Thad Curtz Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

CurtzThad

Title

Thad Curtz Oral History Interview

Date

29 June 2018

31 July 2018

8 August 2018

Creator

Thad Curtz

Contributor

Stephen Buxbaum

extracted text

Thad Curtz
Interviewed by Stephen Buxbaum
The Evergreen State College oral history project
June 29, 2018
FINAL
Begin Part 1 of 2 of Thad Curtz on June 29, 2018
Buxbaum: Good morning. This is Stephen Buxbaum. It’s June 29, 2018, Friday, and I am with Thad
Curtz: Hi!
Buxbaum: Thad and I are doing our first recorded session for The Evergreen College oral history project.
We’re going to just dive right in. I’d like to start by talking a bit about your formative years, pre-college.
Did you grow up in one place prior to college?
Curtz: Sort of. We were in New Haven till I was in the third grade, I think. Then we lived in a kind of
New Yorker cartoon post-war suburb, next to the freeway in southern Michigan—the nearest town was
a place called Belleville—and it was 800 almost identical houses, one next to the other. The nice thing
about it from a growing up point of view was that you could walk across—we were in the last street, so
you could walk across the street—through the sand burrs in the yard across the street, and then you
were in a cornfield. So, basically, there was a lot of kind of open country space. We had a couple of
dogs and I spent a lot of time butterfly-collecting and kind of wandering around outside. Then, when I
was in, I think, the eighth grade, we moved to Ann Arbor.
Buxbaum: In Ann Arbor—it was a college town—was that related to your father’s work?
Curtz: Yeah, my father worked for the university. He worked for a research lab for most of my
childhood, and then for a start-up called Conductron that was trying to do tokamak fusion. They needed
more cash flow, so they started a game division, which my father ran for a while. Then he had a heart
attack, and then he became the Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of
Kentucky.
Buxbaum: Did you move down to Kentucky as well?
Curtz: No, I was already out of the house when my parents moved.
Buxbaum: His career was primarily in research and education?
Curtz: Yes.
Buxbaum: You were born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.
Curtz: Yes.
1

Buxbaum: That caught my attention. But you didn’t spend much time there, it sounds like.
Curtz: No, just my early childhood. I brought a few pictures. My mother’s father was a Presbyterian
minister. He had a church in Clearfield. I was born in 1943, so my father was in the Army. Here’s my
grandfather, Reverend Charles Reeve. So I think, for the first year and a half or two years of my life, I
was basically doted on by my mother and my grandfather—certainly by my mother. My father came
back in ’45 or something, so my mother was in Clearfield basically from the time I was born until the end
of the war.
Buxbaum: So you were the first-born for your parents?
Curtz: Yeah, the oldest one. I have a sister who is three and a half years younger than I am, and then a
pair of brothers who are 10 and 11 years younger than I am.
Buxbaum: It sounds like your grandparents had some roots in Clearfield.
Curtz: Well, my grandfather had been the minister at the Presbyterian church in Clearfield for his
whole career, except for a year he spent in Nebraska when he got out of divinity school. They were sent
to a mission church in those days, so he had a year in Nebraska.
It’s kind of funny. When my mother died, there was this whole collection, a big box of letters
that my father had written to her while he was in the Army, more or less a letter a day. My sister took
those home and she is now reading them and PDF-ing them and sending them out. It’s a little eerie to
read about my impending arrival in the world [laughter] through these old letters.
Buxbaum: What do you remember in particular?
Curtz: It’s kind of funny. There’s this poem called “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” that Hart Crane
wrote about finding these old letters in the attic, and about how complicated it feels to be reading his
grandmother’s private life. You just start out with your parents thinking they are this kind of uniform
block. My mother and father, when I called them up on the phone, they used to both get on the
telephone. For years, I thought about them as just “my parents.” Period. And then you get to the point
where you start thinking, gosh, let’s see. When I was the age of my son, my parents must have been the
age that I am, and their private lives must have been just as complicated a mine is. So, you have some
kind of shift about your relationship to them.
Buxbaum: Yeah, the ongoing awakening of adulthood.
Curtz: Yeah. Anyway, both sides of my family are this kind of funny mix of Protestant, hardworking,
white American middleclass-ness, and a kind of crazy streak. My grandfather, the Presbyterian minister,
married a young woman of beauty. She had already had a breakdown—at least a couple of
breakdowns—that her parents did not tell him about until after they were married. The family
2

diagnosis, in retrospect, was that she was bipolar, so she was in and out of a mental hospital of one kind
of another for most of my mother’s childhood, until she died when my mother was 13.
On the other side of the family, things are wilder, I guess. My great-grandmother was adopted
by a couple of Erie, Pennsylvania farmers. [chuckles] The neighbors are supposed to have said that the
Cooley’s adopted one girl for the parlor and one girl for the pantry. My great-grandmother was the girl
for the parlor.
When my grandmother was 19 or something, her mother and she moved to New York so she
could go to the Art Students League. She married an Austrian Jew had immigrated to the United States
as a teenager, and reinvented himself as an American and had become a stockbroker. He got involved
at one point in his career with some kind of stock market swindle-scandal that he went to jail for. My
father never talked about this once in my life.
So, on that side of the family, there’s a certain amount of wildness as well as this long-time
Yankee stability.
Buxbaum: Mathematician is a unique profession, from my frame of reference anyway. How did your
father end up on that track? Do you know?
Curtz: Well, my father dropped out of high school during the Depression to work and help support his
mother and his sister. He met my mother when she moved into the apartment that my grandmother
had in the ground floor of her house in Cleveland. The family story is that he helped my mother move
in, and he came upstairs and announced at the dinner table that he was going to marry that woman who
had moved in downstairs. She was seven years older than he was at the point that they met. I think he
must have been maybe 18. [chuckles] He’s supposed to have taken other people who came to date her
aside and told them that he was going to marry her, and that they had better treat her with due respect.
In the Army, they had a kind of crash program for giving college educations to people who
looked promising when the Army tested them, so my father went and spent a year or something in
some crash program like that. My mother gave him some giant book about mathematics for popular
readers. I don’t know whether that was how he first got interested in mathematics or what, but then he
went to college on the G.I. Bill after the war and went off and did a Ph.D. in math at Yale. So he was a
pretty good mathematician. I had this kind of childish image about how he had been a great
mathematician, and whenever I said this, he replied, “No, I was a solidly respectable mathematician.”
Buxbaum: How did your parents influence what you did with your education? Do you recall any
particular wishes expressed by either your mother or your father?

3

Curtz: No. I don’t think my parents ever said, “We really want you to become X, Y or Z.” It was taken
for granted in my family that school was important, and that you’d do well at school. But other than
that, no. When you got to college, you had to say what you were going to major in, and people kept
asking you. I think probably what I told people was that I thought I’d be a biologist. I had been a pretty
serious, avid butterfly collector in my teenage years.
But when I got to college, the first two years in college, I signed up for this semi-interdisciplinary
program that Yale ran called directed studies, mostly because you got small classes. It was all taught in
seminars. It was only interdisciplinary in the sense that the art history track and the history track and
the literature track and the philosophy track all proceeded in tandem chronologically. So you were
studying Greek art in one class and Greek philosophy in one class and Greek literature in one class at the
same time. But that was it. I don’t know if the faculty ever talked to each other, and certainly there
weren’t any assignments to compare this with that that you’re doing in some other class.
I majored in philosophy. Basically, I ran my college career pretty much by asking everybody who
the really good teachers were, and signing up for whatever they were teaching. I became a philosophy
major rather than a lit major because the list of required courses that you had to take if you were a
philosophy major was shorter than the list of required courses that you had to take if you were a
literature major, so it left more room for signing up for other things that looked interesting.
Buxbaum: You landed in Yale in 1961. I’m interested in hearing more about your time at Yale. First, I’m
curious, how did you land in Yale? What was the process of deciding that’s where you were going to go?
You had spent some formative time in New Haven. What was the attraction?
Curtz: No. I applied to various fancy colleges, and it was a considerable shock to me to be turned
down by Swarthmore and Harvard. Yale admitted me and the University of Michigan admitted me, and I
think those four places were the only places I’d applied. So, it was pretty simple from that point of view.
[chuckles] I wasn’t going to go to the University of Michigan if I could possibly help it. I’d stay in my
hometown.
Buxbaum: Was there such a thing as a safe school application back then?
Curtz: Yeah, the University of Michigan was a safe school application.
Buxbaum: So, you gravitated toward Yale. Applying to fancy schools, was there an expectation that
you’d go to a fancy school? Was that something that you were just hoping for, or was it an expectation?
Curtz: I’ve always been a very good student. There were a lot of other things that I wasn’t very good at
[laughing] that mattered in teenaged life, but I was very good at school, and liked school. I don’t think

4

my parents gave me much of any advice about where to apply, although I assumed that they took it for
granted that I would apply to places like Yale and Harvard and Swarthmore.
Buxbaum: You already spoke a little bit about—was it actually called interdisciplinary studies at Yale?
Curtz: Directed studies.
Buxbaum: Thank you. Was directed studies something that was available to any incoming freshman?
Curtz: Yeah, you could just apply to it anyway. I don’t know whether there was some process, but if
there was, it wasn’t—there was some limit about how big the directed studies program was, but I don’t
know anything about the process of deciding who got in was. But there certainly were no interviews, or
a long competitive application or something. I just checked some box saying I’d like to do it, and the
college said, “Okay, you’re there.”
Buxbaum: How big were the classes?
Curtz: Oh, they were Evergreen-seminar size, you know, 15 students, the size that the Evergreen
seminars were at the very beginning. And faculty, I think I had very good teachers, relatively speaking,
especially in the first couple of years that I was at college, because they were people who were
interested enough in teaching to want to volunteer for this program.
Buxbaum: When you were a freshman, do you remember what your response was when you were
pressed to say what you were going to study, what you were going to major in?
Curtz: Oh, my whole educational career, I tried to postpone. I and all my friends used to say, “Well,
we’re keeping our options open.” [chuckles] At some point, I had to declare a major, and I told you how
I did that. My parents never said, “Well, what are you going to do with your life? What kind of job are
you going to get if you major in philosophy?” There were never any questions like that in my family.
Buxbaum: You were at Yale from 1961 to about 1965?
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: The sixties were a pretty event-packed decade. How did the political and social events of
that time influence your direction, particularly in terms of your college and career?
Curtz: Politics just started impacting, I think, American colleges in general as I was finishing my college
career. The really big occupying of Columbia and so on happened after I graduated. The big political
event was that William Sloane Coffin was taking Yale students South—I don’t remember whether during
my whole college career, but certainly during the last couple of years of it—to ride buses and to
campaign for civil rights in the South. It didn’t occur to me—I don’t know if it didn’t occur to me, but I
certainly didn’t go.

5

The year I graduated, the philosophy department denied tenure to the teacher who had been
way and away—well, one of the two teachers that mattered the most to me in college. And there was, I
think, the first set of campus protests about college decisions at Yale. There were a bunch after that,
but we picketed and wrote letters to the papers and did all sorts of things like that for six months about
it.
Other than that, I arrived at Yale running scared, having been turned down by Harvard and
Swarthmore. [laughing] I did a few things, but basically I was a student when I was at Yale.
Buxbaum: Denial of tenure is capital punishment for a place like Yale. It sounds like that was a big deal.
Curtz: Yale ran on the principle that hardly anybody—hardly any junior faculty—got tenure; that you
having taught at Yale was enough to guarantee you a good job someplace else if they didn’t give you
tenure, and you shouldn’t expect to get it at all.
Buxbaum: It wasn’t explicit that it was denial of tenure due to certain political actions of behavior?
Curtz: No. It was messy, and I thought that the various members of the philosophy department
behaved very badly in the course of it, but it wasn’t about politics at all. Maybe it was about academic
politics of a certain kind, about[Bernstein having certain notions about what mattered about doing
philosophy that didn’t fit with the notions of various other members of the department. But it certainly
wasn’t about his taking public political stances of any kind.
Buxbaum: It sounds like Yale was a small enough student community that some of this stuff was fairly
apparent. It sounds like you were witnessing some of the details of either the action—
Curtz: Oh, yeah. It was in the New York Times. There were letters from the Yale faculty in the New
York Times. We marched up and down with picket signs outside the President’s office for quite a while.
The graduate students, too, not just the undergraduates.
Buxbaum: I see. When you were at Yale, where did you live?
Curtz: Yale had residential colleges at that point. You had to be married to get permission from the
college to live off campus. They have a freshman quadrangle that all the freshmen live in the first year,
and then there’s a lottery for residential colleges, and you move into a suite in the residential colleges
with three or four other people.
Buxbaum: Was it a fun place to go to school?
Curtz: Uh, it was very exciting. I don’t know that I’d say I had fun. I worked really hard. I had a great
time. As far as being a student goes, it was a terrific place. There weren’t any women at the college at
all, so if you wanted to date anybody, you hopped in a car and drove off, 120 miles across New England,
to some women’s college. Drank beer and danced for two hours, and then piled into the car and drove
6

home again. Or, people came for weekends. But I didn’t have a lot of money. I was on scholarship. I
didn’t have money to put up somebody at a hotel room, particularly. And my father was sort of funny
and complicated about money. He simultaneously wanted to behave as if money was no object, and he
was anxious about it his whole life. He was very generous about it, but he also made me feel, one way
or another, that I needed to not spend any money I could avoid spending.
Buxbaum: After Yale, a Fulbright took you to Paris for a year; starting in the fall of 1966, that’s where
you were. Why Paris?
Curtz: Well, the war in Vietnam was going on, so if you were my age in 1965, you had four choices
maybe. You could go to Canada, you could go to jail, you could go to Vietnam, or you could go to
graduate school. So, I had to do one of those. [laughing] Given those options, I knew which one
seemed the most desirable to me.
I’d studied French in college for four years, so my French was reasonably good. I had studied
French in high school my whole high school career. I thought about, gosh, I’d like to go to France. I
went to see one of my philosophy teachers and said, “All right, I’d like to apply for a Fulbright to France.
What can I do there?” He told me what he thought would be interesting, and I wrote a proposal to do
that and got it.
My parents—my father especially—got to be really interested in wine, and ran a little wine
importing business with a few of his friends on the side. When I was in high school, these trucks used to
arrive, and he and his friends and I and various other people, who had ordered cases of wine through
this process, would show up and unload all these wooden cases of wine off the back of the truck. Both
my parents were very interested in cooking and food.
So, there were a lot of reasons for me to want to go to France of that kind. I would have learned
more philosophy if I had stayed in the United States in graduate school, but being in Paris for a year was
nice.
Buxbaum: What were some of the highs and lows of being in Paris?
Curtz: Well, Paris. [chuckles] I lived in a maid’s room on the very roof of one of these old Paris
apartment buildings—red tile floors, teeny little garret room, which I thought was pretty romantic at the
time, squat toilet down the hall. All the rest of the rooms were migrant workers, I think, probably,
certainly most of them—Spaniards who were working in Paris doing one thing or another, families and
kids.
It was right across the river from the Louvre. On my Fulbright salary, I was relatively rich
compared to lots of French students. I had a little restaurant that I went to and had dinner. I walked
7

over across the river and looked at the paintings. Walked around Paris. Went traveling some at the end
of this. Rode around—rented a car with a bunch of other Fulbright students and went out to Mont Saint
Michel and Normandy. At the very end, I rode around Burgundy and the south of France with a couple
of art history students who were going to look at Romanesque churches. Life was good.
Buxbaum: Yes, sounds like life was good. But in ’66-’67, there was a considerable escalation in
Vietnam.
Curtz: Yes. Also, I met Jo in Paris. She was on a Fulbright, too.
Buxbaum: Maybe you should say something about that. Where did she come from?
Curtz: She’d been at Mills studying French literature, and she’d written a Fulbright proposal. The
Fulbrights are handed out—I think, still—on a regional basis, so every state has a certain quota—I think
state, maybe region—of how many Fulbrights. So it’s a lot easier to get a Fulbright from some places in
the country than it is from others. Michigan is probably somewhere in the middle about that.
She was in Cannes—she wasn’t in Paris—but we met in a dormitory at the Fulbright orientation.
She ended up traveling back and forth between Normandy and Paris a fair amount. A rocky relationship,
off and on.
Buxbaum: It sounds like it withstood the rocks, though.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: I’m curious to follow up a little bit more on that. First though, in terms of other aspects of
life in Paris, was Vietnam a backdrop in Paris at all? Were there demonstrations there?
Curtz: Very slightly. The French weren’t fighting. The French were done in Vietnam. They’d already
been through that. The year after I left, Paris blew up essentially in ’68. But to the extent that I knew
anything about what was going on, there were very vague rumblings about student unrest in places like
Nanterre, where the student strikes started in ’68.
Buxbaum: So, you missed the big strike actions?
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: You came back and you landed in Yale Law, but it sounds like it was a short-lived experience,
a semester and a half.
Curtz: Yeah. I figured out that I didn’t want to be a philosophy teacher. And then I had to do
something in graduate school. I may even had been admitted to Yale Law and deferred it for a year
when I got this Fulbright. I think maybe I had been.
Anyway, law school was what you did if you wanted to keep your options open. Then I could
write a letter to my draft board saying, “Please extend my student deferment. Here’s what I’m going to
8

do.” It got a little complicated because you were supposed to demonstrate that you were carrying on a
coherent course of study. [laughing] So when I switched around three times, it got to be a little
complicated. Eventually, they called me up after I was in graduate school at Santa Cruz, but it turned
out my eyes were too bad for the Army to want me.
Buxbaum: When you came back, did you come back with Jo?
Curtz: Yeah. We spent a year in New Haven. Jo worked as the master’s secretary in one of the
residential colleges and I went to law school. And I figured out that I didn’t want to be a lawyer.
Buxbaum: Which perhaps that wasn’t a super-serious choice, at least initially.
Curtz: I had a funny conversation with my Fulbright advisor, who I only talked to about twice when I
was in Paris. He said, “You are not going to want to be a lawyer.” And I assured him that that was not
correct. [laughing] But he was right.
Buxbaum: When you were at Yale, did you have one advisor throughout your entire student career?
Curtz: You were supposed to have an advisor. I think maybe I met once with my advisor. The advising
system was basically not functioning.
Buxbaum: So the advisors didn’t play a super role. How did you make use of advisors there? Were they
just a sounding board when needed?
Curtz: I didn’t.
Buxbaum: Was there any mandatory aspect of talking to an advisor before entering Yale Law School?
Curtz: I think you were supposed to—not for the Law School at all—I think you were supposed to
talk—you got a reading list over the summer and it said, “Please read all of these books, as many as you
can, because your advisor will have a conversation with you about them.” I was working in a Ford plant
on the assembly line that summer, and I’d come home and go sit beside the swimming pool somewhere
or the other and try to read these books. I was very dutiful; I read a bunch of them. But I got there and
went to see the advisor and he never mentioned any of these books! [laughing] We had a cursory
conversation. He said, “You’re in directed studies. That sounds fine. That will take care of your
curriculum for the next two years.”
You didn’t have any choice in directed studies. There was this package of five things that you
signed up for. One of them was a biology class, which was significantly less interesting—at least to me—
than the other classes in the humanities. If I had had a really good science class at that point, I might
have changed what I decided I wanted to do—I don’t know—but this was pretty nothing.
And I worked. I had this scholarship job. I started out bussing in the college dining hall, which I
didn’t want to do, and wheeled and dealed and got myself—I’d worked a little bit at the University of
9

Michigan Museum in the butterfly collection, so I got a scholarship job at the museum at Yale, which
turned out to be mostly tending an entire room full of tropical cockroaches in metal boxes.
You’d walk in and the whole room would rustle. They were tropical because they wanted to
make sure that if they escaped, they didn’t infest the steam pipes, so they were in a climate-controlled
room. They couldn’t live outside. It was hot, it was steamy. And I wasn’t smart enough to figure out
that if you became a geneticist and worked on cockroaches that you’d have some scholarship student to
deal with the cockroaches; that you wouldn’t have to do it. [laughter] I think that probably also
decreased my interest in pursuing biology.
Buxbaum: Ah. So butterflies were one thing but cockroaches were another.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: Interesting. You worked each summer that you were at Yale.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: Busboy, museum—was that the first summer?
Curtz: The first summer, I bussed in the University of Michigan cafeteria, and sold subscription tickets
to the University of Michigan theater program on commission. The second summer, I worked at Ford.
And the next two summers, I worked at the research lab doing computer programming at the research
lab where my dad worked.
Buxbaum: Did you get that job that your father alerted you that that was an opportunity?
Curtz: Yeah. My father may even had gone to work and said, “You, my kid needs a job. We’re hiring
some people for the summer. Why don’t we hire him?”
My father taught me to program—I was 17, I suppose—on this gigantic machine at the
University of Michigan, which occupied the entire basement of the building. It used punch cards, huge
stacks. I think the only thing he ever said about this that I remember is he thought all of his children
ought to have a trade, just so you could earn a living honorably if you ever decided you wanted to not
do something else.
Buxbaum: He was really framing computer programming as a trade.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: Was there anything interesting about that to you? Was it a satisfying occupation? It sounds
like it was better than being a busboy.
Curtz: Yeah, much better. I didn’t like being a busboy purely for social reasons. I’ve kept computer
programming my whole life in an amateur way. My father sent Eli and me—when Eli was about 10
maybe—the first actual affordable programmable computer, a Sinclair ZX80. It had built-in BASIC; a
10

little tape deck that you stored your programs on; used a TV screen as the monitor. But you could
actually write programs in it. It had 8K of memory, and for another $350 you could buy the 16K add-on.
[laughing]
So, I kind of dinked around with Eli, programming on that machine. Then we kind of
progressively, every few years, we’d buy the most computer that you could buy for $450, so we went
through a whole series of increasingly more powerful machines.
Buxbaum: It sounds like that would have been about 1980-1981.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: And a fun package, it sounds like, for you and Eli to receive from your father.
Curtz: Yeah, it was a fun thing for us to do. We wrote little asteroid videogames and stuff like that.
You could steer around the little cross ship and the little V-shaped ship and get them to fire rockets at
each other.
Buxbaum: Was there ever any thought back in the 1960s about going in that direction, around
computer programming?
Curtz: You mean for me?
Buxbaum: Yeah, for you. No. It was really just that initial time working in the lab in Ann Arbor, but
something that stayed with you in terms of a level of confidence and comfort.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: I think we’ll probably come back to that a little bit later when we talk about your time at
Evergreen, because there seems to be a thread that goes beyond just the Pac-Man.
Curtz: Yeah. When the Internet started to be important, and it wasn’t easy to use, I thought that the
support the college was providing faculty about how to use it was really lame. So I ran a kind of e-mail
help-service for people for a number of years, where I sent out little papers about “Here’s how to do X if
you want to do it, and here’s how to do Y. If you want to know how to do something else, write to me
and we can talk about it.”
Buxbaum: Yeah. So, your education trail picks up at UC Santa Cruz. How did you end up there?
Curtz: This guy—Harry Berger—that I’d studied with at Yale—there were bunches of people—
everybody who had mattered to me, really mattered to me as teachers at Yale—came up for tenure at
more or less the same time, and none of them got tenure. Harry was one of them. I think that this
happened the year after I left Yale while I was in France.
So, he went off to Santa Cruz where this new college was starting at UC Santa Cruz. He was one
of the founding faculty there, along with a couple of other young people from the Yale English
11

Department—three, I guess—that he took along with him. I’d studied with him for two years. I really
liked the work he was doing. I needed to do something else to stay in graduate school with my draft
board. If you asked me, I would have said, “Well, I’m keeping my options open.” A few years later,
married with a little son, one day I said to myself, well, this is my actual life here. I probably ought to
stop saying that I’m keeping my options open [laughing] and embrace it for what it is.
Buxbaum: Did Jo follow you to UC Santa Cruz?
Curtz: Yeah, we got married that summer before we went to Santa Cruz.
Buxbaum: That would have been ’67?
Curtz: Yeah. She was in the graduate program, too, for a while. Then she dropped out. She’d already
followed me to New Haven without being married to me, and I think it would have been a difficult issue
with her parents if she had followed me across the country again without being married.
Buxbaum: You worked with Berger. Can you describe a little bit of his framework of the “ecology of the
mind”?
Curtz: Sure. He started out as a Renaissance literary critic. He got really interested, first, in this issue
about “second worlds” in Renaissance culture, this thing that happens in painting, where the surface of
the painting gradually turns out to be a window through which you can look into an imagined world. It’s
not exactly the real world, but bears certain complicated relations to it.
There are a lot of things like this in Renaissance culture. Shakespeare’s stage is a second world
space like that. The imaginary, experimental spaces that scientists like Galileo create, which are not
exactly the real world, they’re simplified versions of the real world that you can enter and work in, and
then go back to the real world from. Machiavelli’s Prince, their utopias are like this. There are a lot of
things in Renaissance that are really centrally interested in this phenomenon.
After working on that for a while—when I started studying with Harry, he was teaching Cultural
History: Foregrounds of Western Literature or Western Culture it was called. It tried to do cultural
history through close interpretation of literary texts and others things, like political theory texts,
Galileo’s two world systems. He worked on all kinds of stuff. But he was working, by the time I got to
Santa Cruz—I guess even before I got to Santa Cruz—on this kind of grand theory about cultural
evolution, which was about the shifting relations between realities, appearances and interpretations
over cultural development, in the West anyway.
There’s a famous Nietzsche quote about this, about the classics. He says, “The Greeks knew and
felt the terror of existence, and interposed between it and themselves the radiant figures of the
Olympian gods.”
12

So, from one point of view, all reality is cultural creations, projections and so on. But the
cultural understanding of the status of those creations shifts, importantly and dramatically, over cultural
history. So, you start in a world in which those projections are taken to be reality. People really believe
in the gods; they don’t think that they are human fictions. That doesn’t occur to them, but Zeus and
Hera look an awful lot like Greek paterfamiliases and families. Gradually—this got complicated—you
progressively elaborate on those constructions to support and defend them, and to continue to make
them believable. And as time goes on, this is kind of a paradoxical problem, because the more you tie
them up and elaborate them, the more conspicuous the fact that they are human inventions become.
And so culturally, historically this process reaches a kind of crisis point in the early Roman
Empire, at which all the old forms are still there—the Tribes, the Senate and so on—but they’ve all been
hollowed out. Everybody understands that the gods are human inventions. And it’s hard for human
beings to live with that; that there’s nothing really out there except fictions.
What happens, in Harry’s view, is that you execute some maneuver in order to restore
transcendence in the system. Somebody like Augustine comes along and downgrades the current
system; says, in The City of God, “Yeah, those gods are nothing but human fantasy. But, beyond that,
there really is something out there.” There are lots of literary, rhetorical, theoretical strategies that you
employ to create a new kind of set of representations that will be believable, and will function to restore
that sense of transcendence. So, in the Gospels, you have these narrators that are conspicuously
simple, down-home. They are not fancy Roman rhetoricians.
Then that process happens again. The medieval church progressively elaborates and elaborates
and elaborates its theology, and eventually you get to a point—and this happens in literary structures
and all kinds of other things, too—you get to a point at which, all through the Middle Ages, the
fundamental understanding is there are realities; there are appearances; the appearances are closely
linked to the realities; and interpretation is a kind of poor third cousin. Interpretations are completely
dependent on elaborating what’s there in the appearances.
You get to the Renaissance, this same kind of process happens in the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestants come in and they say, “It’s right, and the Catholic—all this stuff about indulgences, and
that’s Purgatory—that’s human fiction. But there really is something transcendent out there, which we
can get back to through our contact with the Holy Spirit and the Gospels.” And a whole set of new
rhetorical maneuvers for doing that, and a pretty profound shift in the understanding of the relations
between realities, appearances and interpretations. Because interpretation, instead of being third hand

13

and dependent on the appearances, the appearances suddenly turn out to be only—you have to have
interpretation to get beyond the appearances in order to have some chance of getting at the realities.
Basically, that’s the kind of thing that Harry was interested in, except that he tried to show how
that process worked out in all sorts of cultural stuff—not just in literature and not just in art history, but
in various pieces of writing about science, and in political theory, and in social structure and kinds of
other things.
So I’d had a lot of exposure to that, what with doing two years’ worth of a senior seminar with
him at Yale, and then going to graduate school. The first year Jo and I went to graduate school, we went
to Santa Cruz in a program called History of Consciousness, which partly existed because they didn’t
have enough faculty to run a literature program on its own, and partly existing because there were a lot
of people that were interested in thinking about cultural history in this interdisciplinary way, one way or
another. The next year, they had a lit program, and we transferred into that.
Buxbaum: Were you deeply captured by what Berger had constructed?
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: It sounds also like some of it was—he was talking about ecology of mind at Yale, I assume.
Curtz: Yeah, just started writing about this at Yale.
Buxbaum: Is it fair to characterize thate was in the process of invention?
Curtz: Yeah, he was teaching. He was already teaching something that started with Homer and did
Plato’s Dialogues and kind of did More’s Utopia and worked with a lot of different kinds of texts, not just
standard literature. He got to Santa Cruz, and Cal College had a full-year required core program at that
point, and Harry ran that. It was about this stuff, doing Western civilization through this kind of
framework that he had been working on.
Buxbaum: Sounds like he was having a good time.
Curtz: Oh, yeah. He’s still writing. He’s 92 or something and he’s still publishing.
Buxbaum: In some ways, you got to witness him having a good time, and participate in a way.
Important relationship.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: You transferred to literature. It sounded like that in some ways was maybe the ground was a
little bit newer. Was there any particular aspect of why you went that direction in that school?
Curtz: I’d gone to Santa Cruz to study with Harry, and he was in the lit program, so I was in the lit
program.
Buxbaum: Okay, so you followed him over there.
14

Curtz: And there were various other people. The most interesting people on the faculty, to me, were
the people in the graduate lit program.
Buxbaum: Mervin Cadwallader, was he at Santa Cruz at that time?
Curtz: No, he was at San Jose State, I think, or maybe he was already at Old Westbury by then. I don’t
know.
Buxbaum: Thank you. I got that confused. I’ll straighten that out a little bit later in the interview.
Curtz: The only person—Dick Jones was at Santa Cruz, and I think Dick Jones had some small part
anyway in my eventually getting hired at Evergreen, because he’d left Santa Cruz to be on the founding
faculty at Evergreen.
Buxbaum: Richard Jones, or Dick Jones, came up as one of the planning faculty, so he would have been
1971.
Curtz: Yeah, and the first year I looked for a job was the year that the bottom fell out of the market for
Ph.Ds. Everybody who had been forecasting job growth turned out to be wrong. Jo and I were living as
resident preceptors in one of the dormitories in Cal College at that point, with Eli. I got tired of all these
students that were kind of friends of ours asking me how my job search was going, so I started posting
my rejection letters. I sent out 225 letters or something to colleges and didn’t get a job, so the whole
stairway was lined with rejection letters.
The faculty felt badly about that, I think, and managed to put together a lecturer position for me
to teach at Santa Cruz for a year while I looked for a job again. I think probably when I told Harry or
somebody that I was applying to Santa Cruz—that it looked interesting—I think he probably sent Dick
Jones a note or called him up or something and recommended me.
Buxbaum: When you first applied to Evergreen?
Curtz: I never heard that but I assume that was the case.
Buxbaum: I want to go back to something you touched on to see if there is any more to the story in
terms of your recollection. At some point during your college career—and it sounds like this may have
happened when you were in Santa Cruz—you did make a decision that you were going to teach, you
were going to go down that path.
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: Can you say a little bit more about what you recall of your thinking at the time? What made
you go that direction?
Curtz: When I got out of college—certainly when I got out of high school—if you’d asked me what I
wanted to do, the one thing I would have told you with some confidence was that I didn’t want to be a
15

teacher. My father had always wanted to be a teacher and eventually became one. Partly, I made this
decision the way I told you. There I was. I pretty clearly was not going to be in position as far as my
draft board was concerned to go off somewhere else yet again and tell them, “Well, this is still a
continuous course of study.” So, in a certain way, I arrived at a point where, as I said, it was clear that
this is actually what I’m doing and I’m going to be doing.
It was a perfect career for me. I’d always liked being a student. I’d always been really good at it.
I really liked teaching. Why not? [laughing]
Buxbaum: Yeah. I don’t know if this happened, but when you and Jo were first talking about what you
each were going to do, what kinds of conversations did you have?
Curtz: I don’t think we talked like that. Jo went to Santa Cruz—she was already not that interested in
getting a Ph.D. I think they probably let her in because they wanted me to come there, and we were a
package. She wrote a kind of flippant letter of application about what she wanted to do. But we didn’t
have any long, complicated discussions about “Do you think this is the best thing you want to do with
your life?” Jo said, “Well, I’m going to drop out.” And I said, “Oh? Okay. You really sure about that?”
She said, “Yeah.” And that was about it. I don’t think we had a much more complicated conversation
than that about my saying, “Well, I guess this is what I’m going to do.”
Buxbaum: What was it like, that sort of first job, doing some teaching in Santa Cruz? Was that your first
teaching job?
Curtz: No, I’d taught as a teaching assistant already for a couple of years. I taught in the core program
that Harry was running for Cal College. There were Harry’s lectures and this massive set of handouts
that he did week by week. He was writing a book, basically, and handing out the pieces of the book as
he was going along. And then there were a whole bunch of seminars that were run by the teaching
assistants that read stuff that was connected to the main readings, and you had a certain amount of
freedom about what you did for the reading list you picked. Probably because there were a lot of
different people teaching these sections. I taught those for probably two years maybe, maybe three.
And then I taught this lectureship probably . . . probably for three years as a teaching assistant.
Buxbaum: So that was your formative time. When you were writing letters of application all over the
place it sounds like, was it really just to find a job? It didn’t sound like you had an opportunity to pursue
something specific. It was almost as if, when you were first applying, you were going to have to take
what you got.

16

Curtz: Well, I don’t think I would have turned down a job teaching. Well, maybe. The University of
Alaska at Fairbanks was interested in a Chaucerian, and was somewhat interested in hiring me. After I
looked up what teaching and living in Fairbanks would be like, I decided I didn’t want to go there.
When I got this job at Evergreen, I was, I thought, about to be hired at Colgate. I wrote—called
up maybe—Evergreen. They had been hanging there for quite a long time. I said, “I have to have a
decision from you guys because I’m probably going to get a job offer when I go out to visit these people
next, and I need to know whether you’re going to hire me or not.” So I did turn down Colgate in favor of
Evergreen—sort of, not quite.
Buxbaum: I want to pick up on that story. This concludes segment one with Thad Curtz. We will be
back in a moment for segment two.
End Part 1 of 2 of Thad Curtz on June 29, 2018
Begin Part 2 of 2 of Thad Curtz on June 29, 2018
Buxbaum: This is the beginning of segment two, Stephen Buxbaum and Thad Curtz. I want to pick up
where we left off about Evergreen. You alluded to this just briefly, but help me understand, how did you
first hear about Evergreen? Do you recall how you first heard about it?
Curtz: No, I don’t think so. I think somebody at Santa Cruz must have told me about it, but I don’t
remember who it was.
Buxbaum: Of course, you were immersed in a job search, and you were in those at least initial
discussions with Colgate, so that was going on in the background. It doesn’t sound like you didn’t
necessarily feel that you were in a position to target your applications to particular places.
Curtz: No. There are not that many jobs for Chaucerians. [laughter] So it was much more a question
of looking at the job listings and saying, all right, these are the people who are looking to hire somebody
who might be something like me and then sending them letters.
Buxbaum: Evergreen, of course, was in this mix of alternative colleges. There were a number of them
around there. But just to clarify, it wasn’t that you were targeting experimental colleges.
Curtz: Nope, I was looking for a job. Although I’d done a lot that meant that Evergreen was attractive
and a good fit.
Buxbaum: Yeah. And in part, it sounds like there was a network in place that helped that a little bit . . .
Curtz: I think so.
Buxbaum: . . . between Berger and Jones and their connections. So, you interviewed there. I’m
assuming you sent off an application. Did you make any particular pitch to Evergreen what you thought
might be unique for that college?
17

Curtz: I don’t remember. I assume I said something about having done interdisciplinary work at Yale,
and about my having worked in the core program at Santa Cruz, and maybe something about having
done this work in the residential colleges. I lived in a residential college at Yale, and Jo and I had been
preceptors in this residential college at Santa Cruz, so we had been kind of actively involved in what I
guess—I don’t know if I had the label then—in kind of learning communities in various ways.
Buxbaum: McCann interviewed you?
Curtz: No, Charlie Teske interviewed me in a hotel room in New York at the MLA [Modern Language
Association] Conference.
Buxbaum: Was it just serendipitous that you were both there?
Curtz: No, Charlie was there because the college was looking to hire people, and I was there because
everybody who looks for a job in English goes to the MLA Conference, and that’s where all the
interviews for the year happen. It centralizes everything.
Buxbaum: What was that like? What did it look like? Were you just in a hotel room?
Curtz: Yeah, we were just in a hotel room. That’s how they did it then.
Buxbaum: Was there a line of folks?
Curtz: Actually, sometimes these days, I don’t think people do it in hotel rooms anymore. When
Evergreen does it, we rent a conference room or something and interview people there.
Buxbaum: Did you have a perception or a notion that it was a competitive position?
Curtz: I don’t know whether I knew it at the time, but the college was enormously popular when it first
opened. Somebody told me at some point that they had 1,000 applicants for this first set of jobs. I
don’t know whether I knew that or not.
Buxbaum: Did you prepare at all for the interview?
Curtz: Particularly, I think I probably knew something about Evergreen and what Evergreen was
supposed to be like before I did this interview, but I don’t really remember.
Buxbaum: What did Charlie ask?
Curtz: I guess I told you the other day, mostly Charlie just talked. [laughter] I hardly said anything in
the course of this interview. I don’t remember what he asked at all.
Buxbaum: Do you remember what he talked about?
Curtz: No. He talked about the college a fair amount, I think.
Buxbaum: Did you know much about him at that point?
Curtz: No, I’d never met him before.
Buxbaum: Just a guy in a room doing an interview?
18

Curtz: Just a guy in a room, yeah.
Buxbaum: At the end of the interview, did you think you were going to get the job?
Curtz: Oh, I had no idea.
Buxbaum: How did the offer come through?
Curtz: Well, there was this long pause when I didn’t hear anything from the college.
Buxbaum: How long?
Curtz: I don’t know. The MLA is over Christmas holiday, so it must have been, oh, three or four
months probably at least.
Buxbaum: That was Christmas 1970?
Curtz: 1971. As I said before, I got to this point where I called them up and said, “Well, are you going
to hire me or not?” I think maybe they even said, “Yes,” on the phone, or said, “Well, we’ll call you
back.” I heard back very rapidly anyway after that. They sent me the paperwork.
Buxbaum: Do you remember who you heard back from?
Curtz: I think just somebody official. I don’t remember who. I don’t know whether I talked to one of
the Hiring Deans or just whatever secretary was in charge of managing hiring when I talked on the
phone, but I didn’t have a long conversation. I just said, “If you’re going to hire me, you need to do it
now, because otherwise I’m probably going to take this other job.”
Buxbaum: That was January ’71?
Curtz: No, that would have been January ’72.
Buxbaum: Thanks. Do you remember what the terms were, when you were supposed to show up
there?
Curtz: That fall. We moved to Olympia in 1972. Evergreen was like a miniature version of Santa Cruz.
[laughing] Tacoma was like a miniature San Jose. Olympia was like a miniature city of Santa Cruz.
Seattle was like a miniature San Francisco.
Buxbaum: Interesting. So, you got the word in January ’72. Eli wasn’t even one yet.
Curtz: He was just one. He was born Christmas Day 1970, so he had just turned one.
Buxbaum: How did you go about preparing for this odyssey up to Washington State?
Curtz: Well, we moved up here with friends of ours from Olympia. We were thinking that we were
going to live together. Then we went off somewhere, I guess for my father’s funeral, and came back and
the friends, Lester and Candice, had bought a house while we were gone. They were kind of apologetic
about it, but they said that they’d figured out that they just couldn’t manage to do this.

19

We had two apartments. We moved up here at the end of academic year in 1971. Moved up in
the summer.
Buxbaum: End of the academic year in ’72?
Curtz: In ’72, yeah.
Buxbaum: Had Candace been hired by the college?
Curtz: No, no. Candace wasn’t teaching at all then. She hadn’t even been to graduate school at that
point.
Buxbaum: So they just happened to be moving to Olympia?
Curtz: She was getting divorced. They were getting out of Santa Cruz. Candace kind of grew up in the
Northwest in the San Juans and various other places, so this seemed like as good a place as any.
Buxbaum: So, you came up in the summer of ’72. What were your first impressions? It sounds like you
had some comparisons between California and Washington.
Curtz: It was kind of interesting structurally. Olympia was a teeny town then. It probably was still the
same way when you were here. There were several working kind of gypo logging operations downtown,
one right across the street from where Childhood’s End is. There was one movie theater in town. The
first time we were here, it showed Snow White the entire summer [laughter] starting in May and
running till September or something. I looked in the paper to see about restaurants and there was a
restaurant that advertised “Fine wines, excellent cigars,” or, “Fine dining, excellent cigars.” That was
Ben Moore’s. [laughing] That was about it.
Buxbaum: I-5 wasn’t built yet, so there was no Interstate 5 coming through town.
Curtz: I don’t even remember about that. I think I-5 must have been there, must have just recently
been there, because I would have remembered building the freeway and I don’t.
We lived out on Cooper Point. We rented an apartment, two duplexes, with Candace and Lester
right next door that first summer. Tried to plant a garden. My lettuce all got about that high because I
didn’t lime anything, I think. I watered it very faithfully, but that was it. That was about as big as it
grew. Then they bought a house in town and we bought a little teeny house out on Cooper Point. Lived
out there for a few years, and then moved into town; rented a house in town and then bought the
house that we’re in now.
Buxbaum: Did you meet any other faculty initially? Was there any kind of reception in the summer that
involved you with campus life or college life?
Curtz: Not much anyway. I don’t remember whether there as some kind of get-together or not, but I
think things just started when contracts started in the fall.
20

Buxbaum: Was that just in September?
Curtz: Yeah, there was some kind of orientation period.
Buxbaum: What was your recollection of the campus at that point? What was your first day on campus
like?
Curtz: The students were already talking about how the college had sold out and gone downhill, and it
wasn’t nearly as good, as experimental and radical as it had been the first year when the buildings
weren’t done and programs had been meeting all over town.
There wasn’t a lot. There was the Library, there was the lecture halls. There was a science
building maybe. One of the important things structurally was the college had a lot of room at that point,
and so when you taught a coordinated studies program, you got a set of offices and a lounge space that
just belonged to the program. Your office was right next to the other offices of the other faculty who
were teaching with you, and you had this meeting space for the program that was just yours, so you
could put up stuff and do whatever you wanted to with it. After a while, that went away for reasons of
space and pressure, I guess. I thought it was too bad. I thought that was a really helpful physical thing,
for the program to have a spatial identity.
Buxbaum: Going back to those first few days when you arrived on campus, was there an orientation
session?
Curtz: Yeah, of some kind, but I don’t remember anything about it.
Buxbaum: Were you handed a program to teach that first year?
Curtz: Yeah, basically. It was probably the most suitable program for me to teach, too. It was some
version of this dream program of Mervin’s. I think this one was called Democracy and Tyranny, I think,
and it was Athens and America.
Buxbaum: So there was a bit of a template there?
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: And a good fit for your background.
Curtz: And I think people had probably been planning already. In fact, I’m pretty sure Nancy Taylor
and Richard Brian were in it. I think they’d already done a bunch of planning, because books had to be
ordered and that kind of stuff.
Buxbaum: Were there just two other faculty?
Curtz: No, it was big. It was Nancy and Richard and Mark Levinsky and me. I think there were just four
of us and 80-some students.
Buxbaum: Nancy and Richard and Mark had been in that first year of hiring?
21

Curtz: No, Richard had been on the planning faculty. Mark was just arriving that year, I think. Nancy
had been hired to run Admissions and sort of migrated into the faculty, so she had been around.
Buxbaum: The structure of the teaching, did you have a faculty seminar to start with?
Curtz: Oh, yeah.
Buxbaum: Was that how you were really introduced to your teaching partners that first program year?
Curtz: We must have had some planning. They must have done a bunch of planning already, at least
for the first quarter. We certainly planned the last quarter collaboratively, and I assume the second
quarter, too.
I assume we kind of sat down when we started working and they said, “Well, okay, hello. Here’s
what we’ve done so far. Here’s the books we’ve already ordered. What else do you think we should
do?”
Buxbaum: Did you have any sense at that point of the structure of what was expected of you as a
faculty coming in and delivering something that was specifically Evergreen?
Curtz: It was pretty much specifically Evergreen in the context of this program was pretty much just
what I had done at Yale and what I had done at Santa Cruz. It was seminars about texts in the
humanities and lecturing. We did a couple of things that I probably would not have done at a regular
college. I’d done a lot of theater when I was in high school and a little in college, so at the end of the
year, I wrote and put on this gigantic theatrical event in the Library lobby with all sorts of jokes about
the material that we had done in the program. Everybody had t-shirts that they wore. We just
advertised it to the college, and some audience showed up and we did it.
We did this thing called “The Mother” for the spring. We were doing contemporary American
stuff and we looked at a bunch of stuff written by women, none of which seemed quite right. I’m sure it
must have been Mark who said, “Why don’t we have them study their mothers?” So we did this big
project called the Mother Project, where people interviewed whatever woman had been the most
central in bringing them up, and wrote about that and did presentations for the rest of the community
about that.
Buxbaum: Do you recall how many students were in the program?
Curtz: Eighty-some. I have a photograph of this theatrical event, the entire cast of the faculty all lined
up. I think maybe that was the second year, because I think Karin Syverson was in the program when we
did that. So maybe I did two years of this kind of Western civ humanities stuff.
Buxbaum: Do you remember anything in particular about the student reception to the program, the
work, the life of the program?
22

Curtz: Not particularly. There were a lot of issues that programs have now about students continuing
through the whole program and so on that just didn’t exist at that point, because there were only X
number of programs. There was no Evening and Weekend Studies courses you could fit into your
curriculum, so you were kind of in it for the year.
Buxbaum: And students weren’t really doing anything else. They were in a 16-credit program and
that’s what they were doing.
Curtz: Yeah. Santa Cruz ran on narrative evaluations, so I’d already had several years’ worth of
experience writing those. There wasn’t much that was dramatically new and different. I guess I had
never had to deal with so many people about program planning, about what we were going to read and
who’s going to do what and so on. But it was not a dramatic shift for me.
Buxbaum: It sounds like the faculty seminar might have been a slightly new element to your work.
Curtz: Yeah, I guess so.
Buxbaum: Was there a sense that that structure—I guess you’d call it coordinated studies with a faculty
seminar, and commitment from both faculty and students to just one program per an entire year—was
there any sense that that was being fine-tuned or critiqued as you went along? Was there an
evolutionary sense?
Curtz: Programs were supposed to produce program histories, and certainly those were supposed to
be a place where you thought about lessons that you’d learned and how you’d do things differently the
next time if you were going to redo the program, and that sort of thing. People’s self-evaluations were
supposed to be about that kind of reflective process. After a few years, various members of the faculty
wrote various manifestos about what they thought ought to be done differently one way or another.
Buxbaum: In the larger life of the college, was there more or less unrest and satisfaction with the
different programs?
Curtz: My world at Evergreen has always pretty much been the program I was teaching in. It pretty
much occupied all my time and all my energy. Although looking at some of this old stuff, it turns out
that I have been on more committees [laughing] than I remember. I don’t think I had much sense about
what was going on in other programs. Over the years, some programs have blown up sometimes.
Faculty have decided they just couldn’t work with each other anymore and programs have been
terminated. But I didn’t have any sense about how things were going anywhere else really.
Buxbaum: Some of the maybe turbulence that you sensed initially in ’72 upon your arrival, but it wasn’t
a deep, predominant unrest amongst students?

23

Curtz: No, I don’t think so at all. It was more like a joke or something. [laughter] And I was teaching
first-year students. They didn’t know anything about what had happened the year before.
Buxbaum: So the students in your program were uniformly all first-year students?
Curtz: I think so. We might have had some transfer students, but I don’t think very many.
Buxbaum: At this point in time, all across the country—we spoke of this a little bit earlier—there was all
this alternative education action. Evergreen, in some ways, might have been a bit of a mixing bowl for
these different approaches to alternative education. Is that a fair characterization?
Curtz: That’s certainly one way that I think about the founding of the college; that the planning faculty
and the early history of the college is about the coming together of half a dozen streams about reform in
American education from the ‘60s—the self-paced learning movement; something about ethnic studies;
something about internships and integrating academic theory and practical experience; something
about the education for democratic citizenship in the Athens and America program; the PSSC [Physical
Science Study Committee] hands-on science, the progressive science teaching movement. All that stuff
sloshed around one way or another. [chuckles]
If you look at the people who were hired, you see here’s some cadre of people who came from
Reed together, because they’d been on the science faculty at Reed and wanted to try teaching science in
some way that they really hadn’t been able to do at Reed, there’s the people who came to do the SelfPaced Learning Lab; there’s the people who came with 1970 ethnic studies impulses.
Buxbaum: How did those different streams, if you will, blend together? Was there active discussion
about that that you were aware of? Were people actually carrying the banner of one approach over
another?
Curtz: I don’t think there was a lot of public conversation about how those things might fit together,
certainly not that I was part of. Over time, I think some of those different kinds of faculty ended up
teaching with each other, and I think that’s probably where things got mixed up one way or another.
And in the structure of the college as a whole, once you had a lot of internships going on and people like
me started thinking about, well, okay, should we have an internship in this program? If so, what would
it be?
Buxbaum: What did program development at that point look like? How did a program get invented?
Curtz: Well, I think there are different answers. Sometimes in the history of the college there’s been
some kind of commitment on the part of a specialty area to run a program. I think in those situations
sometimes the specialty area has got together and people have said, “Well, we have to have some
people to do X next year. Whose turn is it? Well, it’s your turn, so how about you doing it?”
24

Most of the time, I think, this process has been more like people picking college roommates.
People have got to know other people who they thought were interesting and started to say, “Gosh, it
might be fun for us to do something together sometime. What do you suppose we would do?” I think
the occasions on which the deans have said, “You have to teach X” have basically been non-existent, at
least during the time I was at the college.
Buxbaum: In those first couple of years that you were there, the deans were . . . was Charlie a dean?
Curtz: I think so.
Buxbaum: And Cadwallader was Provost?
Curtz: Hmm. I don’t know what Mervin’s official title was. I think probably he was the Provost at that
point. Mervin was the head honcho academically for that stretch.
Buxbaum: Was he somewhat directive in terms of structure and design of program?
Curtz: I don’t think so, at least not I’m aware of. He had this baby of his own, this idea about what
coordinated studies ought to be. He certainly played a big part in the shape of the college in the sense
that he made this proposal to the planning faculty about coordinated studies programs, and they had
said, “Great! Yeah, we’ll do it! We’ll do it for the whole college,” even though Mervin had not imagined
that in his wildest dreams. [chuckles] He had only imagined that as a first-year program and maybe that
as a culminating program, and something else in between.
The programs that I taught in at the very beginning, for those first couple of years, were
modeled on Mervin’s ideal. To that extent, he played some role in having them be part of the college.
But I don’t have the sense of his doing a lot of advocating about the rest of it.
Buxbaum: Good. So, you arrived. Did you share an office?
Curtz: No, everybody had their own office in this little circle of offices. We were in the very bottom
basement corner of the Library, and there was this lounge space, maybe half again, twice again, as big as
this living room, and this set of offices around. And the offices were big enough so that you could run
your seminar in your office space. Everything happened in this one area.
Buxbaum: So you had about a 250-square-foot center space, and then the offices were clustered
around?
Curtz: And the offices were big enough to have a seminar table for 20 people or something in them,
and a desk at one end where you worked. It was pretty cool. I was very sorry to see it go.
Buxbaum: What were you sorry about going?
Curtz: I thought it was good for the program to have this sense of a piece of territory that was the
program’s territory. It meant that when students came for seminar and got out of seminar, they were
25

all in the same big room together, talking to each other. When they were waiting for seminar to start,
they were all hanging out in this big room talking to each other. When the faculty wanted to consult
somebody, they could walk next door and talk to them. As I said, it meant that the program had a kind
of space that belonged to it, where you could put stuff up and display things, and they didn’t have to
compete with anything else.
Buxbaum: It’s almost a physical structural aspect of a learning community.
Curtz: Mm-hm. There was one other thing that we did that we probably wouldn’t have done
someplace else, this thing called the “poster project.” We had some money and we assigned these
students to little teams. Each team had to produce a poster for the rest of the college. Every week,
some group of students was responsible for the next poster. We’d drive up to Shelton to some printer
that we had lined up and get the posters printed, and then bring them back and put them up all over
campus.
Buxbaum: How big were the posters?
Curtz: They were poster-size.
Buxbaum: It was the large flipchart size?
Curtz: Yeah, I don’t know what that—they were about yay wide and yay tall maybe.
Buxbaum: Maybe two foot by three foot?
Curtz: Yeah, something like that.
Buxbaum: Those were composite? Was there any structure to the assignment other than to depict . . .
Curtz: . . . communicate something about what the program is working on and why it matters.
Buxbaum: Did other programs do that?
Curtz: I don’t think so.
Buxbaum: So each small team did a poster?
Curtz: Mm-hm.
Buxbaum: So maybe four or five students per poster?
Curtz: Yeah. Some of them were really good and some of them were not so good. [laughter]
Buxbaum: I imagine so! What would go on the poster?
Curtz: The faculty did the first one, and it was about beginnings. It was the beginning of The Iliad in
Greek and in English on the two sides of the poster. Pale beige in the background.
Buxbaum: All writing, sort of bullet points.
Curtz: There wasn’t anything except words down on one side and “Sing, goddess of the wrath of
Achilles” on the other side.
26

Buxbaum: Was there an evolution to the posters that made some particularly good?
Curtz: Not that I’m aware of, just depending on the students and how thoughtful and clever, and how
much graphic sense they had. Some of them were really beautiful and some of them were just perfectly
ordinary.
Buxbaum: What was a week like? When did you show up? Was there some structure to the day and
days of the week that you recall?
Curtz: Oh, I don’t really remember. I think there was 16 hours a week of contact time or something.
There were some lectures. I think in a lot of programs that I’ve taught, there’s been a week when—
structurally, there’s this ongoing problem about how to provide enough class time for the students, or
enough work for the students, without making the faculty’s workload impossibly heavy. You teach a
seminar, and then you have to read for the seminar, and you assign papers and then you have to read
20 papers, so I don’t know whether . . .
In lots of the programs I’ve taught, there’s been a film series, where we did a film once a week
and then a critique and interpretation session after it. That’s something you can do. It takes a certain
amount of work to figure out what the films that will go with the rest of your work are, but at least I can
watch the movie and then run a discussion about it right afterwards, without having to have seen the
film ahead of time. That’s an easy an interesting way to do something else in the week, and it’s
probably helpful for the students’ education in the sense that they’re probably going to watch more
movies than read old books for the rest of their lives. [chuckles] And it gives you something else to do
in the week’s structure that doesn’t add a lot of work for the faculty.
I don’t remember anything else. I don’t know whether we did films in that program or not.
Mostly we lectured and had book discussions. Maybe we had a separate thing about writing. I don’t
really remember. This was 45 years ago.
Buxbaum: Yeah, I appreciate the characterization of just that first year or so. Things have obviously
evolved. I’m looking forward to talking about some of the specifics of particular programs. But before
we go there, just in terms of the life of the college, you were the second large group of faculty that were
hired. The life of the college from the faculty perspective, how did faculty mix at that point? Was there
any structure to that?
Curtz: You mean did the college provide any sort of thing about people getting together one way or
another?
Buxbaum: Mm-hm.

27

Curtz: Not significantly anyway. I guess there were probably faculty meetings every now and then.
Some people knew each other already and hung out with each other. Some people had lunch together.
I was pretty busy. I don’t think I hung out with much of anybody except the people I was working with.
Buxbaum: And the business was associated directly with your program, your immediate colleagues?
Curtz: Yeah.
Buxbaum: Was there any kind of sense of here’s the new faculty in this new school?
Curtz: There were faculty retreats, where the faculty would all go off together for three days or
something to plan. I don’t remember whether there were specialty area meetings at that point or not. I
don’t think so. I think the specialty areas came along later.
Buxbaum: We’re into that first couple of years and initial impressions. What is your recollection in
terms of the next year? Was it a repeat of the first program that you taught?
Curtz: Kind of. It was the same kind of program anyway with different faculty I think.
Buxbaum: Not Nancy and Mark again but other people?
Curtz: Karin Syverson was in one of those programs. I think the second year probably that I taught that
kind of stuff, Karen was in it, and I think Mark was in it. So I think maybe the two of them arrived, and
maybe there was somebody else with Richard Brian and Nancy and me in that first year.
Buxbaum: Athens and America was your first experience?
Curtz: Yeah, but I don’t think it was called that. I think maybe it was called Western Civilization.
Buxbaum: That was for year one and two. What came up after that, and how? How did you construct
that next program experience?
Curtz: With a few exceptions, I have taught the programs I taught by having somebody that I kind of
knew and liked and thought would be fun to teach with. I think the next stretch of things I did was
probably autobiography programs—self-exploration, true autobiography. I taught that stuff for a couple
of years anyway. Well, Peter Elbow and I. I got to be friends with Peter and Jo and I got to be friends
with Peter and his wife. Peter was interested in student writing, so this seemed like an obvious thing for
us to do.
Buxbaum: Was Peter hired into that same cohort?
Curtz: I think Peter came the same year that Mark and Karin did. He and Mark had taught together at
MIT in some humanities program. I think both of them were hired the same year, maybe one right after
the other.
Buxbaum: I’m getting some sense that at least those first two years—these are my words—it’s almost
like the college was networked in some ways, with groups of people that came from the same spot.
28

Curtz: I think that’s absolutely true. [David] Marr and Rudy [Martin] came because they’d worked
together at Central, or wherever it was they were out there.
Buxbaum: WSU.
Curtz: That’s the way most people get jobs, the research says. [chuckles]
Buxbaum: At least in those initial years, was there anything you remember of Evergreen embodied in
the larger community of Olympia and Washington State? We hear these notions of Evergreen always
struggling for its viability in terms of the political dynamics of state funding, and also some tension
between the college and life in Olympia. Any recollection of that?
Curtz: I didn’t pay much attention to it, but, yeah, I certainly think that there were people in Olympia
who were complaining about all the hippies that the college had brought to town. And there was this
kind of ongoing rumbling in the Legislature with bills to close the college being introduced every year by
somebody or other. Same guy, I think.
I don’t think the college worried much about that at that point because we had tons of students
applying. We were growing like mad, so we didn’t have to worry. I really did not pay much of any
attention to that kind of stuff, but my sense is people figured that as long as we had lots of students
knocking at the door, they probably were not going to close us.
Buxbaum: Do you remember when that changed, when it shifted?
Curtz: We had various enrollment crises along the way. I don’t know what dates they were. In 1978, I
remember Steve Hunter saying we had one but . . .
Buxbaum: 1978 was the big dip in enrollment that is being compared to current times. Do you recall
anything about how that might have been reflected in the approach to teaching or the structure of
programs?
Curtz: We had lots of conversations about what to do about attracting more students. Some of the
stuff I gave you the other day partly was probably written some time in that period. Different people
had different ideas about what steps to take. Evening and Weekend Studies, I think, probably got
started then. Satellite programs. Reorganizing the curricular structures so there were clear career
pathways in it. Improving the functioning of the Admissions office. Lots of conversation about what to
try doing.
Buxbaum: I’m still thinking in the context of the ‘70s, but could you characterize the student body at
that point of time—who they were and where they were from?
Curtz: In 1972 when I was there, we got a lot of students who had not been very happy with traditional
education, and had either not gone to college when they got out of high school and had done something
29

else for a few years, or who had tried college and then dropped out and done something else. A lot of
them had pretty clear ideas about what they needed to learn and wanted to learn when they came
back, and they tended to be really interesting students.
One of the things that happened to the college as it got more famous is it that it got more and
more students fresh out of high school. They were different, in terms of what they knew already and
where they were in their life paths developmentally, though I don’t think I’ve ever had very much sense
about sociological categories to apply to the students. I’ve been working with them full-time and you
have a much stronger sense of who they are as particular, quirky individuals.
I’ve never had much to stay about “Is the student body changing?” And “How are they
changing, as a whole?” And “What are the implications for what we ought to be doing about that?” I
just said hello to them as they walked in the door and figured out what to do then. [chuckles]
Buxbaum: Still in this early period of the ‘70s, people were arriving. It’s almost maybe that there were
three waves of hiring faculty, one before you and one after you. And then there was a leveling out.
Some people left and started leaving. Do you recall any of that happening in a conscious way who was
leaving at any particular point?
Curtz: There were a bunch of people who arrived right at the beginning, who stuck around for a few
years and decided it wasn’t for them and left. There were a few people who left under duress of one
kind or another. Cruz Esquivel turned out to have faked his academic record somehow or other and had
to leave. Later on, there were some people who left because they wanted to go back to traditional
academic life. Peter Elbow left the college because he wanted to have more time to write, and not have
to work so much on dealing with students.
I don’t think I have any other particular sense about the things that led particular people to go.
Some people died. The Self-Paced Learning Lab kind of faded away, and the people who had come to do
self-paced learning went someplace else.
Buxbaum: Just before concluding this segment, was there anything in particular that made you want to
stay? Did you ever consider going in those first few years?
Curtz: No. Evergreen has been a terrific place for me.
Buxbaum: Why?
Curtz: Because I like being a student. If I had gone to Colgate, I would have spent 35 years teaching
freshman composition and introduction to Chaucer and advanced Chaucer. At Evergreen, I got to teach
all kinds of other things, and read all kinds of different stuff, which has been great for me. And I really
like working with the students, so at Evergreen you get to spend a lot more time with them and get to
30

know them a lot better and talk to them a lot more than you would have if they were arriving at 10:00 at
leaving at 12:00 and doing five other classes.
I sort of think that if the college had ever folded, I would have probably done something else
rather than trying to look for another teaching job. I don’t know. I certainly don’t think I would have
been very happy teaching freshman composition and introductory and advanced Chaucer for my whole
career.
Buxbaum: In terms of your own life and work at Evergreen in that first decade, you were doing more
than just teaching, it sounds like. You were starting to become active in governance, and there were
some other—
Curtz: Yeah, I think I did various committees of one kind or another. Jo and I ran the Thurston County
Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign somewhere in there, and that took a lot of my time and energy for a
year or a year and a half.
Buxbaum: So the external politics, the life of a broader community, or Evergreen in the community.
WPPSS was happening, I guess.
Curtz: Yeah. I was actually the president of Fair Electric Rates Now. I was sort of a front man for Jim
Lazar’s work to try to stop the WPPSS plant for a while.
Buxbaum: Were there other things that were cooking locally, besides WPPSS?
Curtz: I don’t think I had much of anything to do with local politics besides those two things. I gave
donations to political campaigns probably, but that was about it.
Buxbaum: In some ways, my own recollection of this time period, Evergreen was somewhat on the map
politically as a place on the map for a bunch of different causes at that particular time. Maybe that was
part of the attraction in terms of students, too.
There was certainly a presence on campus of different offices that were student-run and
student-directed. Were you engaged in any of those student activities?
Curtz: I had a little bit to do with the Cooper Point Journal at one point, but very little. I don’t think I
had anything to do with any other student organizations.
Buxbaum: My next set of questions actually go to some specific programs and DTFs, like the Native
American Studies Program and others. But I think this is probably a good place to break for segment
two, and if it’s okay, we’ll pick up on that so that it’s an unbroken segment. So we’re signing off of
segment two with five minutes left on this card. That’s good timing.
End Part 2 of 2 of Thad Curtz on June 29, 2018

31


Thad Curtz
Interviewed by Stephen Buxbaum
The Evergreen State College oral history project
July 3, 2018

Begin Part 1 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018
Buxbaum: This is Stephen Buxbaum with Thad Curtz. Thad and I are convening our third segment of the
oral history project on July 3, 2018. Good morning, Thad.
Curtz: Good morning.
Buxbaum: I’m just going to launch in here a little bit of organizing first. I was able to listen back to two
of the segments, at least to some sections. In part, I want to do a little bit of follow-up on just that early
period, pertaining to what some have called the mythography of the first early years, the planning years,
of Evergreen. Then I want to move off that.
Curtz: Okay.
Buxbaum: I have a laundry list of things that you kindly provided that I just want to work down.
Curtz: Sure.
Buxbaum: So, for segment three, maybe we can start off a little bit with that initial period again, of the
planning years in the early ‘70s. Anything more that you might remember from that, and how you
would characterize it. I’m going to prompt you by one thing that may or may not be useful. There is
some sense that this was a turbulent period, a period of trying to figure out how to make things work,
between faculty and students, and implement a curriculum. I don’t know if you recall it, there was the
Marr and Martin Manifesto.
Curtz: Yeah, I remember that there was one. I don’t remember what Rudy and Dave maintained in that
manifesto though. [laughter]
Buxbaum: What are your recollections, if you have anything notable that you want to share from this
period?
Curtz: I think all through my experience at Evergreen, I’ve only had a peripheral relationship with the
administrative life of the college. I never became a dean, mostly because I have a very low tolerance for
having people being mad at me, and I thought I couldn’t be dean without that.
So, there were other people who were involved in administrative struggles of one kind of
another that I was unaware, I think, a lot of the time. I have written a bunch of little manifestos of my
own of one kind or another, but I’ve never been chair of the faculty. I didn’t remember the fact that I’d
1

been the convener of Culture, Text and Language, at least once, until I looked back at some of the stuff
that I was sending to you.
Anyway, I think there was a lot going on in the administrative part of the college in those first
years. Certainly, people thought when they staffed up the administration that the college was going to
grow much faster than it turned out it was going to grow. So there were a bunch of people who arrived
and were here for two years and then left again—[Joe] Shoben and I don’t know who else. But my life
at the college was pretty much consumed by figuring out what to do about the program I was teaching.
Like, I guess, most Evergreen faculty most of the time, I was working pretty hard. I didn’t have a lot of
time and energy left over for sitting around the faculty senate and politicking about one thing or
another. [chuckles]
There was significantly more money in the opening years of the college. We had all this brandnew equipment that we’d had the money to buy because we were starting out from scratch, so there
weren’t worries about money. We had a much more generous program budget in those first years than
we did later on. There was money to do things, like the poster project in that first year that I talked
about. We had 600 or 800 bucks that we could afford to spend doing something that we seemed like it
would be fun and interesting, and contribute to the life of the college as a whole.
We wanted to do that partly—one of the ideas we had about it was that all these programs
were going to be very intensely inwardly oriented, and that the college didn’t have much of anything in
the way of structures for programs to have some sense about what was going on anywhere else; and
that putting these posters around would at least give people some ongoing sense that we existed, and
what we were thinking about.
Evergreen structures, at least for a long time, did provide an awful lot more opportunity for
faculty to learn from each other than most colleges do. In most places, you start teaching and that’s it
as far as your education as a teacher goes. Teaching at Evergreen, by virtue of the programs that are
team-taught anyway, every once in a while—fairly often—you see somebody else get up and do
something that you never would have thought of doing. And you think, oh, gosh, that’s pretty
interesting, and I could probably do that. Then you try it out, and lo and behold, you can. Or, you are
going to teach some program with somebody and the structure of the program—the things they’re
interested in—mean that you end up reading various stuff that you probably would never have read if
you were teaching Chaucer and advanced Chaucer. You can turn out to use that some other way, a few
years later.

2

In the early years of the college, there as this, I don’t know, rule certainly that you were
supposed to observe the teaching of the other people in your team as part of the ongoing evaluation
process. I think that has faded away gradually, almost throughout the college. But it was very useful in
the sense that it was really easy to imagine—I think for everybody, but certainly for me as a beginning
teacher—that the seminar down the hall was going infinitely better than your seminar was. Sooner or
later, you get down to actually making the time to go sit it on that seminar down the hall, and generally,
it turned out that things weren’t any better or any worse there than they were in your room. [chuckles]
But because of the way Evergreen runs—ran— I think runs, and because of the fact that
people’s programs basically consumed all the time and energy they had available, I don’t think there was
a lot left over for worrying about—and also because of the fact that the college had been formed by
these cohorts of people who knew each other and were committed to the same notion about what
needed to happen in American education. It was like there were four or five parallel colleges going on, I
think, with some ongoing interbreeding or mutual education occurring between them. But it wasn’t like
there was one college that policy needed to be worked out for and settled for. It was like there were
half a dozen colleges that were working out their own ideas about what needed to be improved and
what needed to happen.
Buxbaum: Can you characterize a few of those cohorts?
Curtz: Yeah. Self-paced learning. The people who came from Reed with some kind of set of ideas about
integrated, hands-on science teaching, engaging students in faculty research, sort of access to
sophisticated lab equipment for undergraduates. And programs like Matter in Motion and INS and so
on. The field biology people who came out of the Grinnell Natural Journal movement of natural history
writing, and some notion about field biology and the capacity to do extended fieldwork with students as
a pretty crucial piece of education in environmental studies. People like me, who came out of an
integrated humanities. Basically, I think we were attracted by the idea that you could provide the
equivalent of really good private education with small classes and a lot of contact with faculty, in a
public college setting. People who were involved in the ‘70s ethnic studies curriculum movement. So
that’s five maybe.
Buxbaum: Yeah.
Curtz: On the social science, I guess I don’t know how I’d characterize the social scientists who came at
the beginning. There was already some set of social scientists that are not covered by my list.
Buxbaum: Can you mention a name?

3

Curtz: Jeanne Hahn. Various psychologists. Ron Woodbury. I think, roughly speaking, they were
progressive left-wing social scientists; people who were interested, at least, in Marxist theory and not
just in contemporary sociology, sort of positivist, [Auguste Comte] sociology, and sort of contemporary
mainstream American economic theory as the be all and end all. So, I guess people who were interested
in teaching political economy instead of straight economics out of [Paul] Samuelson or somebody like
that, is probably a reasonable way to characterize who those people were.
Buxbaum: Some of what you’re mentioning here makes me think of perhaps some of the challenges
with folks that were working in pure science, for example, and how that fit into coordinated studies
model, or even seminaring for that matter. Was there a conscious effort to mix between what might be
an integrated science—well, integrated science, I guess Matter and Motion, maybe that was conceived
in some ways to bridge between scientific inquiry—just lab work—and broader fields of humanities.
Curtz: I think there’s been an enormous range in how people put programs together, and kind of what
they thought counted as a satisfactorily integrated program—everything from programs that were the
rough equivalent of the directed studies program I did at Yale, where there were basically three or four
separate classes going on, each one taught by one of the faculty—they had some kind of relation to
each other, but they weren’t all doing the same thing—all the way to programs where all the faculty did
everything together. That depends partly on the disciplines and the demands of the disciplines—I think
it’s much easier to do that with some combinations of things than with others—and how advanced the
program is, and also just the temperament and interests of the faculty.
But some time fairly late in my career of teaching—oh, I don’t know, Technology, Cognition and
Education—[June Pomerand? 00:15:37], who was a kind of media faculty member taught in that
program, at some point—maybe when we were talking about my evaluation or something—she said
that she’d learned an enormous amount from me, from this program about how you might fit a program
to make the different parts of a program fit together.
It’s a little vain, but I do think that’s something that I’ve always been particularly good at
compared to most people, partly because I have a pretty wide range of competencies and interests, and
I also have a rather unusual, I think, powerful synthetic capacity for figuring out ways of making things
connect to each other. And I’ve always been willing to work really hard at doing that. In program
planning, it’s saying, “Okay, you want to this and you want to do that. I’ll figure out how to find other
stuff that I can teach that I think will go with what you’re talking about.”
Buxbaum: What are the components of a well-structured program, like what you’re speaking about?
How might a person approach that successfully?
4

Buxbaum: It all depends [chuckles] on the person, I think, and the program. I think having a program
theme. There’s a bunch of stuff in the archives, or at least with people’s accumulated manifestos about
this anyway. I think having a program theme is really useful and interesting; helpful to the students, if
you can manage to keep reminding them what the program theme is [a buy is? 00:17:33]. And it’s nice
to have a program theme which is a little mysterious, and which will become progressively more
complicated and interesting as the program goes along.
I taught this program with Don Finkel once called Development: The Aim of Education, which
was basically Don’s program. I think he’d taught it once before, and he’d certainly had the fundamental
ideas for it. It was about [Jean] Piaget and [Erik] Erikson and moral development theory. I remember
him saying once that the title of the program came from the title of a very famous article, which was
kind of about [John] Dewey and Piaget and progressive education and moral development theory, and
how they all fit together with each other. I said at some point, “The good thing about this is that we’ll
read that article at the end and they’ll finally be able to understand it as a result of the work we’ve done
in this program.”
So, something like that, where the theme progressively deepens, and as you go along, the work
that you’re doing in the program contributes progressively to your understanding of the theme. That’s
pretty good, I think. I taught a program called Perception, and the theme was perception, but we did a
lot of interesting work about perception in various ways. But I don’t think that theme gets deeper in
that kind of way.
What else? Well, it’s good to have the faculty get along with each other. Very useful. I
personally have done my best to avoid having the program be separate courses. It seems to me that
that gives you none of the potential benefits of coordinated studies and all of the costs. You’re tied to a
particular set of faculty. You have to take the same combination of courses. You can’t pick one of the
ones in your program and two of the ones in some other program that you’d rather be studying. And
you get a very minimal benefit from the fact that there’s some kind of relationship between the work
that’s being done and the separate courses.
At least from the point of view of the faculty, having everybody do everything is wonderful for
somebody like me, who became a college teacher because I liked being a student. And I think it’s very
good for faculty development in the long run. You get to see all these other people teaching, and think
about what they’re doing and get advice from them. In a program that’s going well anyway, you get
advice from them.
Buxbaum: How can you tell if a program is going well?
5

Curtz: “All happy families are happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
unique way,” as Tolstoy says at the front of War and Peace. [laughing] I actually think the interesting
thing is the opposite; that it’s very easy to have some students come to you and complain and to
imagine that all the students are complaining. It’s very helpful to survey the students every month or
every five weeks, especially if some little group of students comes and tells you that things are going
terribly, or that the workload is impossible or whatever. It’s very helpful to actually see what the whole
program and all the students say before you panic, because in my experience anyway, it generally turns
out that things are not near as bad as you tend to imagine when this little delegation first arrives on
your doorstep.
And if you have a regular process in the program, then it’s easy and unpainful for you to be able
to say, “Okay, we surveyed. Here’s what everybody says about the workload. Twelve percent say it’s
too much for them, 50 percent of the people say it’s about right.” It’s like this social science research
about how all the kids in high school think all the other kids are having sex a lot more than they are, and
smoking more dope than they are. I think it’s helpful for the students who are feeling like they’ve got
way too much to do, or the students who are thinking, there’s not near enough work to have some
sense about, yeah, I do feel that way, but it’s partly me, it’s not just reality.
Generally speaking, I have just taught as hard as I could whatever I was teaching. I have not kind
of . . . well, I don’t know, that’s not absolutely accurate, but I have not shrunk from doing demanding
stuff. In first-year programs, I’ve tried to provide a lot of help for students. And sometimes I’ve just
said, “Yeah, that would be great to do but we can’t do it. It’s just too hard.” But mostly, I’ve tried to do
interesting, demanding work—reading difficult, important books, whatever I was teaching.
Buxbaum: Is there an example of something that you characterize as demanding?
Curtz: Practically any program I’ve taught. Instead of reading some book about Marx, we’ve had
students read [Das] Kapital. Instead of having them read some textbook about developmental
psychology, we’ve had them actually read Piaget. And just down the line. Partly that’s because I’ve
taught in a lot of programs where the point was reading great books, and the students had signed up
because they wanted to have that be part of their education.

But it’s also true about what I’ve done

in programs like Perception or Weird and Wondrous, or whatever.
Buxbaum: In some ways, demanding is going directly to the source, and letting students struggle with it
and making that part of the educational experience.
Curtz: Yeah. I try to provide them with as much help as I can, but not feeling as if they need to just read
a textbook about it, read what somebody else says about it.
6

Buxbaum: Thinking about Kapital, where students plunge in the middle of that and they’re spinning
their wheels? Is that ever the case? What’s the best method of managing [that]?
Curtz: I don’t remember what the particular occasions were, but there have certainly been occasions
where I started out—we, some team—thinking that we could manage do to X, and ended up saying,
“No, instead of the assignment for week three about this, just read these six passages, these six
sections. Skip section so-and-so and skip section so-and-so. We’ve got to do less, and those are the
ones we think are really important, or the ones we think are most manageable, given what we’ve done
so far and what people seem to be able to handle.”
I also think, certainly for me but I think probably for the faculty in general, it’s easy to think that
everybody is getting along all right, when in fact some people have just kind of checked out about this,
that or the other thing.
I’ve always been interested in this issue, about faculty workload and ways to mitigate it. One of
the things I started doing—over the last 10 years I was teaching maybe, or maybe a little less than that—
was having students mark up the reading, do marginal notations, and just collecting all of their books at
the beginning of every seminar, giving them something to do and spending 10, 15 minutes just looking
through the marginalia and making little notes. I think you can get a pretty accurate sense of about how
engaged with the reading students are. I think that probably also provides a fairly substantial amount of
incentive or leverage—pressure—for students to actually do all of the reading. Because it’s certainly not
as easy for students to just float along at Evergreen as it is at most colleges. But it’s certainly possible to
just kind of get by.
Buxbaum: After looking at marked-up texts or articles, what’s the next step, one that’s passed back? Is
there more to a method of helping students figure out how to mark up and read?
Curtz: I guess I’ve always handed out some samples of what I’ve done, reading the books myself, except
I’m being paid to do this. [laughing] I have to worry about running out of things to say in seminar, or
things to ask in seminar, so you’re not expected to mark your books up as intensively as this. But you
can see the kind of things I do, and generally, I give a little talk. I say, “Okay, here’s this kind of mark I
made here, and here’s why I made it.” “Here’s what this little thing here is. You can see how here, I
said, page 22, because back there on page 22, there was an image that was like the one here. You can
see here, I started writing blue in the margins. Every time the color blue, or something else about blue,
came up because it looked like that was going to be an ongoing, returning thing in the book and I
wanted to keep track of it. And this is handy, because if you decide you want to write your seminar
paper about blue, it’s really easy for you to go back and locate all of those places, if you marked them up
7

in the course of doing this. And it helps you stay awake when you’re reading the book to be marking it
up like that.”
Sometimes, either I sat some student down or wrote a little note that said, “You know, looking
at the things you underlined, it looks to me like you’re just making this up. [laughing] You just seem to
be drawing some lines in the book.” Once in a while, I gave people suggestions, but mostly the point of
it was just for me to be able to have some way of checking in efficiently, and doing something that
would take less of my time, and having them write a little seminar paper every time, and having the
feeling that I needed to sit down and mark those papers up, and give people advice about them.
Buxbaum: Do you have a sense, during your time at Evergreen, were those methods widely employed?
Is there a basic foundational set of skills that are provided to students, or were provided to students?
Curtz: I don’t have any real idea. Some, I think, pretty much all the time, and some over stretches of
time have had foundation programs. If you took Introduction to Natural Science, or Political Economy,
and I don’t know, I think Introduction to Natural Science was pretty much a requirement. But certainly,
you were strongly encouraged to do one of those if you were thinking that you wanted to go on to do
advanced work in some area.
The humanities has never had a program like that. I tried to persuade the humanities faculty
that we ought to have one. I thought our not having one was a significant issue. It meant you were
starting from scratch. Every program, you had new students who didn’t know about Freudian theory,
they didn’t know about close reading, they didn’t know about this, that or the other thing that it seemed
like you probably were going to need about them and to do advanced work in the humanities and the
interpretive social sciences.
I thought we ought to have a program that basically taught everybody some set of things. The
faculty—my colleagues—never wanted to do that, mostly, I think, because a lot of them did not want to
be in the position of having to teach that program every so often, and some of them for pedagogic,
principled reasons.
That was one idea about how students ought to get introductory skills, if you like. There was a
lot of ongoing work about core programs of one kind or another, about what ought to be taught in core.
And a certain amount of faculty development work dedicated to trying to make sure that core programs
actually did cover that stuff and teach those skills, but I think [they were] spotty and sporadic at best.
Every core program kind of worked that out in their own terms, I think, whatever ideas they had about
what ought to be done.

8

There were a certain number of things that spread through the college, and then, I think, tended
to fade away again. Peter Elbow did a bunch of stuff about free writing and writing without teachers,
and student-centered writing groups that was attractive to lots of faculty, and a lot of faculty adopted in
one way or another for a while. Some people did intensive journal workshops based on Marilyn Frasca’s
work. There was a whole stretch of a lot of popularity for the kind of structured workshops that Don
Finkel invented. I think probably Grinnell Nature History journal writing, a lot of people did that for in
various programs for quite a while. There was a Writing Across the Curriculum movement, and a bunch
of administrative work dedicated to trying to improve the teaching of writing in every program in the
college, since we didn’t have any freshman composition. But I think most of those things were
movements. They appeared, they gained a fair amount of momentum and popularity, and they tended
to fade away again eventually.
Buxbaum: Were they driven by individuals?
Curtz: I think most of those things in my last list were the inventions of individual people, and they
spread mostly by having people in teams that they had worked with think that they were great, and
carried them forward—sometimes by a little proselytizing. And sometimes people—like the Grinnell
Natural History people—they, I think, all arrived interested in that particular way of working with
students, and knowing about it already.
Buxbaum: Can you share some names?
Curtz: Steve Herman was probably, I think, the central advocate in the faculty for the Grinnell Field
Journal. I think most of those things anyway were written up by the faculty. There was a book about
how to do it already, like the Progoff Intensive Journal book that Marilyn learned how to do that from.
She didn’t learn it from the book, she learned it from Progoff, but there was a book about how to do it.
Buxbaum: Progoff Journal Workshop.
Curtz: Yeah. But I think Bob Sluss and [Larry] Eickstaedt certainly, and Al Wiedemann. I think those
people were, I think, either became committed to natural history field writing, or were already more or
less on their arrival at the college, or were already interested in it as a way of working with students.
Buxbaum: Clarifying question about the labels that we use these days. You mentioned core programs.
At some point, inserted in the Evergreen structure, there’s a reference to basic programs.
Curtz: It’s the same thing. For a long time, the college required entering students to do a first-year
program. You didn’t have any choice about it, you just had eight options or whatever, six options.
Buxbaum: Again, the “first-year” programs, that’s that same thing of a basic or a core program.
Barbara Smith appeared on the scene at some point—1978—so there were specialty areas that were
9

inserted into the mix, and then there was this concept of the basic program. Was that a dean-delivered
structure?
Curtz: No, I don’t think so. There’s probably a DTF or something to try to work out what ought to be
done about the—the whole life of the college, there’s been this ongoing tension between “every
program ought to be its own autonomous world”—certainly I and I think lots of the faculty arrived at
Evergreen thinking, well, I have given up a promising academic career in the regular academic world to
come to this new somewhat risky college. And one of the things that I ought to get, as a result of
coming here, is autonomy.
And that, together with a deep commitment—certainly on my part, and I think on the part of
most faculty—to the idea that at a good college, the faculty runs the curriculum. The administration
does not run the curriculum at a decent college.
Those two things together have contributed. And I think also maybe the temperament of
people who decided they wanted to come teach at Evergreen—at a college that didn’t have
requirements, that didn’t have majors, that didn’t have departments—all of those were connected by a
kind of taste for individual liberty and autonomy probably.
Anyway, at one end there’s been the idea every program is its own universe, and that’s fine. It
doesn’t matter whether students—you could put first-year students in—the whole notion of advanced
programs and beginning programs and this structured, progressive hierarchy in the curriculum didn’t
matter or make sense to a fair number of the faculty, certainly depending a lot on the disciplines that
they were in. The science faculty tended to—I think quite rightly, especially in the hard sciences—to
think that some kind of progressive structure was essential. Faculty in the humanities tended to think
that it didn’t matter at all, at least lots of them tended to think that it didn’t matter at all. And
everybody else [was] kind of in between, I think.
At the one end of the spectrum, we’ve got this idea that every program is its own community, its
own culture, its own little world, and that’s great. And on the other hand, we have this idea about there
ought to be paths of study; there ought to be clear repeatable programs; there ought to be career paths
laid out for students who come thinking that they want to be journalists or veterinarians or whatever,
and they ought to be able to see in the curriculum what they’re going to be able to do for the next four
years, which will lead to their coming out prepared for that career. Those are two visions about how the
college ought to be structured that are in pretty deep tension with each other, and we’ve continually
tried to work out a suitable combination/synthesis/compromise between those two tensions.

10

Buxbaum: Characterize again for me, if you would, the two tensions. Are paths of study and career
paths on different sides?
Curtz: No, I don’t think so, except that there are some paths of study that are not really directed toward
careers at all. The teacher ed mostly is a function of the State’s ever-increasing list of requirements; is
probably about as close as you can get to something where the path of study really is a career path. You
are doing this in order to come out and be able to be certified according to the State’s requirements for
a particular job and union card.
Majoring in philosophy or humanities, even at a traditional college, is sort of a path of study. It
says, okay, and every year for the next four years, there are going to be programs that you can take
which will make sense if you’re interested in, say, English and American literature. But most of the
people who are interested in English and American literature, and want to learn about it in college, are
not going to end up becoming English teachers, not even high school English teachers. So, that’s a path
of study, but it’s not exactly a career path.
Buxbaum: Characterize again for me the two tensions.
Curtz: Just that on the one side, you have the idea that every program is an autonomous and coherent
whole, and it doesn’t have to be related to anything else in the curriculum. On the other hand, you have
the idea that there ought to be four-year integrated structures in the curriculum that link the programs
that are going to be offered for the next four years into comprehensible patterns, and useful patterns.
Buxbaum: I’m just thinking again about sciences. Ed Kormondy, one of the first scientists that was
dean.
Curtz: He was an administrator for a long time.
Buxbaum: Can you think of some examples where there was an active effort to really bring together
integrated structures between humanities and science?
Curtz: I think only in particular programs. I taught a couple programs where I thought that was done
probably more than in most programs. The Reflections [of] Nature program that I taught with Rob
Knapp and Hiro Kawasaki and Larry Eickstaedt did informal outdoor physics, [with] a section about
clouds, a section about flow in water, and natural structures and various other topics like that. Hiro
Kawasaki did art about nature, like Hudson River Valley painting, and I did natural history writing, and
Eickstaedt did field biology.
The Perception program that Nancy Murray and [Chuck] Pailthorp and I did that did smell for six
weeks and vision for six weeks and sound for six weeks. We did lab biology stuff about the neurobiology
of perception, and philosophical stuff about the philosophy of perception, and literature about smelling,
11

and anthropological stuff about [Kalui? 00:49:02] sound worlds, and musician stuff about soundscape
composition, humanities stuff of various kinds. It was about those modes of perception.
I think there have been a fair number of programs like those that integrated work for science
students and for humanities students, but I don’t think that the administration, as far as I know, has ever
done anything about saying, “Every year, there has to be a core program which will combine work for
humanities and work for science students,” though there’s been a lot of faculty interest of one kind or
another in creating programs like that, not just the two that I was in.
Buxbaum: From your list of programs of Reflections of Nature onward, those are all solid examples of
integrated structures.
Curtz: Mm-hm.
Buxbaum: On the other side of the equation, can you recall and speak to anything about the more
autonomous structures at the college, and examples of that?
Curtz: More programs were all autonomous structures in the way I was talking about them a minute
ago. Weird and Wondrous, say, didn’t fit into any path of study exactly, except that Jean Mandeberg
thought that there needed to be a program that would have space in it for beginning metalwork
students, and that program would do. It fit into the structure in the sense that Jean was committed to
being able to offer a certain kind of work with her to students at a certain stage in their college careers
as potential art students. But it wasn’t part of some path of study. It wasn’t like “Well, we have to offer
Introduction to Natural Science again this year. Who’s going to teach it?” Which was what the other
kind of path of study or career path involved—a commitment to say to students, “Yes, here’s what
you’re going to be able to do over the next four years. We will offer X every year, we will offer Y every
two years, we will offer some version of C every year.” That’s the other pole, I suppose.
But especially toward the end of my career, where basically there wasn’t an English department
except for me and one and a half other people, I taught some various group contracts—in The Novel, or
Renaissance Studies. They weren’t quite English department courses, but they were pretty much
certainly literature department courses put together in certain kinds of ways.
Just one other thing. There’s a kind of administrative reflection of this, I guess, which is in the
college’s hiring procedures, the question “Who are we going to hire next?” If your specialty area, or
your piece of the territory, has a path of study, then you’re in a much better position to advocate for a
certain set of faculty needs. You could say, “We have to have another chemist, because we are
committed to teaching X every two years, and we don’t have the faculty we need to teach X.”

12

One of the reasons we ended up without an English department, we started out with four
Chaucerians on the faculty—me, [Pete] Sinclair, Peter Elbow and Charlie Teske. Charlie didn’t quite do a
dissertation about Chaucer, but we had three Chaucerians, which was more probably than any other
English department in the country had. And we had a lot of English teachers in the very first years of the
college—a lot of people who had been trained in literature—partly because it’s relatively easy to
integrate literature as a discipline into all sorts of interdisciplinary programs. It’s much easier than to
integrate chemistry, say, or biology, or lots of other things. So I think that was one reason we ended up
[without an English department] because we started out with a lot of English teachers [who] looked like
they would be useful in various ways.
But one of the problems for the humanities about not having a path of study in any discernable
way was that it made it harder to argue for the area’s hiring needs compared to [specialty areas]. So
one of the consequences of that was that we ended up with fewer and fewer English teachers, fewer
faculty in the humanities. You can look at the statistics about . . .
Buxbaum: What would a good, solid foundation in the humanities look like?
Curtz: Well, I wrote a whole position paper about this once. [chuckles]
Buxbaum: I guess I’m interested, in part, you were working on selling something.
Curtz: Yeah, I have a particular notion about what integrates the humanities and the qualitative social
sciences, and it’s the act of interpretation. An interpreter originally was a price fixed etymologically;
somebody who stands between the buyer and the seller and adjusts values. The fundamental
methodological issue that all of those share is what philosophers call your hermeneutic questions. You
have one set of meanings out there that’s the meanings of the agents and one set of meanings that’s
the meanings of the reader, and the interpreter is standing in there between, trying to figure out how
the process of converting the meanings that are embedded in the actions that some anthropologist is
studying, or the dreams that some psychoanalyst is looking at, or the literary text that some critic is
reading. You’re dealing with the author’s intentions, or the dreamer’s intentions, or the poet’s
intentions and the actual text itself, the actual actions, the actual dream record, the actual poem on the
page, and whatever set of meanings you’re bringing to it. And the meanings of the symbol for the
dreamer are not the same necessarily as the meanings of the symbol for the author. The meanings of
the words in the poem are not the same as the meanings of the words in the language, you know, the
historical moment that the critic stands in.
There’s this famous story about Dr. [Samuel] Johnson walking into St. Paul’s with [James]
Boswell and he says, “It’s an awful heap, Boswell,” which meant is was an awesome edifice in 1842, or
13

whenever they had this conversation. That’s a pretty vivid sample, but that’s almost true. So, I think
about interpretation as the central thing that characterizes work in the humanities and work in the
qualitative social sciences, and in humanistic psychology. So, that’s what I thought the center of an
introductory program to the area ought to be.
And then there were a lot of particular skills and a body of theoretical stuff that I thought
students probably needed to know to go on effectively. I just thought it would be a lot easier if you
didn’t have to start over again from scratch with people having some idea about what Freudian theory
was, and what Marxist interpretive theory was, and what new criticism was, and how to do a close
reading of a text. A bunch of things like that. I had quite a list about what I thought this thing ought to
cover.
I couldn’t persuade the area to do this, but Betty Estes and I—now I think maybe I tried to do a
program like this. [Transcriber could not tell whether he changed from Betty Estes and I to only I in this
sentence 00:59:50] I think students actually got credit in one of the early years of the college. The third
year or something, I organized and evening, for-credit thing—I think you could get credit for it—called
On Interpretation, where I got one person from the faculty to come every week and do a talk. They
brought in a particular text from their discipline and they gave a talk about interpreting it. It happened
in Lecture Hall 1 and there were kind of 50 or 60 or 100 students who came and listened to those, and
then there was some work I think people did on the side if they wanted to get credit for it, as opposed
to just coming to the lectures. It was a set of ideas I’d had around for a long time. There were posters
for it, too, I think that I did put up around campus.
I did this program as a set of three one-quarter programs, where you could take the whole
sequence, and they kind of built on each other. There was one called Poetry and Painting, there was
one called . . . I don’t remember what the title was. The first one did art history and painting, and then
the second one was called On Narrative, and it did storytelling and novels and historical texts, and
various other things that are about creating a story. The third one was about interpreting action of one
kind of another.
Partly it was a time in the college’s history where we had a lot of transfer students, and there
were not many things for transfer students to do, so I had a bunch of students were arriving and
couldn’t find anything else to do and took this. It definitely was not the required introduction to the
specialty area. And it wasn’t taught by anybody else, it was just taught by me.
One of my pitches to my colleagues was that by sharing the work for an introductory program
like this, we could reduce our workloads. People could come and teach a little section about what they
14

could teach kind of off the top of their heads, and contribute to this thing that would make everybody’s
workload simpler. They didn’t want to have to teach it every two years.
Buxbaum: I’m going to quickly break here.
Curtz: And I think, just before you turn it off, some of them were opposed to this for reasons of
pedagogical principal of one kind or another. They didn’t believe that there was such a thing as
introductory skills, really. They thought that there was so much that was individual about doing the
humanities that they really didn’t think you could put together a list of what students ought to know in
order to do advanced work. They didn’t think that work in the humanities built on previous work in the
humanities in that kind of way at all. So it wasn’t just that they wanted to be able to do whatever they
felt like whenever they felt like it, but it was some combination of those two things, I think.
Buxbaum: Good. I think I might end up coming back to this a little bit.
Curtz: Sure.
Buxbaum: But a quick break here.
End Part 1 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018
Begin Part 2 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018
Buxbaum: This is Buxbaum and Curtz again for segment number four on July 3. I’m just going to start
out with Thad. Any recollections to plunge in on?
Curtz: I actually thought of a couple of other things about programs, about programs’ social life. I think
it’s perfectly possible to have a program that’s going well in which students are learning a lot, and in
which they’re not having a particularly good time. I think that whether they have a good time or not is a
function of what the social psychologists call group formation. It’s got to do with some set of things, like
student participation in the planning of the program, and their sense of having some kind of ownership
about what happens and what’s going to happen.
Doing student projects is one piece of that, and student presentations at the end of the
program, where you give students some assignment. In Weird and Wondrous, we told students that
they were supposed to study something that was an experience of wonder for them over the course of
the quarter, and that was a piece of their work for the program. They were going to have to do a
presentation about it at the end. The presentation was not supposed to be a regular talk, but a
presentation that tried to give the rest of us some glimpse of what was wondrous of the actual wonder
in this experience.

15

This is also one of the few things in which you can give the students some work which does not
multiply your own work by a factor of 20, which is another desirable thing about it. You assign some
paper, you get 20 papers to read, you do lab reports, you have 20 lab reports to read, the student only
has one paper to write or one—so, you’re continually behind the eight ball more and more. But having
students do a research project and then a presentation at the end is not like that.
Having students help plan the second quarter of the program or the third quarter of the
program is another. Student retreats, I think, are very useful, and I think one of the things that the
college—everybody did—religiously when the college was starting, and I think has become something
that some people still do and other people don’t. Program potlucks on some kind of regular basis,
another thing that involves shifting the personal relationships between the students and the faculty a
little bit, and giving the students some chance to build some community that doesn’t just involve coming
together for classes and going away again. That was what I wanted to add to that.
Buxbaum: Yeah, that’s helpful, in terms of design. Was that something that was regularly built into
programs in your experience?
Curtz: Those things were certainly something that I always did. I think, in the first years of the college,
everybody had program potlucks, and everybody went on retreat. Partly, the faculty got older, at least a
lot of the faculty did, and there got to be less energy for going off and staying at someplace with hard
beds on cots or bunks or something for three days.
Another thing about the demographic shift at the college is that, as you get older, I think the
emotional basis of your relationship to students changes. When I started teaching at Evergreen, I was
29, and my teaching emotionally, I think, was fundamentally funded by my identification with what it
had been like for me to be a student. And also, I wasn’t that different from the students in lots of ways.
When I got to be 45 or 50, that wasn’t functional for me. I don’t think I had that emotional relationship
to the students anymore, and so I had to shift to some kind of emotional basis for my teaching that was
more like parenting, I think, and less like being another student and remembering what it was like to be
a student.
Buxbaum: I want to go back to paths of study just briefly. I think this may be sorting out some of my
own confusion around paths of study more than anything else, so this might not be useful at all to
anybody. [chuckles] But the interviewer’s prerogative, I guess.
Curtz: I’ll be amazed if anybody ever listens to this, so . . . [chuckles]

16

Buxbaum: Yeah, that’s right. It’s the old placing the dollar bill in the thesis routine. [laughter] Maybe
we should give somebody something redeemable here.
Part of my questioning comes from the college is currently going through this paths of study
effort, and it seems to be an investment. There’s some money behind it from a Mellon grant, and we’re
looking at year two in some certainty, in terms of implementation. Was there a point where paths of
study was something that was invented at the college? And do you recall when that was interjected into
the college vocabulary?
Curtz: I don’t know when historically, no. There certainly was a point at which the college—if I had to
guess, I’d guess at the time of our first enrollment crisis probably. But also, I think, you look at the firstyear catalog, they only had to deal with upper-division students who had already done introduction to
the major works someplace else. And there were just 10 programs or something. [chuckles] So I think
probably just the result of progressive experience, it became clear to people that this was an issue for
students. It certainly was an issue for Admissions. Admissions was dealing with students all the time
who said, “How can I study X at Evergreen?” And Academic Advising was dealing with students all the
time who said, “I want to do X, and there’s no way for me to do it next year.”
Buxbaum: Is this just a continuing dialog about paths of study?
Curtz: I think so. I think it’s a structural tension in the college between departmental majors and
interdisciplinary programs. The more I’m teaching in Reflections of Nature, and running off and picking
out a bunch of books that will fit nicely with studying clouds and studying Hudson River Valley painting,
the less I’m doing in the curriculum about teaching Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or the British novel or
whatever.
Buxbaum: I wish I had more and better questions about this, because in part, I don’t know what to do
with this current discussion about paths of study, particularly in the context of Evening and Weekend
Studies program, which is challenging.
From our discussion, and maybe some of my own perceptions just coming into this whole
project, it sounds like some of the most wonderful programs, and very successful programs, came out of
the inspirational process that was driven by a faculty, and was supported and promoted by good
relations with other faculty.
Curtz: I think that’s true. The most memorable programs, I don’t know that students learned more in
those programs than they did in the Introduction to Natural Science when it was well taught, but they’re
more fun to hear about. [laughter] They were more exciting to read about in the catalog probably, but I
17

don’t know that they were more educational. Just different. They were something that you couldn’t do
at some other college. You probably could do the work that Introduction to Natural Science did
anywhere, though maybe not as well.
Buxbaum: There’s another side to this coin. I look forward to promoting some discussions with alumni,
and getting perceptions of students in terms of what was special about their experience.
I want to switch gears a little bit and start working down a list of your experiences at the college.
I wanted to start with writing, in part because we were talking about foundational programs. Writing is
something that we’ve got to work with in every aspect of the curriculum, from my perspective. I could
have probably pulled out a dozen different things about writing, but I selected one that came from . . .
Curtz: . . . Pacific Northwest Writing Consortium. The National Endowment for the Humanities funded
this thing.
Buxbaum: It was 1982 and it looks like a project that you were directly involved in. Can you shed a little
light on what that was about?
Curtz: I don’t remember where the money came from. I suspect that Peter Elbow wrote this grant, and
then he left the college and I ended up inheriting [the responsibility] for it. There was a stretch when I
did a bunch of things about Writing Across the Curriculum, and wrote a few articles for the Washington
State English Teachers Journal, and did some high school in-service work, and went off, maybe on this
grant, and did something in Atlanta at Emory.
But this particular piece of it was modeled on this each one teach one grant that we had, and on
the Finkel workshop stuff that I had been working with. It’s about using these structured workshops for
groups of students to teach concepts in writing, like supporting a thesis and so on. I did a writing project
just kind of for fun, maybe when I was working in core—I spent this quarter studying core programs,
interviewing students, writing workshops for a couple of core programs about the novels that they were
going to do to try to help reduce the faculty’s workload, I think maybe, as part of that.
Anyway, I sat a bunch of students down and interviewed them about papers that the faculty had
written comments on. I just started at the top and I pointed at every mark on the page and said, “Can
you explain to me what that means, and what you’re supposed to do, what the teacher wants you to
do?” The best students could explain maybe a third of the marks, I think, which seemed important.
That’s connected to this issue about, what concepts do they have? When the teacher says, “You need
to support the thesis more,” or, “You need a transition here,” those are concepts about something

18

that’s supposed to happen. If they have an idea about what a transition is at all, it is not necessarily the
same idea that the teacher assumes that they’ve got.
This piece of the grant paired up high school English teachers and college teachers. I think we
visited each other’s classrooms, and talked about teaching issues with each other and wrote these
workshops about concepts. We had a summer institute thing where I kind of talked about this set of
ideas, and we looked at some sample workshops and then we worked together on trying to do these
workshops about using workshops like this to teach writing concepts. I don’t know that anybody ever
used any of these. [chuckles] But that was the idea.
Buxbaum: Any advice about how writing should be integrated into the curriculum at the college?
Curtz: I never had a freshman composition class. At Yale, you just arrived; they assumed you knew how
to write a paper; they assigned you a paper; and then they gave you advice about the paper. I learned
how to write that way, basically, and that’s fundamentally how I’ve always taught writing, too.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sara Huntington—she changed her name, I don’t know
whether that was her name, but when I arrived at the college, that was her name after, I guess, she got
divorced. Anyway, the other Sara in the Library the year that I was doing all this work with core
students, she was teaching in a core program. She had put together this very elegant, very tightly
structured writing curriculum for the program. It had a little, bitty, very focused assignment—a couple a
week—that built progressively on one another. The students in that program thought that the writing
was wonderful. They thought they were learning a ton about writing, and lots of the students in the
other programs I interviewed thought they weren’t learning much of anything about writing, I think.
I worked hard trying to get Sara to give me all of this stuff and distribute it around the college,
and she was pretty reluctant to actually do that. She gave a weekly composition lecture, and the
workshops that she did, the exercises she did, were roughly, I think, based on or inspired by a book
called Ten Lessons in Clarity and Elegance. Something like that. A good book about writing.
There’s a lot of research about college writing which shows pretty definitively, I think, that
students’ writing goes progressively downhill over the course of their college careers; that they have
formal writing instruction in the freshman year, and after that they don’t do very much writing, and
what writing they do does not get any sophisticated feedback or attention by people who care about it
as writing; and that they get worse. And they’re worse by the time they graduate as writers than they
were at the end of their freshman year. So clearly, the standard model is not very satisfactory. You do
need to have writing be a part of the student’s education every year, in an ongoing, sustained way.
19

[Knocking heard at the door]
End Part 2 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018
Begin Part 3 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018
Buxbaum: We’re just picking up here.
Curtz: I was just saying you need ongoing, sustained attention to writing. Actually getting that to
happen is extremely difficult. It’s like what [unintelligible 00:00:25] says. Well, no, it isn’t even like that.
The main being that teaching writing is very labor-intensive. You assign a paper, you get 20 papers back.
It takes a lot of time to read them. It’s the least pleasant part of the job for most English teachers, so
getting faculty who are teaching something else to do it is really difficult.
One solution to this is to have somebody who teaches writing in every program, and they lean
on their fellow faculty to do this work. Maybe that makes it likelier to happen. But faculty have all sorts
of other things that they think it’s important to teach that they’re trying hard to teach students. I think
the college has been very uneven about its capacity to keep doing this.
There are a bunch of things that English teachers have figured out about reducing the time load
of this. The most important one for me, I think, based on this story I told you about interviewing the
people about the marks on their paper is that most teachers make far too many marks on their
students’ papers. I think you would be much better off telling the students, “I’m going to mark up the
first page of your paper, about copyediting issues and stylistic issues. After that, I’m just going to talk
about what you’ve got to say, and my questions about it, and things I thought were really effective and
that kind of stuff. But after the first page, that’s it. But I want you to look at every one of those marks,
just that first page, and if there are any of them that you don’t understand, I want you to ask me about
them.”
Hardly anybody ever asks you. If they don’t understand it, they don’t [ask], so you’ve got to
pitch that to them as persuasively as you can. Then you have to try to make yourself stop at the end of
the first page. Most people who are writing teachers, or who are interested actually even in this part of
teaching writing, spent a great deal of their student life worrying about the marks on their pages and
what they meant, and trying to make them better, so they’re deeply invested in that process. Just
psychologically, it’s awfully difficult for lots of people to stop making marks on the page.
There are a bunch of other things you can do. Professional writing teachers have figured out
rubrics and having students read each other’s papers with a guided correction templates and other

20

things that can significantly reduce the amount of work that it takes. A good Writing Across the
Curriculum program ought partly be devoted, I think, to trying to persuade the rest of the faculty how
important it is that students actually learn this stuff, because it will affect their careers for the rest of
their lives, and partly try to help them learn how to do it as relatively easily and effectively as you could
figure out.
That’s all the thoughts I have about it, really. It takes a sustained, ongoing commitment by the
faculty, and whatever the faculty leadership can do to support that. It’s probably particularly important
at Evergreen because we have this student writing in people’s transcripts.
I suppose one thing that I did in the teaching of writing is that I did a conference with every
student every year about their self-evaluation. And I marked their self-evaluations up, just like I marked
their papers up, and said, “You ought to take this away, and here’s my suggestions about how to fix and
improve it.”
Buxbaum: Do you remember when the Writing Center was first created?
Curtz: No. Not very long after the start of the college, I think. Six or eight years would be my guess, but
I don’t really remember.
Buxbaum: I wondered, in part, how much of the writing aspect in some camps was just delegated to the
Writing Center; that that was the place where students were referred to?
Curtz: I certainly think some faculty tell students, “You really ought to go to the Writing Center because
you need more work with your writing than I can provide.”
The other thing I’d say about the teaching of writing is that certainly creative writing, and I think
maybe writing in general, teaching it is partly a matter of teeny little skills of one kind and another,
teachable skills, and part of it is a matter of psychological counseling. People’s work as writers is as
much a function of their character structures as it is a function of their grammar. It’s about their
willingness to take risks, and their capacity to inhabit other people’s points of view and see what
objections some reader might make to something they take for granted—a whole set of things like that,
which these days, most English teachers care less about grammar and style than anybody else does.
They’ve got very sophisticated linguistic notions about the relativity of grammatical norms to different
cultures, and they don’t believe that those things—they do spend a lot of time trying to teach people
those things because they happen to be very socially important in the culture that we live in, but they
have almost nothing to do with being a good writer in the sense of being able to move an audience, or
explain what really matters to you in a way that will help other people see the point. Those things are a
21

function of your relationship to the material, how brave you are, what kind of risks you’re willing to
take, and a bunch of other psychological things like some of the ones that I just mentioned. That’s a
completely different side of this process, but also really important.
There was some autobiographical exercise—a faculty workshop at some retreat or something—
that I took part in once about making a poster about yourself as a teacher. My poster was this hand
raised in the air like this, along with this quote from Potemkin who says, “What kind of a world do you
want to live and work in? Ask yourself what you need to know to build that world [and] demand that
your teachers teach you that.” [laughter] And the two sides of that are kind of like myself as a teacher,
and my aspirations as a teacher. I was a very good student of the sort where that means I always had
my hand in the air because I thought I had the right answer, and I was hoping the teacher would call on
me.
One of these things that sticks in your memory about your education, my first year in college, or
maybe my second year, I was in this seminar about philosophy in this directed studies program taught
by a guy named Richard Bernstein. Bernstein asked some question about the text we were reading, and
I told him what I’d figured out about what the argument was. He asked, “Well, what’s the argument
here?” And I trotted out the argument and Bernstein said, “Well, yeah. Do you think it’s true or not?”
And I don’t think that anybody had ever asked me that, but it certainly was like the moment in some Zen
session, where the Zen master comes around and whops you with the bamboo. [laughing] It made me
sit up and realize that I hadn’t really been thinking about that much.
Buxbaum: Learning how to think. You did a lot of observation of colleagues, I believe, at the college.
Curtz: Yeah, a fair amount.
Buxbaum: That was a Danforth grant?
Curtz: Yeah, I got paid to do it for a quarter, I think. People volunteered. They said, “I’d like to have a
Danforth visitor.” I wasn’t the only person who did this. I think we had money maybe for doing this
over three years, and somebody different did it each year. Anyway, I did it for, I think, a quarter.
Ten people volunteered. I went and interviewed them about what kind of issues in their
teaching they were interested in thinking about, and then I did observational work. I went and sat in
their classes, looked at the papers they were handing back to students, and did stuff like that depending
on what they wanted to talk about, and offered advice. I had conversations about teaching with them.
It was fun to do.

22

Buxbaum: Yeah, it sounds fun, and it sounds valuable. Did anything emerge out of that that was more
broadly shared in the college, or things that led to institutionalizing?
Curtz: I don’t think so. Part of the deal was that it was supposed to be a private conversation. But also,
if I came away with any general conclusions, I don’t think I remember what they were.
Buxbaum: Very individualized?
Curtz: Yeah, people wanted to work on very particular things.
Buxbaum: I think at one point maybe there was a presumption that faculty would do this for each other
in their programs.
Curtz: Oh, yeah. It was supposed to be part of the faculty evaluation process and programs.
Buxbaum: I assume that that occurred, and then did it change over time?
Curtz: I certainly think visiting each other’s classes changed over time. I think the smaller the programs
got, the more difficult it was to have an interesting faculty seminar. If you have two people having a
conversation is really different than if you have five people. I guess I would hazard—sociologically or
statistically—that the percentage of programs that had serious faculty seminars, discussing the content
of the material that they were going to be teaching, as opposed to business that had to get done about
“When are we going to do what? Who’s going to do X?”—the percentage of programs that had
functioning faculty seminars in that first sense has gradually decreased over the life of the college. But I
don’t have any empirical basis for that really.
Buxbaum: Is it correct that something that has changed in terms of program structures is just simply
the number of faculty that are assigned to a program?
Curtz: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s unquestionably true that there are fewer and fewer big programs,
have been fewer and fewer big programs and fewer and fewer long programs. The first-year catalog,
there was nothing except programs with six faculty and 120 students and year-long.
Buxbaum: Is that how we would appropriately characterize those early years of Evergreen versus what
Evergreen is now? Is that the singular difference?
Curtz: Oh, no. I think there are lots of differences, but that’s certainly one, and I think it’s probably
quite important pedagogically in all sorts of ways. In the program structure like that, it was very easy to
take students off to the Grand Canyon for six weeks as part of the program because they weren’t signed
up to do anything else. If students are taking some Evening and Weekend Studies program, they can’t
do that anymore.
23

But 20 other things have changed, too. Students are working. College is a lot more expensive
than it was. You look at the tuition in the first-year catalog. I was looking for something so I looked at it
between our last conversation and this one. I think tuition for out-of-state students was $400,
something like that. Tuition for in-state students was $163, if I remember correctly. So a lot more
students are working now than they were then. The student body has changed in all sorts of ways. The
number of black students that I had in the course of my Evergreen teaching, ending in 19-whatever-itwas—2005—you probably could count them on the fingers of one hand. That was partly a function of
the sorts of things I was teaching, but it was partly a function of the composition of the college. You
look at the statistics now, we have a third Latino students or something, and 12 or 15 percent black
students, so the students are really different people than they were. There are a lot of other things that
have changed, too, I think.
Buxbaum: I have my own curiosity. Do you remember the origin of DTF, Disappearing Task Force?
Curtz: I think it was already there when I came. It was one of the things the founding faculty had
agreed on, that standing committees were a blight and a waste of time, and produced entrenched
bureaucratic positions and ought to be done away with.
Buxbaum: You were on a number of DTFs, of course. One of the ones I wanted to touch on was Native
American Studies program. We can find this out, but can you place it in time just off the top of your
head?
Curtz: If I had to guess, it was sometime around 1982-85, something like that. The Native American
Studies program was under a fair amount of pressure. There were a lot of questions about whether it
ought to be continued or not, about whether it was doing a satisfactory job. I don’t know exactly how
this happened, but my memory is that Russ Fox asked me to write the report for this DTF, or asked me
to be on the DTF and asked me to write the report, I think because he thought what I said about the
program would lend a certain . . . what? . . . how is it that I want to put this . . . that if I said the program
was okay, it would carry a certain amount of weight; people would feel somewhat confident in my
having done a respectable job and in my judgment.
But the basic question, I think, was, how much autonomy should the Native American faculty
have about running the program the way they wanted to? It was a sort of complicated political or moral
process for me. I went off and interviewed a bunch of people. The report I wrote was mostly an
attempt to explain and provide reasonable justifications for what they were doing and why they wanted

24

to do it. I don’t know whether it had any political effect in supporting the program or not, but that was
what the process was like for me.
I don’t remember anything else about the DTF other than that I ended up writing the report. I
think I’ve ended up writing the reports for most of the DTFs that I’ve been on [laughter] because I’ve
been willing to do it, and people thought I’d probably do a good job. But mostly because I was willing to
do it, and I thought I’d do a good job. [laughing]
Buxbaum: In this particular case, and DTFs, I guess generally, they emerged because of some . . .
Curtz: . . . problem that people think needs to be addressed.
Buxbaum: Do you have any recollection of what precipitated that particular DTF?
Curtz: No.
Buxbaum: So it was really just that you were imposed upon to—
Curtz: I got recruited by Russ [laughter] because he thought I was at least one of the people who could
do what he thought ought to be done.
Buxbaum: Anything changed as a result?
Curtz: Not that I remember. They didn’t close the Native American Studies program, but I have no idea
what part the DTF or the report played in that politically. Russ probably knows, but I certainly don’t.
Buxbaum: Technology was another thing on my laundry list, and the evolution of technology at the
college. A lot has changed. As a matter of fact, monumental changes, from almost a paper world to a
digital world over the years spread of your career.
Curtz: Pretty much.
Buxbaum: Can you say something about that in terms of evolution at the college? You came in, and in
some ways, you were a bit of a troubleshooter for faculty.
Curtz: Yeah, there was a stretch where when the Internet started to be important and usable, and
wasn’t easy to use, when you had to understand how to subscribe to a UNIX listserv, and there was this,
that and the other thing before the Web came in, really. And then even after the Web came in, there
were all sorts of things about—I guess I said [earlier], I thought the college’s technical support for faculty
was really poor, and I set up and wrote how-to things that I sent out to the faculty about doing this, that
or the other thing, and told people, “If there’s something else you’d like to know how to do, send me a
message and I’ll try to help you do it.”

25

I said before there was a stretch when I thought when the college was having admissions
problems, one of the things that I did was look at everything on the Admissions Web site, and there
were all sorts of things I thought could be improved about that. I did a bunch of work trying to harass
people [and] offer people suggestions about those things.
I did this work I told you about, producing some of the stuff that I thought ought to be on the
Web site for Admissions, both the Alumni Writers Project that I started, and this thing with Fred Tabbutt
about studying science at Evergreen that I sent you. I guess I didn’t. That does still exist. If you’re
interested, I’m getting Amy Greene to bundle it up for me and send it to me, so if you’re interested, I
can send that to you and you can see what it’s like.
Buxbaum: Wonderful.
Curtz: One thing led to another in this process. [chuckles] I looked at the current page on Evergreen’s
Web site about studying writing as part of—there’s no link to this thing, the long set of Web pages,
where there’s testimonials by students who studied writing at Evergreen and have published about their
studies at Evergreen. So, if you’re a student cruising the Web and interested in studying writing at
Evergreen, there’s no way that the page about writing sends you to that. It has a picture on it. The one
picture on the page is, I think, Jane Jervis. She looks like a high school teacher in front of the class
chewing out some student who’s been called up to the front of the room. She’s not teaching writing
particularly. She’s about as far as you could get from the image that you’d like to have students have
about working with faculty at Evergreen is like.
It has a list of the writing faculty that’s on the side, which looks like the curriculum vitae in tiny
print at the back of other catalogs. Their names are not linked to the stuff about those people as
persons that’s on the Web site, so if you want to look them up, you have to go to find the faculty
directory somewhere. Then you go to the faculty directory, and half the people in the faculty directory
don’t have any photographs in the faculty directory.
There are a gazillion things like that that are, in my view, bad, that ought to be fixed. It does not
look as if somebody like me goes over these things for each specialty area and provides feedback to the
Admissions people and the Web people about the fundamental tool that the college currently has for
attracting students, and when the college was in this admissions crisis before and I did this work about
studying—I was working with Irwin Zuckerman then. Zuckerman, I think, actually read the 40 pages I
wrote and he said, “Well, you know, this is what a really good organizational consultant would have
done for the college for half a million dollars.”
26

There were a gazillion things like that—little, tiny, to me obvious things that could be improved
about how they were running the Admissions office. The Admissions people did not like having me
produce this report, even though I’d tried to be as polite as I could about things I thought they could do.
They were not happy. They were doing the best they could was their view, and people ought to
appreciate that and leave them alone. So, it’s not easy for the faculty to offer advice to the staff in
general.
Buxbaum: Now, very challenging in terms of the institution.
Curtz: And lots of the staff are not interested in having feedback and advice.
Buxbaum: Has it always been like that for this institution?
Curtz: It’s always varied depending on who the faculty were and who the staff were, and what area you
were talking about, I think. My impression is that the media faculty and the media staff have always
worked together pretty compatibly, because they’re involved in teaching the same students, I think.
The media staff have basically been teaching members of the college because the faculty hadn’t wanted
to do all the technical stuff about teaching people how to use media. So, I think they’ve always built
having the media staff do a lot of that teaching into the structure of their work.
But it’s different when somebody from the English department offers advice to the Web people.
I think it’s not the same relationship at all.
Buxbaum: Yeah, a critically important interface with the public connection with future students.
Curtz: I think obviously. I think it’s the way in which students look at a college these days.
Buxbaum: Right. Over the years, what kind of connections have there been between Admissions and
faculty?
Curtz: Very . . . well, minimal, I think. Except that during one of these enrollment crises, the Admissions
office recruited faculty to go around to do high school visits around the state. There were two or three
years where a bunch of people rode off in vans with the Admissions staff when they were going to
some—when parents came, I gave a little talk about teaching and learning at Evergreen to the
assembled parents at a couple of those visitors’ weeks. I don’t whether they do a special thing where
they invite everybody who’s interested in the college these days or not. But mostly, my sense is the
Admissions office is kind of run as its own world.
Buxbaum: At one point, you spent a quarter reviewing the Admissions’ recruitment efforts. Was that
that same time?
27

Curtz: Yeah, that was the thing I was talking about where I wrote the 40-page report with all the
particular pieces of advice in it.
Buxbaum: Do you happen to remember a date on that?
Curtz: I don’t know what year that was, no.
Buxbaum: I think some of us will be interested in looking at the report if it exists. Maybe that’s [in the
archives]?
Curtz: I suppose it is in the archives somewhere. An awful lot of it was about very particular teeny
things. Like I walked around the hallways and at this school we were visiting, and the only indication
that Evergreen was going to come and be available for students to talk to us was this one dingy little
piece of paper on some bulletin board in the back room. [laughing] We should be doing better about
trying to give students advance warning that there’s a possibility to talk to us. A gazillion things like that.
I don’t remember that there was much in the way of generalizable advice in it.
Buxbaum: Should Evergreen be looking for a particular kind of student?
Curtz: I’m interested in the question of why the minority composition of the campus has changed so
much, and whether that’s a function of a decision about admissions and recruiting, to put a lot more
energy into trying to attract those students to the campus. For an awful lot of the life of the college,
Admissions has been taking whoever they could get to come. [long pause] I’ve had a few students that
Evergreen didn’t work for because it turned out that they really needed grades. They really to have
some sense about exactly how well they were doing compared to everybody else—mostly about how
they were doing better than everybody else.
I don’t think the college works very well for people who have—outside the sciences—a really
clear sense about what you want to do. If you want to become, say, a mechanical engineer, like [Molly?
00:34:41], Evergreen isn’t a good place to do that. She eventually went back to the U[W] and did a
second major in energy stuff; redid a bunch of stuff that she’d done. She graduated from Energy
Systems. She got a job doing energy modeling, but then she wanted to become a respectable
professional engineer, so she went back to the UW and did a year and a half or two years at the U in
order to graduate with an actual engineering degree and take the exam and so on. So, if you knew that
you wanted to do that before you started, Evergreen probably isn’t a good place for you to do that.
The general things that people say about the college, about how it’s good for self-motivated
students and it’s good for students who have a lot of self-discipline and so on, I take with a grain of salt

28

myself. I guess it goes back to what I said a while ago about having so much more sense about this
particular student and this particular situation and this particular program that I don’t have much sense
about sociological generalizations about the student body. I just don’t think about them that way.
You know, the deans read your portfolio every five years, and Barbara Smith once said—when
I’m writing student evaluations, I try to have a first sentence that’s a summary of the whole thing, just in
case that’s all people want to read. Barbara Smith said, “I notice that you say students are smart very
frequently in those first sentences.”
Certainly, being the sort of student I am, that’s one of the things I value, and I think in every
college, the smarter the students are, the better, from my point of view. I suppose that depends partly
on your political and cultural and moral commitments. There may be other people on the faculty who
think, I don’t care how smart they are at all. I just want to help get them from where they are to being
better educated whoever they are. I don’t think that I’ve tended to play favorites particularly, but smart
students are more interesting to work with than students who aren’t too smart. Students who are
engaged and are taking their education seriously and working hard are better than students who aren’t
doing those things. So the college should try to find and admit them; try to find people like that and
persuade them to come.
I said a while ago that I thought that the students who had done something else for a few years
in the first years of the college and then come back to school were often particularly interesting and
competent students who got a lot out of their educations here, who were better able to take advantage
of the opportunities that Evergreen offered.
Somebody like [Charlie Gustafson? 00:38:23], who arrived knowing that he wanted to make
movies and came to Evergreen basically because Evergreen had fabulous media equipment that he
would be able to use, and he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on anywhere else—wouldn’t be able to
afford—but he could use Evergreen’s 16mm camera and stuff if he could get enough people to sponsor
him in individual contracts to make a whole movie. He had a really clear sense of what he wanted to do.
He was a really smart and interesting and talented person, and very persuasive, and he managed to—
after his first year, I think he just did individual contracts at the college and made that movie. That was
his education.
Buxbaum: Is that something that the college should sell, if you will? Is that a pathway?
Curtz: Yeah, I think it’s fine for—I don’t know that there are very many students who are capable of
doing a huge project like that in an ongoing way, but I certainly think that the opportunity to do
29

advanced individual work of your own is an important thing that the college offers. It’s one of the many
things that few places offered when the college started, and that almost everybody offers now.
Buxbaum: Individualized study?
Curtz: Yeah, individual contracts. I said in one of our previous sections that one of Evergreen’s
structural issues, I suppose, is that there are a bunch of things that Evergreen has always done that
nobody else was doing when we started out, and now everybody does them—internships,
interdisciplinary programs, individual contracts—so that means there are a lot of other places you can
go that are advertising basically the same opportunities.
Buxbaum: Do you think now that there are some specific, unique things that Evergreen is that other
colleges are not?
Curtz: I think that Evergreen still offers a fair number of team-taught, full-time, interdisciplinary
experiences, and I don’t think there are many places that do that. There’s hardly anybody that does
narrative evaluations anymore. Those programs offer opportunities to take the whole program off
somewhere for three weeks together that you can’t do at a regular college at all because everybody has
three other classes they have to be there for.
For the right students, Evergreen offers a possibility for a really intense, sustained study of one
particular subject, like the year-long France program in French. It does Haiti and France and French
history and culture and literature and French language, and then you can go to France. You can’t do
that in most places. You can take one or two French classes a year.
You can do wacky, interesting and hopefully good programs at Evergreen—like Weird and
Wondrous—that you can’t do anywhere else. You can do a lot more interdisciplinary work of more
adventurous and interesting kinds at Evergreen than you can at most of the places that advertise
interdisciplinary studies. We have much more accumulative experience about how to do it, and we do it
a lot more seriously. I guess there are places that have little, bitty learning community experiments,
where you can do something in a learning community, but there isn’t any place where you can do a lot
in a learning community, as far as I know.
Buxbaum: Looking retrospectively at your time at Evergreen and where you’re sitting now, do you have
recommendations on what the college should invest in and do more of?
Curtz: Well, I don’t think the college should invest in distance learning. I do not think that’s a wave of
the future that is a desirable one. Massive online learning groups, Moogs or whatever they’re called

30

[does he mean MOOCs, massive online open courses? 00:44:06], I don’t have . . . well, I think the college
should have a Chinese studies program. So much of this depends on the faculty you have and what
they’re interested in doing. I suppose if the college suddenly had a burst of resources, it could hire three
or four people in different disciplines who wanted to teach a Chinese studies specialty area together,
but it doesn’t have those resources at the moment.
But I’m not like one of the people in 1972 who said, “Self-paced learning is the wave of the
future.” Or, “Nobody in America does internships. This is an integrated piece of undergraduate
education, and that’s really a great idea. We’re going to do that at this college.” Or, “Coordinated
studies is what American education needs to reinvigorate and transform itself and become politically
relevant.” I don’t have a great idea like that to offer.
The college ought to try to keep doing better at what it does. It’s kind of like doing the dishes.
It’s not like you can do something and fix it permanently. It’s a matter of continual, ongoing repair with
the tools falling apart. [laughing] [T. S.?] Eliot says someplace that he spent years trying to figure out
the right way to say something—how to make it possible to say something—only to discover that when
you get to that, it turns out there’s something new that you want to say. It’s some process like that. It’s
not like some [unintelligible 00:46:48] college is going to arrive at some perfect state. And faculty keep
retiring, new faculty keep arriving.
This is not a new idea, but I didn’t know anything about what was going on at the college the
last two years, except what appeared in the faculty e-mail list and what was in the newspapers. There
isn’t anybody who’s currently teaching at the college that I talk to much at all. I talk to [Lester last name
and spelling? 00:47:51], but he’s not really centrally involved in the college. I thought the way that
faculty talked to each other in the course of that was really disheartening. So, whatever the college can
do about supporting and building civic, collegial, engaged, significant, sustained working relationships
among its members would be good. Everybody, I think, would agree to that. It’s doing it that’s the hard
part.
Just to go back to something I said at the very beginning, my notion about what being an
experimental college or an innovative college or a progressive college is, is basically Dewey-ite. The
central thing absolutely is this thing, which is kind of modeled on the scientific process. It’s a matter of
doing things, acting and then playing reflective attention to what you’ve done, and assessing it and
modifying your action going forward on the basis of that. But that’s what “experiment” means. The
more the college could keep that in mind, and improve its capacities for reflective feedback, the better
31

off it would be. I think that’s also very hard to do, but I think that ought to be the center of what faculty
leadership and administration are trying to figure out.
I guess I said at the very beginning that one of the things I thought the college had never done
well was learning from its history; that all these program histories and these oral interviews and these
DTF reports basically go into the dark, as far as I can see. They’re never consulted again. There’s no
ongoing, progressive, accumulative process that says, “You know, we talked about this five years age
and 10 years ago, and here’s the various conclusions that people came to about it, and here’s what
we’ve tried since then, and here is where we could begin if we want to try to move forward on the basis
of that, instead of starting from scratch, just trying to solve our problems.”
Buxbaum: Yeah. I want to try to shift meaningfully from what you’re talking about now to the MiT
[Masters in Teaching] program. You played a role in starting the MiT program. Can you describe that a
little bit?
Curtz: I taught with Don Finkel in this program, Development: The Aim of Education, and before that in
this—oh, there’s one other interesting things about programs that I’ll just stick in here.
Buxbaum: Yes, please.
Curtz: Betty Estes and Don and I and maybe Irwin were scheduled to teach this program called Darwin,
Marx and Freud. At that point, the college had what I think was a very useful process called the “trial
balloon,” where every year they put up all the ideas the faculty had about what they might teach the
next year, and collected feedback from students. It covered the walls in the Library lobby, and there
was a week or something when students could go look at stuff and make suggestions and ask questions.
Hardly anybody said they wanted to take Darwin, Marx and Freud, which was a problem for us.
[chuckles]
So we scratched our heads. We looked at the feedback. There were all sorts of people who
said, “There’s nothing in the curriculum about education.” So we scratched our heads and we renamed
this program. We called it Teaching in the 20th Century instead—how you would teach if you believed
Darwin, how you would teach if you believed Marx, how you’d teach if you believed Freud, how you’d
teach if you did Piaget if you believed Piaget.
We taught basically the same texts that we would have taught in Darwin, Marx and Freud, but
there was a huge waiting list to get into this program. It was sort of welding this stuff to something that
students were personally interested in as a career, and that gave us opportunities. There were a lot of
teaching exercises, people designing curriculum. A third of the program did Finkel workshops based on
32

our reading in Marx, and had the rest of the program take those workshops, and then we did
internships. It was a dramatic improvement, I think, in the quality of the program in general.
But the most interesting thing was just that you could reframe the same texts pretty much
exactly, in terms of some different idea that was better connected to students’ perceived interests,
students’ actual interests. It surprised us a lot that it made such a huge difference, and I thought it was
a very interesting, provocative lesson for thinking about program planning.
To go back to where we were, the MiT program. Don and I had taught these two programs.
Don and I had done this summer each one teach one thing where I’d studied Piaget with him. This was
different from the Danforth visiting thing. You could pair up with some other faculty member and
they’d teach you about some subject that they were interested in—that they knew about and you were
interested in—and you’d teach them about something from your disciplinary background.
Buxbaum: Just to clarify that. That exchange—the each one teach one—what happened during the
program?
Curtz: No, in the summertime.
Buxbaum: Oh, I see.
Curtz: We got a summer grant funding to do this.
Buxbaum: Okay, I’m glad I clarified that. I think other people understand that.
Curtz: It wasn’t about teaching at all, as opposed to the Danforth thing. It was about I wanted to learn
more about Piaget, and developmental psychology. Don wanted to learn more about something I knew
about, modern poetry or British novels or something, I don’t remember what it was.
Buxbaum: And the intended outcome was to further coordinated studies.
Curtz: Yeah, broaden your disciplinary, expand your capacity to teach something else that you were
interested in knowing more about.
Buxbaum: Yeah, and perhaps relationship building, too, amongst the faculty.
Curtz: Certainly. Anyway, I’d done a bunch of work with Don. There was this teacher education
program on campus, where we had some arrangement with WSU or Western or something, where they
taught their teacher education program on campus for a few years.
Then Evergreen started its own program. Don and a couple of visiting faculty from wherever it
was that had been doing this teacher education stuff were the faculty for that first two-year cohort.

33

And then I inherited this program. It was part of what was going on in this applied social theory area
that Don and I and a few other people had set up. The MiT program was originally going to be part of
that. But then, it was a graduate program.
So I and . . . I guess it must have been Sherry Walton and Yvonne Peterson, I guess it was the
next year. So we were the faculty, I’m pretty sure, for the second cohort of that thing. We tried to
redo—they were both brand new, and so I kind of . . . I thought the structure of the MiT program was
going to be what Don and Helen [last name?] and [Sy? Last name and spelling 00:57:23] had worked out.
Obviously, they had other ideas and interests and thoughts about what students needed to learn to be
teachers, and how they ought to learn it. So, we did some kind of combination of the things that they
brought, and this set of ideas and structures that Don and Sy and Helen had worked out. Then the
second-year students did student teaching and some classwork—two student teaching experiences and
an academic quarter in the middle. The MiT program, I don’t think, has much of any relationship to
Don’s originally notions about what made sense as an education for people who wanted to be teachers.
Buxbaum: Can you share a little bit about what that was, and what was different about what you, Don
and Helen were bringing to the table?
Curtz: Basically it was Development: The Aim of Education. It was an integrated view based in
developmental psychology that integrated Dewey-ite ideas about progressive education, moral
development theory of Piaget, Erikson, [Lawrence] Kohlberg and those people, with a political
understanding about American democracy, and what functions progressive politics—progressive social
work of all kinds, including education—ought to provide in a functioning democracy. If you’ve never
read this article, this is really great article, the Development: The Aim of Education article. It’s probably
on the Web now, Kohlberg and [Rochelle] Mayer. I’ll try to send you a link to it.
Buxbaum: Good. Just in summary, what was the counterpoint? What was really being proposed that
was different?
Curtz: There was a lot of stuff that Sherry was interested in that fit perfectly well with this. Basically,
she was committed to this kind of framework. Do you know her? I guess she’s retired now. She’s
interested in the cycle linguistics of reading, and there’s this whole body of research called cycle
linguistic reading theory, which is basically Piagetian. It’s founded on what’s called “errors analysis.”
You ask kids to read you a text, and then you look at all of the discrepancies, what are called “miscues.”
They aren’t errors exactly, they are places where the students reads something other than what’s on the
page. And by studying those, you can get a clear sense of the cognitive frameworks that they’re
34

applying to the task of making sense out of text. There are three ways that human beings do that—
phonetics, meaning and syntax. So you can see, by the ways in which they misread the text, you can
what cognitive structures they’re employing.
This fits with a lot of Piagetian stuff about how learning takes place. And Sherry had a huge
amount of experience actually teaching people in classrooms how to teach, and I had not, except a lot of
experience teaching college students. So, it was partly a matter of integrating that stuff; it was partly a
matter of integrating various things about the stuff that the program was supposed to cover for the
state certification requirements—you have to have all sorts of stuff about this, that and the other thing
as part of the program—so that all had to be faded in, too. But the basic intellectual—and Yvonne
basically had a lot of experience working with Native American students, so she had a different set of
ideas about what we needed to do and what we needed to cover, and what white students who were
going to teach Native American, or students from other cultures in general, needed to know about.
So I did a lot of work going off and trying to find things that I thought would fit with the set of
ideas that were going to be central to the program, and also fit with the things that Yvonne and Sherry
wanted to have students working on.
Then, different faculty kept getting hired and they all had their own notions about what ought
to happen. There was a long stretch where I thought the program was significantly different in every
cohort, and significantly better or worse taught depending on which three faculty ended up getting
together and deciding they were going to teach it. I don’t know what it’s like now at all. I’m pretty sure
that there’s very little of Don’s vision of what it ought to be and what it would make sense to do.
Buxbaum: Yeah. Backtracking a little bit, but I’m interested in the connection between your work on
applied social theory and the MiT program. Maybe simply, can you share a little bit about what that was
about in terms of [unintelligible 01:03:56]?
Curtz: There was some stretch in which the college had this rethinking of the specialty areas. I suppose
we were in an enrollment crisis of some kind or other, one of the many. There were these various
things that seemed like ought to be taught, so Don and I and some other people proposed—basically
Don and I proposed—this idea about a new specialty areas that might bring a bunch of this together—
education programs, mass communications programs, counseling programs of a certain kind.
We advertised it and got enough response for enough faculty to put together this little specialty
area. But it only lasted for three or four years, I think. The various people who had said they were

35

interested in it—Susie Strasser left, I think, to teach somewhere else, and one thing and another
happened.
I taught Mass Communications and Social Reality for several years as a result of signing on to
help do this stuff. I learned a bunch of stuff about journalism and video production and stuff; ran
around and educated myself enough to be a mass communications professor, respectively. [chuckles]
Buxbaum: For me, it sounds like that’s one of the great opportunities at Evergreen. If you are a
continuing faculty, you’re in a good position to be, I don’t know if entrepreneurial is the right word, but
you can build things, a path of study, and recruit others, and run with stuff for a while, see how it works.
And if you’re really good, you can improve, reflect and fine-tune and try again.
Curtz: Try again. One of the other things about learning from experience is I proposed—especially
when faculty were complaining bitterly about the workload one way and another—I proposed a number
of times that the college ought to re-offer programs that have been enormously popular and really well
done in the past; that that would be an easy way to improve student retention, reduce faculty workload.
But most of the faculty have shown very little interest in doing that.
Buxbaum: I have a couple of transcripts that are coming back to us to read, and I’m imaging, after
we’ve had a chance to review that, if we both think it’s a good idea, to reconvene and do another
session, and maybe fill in some of the gaps, or maybe there will be other things that will emerge. But at
this stage, is there anything else you want to mention or talk about—even if it’s a laundry list of things?
Curtz: Not that occurs to me. It was a wonderful place for me to teach, I suppose I said at some point,
compared to teaching freshman composition and introduction to Chaucer and advanced Chaucer.
Buxbaum: I think actually if I recall, that reflection, I think you said that if the college had closed, you
might not have continued teaching.
Curtz: I’m not sure if I could have got a job if the college closed, but I don’t at all know that I would have
wanted to go off somewhere. If I could have found another college that was sort of like Evergreen,
where I could do this sort of thing, yeah. But I wasn’t really prepared. After 15 years at Evergreen, I
wasn’t prepared to be a professional Chaucerian in and English department anymore.
Buxbaum: I took it in part—and maybe I’m not correct in this—that there were conditions that you
found agreeable about teaching, specific conditions. And if you couldn’t get those conditions met, it
was sort of “Why do it?”
Curtz: I think that’s right.
36

Buxbaum: Is it worth saying something about summarizing what those conditions are that might
characterize your particular satisfaction in being at Evergreen?
Curtz: One of the reasons I didn’t become a lawyer was that after six months in law school, I thought
that I pretty much learned all the ideas that there were to learn in the law, and that being a lawyer was
going to consist of looking up references and applying them to the same ideas over and over again, and
that seemed pretty dull to me. Whereas I thought if I went off and studied English literature, there
would always be new books for me to read. So, Evergreen was nice because there were always
interesting new books to hunt down and read, and talk with people about.
I really liked the opportunity to work with particular students for a long time and get to know
them, and offer them advice and see what happened to them. I liked team teaching, and I liked seeing
other people teach, and working as part of a collaborative group to try to figure out what to do next,
and what to do about Jane, and all that kind of stuff. I liked being in the Pacific Northwest. [chuckles]
But that wasn’t terribly important. I think those are the big three things.
I liked being able to be entrepreneurial, to teach what I thought would be interesting to teach
with who I thought it would be interesting to teach with the next time around, and not being inside
some structure where people said, “Well, you’re the Chaucerian. You can’t really teach Dickens,
because that’s the Victorian literature guy’s territory.”
Buxbaum: Good.
Curtz: Just to go back to one of the things I said about the two very different sides of teaching reading,
about grammar at one end and being able to say something that matters on the other end. This is true
about reading, too, I think, and about people’s college educations in general. Most people are never
going to—after 10 years, eight years—remember any of the things that they read and talked about in
college, except in the most general way. They’re going to remember something about The Odyssey, and
have some images from that that they carry with them forever, and some little bits of poems maybe.
But the particular content is a means to something else, which is you want people to emerge from a
college experience caring about reading, and liking to do it, and having some capacity to think about
what they read in certain kinds of ways, and have interesting conversations with other people about it.
So, the measure of a good college is how much it helps people learn how to do that, and I think
Evergreen is better than a lot of colleges about helping students learn that kind of thing. Now, I’m
sounding like my colleagues in the humanities who say, “The sequencing of things doesn’t really matter
that much.” There’s some truth to that, too. Certainly, from one point of view, the only thing that
37

matters in your education is your relations with a few teachers. That was certainly true about my
education. I did a lot of work about Plato, as well as some work about Freud, and I certainly believe that
education us an erotic process, in the sense that it’s about falling in love with your teachers.
Socrates says someplace that it’s not exactly about falling in love with your teachers. That’s this
thing that’s called Himeros in Greek, where you’re sort of stuck on the teacher, so there’s these students
of Socrates who, in the dialogues, were kind of walking around wearing sandals like Socrates [laughing]
and talking like Socrates. That’s not so good. You’re supposed to fall in love with the true and the
beautiful as it manifests itself through the teacher. That’s a good place to stop.
Buxbaum: Good place. We’ll let things percolate. Thank you.
End Part 3 of 3 of Thad Curtz on July 3, 2018

38


Thad Curtz
Interviewed by Stephen Buxbaum
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 8, 2018
Buxbaum: Good morning. This is Wednesday, August 8, 2018. I am with Thad Curtz for our third
interview session.
Curtz: I was thinking about this question that you sent me, in the way of wrap-up, about stories about
faculty. I didn’t think I had any particular stories about faculty that seemed as if they had any general
lessons of interest about the college. But there are a few things that have stuck in my head about the
people I worked with that mattered to me that I thought maybe I’d talk about.
Mark Levinsky, I think, [was] a difficult teacher for lots of students. My impression is that with
Mark, you either thought he was wonderful or he was terrible for you as a writing teacher. Mark told
me once about these conferences—his plan for writing conferences with students—which was you read
their writing, you pick out the one thing—just one thing, whatever you think is the most important thing
for them to change, the worst thing about their writing, the thing they have to do something about if
they’re going to get any better—and then you just go for the jugular about that. [chuckles] You rub
their noses in it and you hammer on them about it. Because otherwise, if you try to talk about
everything, it will just all go right by them. It’s really difficult to make an impression, I think Mark
thought, about anything like this. I taught writing, and I ended up with quite a few students who had
been writing students of Mark’s one way and another, and they either thought Mark was great, or he
practically ruined them as writers, they were so shell-shocked as a result of the experience and they’d
hated it so much.
But Mark was, I think, one of the most creative teachers that I’ve ever worked with, in the sense
of having interesting, ingenious ideas about how to get at the material. I strongly suspect that this idea
in the Western Civ program that I did with Mark [where] when we got to the third quarter, we wanted
to do something about women in America. We looked at all these books and they were about women
who had committed suicide, or artists. None of them seemed like a very good fit for our students trying
to think about women’s lives in America. And I’m pretty sure it was Mark who came up with this idea
about “We’ll have them study their mothers.” As a project for the quarter, they’ll interview their
mothers, and I think that was pretty typical of the sorts of things that Mark dreamed up to do.

1

He cared enormously about clarity. He’d get up on the board and he’d draw all these
diagrams—boxes—and things were inside the box or they were outside the box. That was it.
The thing that actually started me thinking that I was going to talk about is my first year teaching
with Mark, or maybe the second year. Anyway, we had this kind of term paper project for students, and
we went to great lengths to tell them that . . . I don’t even remember what the topic was, but the big
thing about it was that it was not supposed to be a standard term paper that regurgitated what various
sources had said, and more or less plagiarized or quoted at length—So-and-So says this, and So-and-So
says that and So-and-So says the other thing.
Various students did better or worse about this, but I got one student who did exactly what we
had said they weren’t supposed to do. I think most of what he turned in had been pasted out of
encyclopedias. I was trying to figure out what to do about this student, and Mark said, “Don’t bitch at
him about it. Just say, ‘So, you’ve got a start here, but it’s not done yet. You still have to do A, B, C and
D. You can have another month to work on it and bring it back then and we’ll talk about it.’” I thought
that was very smart.
Other people . . . Marilyn Frasca, who I think has been an enormously important teacher for lots
and lots of art students. [When] Marilyn arrived at the college, Peter Elbow and I had basically already
planned Self-Exploration Through Autobiography, which we were going to teach. Marilyn was arriving
as a new faculty member. She’d been on the East Coast, in New Hampshire or wherever she was living
then for the whole summer. She got [here]. We’d ordered all these books. We had our first meeting,
and we talked for a while and Marilyn said, “I can’t do that.” [laughter] I think Peter and I sat up
straight. We were not expecting anybody to say that. Maybe it was Words, Sounds and Images that we
were teaching. I think it probably was. So, we kind of scrambled and figured out how to make things fit
with things that Marilyn thought she wanted to do, and could do.
The important thing that sticks in my head about Marilyn’s work as a teacher really is—I
remember having this little conversation with her once where she said, “The trouble with most student
art shows is you go to see the art show and everybody’s pictures look like the teacher’s.” I don’t know
whether it just started with her, but I think that one of the ongoing commitments and leitmotifs maybe
of the art programs at Evergreen has been helping students figure out how to do their own work instead
of doing the teacher’s work, or doing the work that the teacher thinks they ought to be doing.
Coming back from Seattle, we stop at the UW-Tacoma. We’ve got 15 minutes or something
between the time we get off the Seattle bus and the time the bus to Olympia arrives. Every week, we go
up to one of the buildings to go to the bathroom, and the last several years there’s been a little student
2

art show in the corridor there. Looking at those pictures, it’s just striking how much better the work
that you see at end-of-the-year shows from Evergreen programs in art is than what you see there.
Who else? [chuckles] Byron Youtz I only knew a little bit. A really terrific person, I think, but he
was an extremely good person in some way that I guess is probably kind of complicated. But I think
somebody told me about Byron saying at some point, “My duty, and therefore my inclination, my
responsibility and therefore my desire, is to do X.” Kant says that this is only the case for angels. For
most people, morality is doing what you don’t want to do, and the number [of thoughts? 00:08:58] it’s
supposed to be only the angels for whom desire and obligation match up perfectly. Anyway, I think
that’s pretty typical of what sort of person Byron was. I sat at lunch with Bryon once and watched him.
He had this lunch, which I assume Bernice had packed for him. There was a pear which was brown, and
Byron ate the whole thing. [laughing] So that made me think maybe I didn’t want to be quite that good.
Who else? I guess one way of thinking about the frame for this is, what should the college be
looking for when it thinks about who to hire? I think my impulse about this, given the sort of person I
am, is that the college ought to hire people who have been very good at being regular academics, and
are good at doing something else, too. With all due respect, one of my long-term structural concerns
about the Evening and Weekend Studies program has been it drastically reduced the pool of people
from which we hired. Instead of hiring people from all across the country, we hired whoever was
around in Olympia. Sometimes that’s worked out really well, but over time, gradually those people have
ended up becoming the regular faculty. Statistically speaking, my personal view is that the college
probably would have done better if it could have figured out some way, if we had to have evening, if we
had to have courses, figuring out some way to have faculty that we’d hired in national searches, who
were regular, full-time faculty from the beginning, would have served the college better.
What was that a digression from? Hmm. Byron. Peter.
Buxbaum: You were saying that this might be about the question of how the college would go about
hiring people.
Curtz: Yeah. Other things I learned things from. I learned a lot from Peter Elbow about teaching
writing. Fundamentally, this idea, which was what made Peter famous, about make a mess and then fix
it up afterwards. Separate your creative self from your editing self, instead of trying to do them both at
the same time. That was very useful for me, because I spent most of my time in college writing on a
little, tiny Olivetti typewriter before there was correction fluid. I guess correction fluid had come in, but
I would write half a sentence and then I’d have to roll the paper out of the typewriter and erase

3

something, and roll it back in and try to get it lined up and corrected. So, I was exactly the opposite of
the kind of writer that Peter thought would be a useful and effective kind of writer to be.
Peter was a perfect example. Peter was somebody who had been, I think, an excellent student,
and also a bad boy at the same time, an altar boy who had gone bad, and took a kind of, I think, delight
in publicly advocating for breaking the rules. I remember once his saying that it was really odd for him
to come to Evergreen because, in all of his previous life as an academic, he’d been the radical, the wildeyed person in the community, and he came to Evergreen and all of a sudden, he was conservative!
[laughing]
Anybody else? Yeah, Rob Knapp. I have an image that sticks, the picture that I like the best of
Rob is he’s standing in front of his blackboard with a lot of equations and stuff written on it, and he’s
scratching his head quizzically, sort of looking puzzled. I think he, more than anybody else I taught with,
has a kind of gift as a master of ceremonies, as a host. He’s really terrific, just the sort of person he is, at
making everybody in the program feel as if they’re at home and they’re having a good time. He makes
things hospitable. Lots of faculty, I think, do not have that gift, and I think probably if you’re going to
run full-time programs, it’s an important factor. It’s important to have somebody, preferably the
coordinator, but somebody is going to fill that job anyway, who can do that.
Jean Mandeberg, another very creative person, especially about, I think maybe . . . I don’t know
if better than anybody I ever worked with, but certainly extremely good at figuring out how to come up
with assignments which would work for those students that she was basically committed to teaching—
the studio art students—and would also be intimately and usefully connected to the themes that we
were working on. So, in the Weird and Wonderous programs, everybody did all of this kind of
theoretical reading, and literature reading, and psychology, and social anthropology and various other
things about the experience of wonder the experience of weirdness, and everybody did studio art
projects. There were six weeks about travel, and six weeks about monsters, and six weeks about
dreaming. So, four themes. Six weeks about magicians. Sometimes I had ideas, too, but basically Jean
came up with the ideas for the studio art projects.
So, for the travel thing, students had to make an amulet—one of these things that you wear
around your neck to protect you from evil spirits while you’re traveling—a personal amulet. There was
some exercise about creating a map. They had to do a passport for themselves. I thought they were
fabulous assignments, because they worked for the studio art students, and they also made everybody
think in personal and interesting and educational ways about the other material that we were working
on.
4

That’s my short list, I think. Don Finkel was a friend of mine for a long time. We became
estranged at some point, but anyway, I suppose he’s the person who I think about as being the most like
me on the faculty. We were philosophy students at Yale together, and he was an extremely good
student, and very good at figuring out how to tie all sorts of things together; to bring together, in his
case, this developmental psychology stuff that he had worked on, and Dewey and Marx. It was really
fun to work with him.
It’s just like the students, you know. It’s very nice to work with people who are kind of
basically—it’s sort of like marriage, too, I suppose—it’s nice to work with people who are like you, and
sometimes it’s nice to work with people who are really different from you. [chuckles] The people who
are sort of like you are not so interesting maybe.
So, that’s my short list.
Buxbaum: Good. For the good of the order, anything else at this point?
Curtz: I don’t think so.
Buxbaum: Okay. Let’s call it a wrap.

5



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

CurtzThad_20180629_Transcript_Part1.pdf

CurtzThad_20180731_Trancript_Part2.pdf

CurtzThad_20180808_Transcript_Part3.pdf