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Identifier
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CadwalladerMerv
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Title
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Merv Cadwallader Oral History Interview
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Date
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25 March 2019
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Creator
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Merv Cadwallader
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Contributor
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Barbara Smith
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extracted text
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Merv Cadwallader
Interviewed by Barbara Smith
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 25, 2019
FINAL
Smith: It’s March 25, 2019 in Sedona, Arizona. This is Barbara Smith interviewing Merv Cadwallader.
Merv, we’re going to start with your pre-Evergreen years. A lot of the interviews I did, people didn’t
want to talk about their childhood, but that’s where the interview starts. But you could start with when
you went to college and your previous jobs.
Cadwallader: I think the childhood part of the picture is really important.
Smith: Good! Then tell me about it.
Cadwallader: Both my sister and I were born on the second-largest leper colony in the world.
Smith: Really? Oh!
Cadwallader: In Africa, in what was Nyasaland. I’m the product of a missionary family who went to
Africa to spread the good word and convert the heathen, and I think I’ve been doing that ever since.
I think our childhood, our growing up in Africa, was important because the elementary school
we went to, grades one through eight, was a one-room schoolhouse. The total enrollment in all the
grades was never over 12. There’s something about smallness that has always been important to me.
The small discussion groups that I created when I was in the Navy, and then again at the University of
Nebraska, I think grew out of my experiences as a pupil, a student, in a one-room schoolhouse.
Smith: That’s amazing. You were at Nebraska, too?
Cadwallader: Yes.
Smith: So was I.
Cadwallader: You were?
Smith: We’ll get there. [laughter]
Cadwallader: I started high school in South Africa, near Capetown. We came across the south and
central Atlantic during the early days of World War II on a freighter, dodging German U-boats, and went
past Uruguay and Montevideo when the battle was dominating headlines. So we were very much
involved in World War II because we were part of South Africa.
1
I think both our parents were from California, so California became our destination and our
home. Again, the high school I went to was a Seventh Day Adventist academy. Very small, very small
classes. I decided I wanted to be a doctor, so I went into the pre-med curriculum, again at a small,
unaccredited, Christian, Seventh Day Adventist college near Loma Linda, and then got drafted into the
Navy.
Now, why was the Navy important? For a couple of reasons. First, I was assigned to
submarines, and then they discovered I was a conscientious objector, so they put me into the Hospital
Corps. I was stationed at a neuro-psychiatric facility in the Bay Area, San Leandro. I heard I had a
cousin at Berkeley, and that’s how I connected with Laurie Tussman.
Smith: Oh, wow.
Cadwallader: So I showed up on her doorstep and she was, I think, a little puzzled at just what to do
with a Seventh Day Adventist cousin in a sailor suit. She asked me if I liked to read, and I said I did. She
handed me a book opened to a chapter heading. At that time, I was not in any way an intellectual. I
was a pretty pious Christian, so I’d read the Bible in its entirety, but I wasn’t familiar with world
literature.
The book she happened to hand me was The Brothers Karamazov. She had opened it to the
chapter called “Rebellion,” and reading that chapter changed my life. Because she asked me if I wanted
to take it back to the base and I said yes, I did. I took it back, and it was only then I discovered that it
was a mystery novel. One of my fellow sailors happened to come by and see me reading it and he said,
“Oh, have you read Crime and Punishment?” Well, I had no idea what he was talking about, but he
invited me to join him and two or three other of the corpsmen who met in the cafeteria at night. That
was my introduction to seminaring.
Smith: Oh, a book club.
Cadwallader: Yeah, through reading and discussing the great books. Now, interestingly enough, of that
group, three of us eventually became PhDs, two in sociology, one in social work. The social work PhD
became head of the department at San Francisco State. The two of us ended up at San Jose. So, the
Navy experience was formative and important.
What I discovered was that I wanted to start from scratch. After I finished The Brothers
Karamazov, I started reading Plato’s Republic. That has been a text central to my intellectual
development ever since.
2
Incidentally, Laurie was going to the University of California at Berkeley. Joe Tussman, whom
she had just recently married, was in China. He had learned Chinese—Mandarin—and he was General
George Marshall’s interpreter in the China Theater during the war. Tussman comes into the picture
later.
Smith: Yes, he does.
Cadwallader: So, I’m discharged from the Navy and apply to the University of Chicago, because I’m
interested in what Hutchins is doing, but they have a one-year waiting list. Berkeley won’t admit me
because my undergraduate work was in an unaccredited Christian college, so I went to the University of
Nebraska.
Smith: What year was this?
Cadwallader: This must have been 1945. Now, the interesting thing about my life as a junior and
senior, and then as a master’s student at the University of Nebraska was that I fell under the spell of a
Medievalist, one of the great Medieval historians of that period. His name was Johnson, and what I
ended up doing was majoring in cultural history under his direction, and minoring in comparative
economic systems and comparative Western literature.
Smith: Wow! Broad.
Cadwallader: From two years as a pre-med student deep in the natural sciences and religion to
comparative lit, comparative economic systems and Medieval history.
The important thing, I think, about my experience as an undergraduate at the University of
Nebraska was that I was asked to join the university YMCA and I just decided that what I wanted to do
was create a discussion group like the one that I had so much fun with in the Navy. I created something
called the “noon hour discussion group,” in which we read books and discussed them, rented classic
movies—16mm versions of the classics—and watched them, and considered ourselves part of a superior
and very liberal and very radical intelligentsia.
The interesting thing about that group was that one of my best friends was Ted Sorensen, who
later became Kennedy’s aide de camp. Bill Miller, who later became the governor who ran against
Eisenhower became his speech writer, and then eventually created the Department of Lincoln Studies at
the University of Virginia. Elmer Sprague got an Oxford Rhodes Scholarship and went off to Oxford. I
fell in with a bunch of art students and went to New York, specifically to Brooklyn, to establish a small
commune. Quite by accident, I found myself across the street from Pratt Institute, and went over there
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and asked if they needed faculty, and they did. So I ended up as a freshman teacher at an arts school in
Brooklyn.
Smith: What a path! What a journey! [laughing]
Cadwallader: And what I was teaching was something called Social Institutions. So when my friends,
Mick Putney and Jackie Putney, who later became President of San Jose State, suggested that I join them
at the University of Oregon and apply for a Carnegie Interdisciplinary Fellowship, I did it, got the
fellowship, and ended up in a program in which I read in sociology, anthropology and psychology, all
new fields.
I say all of this because it illustrates the fact that I never really wanted to be pinned down to a
single discipline, or to follow a conventional career path in academia. I was always trying to be a part of,
or create moral discussion groups that addressed the big issues, the big questions of life and
unanswerable stuff like that.
At the University of Oregon, I was in a very small, pretty self-contained PhD program funded by
the Carnegie Institute that was designed to encourage PhDs to go into interdisciplinary teaching, rather
than concentrating on research. And so I never really did have a conventional academic experience. I
was always on some kind of innovative edge of things.
Smith: Amazing. So they must not have made you start through all the intro courses all over again, and
you were in a PhD program.
Cadwallader: Well, when I arrived at Oregon as a fellow, they gave me a freshman intro class to teach in
sociology.
Smith: So you learned it by teaching. [laughter]
Cadwallader: My first encounter with sociology.
Smith: Amazing.
Cadwallader: The fellowship program—although I don’t think we realized how radical it was at the
time—really did allow us free reign. And to illustrate that, Mick Putney and Jackie, his wife—he had the
fellowship in the Philosophy Department, she was a Carnegie Fellow—they got a grant to do research on
social change in rural Mexico, funded by some foundation.
Smith: Ford or something.
Cadwallader: They came back to the University of Oregon and asked for permission to write and defend
a joint thesis.
4
Smith: Wow.
Cadwallader: And they were given that permission. I find that amusing because when I proposed that
the unions for experimental colleges and universities to say, “Let two guys who want to do a joint thesis
do it,” they refused.
Smith: Oh, yes.
Cadwallader: Oregon, who no one had heard of.
Smith: I did my master’s and my PhD at Oregon, but they were all in political science. But it was very
interdisciplinary.
Cadwallader: By the time I left, the Oregon social sciences were getting pretty frisky. They were
actually willing to hire Marxists and radical stuff like—
Smith: They were young, too.
Cadwallader: Yeah. My first teaching job after I got my PhD was at San Jose State, and I went to San
Jose because I wanted to be near the Bay Area. I had visions of living on the beach and commuting to
work. It didn’t quite work out that way.
The first course I was given was a course designed for elementary school majors, and it was
called Introduction to Social Science. It was an introduction to history, geography, sociology,
anthropology, and so on, so I was in my element.
Smith: I wonder if you taught in a conventional way.
Cadwallader: Well, that’s an interesting question, because I became a kind of flashy lecturer. But I was
also completely dedicated to the idea of the small, interactive discussion group. So I managed to figure
out a way to be assigned to courses that allowed me to do both.
My big lecture course, that became sort of famous locally, was something that I built out of a
course that was supposed to be about social movements. The title I finally gave it was Cromwell and
Castro: A Study in Social Movements. It was the study of the role of social movements in social change,
the development of Christianity out of mystery religions—Cromwell’s Protestantism and then what was
then current for Castro.
Smith: So your religious roots started to come out there, huh?
Cadwallader: Yeah, right.
Smith: But it was also about leadership, obviously.
5
Cadwallader: Yeah. This is an aside, but Tussman wrote a book that has the best title.
Smith: What’s that?
Cadwallader: It’s Agamemnon and Other Losers.
Smith: I haven’t seen that one. [laughing]
Cadwallader: It’s a study of leadership. It’s about Agamemnon, Oedipus, Moses, Jesus.
Smith: Oh, Jesus is a loser in this book? Okay.
Cadwallader: Where did he end up?
Smith: Well, we all do. [laughing]
Cadwallader: Yeah. Anyhow, it was at San Jose that I met Alexander Mieklejohn, at Joe Tussman’s
Thanksgiving dinner, and got interested in trying to recapitulate something like the Wisconsin
Experimental College. My buddy at the time, and the guy whose kitchen table was where he and I wrote
up the proposal for the tutorial program, was John Spurling. I went off in one direction—non-profit
undergraduate education—and he went off in another and became rich. [laughter] Filthy rich. John
Spurling was a real troublemaker. He was a very exciting guy.
Smith: How old was Mieklejohn when that meeting happened?
Cadwallader: He was 90. He died two or three years after I got acquainted with him. But he was still
playing tennis in his eighties. And his wife was terrific. The two of them were just a wonderfully
dynamic, charismatic couple, the kind you’ll never forget.
In the tutorial program, the big emphasis was on reading and discussing important books
organized around a theme, rather than just a list of great books. It was a program that required a
thematic structure, with the faculty selecting the theme and selecting the texts.
Smith: Accordingly.
Cadwallader: Yeah, rather than turning it over to the students and saying, “What do you want to do?”
That got me into trouble when I took the ideas of the tutorial program to Old Westbury, because most
of the students that had signed up for Harris Wofford’s experiment were very much interested in
designing their own thing.
Smith: At Old Westbury.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Well, Evergreen has that little thread in it, I’ve seen, too.
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Cadwallader: There’s something to be said for that. Doreen was in charge of a student-funded and
student-run experimental college at San Jose State, where the students decided what they wanted to
do, so there was a bit of a tension there.
Smith: So you were both at San Jose State then?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Interesting. I re-read your chapter about San Jose State. It’s very good.
Cadwallader: Well, it was an important experience for me because, as I realized later, it shaped a lot of
what I did at Evergreen—my attitude toward the creation and selection of a curriculum; my attitude
toward student power.
A lot of important people during that period got burned as a result of their encounters with
students. Pope Benedict, for instance, became a reactionary because his authority was challenged by
his . . .
Smith: . . . his naughty students. [laughter] They were naughtier then, too.
Cadwallader: Yeah. But the way I got to Evergreen.
Smith: Wait, go back. You left San Jose after four years?
Cadwallader: No, I’d been at San Jose 10 or 12 years.
Smith: Why did you leave?
Cadwallader: I fancied myself Johnny Appleseed. I was going to spread the tutorial experimental
college idea. I gave a little presentation at a conference attended by a chap named Byron Sukey, who
was Harris Wofford’s administrative assistant, and he invited me to come and meet Harris. Harris came
out and interviewed me and Byron Youtz, from Reed College, and Michael Novak from Stanford, and
hired all three of us.
Smith: Wow. Team made in heaven.
Cadwallader: I thought, oh, well, we’ve got a program going at San Jose. I’ll leave it in charge of people
who will love it and protect it—and, of course, they didn’t—and I’ll go up to Old Westbury. The summer
before I got to Old Westbury, I got a letter from Harris saying he’d only be there a year because he’d
taken the job at Radcliffe?
Smith: I don’t remember.
7
Cadwallader: A women’s college. So, he bailed out, and my approach to education was reading classics
by old white men. That didn’t go over very well. Dave Barry showed up, spreading the gospel about
Evergreen-to-be, and I got hired as one of the three founding people—Will Humphreys, Cadwallader and
Charlie Teske.
Smith: Did Byron go at the same time?
Cadwallader: I was only at Old Westbury for one year. Just about the beginning of the second
semester, I was hired by Dave Barry to be Dean at Evergreen. I was to show up on weekends, so I flew
back and forth.
Smith: That’s what Charlie Teske talks about, too.
Cadwallader: Twenty-two times. [laughter]
Smith: And planes were slower then, too.
Cadwallader: Yeah, and Michael Novak. He just died. I sensed that Evergreen was going to be pretty
exciting, and I wanted to protect it from the mistakes that I’d seen made at other experimental sites. So
I persuaded Charlie McCann that the way to protect us against that would be to hire people who had
been through some of those experiences—hire somebody from Old Westbury, hire somebody from San
Jose State, hire somebody from Hampshire College, and so on. So, Byron and Larry Eickstaedt from Old
Westbury.
Smith: Pete Sinclair? He was from the next year. Richard Alexander.
Cadwallader: So, we put together the planning faculty out of people who were not only jumping with
excitement at the prospect of creating a new college, but who also had some experience, like Willi
Unsoeld in the Hurricane Island Outward Bound program.
Smith: Hitchens, too. He’d been at Rollins College, I guess. It seems like a bunch of the ones that
weren’t at experiments were are at liberal arts colleges, so they had your smallness idea.
Cadwallader: But in retrospect, what I’m struck by—and embarrassed by—is how oblivious we were to
the fact that the planning faculty was all male.
Smith: Maxine Mimms would agree. She says hello, by the way. I told her that I was coming here.
She’s doing good.
Cadwallader: She’s so wonderful.
Smith: Yeah.
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Cadwallader: We were oblivious.
Smith: Well, that was a different time. [laughing] I bet when Mary Hillaire showed up, you noticed,
though. And Maxine.
Cadwallader: Once we started recruiting the first faculty—not the planning faculty—we did make
amends. We looked for Native Americans, we looked for blacks, we looked for women, and ended up
with, for those times, a spectacularly diverse faculty.
Smith: Yeah.
Cadwallader: But the first year, god. Barbara, it just never occurred to us.
Smith: Can you imagine if you’d had Maxine and a few of those in the planning year? Your meetings
might have been a lot more raucous. [laughing] Because they were community organizers, a lot of
those first women. They weren’t little traditional, well-behaved academics.
Cadwallader: Right. Pete Sinclair and Willi Unsoeld. The planning group, if we’d just had some women
in it . . .
Smith: . . . it would have been different.
Cadwallader: But that was quite an experience. As you know, we were all dedicated to the idea of
seminaring, and more or less hostile to the idea of using pot boiling textbooks. But my devotion to a
political curriculum that was to prepare people for being liberal citizens didn’t go very far. As Dick Jones
likes to point out, what the faculty bought was the pedagogical features of the experimental college and
movement, and not Mieklejohn’s curriculum ideas, which I still believe . . .
Smith: . . . is important.
Cadwallader: . . . should guide both high school and early college education. I keep thinking, what if the
deplorables who voted for Trump had had the proper kind of education? Then we might not be in the
pickle that we’re in now.
Smith: It’s pretty amazing, actually. I think one explanation for the Evergreen non-buying of that is it’s
harder for non-social scientists and non-humanities people to see how they fit then. And they do, in
some ways. We’ve seen that in our case studies. They come down to value questions, most of the
problems.
Cadwallader: Yeah, I think Bob Sluss was really a find. I found him in the Etymology Department at San
Jose State, where if he was doing battle with someone over DDT. San Jose had an etymologist who was
a favorite of congressional investigating committees who were trying to poo-poo the idea of . . .
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Smith: . . . poisons.
Cadwallader: Yeah, and he would have a cupful of DDT on the lectern, and he’d eat some of it during
his lecture, and he said, “I’m not a bird.”
Smith: Really?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Wow.
Cadwallader: Before Congress, he did it.
Smith: It must not have been real DDT.
Cadwallader: Anyhow, I think perhaps an important thing for me to mention is how surprised I was that
McCann pushed the idea of putting all the entering freshman class into what we came to call
coordinated studies.
Smith: Right. So was that McCann who said that?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Okay. I think that’s where you were wrong, because if they’d done that, it wouldn’t be still
intact.
Cadwallader: Yeah, we’d go Old Westbury.
Smith: We would have gone traditional.
Cadwallader: Yeah, I think I was wrong. But I was trying to be humble. [laughing] Also, I believed—and
this hasn’t turned out to be the case—that all you had to do was tell a bunch of academics about the
joys of working in one of those seminar-focused cross-disciplinary programs, and they’d all want to do it.
They’d immediately write a proposal. There were always some who did, who’d catch fire immediately.
People at Sonoma, for instance.
Smith: They don’t know how. I think that’s a lot of it. They didn’t go to a one-room schoolhouse like
you. And they went to big universities that are dominated by lectures, because of the scalability and
cost issues. But we still get unbelievable faculty pretty easily. But then, they learn the skills by being in
teams. Probably the most alarming current fact is half the faculty are teaching alone.
Cadwallader: Oh, yeah?
Smith: That’s really dangerous.
Cadwallader: The team is the—
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Smith: The team is them.
Cadwallader: I mean, without the team, nothing.
Smith: I agree, especially if it’s more than one quarter long. Then it becomes all about that teacher.
And it’s exhausting. I can’t even imagine doing that.
Cadwallader: At our first faculty retreat after the first year, the topic that dominated everything was
faculty exhaustion.
Smith: I bet.
Cadwallader: Writing an evaluation that was clearly about the student and not about the teacher is
hard work. [laughter]
Smith: It is. Still is, too! We’ve gotten better at that, though, but it’s still exhausting. And when I came,
half the evaluations were outstanding, so getting people to write them on time has been a problem
persistently. And they’re trying to make them shorter, because in some ways, faculty, I think, thought
that the more they wrote, the more they showed their devotion to students. So you ended up with
transcripts that were like 800 pages long, which nobody would read. So, there’s this issue about, how
much is enough? What’s the focus? What’s the carry-forward learning outcome?
Cadwallader: I remember a conversation I had with the Dean of the Law School at Madison, in which he
said that his Admissions Committee both loved and hated to get applications from Evergreen. [laughing]
Because it meant so much work for them.
Smith: But it told them so much.
Cadwallader: Yeah. Oh, boy.
Smith: So, they all talked about exhaustion. Was it mostly just complaining, or was it working toward
solutions?
Cadwallader: I think working toward solutions. The solution I suggested—which I think, in retrospect,
was a bad idea, and that McCann rejected—was that we have two colleges in tandem, one that was
wildly experimental and the other that would give faculty a chance to rest. They’d have an assignment
here, and then go over and catch their breath teaching a regular course.
Smith: Yeah. All the colleges I know that were like that don’t exist anymore, except at Fairhaven at
Western Washington University. But it’s little. And the faculty don’t rotate. They have their own
faculty, so it’s not like you can escape either.
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Cadwallader: Well, in the academic world, the prime directive is to publish research, even if it’s phony,
even if it’s pathetically trivial. If you can’t get published, you found your own magazine, your own
journal.
Smith: Right. [chuckles]
Cadwallader: So we have hundreds of journals now.
Smith: We do. That no one reads. [laughing]
Cadwallader: No. It’s awful.
Smith: Besides the exhaustion of the first year, what do you remember of the next couple years in
terms of what happened?
Cadwallader: Faculty burnout remained center stage. But I think, coming up second was the concern
about, what do we do about majors? If you’re an ornithologist and you want to leave behind some
ornithologists who are good folk like yourself, how do you do that at a place that won’t talk about
majors? We were starting to struggle with that.
Smith: And where you’d get depth and where you’d have sequencing and that kind of thing.
Cadwallader: Yeah, and how will you be treated by admissions committees at conventional institutions?
Those were the things we fussed about at those first retreats.
Smith: How did you figure out who to hire and with what academic backgrounds when you didn’t have
any curriculum parameters, really?
Cadwallader: Wow.
Smith: I know some of it was your old friends, so it would fit with the pedagogy.
Cadwallader: Well, part of it stems from something Tussman said that I agree with. When he staffed
his second program, he staffed it with friends.
Smith: Yeah, and he does say that in that book, Experiment at Berkeley.
Cadwallader: Yeah. If you don’t staff it with friends, you’re going to end up with enemies. [laughter]
Smith: But that was because of the discontinuity with the larger system.
Cadwallader: Yeah. Wow. See, I hired a lot of people.
Smith: Right.
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Cadwallader: I’m not sure . . . hmm . . . a lot of it was just by the seat of my pants. For instance, one day
I’m sitting in my office in the blue trailer, and Don Humphrey introduces me to somebody from Oregon
by the name of Willi Unsoeld. Willi introduces himself, and I begin describing what we’re going to be
doing. He becomes more visibly excited and tuned in as we go on.
Smith: Yeah, Willi especially. [laughing]
Cadwallader: And after we’ve sort of fallen in love, after about two hours, Jolene Unsoeld shows up and
she looks at the two of us and she says, “Uh-oh.”
Smith: So really, that process elicited imagination.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: And they started to create their own image of what they could do. Okay.
Cadwallader: Right. This is a very important point to me. I think each faculty created in their
imagination that ideal school that they wished they’d been able to go to, and that now they’d have a
chance. [laughing]
Smith: Yeah. Wow.
Cadwallader: Willi dreamed of taking freshmen up into the mountains.
Smith: Which he did. Wow. But then one of the things that Rob Knapp told me in his interview was
that the deans really did design more of the curriculum the first couple years.
Cadwallader: Oh, yeah.
Smith: That seems hard to understand, how you could do that, and how detailed your direction was,
and how you figured out which people should be together.
Cadwallader: What I recall is that we let people just sort themselves out.
Smith: Okay.
Cadwallader: Now, the person who was the chair of each team.
Smith: We were talking about how teams were formed, and how you knew some of these real kind of
leadership people to work the teams. What about the Athens in America curriculum, and your political
idea about the messages?
Cadwallader: I brought that with me. I’d done it twice at San Jose, refined it a bit at Old Westbury, and
then had a program, Democracy and Tyranny, at Evergreen that I thought really sang.
Smith: They were still doing that when I came in 1978.
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Cadwallader: Nancy Taylor was a part of that. And when I’ve described it since to faculty and
administrators at other universities and colleges, they all wished they could do something like that.
Smith: Yeah. It’s very pertinent now. [laughing]
Cadwallader: Wow, isn’t it ever.
Smith: Really, it’s perfect. Without getting too judgmental even, I mean, the history part makes it sing.
Cadwallader: What I was struck by—this was after I left Evergreen—was that research at that time
showed that the more exposure to civics that high school students and seniors had, the more
contemptuous they were to American government.
Smith: Really?
Cadwallader: And more bored they were by it, especially bored, because I think they thought it was just
all so self-evident. Why read about it and discuss it? But I think that’s what’s going on in the high
schools has changed a lot. I’m not sure what’s going on. My only avenue of contact is with teachers I
work with at the University of Phoenix who are working on their doctorate degree, and they tell me
what’s going on.
Smith: But the research also shows that the more liberal, tolerant people are highly educated.
Cadwallader: Now, that’s reassuring. But even as bad a job as we do, at least it works.
Smith: I’ve noticed—because of the faculty development I’ve been doing for years and years—that
people from my own field, political science, don’t show up much. And when we did a lot of diversity
work at Evergreen statewide, the Political Science Department didn’t come to our Minority Student
Success conferences or anything, so they were kind of in the backseat about how to even integrate all
the bad news about slavery and emancipation and libertarian movements. But that’s there. The
discipline needs updating, I think, and that’s part of it. I don’t know. That’s an unfinished agenda.
Cadwallader: Jumping ahead to where I am now, I’m really excited by the way young people are
flocking to the climate change crusade, anti-gun. They seem to be more effective politically than they
were.
Smith: And smart about it, not just angry. I’ve noticed that with the gun shooting especially. But it
seems like there is hard evidence that’s really irrefutable that that’s rising out of, which is different from
a dry civics course that makes you memorize the Constitution, and recite facts.
Cadwallader: That’s what they were rebelling against.
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Smith: Yeah. That’s how citizenship training is done, but that shouldn’t be how education is done.
Cadwallader: Yeah. I left Evergreen for personal reasons, and also because I dreamed of spreading the
Mieklejohn gospel. I was offered two jobs, one in Chicago at Columbia University, and the other at a
branch of the University of Wisconsin. Because of my ties to Mieklejohn, I took the Wisconsin job.
Smith: Where was that? Platteville, Wisconsin?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: I grew up in Wisconsin.
Cadwallader: You did? Where?
Smith: Milwaukee. And I went to Lawrence College in Appleton.
Cadwallader: How did you end up in Nebraska?
Smith: Well, I finished graduate school. I did a master’s and PhD at Oregon. Then I applied for various
jobs, and got lots of offers then at Case Western Reserve and the University of Houston and Cal StateLA. Then my alma mater for my bachelor’s was Lawrence, and they offered me a visiting position, so I
went back there. Spent two years there, and there were only three unmarried faculty, so I met my
husband there. He was a University of Chicago and Stanford philosophy graduate. Then I got hired at
Nebraska after that, and he followed me as a trailing spouse.
Cadwallader: When I was at Nebraska, right after World War II, it was a lively place intellectually.
Smith: Yeah. I think it still is. We were there for eight years until Evergreen hired me, but he taught at
the University of Nebraska-Omaha, which has become a branch, in a new program to serve inner-city
students called the Goodrich Program. They got four-year scholarships and an interdisciplinary lowerdivision curriculum, seminar-based. It was like your program. They taught in jails. Those people went
on to become justices, mayors, all amazing people.
I taught in the department for a while, and then I retired to teach in a little living learning
program at UNL called Centennial College. It was in the dorms for 12 years, and did an alternative path
to gen ed. They’re having their 50th reunion now.
Then Evergreen hired me as their first senior dean. Because the board reorganized the deans
because it was in a crisis, and enrollment was down 600, and the whole economy had gone in the toilet
in 1978 because of Boeing crashing. All of the schools were under-enrolled. The deans were fighting.
Two of them moved out of the Library into a different building. So the board reorganized the deans and
put in two senior deans, one for curriculum, one for budgets. Will Humphreys became the Curriculum
15
Senior Dean, and they hired outside for the Budget Dean. I’d managed $2,000 at that point for one year
in Centennial College, but their first-choice person turned it down. She was at Franconia, which was an
experimental college that perished.
So, I learned it all on the job. I was there for 12 years as the Senior Dean, but we never acted
like the senior anything. It didn’t work. We just couldn’t imagine being hierarchical. But they had
lengthened the terms of all the deans, and now they’re almost all are there for four years, renewable
twice—once, renewable once.
Cadwallader: What was the Joseph Olander fall?
Smith: Well, he was a fraud.
Cadwallader: He plagiarized.
Smith: He plagiarized his resume. He changed the topic of his dissertation. He was eventually found
out. But he was a con. He used to dress up as all the people on campus, like the police officers, and
he’d go around and do that. He was kind of fascinating at first because he was so weird. Yeah, he was
strange.
Cadwallader: Really weird.
Smith: Yeah. Then after he was found out by Betty Ruth Estes, who did deep research on his
background and took it to the board and they eventually got rid of him. Then they made Russ Lidman an
interim Provost for a year, and then they made me Provost, with Jane Jervis, who was just an amazing
President. We had a good time then. The economy came back. Enrollment was full. The college was
selective, for the first time ever since you were there.
Cadwallader: Oh, yeah?
Smith: Then she retired, so I retired, too. And then they had this fiasco about rotating Provosts, and the
enrollment is back to when I came, now, down 1,500. But a lot of it’s because of Patriot Prayer, that
right-wing group, targeted the college. It targeted Berkeley and Portland State and Evergreen, and
organized protests, and the media clamored in.
Cadwallader: Even the New York Times got into the act.
Smith: Yeah. But Nebraska was wonderful for me. It was a great place to start, and almost all the
faculty in that department went on to something else—became presidents here, there and everywhere.
It was very good.
16
Cadwallader: Father got his PhD in the School of Education at Nebraska, and we went to the same
commencement. I had my master’s and he had his PhD.
Smith: What was the personal reason you left. If you don’t want to tell me, just say no.
Cadwallader: Well . . . my romantic troubles . . .
Smith: About romantic relationships?
Cadwallader: Yeah. [laughing] My wife, who is from Croatia, was understandably terribly unhappy at
Evergreen because of what I’d been up to before she arrived. So I thought, well, two things. I wanted to
put all of that behind me, but also there had been an opening for, I think we called it the Provost at the
time, that Byron Youtz—
Smith: He was a Provost with me. He was the best mentor.
Cadwallader: Yeah, he and I competed for the job, and he won it. I was offered a Vice Chancellorship in
Wisconsin, so I thought, well . . . so it was sort of . . .
Smith: No, I think the person that was picked when you were there was Ed Kormondy.
Cadwallader: Kormondy, right.
Smith: Then Byron was after. And Kormondy left right after he hired me and went to the University of
Hawaii, and then Cal State LA. He became the Chancellor down there. He recently passed away.
Cadwallader: Byron was great.
Smith: He was fabulous. And such a steady hand. He’d hired my husband at Reed, too. So there’s all
this tangle of people’s paths, together or slightly missing. [laughing] It’s really funny.
Cadwallader: Yeah. Bernice Youtz, when I went to Old Westbury, Byron was there. Bernice had a
mastectomy.
Smith: Oh, way back then.
Cadwallader: And she really conquered it.
Smith: After Bryon passed away, she just stayed with the college. She was on the Foundation Board,
and did a whole bunch of stuff until very recently. Both her kids became teachers.
Cadwallader: Yeah, they’re great.
Smith: What a saint.
17
Cadwallader: When I got to Platteville, I found myself at a very conventional institution. It was part of
the Wisconsin system. It had been a teacher’s college and a mining school combined, and then they
became a part of the University of Wisconsin. They had a President, a Norwegian for years and years
and years and years, and they’d just hired a kind of rambunctious guy. The short-term memory is really .
. . it’ll come to me.
Smith: The long-term is still there! [laughing]
Cadwallader: He’d been there a year, and he couldn’t stand his Vice Chancellor, so he happened to
resign and advertise his position. And I showed up, and we both knew all about Mieklejohn, and he was
a novelist as well as an English lit PhD. So we had visions of maybe turning this pig’s ear into a silk purse.
[laughing] I thought of meeting the faculty, and the chairman of the English Department had an
appointment and came to get acquainted with me. She saw Peter Elbow’s book on my desk, Writing
Without Teachers, and the rumor spread that I was going to shut down the English Department.
[laughter] Oh, god.
Smith: Peter is in Seattle. He moved back. After he left Evergreen, he went to the East Coast. Now he’s
retired and he’s back in that area.
They made all the deans teach the first quarter they were here, so I was in a team with Peter
Elbow and Rainier Hasenstab and York Wong called Voices of the Third World. That was interesting.
They should make all of them do that. I thought it was kind of weird to be a dean, and then be told to
go teach. But it was very important.
Cadwallader: Absolutely. Don Humphreys and I came up with the rotating the deans idea simply
because we wanted all key administrators to have experience in the teaching/learning system that they
were supposed to be in charge of.
Smith: That was brilliant, and it’s not being done anymore, which is stupid.
Cadwallader: Charlie McCann, at first, was just nonplussed. He thought it was a crazy idea. We had a
faculty meeting, and he started it off by holding up a poster—I don’t know if you ever saw it—that
showed two ducks. I think it was for United Airlines. Anyhow, this one duck was going to copulate with
the other duck, and he said this rotation of deans idea is this bad. [laughter]
Smith: I never saw that side of Charlie McCann, I have to tell you.
Cadwallader: But we won him over, got him finally to write a self-evaluation.
18
Smith: Oh, yeah. They still do that. That’s funny. It’s very odd, though, to have deans who were
permanent deans—which you were—sort of give up your status that way and recommend that that be
done.
Cadwallader: Don and I connived a bit. We felt that if it was going to work, a senior dean had to lead
the way, had to show that they were willing to go not back down to the faculty, but go across the
faculty.
Smith: Yeah.
Cadwallader: I mean, why is leaving an administrative job going back down to the faculty? In the cellar?
Smith: But there was an assumption, I think, especially with the short terms, that administrative work
didn’t require much skill.
Cadwallader: The big mistake was we didn’t think it required memory. An institution has got to have
memory.
Smith: The personal relationship issue is a big one. A lot of the deans seem to be pretty scared of
ruffling anybody’s feathers, because they’re colleagues. And now that we have a union—that’s been
one of the big major changes; after the first failed Provost after me, the faculty voted in a union—now
the deans are kind of timid, I think. It works pretty well, actually. Mostly the union is codifying what
was practiced anyway, but I think it’s changed the level of aggressive leadership quite a bit.
The other thing that changed quite a bit was we got rid of annual evaluations of everybody,
which was taking almost everybody’s time as a dean. I had 37 faculty in my group.
Cadwallader: A lot of work.
Smith: More and more things kept getting into the administrative coffer. They went then to three-year
contracts, three-year renewable contracts. So people don’t know the faculty very well anymore as a
result of that. It’s a really important structural issue. I think it was necessary in some ways, but it has
consequences.
Cadwallader: From your point of view, what were the mistakes that the founders made?
Smith: I think the main ones are the ones you said. There was a lot of learning that happened that’s
inevitable, and it made everybody own the changes. It’s a little naïve, I think, about how big you could
get without more organization.
Cadwallader: I think very naïve.
19
Smith: The depth issue. The biggest battle I had my entire time—20 years in administration—was
stabilizing the curriculum, and having hiring keep up with where student demand was, and organizing.
Certain areas self-organized. The sciences did, because they have natural sequencing. Some of the arts
fields, too. But the humanities were constantly just undoing any organization that would give the
students reliable curriculum. They didn’t even put out a catalog the first year that I was there. They just
thought students would just sign up for blind programs that aren’t described. [laughing]
Cadwallader: I want to say something about Political Ecology.
Smith: That was an ongoing theme for a long time.
Cadwallader: Yeah. It starts at San Jose in the tutorials in conversations between Bob Sluss and myself.
At Berkeley, Tussman was very concentrated on the Federalist Papers, and law and the courts. Because
I had Bob Sluss on my team, we talked a lot about science, and Faust. It was wonderful watching Bob
get immersed in and take joy in talking about the great humanistic texts.
One day I’m called into Bob Clark’s office—the President of San Jose—and he says,
“We’ve just been offered the chance to buy a nunnery.” There’s a nunnery up in back of Los Gatos in
the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the sisters were closing it down, and they offered it to Bob Clark and San
Jose State. So he said, “Merv, design a teaching/learning system for this nunnery.” I went up and went
through all of the buildings and so on. We decided it should be the site for a program in political
ecology. The whole idea was—
Smith: It was a living/learning community with dorms and everything?
Cadwallader: If you read my position paper or memo or whatever it was about Guadalupe, which was
the name of the nunnery, it sounds like a forecast of what we actually did at Evergreen.
Smith: Wow. I haven’t read that. The other thing I want to say to you is I went to the Archives and
checked on what was there, and there’s nothing there of yours. So if you have any information,
writings, old stuff that could go there, that would be great. The only thing that’s there is a monograph,
you wrote, I think, for the SPLU Lab, I think, called “How to Study Small Communities.”
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: That’s all that’s there.
Cadwallader: Good lord.
Smith: So I can put your chapter there from the “Reinventing” current book, but that’s not enough.
Cadwallader: Huh.
20
Smith: Yeah. It’s not your fault, it’s the Archives’s fault.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: So, you did go there to the nunnery, and run Political Ecology.
Cadwallader: Yeah. The physical problem we had was access and parking. There wasn’t room enough
on the site—and it was on the top of a hill—to park the cars that the students would need to drive up
there from San Jose State. So, we took the restricted parking and the narrow roadway that went up to
Guadalupe as constraints and devised a morning-to-noon and noon-to-evening program, with half the
students coming up in the morning and leaving and stuff. It was all killed down in Los Angeles. We
could have had Guadalupe for a dollar.
Smith: Ugh.
Cadwallader: We got so excited about it, I had the A/V guy, who was a friend of mine—audio-visual
back in the 16mm days—we made a movie pitching Guadalupe. Bob Clark was to take that movie, use
it, and make a pitch for Guadalupe at a regents meeting. He showed up, but it happened to be the
weekend that the radical students sat in in his office. So, the sit-in at San Jose was very much in the
news. The chairman of the board was somebody by the name of Ronald Reagan.
Smith: Oh, geez! [laughter]
Cadwallader: As noon approached, somebody said, “Well, it’s time to go to lunch.” And Ronald Reagan
said, “Wait a minute. Dr. Clark and his aide have a movie they want to show us.” So, I can say with
some truth that I was asked by Ronald Reagan to show him a movie.” [laughter] Which I did, but it
didn’t do any good.
Smith: But it probably didn’t help that a student revolt was going on at the same time.
Cadwallader: Yeah, those were the days. What are the forces driving change at Evergreen now?
Smith: State policy is part of it. Evergreen was built when they needed more seats, and now we’re back
again in that place where they need more higher-education seats. But what happened first, they said,
“Okay, let’s move Evergreen from 3,000 to 5,000, and people agreed with that because it looked like it
was starting to happen. But then the University of Washington agreed to build two branch campuses,
one in Bothell, north of Seattle, and one in Tacoma.
Cadwallader: Scoundrels.
Smith: They’re now the fastest-growing institutions in the state. Bothell is 67—
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Cadwallader: But Boeing is in trouble again. [laughing]
Smith: That’s true. And they both started with liberal arts programs, and then they branched out. And
now they do lots of graduate programs and specialty programs. And they’re good. They’re really
challenging our Tacoma Campus. The Tacoma Campus has real enrollment trouble now. The
community college system now also—Dan Evans and I both think this was a mistake, but the State
decided to let the community colleges do a limited number of bachelor’s degrees, to provide more
seats. So now they’re taking over more of the market.
There’s just a few schools that don’t have any enrollment trouble, but the privates are suffering,
we’re suffering, and the community colleges aren’t growing as much as they did before. Cost is really an
issue. It’s very, very expensive to go to school now. The State proportion of tuition subsidy is much
lower. And the economy’s good, so you don’t need to go to college.
Cadwallader: After World War II, for one year I enrolled at University of California, Berkeley. Tuition?
Zero.
Smith: It’s still low there. So that’s driving change. At Evergreen, the current Provost has forced the
faculty to get the curriculum organized. There’s a national movement called Guided Pathways, where
they’ve asked all schools to develop guided pathways that show students, especially ones who have no
background in education—immigrants and first-generation students—how to navigate colleges.
Bothell is 67 percent first-generation students, so you start to think pretty differently about how
to take care of them. They aren’t like us. She just came in, and with the enrollment so poor, they fired
54 people because of lack of enrollment, and she put them through a Venture Pathways, which in some
ways is good, because it made them start over. So we’ll see how it works. The problem is a lot of the
areas that were high enrollment aren’t in it. They just disappeared.
But there’s always been a problem about the fit between student interest and the curriculum. I
had the biggest problem with two areas. Human services, psychology and health were very popular
programs—and management. It took a long time to get enough money to hire people there, and those
people have retired, and they weren’t replaced.
Cadwallader: Are diversity issues—
Smith: It’s a very PC campus. It’s got about 26 percent diversity. Very strong in Native Studies still, and
Latino Studies is building. Some of it’s in self-sealed areas, which is a problem. Tacoma has the black
22
population. The Native Studies area that I’m with has the Indians mostly, and it’s because their
curriculum works with the people. People still want to have this full-time daytime.
What did you learn at Phoenix and Union? [laughter] Because they’re kind of related to this
whole story.
Cadwallader: Yeah. My academic career, until I went to the Union Institute, had been with
undergraduates. These were kids—18, 19, 20 years old. Then suddenly I’m at an institution where the
students are quite frequently our grandparents age already. Trying to deal with the demand by the
students for control over their curriculum is now a sacred right at this new school. You don’t push your
curriculum on anyone. You ask these grownups what they want to get a doctor’s degree in, and then
you make it as easy for them as possible.
Smith: That’s Union, right?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Is Phoenix that way, too?
Cadwallader: The graduate school. When I joined Phoenix, it was still mostly on site, not online. The
online division was just getting started, and it was up in San Francisco. Since then, it’s become the dog
that wags the tail.
The fact that the grownup students that I was working with at the Union Institute didn’t respond
to my ideas of a liberal education, well, that didn’t bother me so much because most of them were leftwingers. They weren’t afraid of the word socialism. They were becoming the generation of activists.
Smith: That’s what our graduate students are like now. They always have been. But they’re
demanding. They want quality for their money. And they know things! [laughing]
Cadwallader: What troubles me about the University of Phoenix—and this illustrates a core dynamic in
higher education—is that far from being the exploratory program that it once was for, it’s become a
program to turn out doctoral research people.
Smith: Really? Wow. I don’t think we need more of those.
Cadwallader: Methodology is now required, and all of the standards, and the notions of what is
appropriate for a doctoral student have been extremely conventional. I think this is because the online
faculty—who are all part-timers, and they’re all teaching somewhere else, and most of them are
teaching at conventional institutions—are importing those conventional values into the online
environment.
23
Smith: They also are just part-time, so they have no influence on the bigger degree programs.
Cadwallader: No. The coherence of the institution lies in the coherence of its students, not its faculty.
Even though a good number of the faculty do turn up for commencement, but the faculty are all parttimers.
In that format, there are inevitably great success stories. My best student was a woman in
Madagascar, who was principal of the school for diplomats’ kids. She was an ex-missionary from Kenya.
Very bright, very articulate, who had no way of getting an advanced degree in Madagascar, but could
through either the Union or Phoenix. But the trouble is, those kinds of students are rare. They can
really take advantage of what the online system can provide.
I had a doctoral student at the Union, for instance, who was doing social life of a specific species
of dolphin. She was able to have on her doctoral committee a PhD in Europe and one in Florida and one
in Canada. So you defeat the constraints of location and so on. But the bad ones are really bad.
[laughing] I guess that’s true everywhere.
Smith: Big difference, though, I think. I mean, like Antioch and some of these other places seem to be
working with online that has a little bit of a residence requirement, which helps. They build a
community that way.
Cadwallader: We did that at Phoenix, too. What you hear from the students is once they show up,
especially if the seminar is, say, on campus, they look at it and see bricks and buildings, and they say,
“Well, this really is a university after all.” They’re comforted by that.
Smith: And they like it then. I like the middle way. Evergreen’s been very antithetic to any online stuff.
I was that way before, but we found that lots of the Native students were dying in the community
college system. They never transferred. So we made a bridge relationship with Grays Harbor
Community College, where they taught a mostly online general ed program, but it required them to also
come to the Longhouse for a common class with upper-division students every month. We worked with
the online teachers. We brought them together to do a seminar, so they understood this issue of
community-building, and Writing Across the Curriculum, and building coherence.
So their online classes owned the students in a way most teachers don’t that are part-time. But
those were full-time teachers at that school, and I don’t think part-timers can be controlled that way.
Cadwallader: Speaking of Native Americans, during the planning year, Nancy Taylor—who at that time
was Admissions Officer—and I visited the Coastal reservations.
24
Smith: Quinault, Makah.
Cadwallader: We went up to Port Angeles. Not a single counselor had ever recommended that one of
their Native American students go to college. Not a single one.
Smith: They’re all going to college now. Those students we have are all like 30, 40, 80 years old, and
they’re fabulous. We have the highest retention. Tacoma and the Native programs have the highest
retention.
Cadwallader: That’s amazing. That’s wonderful.
Smith: It is, yeah. But the tribes are rich now, too, and they need that expertise. They know it
contributes to running their businesses. There’s a lot of pressure to do it, which is great. That’s a real
success story.
Our graduate programs are very successful, and those students are very loyal, and very smart.
They would understand everything you said about community and civic education. And they’re
embedded in jobs where they use the skills right away. That’s all good.
Cadwallader: I’m glad to hear that. The Native American was the forgotten person.
Smith: Yeah. Not anymore, where I live anyway.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Before I came here, I went to your amazing store. Have you been to the Kachina House?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Whoa, boy!
Cadwallader: When I went to the University of Oregon to start work on my PhD, I met a woman, a
potter, who had just graduated in fine arts from the University of Oregon, and she’d never seen a black
person.
Smith: Wow. Yeah, America looks pretty different now, doesn’t it? It’s amazing, actually.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: When I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, the out group, the divide, was about Jews versus
Christians. There was no diversity at all. Well, it was segregated, too, which I didn’t know.
Cadwallader: I remember that first year at the University of Oregon. They had just hired a Jew on the
faculty of the Psychology Department, and he had to drive all the way to Portland to get kosher food.
Smith: Geez! [laughing]
25
Cadwallader: I mean, it was lilywhite.
Smith: Yes. I think you have to be as old as us to appreciate how wonderfully diverse America is now,
by comparison.
Cadwallader: Yeah. When I was in the Navy, the only ranking available to blacks was cook and steward.
The hospital I was assigned to there in the Bay Area was the first to experiment with six black corpsmen.
They were allowed to become corpsmen.
Smith: Oh, wow. It’s pretty recent, actually, when you think about it. Baseball—
Cadwallader: In my lifetime, yeah.
Smith: I sound like my grandmother. I always thought she was an old fogey, and she’d tell you these
things about women getting the vote and stuff, and now we talk like that. [laughing]
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: So what do you think about Evergreen’s prospects?
Cadwallader: Well, without knowing too much actually about what’s going on, I’ve been feeling
discouraged. But after talking to you about enrollment of Native Americans and the graduate programs
and so on, I’m encouraged. Hampshire—there’s an article in the Times last week—they’re closing now.
Smith: They’re in big trouble, yeah.
Cadwallader: God, I hope Evergreen hangs in there.
Smith: I think it’s way too big to disappear.
Cadwallader: Size is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
Smith: Yeah. I can’t distinguish what I think sometimes from what it is, but the fact that we had, by and
large, yearlong programs with teams made it seem small, I think. The students’ experience was more of
a program, though, than the college as a whole. But the whole college had the same sort of thing going
on. So I’m most worried about teaching alone, and more and more short programs. Because I think if
you don’t keep that team and larger structure in place, it’s a problem.
I asked Rob Knapp, who’s very wise, I think, “How do you feel about the prospects?” He said,
“You know what?” I said, “What?” He said, “Evergreen’s always been falling apart, and it always
reinvents itself. It always comes back.” And it’s true!
Cadwallader: He’s right.
Smith: Yeah, he is. As long as you hold onto the right things.
26
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: And you keep working it. You can’t just let it all go on its own accord. That’s what worries me as
a leader. It worries me that the deans aren’t really doing faculty development, and program
development, and team building and that kind of stuff. A huge amount of their time, they should be
doing that, because they’re going to lose the grist to just minutiae, inattention otherwise.
Cadwallader: We had some advantages. We had Peter Elbow, who ran us all through Writing Across
the Curriculum.
Smith: Right. And everybody bought it. My first grant at Evergreen was $400,000 from the National
Endowment for the Humanities on Writing Across the Curriculum.
Cadwallader: Wow.
Smith: We wrote 14 monographs about it. One, Leo Daugherty went and interviewed 25 faculty about
how they taught writing. But that’s come and gone, because that cohort is all gone.
Cadwallader: I tried to start it at Platteville.
Smith: That’s the easiest thing to start.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: It should be.
Cadwallader: You’d think so.
Smith: Yeah. Well, there’s 900 schools doing little Evergreen things. They started at U of Oregon after
we started pushing learning communities. Then UW adopted what they called freshman interest groups
in ’87, and they’re still doing them. It’s a quarter of the freshman class, and it’s linked classes, two
classes linked together. It’s usually a writing class and a content class. That’s a victory.
Cadwallader: One of my science faculty at Platteville said, “We also ought to teach thinking across the
curriculum.”
Smith: Exactly. Critical thinking across the curriculum. That’s harder.
Cadwallader: Yeah, and reading across the curriculum.
Smith: Yes. And they are doing technology across the curriculum.
Cadwallader: To try to talk a chemistry professor who’s on a traditional career path into paying
attention to reading, thinking, writing . . .
Smith: It’s hard.
27
Cadwallader: Yeah. Boy.
Smith: Platteville really didn’t do anything, huh?
Cadwallader: No.
Smith: I think you have to stay quite a long time to make things happen in places like that.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: And most administrators don’t spend time thinking about teaching. They don’t go to
conferences about teaching.
Cadwallader: And most of them don’t have any kind of an intellectual arts. They don’t read, they
don’t—
Smith: I don’t know about that. Les Purce was the President before the current one, and he affiliated
with one of the first-year programs for the whole year. Went at least one day every week.
Cadwallader: Is he from Walla Walla?
Smith: He used to be. He was from Idaho. His family had been in Idaho for generations. They were
among the black cowboys.
Cadwallader: Hmm. I’ll be darned.
Smith: Yeah, and he was into economic development before. And then he was in our Advancement
Office. Then he became President. He was a great President in some ways. People loved him, the
Legislature gave him buckets of money, he built a bunch of buildings.
Cadwallader: Huh. I’ll be darned.
Smith: He also liked to fish.
Cadwallader: I’m trying to remember the name of the chap who became President. He had been
Provost, I think. Native American? No, black.
Smith: That’s Les Purce. That’s the guy I’m talking about.
Cadwallader: Oh, okay.
Smith: He does have Native blood, but he’s very dark black.
Cadwallader: Okay, I have a little story about that. When I was a dean when Evergreen was searching
for a President, it came down to two finalists.
Smith: Really?
28
Cadwallader: Purce—is that his name?
Smith: Yes, Thomas Les Purce.
Cadwallader: And a woman that I respected, Elizabeth Mennick.
Smith: Oh, yes! I’ve read a lot of her work. Very important work.
Cadwallader: She’s terrific.
Smith: Either one of them would have been great. She would have been very different. She’s more like
you, more of a scholar.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: Huh. Interesting.
Cadwallader: Well, she’s the one that got me the job at the Union.
Smith: You followed her. She came out to Evergreen a couple times. She was good. Well, good. So I
don’t think you should despair. You were such an important influence. Evergreen wouldn’t be where it
is today if you hadn’t been there saying, “We need to do this coordinated studies. Teams.”
Cadwallader: With some structural stuff.
Smith: Stuff, way more than the course.
Cadwallader: Yeah, that stuck.
Smith: Yeah. And it did. People are avidly attached to it, so that’s the most important thing. The
wonderful part is that it’s exportable, not as a wholesale, but little bits of this. And people get it. They
can’t imagine changing the whole school, but they can sure imagine little ways that it can happen.
Cadwallader: About a month ago, we were visited by two of my tutorial students.
Smith: From San Jose?
Cadwallader: From San Jose. I keep in touch with about a dozen of them. But this is after 50 years.
Smith: That’s amazing.
Cadwallader: They’re still talking about the class. The one went into marine biology and has been
responsible for creating the Moss Landing Conservancy, which has rescued the sea otter in the
Monterey Bay. The other one went up to Humboldt. Majored in art. Got a job in San Francisco at the
big museum up on the hill and became an expert in the restoration of Renaissance parchment, and she’s
now head of that department at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles. They described for us how
they showed up as naïve freshmen and had never thought of reading a book before. So, it works.
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Smith: Formative. I hear lots of stories like that from teachers at Evergreen, students from long ago.
We live out in the country near Port Townsend now, and one of our neighbors was in the first class of
Evergreen. They still talk about it all the time.
Cadwallader: Well, Nancy Taylor has been in touch with lots of her students.
Smith: Yeah. She’s a prize.
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: She was a dean when I was the Provost. She was terrific. She said hello, too. I see her a lot.
She’s doing a lot of these interviews as well. She dragged me into it, actually.
Cadwallader: Tell her even though I’m too lazy to write, I think of her often.
Smith: She lives on Bainbridge Island. She’s pretty active still at the college.
Cadwallader: Is Fritz Levy still alive?
Smith: Yeah. He had knee surgery last June.
Cadwallader: Yeah, I knew he was having something.
Smith: It took a little while to get better, but he’s fine.
Cadwallader: And Charlie Teske.
Smith: Charlie Teske has the longest interview in history that was taped. I think it lasted three days.
[laughing] He’s fine.
Cadwallader: We accused him of being a tape recorder.
Smith: I think he is a tape recorder. [laughter] He’s funny. Richard Alexander got interviewed. He
passed away recently, but he was interviewed before that, so that was terrific.
Cadwallader: I have contact with Steve Herman on Facebook.
Smith: He’s still around doing his old Steve Herman stuff.
Cadwallader: Yeah. Birds.
Smith: My first day at Evergreen, I was in the office in the Library, and he comes rolling in my office with
a wheelbarrow of dead birds, and he dumps them on my desk and starts to yell at me about “You turned
the freezers off! Look what they did! They’re my birds! All wrecked!” [laughter] He went on for like 10
minutes, because one of the janitors had pulled the plug on the freezer where he kept his dead birds,
and they’d all thawed out and now had to be buried. He’s very memorable. [laughing]
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Cadwallader: Leo Daugherty’s gone?
Smith: He’s gone. He went to Virginia when he retired, and he was teaching there for a while,
University of Virginia. He was one of my closest friends. He took me under his wing, and took me
around, and taught me how to do things. He was a dean when I first got there. The other one that did
was Phil Harding and Bill Aldridge, so I got quite a spectrum. [laughing] A lot of those old people, what
a difference they made. And Beryl Crowe. I knew him even when I was down at Oregon, because he
was at Oregon State and we went up there—a bunch of grad students went up there to a seminar with
him.
Cadwallader: The people I think about most often and miss are Nancy, Bob Sluss, Willi Unsoeld, Dick
Brian.
Smith: I didn’t know him.
Cadwallader: Richard Alexander.
Smith: Richard Brian, yeah. He went off to Maxine then after that. He taught his last years up in
Tacoma.
Cadwallader: And Maxine. Oh my god, Maxine! I still remember our first encounter in Washington.
Smith: What happened?
Cadwallader: Well, first of all, I was sort of nonplussed by the fact she was part of the Nixon
administration.
Smith: Right! [laughing]
Cadwallader: But we’re interviewing her, and she started prowling around, and she messed around in
my suitcase and the drawers and the bureau and so on, and then used to tell a story about how I had
matching socks.
Smith: Like that’s unique, huh? She could make a story out of anything.
Cadwallader: Maxine was great.
Smith: I think she could navigate any administration, but she probably wouldn’t go to Donald Trump’s.
That experience in the outside world, I think, was one of the huge assets of Evergreen, having people
like that who had two feet, one in the academy and one in the community. And real social justice
agendas, but not just about being angry.
Cadwallader: My most controversial hire was from the CIA.
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Smith: Andrew Hanfman. I loved him. He was a precious.
Cadwallader: But the planning faculty, when they heard I was going to go to Washington and interview
somebody who was in the CIA, it freaked them out. [laughter]
Smith: I didn’t see a shred of impact of that. I interviewed at the CIA, too, for a job once.
Cadwallader: He and his wife were both.
Smith: Yes. He taught in Port Angeles. We did a program up there for a couple years, and he taught
with Bill Winden up there. The two of them were a great team. Very special people.
Cadwallader: Is the geoduck still the mascot?
Smith: Yes, and we train people to sing the song. We’ve got little furry geoducks in the bookstore for
sale. I was going to bring you one, but I wasn’t down there to get it.
Cadwallader: When I tell people about Evergreen and mention the mascot, that’s the thing they get
most hysterical about. [laughter] Malcolm?
Smith: Malcolm Stilson retired, and then his son Randy took over the Archives. Now we’re in our third
generation. We just hired a new archivist. That’s fun stuff. And Gail Martin and people like that were
really part of that fun stuff of dramas and plays and skits and songs. It isn’t as prevalent as it used to be.
I still remember, when Gail Martin retired, they had it set up as a picnic behind the Library, and
she rode in on a Pat Barte’s white horse. [laughter] Got to have fun. Otherwise it isn’t fun.
Cadwallader: No, the fun part, I think, is what’s really essential.
Smith: Yeah.
Cadwallader: I’m in communication with Dick Jones’s wife.
Smith: Suzy?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
Smith: She’s good.
Cadwallader: She sends me pictures of snow in Massachusetts.
Smith: Do you want me to turn this off and we could just chat for a little while?
Cadwallader: Yeah.
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