, they were in a different group. They were all attached to the idea of their marriage and
that’s it.
Fiksdal: You clearly just weren’t around them.
Bowerman: Yeah. My closest friends were all heading for some kind of graduate work, maybe not
necessarily PhDs but some kind of graduate work. I guess you just sort yourselves out that way over
time.
Fiksdal: For graduate school, what were you aiming at? Were you aiming at? An MA or a PhD?
Bowerman: I went for a PhD. In the econ departments, at least, a number of them didn’t let you apply
for their master’s. They didn’t have a master’s program. A master’s was along the way to the PhD, so
you had to be accepted to the PhD program.
I applied to three schools and only one was not that way, so that’s where I was going. By that
time, I had decided teaching was fine. I had noticed that a lot of economists—because I spent an
internship summer in D.C.—they go back and forth between academia and government. And now, they
do business of course.
Fiksdal: In that internship, what were you doing?
Bowerman: I was working with the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and I was a researcher for
them. It was really nice.
Fiksdal: It was fabulous.
Bowerman: I worked with the staff, not the committee members, but they did research for the
Congresspeople, whatever they wanted researched. I learned a whole lot about beef exports between
Argentina and the United States and Europe.
Fiksdal: But it’s a real-world thing. People need to know this.
Bowerman: Oh, yeah, that’s right. We wanted to get the trade. The British only ate Argentinian beef
and we wanted to sell them hamburgers, but they thought hamburgers were terrible because at that
time, Argentinian beef that was exported was low in fat. If you fry a low-in-fat hamburger, it’s kind of
8

tough and chewy. We wanted to show them what an American hamburger tasted like. So, we were
reporting on, why is it that the British market is with Argentina and not with us, and what could we do?
We eventually got the British market, but I think, in part, because the Argentinians had some
trouble agriculturally as well. Our farmers did a lot of demonstrations in cities of American hamburgers.
“Oh, that’s pretty good.” [laughing]
Fiksdal: That’s a whole story there, Pris. Never heard it before. Did you have a mentor as an
undergrad? How did you get steered to a PhD, do you think, and which programs to choose?
Bowerman: I guess there was an old woman economist on the faculty at Vassar. Edna McMann, I think.
She acted as one, kind of. Then there was a man whose was middle-aged. Marshall was his last name.
They both took a light hand in guiding [me].
She was so funny because one spring when I went on the internship program in D.C., she stood
over the whole program, but she knew I was an economics major.
She was explaining to somebody sitting next to her on the bus behind me that I had decided I
really preferred art history, so I wasn’t going to be an economist. I said, “No, I’m still going to major in
economics. I’m just going to do the museums here because—
Fiksdal: I just liked museums so I couldn’t be an economist. How funny.
Bowerman: She got it straight.
Fiksdal: Where did you go for your PhD?
Bowerman: I went to Yale. I was very familiar with the Yale campus because of the dating between
Vassar and Yale, so that part of it was comfortable. I hated Yale academically. I just did not like the
econ department. It was a very top department. Probably the only one that was listed higher was MIT,
and it was competing with MIT to be the most mathematically inclined econ department. That wasn’t
really my basic interest, but you had to get it under your belt to go through the program.
I did not enjoy it. A lot of the professors were extremely distant. They could be the opposite.
We had James Tobin for theory the third quarter. You had to take three written exams and an oral exam
to get past your comps.
One of the written exams was in econ history, which was simple. All you had to do was
memorize what the prof thought and repeat it back to him. The theory was the hard part, and I don’t
think I got enough mathematics in my theory classes as an undergraduate, so I struggled a lot.
But the third quarter was the hardest. It was about capital, and nobody understands capital and
time and all that stuff. But it was taught by James Tobin, who, at the time, was on the Council of

9

Economic Advisers. He’d come in and he’d put all these formulas on the blackboard. Econ theory is
nothing but mathematical formulas where each letter stood for something in econ.
One day, somebody dared to ask him if he used any of this when he was in Washington and he
goes, “No, of course not.” [laughter] He says, “After you practice this long enough, and look at numbers
long enough, you get a sense, a feeling in your gut.”
Fiksdal: Oh, this is really disappointing.
Bowerman: I thought, great, it does have a human side to it.
Fiksdal: But it seems like, why are you learning this theory? It doesn’t give you the inspiration for this
hard exam.
Bowerman: My gut tells me.
Fiksdal: “Finally, I’d like to say, my gut says give me an A+ because I sat through this.”
Bowerman: Exactly. You had to take two areas of specialization, so I did economic development and
trade. The trade was another Washington guy who was very good, but young and distant.
The development people were much more human. They integrated a lot of sociological thinking
into their work, and they were people that worked in the field. They also developed theory, or else they
wouldn’t be at Yale, but they were more interesting. So, that’s the area I started to do my dissertation
in once I passed the comps. I also got sick at that time with Crohn’s, and I was so disenchanted with the
school, so I didn’t get very far in my research work.
I got married and we both had been at Yale five years, so we started applying for jobs. We
decided to take the one that looked like the best job. It was getting very hard to have two people picked
up at the same university at that time. And my husband wanted to be on the West Coast because he
spent some time in California.
He got an offer from Oregon, and we talked to Oregon. They said, “Oh, people commute all the
time up to Portland from Eugene.”
Fiksdal: From Eugene? Lies.
Bowerman: And there’s lots of schools in Portland. Because we’re used to commuting, being from New
York, but they don’t commute here.
Fiksdal: There are no trains.
Bowerman: Exactly. Every hour on the hour, you can get a train to New York. When we got here, we
found out the truth, there was an opening at Oregon State, which was only 40 miles up the freeway, so I
applied for it. It was part-time, and I got it.

10

The first year, I just taught basic econ principles for half-time. The second year, the chair hired
me to go full-time, continuing to teach the same stuff, but to do research with him on women’s labor
force participation. That was interesting at the time.
Then my husband decided not to finish his dissertation, and that was the end of his career in
academia because he was a white male in literature. [laughing]
I said, okay, it’s my turn, and I went into the job market, and I applied. In the main economics
journal, there were some openings that existed. There were only 20 that year—very few listed there—
so I wrote to all of them. I wrote a letter saying, “This is my academic background. I’ve had two years of
teaching experience. I understand you have an opening in economics.” I just wanted to add, though,
that I had a secondary interest in philosophy.
Out of these 20 letters, I got three responses. One is Evergreen, one is Hampshire College, and
one is an innovative College at Redlands. It was that one sentence that I put in.
Fiksdal: I recognized that that would be it because I read a lot of applications.
Bowerman: It did show as an undergraduate. My dissertation as an undergraduate had combined
philosophy and econ, so if they looked any farther, they could see that. I thought, oh, my.
I always advised my students who were applying, “If there’s something you love but you’re not
going to apply for that, do mention it. It can make a real difference to your future.”
Fiksdal: The alternative colleges were the ones that were interested.
Bowerman: Yes, three alternative colleges. That’s right.
Fiksdal: What happened? Did you go for interviews to all of them?
Bowerman: I went to interviews at Hampshire. Redlands didn’t follow up. I don’t have any reason why.
I went to Hampshire, which is in Amherst, so, going back to the East Coast. Hampshire, as you probably
know, is linked to four other schools in the area.
They were very nice, but after the first day, the guy said, “I have to be honest with you. We are
all feeling so bad. We lost a faculty member last year. She was a woman in your class at Yale in
economics, and when we saw your application, we thought, Oh! Maybe she’s come back! He said, “We
have been so unfair to you through this whole day.”
Fiksdal: That is weird.
Bowerman: I said, “Thank you for telling me.” So, that was the end of that. After I was out, they closed
the position and didn’t hire for I don’t know how long. They said, “We’re not ready to be objective in
hiring.”

11

But Evergreen came through. I came up from Eugene. Met Larry Eickstaedt, Charlie Teske, who
was the Dean at the time, LLyn De Danaan.
Fiksdal: What year are we talking about?
Bowerman: We’re in ’73. I came in September ’73, so I came up in the spring of ’73.
Fiksdal: At least we had a woman in the deanship. That was major.
Bowerman: That’s right. LLyn was there. Oscar Soule was a Dean. Charlie, Oscar,, Llyn, but Larry was
the greeter, probably from the hiring committee. Those are the people I remember from the interview.
Fiksdal: Was it a two-day affair?
Bowerman: Yes, it was two days. I stayed over at the Governor House.
Fiksdal: Oh, you did?
Bowerman: Drove up there and gave them a call and said, “I’m here.” “Okay, we’ll come by tomorrow
morning at 9:00.”
On the second day, I think I drove right back to Eugene. I’m not sure. It was a long day. I got
the acceptance letter, so we came up. The first team I taught in was Matter of Survival, which I thought
was a hilarious title for the first course. [laughing]
Fiksdal: It is because you’re in a new position you’ve got to survive. You’re in a new place. You’re a
New Yorker.
Bowerman: [Laughing] That’s right. Totally different place. I didn’t experience any of the West Coast as
totally different. There were differences, but they struck me as fairly subtle. I’ve had family come out,
and I’ve met other people from the East Coast who thought, oh, it’s shocking! And I was like “I don’t
think it’s so different.”
Fiksdal: Maybe because you lived a rural lifestyle for your childhood.
Bowerman: Yeah, kind of. It was suburban but it had that rural heart to it.
Fiksdal: That estate is what I’m thinking of as rural.
Bowerman: That’s right. Then, in Connecticut, we didn’t live in New Haven. We had a car and we lived
about five miles out in Bethany. But, like so many Eastern cities, five miles out can be country—and it
was country. We lived in what was then a 150-year-old farmhouse that was owned by a math faculty
member at Yale.
They rented the one-bedroom apartment upstairs and we rented it. We got to know them real
well as friends, and then they introduced us to a visiting faculty member who was more our age. They
were almost lifetime friends as it turned out. The landlord went on a sabbatical to California and these

12

people came in from somewhere else to be on a sabbatical at Yale. That’s how we lived in the same
house for a year and got to know each other.
Fiksdal: It sounds like you had such a supportive atmosphere.
Bowerman: Yeah. And that was a four-acre property. They didn’t do anything with it, but neighbors’
cows would get caught in the vegetable garden and we’d have to shoo them out. That was very rural.
Across the way was an Italian farming family. Oh, I had to come over and have lunch! The big deal.
[laughing] It was very fun that way.
Fiksdal: So now, let’s get back to Evergreen. Your first program was Matter of Survival.
Bowerman: Yes. Al Wiedemann was the coordinator. Russ Fox had one experience year ahead of me.
Then there was Medardo Delgado, who I think left after that year.
Fiksdal: He was new?
Bowerman: I don’t know that he was new. It might have been his second year, like Russ. I’m not sure.
Fiksdal: You were suddenly team teaching. You hadn’t done that before.
Bowerman: That’s right, and you don’t know what your colleagues think is a good workload, a heavy
workload, a light workload, so you’re always working that out.
They didn’t quite know how economics fit but they knew it must fit. But the program’s been set
up in their minds largely as natural history, living off the land type thing, about which I knew almost
nothing. Actually, I pulled on a lot of my interests outside of straight econ.
We each chose to run one seminar on a different topic from everybody else—not a common
book—so I did Utopians. I’d read a lot about them in philosophy and some literature classes, so it was
no problem for me to do that. It attracted a number of students.
Fiksdal: Plus, it was fun.
Bowerman: Yeah, it was great fun. Teaching writing, at first, the thought of it was daunting, but I didn’t
have any trouble with it because I think I went at it like an editor would, only maybe on the second
version of the manuscript. A lot of detail, and then a long, long note trying to explain what was going
on. Students appreciated that, and it worked. It was very time consuming.
Fiksdal: I saw some of your annotations. You really rewrote their papers for them. It was a huge
amount of work.
Bowerman: Yes, exactly. But I got to really like to do that.
Fiksdal: Yeah, if it worked.
Bowerman: I didn’t do it growling the whole time, although sometimes I thought, how can they not
even know that? [laughter]
13

Fiksdal: But the students at the time were good. They usually had transferred in.
Bowerman: Yes, and they knew what they were achieving, I think.
Sometime during that first year, the college said how old the average student was, and they
were my age. That was another thing that I think was different, and I liked it. It didn’t make me
uncomfortable. If anything, it probably made me comfortable. The give and take you have with
students, I wasn’t learning a new language generation-wise, so that was good.
Fiksdal: Were you hooked by Evergreen? How did you feel that first year? Did you like the philosophy?
Bowerman: Yeah, I liked it a whole lot. The main thing I remember struggling with, with the colleagues,
was workload and how much you ask the students to do. I think I always wanted to ask them to do
more.
I developed a rule, which I shared with my faculty team. Whatever you assign the students,
they’ll do 80 percent of it. So, if you assign them a whole lot, they’re still going to do more than if you
assign a little bit. They’re not going to be much more thorough with a small reading than with a large
reading.
Fiksdal: That’s a very good insight. I wish that you had told me that.
Bowerman: I don’t know if it’s true anymore, but that’s—
Fiksdal: I’d say they do less, the last year that I was there.
Bowerman: They never quite do it to the depths you want. Right?
Fiksdal: Right.
Bowerman: When we found a middle ground, I was willing to compromise on those things. Then I had
control of my own little seminar group, and we did a book a week, which became the standard, I found,
in programs I taught in. But they did have other assignments from the program in general.
I learned so much, especially from Al, because he was in natural history, and I was so interested.
I had done a lot of gardening before then, but not natural history. I was comfortable with plants and
being outdoors and that sort of stuff, but I just learned so much from him. He’s a very comfortable
person, and funny.
Fiksdal: You had these seminars—yours was Utopia—but did you have lectures that everyone came to?
Bowerman: Yes.
Fiksdal: They did have full program activities.
Bowerman: That’s right. I can’t even remember right now what I lectured on or what any of them
lectured on. We also had field trips. I think that’s what’s coming through now. And, of course, we had
a retreat at the beginning, which was a totally new idea for me.
14

Fiksdal: That must have been strange.
Bowerman: Yes. And it was a horrible stretch in one sense that because of the Crohn’s, my ability to
eat was very limited, and we were going to live off the land.
Fiksdal: Oh, no.
Bowerman: That was a death sentence. I had not told anyone I had Crohn’s because I thought it might
be a great way to get fired.
So, I brought foods that I could eat, but also that didn’t need to be cold and kept them in my
pockets. [laughing] You know what? The students were eating salal berries, anything and everything
they could make out of salal berries.
Fiksdal: They’re just terrible, too.
Bowerman: And would have killed my gut.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Bowerman: So, I survived.
Fiksdal: They’re very seedy, and you couldn’t take the fiber.
Bowerman: Yeah, exactly, and at that time, I couldn’t take skin and I couldn’t take seeds.
Fiksdal: They don’t taste good either.
Bowerman: They liked it. I think they had sugar and flour, so they probably added a lot of sugar.
[laughing]
Fiksdal: A lot of sugar. That would do it. I’ve had a lot of things from salal.
Bowerman: It was at least two nights.
Fiksdal: They were always long retreats.
Bowerman: Yeah. I liked getting to know your students that way. It wasn’t particularly great about
learning about your colleagues because I was always trying to eat when they weren’t around. [laughing]
That was a funny experience.
But I liked the idea, so I wasn’t against the idea. But the next year, I taught alone in an individual
group contract, so I was in control.
Fiksdal: Was that something that the students organized, like they said, “We want this”?
Bowerman: Yeah, absolutely. I would say in winter quarter, I was approached by an upper classman,
Geoff Rothwell.
Fiksdal: I know Geoff really well.
Bowerman: Chuck Nisbet was the only economist on the faculty besides me at the time. The year I was
interviewed, he was away, so they actually didn’t interview me with any economist.
15

Fiksdal: Wow.
Bowerman: Yeah. LLyn was probably the closest one topic-wise, as an anthropologist and sociologist,
but they didn’t have anyone else.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting.
Bowerman: Then I met Chuck when he came back, but we weren’t teaching together at that time.
Anyway, Geoff approached me and said, “What we needed was a really good thorough big group
contact with lots of material. I was ready for that, so he and I designed it together. I think mainly he
brought me ideas and I’d edit them.
Fiksdal: And translated them into a curriculum.
Bowerman: Exactly. He got a lot of students to come, so we had practically a full 20 students.
Fiksdal: Good for him.
Bowerman: Yeah, and it was two quarters. At the end of that, I went into individual contracts for the
spring quarter.
Fiksdal: You know that Geoff worked in Paris for the nuclear power something.
Bowerman: I knew he was working in that area.
Fiksdal: His office looked out at the Eiffel Tower. I go to France every two years, so I think it was preCovid, and we got together. We were talking because he’s always had French. His French is terrible.
[laughter] But I remembered him speaking French. And we were friends. He said, “I never took a class
from you,” and I was surprised. I remember him coming to my house and helping me cook, preparing
some things for students to come over.
Bowerman: In France?
Fiksdal: No, in the States. So, that second year, you got to do economics, that probably helped you
ground yourself also.
Bowerman: Probably, I’m not sure it felt that way, but, yeah. We did the history of theory.
Fiksdal: You’re teaching stuff you know.
Bowerman: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: You’re in control, like you said.
Bowerman: You can go right back to stuff you’ve been doing so much of.
Fiksdal: Exactly. I wanted to ask if you remember what the campus looked like when you were there
because it was still getting built.
Bowerman: My office was in Lab I, I think. I certainly was where Al’s and Russ’s were. I think I was in
that building, too. I did have a view. I wasn’t in the basement at that time.
16

There was a Lab I, but there wasn’t a Lab II, there wasn’t an Arts Annex. There was a library. I
think the lecture halls were there, but I don’t remember. We didn’t use them if they were. Or did we?
[laughing] I’m not sure about the lecture halls. The Student Union Building, the first part of it was there.
The gym was partly there. It was pretty. It had a lot of trees, but they were young compared to now.
Compared to now, it was empty, but back then, I liked it.
The parking lots were still where they are now, so you still had to walk from your car to campus.
I liked the idea behind it; that it was a city in the woods. Was it that year? Yes, that year—my second
year. I began swearing at the parking lots, how far away they were. It’s just not proper. [laughter] It
was wrong! Then I found out I was pregnant. That’s what’s wrong with the parking lots.
Fiksdal: You’d been there two years?
Bowerman: Yeah. I didn’t know I was pregnant for five months.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Bowerman: That’s why it was really getting onerous. Nobody knew that. That was kind of a tense time.
I didn’t feel tense like my doctor apparently felt tense, but I’d been on all these medications for Crohn’s,
and all of a sudden, I wasn’t only just getting pregnant, I was very pregnant, and I was still on all these
medications. So, he did some research where we found that one of them would have killed the baby by
now.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Bowerman: Another one, they didn’t know what it would do. They had no research on that one. The
one they knew about they had research on rabbits and mice. They wouldn’t develop properly in the first
months of getting miscarried.
Fiksdal: Were you scared then?
Bowerman: No, I think I was a very happy pregnant woman. I wasn’t, but I know he was. He was about
our age, so he wasn’t terribly experienced either.
The baby came in summer, of course, and he was perfectly fine. My doctor came in very early in
the morning and he said, “I’m sorry to wake you up but I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that we gave the
baby a very thorough examination and he’s perfectly all right.” And I go, “Yeah, of course he is.”
[laughing]
Fiksdal: Who was that baby?
Bowerman: That was Jude.
Fiksdal: That was summer. Did you teach in the fall?
Bowerman: Yes, there was no such thing as maternity leave.
17

Fiksdal: And you didn’t ask for one?
Bowerman: I don’t remember if I asked for one then. I know I did the second time, in 1981.
Fiksdal: What year was that?
Bowerman: ’75.
Fiksdal: Oh, Pris, I got pregnant the next year, ’76, and I said, “I want a relief.” I gave birth at the end of
fall quarter.
Bowerman: Oh, you were in the middle. Did they give you sick leave?
Fiksdal: They gave me two quarters.
Bowerman: Wow. That’s what I got, too, with my second in 1981.
Fiksdal: I did contract students. But still, it was a lighter load, and it was too much. It was better not to
do anything. So much work.
Bowerman: With the first one, I went right back as well. He was an early July baby, so I had some time.
And I had a great caregiver, who I brought him to. We would have been out here in Lacey by then—not
very far—and she was also in Lacey.
That was easier, because when he got a little older, we started putting him in daycare and
preschools, and I had to drive him to different places each day. Some days I had to leave campus to
move him and then come back to campus for my next appointment or class.
Fiksdal: And trying to find caregivers was really hard and daycare was really hard.
Bowerman: Yeah. My caregiver had done it for a while. She had four school-aged children who came,
and she took two babies. He was one. She was really good. She ran her house differently than I ran
mine, but I found that my kids, at least, were totally adaptable. Once they could speak, they would say,
“Carol does it this way, but Mom does it that way.” They just adapted to it, so I thought that was good.
That worked out very well. I was off all the medicines, because at the end of the pregnancy, I
was still on one. They wouldn’t dare take me off it because they didn’t know what would happen. He
had four doctors at the delivery. I thought, my gawd, I’m meeting all the doctors at Group Health. Why
are they all here? Then I go, oh, I know why they’re all here. He didn’t know which of us was going to
be in trouble. But it turned out everything was fine.
The one that I was still on, I just said, what the hell? I went off it, and then three months later, I
told my doctor, and he looked at me, and he said something my father once said to me. “Well, you’re
still alive. I guess it’s okay.” [laughing] I didn’t go back on it for years. That was a good thing.
Fiksdal: Okay, Pris, we’ve had a little break. As we were chatting during the break, and one thing that
you and I shared was being a mother, and especially in those early years, there were very few of us who
18

were mothers. It was a lot of work to be a mother, to run a household, to do all the work Evergreen
requires of you, even to just be in class that much. Let’s talk about that a little bit. What was your
experience?
Bowerman: Busy. Busy, busy, busy. I’m glad I was young then. There was no way you could do it if you
were very much older. You were physically moving back and forth a lot. I don’t think any of the
mothers—when I was pregnant, Carolyn Dobbs was pregnant. You were shortly after.
Fiksdal: I was after. Barbara Smith perhaps?
Bowerman: Should be right because Chris is the same age as Jude. I wasn’t close to Barbara at that
time, but there was Russ Lidman’s wife, Raven. We were all in the same corridor, by that time, in the
basement of the library. The dark hole. But that’s when we were pregnant, not when my babies were
born. The really hard time was when they were young—when they were infants, and till they went to
school, when we had some other place to put them most of the day. [laughing]
In the last few months of the first pregnancy, I was doing individual contracts, and it was really
good because I gave myself a two-hour lunch and I took a nap after I ate. That was very helpful.
Because I was—and I think most women are—very tired, or sleepy anyway, the last trimester.
Busy would be the main thing. I think back now, at my age, and ask, how could I keep all of that
in my head at once? But that part didn’t seem so hard. I was able to say, “Okay, class is done. Now I
get in the car. Now I drive home, and I pick up the kid, and I play with him because he’s so cute.”
[laughing]
Fiksdal: What was your husband doing while you were teaching?
Bowerman: At that time, he was teaching at Capitol Business College downtown. When he decided not
to go ahead with his doctorate in literature, he had also been good at math, so he started taking all the
courses he could in accounting at the community college, and he got hired right away by them to teach
business math and business English, which was no problem. At that immediate time, that’s where he
was. But he was taking courses as well as working.
Fiksdal: So, he was super busy.
Bowerman: He was busy as well. That’s right. After he finished all that coursework, he had enough to
get into the State government because you had to write essays on your application and he could explain
that he didn’t have a degree in accounting, he had all this work and study. He got in, and once you get
in, your prior job was another State job, so you qualified.

19

Then he got his CPA, and I think he was the second in the state that year, so he got taken on by
the Auditor’s Office. But there were months and months and months of studying for the CPA, so he was
also busy with that.
All along, we both worked the whole time. His job was one where you couldn’t take time off.
My job was flexible, so I did most of the childcare—during the week, certainly. But, as I was trying to say
earlier, mentally, I could keep my attention focused on whatever I was doing at that time. The hardest
part, of course, was when you were trying to either look at student papers or read the text and have it in
your head, and the baby was awake. [laughing] That was the hardest part.
I remember the third year—Jude is now an infant—and my parents were visiting, and we had
the faculty seminar at my house, which was for my convenience because of the baby. Charlie Teske was
one of the faculty members. He met my parents. It was kind of embarrassing because he was trying to
communicate with them like he was their peer, and I was the child. He says, “It’s so wonderful. She’s
had this baby, and when she teaches with us, you wouldn’t know she had him.” I thought, well, I don’t
know, Charlie!
Fiksdal: Never out of my mind.
Bowerman: The highest compliment he could share with my parents.
Fiksdal: It was such a different world for men.
Bowerman: It really was.
Fiksdal: They couldn’t even conceive of what we were doing. Women’s work was women’s work. It
allowed them to come to campus, read the paper, have a cup of coffee. Are you kidding? I came to
campus moments before I had to be there. I was dropping my kids off, or dealing with them and their
breakfast habits, and all that stuff.
Bowerman: That’s right, and sometimes they’re sick. And sometimes you’d have to make excuses, and
that was nice when you had a team. I always had teams who understood, so I could say, “My baby’s
very sick and I can’t come in this morning. Could you do something with my seminar group?” And they
would manage.
Fiksdal: And what about—I admit that I did not go to faculty meetings because they were from 3:00 to
5:00 on a Wednesday.
Bowerman: I don’t think I did either.
Fiksdal: There was just no way, so I missed a bunch of talk about ways the college could go, a lot of
planning for the future. I just missed it.

20

Bowerman: I don’t remember any important ones. [laughing] I don’t think I thought they were terrible
important. When we began to divide the curriculum into specialty areas, I did go to specialty areas
meetings, but they were earlier. They would end by 3:00 or 3:30, and that was okay with me.
Not only the fact of having to pick up the child, but your own exhaustion. You needed a down
[time] before dinner or whatever you were going to eat. Later afternoon didn’t work.
I began teaching with Alan Nasser, who liked to get to campus at noon. But he was very flexible,
so we presented it as an option to students. Lectures started at noon and went to 2:00, which was fine
with both of us. But if you wanted a morning seminar, you’d better sign up for mine. By that time, my
children were older, so we did have late afternoon faculty seminars. That was usually over a dinner or
something, so that worked out.
Fiksdal: What was it like teaching with Alan Nasser?
Bowerman: You want me to go there already?
Fiksdal: Well, you mentioned him.
Bowerman: That’s fine. It was great. I know a lot of colleagues couldn’t believe that that could be
possible. Alan was mainly a philosopher, but he had a lot of economics background, and I was the
reverse of him. So, I think in terms of our interests, that was a good coordination. We were both New
Yorkers, so there was something of that background thing that you get the same jokes, you make the
same jokes. I admired his logical mind and the way he could use it, and I think that was mutual. We’d
planned lectures to coordinate with each other, it usually worked very smoothly, so that was good, too.
He had a following. He had some students who really wanted to be in his seminar, and he had
some students who really didn’t want to be in his seminar. Some students wanted to be in mine. Some
just came over because they didn’t want to be in his. But lots of times, we would teach more than one
quarter, so we would shuffle students. And I think students were often surprised at the quality of his
work. He could be sharp, and students could really resent some of the ways—and my colleagues were
more sensitive to it than I was, I suppose.
Fiksdal: His office was next to mine for years in Lab II. For years, he was next to me. Never talked to
me.
Bowerman: I think that some of the students felt that way.
Fiksdal: I didn’t really talk to him either.
Bowerman: I had an office next to him for a couple years in Lab II. His office got so crowded with stuff,
he would meet in the hallway outside. He would bring out two chairs when he met with his students,

21

and I had to shut my door because I couldn’t hear anything. So, mine was pretty neat and his was floorto-ceiling books, papers and everything else. We were quite a contrast that way.
I learned a lot from teaching with him, and he claimed he learned a lot from teaching with me,
so that was good. I knew a lot about Marx, which was his initial strong point, I think. Because when I
was at Vassar, in my junior year, a philosophy prof invited me into his senior-year seminar. What he did
with that seminar was he had one student study Marx, one student study Freud, and one student study
existentialism for about six weeks. We had a semester system. He taught during those six weeks, and
then we each had two weeks to teach the class about what we’d studied.
I, of course, was assigned Marx because he knew I was an economist. I think I read everything
that was available at the time. It just made sense to me. I could see the logical system. It’s a matter of
philosophy. If you like it, and you can pick out the logic, then eventually, you know you have it because
you can extend it. I did that way back in college, so no problem for me doing it when I got to Evergreen.
No problem criticizing it either. As part of my undergraduate thesis, usually you present it, but
you say what’s bad or weak about it. That was good. It was a more conservative approach to what’s
wrong with it than Alan’s was. It’s okay. They’re both interesting.
We had a lot of things where we had similar interests. We enjoyed teaching together.
Fiksdal: You respected each other.
Bowerman: Yeah. We were good lecturers. He was a great lecturer. As long as I talked up loudly
enough, I was good lecturer.
Fiksdal: You have a softer voice. Did you teach with him once, or many times?
Bowerman: Many times. The first time we taught was in the standard Political Economy and Social
Change program. I think we did that twice. Then we did Paradox of Progress. I think that was twoquarter coordinated studies. This is probably out of order, but we did The New Insecurity, which was
another two-quarter piece.
We did Philosophy of Religion, which was another two quarters. That was the biggest leap for
me. It was all philosophy, and he knew I’d done a lot of study of religion, but not philosophy of
religion—religious figures, spirituality, Catholicism, Protestantism, that kind of thing. But I’d not done
philosophy of religion, and he knew that. Half the first quarter would be Wittgenstein, who I had not
read, but he didn’t mind that I was a student along with him.
I would read ahead, and then my lectures would be about, okay, this is what Wittgenstein is
saying about this religious concept or set of concepts, and this is what Christianity generally teaches.
Where are they the same? Where are they different? What perspective does he lend on that?
22

We had some really good students and really enthusiastic students. They were enthusiastic
both for his work and my work. I had them coming in my office all the time. One of them had been
raised by a Protestant minister and he was still caught up with his faith beliefs, and his father’s
relationship with him. Two of the students went off and did a Buddhist 10-day meditation seminar.
Fiksdal: He and his dad?
Bowerman: No, his close friend, who was also in the program. I saw them when they came back. They
nearly broke my office down. [laughing] “You can’t believe the experience!” It was amazing for them,
because it was not only intellectual engagement, but a deeply personal engagement as well. That was
very fun, and I learned so much from reading Wittgenstein. That was great.
Then Alan and I did two years’ worth of Rights and Wrongs with José Gómez. There were a lot
of programs with Allen, probably more than with anybody else. But we did span both econ and social
sciences and then the religion part. Rights and Wrongs was a great deal of fun, too.
This was one of José’s first teaching experiences. We had been deans together, so we knew
each other, but we hadn’t taught together. He’s an attorney, so I’d never taught with an attorney, and
he has a certain mind, too. So, you’ve got this philosopher over here and this attorney over here and a
social scientist in between them. [laughing]
At first, he did not get the philosophical approach that Alan uses, and understandably, with a
lawyer’s background. It’s very different, because instead of talking about what rights you’re guaranteed
in the Constitution and how they apply in cases, which was Jose’s strong point initially, Alan and I were
trying to deal with, whoever started talking about rights? That’s way back in the beginning of the
Enlightenment period. Before that, rights were not part of the Medieval mindset.
Fiksdal: Oh, I can hear echoes of what you taught him because I taught with him, and he talked about
rights. Okay.
Bowerman: He did not get it when we said, “Where did rights emerge from?” It was like there’s no
answer to a question like that. But, of course, there is one historically. I would go into it historically;
Alan would go into it on a philosophical plain. And poor José would be raising objections, and Alan very
politely and nicely would try to show him what he was getting at. Well, the second year he had it, or
pretty much had it. He was still thrown sometimes. But they very often had great disagreements and I
was just sitting there going, “Ok, each of you to your own corners. Let’s start again on the topic here.”
[laughing]
Fiksdal: Alan had you do the Philosophy of Religion where he already knew quite a bit.
Bowerman: Yes, exactly.
23

Fiksdal: Did you teach with him, where he had to grow and learn?
Bowerman: Yeah, because in the beginning, he had a whole lot of questions about, what is it that
standard orthodox economics has to say about some of these topics? He was thrown by the more
complicated contemporary views. He’d studied the standard theory as an undergraduate or maybe as a
graduate. But there had been a lot of developments since we were in graduate school, and they were
complicating ones. A lot of the introduction of the idea of risk and what that does to your predictions
and things like that, so he was very interested in that kind of stuff. In the classroom, you didn’t go into it
too much because it’s pretty advanced stuff, but we would talk about it a lot.
Yeah, we did a lot of back and forth, and oftentimes, when he wrote a paper, I would say, “This
does not follow that.” He’d see what I meant and get to a better step-by-step procedure.
Fiksdal: He was writing academic papers?
Bowerman: Yeah, he wrote a lot, and he also presented. Once he went to Scotland to St. Andrews and
that really thrilled him.
Fiksdal: That’s prestigious, yeah.
Bowerman: He was a regular contributor to professional journals.
Fiksdal: We have a little time left. I wanted to go back to my first experience with you, so you’ll have to
try to remember back. I was hired in ’74 but I was there previously teaching, teaching French language,
with whatever money they could find and throw at me. It was never regular. Every year, I quit, and
they’d give me a little better deal the next year.
Bowerman: That’s why you went on maternity leave.
Fiksdal: It was ridiculous. Anyway, ’74, maybe the summer of ‘75—I don’t remember when this might
have happened, but we had a Danforth grant, where a bunch of faculty came who were interested in
working over the summer, and you’d get paid. We would pair up, and you and I paired up. The goal was
to learn about each other’s discipline so that we would be bettered prepared for teaching.
Bowerman: I remember this vaguely.
Fiksdal: I just remember so clearly because you had me reading all these things, actually things that I
read later again when I taught with you. Adam Smith and all these people.
Bowerman: John Locke.
Susan. John Locke. I’m reading these big treatises, and I get pretty interested. I didn’t like economics
when I was in college. I had one course and I found it quite hard. I asked for help. I didn’t get help. The
TA just took me for a beer, and I thought, this is great. [laughing]
Bowerman: If I loosen up, maybe I’ll get it.
24

Fiksdal: I got through it, but I was not happy with it. I thought it would be a good challenge. Each of us
would read, and then we’d get together, and we’d talk about it. At the end, we talked to each other,
evaluating our own experience doing this work.
I remember that you said to me, “I don’t know what I’m doing in economics. Literature has all
the answers.” I looked at you and I started laughing and I said, “Oh, my gawd! I’m in literature, and it
seems to me that economics has all the answers.” [laughter] I just remember that so well because we
had fallen in love with each other’s field—for me, at a low level, and a long time ago when people wrote
well and I could understand it, not like a textbook.
Meanwhile, you were reading all these French novels in translation, because little did you know
that English literature was not my thing. But you did enjoy it.
Bowerman: Right. That’s interesting because over the years, I did very little history in college. I think
the only course I took was History of Science. It was more like a philosophy course, so even that course
was not a history course. Remember, I had no requirements other than to make the two minors, so I
didn’t have to have distribution requirements.
In graduate school, econ history was a joke. I don’t think the field is a joke, but my particular
course’s full prof was. Because he had the right history and you just had to memorize it, so that wasn’t
history.
Fiksdal: No questioning.
Bowerman: So, history was not interesting particularly. I got my load of it in Political Economy—Jeanne
Hahn and Tom Rainey and some of the other teachings—and it was fine. Then I did broader courses, to
some extent, like with Dave Marr and Charlie Teske—I guess that was earlier on—and I got more
interested. I began to think, yeah, you’ve got to bring this perspective into whatever you’re going to say
about policy and so on, so I began to really appreciate history and start reading more history.
Then I got hooked on literature again because I think a lot of the questions that interest me,
they go as far as, what’s the impact on the individual? Of course, novels are always addressing the
conflict between society and the person, and they got to the—pun--heart of things. You need to bring
that into policy if you’re going to have one that’s appealing and might work. I still feel that way.
Same thing with philosophy. You have to pay attention to that side of life. Wittgenstein, I think
that was part of what he did and what fascinated me so much. On language, it’s not what the dictionary
tells you, it’s how people use the language that matters in terms of what it means. And that has
everything to do with the circumstances you’re in, the understanding between the people who are

25

talking. I might use the same sentence with you and a child, but they mean different things to each of
you, I hope.
Fiksdal: You are a sociolinguist at heart. That’s what I used to teach. So far, Pris, you’ve given me this
trajectory of your own intellectual history. It’s really very interesting. I think for all of us at Evergreen—
well, I’m pretty sure; I really don’t know; I’ve never done a survey—teaching interdisciplinarily just
awakens you all the time to this new area where, oh, this matters, because. If you can make a
connection through your own study and what you already know, all the better.
Bowerman: I like that phrase, “this matters.” That’s right. It’s pretty much the impact of suddenly
waking up to a new area or a new way of thinking.
Fiksdal: Going back to Charlie for just a second, do you remember what you taught together?
Bowerman: Yes, it was the third year. He had a grant, or the college had a grant. Culture, Ideology, and
Social Change in America. He invited me and Dave Marr to teach with him. One quarter, we had a
visiting prof from California who was a scholar. His name is slipping right now. He was more or less a
political philosopher. Anyway, that’s what I taught with Charlie. A lot of lectures.
Fiksdal: There were a lot of lectures. He’s known for talking a lot.
Bowerman: Oh, gawd, yes. Sometimes you could just sit back and say, oh, go ahead, Charlie. [laughing]
I knew he was already a big talker because he had been my dean my first year. He would come check on
me, and he would ask me a question, and I’d start answering it, and then he’d fill it all in.
Fiksdal: That’s really true. He would just talk over you and then take over. But he was entertaining,
and you learn a lot, and he was funny.
Bowerman: He was very entertaining, but he gave room. He definitely gave room to the rest of us, as I
recall. Every now and then he’d bring up the grant or something we had to do to stay within the lines of
it. Doing a group faculty evaluation of the program was extremely important for the grant, so we had
extra time to do that. I remember that it was helpful, but I don’t remember what we concluded. I’ll get
you the title for the next time.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting, because it might have been one of the first programs he taught after coming
out of the deanship.
Bowerman: Yes, I think it was.
Fiksdal: He made a certain calculation in asking certain people to teach with him.
Bowerman: Yeah, it’s interesting. Of course, everyone was new. David, I think, had been there a year
before me, but no one was not new.
Fiksdal: That’s a good point.
26

Bowerman: I must have been quite a cipher still. I don’t know about David. That’s when I met David,
too. I also appreciated the way his mind worked. It was certainly more literary than Alan’s, but it was
disciplined. I was used to literary people because my husband was a literary person, and my roommates
in college were English majors, so I had a lot of that around, and I really liked to read fiction, but I didn’t
know much about how you analyzed fiction. I’d hear things about textual analysis and critical analysis.
Fiksdal: What is that? [laughter]
Bowerman: I had an oral background in that for quite a time. My older sister, when she was at Barnard,
majored in Medieval history, so there’s a history. Right? She was married quickly after leaving college
to a physical chemist, who was just out of Princeton. But he was a lot older. He had left the Soviet
Union in 1944 with his mother. His story was they had to get out because he was such a rebel. He was
also Ukrainian and very angry at the Soviet Union.
They went to Greece for a year, and then they got a sponsor in New York, where there’s a big
Russian community just on the Hudson River. Came here, and he learned English quickly. Went to
Columbia. He said he read books in German and Russian and took his exams in English. Then he got
accepted at Princeton for a PhD. He was very good. Very smart. By then, his English was accented, but
it was good.
He had just finished his PhD and he had a post-doc at Cambridge in England, so they went to
England, which she loved. She wanted to travel all the time. Then he got appointed to Toronto. He was
starting to teach chemistry, so she started taking courses in Russian, and she became a PhD candidate in
Russian language and literature. So, there’s another literature person. They spoke both languages at
home. So, there was that part of the family as well. We used to write about what I was reading and
things like that.
Fiksdal: You had an intellectual relationship with a sister.
Bowerman: Yeah.
Fiksdal: That is, in my view, unusual.
Bowerman: Yeah, I think so. My first sister died when she was 52. She was six years older than me, but
she became very ill at 42. She had a cancerous brain tumor. They eventually couldn’t find it anymore,
but the radiation treatment has long-term consequences. She got better, where we could understand
her clearly. She had lost language from the tumor and the surgery, but she got it back. She got quite
fluent again, and then I began noticing on telephone calls that she seemed to be slipping. I asked my
mother and she said, “Yes, she is.” She eventually lost most of her language, and then was in a nursing

27

home till she died. That was quite a trajectory. She finished her doctorate and self-published it. Her
daughter wrote the introduction. We still have a copy of that.
Fiksdal: She accomplished a lot.
Bowerman: Yeah. It’s very hard. Very hard.
Fiksdal: You were close to your sisters.
Bowerman: Yeah, and especially her. Growing up, she played a big sister role to me. My other sister,
we were kind of antagonistic to each other. We had great fun having fights. [laughing] But she’s an
artist. She went to Pratt in fine arts. She married before she left college. She tried to get commercial
contracts, if you will. She was designing children’s books. The publishers would tell her that it was a
beautiful book, but it would cost $40 per copy to produce this book. The work is too fine.
She would not reduce it to what is printable, so she went her own way. She did a lot of odd
jobs, but she continued painting. Eventually, she said, “I asked myself, what do I really like to do?” She
was widowed twice. No children. “What do I really like to do?” She thought, I really like to paint
animals, dogs and cats.
So, she got a Webpage and she said, “You send me a photograph of your pet and I will paint it,
and it will be your pet, not just the breed of the pet.” There were various formats—canvases, oil
paintings, or on slates. Now, at 82, she’s down to just “If you want it, it’s going to be a slate.”
Fiksdal: But she’s still doing that?
Bowerman: Yeah, she does. She got picked up by Orvis Company, which is across the country, but they
started as East Coast sportsmen catalog. They branched out. Dogs are really important to them, but
they branched out, offering a few artist’s renditions of your animal and they picked her up for that.
Recently, they stopped that whole line, but now, she has a following. They find her through the
web even if she doesn’t tell them.
Fiksdal: At 82 years old.
Bowerman: Yeah. She still does that, and now, we’re extremely close. We talk almost every day. She’s
in New Jersey.
Fiksdal: Now, there’s no long-distance charges.
Bowerman: Yeah, it’s so different.
Fiksdal: The world has changed.
Bowerman: She’s still working away, and full of energy. Skinny as can be. [laughing] She uses her
maiden name, which is Valesio, because her first husband said, “Don’t change your name. When you’re
an artist, you should have an Italian name.” She just always kept it.
28

Fiksdal: Now we’ve got your maiden name out of that. I’m going to stop.

29


Priscilla (Pris) Bowerman
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 18, 2023
FINAL

[Begin Part 1 of 2 of Pris Bowerman on May 18, 2023]
Fiksdal: This is Susan Fiksdal with Pris Bowerman. This is our second interview. This is May 18, 2023.
We thought we’d start with a program we taught together, which was Modernization and the Individual,
in 1978.
Bowerman: That’s right. We had Max Smith as a colleague, and then Larry Smith from St. Martin’s.
Two Smiths. I didn’t remember Larry Smith very well, and I still don’t know him well, but when Susan
mentioned him, “Oh, that’s right. There was a fourth.”
Fiksdal: No, I don’t think we got to know him well. I think, though, that Matt was the coordinator.
Bowerman: I do, too, when I think back to it, which would make sense. It was not, from my point of
view, totally different from teaching from what I’d already done at Evergreen. I’m not sure if I taught
with Matt before. Let’s see . . . no, I hadn’t taught with Matt before, but we had both taught in the
Political Economy area, so there were standard things we political economist types would do, and put
Susan through, reading the texts of the origin of liberalism and where the central idea of the individual
became so dominant in Western thought.
Fiksdal: But I really loved that because I had had Western Civ, but not taught in the way you and Matt
were doing it. Matt explained to maybe just me, but maybe to Larry, too—maybe we were all present—
that the whole point of Evergreen was not to use a textbook but to use the primary sources. Yeah,
sometimes they were long, and sometimes they got hard, but that’s what we were going to do.
Bowerman: Dear old John Locke. Did we do him in that program?
Fiksdal: We did John Locke. We did Adam Smith. We did all these people. But they’re not hard to
read, so that was very good. I knew something about them previously.
Bowerman: Yes, you did. As I recall, I thought you had a lot of background in European history that was
deeper than mine.
Fiksdal: I did have that.

1

Bowerman: That was really helpful to me personally, and then to the program, I think. That was really
good.
I remember Matt lecturing because his style was so different from anything I had seen before. It
was—I don’t know what words to use—casual. He liked to walk around, and we had a pretty big double
classroom that we were in. Remember that?
Fiksdal: Oh, yes, in the library.
Bowerman: Exactly.
Fiksdal: It was in the basement. Not basement but—
Bowerman: Not basement, but there were no windows, that’s for sure.
Fiksdal: Whatever floor that was. Yeah, no windows.
Bowerman: I thought he’d prepared, but he had no notes, and he had nothing to hand out to students,
either, so it was much more like it was off the cuff. I don’t think it really was off the cuff.
Fiksdal: I think that’s so interesting. I don’t remember in such detail about his lecturing, but I
remember the first time he was to lecture. That’s one of the things I really loved, because it was my first
interdisciplinary program. I had been just teaching basically French language, fulltime, full bore. Every
level, and I had tons of students. Sometimes I was able to squeeze in a literature book. There were
plenty of students that were advanced, so that was good.
That first time he was to lecture, I think it was at 9:00, so I got there early, because I was always
early. He came in the room and looked pretty bad. I said, “Are you okay?” He said, “It’s my first lecture.
I’m not a lecturer. I just threw up.” [laughter]
Bowerman: I’m not surprised. He knew that, and he was nervous. I think some people had the
impression that he was very laidback, and he was not at all laidback. And conscientious.
Fiksdal: He was.
Bowerman: And so were you.
Fiksdal: I’m sure you were, too. We all were doing our job.
Bowerman: Which was nice. But I knew very quickly—I don’t remember having a question about it—
that I could rely on you, and you never undermined me in any way.
Fiksdal: That’s good. I just spent hours on prep.
Bowerman: I think we all did, or at least you and I both did, and probably Larry Smith, too. He was
going “What are you doing?”
Fiksdal: Did you write out your lectures ahead of time?
Bowerman: I probably did back then.
2

Fiksdal: Yeah, I did.
Bowerman: I still kept notes right to the end. But sometimes I was teaching stuff I knew but I hadn’t
studied until I was getting ready to do a program again. What’s the order to present it in so it’s clear?
That kind of thing.
Matt was my first really different lecturer. He was funny, which was good for everybody. And I
learned some stuff from him, too. I really liked talking about teaching with him. I think you and I were
in the same conversations about that.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that was a major focus, I remember, in those early years for me. What is this teaching
supposed to be here?
Bowerman: That’s right. It’s interesting because you felt like a newcomer because it was the first time
you were in coordinated studies. But when I was a newcomer the first year, the first scary thing was, oh,
I have to lecture in front of other faculty.
Fiksdal: That’s true.
Bowerman: I’d never done that. It was like going back to graduate school and lecturing in front of your
faculty. [laughing] I learned and after a while, it was comfortable.
Fiksdal: They actually don’t know everything in your discipline.
Bowerman: The interesting thing is they don’t know your discipline, so they wouldn’t know if you were
making big mistakes. Most of the time, I taught with people like that. Occasionally, I taught with other
economists, like Russ Lidman, but only very occasionally. Once that hit me, it was like, oh, they don’t
even know my discipline! [laughter] And when I did make a mistake, I always made a point at the next
lecture of going back and correcting my errors. I got comfortable doing that.
Fiksdal: I did, too.
Bowerman: But I felt the same way. There was no guidance on how to teach. Our seminars, I think I
explained last time, were we each chose a topic, and we advertised it to the students, and they could
choose which one they wanted to do. That was completely off the cuff, too, in terms of teaching that
material.
I also had the feeling that this institution had always been here. I had no idea. It was the third
year of classes, or whatever year it was.
Fiksdal: You didn’t know that?
Bowerman: I knew it, but it didn’t feel that way. My dean was Charlie Teske, who would come by and
talk, and it was history and these stories. Oh, there’s this huge history behind us.
Fiksdal: There was, for him. It was a longer history.
3

Bowerman: He was a founding faculty member. Rudy Martin was my other dean, and he was also
planning faculty. I thought later on, on reflection, oh, my lord. This school was so new. They couldn’t
talk about teaching because they didn’t know either. [laughter]
That was a big part of my beginning, but also, I really liked team teaching very quickly. Part of
what I liked about it was learning so much from other people, like being impressed with your knowledge
of European history. My ears were wiggling. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I loved it, too. I took notes all the way through.
Bowerman: I did, too. I still have the better ones, the ones I remember being, oh! I don’t want to ever
forget that.
The other thing, I think, was the change in the curriculum; that you didn’t teach the same thing
year after year after year. I’d just done two years of teaching Basic Principles at Oregon State before I
came. It was fine. I still had things to perfect, but I could see like, oh, my goodness. [laughing]
Fiksdal: You were near the end of your perfecting after two years.
Bowerman: Almost achieved perfection. [laughter]
Fiksdal: That’s right. You and a lot of people had that experience of possibly having to teach the same
courses for the rest of your life.
Bowerman: Over and over. That’s right. The fun would come from research but not from teaching.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Bowerman: Eventually, the best thing was the students. They were always good, but they were always
more and more good, until eventually, it became the only thing that was really significant to me. Not to
say the faculty weren’t, and so on. But the faculty I taught with were faculty I’d taught with before, so
there was a little less of the brand new in terms of how to teach and that kind of thing.
I loved that program, but right now, I can’t remember. Was it two or three quarters?
Fiksdal: I think it was three.
Bowerman: I do, too, because I don’t have anything marked down for spring.
Fiksdal: I think that’s right.
Bowerman: It was good. We had the normal attrition that you have in programs. I don’t think we knew
if it was normal yet.
Fiksdal: Maybe Larry was only there two quarters.
Bowerman: He was, I’m pretty sure, even though I don’t have a good memory of him.

4

Fiksdal: We were commenting before we started the official recording here that there wasn’t so much
of a worry about enrollment back then. In other words, it didn’t come up at all while I was teaching at
the beginning.
Bowerman: Right, it wasn’t an issue.
Fiksdal: I just don’t recall it in that program or in the ‘70s.
Bowerman: No, I don’t think it was.
Fiksdal: In the ‘80s, I really remember low enrollment at the college, but I always had plenty of
enrollment in my classes.
Bowerman: It also became a concern—which I think was coming from the State, more like the Council
of Presidents or whatever, or maybe one of the departments that oversees higher ed—whether the
students were in state or out of state.
Fiksdal: That’s right.
Bowerman: We had to make a big push to get in-state students as well.
Fiksdal: Because we had plenty of out of state.
Bowerman: Yeah. And we were less comfortable then than I think we became about having few
freshmen.
Fiksdal: That’s right. As I recall, one story I heard in doing all these interviews is that at the very
beginning, they were reaching out to just anyone. They had an enrollment, but it was kind of low.
Nancy Taylor was working in Registration at that time, so she was asked to quickly go out and get a
bunch of freshmen. She was working alone, and she had to figure out what to do and get out there. But
she did it.
Bowerman: She did. She beat the bushes, went to high schools, things like that. Sometime, in the
second or third year I was there, administration said something about the average age of our student
body, so they were thinking about that. It was 27, and I realized that I was 28. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Exactly. I was young also.
Bowerman: I was glad I did not know that the first year. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I’ve forgotten what year you said you were born, but I think we’re just a couple years apart, so,
yeah. It was odd to be teaching sometimes people who were quite a lot older.
Bowerman: Oh, yeah. If they were really older, that was great. But if they were, oh, I thought they
were younger, but guess what? Maybe they aren’t.
Fiksdal: It sounds like you didn’t have lunch in the hallway there. It was later called the “dinosaur
table,” but we used to go to lunch there.
5

Bowerman: Oh, yes, I wanted to bring that up. Yes, I did go to lunch there very regularly.
Fiksdal: That was really helpful, I think, for talking about teaching.
Bowerman: I loved that table because I taught with almost no one who was at that table. That’s how
we got to know each other.
One was Bob Sluss, and I taught with him very early on. We had so much fun because he was
talking about demographics. The theory behind it, which he was really interested in, is identical to econ
theory, except instead of using dollar signs, you used some other unit. We had loads of fun.
He was like, “Oh, no! That’s the same thing!” [laughing] It was only one quarter, but just
because he was at that table all the time, and I was there almost every day I was on campus . . .
Fiksdal: Ah, you created something together.
Bowerman: Yeah. We just continued on, and that was really nice. But then there were people—Beryl
[Crowe], Sandra Simon, Pete Sinclair . . .
Fiksdal: Leo Daugherty, I remember.
Bowerman: Yeah. I was in a seminar later with Leo, but I never taught with him.
Fiksdal: I didn’t either.
Bowerman: Sometimes, [David] Paulsen and Barbara Smith would come. Sometimes, Carolyn Dobbs
came. But the others, I never taught with, and yet, I gotFiksdal: - It seems like mostly people in the humanities, if I’m thinking about it.
Bowerman: There were a lot. Charles, and also . . .
Fiksdal: . . . Richard Alexander. I felt very comfortable there, so I think it was humanities mostly.
Bowerman: Okay. There was Charlie McCann.
Fiksdal: I think a lot of the biologists were very broad at that time. There wasn’t all that specialization
yet.
Bowerman: No, Bob certainly was.
Fiksdal: Especially since a lot of them came when they were in their forties or later, so they were
generalists, and it was easy to talk to them.
Bowerman: And many of them were planning faculty, so they had been attracted by the diversity the
school was promising in terms of teaching.
The other thing I found interesting when I became dean, one of the things I was very aware of
quickly—by the faculty that came in who asked to see me and talk—was that there was a generation
that was 10 years older than us. They were partly planning faculty, but they were also others they had
hired.
6

Then there was our generation, which was pretty big, too. I was in my forties and there was this
group of 50 people, and they were looking ahead, and they came in to talk about what they wanted to
teach before they retired.
Fiksdal: Oh, interesting.
Bowerman: Because as Curriculum Dean, they wanted to get the approval for that. I’m like, ugh.
[laughing]
Fiksdal: Do what you want. Why are you talking to me?
Bowerman: Yeah, exactly. Is there anything new here? I don’t put you in a program. [laughter] Then I
started bringing that up at the deans’ meetings that we have to first recognize the hiring issue that this
presents. They all start retiring, a whole cohort is going to retire within two or three years of each
other.
Also, how do we support them between now and then? Because most of them were saying—
and I thought that was interesting; it didn’t happen to me later—they wanted to hone back in on their
specialty that they’d done their graduate work in and their dissertations, and they wanted to teach more
and more alone.
Fiksdal: I remember that. I remember old men teaching alone.
Bowerman: That’s right.
Fiksdal: Who was on your deans’ team? Do you remember? And do you remember the years at all?
Bowerman: Yeah, I have it written down.
Fiksdal: I shall call Pris out. She’s got notes this time. It’s great.
Bowerman: Yeah, here I am. ’90 through the academic year ’93-’94, so four years. Russ Lidman was
the new provost. The team was Carolyn Dobbs, Mike Beug, Chuck Pailthorp, Jose Gomez, Les Wong, and
Masao Sugiyama.
Masao and Les were new as deans that year when I became a dean for the first time, too. Mike
had been there a long time and had moved into the Budget Dean position. Carolyn had been there a
while. Chuck had been there at least a year, I think. Don’t become a dean at an institution who just
threw out their President. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Oh, gawd.
Bowerman: We had just gotten rid of Olander, and faculty were really angry.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Bowerman: It was like now in terms of the whole society. They were angry about everything.
[laughing]
7

Fiksdal: Oh, interesting.
Bowerman: But mainly what they would bring to me would be academic things, but, oh, there was so
much anger around. They were angry at each other. They were angry at students. I used to say, “Some
faculty leaves my office, and I look down the hall and there’s another one coming in and they want to
talk to me, and it’s another conflict.” That was how a lot of my days were the first year.
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s horrible, especially that first year. You’re trying to figure it out.
Bowerman: It trailed on, but less and less.
Fiksdal: You think it had to do with problems that were festering during Olander’s term?
Bowerman: I don’t know about the problems. People made such an effort on the faculty to show the
board what was wrong, and it took them a couple of years to do that. That built up their frustration and
their anger against Olander, I think, and the board. By then, they had won, but that anger was still there
looking for a place to go.
Fiksdal: I really remember a faculty meeting where people talked about [Censuring President Joe
Olander]. Several men got up to rant and rave. I remember most particularly Tom Rainey. It was pretty
emotional. I was a little surprised. Then Marilyn Frasca got up, and she started pacing. We were in the
lecture hall so there was this level part in between the two levels of risers. She put her hands behind
her back and walked and talked. She was completely and absolutely rational, going over what
arguments she could find in their talks, and she pointed that out, then moving on with them to move us
to a better place. I thought it was calming and so useful. Plus, as a woman, I sat there thinking, Go,
Marilyn!
Bowerman: That was before I was dean, but even when I was dean, she often played a role similar to
that in faculty meetings. I know there was a lot of shouting—not real shouting, but . . .
Fiksdal: But almost.
Bowerman: . . . a lot of emotion, and she could bring it down, which was good. That was one
characteristic of my time as dean. A lot of my time was spent quote “mediating”—not formal mediating,
but pretty much just one on one with this upset faculty member, partly trying to get a clear picture of
what was bothering them.
Fiksdal: You’d have to have them come back several times?
Bowerman: Some of them came back several times, some didn’t. And some turned into real issues
when it was between them or another faculty, or them and a student, but that often left the dean’s
hands and went upstairs to other places. Still, that was the mood.

8

Fiksdal: That must have been a tough time to be dean because I remember Russ Lidman firing people.
He fired quite a few people.
Bowerman: I don’t think he actually did. I know that that was the impression. I don’t know. Do you
think he fired a lot of people?
Fiksdal: Yeah, I used to know a few names, but I’d have to really think hard.
Bowerman: I know one person.
Fiksdal: Maybe he called people in.
Bowerman: He probably did. I’m sure that Russ did that. That was the thing was that Russ was not
happily appointed either to his position. It was Olander who appointed him. The President we ousted
appointed Russ.
Fiksdal: I remember there was some hostility.
Bowerman: I know that it was in people’s minds as, oh, he’s Olander’s person.
Fiksdal: I think he ran against Duke Kuehn for that position.
Bowerman: He may have.
Fiksdal: That was very disappointing for Duke. I didn’t know him very well. I got to know him later
because I was doing the seminar study, so I recorded his seminar and talked to him a little bit. But he
made himself happy by going to Tacoma and teaching there, so he was fine.
Bowerman: That’s good. People who can take care of themselves like that, they’re just fine.
Fiksdal: Yeah, there are people who . . . you know.
Bowerman: Russ and I spent a lot of hours talking, talking, talking, after work or on his balcony [outside
his office]. It was good for him, I think. It was good for me, too. He had been at the research institute
over those years. He came only a year after me. Chuck Nisbet was on leave the year I was interviewed.
When he came back, we were the only two economists. The school agreed to hire a third and Russ was
the third one hired.
But he always seemed more distant from the goings on in the school. Not that he really was,
but he was in that institute, and he wasn’t always teaching, so I think he had less history than some of us
had who were always teaching.
Fiksdal: He was a social science research group funded by the State?
Bowerman: Yeah, a policy researcher. Whatever the official name was.
Fiksdal: I remember that.
Bowerman: Eventually, Greg took over.
Fiksdal: I remember Greg—[Greg Weeks]
9

Bowerman: When Russ became provost, he took over the institute.
Fiksdal: I really liked Greg.
Bowerman: Yeah.
Fiksdal: My office was up by their offices.
Bowerman: In the Lab. Right?
Fiksdal: Yeah, or wherever it was, so I talked to Greg a bit. I thought he was a really solid person.
Bowerman: And a very kind person.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Bowerman: Russ, he’s an Easterner, a New Yorker. Similar sense of humor, as I mentioned, with Alan.
There were ties like that where I think we didn’t have to translate things very much. Not that I
translated with a lot of people, but I think that he gets misunderstood really quickly because there’s an
edge to it. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I remember he’s a little bit abrupt, but he didn’t threaten me, so I was never worried about
him. But I can understand what you’re saying.
Bowerman: That didn’t help it to be a calm and peaceful time.
Fiksdal: Exactly. You were a dean for how long?
Bowerman: Four years. Just the one term. I was tired of it. At the end, I did not want to stay with that.
Fiksdal: Why did you become a dean?
Bowerman: I don’t know. I really don’t. People ask you that question. They ask you that when you’re
applying, and, of course, you say something. I was just interested in knowing about administration at
that level, so it was kind of—once again—let me learn something I don’t know.
I had been invited by the faculty of MPA to become the director of that four or five years earlier.
I’d only taught one quarter in MPA before that, and it was during that quarter I was invited. Barbara
Smith was the one who said, “By the way, would you like to be interested in the MPA Director?”
Fiksdal: Because it was a disaster from the very beginning.
Bowerman: She offered to drive me up to the retreat. That’s when she said, “We’ll talk about it
tomorrow on our drive to the retreat.” So, she had me in the car. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah, there you go.
Bowerman: I didn’t think of it that way at the time. She said, “That’s coming from the faculty because
they’re at odds. They’ve been that way for a while, and they cannot work together.” Somebody
brought up my name as a possible new director. They all said, “Yes, that would be fine.” I think the
people perceived that I could make peace among other people, not that I always did that. [laughing]
10

Fiksdal: But you must have done pretty well.
Bowerman: Enough, over the years. They picked that up. That was also a part of my wanting to be
dean because I knew that the deans handled a lot of issues like that, and I thought, I have that strength.
Plus, a lot of history at the institution.
Also, Barbara would sometimes approach me about, “We have a new faculty member. Would it
be all right if I assign them to your team? Because you’re such a good mentor.” She did that with Lucia
and me, too. We did that, and we were good at that.
When John Parker came on as a new—not part of the faculty—leader of the teaching master’s
program, Barbara came to me and said, “He’s got no real way to introduce himself to this, so would you
mind having lunch with him occasionally?” So, I did, and we’d just talk about administration and things
like that, not to any great depth.
Fiksdal: But it gave him someone to talk to, a friendly person.
Bowerman: That’s right. We met quite often.
Fiksdal: When he didn’t know.
Bowerman: Then, when he got very sick, Russ and I drove up to see him. He was a very sweet man, and
his wife was a sweet woman.
I remember telling him—and I don’t know if he’s the first—a number of new people, especially if
they were in administration, “If you talk to five different faculty members about that issue, you’ll hear at
least six opinions.” They would understand eventually. [laughing] It wasn’t like you were
misunderstanding, necessarily. “Just go back and ask them, ‘Did I get that right?’”
That was another thing disconcerting about being a dean. They would come into my office.
They’d ask for time. “C’mon in and talk.” I often didn’t know what the issue was, but it would be an
issue about the school, not in their team. I had those, too.
There’s something that the faculty was going to address in faculty meetings in the future. They
had a strong opinion one way or another, and we would talk about it. Sometimes the opinion would get
modulated.
Then the faculty meeting would happen, and they’d get up to talk, and they had a totally
different [point] than either of the two in the meeting. That happened so often, it was like, why am I
bothering to be in this position?
Fiksdal: I often wondered why I was bothering to be there [in faculty meetings], because people were
derailing committee work. It just seemed like, yeah, you could endlessly pull up new questions, and new
comments, new things that they had to address. Let’s just address it.
11

Bowerman: “What do you want to do?” “Oh, well . . . “ Then they’re not sure.
Fiksdal: Exactly. It’s not like they have an opinion.
Bowerman: That, and this anger that was there in the beginning, and then that switching of public
presentation of your preferences was like, I don’t want to deal with this. This is ridiculous.
Fiksdal: Did you get to deal with the curriculum very much?
Bowerman: Not all that much because we were so tied up in these feuds that were going on in the
faculty. Yeah, we did the standard curriculum stuff, but it wasn’t very different. We did start a
discussion about changing specialty area definitions. We did that mainly through committee meetings
on the topic. But the years before, I’d done a few DTFs. We did a lot more there in the DTFs.
Fiksdal: Interesting. But I think you let it be ground-up. We talked in our specialty areas.
Bowerman: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: That’s really the mark of good deans, I think.
Bowerman: When I wrote my application, that’s what I said. I want to be able to walk the campus and
meet a lot of faculty. That was a highlight, the faculty evaluations. We had a couple—Jose was an
assistant dean, so he didn’t do evaluations. I think we had one-fifth of the faculty, each of us.
Also at that time, I was over the part-time faculty, and we went through evaluations. I did
evaluations on them, too, so I did manage to go to the classroom of every full-time faculty member.
Fiksdal: That’s great. Like in the old days. Were we still on the three-year contracts schedule?
Bowerman: No, because just before I was dean, I was head of the DTF on faculty evaluations, and that
changed everything to the eight-year contract. It was just about a year or two before we switched to
the eight-year. And tenure. Everyone had tenure if they were hired on a full-time contract. But we
always did, we just didn’t know it.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Bowerman: What are you telling me? [laughing]
Fiksdal: Something I never really worried about, though, getting fired.
Bowerman: In the very beginning, I did.
Fiksdal: Yeah, at the very beginning, it seemed a little scary, but then, it wasn’t. Even though I had
some very strange dean comments, someone wrote this very strange evaluation of me. I couldn’t
understand it. Then I decided that if I can’t understand it, so it’s not about me and my teaching
apparently. If I don’t understand it, then no one will, and I’m not going to get fired, so I just let it go.
Bowerman: I remember, I think it was Leo Daugherty, he was interim dean for a while, and I was in his
group. My evaluation was maybe two paragraphs. “Dear Pris, I have read your portfolio. It is very nice.
12

I’m recommending you for re-appointment. Have a good summer.” [laughing] I thought, “That’s the
way to be efficient!”
Fiksdal: He was always writing things, but whenever I saw his writing, it was like that. He dealt with
everything official that he had to in a very brief manner. No beautiful words. No beautifully crafted
sentences.
Bowerman: You didn’t even know if he’d read your portfolio, except he said he did.
Fiksdal: Exactly. Probably not. He was sort of towards his ending years.
Bowerman: Yes, he was. He was in that group that was maturing out.
Fiksdal: Maturing out.
Bowerman: What was the last thing?
Fiksdal: The eight-year contract. I forget why I brought it up. Oh, you were happy in the deans’ area
because you got to go to everyone’s classes.
Bowerman: Yeah, and I ended up having people like Doranne Crable and Marilyn Frasca—people of the
arts—and we all knew each other, but I’d never taught with them, and I didn’t really know what was
going on in much of that curriculum at that time, so it was wonderful. It was eye-opening.
I just wanted to know how you teach something like the theory of dance. Not dance, but the
theory of dance. How do you teach painting? With Marilyn’s, it was for students [who] had a project
they are bringing in their work. She recommended that I come to this one. They discuss each other’s
work. They put it up around the room.
I think I went back for a second session of that, but it was so interesting. I didn’t know about
that. Later, I taught with Lucia. We did that in our programs, so at least I’d seen it before. I think the
artists stood out most to me because it was the area I knew least about how to teach.
I do remember a few of the scientists, and I remember having a few faculty who I knew—I think
everyone knew who they were—but who didn’t seem to have a reputation. Obviously, they weren’t
bad. Most of them kept very good portfolios, so I really read the portfolios. This one person, he just
turned up, extraordinarily modest about his abilities. I wrote a really detailed evaluation based on his
portfolio. I said, “These are your strengths. The students picked them out all the time. You’re doing
just fine. Don’t retire early.”
Fiksdal: That’s great. Encouraging. I agree. When I was a dean, I loved also—it’s like spying—you get
to observe someone’s class, and they don’t pay attention to you because they’re teaching, and you get
to be in the classes, watch the students and see how it all works.

13

We were endlessly fascinated by that because that was the one bad design of programs, I think,
that we had seminars all at the same time, so we couldn’t observe each other’s seminar to get tips.
Bowerman: Yes. We did get to do one program early on. It was the CISCA program that I couldn’t
remember what it stood for, so I looked it up. Culture, Ideology and Social Change in America. That’s
why it was called CISCA.
Fiksdal: Imagine trying to teach that now.
Bowerman: I know. That would be fantastic, but you’d need six quarters. It was Charlie Teske, David
Marr, Eric Larson, and myself. We wanted to be able to attend each other’s seminars, so we had
different times. I remember in one—because I just looked it up when I was looking up the title—that
David and I went to each other’s seminars three times in the winter quarter or whatever quarter it was.
We did the same thing in other quarters, and I did see Charlie and Eric, too.
We learned interesting things. It wasn’t necessarily something you were going to do in your
seminar, because I think it has a lot to do with personality and how you think. But I was like, oh, how
interesting. He just sits back and the students go “Oh!” [laughter] I think if I’d just sat back, no, that
wouldn’t happen. [laughing] We did manage it, but it was a scheduling issue about how you make it all
happen. I think that’s the only time that we did that.
Another program, we tried the fishbowl seminar. I never liked the idea because I thought we
were performing.
Fiksdal: Do you want to describe a fishbowl?
Bowerman: A fishbowl is when the faculty hold their faculty seminar in front of the students. You’re in
a large enough area that if the students want to attend, they can come and sit down and listen. Our
rules were “You don’t talk. This is the faculty seminar.” It just struck me that a lot of it was
performance. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t think I got much out of it, except, oh, yeah, that’s the way he
performs. [laughing]
Fiksdal: That happened to me, too. I didn’t really find it useful.
Bowerman: We didn’t do it very often. I think to have questions from your colleagues at a lecture—
after the lecture, that’s what we usually did—is really useful, both to students and you, as long as
they’re not trying to put you—
Fiksdal: No one was antagonistic.
Bowerman: Yeah, they weren’t purposely trying to get you. They were genuinely asking a question and
you might or might not have the answer.
Fiksdal: I don’t really remember that happening.
14

Bowerman: I did that a lot.
Fiksdal: I think that would be great.
Bowerman: I don’t think we did that early on.
Fiksdal: No.
Bowerman: I think you have to get a certain degree of confidence, both in yourself and your colleagues.
Fiksdal: For me, that was my first program. I think I would have been a little thrown, unless it was right
in my area, and I knew it. If asked to extrapolate or to link it something we were talking about in the
program, I would have had to think.
Bowerman: We did that a lot in Rights and Wrongs, which was mainly about First Amendment rights
and lawsuits. Jose was one of the three faculty so he would bring in the Supreme Court decisions, and
sometimes they were several of them on one issue because they changed their mind over time.
It was a program built on dispute and students had to take a side on some issue and get up
there in front of the classroom and argue it against the others. It was okay, but, again, it wasn’t really
antagonistic afterwards, but we could do a lot of clarifying, or we could say, “How about?”
Fiksdal: In a way, you’re acting like attorneys would.
Bowerman: Yes, that’s right. It was appropriate and good. Was there a general theme we’re working
on?
Fiksdal: This was good. It laid the groundwork. I wanted to ask about your most memorable programs,
and/or the most memorable people you taught with, and people that you remember, good or bad.
Maybe start with the good.
Bowerman: Of course. [laughing]
Fiksdal: As we all do.
Bowerman: Like when you write comments on a student’s paper.
Fiksdal: I thought of the exact same thing.
Bowerman: “It’s really wonderful, except, except . . .” [laughing] Memorable programs. I’ve obviously
talked about Rights and Wrongs a lot, and that was one.
The Philosophy of Religion was another because the topic, I had things to contribute, but I was
taking what Alan was presenting and applying it to other things. But I learned so much because it was
an area that was fairly new to me. There were parts of it that weren’t, but the philosophy part of it was,
so it was a great learning thing. The students were very enthusiastic, and they were among some that
came back more often than not.

15

Then there was—I’m just pulling this out of my head right now—the original Introduction to
Political Economy program, which was only a quarter long, so you had to pack a whole lot in there. We
taught micro and macro in one quarter. Usually, you take one quarter for one, one quarter for the other.
The self-appointed Marxist or Socialist would present the Marxist framework, and then there would be a
historian or political scientist who would present history.
Again, it was set up as an antagonistic thing between the conventional economist and the
socialist economist. It was fun. I learned a lot. I had studied Marx intensely as an undergraduate, so a
lot of that wasn’t new, but the way in which they would present it was different. And to actually
counter it against a conventional [economic view], I began to see more and more similarities not
differences.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Bowerman: The basic premise is different, but beyond that, there were a lot of similarities. That was
good. I think that first one was Jeanne Hahn and Alan. I think Alan was a new prof at that time. He
came in ‘77, ‘78.
Then we did more IPEs, Introduction to Political Economy—sometimes two quarters, sometimes
one—a few more times. I think the specialty area did it quite often, but I only did it a couple more
times.
Fiksdal: Because you got involved in the MPA?
Bowerman: Yeah, that was eight or 10 years later. Then you put in your time. You do MPI.
Management and the Public Interest was not my favorite program because I didn’t think it was
integrated; that it was really an interdisciplinary study. Each faculty member taught their unit, and the
students took them all, but where did they put them together?
Fiksdal: Oh, there was no place in the program for people to match?
Bowerman: No, to put them together. I think that that changed in later years, but that’s the way it was
then.
We had a faculty seminar, but what are we going to talk about, because I don’t know what
they’re doing?
Fiksdal: Oh, right.
Bowerman: They were business meetings.
Fiksdal: Wait a minute. You didn’t go to each other’s classes?
Bowerman: You mean lectures? No, not as I recall. Maybe there was one a week, very thin.
Fiksdal: Then the seminars were all based on your own material.
16

Bowerman: Yeah, I taught principles in political economy. Another faculty member was Niels Skov, who
taught something about business. I think Guy Adams was in that one. I’m not sure. I just remember
Niels Skov, but I know there were more than that.
Fiksdal: I remember I did a program like that, maybe two, where what I taught was separate from the
other two faculty. But we would bring elements of what we were teaching into—of course, our lectures.
Otherwise, why lecture?
Bowerman: Yeah, I think we only had one a week maybe. I’d have to look it up.
Fiksdal: But I remember they were very tightly tied together.
Bowerman: I taught in Tacoma. I really liked that. It was like, I don’t know what this is going to be.
Maxine was the coordinator up there still at that time. She was like, “Do your thing.” [laughing] Oh, I’ll
go do my thing twice a week. Okay.
Fiksdal: Did you have to teach during the day and at night?
Bowerman: No, just during the day. I don’t know if I did anything else at the same time.
Fiksdal: It changed in its organization over time.
Bowerman: Oh, huge.
Fiksdal: Maybe at that time, it was just during the day.
Bowerman: I think there were evening courses, but I didn’t have one. This was ’81-’82, the first time I
was up there. I was up there again in ’83-’84.
She really did want the students to have economics, so I did macro economics mainly with them.
The second time, we did micro and macro. I loved it because most of the students were worldlyconversant, middle-aged men who were facing retirement. Many of them were military. Many of them
were African American. They’d had all this experience with money, exchange rates, what happens when
you go over to Japan.
Fiksdal: They’d been all over the world.
Bowerman: They’d been everywhere, and they had dealt with money and issues like that. That’s
exactly what econ is about—not only, but to a great extent—so they knew this stuff. What I always tell
students, even American 18-year-olds, “You actually know this because it’s in the culture and you’ve
been brought up with it, but you are not used to thinking about it, or thinking it out in a logical way as
the profession does, and that’s what you’re learning here.”
It was just like teaching a vocabulary, and then, okay, this is the way you make the argument.
They were really open to it, and they were really enthusiastic.
Fiksdal: You saw a lot of “aha” moments?
17

Bowerman: Oh, yes, so many of them. Then they gave me “aha” moments. “When I was in So-and-So,
this happened . . .” “Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.” [laughing] That was really fun. The
environment was very friendly so that was nice, too.
I did that one quarter in the winter. Yeah, I had a leave in the fall and did that in the winter. A
year later, I went back for two quarters.
Fiksdal: That sounds like a really good experience.
Bowerman: Yes, it was. Shortly after that, Patrick Hill was provost. He called me up—and I’d never
talked to Patrick before that—and he said, “We’re forming this Tacoma Study Group, and we want to
look at the program, and we want to see what goes on in the program, and we want to see if it needs to
be changed or anything like that, so I’m thinking of having you chair it.”
He asked me to go over to his office, and I did. He said, “We really don’t know each other at all,
but all the deans tell me you’re the person to chair this group.”
Fiksdal: You’d really built a reputation by then. [laughter]
Bowerman: He said, “I am taking a risk, but are you interested?” I said I was. It was another
translation in languages because I was familiar enough with the way Maxine talked about the Tacoma
program from having taught there almost a year or a year altogether. Of course, I knew the Olympia
Campus. “You don’t have seminars in Tacoma.” “Yes, we have seminars in Tacoma.”
Fiksdal: People would just say things. They didn’t know really what it was about.
Bowerman: Or they would not think that what they were doing was a seminar, so I would have them
talk it out. “What do you do?” “What do you do?” “Oh, we’re amazingly alike!” [laughing] So, we
could agree on a new vocabulary that everybody could share. That was a large part of what it was. It
took a whole year. It was a long report. It was almost totally favorable. There were some
recommendations.
Fiksdal: That’s so affirming, too, I think, for Maxine and everyone who was working up there.
Bowerman: Oh, yes. Joye [Hardiman] was on the DTF, too. Maybe I’m wrong, but it wasn’t evenly split.
The faculty up there were still small in number.
I think everyone who was on the DTF from the main campus learned a lot from listening to the
Tacoma people. “Oh-h-h.” [laughing]
Fiksdal: My next question would be about governance because you’re talked a lot about it so far.
Maybe that’s the end of it, but before we do that, I’m going to go back and remind you: good teaching
partners and teaching partners that you wish you didn’t have, or who were more difficult.
Bowerman: Well, you get rid of the few, but they’re retired by now.
18

Fiksdal: But clearly, you knew how to get along with people or you could respect them.
Bowerman: Yeah, respect. I’ll start backwards, I guess. Lucia and I taught three years after I left the
deanery.
Fiksdal: Three years?
Bowerman: Two years in a row, then a skip of a year, and then another year. It was the same program,
but it changed names, and the third person changed each time on the team. The first time, I think it was
called Search for Meaning. Terrible name. [laughing] It could mean anything.
Fiksdal: I taught in a program called Search for Meaning. That program name got used a lot after I
taught in it.
Bowerman: These were all freshmen programs. That was one of the things when I was a dean that I
was interested in getting back into teaching freshmen. Beforehand, I’d been teaching graduate students
or whatever.
It combined art—she participated mainly as an artist in that program. The third person the first
year was Earle McNeil and he was a year away from retiring, but he added his particular strengths to
that. The second year, I think he had retired, and Barbara asked us to take on Michael Vavrus, who was
brand new. He was going to be the head of the teaching program [Master in Teaching], but they wanted
him to have a year of undergraduate coordinated studies teaching. That was fun.
Michael was very willing to ask questions and to show you that he was totally surprised. I
remember his coming into my office one day and saying, “When does the grass turn brown around
here?” [laughter] I said, “Well, never.”
Fiksdal: Yeah, where did you come from? The desert? [laughter]
Bowerman: That was fun. And he was very open to learning stuff about how Evergreen operated and
what a coordinated studies was like.
By then, Lucia had been Director of the MPA program—she followed me—so we both were
administrators, and we knew he was heading for an administrative position, so we would throw tips at
him [laughing] or say, “Oh, you’re going to love it.”
Fiksdal: You can’t tell them too much.
Bowerman: That was a good experience and a good program. When we came back the third time with
a year between the second and third, we just taught alone. I think I was getting on, was ready not to
complicate things. We were very comfortable.
We called it Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. We changed some of the structure of it, and
we cut it to two quarters. And then we were done. [laughing]
19

Fiksdal: That sounds very good. A nice experiment.
Bowerman: Yeah, it was. I really liked teaching freshmen at that point. I remember in college a prof
saying when I was a senior, “You can’t believe the changes we see from freshman year to senior year.” I
always wondered, had it anything to do with college, or was it just four years of being older at that
time? [laughter] When you have a lot of juniors coming in because of the transfer students, you don’t
see as much, but it’s there. But freshman to senior year is -woah!
Fiksdal: It’s huge.
Bowerman: You see some of these people later and go, “Whoa!”
Fiksdal: Any other great teaching experiences?
Bowerman: When I was in Political Economy the second and third time, we started having students
from the year before act as tutors in the principles part that I taught. They were great. One of them
was Tom Womeldorff.
Fiksdal: Oh, you’re kidding.
Bowerman: . . . who came back. I just saw him the other day—we were both at the fish store—and he
retired this year.
Fiksdal: That’s right. I ran into him, and he told me that, so he’s next on my list.
Bowerman: Yes, he said that you were talking to him. I told him he should do it.
Fiksdal: The minute I heard. First of all, I was so surprised because I always thought of him as so young.
Bowerman: I know. He still looks young.
Fiksdal: Yeah, and I think he is young. I don’t know how old he is. I knew that he had been a student,
but I never interacted with him. This is great.
Bowerman: We interacted a lot because he was one of the three tutors. We met once a week as a
group.
Fiksdal: Was he a good tutor?
Bowerman: Yeah, he was a good tutor. All of them turned out to be good tutors. Earlier in the year, I
had tutors again. One was Tom Richardson, one was Tom Morrow. I used to put Tom—
Fiksdal: Must have been only Toms can apply.
Bowerman: Only Toms were allowed. There was another one. They were good tutors, but those two, I
remember. I think Tom Womeldorff knew them. He must have been younger by several years. Because
he would tell me he heard—or someone would tell me they heard—from Tom Richardson who was back
East—what he was up to and that kind of thing.
Fiksdal: Is he famous now or something?
20

Bowerman: He went on for a doctorate, I think in econ. I think he got it from American University.
Then he went on to teach and probably research. I don’t know. A lot of them did go on like that.
I had a group contract in Intermediate Economics fairly early on. I think it was two quarters. It
was just a group contract, so there were 16 to 20 students in there. They were the most hardworking
bunch of students.
Fiksdal: I think you told me that they requested it. Is that right?
Bowerman: No, that was the studies in Capitalism.
Fiksdal: Oh, that’s a different thing.
Bowerman: Yeah. This was a few years later and Dave Pavelchek was in there. Because that part of
econ is totally logical exercises. There’s graphing going on, too, but you have to understand the shape of
this curve and what that means. But they were really into it. [laughing]
Occasionally, because of snow or whatever, I’d be late. I’d come into the class 20 minutes late
and they were up there on the blackboard, because they always had assignments.
Fiksdal: Heaven!
Bowerman: Yeah, that was such a wonderful group of students.
Fiksdal: Were they mostly all male?
Bowerman: Mostly, but there were definitely women, which was really good.
Fiksdal: That’s good. I just needed to hear that.
Bowerman: Maybe 15 years ago, they did a study and there were fewer PhDs in econ who were women
than in the hard sciences. They just don’t attract them.
When I went to graduate school, there were five women in a class of roughly 30 students.
Secretaries were so delighted because they hadn’t had a woman in five years as a group of students.
But I don’t think it’s stayed that way. [laughing]
I have this list of students.
Fiksdal: It’s fine to talk about students that you admired or who did well.
Bowerman: Dale Favier was in Power and Personal Vulnerability. I haven’t mentioned that. That was a
program with Dave Marr and Rudy Martin. It was kind of fun because a lot of the structure of the
program was to take pairs of terms that might be regarded as opposites.
The one I remember most was Authority and Responsibility. I remember that one because I
didn’t understand why those were opposites, but David was sure and it was all right with Rudy and then,
it became clear to me along the way. Near the end of fall quarter, the students were getting really lax

21

and it got on David’s nerves. He sent out this memo over Christmas vacation to all the students, gently
blasting them, talking about Authority and Responsibility. [laughing]
Fiksdal: And you hadn’t reviewed it first?
Bowerman: No. We knew he felt that way and he did tell us he was going to write something, so we
said, “Go ahead.” It just made me howl because it was taking one of our examples and applying it to
them. He set new rules, and I think they were just for his seminar, but Rudy and I complied with them.
Two absences. You lose all credit. Things like that.
Fiksdal: He was famous for that. You could lose all your credit in a David Marr program. I didn’t know
what the conditions were, but I heard from students stories of different faculty and how hard or good or
bad they were.
Bowerman: That’s right, but he really laid the law down. Boy! Those students were at their desks,
sitting up straight.
Fiksdal: That’s great.
Bowerman: It was funny. And then, one of the opposites was something like Autonomy and
Responsibility. When you’re sitting there sitting up straight, we didn’t ask them this, but “Are you
practicing autonomy?” [laughter] Some of them got that and they started struggling with it, about how
they had reacted to being told.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting.
Bowerman: It was a wonderful program intellectually as well as a source of fun.
Yeah, we had some really good students. Later on, though, what I should have talked about that
I haven’t added.
In Rights and Wrongs in one of those years, I had a student—you might know him—Phil Owen.
After he graduated, he started Sidewalk, which is a homelessness program downtown.
Fiksdal: Oh, right. It’s still in existence.
Bowerman: Yeah, it still exists. He left it maybe a year or year and a half ago and he went back East.
But he was a student who I think was in my seminar, but he made a point to come up to me at one point
and say, “You’ve changed my life.” I’ve had very few students tell me that. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah, really.
Bowerman: I asked him what he meant, and he said, “You may not know this, but when I came into the
program, I was really conservative—a real conservative—and you changed me around completely.” I
wasn’t the most radical of the faculty.
Fiksdal: No, I can think of a lot of others. [laughter]
22

Bowerman: I said, “How did I do that?” He said, “There was a lecture you gave and it was about”—
again, the same theme you’re familiar with in teaching with me; I started with the view that we all call
an entirely autonomous individual and then I said, “That’s a pack of lies that we are sold. You all know
it, I would say to them, because there’s one relationship most of you have had, which completely belies
that, and that’s your family relationship. When a mother says, ‘I would rather cross the street and get
hit by a car than little Johnny,’ she means it, and she will do it if it’s necessary.”
He said, “That just blew me away. I thought, oh, you’re right. We are inherently—or maybe
equally—social beings who feel that we have a responsibility towards other people. That completely
shattered everything [I believed] before.”
Fiksdal: He was a deep thinker, also.
Bowerman: He was a thinker, and that was obvious all along. I was like, whoa!
Fiksdal: That’s fabulous. Look how far he took responsibility.
Bowerman: I know. He really did. He told me some personal stories that explain part of it, too. It
wasn’t just the education.
Fiksdal: I recently read a news article about Sidewalk, and it’s been quite successful in moving people
out of homelessness.
Bowerman: Yes, it has a particular model that he liked. His mother was a doctor, or is a doctor, and she
had worked with people, I don’t think they were homeless, but people who are unfortunate in their life
situation. She had certain models that she used in medicine, and he adopted this from something in
there, as I understand it.
Then there was Steve Buxbaum. You probably don’t know him, but he was in one of the other
programs. He was a somewhat older student. My daughter-in-law, Whitney, is very much into working
with homeless people. She went to a fundraiser for Sidewalk. You get a table of eight and you pay a
certain amount, so she invited me to be with them, and I was.
Steve was Mayor of Olympia at that time.
Fiksdal: That’s why I know his name.
Bowerman: That’s why you know his name. Phil was there because he was the head of Sidewalk. I saw
Steve and I thought, oh, he doesn’t even recognize me. I went up and I introduced myself. “Ah!” He
got up and it was just so, so very nice. There was obviously a very positive feeling on both sides.
So, to have Steve there and Phil there, they’re running the city, you know? [laughter] [Pam
McEwan was a former student. That was really a nice thing.
Fiksdal: And they stayed local.
23

Bowerman: Yeah, they all stayed.
Fiksdal: And made it a better place.
Bowerman: That’s right.
Fiksdal: A lot of students did.
Bowerman: Yep, they did. You see them around a lot. That’s another great thing about Evergreen.
When you’re with other people of our own generation and they see someone walk by with green hair,
and they’re like “Oh!” And I’m going like, “Huh? What is it?” It’s all these things you’re just used to,
and I think that was a wonderful side effect of teaching at Evergreen.
Fiksdal: There was amazing diversity.
Bowerman: Yes, and you just get used to it.
Fiksdal: That’s right.
Bowerman: You don’t judge people on that anymore. They have green hair and she has brown hair.
[laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah, it doesn’t real matter.
Bowerman: My granddaughters for a while went through a phase—and I think the younger one still
does it—where they dye their hair purple and blue. It starts purple and ends up blue, but only half. “I
like that. It looks good on you.” [laughter]
Fiksdal: You’re much more open.
Bowerman: It keeps you young.
Fiksdal: I think that’s right. I think Evergreen keeps you in the know for longer about young people.
That’s a hopeful thing. We need to remember that young people are hopeful, in the main, and that they
have amazing ideas.
Bowerman: And the energy is just wonderful, which they use fruitfully. Sometimes they’re searching
for how to use it, but they’re still not wasting time with their lives.
Fiksdal: So, you’ve talked not maybe completely, and if someone else pops in your mind, mention
them. But what about some experiences with faculty or students that were difficult?
Bowerman: I don’t really want to talk about the ones that are difficult.
Fiksdal: You don’t have to, although it’s okay.
Bowerman: There weren’t too many that were really down-to-earth difficult, but there were some, and
it wasn’t in teaching that I can recall, but in administrative work.
I have a couple of personal stories about faculty or administrative types I’d like to share. I was a
single mom with two boys, and never had brothers, so it was like a strange, new world. But I had kids
24

who were really nice and good, and also knew how long to keep things from Mom, until I found out
later.
Luke, the younger one, got into bicycling. After school—this is middle school so he’s still fairly
young—he would hit the road and go 25, 30 miles. We had these fights about “You have to carry a
quarter,” because there were no cellphones. Can you imagine you have to carry a quarter?
Fiksdal: No, that’s funny. You’d better say why right now. Whoever’s reading this may not—
Bowerman: If you can find a telephone just with a slot. “Operator!”
Fiksdal: A public telephone. A booth.
Bowerman: I did have to pick him up twice out in the county. Often, he did ride with an older friend,
but sometimes—
Fiksdal: Flat tires, all kinds of things happen.
Bowerman: Yeah. Anyway, he got very interested in the mechanics of bicycles and he wanted to know
something about them, I don’t know what. So, I called Tom Grissom, a physicist, and I said, “Tom, can
you help me?” He came over sometime the next week and he spent 45 minutes with bicycle wheels,
explaining the forces and all that stuff [to Luke].
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness.
Bowerman: I was so [appreciative]. I never taught with Tom. He was at the dinosaur table. But it was
just so very generous. That was really nice.
Jude was a musician and he decided when he was 13 or 14 that one of the great stars—I don’t
remember which—learned to play guitar by hanging the guitar around his neck and never taking it off
except when he went to sleep [laughing] and playing all the time. He did that for two years, not at
school but when he was home.
Fiksdal: I’m imagining the background for you.
Bowerman: It was an electric guitar, and it wasn’t hooked up when he went to bed. When he was in his
room, he had to use earphones, so it didn’t bother us, but there were certain rules. He didn’t think he
could sing, and I said, “Jude, a lot of these singers who are famous, they can’t sing either, but they have
personality, and they can put a song over.” That did not hit him.
I guess I was a dean at the time. Les Purce comes by, and he says, “How are things going?” I
said, “I have this problem at home. I have a son who thinks he can’t sing, and I told him nobody can sing
that way, or lots of people can’t.” He says, “Yeah, they get hung up about that.”
Fiksdal: Let’s just mention that Les Purce was a fabulous singer, and guitarist [and president of
Evergreen].
25

Bowerman: Yes, so it was not inappropriate to mention it to him. The next Saturday—we were living in
a duplex; it was after my divorce and between the old house and the new one I bought—my doorbell
rings. I open it up and there’s Les, and he’s got a guitar case in his hand. He says, “Jude home?”
Fiksdal: For heaven’s sakes.
Bowerman: I said, “Yes.” He said, “Hey, Jude!” He calls him downstairs, and they spent an hour, hour
and a half, playing guitar together. Les would start singing and he said, “C’mon, Jude. Join in.” Jude got
to like one note by the end of the hour and a half. [laughing] Next weekend, the doorbell rings.
Fiksdal: He came back?
Bowerman: He came back maybe three maybe four times. By the end, Jude was singing. I thought, oh,
my gawd. I’ve told a few faculty this and they’re just wowed by that. He’s so kind and so thoughtful.
Fiksdal: That’s an incredible story.
Bowerman: Later, they played together at Super Saturday and things like that. If Les showed up at one
of Jude’s shows, he’d come on up and do a number.
Fiksdal: How long was Jude a professional musician?
Bowerman: About 10 years. He went to college, and when he graduated, he had a band. They went on
the road, and they toured between the West Coast and the Mississippi basically—occasionally, the other
side. He had a manager, and she would get gigs for them.
It was touring in a big van with three or four guys in there. They would sleep in there, too. It
was hard. A lot of mediation between people who weren’t getting along. Finally, he said, “Mom, I’m
making enough money for myself, but I can’t afford a family with this, so I’m going to go and look for a
job.”
Fiksdal: What was the name of his band?
Bowerman: It started out something-or-another Blues, because it was blues and funk. I loved the
music. I was dancing all the time. [laughing] Oh, and they practiced in my garage, talking about
loudness.
Then I got a phone call. A very kind person saying, “Are you the mother of Jude?” I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Well, we have trademarked the name of their band several years ago for our business, so we
don’t want to sue him for trademark infringement, but we’d like him to change the name of his band.”
Jude understood that right away, but he didn’t know what to call it, so I said, “Call it the Jude
Bowerman Band. There probably won’t be another one.” [laughing]

26

Yeah, he had a big following. Even when I moved here [Panorama], one of the counselors came
up to me and said, “Are you related to Jude Bowerman?” “He’s my son.” “Ah!!! Is he playing
anymore?” “No.”
Fiksdal: Star power.
Bowerman: That’s right. I remember he was playing once downtown on Arts Walk. They closed
Washington Street and he was assigned there for his band. I’m standing by these women who are
maybe 10 years younger than me and they’re drooling. I go, “That’s my son. Don’t do that! He’s much
too young for you.” [laughter] It was funny.
But he would not have been singing without Les Purce, I don’t think.
Fiksdal: But he did go to college first.
Bowerman: Yes, he did. He was in a band. Someone else had a band. It was a local band, and he
auditioned before he was 16. They were looking for a lead guitarist. They had a bass and a drummer.
The lead was a singer with a harmonica. They had lost their lead guitarist, so he went and auditioned.
Later, we heard the story. The lead said to his wife, who eventually became Jude’s agent, “Well,
we found our player, but the trouble is, he’s too young to play in bars!” [laughter] But it turns out that
if you’re a professional group like that, you can have one member who is below age go into bars with
you. They’re not allowed to drink but they can be there, so it went okay.
That was before he was 16. He also was in the jazz band with his guitar at the high school. He
played a clarinet before that, so he was in band with that, but then, jazz band.
Fiksdal: What high school?
Bowerman: Capitol High. They had a foreign exchange student that was playing, who was also a
guitarist, so they were great friends and they visited each other subsequently.
I never questioned that he would go to college. My children go to college. [laughter] But he
applied to several Washington State schools. He got into Western and he got into the U. I don’t
remember where else. I think he got into everything he applied for. His grade point average was
wonderful because he had three music courses.
He chose to go to Western, and a lot of the other kids he knew from Capitol went to Western, so
that was a nice aspect to it. He decided he wanted to major in African American studies, but Western
didn’t offer that. They offered ethnic studies but not that, so he switched in his junior year to the UW
and had that as his major.
Fiksdal: Wow.

27

Bowerman: He finished there. He had parts of a band from his high school days. They reassembled
themselves and went on the road.
Fiksdal: Isn’t that great. So, neither of your boys went to Evergreen?
Bowerman: Luke took eight credits—four in one summer and four in another—in computer language.
Luke did not go to college. The only college he went to was Evergreen for eight credits in summer
school.
Fiksdal: That sounds hard for you.
Bowerman: Is this appropriate to talk about this?
Fiksdal: We can turn it off.
[End Part 1 of 2 of Pris Bowerman on May 18, 2023]
[Begin Part 2 of 2 of Pris Bowerman on May 18, 2023]
Bowerman: I just want to mention Lucia again. We can certainly talk together about it, but we were
very compatible. Obviously, we knew each other from MPA. She became the Director more or less at
the time that I became Dean. I sat over the graduate program, so we did have some interaction then.
Fiksdal: I’ll bet it was very helpful to have a dean who knew something about the program.
Bowerman: I think so. I think all the graduate programs appreciated that.
Fiksdal: When I was a dean, nobody wanted to deal with the graduate programs since no one
understood them and they seemed to have a lot of problems.
Bowerman: Yeah. Some of them, like the teaching program, went through huge revolutions in terms of
who they wanted to attract and what they taught. I just know that something like that happened, but I
wasn’t part of that.
I meet a lot of MPA grads. They’re in the community, for sure.
Fiksdal: There sure are.
Bowerman: Because they came in a people who were already employed and had a bachelor’s. Most of
them were happy with their experience and what it gave them in their positions.
Also, I should mention Patrick Hill because he was provost when I started doing a lot of the DTF
work—the Tacoma group first—and then he asked me to chair the evaluation DTF, which was a two-,
two-and-a-half-year thing. We worked really closely with that.
I became MPA Director, and he was very, very supportive in a personal way. He’d send me
flowers. I’m sure he didn’t do that to the male faculty.
Fiksdal: Oh, my goodness, no.
Bowerman: He’d hear something great happened, and all of a sudden, there were flowers on my desk.
Fiksdal: How sweet.
28

Bowerman: It was really nice. I realize now he kind of mentored me, pushed me, so that was nice. We
had some really big differences in opinion on some matters. He loved John Dewey, and I only read some
John Dewey in graduate school and as an undergraduate, but I can’t stand John Dewey. [laughing] I
don’t think he had ever run into anyone who felt that way. But that was okay. It’s stimulating in its own
way, so it didn’t turn into anything.
Fiksdal: He really liked conversations like that.
Bowerman: Oh, gawd, yes. Charlie Teske and Patrick must be terrible together.
Fiksdal: I think they were brilliant together. Of course, Sean Williams taught with them in the Ireland
program.
Bowerman: Oh, yes.
Fiksdal: She said it was tough to get a word in, even in the program. She would lecture, and they’d
interrupt, and tell stories.
Bowerman: Yeah, I would not have been a good partner in a teaching relationship. Very different way
of teaching.
Fiksdal: He was such an interesting person. He had a long background in experimental education.
Bowerman: Yes, he did.
Fiksdal: But he didn’t come in [to Evergreen] promoting himself. I think people knew, but he didn’t try
to push us. Well, maybe there was a little nudge here and there when we were adopting an actual
requirement for graduation, which was writing the essay.
Bowerman: He wrote professional papers. He shared some with me and I think he probably shared
them with a lot of other faculty. More quickly than with me. It was about teaching, of pedagogy. And
John Dewey! [laughing]
Fiksdal: I didn’t read any John Dewey. All I know is his decimal system. I did learn that.
Bowerman: He actually has ideas that are not very un-Evergreen-ish, but I think it’s more his style that
grated on me.
Fiksdal: It was sad when he died. It was sad.
Bowerman: Oh, so sad.
Fiksdal: He didn’t tell anyone how sick he was. I remember seeing him, and after he died, I realized that
was his goodbye to me, and I wish I could have said more to him about how valuable he was as a person
at Evergreen, and just as a person.
Bowerman: As a person, yeah.
Fiksdal: I didn’t know him well, but I thought he steered things just expertly. And he didn’t seem to
have this big ego that got in the way, which was unusual the whole time I was at Evergreen [laughing]
with men, male faculty.

29

Bowerman: I did visit him when I heard he was dying at his home. I had met his wife occasionally
before, maybe once or twice, and she was there. But there were also a couple of other faculty there. I
didn’t know what to say particularly, so I felt awkward, but I was glad I [went].
Fiksdal: I think the fact that you were there is meaningful.
Bowerman: I think that made a big difference. I remember once—I must have been dean, I guess, I
don’t know—I innocently planned—this was after I was separated, but I was still in the big house that I
had been living in with my kids and husband—and I decided I’m going to have some dinners and have
friends over.
I invited Patrick and his wife, of course, and the Marrs, and one or two other people. I heard
later- I mean Patrick came, and there was no hesitation, “That’s really unusual. Patrick doesn’t accept
invitations to faculty’s homes.”
Fiksdal: Oh, because he was provost at the time?
Bowerman: Yeah, he was provost.
Fiksdal: He had his own moral code of some sort.
Bowerman: Yeah, I think he had his own code. So whoever told me said I should feel very gratified by
Patrick. [laughter] Okay. I didn’t know he had that code, and I’ve not known if it’s really true.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting. Let’s make sure you’ve said everything you want to say.
Bowerman: Because otherwise you’ll have to come back. [laughter]
Fiksdal: If you think of more stories or people, you get to add those in. This will move to a transcript,
and then you read the transcript, and you can take out anything you want. You can add. You can just do
brackets to add, or you can do end notes and tell a longer story. This is how I envision it in my mind.
You do it however you want. But it’s your transcript.
Bowerman: Okay, that’s cool. I can just go back through my notes later and if someone wasn’t
mentioned—
Fiksdal: Things might pop up. One of the things we do at this point is try to move to your retirement.
Of course, you were ill, and that’s one of the reasons you retired, so there was a chunk of time there—
Bowerman: It was about five years earlier than I would have retired.
Fiksdal: You don’t really want to talk about that.
Bowerman: I do want to mention Jerry Lassen because he was another economist, and he was part of
Political Economy. He was kind of involved in Academic Advising when I was dean. I think maybe the
first year, he was the Academic Advisor.
We taught together one time for almost a year, near the end. His method of lecturing—if you
want to talk about Max Smith—was just amazing to me. He would bring an outline, which he would
hand out to all the students. It was a very basic outline—A, B, C, 1, 2, a, b. Then he would read the
outline.
30

Fiksdal: That was the lecture?
Bowerman: That was the lecture. It was like, wait a minute, Jerry. We’re just so different, it was
interesting. But the students didn’t seem to mind.
Fiksdal: There might have been some cognitive decline, however.
Bowerman: I hadn’t thought of that.
Fiksdal: Because that did come.
Bowerman: That’s true. But what he did know that amazed me all the time—it was in ’99-2000 when
we taught—was he knew American economic statistics. He could go as far back as you wanted. “What
was the interest rate in 1937?” “What was the policy of that President, or the Federal Reserve Board?”
He just had this memory. He studied it at some time, or read it, and he had this memory for
that stuff. It was wonderful. You really need that or else you have to go research it every time. And
there wasn’t Google at the time. [laughing]
He was really interesting to talk to about stuff—policy stuff, actually—and in the MPA, he was
good at policy. He had been working with the State before we hired him in the policy areas.
Fiksdal: He was more of a people person.
Bowerman: He was very—
Fiksdal: You mentioned Advising. I didn’t remember that. I might have known it at the time, but when I
was dean, I was trying to hire people in all kinds of different disciplines, so I would call on my colleagues
to come and help me. I just wanted one other person to help me interview. It didn’t have to be this big
process, because these were adjunct faculty.
Jerry would come every time. He was so generous with his time, and really helpful in listening.
Even if it wasn’t quite his discipline, he was there.
Bowerman: That’s right. He was very attentive
Fiksdal: I tried it once, I think, for someone, and then I couldn’t get the people I thought I should have,
so I just called him up again, and he said, “I’ll come. It’ll be fine.” Read the application and then sat and
talked. Asked some really good questions that I wouldn’t have thought of.
Bowerman: Talking about people who helped in a personal way, I should mention shortly after I was
separated, I was visiting Jeanne Hahn. I had a little 10-year-old VW Rabbit, and as I’m coming out of
Cooper Point, the engine just dies. I was able to coast it over to the side of the road and walked down to
Safeway. How am I going to get home?
I don’t know if I got home by calling Rudy Martin, but I called him later. I think probably Rudy
picked me up and drove me home. I was living on the West Side. Within a few hours, I got a call from
the police. I had called the police earlier to tell them the car was parked there and would be there till
the next morning when the tow trucks could come. They called me back in a couple of hours and said,
“Do you have a little yellow Rabbit?” “Yes.” They said, “Was it dented?” “No.”

31

Fiksdal: Oh, no.
Bowerman: Yeah. “We’d like you to come out and identify it as yours and take it away.” So, I called
Rudy again [laughing] and he came. Yes, it was my Rabbit. It was opposite 14 th Avenue. They said, “All
these teenagers probably joyride.” They went smack right into the side of it, and it was totaled. It was
10 years old anyway.
So, Rudy towed that car to my place. The next day, the insurance agent could came and looked
at it. I mean, really.
Fiksdal: Above and beyond.
Bowerman: Then I had to buy a new car. I’d never bought one alone before, and it still was a very male
world, and you still had to bargain with the dealer, so I think I talked four different male faculty into play
a role.
There was one who loved to talk about kinds of cars, so we talked about what kind of car would
be good for me. There was one who loved to dispute with dealers, and he came with me on that one.
[laughing] It was really fun. [laughing] But it was really very, very helpful, too, that people did that.
Then with Jerry one time when I was with the boys alone living on the West Side, I had some
kind of medical issue. My heart was racing like crazy. I woke up in the middle of the night. I had a 14year-old and an eight-year-old. I called an ambulance, and then I woke Jude up and I said, “Mom’s going
to go to the hospital. I want you to call Dad early in the morning and tell him what’s going on, and I’ll
get in touch when I can.”
I get to the hospital, and I’m there a few hours, and they said, “Okay, you’re fine. You can go.”
It’s 3:00 in the morning [laughing] and I hadn’t come by car, so I found one of these cots that sits in the
hallway, and I just laid down on it. Some nice, nice janitor-type came, and he gave me a blanket and a
pillow. Then, at 6:00 in the morning, I woke, and I couldn’t settle anymore. I used the phone. Who can
I call? Jerry had told me he got up early, so I called Jerry, and he came and picked me up.
Fiksdal: This is reminding me of something that I thought was hysterically funny at the time. I was
teaching with Rachel Hastings, who is also a linguist, and we were having a great, great program. We
ran into Brian Walter, who is a mathematician, and of course Rachel is also a mathematician.
They both said, “Hi,” and then she said, “Oh, I can’t talk to you right now. I’m married to Susan.”
[laughter] Because we were in a conversation and we needed to continue it. Brian was my friend, too. I
thought, oh, poor Brian! Oh, we’re married! [laughter]
In a way, you are. There’s this connection with your colleagues that’s quite strong and deep.
You might not keep it, but during that program, you’ve got to know a lot about that person, like do they
get up early? You learn whether you want to or not sometimes. You have to know certain things that
will bother them or not bother them.
Like you said, “David could just send out this memo to the students,” when you hadn’t even
looked at it. That’s a lot of trust, and I have to say that I never have that level.
Bowerman: Though they did tell us he was going to do it.

32

Fiksdal: But even still, I would have wanted to see the draft. Not that I would have maybe made
suggestions.
Bowerman: Most people would have, too. “Don’t you dare send that!” [laughing]
Fiksdal: We know a lot about each other in those programs.
Bowerman: I found that was my social life. You and I were both in a situation where we were parents
with young kids for a long time and I didn’t have a lot of time to do beyond childcare and teaching. But
the social life was absolutely in your program. Then it was so sad because the next fall, you had a new
group.
Fiksdal: Yes, and you had to drop the old group. That’s right.
Bowerman: There was a party at the college to say goodbye to Les Purce when he was retiring. Russ
Lidman got up to give a talk. The first thing he said was, “Don’t expect any phone calls. You won’t hear
from anybody anymore.” [laughter] How right you are it’s not just my experience. Evergreen was very
much your social life as well as your [workplace].
Fiksdal: Very intense. That’s true. You didn’t have too much time otherwise.
Bowerman: No.
Fiksdal: Although I did have friends outside.
Bowerman: I did, too, and those are the ones I see most now. I got to know them real well on
sabbatical, when you had your own schedule.
Fiksdal: That’s right. Thinking about retirement, we’re sitting here in Panorama.
There are other faculty here, and staff, whom I’ve interviewed—not all of them. How are you
feeling about life after retirement?
Bowerman: I really have been having a good time. Initially, as you know—I’ve told you already—I was
sick, so I was just recuperating. Then I was trying to decide where I wanted to be, basically. My children
were off on their own lives.
I lived in a little place on a cul-de-sac, 12 houses, off French Road. Most of the people there
were 10 years younger, or younger yet, and they had little kids. But, as the kids grew up, they moved
away, and then there were more new people with little kids.
I didn’t know half of them by the time I was retiring. I thought, there’s no social life here either
and there’s no security in any sense. Those were the two reasons I chose to live here. There would be a
lot of things to do, people to meet. Also, there was some backup for medical issues.
I came here in 2009. I retired in 2005 but it took me a couple of years to get well again. I had
been volunteering before I got here. One of my close non-Evergreen friends had been a neighbor in my
house. They moved two miles away, so we were still close.
She had started doing hospice, and she loved it, so I thought, I’ll try it, and I liked it a whole lot,
too. Then the hospital started a new program. They go to the people who had just been admitted to
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their rooms upstairs and let them know some of the services that were available at the hospital and try
to get them to talk about how they were feeling, or whatever. That worked out really well. But since
only two of us trainees stayed with the program, a new director cancelled it.
Then the hospital introduced a program called “No One Dies Alone,” which is copied after, I
think, a Salem, Oregon, hospital. Basically, they said, “We have a number of patients who die here
absolutely alone. They have no family, no friends, or they’re not nearby and they can’t be here. It really
bothered the nurses a lot, and it bothered the doctors who were attending them. Most of them were
being attended by palliative care doctors, all two of them at St. Peter’s.
I went through the training for that. Basically, what you do is when they know that the person is
within a day or two of dying, you spend four hours at their bedside. You can talk. You can play music.
You can do nothing. But you’re there. We took shifts of four hours. I really liked doing that. It was very
strange yet meaningful.
But then, when Covid came along—when I came here, I was doing all three of those things. I
had a hospice patient. You got one hospice patient. You saw them for four hours a week. They could
be anywhere in the area. They could be anywhere in the county, but I never went beyond Lacey,
Tumwater, Olympia.
That ended with hospice because of Covid. The “No One Dies Alone” program ended for the
same reason. The other program, when they only had two of us, was dissolved.
Fiksdal: It was dangerous to be in the hospital.
Bowerman: Yes, it was. It made infinite sense, it was just . . .
Fiksdal: . . . hard.
Bowerman: And a lot of things closed up here. I’d been in a yoga class, and I’d been using the pool a
lot. They shut the pool down for a while. Things like that. You became very isolated during that time.
I ultimately decided, okay, how do I keep my mind sane? Also, my kids were being very
respectful in staying away. [laughter] In the earlier years—
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah, because you were an elder.
Bowerman: That’s right. “Mom, are you staying home?” My two granddaughters, from the time they
were two—maybe the little one was younger—they would spend a day with me each week. Two
different days, not together. I never had two boys together. They were six years apart. [laughing] I’m
not going to start now.
That was really nice. When the older one started to go to all-day school, it did cut out, though,
because on the days that they got early, I would pick them up from school and bring them here. But
with Covid [sighs] just flat. That was out, too.
I thought, how can I stay sane otherwise? Well, I’d always been in school, so I said, okay, choose
some things you want to really read about, learn about. I chose three things and I started to do an hour
a day on each of those things. That would take care of most of the day, as we were saying. Then, you’d
have lunch. [laughing] So, I did that for a long time.
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I have gone back into hospice. I’m not visiting yet. Only a few people are visiting at this point
who are volunteers. But I call hospice patients’ principal caregivers Tuesday mornings and Wednesday
mornings. It strikes me it has a lot to do with kind of what I did in school. You listen to people. You try
to give a seminar. You try to get them to express how they’re feeling or thinking.
Fiksdal: That’s a lot of compassion on your part.
Bowerman: Yes.
Fiksdal: I don’t think I would.
Bowerman: A lot of people say, “Oh, I could never do that.”
People say, “I couldn’t do it,” but what I found—and I mentioned this to one of the people who
is on staff at hospice, and I remember that—was the people who are dying are living, and they really try
to relate to you, just like they were living, most of them.
Fiksdal: I think I could do it. I could make anyone talk, I think. [laughter]
Bowerman: It’s not that different. It doesn’t necessarily cross over to someone you know who is dying.
Fiksdal: But they die, and then it’s sad, isn’t it? I guess you know.
Bowerman: Hospice staff call hopefully before you try to visit a patient. They leave you a message.
“Your patient So-and-So died this morning.” It feels very cold. But a lot of them, you haven’t seen that
long.
There was a guy here I visited. He was over 100 when I started visiting him, but he lived in a
place like this. He was in independent living. He had a caregiver who lived in, but a lot of hospices,
you’re with that person who’s dying in order to relieve the family or the caregivers, so they have four
hours a week. That’s what we were doing.
Oh, my lord! He had such a different life than I did. He loved to talk, and I learned so much. His
family was from California, but his father wanted to [have a] ranch. Now I’m forgetting exactly, but on
some federal program, they went to southern New Mexico and got land to ranch. They were
homesteaders.
He was in school. He went to school in Phoenix, so he wasn’t at home. His father stayed in
Phoenix with him, so his mother was left alone down there to take care of the animals. [laughing]
Guess who decided they’d had enough?
Fiksdal: That sounds like a horror.
Bowerman: I didn’t know anything about that. You read about it in history, but here is a person that
lived some of it. He lived close to another year and a half, and I saw him every week. I really missed him
when he died.
Fiksdal: There, you made a friend.
Bowerman: Yes, and there was another--a woman. She lived in Lacey, too. Totally different class.
Poor. Not well off at all. But she had a really close friend who lived next door and I got see to both of
35

them. Things like that. Again, it was long enough, and she opened up enough that you felt a real
attachment to them.
My friend who introduced me to the whole thing started doing only people with Alzheimer’s. I
couldn’t do that. She had such patience, but it did burn her out.
Fiksdal: That would be very, very hard.
Bowerman: Now, the girls are older, and I’m seeing them about once a week, even though they’re in
school. Jude had boys and they’re much younger. They’re six and four. We know each other real well
on the telephone. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Where do they live?
Bowerman: They live in Seattle in Ballard. So, that’s it.
Fiksdal: This has been a real pleasure talking to you, Pris. As always, I learned a lot more about you
than I had known previously. It sounds like you had a lot of good teaching experiences and good
relationships at Evergreen, and you contributed hugely.
Bowerman: Thank you. So did you.
Fiksdal: Both in DTFs and as a dean, and in the MPA program. Those are all difficult. They can be
rewarding, too, but they are difficult things to do. Especially because your DTFs were longterm. I think I
was only on one that was super long. Maybe two years.
Bowerman: And then the faculty gets to read the report.
Fiksdal: Then they didn’t like it and it didn’t pass. It was pretty sad.
Bowerman: You put in your time in it.
Fiksdal: We were trying to introduce a requirement for study abroad, but it could be study anywhere. It
could be study in Tacoma in an urban area.
Bowerman: Not your usual sphere.
Fiksdal: Yeah, just some different place than maybe where you grew up. If you grew up in Yelm, going
to Tacoma downtown or the Hilltop, that would be big. But people just tore away at it. It’s really too
bad.
Bowerman: That’s sad. In the program that Lucia and I did three times, there was a component—they
were freshmen. We took them downtown and introduced them to the city. It was downtown, but we
thought college students would like to know about and might not find out about in the dorms.
Then they had an assignment that they had to complete the fall, by the end of fall. They had to
choose a non-profit and arrange to work three or four hours a week during winter quarter. We had one
student who proposed that instead of working for a non-profit, she would just talk to the homeless on
the streets. I think this was a young woman. She was little. She had the nerve, and she had the
interest, and she did a wonderful job. Her report was fantastic.
Fiksdal: I bet those people were so happy, instead of being ignored . . .
36

Bowerman: Yeah, it’s like, what? I say hospice isn’t hard to do. And that was her attitude. Why don’t
you just walk up and start talking to them and they talk back.
We had Long-Haired Dave in there in one year of that. He was very interesting and very good.
He wasn’t a great writer, but he was a great thinker, and he was a good reader.
Fiksdal: He was homeless?
Bowerman: He wasn’t at the time, but he was an advocate for the homeless downtown. He had very
long hair. Even The Olympian would call him Long-Haired Dave. He was one of them, in a sense.
He started the needle program in downtown Olympia. That was his baby. He did a lot of that
stuff. A lot of people would take one look at him and say, “He’s not coming into my class.” Again, Lucia
and I were approached. I think it was by . . .
Fiksdal: A dean?
Bowerman: No, the student advisor.
Fiksdal: Kitty Parker?
Bowerman: Kitty Parker. Would we take Long-Haired Dave into our program? She thought he’d get
along with us and we’d get along with him. And he was great.
Fiksdal: She was fabulous, Kitty was. She really knew a lot of the faculty and worked closely with us.
Bowerman: Yes, she did. I worked with her a fair amount during deaning. And Arnaldo [Rodriguez], the
first couple of years, then I think he went elsewhere at that time.
Fiksdal: I think when I was dean, it was Doug Scrima in Admissions.
Bowerman: Yes, I think we switched while I was dean.
Fiksdal: I should know all about it exactly because I interviewed Doug, but I can’t remember the years.
He worked for Arnaldo, and then he left and worked for the State, and then came back, I think, after
Arnaldo. He worked with Steve Hunter.
Bowerman: Steve Hunter, yeah, he was there, too, the staff person.
Fiksdal: He was always there, wasn’t he?
Bowerman: Yes. Tom Womeldorff was the student advisor near the end of when I was dean.
Fiksdal: Oh, he was?
Bowerman: We understood each other. The economics concerns. [laughing]
Fiksdal: I don’t think they have any economists now at the college. I don’t think they could ever hire
another one. They won’t come because economists are too expensive. You can get a job anywhere at
any price. Why would you come to Evergreen where the salaries are bad?
Bowerman: You have to be committed to teaching to do it because you can make so much better
money.
37

Fiksdal: That’s right. And everything has become more specialized now, too, so it’s a little different
game. When you think of all the things you did, I can’t imagine hiring someone who could do that
range. They could if they wanted to and tried.
Bowerman: But would there be opportunities now? I don’t know.
Fiksdal: I don’t know. The college has changed a lot.
Bowerman: I know. Even when I was dean, the sciences were locking down into here’s the pathway for
the biology people and the psychology people.
Fiksdal: That’s true, they do have pathways now. But I think you can teach outside the pathways.
Bowerman: That’s good.
Fiksdal: I have no idea, actually, but you should be able to.
Bowerman: But all the specialty areas are trying to do that.
Fiksdal: Yeah, they are.
Bowerman: They were very successful because they were following a long-established professional line.
Fiksdal: Do you want to be a chemist? Here’s how you do it.
Bowerman: I was like, oh, I hope that doesn’t spread.
Fiksdal: Yeah, but all our sciences, for all our time there, it was different, because there is a certain
body of knowledge you must have to go on.
Bowerman: Yeah, but that’s the same thing you could say about French.
Fiksdal: That’s certainly true of French.
Bowerman: Fluency.
Fiksdal: And we never solved it. I taught in the French program only every other year because I had to
have a life and teach other people and teach with other faculty.
Bowerman: You also wanted to keep the French language program going.
Fiksdal: Exactly, and when I went away to do my linguistics degree, then I wanted to teach that. It’s
hard at Evergreen to have something that’s step-by-step learning like sciences or language or math.
Bowerman: But it’s how you look at it, too. When you have a Health and Human Behavior program, it’s
a whole year. What student who goes to the U has a whole year in their major? That’s what they have.
They never have another year. One quarter of their credits? But here they want to add a second one in
order that you really be educated properly in that science.
Fiksdal: Oh, so you don’t think they really needed that extra?
Bowerman: The faculty did in the area, and I’m going like, how many credits?

38

Fiksdal: I never questioned it, but I just remember they always needed anatomy, and they always
needed chemists in the Evening and Weekend Studies.
Bowerman: To teach the course that they didn’t want to teach.
Fiksdal: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I confronted them with, and art theory among the artists.
Bowerman: Instead of integrating it into the—
Fiksdal: So, we hired halftime regular faculty in art history. That was our contribution to the whole
college.
Bowerman: That was one of the hangups I had with art history before you. Ron Hinson would teach it
and they would always say, “We can’t do it in the program,” and I thought, what is it that you include in
art studies?
Fiksdal: They could have. Absolutely, they could have. Both Bob Haft and Hiro Kawasaki could teach it,
and did teach it, in their programs. The other artists, maybe they weren’t trained in it, but how hard
could it be? You could do some chunks of it here and there.
Bowerman: Get a good book and do it repeatedly.
Fiksdal: Exactly. You don’t have to do the whole thing from Medieval to—but anyway, I knew a lot
about art because I had studied in France, so I felt like if I could do all that and recognize these memes
of movements, and describe them to students, then other people—
Bowerman: That was part of the fun of teaching at Evergreen was learning and getting it down well
enough.
Fiksdal: If there’s no one else, and you can’t hire someone—that was usually our problem in the French
program. They never wanted to give us a visitor. It was really hard to get a visitor. It was only if I wasn’t
there. Then they would hire someone. It was really something. They just expected that you would
carry on somehow.
Bowerman: But also, teach with other people.
Fiksdal: And then you want your discipline to be present in the curriculum. Students should be able to
study languages. It shouldn’t just be . . . anyway, it was hard. It was fraught. Not with economics.
Clearly, in the way you taught it, it was all over the curriculum, which was great.
Bowerman: In that area, there was a problem about anything beyond the beginning level.
Fiksdal: I’m wondering now, as I think back about the people you taught with, I’m not sure about
philosophy. I always thought philosophy was in the humanities, but do you think you were crossdisciplinary pretty much all the time?
Bowerman: Yeah, that’s why I say social sciences, or other times, it was humanities. Kind of went back
and forth.
Fiksdal: You didn’t teach with a scientist?

39

Bowerman: We had a Political Ecology program early on with Bob Sluss, and one other version with . . .
he was a chemist . . . Jeff Kelly. One quarter, right? But I think those were the only scientists I taught
with.
Fiksdal: Yeah, but you did, so that’s great, and with an artist.
Bowerman: Betty Estes, too.
Fiksdal: She was History of Science.
Bowerman: Yeah, so that would work into Political Economy really well in terms of the Industrial
Revolution into the Industrial Age. She’d be good now with all the technology that we’re developing.
Fiksdal: Yes, except she died. Really sad to see all these people go.
Bowerman: I know. So many of them.
Fiksdal: So many. Still, you’re glad you went to Evergreen, that you taught there, and you made it your
life.
Bowerman: Oh, yes. Definitely. It was good.
Fiksdal: Let’s end on that note.
[End Part 2 of 2 of Pris Bowerman on May 18, 2023]

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

BowermanPris_20230511_Transcript.pdf

BowermanPris_20230518_Transcript.pdf