Susan Fiksdal Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

FiksdalSusan

Title

Susan Fiksdal Oral History Interview

Date

12 March 2019

28 May 2019

Creator

Susan Fiksdal

Contributor

Nancy Taylor

extracted text

Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 12, 2019
Part 1
Final
Taylor: I think we’re on. This is Nancy Taylor. I’m at Susan Fiksdal’s house in Olympia. It’s March 12,
2019. Let’s start with your life before the college, things what you want to say about your growing up
and your parents, and the fact that the college was opening in your backyard.
Fiksdal: Yes, I’m from Olympia. Well, I started my elementary school in Seattle, but my father was the
administrator for Bert Cole, who was the Department of Natural Resources Commissioner. When he got
that job, we moved here and built a house out on Cooper Point.
Both my parents had bachelor’s degrees. They were very involved in the community, and all
their friends were very involved in the community. They were starting everything. One of my mother’s
friends founded Head Start. One of her other friends started the Farmers Market. They were also active
Democrats, so that was another way that they knew people, and through their church as well. They
called themselves volunteers, but in fact, they were activists in the community. My mother developed
the certification for childcare workers and helped found the Childcare Action Council. My father was a
“state democrat” and president of the senior lobby.
There was never any question about whether we would go to college. It seemed to us that it
was just the next step. The only difficulty I had was I was the oldest of four, and my mother didn’t work,
so we had, I guess, limited income. Well, I felt we had limited income because I worked at the library,
after school and on weekends, to have some spending money, and even to buy myself some clothes and
shoes and things. I really knew the Dewey Decimal System. [laughing]
I wanted to go to college at Willamette, which is in Salem, Oregon. I went for a visit there and I
was just enthralled. But we just couldn’t afford it, so I went to Western—which was, at that time,
Western Washington State College—in Bellingham. It’s now a university. I went there because they
didn’t have sororities or fraternities, and I just didn’t want to deal with all that. It was also small, 5,000
students at the time.
When I was there, I was taking French, because I enjoyed it. One day, we had to declare a
major—I guess it’s at the end of your sophomore year—so I just added up, if I kept taking French, what
1

would happen. I realized I would have a degree in French if I only just continued to take five credits a
quarter. And I did like biology, so I had to really think about whether I wanted to do that instead. But I
decided on French.
Then I decided that if I was going to do French, I had to go abroad. Western at the time didn’t
have any exchange program or anything. We had these French professors—men—who came to the
college to teach. All my faculty were men. They gave me some ideas of places I might want to go. So, I
devised my own year abroad and applied to three universities.
Taylor: This was in the ‘60s?
Fiksdal: This was in ’67-68 is when I did that. So I went for the summer first to two programs in Pau,
which is near the Pyrenees, and in Tours, which has the best accent.
Then I went to Aix en Provence for the school year. What I did, I enrolled in this program—well,
I tested into it—where people could come from all over the world—of course, most were from the
former French colonies—to get a certificate. With the certificate, you could teach French anywhere in
the world. The French system is so different. They wait until the end of the year to test you, so you
have no tests whatsoever until the end of the year, and then you either pass or fail. This was extremely
scary to me.
What happened was I, for the first time ever, about three months into my study suddenly began
to love studying. I loved everything about it. We were doing this civilization program, so there was
history and literature and linguistics. We learned phonetics. We learned political science. We learned
everything in French.
Taylor: And this was in Aix en Provence?
Fiksdal: In Aix en Provence. It was a branch of the University of Marseille. The professors teaching us
were some of the greatest researchers. Just a few years later, they became very famous, like Georges
Duby, an amazing medieval French historian. They wanted to teach foreigners because they believed
that they should spread French culture everywhere in the world.
It was the ‘60s, and it was just like here. There was great foment in the educational system.
May ’68, I was in France. I wasn’t in Paris, but this big student revolution was going on everywhere. I
have lots of stories about that.
The one thing that I really remember, and it was so surprising because life was very hierarchical
in France. Well, I think here, too, really, in a lot of ways. We just don’t recognize it. But I went to some
2

of the demonstrations, and there were people on the outside looking in at the square. The square was
all paved, and there were students and workers talking to each other—not arguing—talking about what
they wanted, and what they saw in the future, and what was necessary for France. And then people on
the outside just looking at it and sort of wondering. You could catch little phrases.
Taylor: This was in the farmer’s market in Aix?
Fiksdal: No, just one of the squares. They had a lot of squares, and a lot of fountains. There’s thermal
water there.
That, to me, was a huge breakthrough, and all the students said so, too. They had never talked
to workers. They were in a different social classes. That didn’t happen here in the States, but I think in
other countries, it did happen as well, because there were huge issues that all connected. So, in Europe,
on the whole, students were pigeonholed at age 15 into which track they were going to go in. They had
no choice in the matter. It was done by the schools—the teachers and the principals—and they often
decided by the social class of the parents. Some kids were tracked into college-prep classes—they’d go
to the lycée—and others were tracked into technical, what was called collège, so they would learn a
trade. People felt that needed to change. Students wanted to have a choice in what they wanted to try
to do.
After that wonderful year abroad, I came back a changed person. I had made a lot of friends in
French. I had a new vision of the world. When I came back, there was finally a female professor of
French. They said I had to take one class with her to make sure I really had learned something.
Taylor: This was at Western?
Fiksdal: This was at Western. Well, I had passed that certificate, so to me, I clearly was ready to teach
French anywhere because they had told me I could. I brought the certificate and she acknowledged [it].
She’s French, so she knew that it had great value, but she said, “They want you to take this class.” Of
course, I was the best in the class. I knew so much more, not just about the language. It wasn’t just that
I was fluent, and it wasn’t just that I had an excellent accent. And it wasn’t just that I knew the little
excerpts they were reading, I’d read the books. I had this feeling that I had really made the right choice.
I came back and I was ready to do whatever.
Taylor: It’s interesting that 1968 is a common thread through all the new faculty, all the faculty that
were hired that year. I’ve talked with David Paulsen, and he in 1968 was in Berlin, and remembered
protests. I was in Berkeley and remember the protests. That is a common experience that all the new
faculty in 1970 had.
3

Fiksdal: I was really thrilled that I had been abroad. All that the students did in Bellingham was stop the
freeway. They had done a few things like that, but the movement wasn’t as deep, it didn’t seem to me,
as it had been in France. Of course, in the aftermath, things improved everywhere, I think,
educationally, and all these new colleges were formed and that sort of thing.
Taylor: But Paris was really at the center.
Fiksdal: Yeah. It was quite amazing to go to Paris and see the graffiti that people had put up. When I
returned to Western, I had so many credits—because I had done the summer and the year abroad—that
I graduated one quarter early. Then I was sort of waiting. Well, I had to wait until spring to figure out
what I would do next. Because what they had told us at Western was when you’re a senior and you’re
ready to graduate, all these people will come to campus, and they will find you. In other words, they
will notify you about possible job opportunities and you won’t have to do anything. We were told that
year after year after year.
So, I graduate early, and I figure that’s fine, I’ll just go back in the spring and I’ll wait for
something to come to me. Sure enough, I get a little postcard and it says the CIA wants to interview me.
[chuckles] At the time, I was friends with people who were doing drugs, they were listening to music
that nobody understood, they had long hair. They were hippies, and everybody was paranoid, especially
about the CIA, and paranoid about the government. Everybody was against the Vietnam War. I was,
too, of course. That was my generation, and that was my friends, my family, my cousins, my boyfriend
needing to go off to Vietnam to a war that we didn’t understand, and no one could prove to us that it
was important.
That was a very tough time, a very big time in our lives, and I didn’t want to interview with the
CIA. I’m sorry, in a lot of ways, that I didn’t because I think there were lots of interesting jobs, and I may
have had a completely different life, living abroad and doing amazing things.
Taylor: But it wasn’t your identity. That’s not where you belonged.
Fiksdal: No, I didn’t feel like I did, and I didn’t know anything about the organization either. I didn’t
bother to find out. But anyway, that was the only card I got. Everybody was angry because they got one
card or no cards.
Taylor: So it was a promise that wasn’t kept.
Fiksdal: Things had really changed in the economy, or something happened but I never bothered to
check what it was.

4

Taylor: 1969.
Fiksdal: Yeah, 1969. I really didn’t know what to do. I, of course, checked the community college here
in town, SPSCC. It had a different name, but I can’t quite remember what it was. They didn’t need a
French teacher at the time, and I really did only have my bachelor’s degree, so I thought, well, then, I’ll
go to graduate school in French. My advisor, the French woman professor—who was head of the
French Department also—told me the very best school was Middlebury in Vermont, so I applied there
and got accepted.
Their program is quite wonderful. You spend the summer in Middlebury, Vermont, in the heat
and humidity. Then, if you do well, you go to France. At the time I went, we went to the Sorbonne. It
was like, wow! [laughing]
Taylor: One year later, after Aix, you were back in France.
Fiksdal: I was back in France. Graduate school was harder, of course. The summer was particularly
scary because we had to do very well. I just wanted to learn, so I took philosophy among other topics.
They had amazing professors from France who came and taught us. I don’t think I had taken philosophy.
That was just a new opening, and, of course, literature.
Taylor: Were you in the regular Sorbonne?
Fiksdal: We were in the Sorbonne, not for all our classes because we rebelled. You’re sitting in this
amphitheater. It’s not giant like in the States, but an amphitheater. Your professor is kind of far down
there.
What happens first is this person in a blue—they always wore this blue duster thing that
buttoned—these men—and they would come in and kind of arrange the podium and dust it. They were
subservient people, but everyone in France wore those coats if they were sort of the custodians. They
could give you directions, but they were a low-level person that was just everywhere in France in the
public institutions.
Then the professor would walk in with his yellowing notes, put them down, and read. It was so
boring. I remember our theater prof wanted only to talk about a playwright, Henri de Montherlant. He
told us, “Oh, you know, we’ll talk about some other playwrights, but this was my friend.” None of us
wanted to hear about Montherlant—I’m talking about the French students and the Americans—because
the French students told us that he had worked for Vichy. They didn’t want to hear about a

5

collaborator. It might not have anything to do with his art, but that doesn’t matter. They took a political
stand.
He just droned on, and all our teachers were like that. A few were more exciting, but not many.
So, we rebelled, and we told the director of our program that he would have to teach us or get someone
to teach us modern theater. We wanted to know the latest. We wanted to read Beckett.
Taylor: This was the Middlebury students that got together?
Fiksdal: Yes, we got together.
Taylor: You weren’t joined by the French students?
Fiksdal: No, because we were separate in that way.
Taylor: But actually, that had its advantages, because you got a better education than just being
invisible in the Sorbonne.
Fiksdal: Yes, because we were invisible in the Sorbonne. We were scared to death to ask questions.
The professor would call on a student, and then they would say something, and then the professor
would say something like “Can you elaborate on that?” [laughing] That was the scariest. When you’ve
never had an education where someone asked you to speak, and then suddenly you were supposed to
speak and speak well and in French.
Of course, the young men were mostly in control of that class and would talk and needle the
professor or ask questions and say funny things sometimes, and we would understand a lot of that, not
all of it. But I did learn a lot from those students. I learned how you ask a question, and how you
respond to the professor. That was a new level of French that I hadn’t known before.
Taylor: In terms of being a woman in the situation, did you make connections about what was going on
with women? This was 1969-70. It was beginning to be an issue in the United States, but I think maybe
in France, too, where women were starting to assert themselves?
Fiksdal: Well, something like five women were starting to assert themselves. France has never been a
feminist hotbed, and still isn’t. Of course, I read Simone de Beauvoir and I was enthralled by her work.
Taylor: But you were conscious. The women consciousness-raising era started about then.
Fiksdal: All my life, I was conscious, let’s just say. [laughing] Like I said, in college I never had female
professors. In France, I didn’t have female professors. I had one for one quarter in my senior year in
French, and that was in French. I didn’t learn to teach by having models of women teach me. I was
ambitious, and I was in love with learning.
6

One of the other things I did in Paris to consider my future is that I went to the American
Embassy, and I talked to a cultural attaché there. It was an informational interview. I wanted to know
what kinds of jobs might be open to me when I graduated, because I wanted to stay in France. Or, if I
went home, maybe I could figure out another place to go by using French, because there were all the
colonies and France. I knew Paris would be a plum and I wouldn’t get that job for a long time. But I just
thought I’d ask.
He asked about my undergraduate work, my high school. Because I was in Middlebury in the
summer, I had learned a lot about East Coast people who were at Middlebury. They had gone to prep
schools, they were wealthy, they had already been to France 12 times in their lives. It was another
world that I had entered by going to Middlebury. Even though at the graduate level, it was supposedly
open to everyone. There were two students from California and me. Everyone else was from these
prep schools and ivy league colleges in the Northeast, and they had had completely different lives.
So, when the cultural attaché started asking me some questions, like “Okay, Reeves (my maiden
name). I can’t quite place that.” I said, “Well, I’m from the state of Washington, and I grew up in
Olympia, Washington.” He didn’t memorize his capitals, clearly. [laughter] I said, “It’s near Seattle.” I
hadn’t gone to a prep school; I hadn’t gone to a prestigious undergraduate program. I didn’t have a
prestigious family name.
He said, “What would you like to do? What is your goal?” I said, “I would like to be an
ambassador.” Mainly because I had absolutely no idea what all the roles were. The Internet wasn’t
around. I mean, who would know all this stuff? He basically said, “Ambassadors come from certain
kinds of family who generally are in the Northeast or around there, and who have names that everyone
recognizes.”
Taylor: And that’s not you.
Fiksdal: Yeah, basically. He didn’t say that wasn’t me, but he basically told me that I was some hick that
would never, ever get an ambassadorship. I said, “Well, then, if I can’t get some sort of prestigious job
like that, what else could I do for the government?” He said, “You could be a bilingual secretary.” I got
so angry. I was so angry that I could only be a secretary that I just stood up and said, “Thank you. Goodbye.” I just ended the interview. The Foreign Service might have been an interesting place to work, but
I was not willing to find out any more about it because of this person who spoke to me in this way.
Needless to say, I graduate and everything is fine. I come home on a student ship, which was an
amazing adventure, where people had spent the year abroad in a whole variety of places.
7

Taylor: Holland America Line?
Fiksdal: Yes!
Taylor: I was on the same kind of ship.
Fiksdal: It was cheaper to go on these ships than to fly home.
Taylor: That’s right.
Fiksdal: I never had so much fun in my talking to people, and everyone had these rich experiences.
People were teaching pidgin and creole from various colonies. We had a fabulous library. There were
events. I don’t remember everything that went on. It was an Italian crew, and so we had incredible
food, and they served us five times a day, which was great because we were all starving all the time.
That was wonderful.
Getting back to New York, I had a friend, so I stayed with her. I just felt very worldly. Finally, of
course, I had to come home. I come home to Olympia, which was just this tiny town I’d always wanted
to leave, but what could I do? I moved in with my folks because I had no job and no job prospects.
Taylor: This was 1970?
Fiksdal: Yeah, this is 1970. One of the first things my parents told me was that they were building a
college just down the road. It was three miles away. And I thought, really? [laughing] Once again, I just
thought this is perfect for me.
Why did I think that? Honestly, I didn’t know what to do, and with French, basically you teach.
That’s the job. My parents had both been teachers. I had sworn I never would be because they had
been. I was just this rebellious soul.
Taylor: There’s so much irony in all of this.
Fiksdal: Yes. I didn’t know much more than that. They told me that they had helped the college come
to Olympia, and I said, “What do you mean?” Like I said, they were in all these activist groups, and my
mother in the League of Women Voters—which was very powerful at the time—and my father in the
Legislature, his job with DNR was legislatively focused. He knew everyone, and they were always trying
to get bills passed.
He heard that there was going to be a new prison and there was going to be a new college. He
joined a group that really pushed for putting the college in Olympia, unlike a lot of other people who
wanted the college elsewhere. He told me that the main other location was Walla Walla, but that could

8

have been towards the end, the last two locations in play. Because we know that at first, they wanted a
college in Southwest Washington, and maybe that became kind of the rallying cry.
At any rate, he and his group and my mother and her group got the college to be in Olympia and
the prison to Walla Walla. That was fine, because it gives jobs to each place. But, of course, it’s more
prestigious to have a college. In the state capital, everyone thought that was a good idea finally. My
father’s name is on the plaque at the entrance to Daniel Evans Library, there on the right. My mother
didn’t get her name there because it was the early ‘70s and the movement for women’s liberation
picked up a couple of years after that. I’m saying that’s the cause, but it really was. Women just
weren’t as important.
Let’s stop for a minute.
Taylor: Okay.

9


Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 12, 2019
Final 2
Taylor: Okay, we’re back on. We just had a delicious lunch at Susan’s house in Olympia. It’s time to
talk more about coordinated studies.
Fiksdal: As I said, for several years, I was just teaching these modules, what we called modules at the
time—courses—teaching French. Then, in the spring of ’75, Cruz Esquivel, who I had kept in touch with,
asked me if I would teach with him in a program focused on Mexico. I loved Mexico and had been there,
and I thought it would be good to do.
I had already studied Spanish because Andrew Hanfman had encouraged me to learn the
language. I went up to the UW and took a second-year Spanish class in the summer to learn some
Spanish. I entered the second year, and it really wasn’t that hard. The grammar is pretty much the
same as French.
I did that, and then the summer before we were going to teach, I went to Mexico because my
idea is always to go to the country and immerse myself in language to really learn it. I went to
Cuernavaca, where they had very innovative language programs. I learned through the silent way,
which was very frustrating. I was so glad I had brought some books with me to learn Spanish in a
different way. But you would learn vocabulary and sentence structure by trying it. That silent part was
the professor. Completely silent. If you were wrong, they used hand gestures to try and get you to say
it correctly.
Taylor: But you never heard the accent.
Fiksdal: Well, it was all around me all the time. I lived with a family—they put us with host families—
and you’re talking to kids, you’re talking to grandparents, you’re going to fiestas. You’re integrated into
the community, so I heard it all around me.
I told Cruz, “Okay, I could do that,” because I had learned some Spanish. [chuckles] I wasn’t
super advanced, but I thought it would be okay. Unfortunately, he planned it. He had worked with
students for a while in Spanish, and he was, I guess, a point person in Spanish, whereas I was in French.

1

And Nancy Allen, who had been hired in Spanish, wasn’t teaching Spanish, so basically, he was the focal
person.
He had students who wanted to go to Mexico. They already knew Spanish, or they didn’t, and
they wanted to do various projects. For example, one was in the Veracruz Symphony Orchestra. You
don’t need to know Spanish to play in the orchestra, I guess, at least she didn’t. To be in a country’s
orchestra is a pretty big deal. It wasn’t the national orchestra, but Veracruz is a big city. The idea was
that the students would be in Mexico for two quarters, and then they would come home. We would put
on some displays of what they learned.
I had my students and he had his. I took my students to this tiny village, where my professors
from Cuernavaca were from, Chalchihuites.
Taylor: How was your Spanish at this point?
Fiksdal: It got really good really fast. [laughing]
A: And the students were fine with it?
Fiksdal: The students were not very advanced, so they didn’t know. What I did was I asked these
professors from Cuernavaca to teach the students, because I didn’t want to be teaching them. I wasn’t
so sure I could do that. But for the more advanced students, I worked with them in literature because I
knew how to do that.
Chalchihuites is very close to Zacatecas, and Zacatecas is known, but it’s not a place foreigners
go, really, which was all the better. I wanted that. It’s in the mountains, it’s in the north, so there were
a lot of stews. They had tacos, but it was not like Mexican food you eat in this country. The students
just loved it. They were in families.
Taylor: You made all these arrangements?
Fiksdal: Yeah, I made all the arrangements when I got there with my Cuernavaca friend, who was from
that village, so it wasn’t that hard. But I had a problem right away with two students, a man and a
woman, who were in love, crazy in love. They wanted to be housed as a couple. I said, “Well, this is
Mexico, so we’re going to have to say you’re married. Because you can’t just live with someone. That’s
just not going to work.” They agreed. We found them a family so that was fine.
It wasn’t that long—I think it was a month later someone comes running up to me and says, “Oh
my god! The men are going to kill Eddie”—who was one of the other students. I said, “What do you

2

mean they’re going to kill him?” “Well, they’re all drinking in the cantina, drinking shots with James, the
so-called husband.
They were all getting very drunk, and James had been complaining because Eddie was getting
close to his “wife.” Of course, they weren’t married, but this other student kind of liked her and she
kind of liked this Eddie, so they were trying to get rid of James somehow, but they didn’t know what
they were going to do. The men were like “What? Someone’s trying to steal your wife?” One guy
pulled out a gun and shot it into the roof of the cantina.
Some students came running to tell me this. I went to the police station. There’s this guy there,
and I explained what was happening. He understood right away that James’s honor was at stake, so
they all had to protect James from this Eddie. Shooting him would be the easiest. I said, “Maybe it’s the
easiest but he’s a person, a student, and I’m responsible for him, and he cannot die. He cannot get
maimed, he cannot get shot at. You have to go, you’re the police representative here.” And these are
all his buddies, these guys in the cantina.
Taylor: It was the Mexicans that were going to shoot up Eddie?
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. Somehow it gets worked out. Then these students, they’re not happy in their
arrangement because basically, James is no longer wanted. But he’s in the same room with this woman
who wants to be with Eddie. I told them they just had to grin and bear it, because it was just one
quarter that we were there—fall—and there was nothing I could do. You can’t just get divorced. I said,
“What do you want to do? Get married down here? Look at how long your first marriage lasted.”
[laughter] They were unhappy, but they managed.
Taylor: Did they stay together?
Fiksdal: Yeah, they had to. James stayed with the woman and Eddie mooned around. It’s such a tiny
town. Everyone knows what you’re doing at all times.
Taylor: But they stayed? They finished the quarter?
Fiksdal: They all stayed, they finished the quarter, and they went with me to the next town in winter.
My idea when I had planned this was that they would go to this tiny village that I had only heard
about—I’d never been to—because that would be really good for learning a lot of Spanish right away in
a place where there were absolutely never any tourists ever. Then we would go to Jalapa, which is near
Veracruz on the coast. I knew it was a bourgeois town, completely opposite from this poor little village,
and we should see both worlds.

3

Taylor: How many students did you have?
Fiksdal: Probably 12. We were getting very close. But before we leave this tiny little village, what
happens is this young man shows up. Again, there’s this big flurry of excitement and people come to me
and say, “Oh, my, god! Jessica’s boyfriend is here!” How did he find this tiny village in Mexico? I don’t
know.
This guy, Devon, had hardly any Spanish. He arrives and he’s mooning around outside Jessica’s
window. Now we would call that stalking, and we know it’s part of sexual harassment. We didn’t have
those concepts then, except that Jessica was just white as a sheet when I saw her, she was so upset.
They had been gone out a bit at Evergreen, but she had broken up with him, and she thought of him as
just, I don’t know, a little bit pushy. He wouldn’t accept that they were no longer a couple and he kept
showing up all the time, and that was one of the reasons she had come on this trip, to get away from
him.
Devon doesn’t seem like a normal, reasonable person. I asked, “Why are you here?” “For
Jessica.” I said, “She doesn’t love you and she doesn’t want you here. We’re doing an academic
program, and I need her to be focused on her work. You’re causing a real problem, in the village as
well.” There started to be all these people in the village who were rooting for him. He had gotten a ride
with these men in the back of a pickup truck, and they all loved him because, I don’t know, he was a nice
guy. They understood that he came because he was crazy in love [loco de amor], and they all
understood the feeling.
Then he told me, “I’m just so in love with her. I have to be with her.” I said, “But she doesn’t
want to be with you. You have to leave.” I put him in a truck the next day and said, “Take him away and
do not bring him back.” They didn’t bring him back, but someone else did. He was mooning around in
Zacatecas. He knew the route, and so he’d get on the route and he’d beg a ride.
Three times I tried to get rid of him. Three times he came back. I didn’t really know what to do.
I talked to my Mexican friend, who was there teaching.
Taylor: You’re 25 years old.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I’m young. I speak Spanish really well by this point, but I don’t really know what to do.
My friend says, “We’ll put him in the school.” How that worked, I can’t remember. School must have
been out for some reason, out of session, but it was fall. Anyway, we put him in there. He said, “That
will be kind of like a jail for him. We’ll lock the doors.” Of course, he just scales the wall—it’s all open—
so he’s out in seconds.
4

I don’t really know what to do. We meet again, my friend, me, and the police representative.
The representative is not really trained, because he’s in this tiny village, so he doesn’t really know what
to do. We’re talking and he says, “The only thing I know to do is put him in a real jail.” I said, “In
Zacatecas? You’re going to put him in jail?”
Now, this calls up all kinds of things to me, because my husband, Allen, had once been rounded
up from a beach in Mexico and put in Guadalajara jail. He and his friends were scared. They didn’t have
money, and they couldn’t bribe, and they were getting kind of hungry, and they didn’t know how to get
out of there. Finally, they were flown out. The government just didn’t know what to do with them and
just flew them to the States. But the stories of the people they met in the jails were such that once
you’re in the jails, it’s pretty hard to get out. I thought, I’m putting an Evergreen student in jail.
Taylor: But this kid wasn’t a student of yours.
Fiksdal: He wasn’t my student. I don’t know if he was enrolled. He’s just there, this kid. Rudy Martin
was my dean, so I called Rudy and I said, “I’m having trouble with this guy.” I told him his name. “He’s
here and I don’t know how to get rid of him. I try to send him off and he doesn’t go.” Rudy said, “Call
me back. I’ll find out his parents’ names and you can call them.”
I think I called him several times. He didn’t know quite what to do either. Larry Stenberg was
involved. Larry knew the student, so he was obviously already kind of a problem. Oh, and Larry was
supposed to dis-enroll him and kick him out of Evergreen, but he didn’t. Because the kid was nice.
People thought, oh, we’ll give another chance.
I finally get ahold of the dad. But meanwhile, we go ahead, and we put Devon in the jail in
Zacatecas. I go to visit, of course. I find that he knows what to say. The people are asking him things
and he says, “Oh, I’m just crazy for love—loco de amor.” They all understand that, and they said, “Oh,
we’re so sorry that you’re jailed because of that.” He says, “Yeah, I can’t see her.” “Oh, we’re so sorry.
She’ll come around.”
I go back about three days later, and there’s this beautiful Mexican woman with him who is his
buddy, who’s bringing him food and talking to him. I can’t believe it. [laughing] Like I said, Devon is
nice, and so she’s helping him. She’s someone who comes to the jail as a volunteer. She’s from the
upper class of Zacatecas. She has tons of money, and to help out, she goes and talks to the prisoners.
She found it really interesting to talk to a norteamericano. So he’s got buddies in the jail, and then this
woman who talks to him through the bars. I had found out that his dad was coming, so I informed him
of that.
5

I go out to the airport to meet the dad. This is a tiny airport, so the plane lands and the father
has to walk quite a way to get inside the airport. So he’s walking, and as he’s walking towards me, he
pulls something out of his pocket and everything just flies out—his passport, his money. And I think,
great. He’s not going to be the one that gets the kid out of anything, because clearly, he doesn’t know
what he’s doing. This Mexican money, he doesn’t know anything about pesos. He’s just not what I was
expecting, and he couldn’t speak Spanish, of course.
I go to the chief of police with the dad and I said, “This is Devon’s father. The boy cannot be in
Mexico at all—because he keeps coming back to upset my student. My student is a wonderful person
who doesn’t love him.” I just decided to talk about love, because it’s what they seem to understand. He
loves her. She doesn’t love him. He has to go away, because she’s a serious student and blah blah.
Taylor: Did the father understand what was going on?
Fiksdal: Yeah, he understood, because I had called him. I said to the police chief, “You need to release
the student in the custody of the father, and the father needs to take him back home. That way we can
finish out our quarter and everything will be okay.” The chief looks at me and he says, “Why is he in the
jail?” [laughing] I have to remind him of why he’s in the jail. He’s never hurt anyone.
Oh, and I forgot a really important part. When he climbs the walls or the school—this is like the
fourth time he’s escaped in Chalchihuites. Before he goes to jail in Zacatecas, he announces to me, “
“I’m Jesus Christ Superstar.” I said, “What?” [laughing]
Then I realized he’s unbalanced. He’s got some kind of mental health issue, because he’s just
this nice, gentle soul. Right?
Taylor: And he’s like 20?
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah, he’s 20. I tell his dad that he’s got some kind of mental health issue. I can’t seem to
talk to him in any rational way; that he’s made friends, but he can’t stay in the jail. He didn’t even seem
upset that his son was in the jail. That was the odd thing. The father seemed kind of out of it also.
Finally, I do get him released. They leave. I have spent I can’t tell you how many hours on this
one kid, who isn’t even my student, who has harassed us in Mexico—except I didn’t have the word
harassed at the time.
Taylor: How is Jessica during this whole thing? Is she the one that’s supposedly married?
Fiksdal: This student, that’s the odd thing. She didn’t even write about it; she didn’t talk about how
wonderful I was to have dealt with this difficult situation. I don’t know. She wanted to be protected,
6

and I protected her, and that was that. I guess that was my job. I didn’t think it was my job. None of
this was supposed to be my job. I was their teacher. Right? That was my first experience taking
students abroad.
Taylor: Rudy gave you support?
Fiksdal: Yeah, I mean, kind of. He found the father, but there wasn’t any more that he could figure out
to do.
Taylor: I remember when Eric Larsen took students to Spain really, really early. He had two students
that were Mormon maybe, and they stopped being students and started being proselytizers. There was
a real problem with that, and he—
Fiksdal: It’s a real problem. You’ve got these students who really want to do what they want to do. You
try to make concessions, but . . .
Taylor: We’ll get to that point, because you’ve done lots of overseas study. You have lots of experience.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Surprisingly, even though all that happened, I still took students abroad later.
Taylor: That was the worst experience you had?
Fiksdal: That was the worst. The next-worst was the winter quarter. I’m now not in the mountains far
from everything, where there’s not even transportation very often. I’m now in Jalapa, which is a major
city. Very worthwhile place. To give you an idea, I’m looking out my window one day, and I look onto
this beautiful park with a pond, and there’s a path around the pond, it’s kind of a large pond. There’s a
path and people walk their dogs around it. There’s a guy walking his anteater. [laughing] This was in
the ‘70s. There are rich, crazy people everywhere.
The students were pretty happy there. We had a good space. There, I had run into these two
guys on the street—young men—and I talked to them about these students coming. They found the
families and they organized everything. It was like two days before everyone came.
Taylor: Those students had good experiences?
Fiksdal: They had wonderful experiences. They really learned a lot, and they were happy. In the village,
they learned weaving, they learned rug making, all kinds of things they were doing in the village. In
Jalapa, I can’t quite remember. I think I let them follow their own interests. There were people that
were really interested in music and various things.
Taylor: So you didn’t have scheduled classes?

7

Fiksdal: No, we did. We still had classes, which I had to teach because I didn’t have my backup people.
But they got to do their independent projects that were less constrained than they were in
Chalchihuites.
Taylor: Where was Cruz?
Fiksdal: That’s what everyone kept asking me. I was starting to get all these messages from his students
that they had never seen him. All of fall quarter, he wasn’t in Mexico, or if he was, he never saw his
students. So in winter quarter, I felt they were Evergreen students, they were getting credit somehow,
and no one was looking at how they were getting credit. I think I had a two-week period where I had to
just go and find all these people, talk to them, and be a mentor and a teacher to them.
Taylor: They were all over Mexico?
Fiksdal: They were all over.
Taylor: How did you find them? Because this is before the Internet.
Fiksdal: I think I wrote to Cruz and told him he had to send me that information and he did. But I didn’t
understand why he wasn’t doing his job. I just didn’t know.
Taylor: So that was the end of him?
Fiksdal: Well, when I came back in the spring, my students put on a show in the Library about the work
that they had done. They invited everyone, and it was very cool. They spoke good Spanish by then.
They had done very well.
But Cruz’s students, I’m not sure if they came back. They may have stayed, I really don’t
remember. Because I went to visit them and really spent time—sometimes half a day or sometimes
overnight—to hear every problem, and to solve a few things if I could. I was really their only contact
with someone at Evergreen for the whole year.
Taylor: And nobody complained to the college?
Fiksdal: That, I don’t know. They could have, and probably someone must have. Cruz and I met for our
evaluation conference together. We both had read the evaluations each of us had written the other.
Mine was very honest and said, “Where were you? I had to visit your students. I hardly heard from you
the whole time.” I think I heard from him twice in that whole six months. I said, “I had to teach my
students, and then I had to visit yours, who had not seen you, who had not gotten any direction, who
had not gotten any support.”

8

He grabbed his evaluation of me back—which was very positive—and said, “I’m going to rip this
up.” I said, “Go ahead.” He said, “I’m going to write really bad things about you because you’re writing
bad things about me.” I said, “I’m just being honest. You do what you want.” I don’t think I ever saw
his evaluation of me, actually, but I turned mine in to the dean, not just giving it to him but another copy
to the dean, because I felt that people needed to know what was happening.
It wasn’t a coordinated studies program. We were not coordinated. And he didn’t help me. He
was the elder, the one that was supposed to be the coordinator, and basically, I did everything.
Taylor: Did he leave the college after that?
Fiksdal: Yeah, soon after that. I think it took a year. My understanding was that he had lied on his
resume, but I’m not sure. I had heard he wasn’t doing his work. But I was sorry to see him go. He was
brilliant. He really was, and a good person deep down, but he just didn’t like responsibility, I think.
[laughing]
Taylor: That was ’74.
Fiksdal: No, that was ’75-76.
Taylor: And you were married then.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I had to leave my husband when I taught in Mexico, but we didn’t have kids at the time.
Taylor: That was before Mara was born.
Fiksdal: Since I was going to go to Mexico for six months, he decided to go get his master’s degree, so
he did that. He moved to Portland and went to Portland State and got his master’s, so we were both
doing something.
Taylor: Then what happened?
Fiksdal: I had taken students abroad, but it was to the wrong place. I wanted to go to France.
Taylor: It’s interesting that the first program you were in and the first language is not French.
Fiksdal: Not even my language. But I felt sorry for all the students who desperately wanted to learn
Spanish. I mean, I had gotten lots of questions, and Cruz, of course, was overwhelmed, and Nancy Allen
wanted to do other things.
I had a lot of empathy for Nancy because I knew her. She and you and a lot of other women—
probably all of us—we were all in the women’s movement at Evergreen. We were meeting. I don’t
know how regular it was, but we would meet off-campus to talk about women’s issues, and the kinds of
9

feelings we had. It was a very patronizing kind of place. We discovered, as we talked, I remember that
most of us that were hired were hired with master’s degrees, and we even conjectured whether that
was what the men wanted, they wanted woman at a lower status? I’m sure that wasn’t by design, but
who knows?
I joined the women’s studies seminar because I didn’t have a seminar. You’re supposed to have
a faculty seminar. We read a lot of women’s studies books. We learned a lot. I read the Grimké sisters, I
had just a wide array of books.
Taylor: Who did you meet with?
Fiksdal: I can’t quite remember everyone, and I’m not sure everyone came regularly.
Taylor: Just a group?
Fiksdal: Yeah. Do you remember Bonnie Greenhut?
Taylor: Oh, I do.
Fiksdal: Except Naomi Greenhut. She changed her first and last name.
Taylor: She taught with Nancy.
Fiksdal: She was pretty great to talk to. And Nancy. Those are the two I remember the most. I was
new to the whole business of seminars and faculty seminars, but I really enjoyed that because it was a
small group, and we really talked through what we were reading. I didn’t do the research on which
books to read, I know that. I was super-busy with my French classes, and then Spanish.
Taylor: It’s easy to be in a faculty seminar when you’re teaching what you’re reading, but when you
were having to read extra things, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Fiksdal: But I wasn’t teaching in a coordinated studies program, I was teaching things I knew. I would
get books that I didn’t know and teach them, but that didn’t take over my life.
Taylor: What was the next coordinated studies program you were in?
Fiksdal: Then I taught alone for a couple of years. I did France Today and took students abroad finally in
’77-78. In ’78-’79, I taught Modernization and the Individual. That really was a true coordinated studies
program, with Pris Bowerman, Matt Smith, and we had a visitor from Saint Martin’s—he was a
sociologist—Larry Smith.
Taylor: You didn’t teach French that year?

10

Fiksdal: No, I taught French Literature in Translation. We got together to plan, and the idea was to look
at that whole change in how European people saw themselves, from guilds and people living
communally, to the French Revolution where each individual had rights. It was quite exciting, because I
actually had not taught about the French Revolution. I had studied it, but that’s it. But I had studied it
from a historian’s point of view, not the point of view that they were going to look at. So they wanted
novels from before and after the Revolution, and there was no other literature person, so we just did
French novels. They just kept saying, “What’s another one? What’s another one?” So I just did all the
best-known—The Red and the Black by Stendhal, and Madame Bovary. We just did all those.
It was fun. And then I had to read very widely to create lectures. If I am correct, it was the first
time Matt Smith had taught in a program, or if not, it was the first time he had lectured. After the first
lecture, I found out later, he had to go and throw up. So nervous. Knowing that taught me a lot because
I was new to the whole idea, and to be treated equally, and work with people who thought I would offer
something to the program was exciting. The summer before, Pris and I had been on a Lilly grant, where
we got to learn from each other.
Taylor: Each One Teach One.
Fiksdal: Each One Teach One. She taught me some economics and I taught her to analyze literature. I
think we read some French literature, but the idea was to try and help her understand why one would
want to study literature to understand about metaphor and things. She had never done it before and
was interested. I had had a lot of trouble in economics, the one course I took as an undergrad, so I was
interested in trying to understand more.
At the end of the summer, it was so funny. I turned to her and I said, “Pris, I think really that
economics has the answer.” She said, “You’re kidding. I think literature has the answer.” [laughter]
We both laughed about that over the years.
Teaching with her was nice because I already knew her. That was a great program—really
good—because I had studied French Civilization. But Matt, as a political scientist, brought a lot in that I
wouldn’t have known otherwise. Also, he insisted that we read not a textbook, but original works. So
we were reading Adam Smith and other philosophers. That was a real education for me because I
hadn’t read the originals, I just had a textbook when I was in college.
Taylor: Through all of this, does a kind of educational philosophy develop in you? You didn’t come on a
crusade to do something—well, you did—French language.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
11

Taylor: But in terms of understanding an educational point of view and an educational philosophy, you
sort of grew with it.
Fiksdal: Yes, that’s right. Right from the beginning, I understood that Evergreen’s pedagogy was
student-centered, and that we were to teach, but we were more like guides, so we would give people
things to read and discuss. The trouble is, if you give them something to read, you have to have read it
yourself. So it was just a hell of a lot of work. [laughter] But I understood that that was what we
wanted to do, and I accepted the philosophy hook, line and sinker.
I felt that what I had to offer was like a coordinated studies program, because it was. It was
history, literature, language, linguistics. I had all of that to offer. It was just in French, and people didn’t
value it as much because it was in French.
Taylor: That’s why I always thought cultural studies programs made so much sense, because by nature,
they’re interdisciplinary.
Fiksdal: They are. You can’t really teach the language without talking about history and culture. And
French is so agricultural. Even in the very first text I studied, the vocabulary was all about animals and
farm life. It’s an agricultural country, and you have to understand that. You have to understand
Catholicism and all the variations of Catholicism including corruption and things like that. And truly
understand the values of the Revolution, and how they play out in modern-day France.
And I think teaching this program with Matt and Pris—Larry was a visitor, so he was learning,
too—they were very good guides about how to teach, and who would have to do what. It just was the
most relaxing program, in some ways, because I only had to lecture once in a while. I wasn’t on stage
every minute. I was learning a lot by reading all our books. For me, the educational philosophy, the part
that I loved, was I was always learning. As I mentioned, I had fallen in love with learning only when I was
a junior in college. [laughing] I really didn’t get it before that. I did my work, but I wasn’t—
Taylor: I don’t think I got it until I came to Evergreen.
Fiksdal: Yeah. And then I think teaching at Evergreen just instills a love of learning in you. You want to
teach with someone else because you want to know what they know. Then you don’t get to know
everything they know, and so you’re trying to figure out how to learn more. I mean, I think, for me, it
was the best life I could ever have. I was always learning, and happy, and I enjoyed it. But the
philosophy of Evergreen, this—
Taylor: For you, what are the essential elements? Interdisciplinary study, teams, student-centered.

12

Fiksdal: To me almost more important than all those—although those have to be there, too—but
overall is innovation, innovation in the way you’re approaching your questions or topics. Because each
time you’re teaching a coordinated studies program, it’s new. You’re trying to put together things that,
as far as you know, have never been put together before, so you have to find the problem or the issue
that’s central to that, and you’ve got to make sure you’re always addressing it; you’re not just teaching
whatever you want to teach, but that it connects.
That calls for enormous amounts of innovation. I think what most of us have done is figure out
ways to lead seminar that are different, depending on the book. And workshops have to be quickly
improvised when you realize people aren’t understanding something, and you need to make those
connections clear. It’s partly your fault because you didn’t know what confusions might arise until
you’re teaching in the program, because you haven’t read all those books yet. To me, innovation in
teaching was one of the most important things, and not just going back to some notes and something
you used to teach. Like I used to teach History 354, and I’m going to give all those lectures in this
program. Well, that’s the exact wrong way to do it. But I have encountered faculty trying to do that.
I think this constant innovation of creating something intellectually engaging is at the heart.
However, there’s a real problem with the coordinated studies model, and that’s language, math, music,
sciences—lots of things that need to be taught by proceeding point by point, getting stronger and
stronger, and learning more and more vocabulary, and how those and other concepts fit together—all
that kind of work is very hard to do in a coordinated studies program.
What I wanted to do was make language learning relevant, and not just through literature. I
liked literature, but I really liked language, so for the first eight years, I was really focused on language
and literature. And when I could, when I was teaching something I called French culture, I would add in
as much as possible. Every time I went to France, I would buy more books, and I found lots of ways of
talking about economics and history. I really educated myself about France and its history.
My idea before very long was, I should do that every other year; teach this program every other
year, even if I were alone, because for a long time, I was alone, and there was no one to teach with me.
I mean, several people wanted to teach with me, but they didn’t know French, and I wanted French
language to be half the program.
Taylor: And you wanted to teach in French.
Fiksdal: Yeah, I wanted to teach the whole thing in French. When we finally hired Marianne Bailey, we
were able to do that. We gave lectures in French. We wrote out the lectures and put them in the
13

Library in a notebook, so students could refer to them. We handed out an outline in French of what we
were going to talk about. It was really hard for beginners. Really hard. But they were amazing, those
beginners. They’d get what they could. I told them, “This is how we learn. It’s immersion. You just try
to figure out meaning through context. You write down the dates from the blackboard and you look at
your outline, and if it’s not on there, well, listen carefully. It’s more like gestalt. You just listen, and little
by little, things will start making sense to you.” Sure enough, they did. We were demanding. Really
demanding. Then they would work with more advanced students to round out what they learned.
Taylor: Meanwhile, they were separated out in terms of levels of French.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we had beginners. We always had at least three levels, most of the time four. We hired
adjuncts to help. Then our seminar was literature, but the overall lecture series was about everything.
Sometimes we’d have them read, like I remember one year we read a book in English about the
Haitian sugar cane industry. It was written by a political scientist or an economist.
Taylor: That was in French?
Fiksdal: That book was in English. We would have our seminars in English so that they could read whole
books. We wanted them to read an entire novel, not just parts of it. Because that’s part of what we’re
about at Evergreen is having them get the whole experience.
For example, I would teach beginners quite often. I got to be a real specialist at it. Somehow,
with my zeal and my excitement about it, I could get them to read The Stranger in French in the second
quarter of their study of French. It was amazing. They were serious students, and they cared.
Taylor: And you were absolutely content to teach all levels of French.
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. It doesn’t matter.
Taylor: I think that has been an issue with Stacy Davis. She didn’t want to be a French teacher, she
wanted to be a French history teacher.
Fiksdal: Yeah, because that was her field. She had never, ever taught French. But her French
background was quite extensive. She went to a high school where she did everything in French. She
had a French husband.
Taylor: She was fluent in French.
Fiksdal: She’s fluent, yeah.
Taylor: But she didn’t think of her job as teaching French.

14

Fiksdal: No. Even in France, she deferred to me, and I had to work everything out. [laughing] When
things happened, I had to fix it. For example, one time I had thought I had arranged a bus trip for a
fieldtrip. Every Wednesday, we took the students somewhere on a fieldtrip because they didn’t seem to
go anywhere themselves. We couldn’t understand that, so we just started arranging things. And
everything was so cheap, because if you’re a student there, they really reduce the price. So I thought I
had everything arranged. I called to check on a Monday, I think, and they didn’t have anything
arranged.
I had just read this book about the French; that what you do is you just go a little bit crazy in the
office and demand things and you will be successful. I told Stacy I was going to try this. I’d never tried it
before. Usually I would just give up and say, “Oh, god, we didn’t get it organized. We’ll do it another
week.” I go in there and I explain very nicely how I had called, and no file was created, so nothing
happened. And yet, we are supposed to go in two days’ time. The woman said, “That is one of the
places that our buses go, but we don’t have it in the file so you can’t do it.”
Then I said “What?” I went on and on about these students, and how we do all this work with
them, and every week is planned, and this week is just falling through, and it shouldn’t fall through
because I called, and they just didn’t follow up, and they should have followed up. “What are we going
to do now?” And I just looked at her. She said, “Well, we will fix it.” [laughing] So, they fixed it.
I was really glad I had to do everything, because I learned a lot.
Taylor: But you were willing to do the language, too, but you got help. You got adjuncts at some point.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we just requested that from the deans. Our programs then were a little more expensive
than, say, any other humanities program, where you just have books and you can just stay on campus.
Taylor: Stacy is in history, and so are there any study abroad French programs?
Fiksdal: Yes. Every other year there is a French program. But what Marianne Bailey does is she teaches
a lot with Bob Haft, who joined us after a while. In the ‘90s, he came to us and wanted to work with us.
I said, “Do you know French?” He said he did. So what he did in our program, to make sure his French
was good enough, he came to my advanced French class that year, and he was the best student. He
taught photography, which works out very well for students traveling abroad, and students who just
want to do some kind of art.
Taylor: But he’s now retired.

15

Fiksdal: Yeah, he’s retired. Then Steven Hendricks wanted to teach in the French program. He used to
be a student at Evergreen years ago, and worked with Marianne apparently. He teaches with her now,
and they can have any number of people working with them because it’s more of a literature—
Taylor: But who teaches the language?
Fiksdal: Judy Gabriele.
Taylor: She’s been doing it for a while.
Fiksdal: Yeah, forever.
Taylor: But she doesn’t travel. She’s an adjunct.
Fiksdal: The reason that we’re traveling with students is not just for them, but for us to maintain our
fluency and our understanding of the French world. It’s like a fieldtrip. You’ve got to go.
Taylor: And then the students are enrolled in a language program when they’re there or something?
Fiksdal: No, we teach them. We’ve always taught them. Marianne teaches languages. She just doesn’t
want to give it very many credits in the program. I wanted always eight credits to be language, and she
wanted four or three or two or something.
Taylor: But you don’t do the kind of program that you did where it was three quarters, and you started
out with students who knew nothing, and by spring quarter, they’d go to Europe.
Fiksdal: Our students have changed radically, so we don’t get students who come with advanced French
anymore, and haven’t for years. Basically, you’re teaching big groups of beginners and intermediates.
Some people are very good at it, for one reason or another. Either they have studied another language,
or they’re just very good at learning a language. So you end up always with three levels. We’re always
pushing them pretty hard.
Taylor: And then a select group will go?
Fiksdal: A select group always goes. Steven has taken students, but what they usually do, as I
understand it, is they divide their time. Steven might go for five weeks, and then Marianne goes for five
weeks, something like that.
Taylor: And the Spanish group is still strong because of Alice?
Fiksdal: It’s strong not just because of Alice Nelson, and not just because before Nancy retired, she
made sure they hired another person in Spanish, because Diego de Acosta, who was that person, left
last year. He just decided he didn’t want to teach anymore. But we had already hired another person.
16

The idea we always had, and that we argued for and tried for, was to have three people that
could teach all manner of things French, all manner of things Spanish, etc., so that we’d have some time
off and we could pursue other interests, and so you’d have enough people in a pinch to teach
language—if you needed more levels, or sometimes you have years with a lot of students for some
reason—they could maybe come in and change what they were planning to do.
Alice was able to capture people’s ears because she kept expanding her goals nicely. So instead
of just saying she knows Chilean Spanish, and hiring someone who knows Castilian Spanish and culture
and history, what she has argued for is getting someone who can really help teach what they call
heritage students. There are a lot of Hispanic students who speak a Spanish that they knew when they
were little, but they don’t have much of a vocabulary, and they don’t know much about their culture
Taylor: Did they hire somebody?
Fiksdal: Yes, they’ve hired someone, so they have three excellent faculty in Spanish now. By making
different arguments for each one, somehow it’s worked. Alice is active in the college—people know
who she is—but Marianne, I don’t even think she’s ever gone to a faculty meeting—maybe one that I
made her go to—but she’s a very shy person and doesn’t like to be in the center of anything. She
somehow has opted out, and to have that be the last person who does French is kind of too bad.
Taylor: There is nobody else. Well, Steve Hendricks, but he’s not going to be the leader.
Fiksdal: No, no. He’ll teach French literature, but he’ll do it in a different way. He’s interested in
experimental fiction.
Taylor: You have brought up a major problem. In order to allow for a steady stream of, say, a culture
program or even a science program or something, it needs to be offered regularly. But you don’t want
to force faculty to do the same thing year after year, so you’ve got to have duplicates. When you look at
a hiring program, where you want to do something to hire a duplicate, it doesn’t necessarily win the day
when somebody wants to hire a computer scientist to do something new. Especially now, with the
faculty not going to grow because of the budget problems—
Fiksdal: They’re hiring now.
Taylor: They are, and I don’t know how they’re going to deal with it because, again, there’s going to be
a budget cut for next year.

17

Fiksdal: I was just at Toska Olson’s five-year review, and the deans said that they’re working on finding
things for faculty to do that are not teaching, because they have too many faculty for the number of
students.
Taylor: How are they hiring new people then if that’s the case?
Fiksdal: They do have to have people in certain areas. As you know, there are certain areas that are
doing well.
Taylor: But are they hiring adjuncts or are they hiring full-time?
Fiksdal: They’re hiring full-time, amazingly enough.
Taylor: I don’t know how they’re going to balance the budget.
Fiksdal: There’s just one more thing I wanted to say before we end today, and that’s I mentioned how
much I loved learning new things and how fun it was. I mentioned that it was students who posed really
tough questions sometimes. Sometimes they knew exactly what they wanted to do and needed a book,
so we would just do that. But other times they would ask me questions that I just couldn’t answer. A lot
of them were about language—how do we learn language? How come someone learns it faster than
me? I had theories from teaching language, but I didn’t know. They also had questions about language
itself that I couldn’t answer.
So after eight years of teaching, even though I really fought to get that job, I left, and I applied to
the University of Michigan in linguistics. When I got there, I found out that I had to do a master’s
degree, and then a PhD. They didn’t have one program for the PhD. I only got a three-year leave. I
asked for four. Byron Youtz was our Provost at the time and he said, “You can have three.” I said, “Well,
Linda Kahan had four years off, and she only worked for the NSF. I’m getting a new degree, completely
different. You don’t have a linguist.” He said, “You can have three years.”
When I left Evergreen, I didn’t worry about my studies. I just decided, well, I’ll just go fast.
[chuckles] Traditional schools, they don’t like you to go fast. I had one faculty member who was kind of
against me, just because I wanted to go through their program very fast.
Taylor: At Michigan?
Fiksdal: Yeah, she was a psycholinguist. Not exactly in my field, but she ended up on my committee.
She asked to be on my committee at the end. That was unfortunate, because they wanted to put my
dissertation up for a prize, and she voted no.
Taylor: Because you hadn’t been there long enough?
18

Fiksdal: Yeah. I was going too fast. And, my dissertation mentor was an enemy.
Taylor: Did you finish in three years?
Fiksdal: Oh, no. But I finished my master’s and required PhD courses. I took my qualifying exams, and I
gathered my data. Well, I was hoping it was enough. I did a lot of work gathering data, and then I had
to come back to Evergreen, and I had to teach. Finally, in the second year after I came back, I was
teaching with Charlie Teske and I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to have spring quarter off. I have to finish this
dissertation, or I’ll just be an ABD forever.”
He understood. He was unhappy, but he understood. Betty Estes came in to replace me
because our program was very successful, and if we lost students, more came in.
Taylor: What was the program?
Fiksdal: That one was Making of Meaning. It was a wonderful program.
Taylor: Did you go back to Michigan, or could you do it from here?
Fiksdal: Well, I had to finish writing, so I did that here. Then I went back for my defense.
Taylor: But you had two babies.
Fiksdal: Yes, when I left, my daughter was four, so that was good. But I had a baby two months before
we left.
Taylor: Did you all go back together?
Fiksdal: Yes, we all went.
Taylor: Allen went, too?
Fiksdal: Allen had to quit his job at the State of Washington. He was going to stay home and babysit,
and off we went. He got a good job. [laughing] Oh, it was crazy, but it was one of the best things I ever
did.
Taylor: I was really proud of you for doing that.
Fiksdal: I just loved it. Do you know, getting your degree later in life is so much easier? And it was all in
English. [laughter] Okay, so we should stop.

19


Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 28, 2019
Final, Part 1a

Taylor: We’re going to start recording, and let’s see if we get anything. It’s Tuesday, May 28, 2019. This
is the third interview. We may have lost some things from the second, so this first part is going to be an
attempt at reconstruction. Just briefly, in case we lost it, tell the story—I mean briefly—about your
deciding to go back to school to get your PhD.
Fiksdal: I think there were two big influences on that decision. One was that it seemed to me to have
any power to speak, you really had to have a PhD. The second was that I really wanted to learn more
about linguistics. I had had so many questions from students that I couldn’t answer. I had bought a
number of books, and I had read them, and recommended them to students, but I didn’t have a
method. I just would go to the UW Bookstore.
My husband agreed, and so we moved for three years to the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor. It’s a small town with a huge university, very liberal, lots of good food, and a good place for
children. I had a two-month-old baby, Alex, and Mara, who was four. We moved into married student
housing, which was very supportive and good.
Taylor: I’m just amazed that you did this.
Fiksdal: The first year, I found out that before the doctoral work, I would need a master’s in linguistics. I
thought I could just jump right in. I just didn’t know how things worked. They did allow 12 credits from
my master’s in French to be applied.
So, I got my masters done in a year and a half. Allen had a job, so he was making money. That
was very, very helpful because I could afford a preschool for Mara nearby, and I could afford daycare for
Alex. Most of the students in married student housing were men from other countries—all the families
were from elsewhere in the world, so it was fun. A lot of women took in children, so I chose a Puerto
Rican woman to take care of Alex, and she was wonderful.
Briefly, my experience in Ann Arbor was wonderful because I didn’t think it was so hard. I was
older. Most people who do a PhD, it’s when they’re young and still indecisive, and are falling in and out

1

of love, and they have all these other issues. I had a lot of stability because my husband was working. I
wasn’t falling in and out of love. [laughing]
The second and third years that I was there, they gave me a TA assignment teaching ESL, and
that was very nice because it reduced my tuition and gave me a stipend, and an office. And then you just
learn so much culturally by doing that kind of work.
There are so many things that you had to know to teach ESL. Ramadan was all-important. You
had to know about it, and you had to know about soccer. You had to know what was happening in the
soccer world. Those things were universal among the students that we taught, who were, as I say, not
English speakers.
I got my pre-reqs done for the PhD, I got all the coursework done, and I even gathered all my
data. When I got back to Evergreen, I thought I could finish my dissertation, but, in fact, it’s impossible
with our full-time jobs. I finally had to take a leave of absence for one spring quarter, and with summer,
I finished it. In ’85, I taught with Charlie Teske, Ainara Wilder and Meg Hunt. Barbara Leigh Smith, the
curriculum dean had asked Charlie to teach in the arts, because she was afraid there was not enough
content, that people were just learning to dance or do theater, but they weren’t really learning how to
think critically and learn other important things for a liberal arts education.
Charlie was placed there, and then I was asked to teach in a program he had conceived of as
well—The Making of Meaning. It was just perfect for me, because I was thinking about so many of the
things that they, in fact, teach. So after my first lecture, for example, Ainara and Meg came to me and
said, “Okay, everything has to change. You have to think about where you are on the stage.” Because
we were always in the Recital Hall, and they are stage artists, and I was apparently just standing there
like a, I don’t know, just a stick. I needed to have more animation. They talked to me basically about
presentation of self on the stage, and that was what I was working on (in my dissertation), The
Presentation of Self by Erving Goffman. I was encouraged to start thinking about how to change my
teaching style a little bit. So that was great.
Charlie was wonderful because he had so much to say that he could easily fill up time if we
needed it. [laughter] You’re always scrambling at the last minute. Who’s going to do this workshop?
What’s going to happen? Oh, we forgot this. So he was great. He always had something he could do or
that we could all do.
We were teaching first-year students, and Charlie reminded me of one good teaching technique.
I was interviewing him for this oral history project and he told me that, early on in the fall, I jumped up
2

after one of his lectures and I said, “Okay, now, what we’re going to do is go back over Charlie’s lecture
and look at its structure, because it’s unusual, and I want you to be able to follow this kind of lecture as
well as any other kind of lecture. Let’s just be thinking that that’s going to happen in your life here at
the college.”
So, with my notes, I went back over his lecture much more briefly, just talking about the topics,
and then how cleverly he related this to that, and how it looked like he was going in a circle off over
here, but in fact, all that meant was that we understood this point better. I got to the end and the class
just started clapping, and Charlie was just “Ooh! Ooh!” He was so excited. I think we had such better
ideas back then for those first-year students.
Taylor: This was called The Art of Meaning?
Fiksdal: This was Making of Meaning. It was a wonderful program where basically, the questions were
how do we make meaning, in what ways, and how are we influenced? It was perfect coming back from
graduate studies, trying to introduce some topics from linguistics. I wasn’t too proud of how I was able
to do that. I thought there could have been more, but I did my best at the time.
That spring quarter was when I took my leave. It was a three-quarter-long program, so Betty
Ruth Estes stepped in, which was great. I attended the final performances, and the students created a
play that was just stunning. I felt that they had delved into the material so much farther than any of us
had even thought about when we created that program. It was one of those magical moments at
Evergreen, where you see the incredible learning that went on. I guess we guided them, but we
certainly didn’t have those ideas when we were teaching. That was wonderful.
In that six months, as I said, I finished the dissertation. In the meeting after the dissertation
defense, we all went to lunch, and one of my mentors, Frederick Erickson, asked if I would like to publish
my dissertation as a book in a series where he was supposed to produce a book, but he didn’t have time.
I said, “Well, sure!” Not knowing one thing about that. But it seemed like that would be a good
opportunity. That work jump started the research I tried to do while I was still teaching, and having a
family to manage and all of that. That book was called The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of
Cross-Cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. It was the first book about really analyzing interviews at a micro
level. I looked at pauses, and I counted them.
Taylor: This was your dissertation?
Fiksdal: This was my dissertation, but the editor just said, “Take all references to people you had to
refer to, because maybe they were on your committee or whatever. Take out anything too detailed.
3

Make sure it’s pretty clear. Rewrite the intro.” Basically that’s all I did. I didn’t really change it all that
much. That was published in 1990.
Taylor: The Right Time and Pace came out in 1990?
Fiksdal: Yes. I loved the title because it encapsulated what I was working on, this idea that there’s a
right time to introduce a new topic, for example, or to try and diffuse a topic in a conversation. You can
feel it when you do it wrong. [laughing]
Taylor: Like we’ve done. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Yeah. And then there’s a pace that’s going on, which has to do almost with a metronome; that
we actually have a very particular tempo that’s guiding how we talk all the time. That’s really quite
interesting, too, so I introduced those topics.
Taylor: Then you came back and you taught full-time?
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Taylor: Maybe this is a good time to talk about other coordinated studies programs that stand out, and
people that you talked with, and what you learned in the course of that teaching.
Fiksdal: That was what kept me at Evergreen, and kept me teaching, and kept, I think, everyone
engaged. When you collaborate, you learn so much from your colleagues and from the students. It’s
quite exciting. When you’re planning a program, you can get a glimpse, but you don’t really have a
sense until people start unfurling all their ideas, and then you try to connect those ideas for yourself and
for the students.
Taylor: Could you talk about how you formed teams, and how you came up with ideas that were useful
and good teaching programs?
Fiksdal: I’ll tell you one way, which is, I think, a way that a lot of people do it now, unfortunately. One
way was in 1990, I wanted to teach with Doranne Crable because she was a friend, and I had helped her
get hired at the college. So, I chose to teach with her because she was a friend. I told her about this
book that I had read called Mirror of Language. She liked mirrors and then she could imagine all kinds of
ways they connected to her teaching. Talking is actually a performance, when you think about it,
because words are not rehearsed. Sometimes you pretend to rehearse them in your head, but they
don’t always come out exactly right. So, you are performing, and she was, at that time, in the
performing arts teaching Butoh and various other types of theater, so she could see her role.

4

Then we decided we should have a psychologist, so we asked Carrie Margolin, who we didn’t
know very well, and that was great. What was unusual about that program was that we were three
women teaching it. We were a little afraid when we proposed it. We thought that the deans would
insist that at least one man should be in it. Whereas before it was mostly men, one woman maybe, this
team was going to be all women.
The program was accepted. Each of us had of a module that we taught. I taught beginning
French, Doranne taught beginning performance studies, and Carrie taught some basic psychology. The
rest of it was all very connected. But I remember in the ‘90s, that was the time—in linguistics and in a
lot of other areas—people were looking at gender a lot. That was a great topic.
Taylor: That was in the ‘90s?
Fiksdal: Yeah.
Taylor: I can remember the time when it used to be there had to be one woman on each team. Then,
for me, too, I started teaching with only women, and that became quite common.
Fiksdal: Yeah, then it became common. Well, let’s check to make sure everything is going well.
Taylor: Okay, that’s good.

5


Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 28, 2019
Final, part 3
Taylor: You’ve been retired two years?
Fiksdal: Since 2013, so six years.
Taylor: Oh! Six years. Did you do a post-retirement contract?
Fiksdal: I did. I requested and got a post-retirement contract, but when the time came to actually
prepare to teach, I couldn’t do it. [chuckles] I was exhausted. Teaching really takes a lot of time.
The first year after retirement, I was asked to go back as interim dean for one quarter by
Michael Zimmerman. I was happy to do it because they had an issue. Two deans retired or resigned
and so they needed a Dean of the Library, but not directing the Library. They had a Library Director but
they needed someone for all the other desk assignments.
Taylor: What was your job?
Fiksdal: When we were deans. We walked into our weekly meeting. We were ready, we had an
agenda, we had our notes, and we knew what we had done before. And so we talked face-to-face, and
we got through the agenda somehow, and it was just really hard. Every week, it was too much. This
meeting, everyone comes in, they open up their laptops, and start looking at their e-mail. Then Michael
starts talking, someone else might talk, and no one’s making eye contact. I’m the only one sitting there
with no laptop. Michael’s got his laptop. They’re all doing at least two or three things at the same time.
It was so disconcerting.
Taylor: Wow!
Fiksdal: So here was my job. My job was to create a conversation. I made several comments about it.
But I have to say, there were times when someone said, “We really need to contact that person,” and
Nancy Murray would say, “I’ll just text him right now.” [laughing] I have to say, that was very effective
to text someone immediately and get an answer.
Taylor: But you didn’t have a responsibility. Why did they think they needed you?
Fiksdal: Because you have to have a certain number of deans because of all the work.
1

Taylor: But what work did you do?
Well, I’m having a little trouble remembering it, Nancy. I’m just trying to think what my role
was. I know. Projects. I ran all of the six-year reviews. Things like that. I ran everything they didn’t
want to do—late evaluations, probably. I did all kinds of stuff that just has to get done.
Taylor: But still the Curriculum Dean was there, the Hiring and Faculty Development Dean was there,
the Part-time Studies Dean was there, the First-Year Curriculum or something person was there.
Fiksdal: That person wasn’t there.
Taylor: The Budget Dean was there.
Fiksdal: Yeah. I think Bill had left, the Evening and Weekend Dean had retired suddenly.
Taylor: Dean Olson maybe?
Fiksdal: No, it was . . . the psychologist.
Taylor: George Freeman. That’s right.
Fiksdal: It turned out it wasn’t what he wanted to be doing in his last year or so of the college.
Taylor: I think he retired.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he retired. Then the Dean of the Library, it just wasn’t a job for him. He couldn’t do it,
and so he left, so we were down two deans.
Taylor: Yeah, he went to Japan. That was the one that did so much with Native American Studies.
Fiksdal: Yes. Jef Antonelis Lapp. Really good person, but not cut out to be a dean.
Taylor: Yeah.
Fiksdal: It was just a quarter, but it was so different from my previous experiences. Our perfect Provost,
the model in our minds, is Barbara, and Michael Zimmerman was so different. Very hierarchical. At one
point, I questioned him—more than once, maybe twice or I might even say three times—about
something, because I really thought he was wrong, and he started screaming at me. I just looked at him.
At another point, they were arguing about something and I said, “Okay, I feel the need to come
in here and say something.” Dead silence. I said, “Our job as deans is to help the faculty to do things,
which is basically teaching, researching, working with students. We have to help them do all of those
things. That’s our job.” And it was like “Oh, really? I thought my job was something else.”
Taylor: Good for you.

2

Fiksdal: I think I helped drum a little sense into Michael Zimmerman, but not entirely. I was also happy
to do this job because when I retired, I really wanted to start this teaching and learning center.
Taylor: Oh, that’s right.
Fiksdal: I had talked to Michael about it previously, when I was still working, and it didn’t pencil out,
according to him and Nancy Murray, even though I thought they didn’t understand my model. But also,
I’m not a real budget person, so maybe I didn’t present it well. Yes, it would have cost money. Yes, but
not very much. And I really wanted that. I even spoke about it to the Board of Trustees when I was
honored with emeritus status. So, I kept pushing for the center while I was dean. Anyway, that didn’t
happen.
The next year of my post-retirement, the college needed a grant writer, and they decided on me
because I had that post-retirement contract. It was easy to hire me because I was already on the books.
They asked me to write a grant that would include having a new teaching and learning center, so, of
course, I wanted to do it. This hadn’t been really vetted with the faculty. The administration wanted me
to write it.
I found out that pedagogy is an actual discipline, and that we have faculty who know it, and
they’re all in MIT. I started working closely with them. They started helping me, and I was reading all
these papers and then rewriting a grant that Emily Lardner had written two years prior, and we had not
gotten the money. It was really expected, if you submit a second time to the U.S. Department of
Education, you’ll probably be successful if you responded to all their queries, because we weren’t going
to change too many things. I worked on it and worked on it, and rewrote that grant.
Then the top two deans didn’t read anything until the very end. It was due on a Monday at 4:00
and it ended up being 20 seconds late. John McLain sent it. Usually his assistant does, and there never
has been a problem. He didn’t realize that you can’t send it at 3:59 to meet a 4pm deadline, because
the internet is not instantaneous. He should have sent it—the day before would have been good, for
example, but he didn’t. He couldn’t for one reason because the two Vice Presidents kept it until really
late Sunday night, and then he had it Monday, revising and making it fit the word count. He just was 20
seconds late, and so it wasn’t submitted. They counted it as not done, and I worked over six months on
that.
Taylor: So it never got submitted?
Fiksdal: No. It was on a two-year cycle, and when Trump was elected president, the Education
Department funds dried up.
3

Taylor: But they’re going to do something now?
Fiksdal: A lot of things came out of it. John worked a couple of innovations from it into another grant,
and we do have a center now. Instead of teaching and learning, it’s called learning and teaching.
Taylor: And it was incorporated into the Washington Center, I think.
Fiksdal: Which it had to do, which I had insisted on.
Taylor: And we didn’t get any money to support it.
Fiksdal: No, it was going to be $5 million over three years. It was just so sad.
Taylor: They can’t submit it again, or they don’t want to?
Fiksdal: Then Trump got elected and there’s no money.
Taylor: Well, there we are. That makes you feel good.
Fiksdal: The third year, I’m coming down from a hike from Mount Elinor with Allen, and I get a text from
Brian Walter, who I love, saying, “Could you come teach with us? Fall quarter starts next Monday.” This
was Thursday. “Fall quarter starts Monday, and Toska Olson is really sick. She doesn’t think she can
teach the whole time. She said she’s going to teach exactly what she taught with you, just before you
retired”—because that was the last program I taught—it was a wonderful program—with Toska Olson,
about doing gender. I took the language aspect and she took the sociological aspect. It was a really
wonderful program. She’s terrific. We worked well together. It was very integrated.
I thought about two seconds and I thought, well, I like Toska, I like Brian. I’ve never taught with
Steven Hendricks, but I used to talk with him all the time because his office was on my hall. So, I
thought, it will be fine.
The books had been ordered. I was supposed to do seminars and correct all the papers. Well,
this turned out to be the lion’s share of the work, of course, because Toska had the lectures done from
before. She was so sick, so she would just come in sometimes for lectures. Then I went to all parts of
the program because I didn’t know what in the world was going on. That cured me from teaching ever,
because that was a first-year program.
Taylor: That was your post-retirement contract?
Fiksdal: Post-retirement.
Taylor: So you got paid.

4

Fiksdal: I got paid half-time. But we all agreed that’s what it would be because Toska had to be in the
program. I couldn’t teach her field.
Taylor: She did come?
Fiksdal: She was there, but not for everything. She drove from Tacoma, and she was really sick. Driving
was hard for her. She would get these migraines. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. They
were going through all these tests, and this had been going on for a while.
Taylor: And she has children, doesn’t she?
Fiksdal: She has one son who’s brilliant. I taught the seminars. After two weeks, my seminars usually
coalesce and we’re moving into deeper learning. This one wasn’t doing anything. I had three people
talking, and even sometimes one wouldn’t talk, so I’d have two. I just couldn’t get them fired up to talk.
Well, we were reading a very difficult book by Virginia Woolf, an experimental novel called The Waves.
I’d never read it before.
Taylor: Well, that’s her easiest. [laughing]
Fiksdal: No, I would say there are easier books.
Taylor: She’s not easy.
Fiksdal: This one, you don’t know what’s going on. There’s no plot. The characters kind of come in and
out, and they’re different ages. It’s a very strange book. I have read several of her books, but not that
one.
I knew the book was difficult. I didn’t know what the problem was, so I finally thought, I’ll just
ask them. I only have 18 students, because now we only have 18 if it’s a first-year program. I said, “How
many of you have read a whole book in your lives?”
Now, if anyone had asked me that in college when I was 18, I would have gotten up and left the
college, thinking, “What is this? Weird. I want to go to a place where people think and read.” Do you
know how many raised their hands? Five! Five students had read a whole book in their entire lives, and
the others had not.
Taylor: Oh, my.
Fiksdal: These students not only did not know how to read a book—any book. I know it’s hard at
Evergreen because we’re throwing all kinds of different genres at them. But these students didn’t know
how to read, they didn’t know how to study, they didn’t know how to manage time, they weren’t
intellectually inspired. They were in college because that’s what you do. You come to college.
5

For some reason, I had the people of color in my seminar. Maybe I had suggested that, I can’t
remember now. So, there were only three, and that was also very sad that there were only three. It
was a difficult quarter, where students didn’t really do much work.
Taylor: This was 2015?
Fiksdal: 2017.
Taylor: This was really recently.
Fiksdal: And I gave lots of no credit, more than I ever have before. I think four people in my seminar got
no credit whatsoever.
Taylor: Wow.
Fiksdal: Most people got partial credit. The students weren’t prepared, and we weren’t doing anything
to prepare them. We should have changed everything.
Taylor: What was the rest of the team thinking? Were they having the same trouble?
Fiksdal: Yeah, but they’d been having that trouble for a while, and they just figured they would teach to
the best students, like we always have. But you can’t do it anymore. That’s what I had learned writing
that grant. I had read this book. Before, we used to say, “You’re not college-ready.” But now what we
have to do is be student-ready. We have to change the way we’re doing things.
Taylor: You have to teach the students that come.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Not everyone is doing that, but they’re on track to do it now. They have Jadon Berry,
someone who is in Student Services, working with a dean, Trevor Speller. They are working to make
much better first-year experiences, really a coherent first-year experience for the first time ever.
Taylor: And recognizing the kind of students that are coming.
Fiksdal: Recognizing the students that are coming. Also realizing that one of the things that we always
wanted for students to feel is some connection to the college, and some faithfulness to it, some
attachment. The only reason our sales were going up for Evergreen paraphernalia was the foreign
students that come and buy all that stuff. But students, over and over, would report that they did not
feel connected.
They encouraged students to create more clubs. They’ve been doing a whole lot of work to try
and help students feel more connected and more supported. I’ve seen more clubs come into being with
students, and I always thought that was fine and good. But this is different now.

6

The other thing, Trevor Speller went to a first-year experience conference and here are all kinds
of universities that are doing this, and our faculty know nothing about it. No one at Evergreen knew one
thing about it, and no one was trying to make sure that people had roughly the same experiences. So, in
the first-year programs, people are just planning them as they used to.
Taylor: One of the Evergreen problems is not learning from anybody else, because we’re so special and
so unique, we can’t—
Fiksdal: And what’s the use? If you’re not teaching them to read and write in a first-year program, then
what’s going to happen in the future? They have to learn certain skills, and quantitative reasoning, you
can’t just say it. You’ve got to do it. That’s what they’re working on with the faculty, and the faculty
voted to create the First Year Experience with learning objectives in common.
Taylor: Do you think that the morale is improving?
Fiksdal: Yeah, it’s the people that have retired that are sort of saying, “Arrghh! The college is going
downhill.” And the people that are inspired by this first-year experience idea and the new way of
thinking about pedagogy again, they’re the ones that seem gung-ho.
Taylor: Oh, good.
Fiksdal: But there are a bunch of people that distrust all thinking about pedagogy. They think, I am this
kind of a person, and I teach well, and my students like me. So at some point, they’re going to have to
change their minds because not everybody is going to be able to keep up. There’s a point where you
can’t keep paying faculty to teach four students. You just can’t do it.
Taylor: Right. And I think the student body has changed remarkably in terms of preparation.
Something like maybe more than 50 percent are students whose parents have never been to college, so
they’re first generation.
Fiksdal: First generation, and the poverty level among the students is really high.
Taylor: They have just no model of what it is to be a student. The last program I taught in was one of
the best I ever taught in, actually, with Andrew Reece and Nancy Koppelman. I’m still in touch with
those students. That was in 2003.
Fiksdal: Wow.
Taylor: And in my fall seminar, where we did have probably 22 or 25 students, four of those students
have PhDs now and I’ve kept up with them. That was a seminar that immediately clicked, and if

7

someone didn’t come to seminar, they’d call them up and say, “Where are you?” It was unbelievable.
But those students were all totally prepared to be in college.
Fiksdal: Ten years later, you have a majority of students who are unprepared, and still, some brilliant
ones coming. So you have no one in the middle. That middle went away, you always would have five
great students—fabulous students—and then a middle, and then a couple that just weren’t.
Taylor: But now, I don’t know that you have the five great students.
Fiksdal: No.
Taylor: Because unfortunately, why should they come if they’re in what feels like remedial classes?
Fiksdal: Yeah, and you can’t be in a seminar where no one talks. If you’re the only one talking, that’s
not going to work either. That’s why I think that my book A Guide to Teaching Seminars: Conversation,
Identity Power is already a little outdated. I’d like to revise it; go back to some studies and think about
more structured ways of organizing seminar.
Taylor: That would be a different book.
Fiksdal: It’s got to be structured. Yeah, it could be a completely different book. That’s right.
Taylor: So you basically have no contact with the college now?
Fiksdal: No, that was the last. Those were all invitations from people at the college. I didn’t propose
anything more. I was pretty much done then, because I retired when I was 67, and I was getting tired. I
was happy to go back and do things, and I felt honored to do it. I had expertise to give, and I feel like I
did well. But I finally realized I don’t need it anymore. So this retirement business, it’s not easy for
everyone. It was telling that I couldn’t teach again because I just—I mean, it is so much work, I just
couldn’t face it.
Instead, what am I doing? Early on when I retired, I became a reading buddy, because my oldest
grandchild was in kindergarten and I wanted to know what they do in kindergarten. I was completely
surprised to find out they learned to read in kindergarten, where my kids sure didn’t, and I didn’t. I
became a reading buddy, and I just have gone through each grade with him. He’s in fourth grade now,
and I’m in a fourth-grade classroom. I’m in Olympia and he’s in Renton, but I get a sense of what they’re
learning, what they’re like. I’m working usually with the lower-level kids.
Taylor: Do you go up to the school?
Fiksdal: It’s just L. P. Brown, right close. No, I don’t go to his school. The point is I just know what
fourth grade is like. I have a sense of it.
8

Taylor: You go to L. P. Brown, and it’s come full circle.
Fiksdal: Yeah. So that’s through United Way that I do that work. That’s all I do for volunteering. I
thought I would do much more. It’s one hour a week, and it’s all I can do to manage it, really. [laughing]
Taylor: Is there a teacher there named Wendy?
Fiksdal: Oh, maybe. I only work with one person and then I’m out of there.
Taylor: Okay, because she was an Evergreen graduate that got a job there. She was an intern there
when I was teaching in the MIT [Masters in Teaching] program, and then she got hired. She was a
wonderful, wonderful teacher. I went back several years later and she was still there. She might still be
there.
Fiksdal: It wouldn’t surprise me. That Evergreen MIT degree, I found out, has very high staff value now,
or has for the last 15 or 20 years. It’s been very, very big.
When I was first going to schools with my kids and talking to teachers of my children, Evergreen
wasn’t really known. They didn’t know what was going on out there. But it took about five more years
and it’s the better degree.
Taylor: I taught in that program twice, and I often said, “We made better teachers out of people than
you would ever imagine.” Some people are natural teachers, and some people can be taught to be good
teachers. We did that.
Fiksdal: You did. That program is a solid program, and having it last two years, and having the teaching,
and then coming back to reflect, and then teaching again. It’s a wonderful design, wonderful program.
What else? One of the other things, I had talked to Linda Kahan. She’s a friend and I taught
with her in a program that didn’t go so well, but we were fine, she and I. We had a colleague that made
it very difficult that year. I had always heard that programs could fall apart. We were determined that
this program would not fall apart. We were determined that students wouldn’t know, but we could
hardly talk to each other.
Taylor: Oh, dear.
Fiksdal: It was very difficult. Anyway, she and I were fine. Andrew Buchman—he’s got another name
now.
Taylor: He’s called Drew.

9

Fiksdal: Drew. He was great, too. The other person, well, it was Kirk Thompson. He was just
impossible, so he made it very, very difficult.
Anyway, Linda and I have known each other for a long time, and she’s had these parties and
we’d go to the parties, New Year’s Eve all the time. So, I talked to her about retirement, and she said
she went to the Valley, which is a gym, and she said it really structured her days to go in the mornings,
and then everything else would be afternoon. Like lunch with friends or doctors’ appointments,
whatever she had to do, it would be afternoons. So Allen and I started doing that, and it’s been
wonderful, where you stay really in shape, and we know lots of people there, and you meet more
people. So it’s a social opening.
Taylor: The one in Tumwater?
Fiksdal: Yeah. They have lots of classes that are free, like yoga and Pilates. They have a pool. We have
grandchildren, so we can take the grandchildren to swim. Our lives now are the gym and grandkids,
helping out if we can, just getting them together so they know each other because they live in different
cities. And gardening, as you can see, is a big thing, and then travel. I’d say retirement is good.
I miss the close companionship of Evergreen. When you’re teaching we used to joke that we
were married to each other. I remember walking with Rachel Hastings one time, we’re talking as we’re
walking and we’re trying to get things done. She runs into I think it was Brian Walter—someone she
knows very well because they’re both mathematicians—and she says, “Oh, hi, Brian. I can’t talk to you
right now. I’m with Susan now.” [laughter] I thought it was just so funny because it’s true. You marry
each other. You know all about each other. You’re just constantly in contact. And then it’s over. And
then there’s someone else. [laughing]
Taylor: Yeah, and you’re supposed to adjust to that kind of . . .
Fiksdal: And you do. You just naturally fall into this. It was wonderful. You really get to know people
well. I miss all of that, but I think that lifelong learning has a lot to say for it, too. For me, it’s studying
another language before I go somewhere. When we travel, we usually are on our own. I stammer
through with whatever language it is, and it’s fun. People appreciate it and we learn a lot.
Taylor: But I sometimes have thought about the structure that we have at Evergreen. It really might
not be self-sustaining. It’s like the books you read about the second-grade teacher who gives her all,
and then burns out, because that expectation that you give everything. When I would get in teams and
people wouldn’t give their all, I really got resentful.

10

Fiksdal: Yeah.
Taylor: Because that was supposed to be their whole life. And that’s unreasonable. It’s totally
unreasonable. But that’s the way I taught every year. Every year, you give your all.
Fiksdal: That’s exhausting.
Taylor: When I got married, Fritz was in Seattle, but there was no idea that I would move to Seattle,
because then I wouldn’t be fully a part of the college. So I was down here four days and back in Seattle
three. It worked out fine, but that was the expectation I had of myself. There are people at the college
that moved to the San Juan Islands or moved to Seattle, and they have a total life outside of the college.
I don’t know that I like that idea, but I do think it’s only reasonable that, yeah. Like when you started
raising children, there were some limits on what you were willing to do.
Fiksdal: Absolutely. It’s true. You get a little more interested in reducing your class time. But also, I
talked to people who didn’t have kids and they just wanted to reduce it anyway. Lots of people felt that
they shouldn’t have to spend 16 hours just because they’re teaching 16 credits. In science, they’re doing
labs, so they have to do way more class time, but they have help with the labs.
Taylor: When I retired, I said, this is the first time—well, when I was dean, the pattern was different.
But other than being dean, where every weekend I read a book, and then there were the three
weekends during evaluations, the three weekends from hell. That’s what you did, and that’s what I
expected of myself. I don’t think it’s sustainable.
Fiksdal: No, not this notion. I don’t think there are still faculty teaching who believe that their life
should be Evergreen. A lot of people we hired that I know—like Nancy Murray and Rachel Hastings and
Heather Heying—had their children once they got their job. So there never was an intention, nor did
anyone say, “Your life is the college.”
And people are not in their offices very much. It’s really harder to reach people. But you have
social media now and you have all these other ways. I think people have experimented a little more and
there’s more electronic stuff you can do. I started using it, too, when I went back. You can put readings
online and assignments, too. It can be a regular assignment, and you can evaluate it electronically.
Taylor: That’s the other reason that I could never teach now. I just can’t imagine doing the technology.
Fiksdal: It’s not hard, but there are things you have to learn and be able to do. Things have changed
quite a bit.
Taylor: Well, it’s 50 years. Fifty years.
11

Fiksdal: Over those years, a lot has changed. I mean, the Internet came in at that time. In the mid-‘90s,
we were just starting to do e-mail. Wow.
Taylor: Right. There have been huge changes. The other thing is that the adrenaline that ran in you
and me in the early years, just because we were at the beginning. We could be nostalgic about it, but
there was energy that just didn’t stop, and it meant that you could do things wrong and survive it
because there was so much energy.
Fiksdal: There was, and there was so much more interest in pedagogy. You would talk about it at lunch.
You would talk about ideas that you had and what you might want to do. People were interested, and
they’d say, “Well, maybe I’ll teach with you someday.” Then somehow, you didn’t see people at lunch,
because we were all eating at our desks because we couldn’t get everything done.
I don’t know what happened, because in those early years—remember?—we would type out
our evaluations. [laughing] We’d type them on these—and there had to be four carbon copies.
Ridiculous! I would first write them longhand. I recently saw my program secretary, my very first one,
Maureen Karras. She’s at my gym. I just looked at her and I said, “Oh my god! Maureen! Can I
interview you sometime?” She said, “Well, I don’t know if I can remember back that far.” [laughing]
Taylor: She was the Registrar’s secretary for a while.
Fiksdal: Oh, she was?
Taylor: Maureen Karras and Sally Hunter.
Fiksdal: Oh, I remember Sally Hunter.
Taylor: Ask her about Sally Hunter, because they were friends, and they would have been staff at the
same time. They’re both in their sixties by now at least, maybe more.
Fiksdal: She doesn’t look like it, but maybe she is.
Taylor: She must be 60.
Fiksdal: She said she left the college a long time ago, but still, we were friends. You were friends with
your program secretary.
Taylor: Absolutely.
Fiksdal: You’d chat. You had time to chat. I don’t know how this all—
Taylor: We even invited the program secretary—I remember the first one—when we went off on
evaluation retreats to go be a part of the team.
12

Fiksdal: Oh, dear. Well, we sure don’t think of staff that way anymore.
Taylor: And staff were critical about the way they were treated then.
Fiksdal: But it was so much better.
Taylor: It was better. There’s always been a concern about team teaching. How do teams get formed?
It was so much by friendship. Now people, I think, feel isolated.
Fiksdal: I don’t know how people feel. I haven’t talked to anyone who feels isolated. Everyone I’ve
talked to is happy in their work, and they feel like things are going just fine.
Taylor: The morale? Because I’ve heard that morale is not so fine.
Fiksdal: I think it will be interesting to lead this retirement institute in a month— or in three weeks—
and hear what people who are now retiring have to say. They’ve seen a lot, and the students have
changed a lot, and they’ll really have a good view, because they’re the ones who have been teaching
with 30 students in a three-person program. It’s just devastating to not have very many students come
or be interested in the college. You wonder what’s going to happen to the college as a whole.
Taylor: Someone said the enrollment was down 20 percent.
Fiksdal: I don’t know. I just read the Provost’s report that said they were hoping for a lot of applications
and they just didn’t get them. They have this new system where you can apply to any Washington
college. It’s just one application. It’s really nice. And Evergreen became a choice for the first time and it
didn’t yield anything more. So Evergreen has to do a lot more to attract students.
Do you remember quite a long time ago—I think it was in the ‘90s—Matt Smith, who recently
died, I’ve been thinking about him, and I remember he was on a committee. He was just on a DTF and
he was the one that reported out to the faculty. Their suggestion was that we would turn into a juniorsenior-level college; that students could go to community college or somewhere else and then transfer
in. And we would be teaching, because of interdisciplinary studies, they would have background and we
could do a better job. We’ve never been good at retaining first-year students.
Taylor: But we’ve also never been very good at doing the advanced work.
Fiksdal: But you get to do advanced work is the idea; that it would be advanced. You would advertise it
as advanced, and it could be. I remember standing up and arguing against that, and now I wonder,
wow, maybe I was wrong.

13

I did buy into the whole idea that a student at the beginning could come in and take just four
programs—one year-long program each year—and have a wonderful education. It took me, I don’t
know, five years to realize, no, that’s not the way.
Taylor: But that’s because the culture has changed. The assumption at the beginning was that we were
going to get a full load of 18-year-olds, and they were going to stay at the college for four years, and
they were going to do a rationalized curriculum, where they were going to be helped to design their
own curriculum with what was offered. And, because it was interdisciplinary, it was going to provide the
breadth, and they were going to be able to—I mean, all of these things were imaginary, because the
students aren’t—and they might not have been that way in 1971 either . . .
Fiksdal: I think more of them were well prepared.
Taylor: . . . but they’re not like that now.
Fiksdal: As late as ’85, teaching with Charlie Teske, I remember that we produced a syllabus for only five
weeks, and gave it to the students. It wasn’t more, it was just five weeks, because that’s all we had
planned, because we were all somewhere else, right before classes started. So, right before class, we
drummed out this, I think, very wonderful program, and then we kept building. Students didn’t protest,
they didn’t cry. Well, they weren’t working outside the college. Now you have to have all this
information so you can plan ahead, and see where the heavy parts are, and if your work schedule will
allow it. But back then, you still had the vision of the liberal arts college.
I remember also that it was week eight or something, maybe even week nine, and we’re talking
about the next quarter and asking the students what they’d like to read. They suggested all kinds of
books and we hadn’t even ordered them. You can’t do that now. You have to order way in advance,
and you have to know. And you can’t ask the students now. They don’t know anything to suggest, but
then, they did, and they enjoyed being part of the process.
Taylor: But I don’t think people are coming to college for that reason anymore. If you look across the
country, the liberal arts colleges, except for the really prestigious ones, are having a lot of trouble.
They’re closing down. STEM is ruling the day.
Fiksdal: Yes.
Taylor: And vocational, and you’ve got to say what kind of job. Tuition has gone up so much that you
have to be really focused.

14

Fiksdal: It’s just sad, because humanities is not considered very important. They never replaced retiring
faculty. We needed to have three faculty members in each language to really make language learning
accessible, just to teach every two years in that language, so you’d have something for the more
advanced students. Now, you just will teach it every other year, and then there’s nothing except first
and second year. I mean, this is just ridiculous. The whole system has been—
Taylor: The language offerings have gone down.
Fiksdal: At first, it was fabulous. We got students at all levels. But in the ‘90s, we started getting
students who were really just beginning, first and second year. And now, nobody has any training. They
get into college, I don’t know how.
Taylor: They still have to have two years of language, I think,
Fiksdal: Yeah, but somehow they come in a different way.
Taylor: Language programs is one problem, but even more general humanities . . .
Fiksdal: If you don’t replace people—I remember once you came into a meeting. We were all on the
DTF to decide who the next hires would be. And, you know, that’s just a horrible DTF to be on. People
cry. Everybody’s desperate. Desperate. And then there’s Barbara who says, “If you don’t hire mm mm
mm, then” . . . and I had to carry that message. One time you sailed in—you never came except one
time—and you looked at the list and you said, “There’s no philosophy. You can’t have a liberal arts
college without a philosopher.”
Taylor: I said that?
Fiksdal: Yeah. And then you just looked at everyone and waltzed out. And we put up philosophy. It
was the most effective thing I’ve ever seen. No one had managed that yet. [laughter] You didn’t even
take your coat off. You just kind of came in—
Taylor: I don’t remember that at all, but that’s funny.
Fiksdal: It was really great.
Taylor: I’m surprised it would have been philosophy. But the University of Washington right now—I
think I told you on the phone last night—it used to have 45 members of the history department, and
now their goal is to get down to 25 because there are just no students wanting to study history. But the
25 are random, because it depends on who retires. So instead of having a range of history—you could
have a history department of 25 without an American historian.
Fiksdal: Sure.
15

Taylor: It wouldn’t do as well, but you could have that. But four or five American historians have
retired, so they have one left. So the major university of the state has nobody teaching American
history.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it sort of reminds you of Evergreen.
Taylor: Yeah. But at Evergreen what happens is—we’ve always fought this. People say, “Students want
X and so we ought to get more business people.” There was a cry for psychology since day one, and we
used to say, “We could hire 20 psychologists and still not satisfy the students.”
Fiksdal: That’s right. It would never be enough.
Taylor: But they’re responding to that a bit now because they’re desperate.
Fiksdal: Yeah, they’re desperate.
Taylor: So they are hiring psychologists because they think they’ll get students.
Fiksdal: The faculty have gone through this process for the last two years of creating these paths.
Taylor: Pathways, yeah, it’s a new word.
Fiksdal: It’s a new word but it’s not a new concept.
Taylor: No.
Fiksdal: It’s been there for a long time. But the idea is a little bit complex. You’ve got to have enough
faculty to make sure the students can go through four years. Now, this is a lot of faculty who are doing
other things, possibly. So not only is it a question of levels, it’s a question of interdisciplinarity, it’s a
question of all these things. So if you don’t have people sign up to support that path, you don’t have a
path.
Taylor: The other problem traditionally is faculty have taught what they wanted to teach. It was only
out of the goodness of their hearts that we would try to get people to say, “Okay, I’ll teach first-year
students this year,” or, “I’ll do my share in teaching something.”
Fiksdal: And it didn’t happen, and Tom Womeldorff had to create a rule, so now it’s in the handbook,
that you have to teach first-year students every certain period of time.
Taylor: But people don’t.
Fiksdal: Well, the deans go after them. But you don’t want someone who doesn’t want to do it and do
it right.

16

Taylor: That’s true. But the other thing is that someone that could be teaching—you’ve always had
collaboration among the language teachers. They have said, “Okay, I’ll do the French this year.” But in a
lot of other cases, it’s not there. They’ll say, “Oh, I’d rather do photography this year,” or, “I’d rather do
something.” So they’ll do something very odd, and physics won’t be taught.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Taylor: With the sciences, they were more organized, but—
Fiksdal: I think sciences and languages were the only—because they are the two areas where you have
to go developmentally.
Taylor: Yes.
Fiksdal: Step by step. That’s the way it is. There’s no other way. With a lot of humanities—with
literature—let’s face it. Everybody in literature, everyone in history, everyone in philosophy, what do
we do? We mostly teach reading and writing, and analysis through all that.
Taylor: And you don’t have—
Fiksdal: We do it over and over. And some students are more advanced, but you always have people at
the low level.
Taylor: That’s the service. But if you don’t have humanities teachers, then nobody’s doing it. The idea
of Writing Across the Curriculum is still very powerful, but I don’t know that it’s happening.
Fiksdal: No, I don’t think so. A lot of initiatives, they never happened well. I mean, every once in a
while, we got a burst of energy, and remembered and started doing it. That’s our problem at Evergreen.
We don’t have longstanding deans or longstanding provosts, so people forget, or have other agendas.
Taylor: It sounds like they’re getting more proscribed in what people are asked to teach.
Fiksdal: I’m not against that.
Taylor: I’m not against that either.
Fiksdal: From the very beginning, I always have thought that people should not be allowed to do
whatever they want. You take someone like Kirk Thompson. He was hired as a photographer, and he
becomes a psychologist and thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. It helps to be trained somewhat, as
I found out when I went to graduate school. Linguistics is partially humanities and partly social sciences,
so there are some people—I did qualitative work, but I have colleagues that do quantitative, so there
are all these differences and you have to be able to read and understand the papers.

17

I was stunned when I realized you should have a research agenda, and that you need to develop
it. It was just a whole new world to me. And I think having that experience was really good, because I
understood much more about when students really wanted to go on, I could help them.
Taylor: If someone were to ask you—sincerely, not just conversationally— “Okay, given the situation
that Evergreen is in now, what would you advise? Would you advise trying to patch it up, or would you
advise trying to start from scratch? What would you advise?”
Fiksdal: I can’t abandon the dream. I would advise going back over values that everyone has now.
What values have lasted? Do people believe in collaborative learning? Do people believe in team
teaching? Do people believe that students are learning with these methods and these ideals that we’ve
always had that we helped create?
If they don’t, that’s one thing. But if they do, then we have to make it work better. And I think
the Pathways are a way to show students how to make their way through the curriculum. We get
students now who’ve been told what to do their whole lives. They’re in clubs, they’re busy with all
these things, people telling them what to do, and training in sports and training in music, or love of
videogames, or whatever it happens to be. So they are not focused on academics, like we were.
They’re just different people.
Taylor: The world is different from 50 years ago. It’s changed.
Fiksdal: The world is different, radically.
Taylor: What was designed at the time was appropriate and exciting, and maybe not appropriate and
exciting now.
Fiksdal: But I think it is appropriate and exciting now. What I think they should do is hire some of us to
go off to other colleges where this is being done, where interdisciplinary studies are being done. It’s
everywhere now. Go and see how they’re doing it, and come back and set some really hard questions
for the faculty and the administration to examine. We finally did that in the long-range curriculum
committee. I was on that DTF the year I left. It was only two quarters, but still, we looked at Web sites
from other colleges. Brown University is a very prestigious place. Do they have requirements? No. You
can take anything you want. How did they get to be so cool?
Taylor: It’s partly because they have the reputation.
Fiksdal: Well, we used to have a reputation.
Taylor: But we’ve never turned down students.
18

Fiksdal: Well, people argue for the public nature of the college, and that’s very true. I think we need to
change that. I think we have to have standards, and we have to have more rigor. We can’t just take
students who really should be in high school still.
Taylor: That’s an old argument, too.
Fiksdal: You can have intensive classes for a couple of weeks before school starts to do a lot of things.
Remember, when we were deans, there was this big argument, or question, about whether you could
teach algebra. It turns out, you can’t really teach it in college for credit. We found that out—I think you
did—and we had to work around it, because some students have to have algebra. So you just somehow
pay someone to teach them.
Taylor: But I sometimes wonder, if you could get together a group of people that were really excited
about planning something new, you start with the students that you have. In 2019, there are different
students than there were, so you design something that’s going to work for students that have no
college experience, students that aren’t so prepared, a world that is very technological, and then you try
to design something. Because what we were designing in 1970 was change, freedom . . .
Fiksdal: But look at all those ideas. The idea that you could have an internship and it would be worth
credit. We could do so much with that now.
Taylor: Absolutely.
Fiksdal: Students don’t even know what jobs are out there. Who does? But you could do so much with
that.
Taylor: Other schools are doing that.
Fiksdal: We could do more with internships, we could do more PLE, Prior Learning from Experience, we
could do all these old ideas. They just need to be hauled out and really examined. Instead of being
peripheral, they could be central. Every student will have at least two internships, something like that.
If they decide they really need to do X, what are they lacking? And then there are ways to do it, both
part-time and full-time. I think there are ways. Everybody says students are more vocationally focused.
Well, make it vocationally focused then.
Taylor: Yeah. And the other thing that they have done is put this big focus on equity, which I think is
right. You have to have that as a given.

19

Fiksdal: And as a value, so when you graduate, you have this to offer. You, as a student, know how to
be inclusive, you know much more about how to work with differences. All these things are in our
values.
Taylor: They are.
Fiksdal: It’s just looking at them again, and deciding if they really still matter, and if so, how you talk
about it, how you highlight those things, and what really matters. I just believe that a lot of the ideas
are ideas that are still valid and important today. Collaborative learning is still super-important. Any
meeting you go to, all of your skills come into play.
But I would hate to see it fail, like close and become a branch of the University of Washington,
and then they would win. [laughing] The behemoth.
Taylor: That’s true. I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s what’s happening to Hampshire College
in Massachusetts. They can’t seem to make it, and if they’re taken over by the University of
Massachusetts, then they’ll just be a branch.
Fiksdal: But if you go to Hampshire, you have access to Amherst and all these other private colleges.
Why bother going to Hampshire? You might as well go to those other colleges.
Taylor: That’s right. They’re not getting students.
Fiksdal: Maybe that’s part of it, too. Anything different is not . . .
Taylor: Right now, it’s all driven by economics.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Did you read in the paper for a few days now, they’ve had references to this article that
came out, “Camp for Capitalists”? Children’s camp. Learning to be a capitalist. I just thought, oh, my
goodness. It’s propaganda, and everything is propaganda. You can argue you’re sending kids—any kind
of church camp of anything it’s all propaganda. But on the other hand, well, if you want kids to be
critical thinkers, I’m not sure, you have to have some counter-balance there.
Taylor: Well, I’ll have the propaganda about equality/inequality. I’ll go for that propaganda. I think our
country depends on that one.
Fiksdal: And that might be just the kind of thing to say that you’re centered on.
Taylor: Yeah. And I think the college might be headed in that direction. It’s a little odd in Olympia,
because we’re not a very diverse community, but I think that’s the direction the college wants to go.

20

Fiksdal: It sure has gotten more diverse, though. I grew up here, so it’s much more diverse now. My
daughter, Mara, said that in Renton, minority cultures are in the majority in Renton.
Taylor: I bet that’s true.
Fiksdal: She’s on the Planning Commission now, which is a volunteer job. In this city, it’s a paid job, but
there, you can volunteer to be on it. And she tried for it and got accepted, and she looked around and
everybody is white, middle-class.
Taylor: Everybody is white?
Fiksdal: Everybody on that council. You can go into any store, you feel like you’re a minority. You go to
any business, you go to any club—because she goes a lot to these clubs to try to get volunteers for
things—you understand. The structure of the council is incorrect. And that might be at Evergreen, too;
the structure might be incorrect.
Taylor: Yeah.
Fiksdal: But that’s my feeling. I just feel like, don’t give up. The college should be using the retired
faculty more, even those of us in our seventies. We can still think and do things, and I think we still have
energy, and a lot of love for the college because we helped create it. We want it to continue, if it can.
But I do believe in innovation. I believe in change, and I think the college can and should do that.
Taylor: Okay, shall we quit at this point?
Fiksdal: Absolutely.

21


Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 28, 2019, part 2
Final
BEGIN ZOOM 2
Taylor: Okay, so we’re back after a delicious lunch, and we’re going to move to your being dean, Dean
of Part-time Studies.
Fiksdal: Part-time Studies.
Taylor: Evening and Weekend, whatever it was called.
Fiksdal: Later it became Evening and Weekend, but at the beginning it was called Part-time Studies.
The slogan was “Part-time studies for full-time lives.”
That was an interesting position to have in the deans. You were a dean at the time, and we had
Jin Darney. You did hiring, Jin did curriculum, John Cushing did budget, and it was Masao Sugiyama,
wasn’t it, at the beginning? To do the first year.
Taylor: And then Brian Price?
Fiksdal: Well, I came back to do interim dean when Brian Price had some difficulty. And then, after a
little while, Masao must have retired or stopped, and so we got Lee Little.
Taylor: And Bill Bruner.
Fiksdal: Bill Bruner was Dean of the Library. So it was a fabulous team. Very strong people in each
position. Barbara Smith was the best Provost we ever had, for sure. Then we had Jane Jervis as
President, thanks to you and your work. I would say that was the time to be in administration. It was
great.
The thing about it for me was not knowing at all what I was getting into, because Part-time
Studies was brand-new, the faculty had just voted it in, but I had no directives. No one knew what it
would be like. There were two arguments. One was that it would become its own college, like a college
within a college. The other one was, “We don’t know, but it’s not going to be that.”
Taylor: Did you have a mission when you applied for that job, or did it just happen? There were four
dean positions or something and you just ended up there?
1

Fiksdal: I applied for that position.
Taylor: Because the college had very little experience with part-time studies.
Fiksdal: Yeah, very little. Years before that, I had taught part-time students in a program called
Foundation of Modern Society, I think. Both Thad Curtz and I decided to have our seminars in the
evening. Each quarter, one seminar would be in the evening. We taught with Dave Hitchens, too. I
think the first quarter, Thad taught his seminar in the evenings. They had to come to some other parts
of the program—maybe just lectures—during the day, but the evening seminar allowed them to do that.
Then I did it winter quarter and Dave must have done it spring.
So I knew something about part-time studies, but I was really interested in innovation, and I
wanted to try something different, and I didn’t want the other positions. So, I applied, and I really didn’t
know what I was getting into. I basically had to figure out what I would do and how. There were no
precedents.
On Barbara’s suggestion, I had a very good committee that met, I think, every two weeks,
representatives from various departments. We had Andrea, who was Registrar; we had Edwin Bliss,
who was a career counselor; we had someone from Admissions person; Jane Wood, who was my
program secretary, and Kasia Pergia from Marketing.
It was a wonderful group, and we grew close as we tried to work things out—they had
comments about curriculum, but I was really in charge of that curriculum because it needed to be a
liberal arts curriculum. Basically, we did some hiring. The faculty were all going to be part-time
adjuncts. And the idea that Barbara had was that Part-time Studies was going to be a cash cow, because
you don’t have to pay adjuncts very much money. You pay them less, and then they teach less also.
They teach one quarter or two quarters or something like that, but four quarter-hours so it’s all very
cheap somehow.
I went around to the planning units to ask them what they wanted to see in our curriculum, and
they were quite surprised by that. [chuckles] The arts people were most interested because they have
studios, and someone had to teach or the studio wouldn’t be used, so like printmaking and
metalworking.
Taylor: So the issue was whether Part-time Studies would be in support of the full-time program, or
whether Part-time Studies would be a college within a college?

2

Fiksdal: It had to be both, actually. The moment I started talking to people, I realized we had to have
certain things. For example, the psychologists wanted us to have three courses always, because those
are the three courses required of students before applying to a master’s program in psychology. You
don’t really have to have the whole major, or they didn’t at the time, I guess. This was 1996.
I talked to all kinds of groups and tried to figure out what needed to be there to support the
curriculum. Then I hired to create a liberal arts college, so we needed someone in literature, history,
economics, things like that.
The first year we only hired adjuncts, and they had no rights. I think we passed a rule in the
faculty meeting that year that adjuncts were faculty and they could come and vote in faculty meetings.
But, you know, they taught in the evening and on weekends, so during the day, they usually had another
job because they certainly couldn’t live on what we paid them to teach. Some taught half-time.
The second year, we decided that it would be good to anchor Part-time Studies. I think Barbara
really had this idea. She suggested five permanent hires to anchor it. So, we worked out the areas that
they would be in. I wanted art history to have something in the arts, and I talked to a lot of artists and
they said, “That’s the one thing we don’t teach enough of.”
Taylor: That was Ann Storey.
Fiksdal: That was Ann Storey. Then we wanted to have someone in the social sciences. We had politics
and government, we had history, and, and then we had literature and math.
Taylor: They taught half-time programs but team-taught?
Fiksdal: Yeah. Those five people were hired as regular faculty members, but half-time. They created
programs. They taught with each other and with adjuncts. Most of the other adjuncts were just hired
to teach four quarter-hours, so it was always a boon if they were asked to teach in half-time programs.
They’d get more money and have more to do. And it was more fun. It was more like Evergreen, so
everyone was always trying to teach half-time.
Then the half-time folks came to me and said, “This is really hard. We work as much as fulltime,” and I believed that was true because the initial planning and preparation, and the work you do
every week is the same for half-time or full-time. There were the same number of evaluations. It’s just
that they were not present as much an paid less. They said the other problem besides pay was that
students wanted more. Some students could probably take 12 quarter-hours by extending their work in
the program.

3

So we worked out a deal where if they had enough students who wanted 12 quarter-hours, they
could be paid three-quarter time by teaching students in their programs to do 12 quarter hours of work.
Or, they could teach another class if they really wanted. That’s a lot of work, but some people opted to
do that. Our half-time people were not assured of that extra class, but basically, we were able to give it
to them the whole time I was there, and the faculty just loved that. They thought that our solution was
innovative, and it was fair, I thought, in terms of workload, and they did, too.
That group we had was so good. I just really loved our faculty. A lot of them had been teaching
for quite a long time at the college, but had not been acknowledged, so I had to decide on a policy for
reviewing the faculty, for evaluating them. I went back to the early years, and I decided it would be
every three years.
It was really a lot of work for me. I had to observe to their classes, which were on the weekends
or in the evening. My work was hard on the deans’ team because I was in charge of this new part of the
college, and all of you had the rest of the college. The conversation in our long dean meetings—three
hours a week—were always about the full-time faculty and the curriculum. I could never get a question
in. I’d sometimes contribute, but no one really cared. Part-time Studies was new and it just wasn’t in
people’s minds that we had this other thing going on. Those meetings were hard for me.
The only thing that saved me, I think, was Barbara. You remember, she taught us how to be
deans by talking to her every week. I always had a lot to say because I had so many decisions to make
all the time. I made them, and tried to defer as many as I could until I talked to her, but basically, I was a
mini-Provost. I was hiring, I was firing—not firing but just not rehiring, trying to balance the curricular
needs of students, and evaluating faculty, some of whom had not been evaluated for 14 years!!
Taylor: And you were doing a lot more of that because you had one-year appointments, and they
weren’t guaranteed another one. So even if they did teach another year, you had to rehire them.
Fiksdal: And if I needed someone new, I remember that Jin Darney had a bunch of files of people who
had taught, maybe stepped in to help out—various kinds of people like that—but they hadn’t really
been evaluated, so we didn’t really know if they were good. They just had some experience.
There was an awful lot to do. I remember one time, Barbara went on a Saturday to visit a
program and kind of hung around, and one of the students told her that he only came on Saturdays.
Whatever was offered, that would be his Evergreen education. She told me to pay attention to that. I
said that just seemed impossible to me to schedule so someone—
Taylor: To make sure that there was a whole range of things on Saturday.
4

Fiksdal: Yeah, so I mentioned it to our planning faculty in Part-time Studies and they said, “No problem.
We’ll start teaching more on Saturdays, and we’ll have maybe one night during the week, or two nights,
and then part of a Saturday, and it will work out.” They were just amazing.
Taylor: You did have a planning group, because I remember when I was in the deanship for hiring, we
hired specifically half-time people. I think one time, the hiring priority group decided that four positions
or something would go to eight people.
Fiksdal: Yeah, exactly.
Taylor: That’s when we hired . . .
Fiksdal: It wasn’t the first people, was it?
Taylor: No, it was the second people.
Fiksdal: The first people were Helena Meyer Knapp, Sarah Ryan, Susan Preciso—
Taylor: No, Susan was the second. Susan was there, but she was in the second batch.
Fiksdal: Okay.
Taylor: But these people were hired from the outside. Kevin?
Fiksdal: Ann Storey?
Taylor: No, Ann was in the first batch. This is the next one. Kevin . . . what is his name? . . . who’s now
Karen?
Fiksdal: I’ve forgotten her last name. And Doug Schuler, probably, who was in computer science.
Taylor: Yeah. But they were a group.
Fiksdal: Yes.
Taylor: Because the idea of the college—eventually, it dawned on them—we needed people that had
some permanency and some loyalty to the college because they were guaranteed employment. They
were half-time, but they were permanent.
Fiksdal: Yeah, we needed that permanence. They became the planning unit. It was a wonderful group
of people.
Taylor: The only trouble was each year maybe they would add two or something, and there would be
10 people that wanted [a permanent position}. Like when Stephen Beck finally got it, and I don’t know if
Marla Elliott ever did.

5

Fiksdal: She did, I think, at the very end.
Taylor: But it was cruel.
Fiksdal: And these people were all about to retire.
Taylor: It was very difficult.
Fiksdal: Joli Sandoz. I noticed that Joli is very active.
Taylor: And Steve Blakeslee. The part-time people became integrated into the whole college. They
have been Chair of the Faculty, they have been active in a whole bunch of things.
Fiksdal: Yeah, over time things finally worked out and part-time faculty gained in stature. But it was
really hard for a lot of people. At first, I would be walking out around 5:00 as my faculty would walk in. I
recognized that that wasn’t a good idea. I arranged my schedule so that I could observe classes and hang
around, and sort of know what was going on. So many weekends. I put in a lot of hours.
Taylor: The curriculum got more representative. In the Part-time and Weekend Studies, you could get a
full college education.
Fiksdal: You could even create a Pathway. The planning group created that. We sent out newspaperlike brochures. It looked like a newspaper because it arrived folded in residents’ mailboxes. I would
have to write a little column, “From the Dean.” I was always trying to encourage people to think about
coming. It really wasn’t that hard. Once you get a few State workers, they know other State workers,
and pretty soon—it was amazing how many State workers didn’t have their bachelor’s degree yet. Then
we had these wonderful graduate programs, especially MPA—Master in Public Administration—so that
was really useful.
Taylor: That was in the evening?
Fiksdal: Yeah, that was in the evening.
Taylor: There was always an issue about whether students that were full-time students should take
Part-time Studies. There was nothing to prevent them from doing it, but that was always an issue.
Because the idea of Part-time Studies was really originally to offer a service to part-time students.
Fiksdal: And older students was the idea, so they would be adults.
Taylor: So if full-time students took those places . . .
Fiksdal: We were worried about that, but in fact, it turned out that our full-time students didn’t go to
part-time studies. You could see that occasionally they would take a course. They would try to discuss
6

with their faculty how to not do some of the work, so that they could take a course such as language or
math or art. That happened, but those courses are there to support the curriculum anyway.
We did lots of studies to show that students did not migrate. I think there was only one student
that we talked about—I’m sure there must have been more, but honestly, no one took four courses
because it was way too much work. It was crazy. Then, of course, it wasn’t like the Evergreen
experience. You’d never know when someone is going to have a test or a fieldtrip or something, and
there you were. Most people realized that they had a bigger benefit by taking eight quarter-hours.
Then others realized the economic benefit of taking 12, even when they were working, which is a heavy
load, but economically, you paid less per credit if you did that. That actually did benefit the college as
well, because they were only taking 12, not 16, so you need more students to make up the FTE.
Taylor: What percentage of the total FTE were in Part-time Studies when you were there?
Fiksdal: Oh, I have no idea.
Taylor: Was it a quarter of the students? Was it that many?
Fiksdal: I can’t remember, to tell you the truth, how big it was. It started quite small. I was dean for
five years, and then I felt like I’d done my work and I wanted to leave. I had signed up for a six-year
term, I think two three-year terms. But I just thought, oh, well, I’ll just tell Barbara. So I went and told
her, and she didn’t seem upset, so I thought, great, I’ll just leave. And then it was like “Who’s going to
follow?” [laughing] But I talked to Russ Fox a lot, and he finally agreed to do it.
Taylor: The other part of your assignment, you were not only Dean of Part-time Studies, but you were
Dean of International Studies, and that was a huge desk assignment.
Fiksdal: Yes, it turned out to be huge. I remember we had an early meeting in the fall when I had just
become Dean. I guess we were talking about study abroad programs or something. Barbara, in her own
mind, had this trip she was planning to go to Kobe and Miyazaki. She was going to check on things and
maybe give some speeches. Just kind of reinforce our two exchange programs. The one in Miyazaki was
with students, and the one in Kobe was with students and with faculty.
Several things started coming up, and she announced suddenly in the meeting—I guess by
design, I don’t know—“Susan, I think you should be our International Studies Dean.” There must have
been a question and I could answer it, because I had done so much work with study abroad, and I knew
all the faculty who were doing work in that area. I thought, oh, this won’t be hard.

7

Well, that job grew and grew and grew. Also later, either in that meeting or the next, Barbara
announced this trip she wanted to take. She said, “I’m going to go to Miyazaki and Kobe, and because
Susan has the International Studies Desk, she’s going to go with me.” And I thought, oh, well, this has
perks. Then I was happy.
I had never been to Japan. I remember asking Barbara if Allen could come with me, because our
kids by then must have been in college, or were able to stay with my parents. She agreed! It wouldn’t
cost the college anything.
When we first met the President and administrators of Miyazaki University, I knew it must feel
strange for them. Japan has such a traditional society, and they are meeting the Provost of a college and
the dean of a college who are women, and then this man with them doesn’t seem to be anything. He’s
shaking hands, and they kind of look at him, look at us, look back at him and I realized they don’t know
what he’s doing here, and really, neither do I. He just happens to be present. So I said, “And this is my
husband, the photographer.” They just thought that was hysterical. They loved it.
Allen dutifully took the camera and started taking pictures. He did it so perfectly—you know
this very well because you went to Kobe, as I did later, but this was our first experience. I had read a
little bit, and I knew that handing someone a present was important, so I told Allen to take the picture
when we both had our hands on the package. He did that, and they were just like “He is the
photographer!” [laughter]
They insisted in inviting him to all the banquets because, well, he’s a man, and he should be
[there].” [laughing]
Taylor: You stayed in that place where we did later, where the two daughters—
Fiksdal: Yeah, I had taught the two daughters of this one family. Their father owned a nice hotel, and
he insisted that we stay for free in his hotel. His hotel had some Western rooms and some tatami-mat
rooms, and unfortunately, we had to go to the Western rooms. I really wanted to stay in the Japanese
ones.
I can remember trying the green tea the first night and I couldn’t sleep because it was
caffeinated. I didn’t realize. So I learned a lot. We would praise things too much, and then suddenly it
would be ours. Barbara and I realized, just say thank you. [laughing] That’s all.

8

Taylor: At the time that you were given the International Studies Desk, we had the Japanese program.
There were other people that had done some things, like your going to Mexico or something, but there
was no organization. Did you set up to make an organization?
Fiksdal: No, there was an organization. I had started taking students abroad, as you say with the
Mexico program. Then I taught a French culture group contract where basically we studied art,
philosophy, history, and French language, and the French language was half of the credits. The idea was
to prepare students for studying in France spring quarter.
Nancy Allen said she copied me, but we never sat down and talked. She just must have looked
at a syllabus or talked to a student or something. So she and Alice Nelson did the same thing, and later,
when we hired Marianne Bailey, that was just the best because then we could teach about the whole
francophone world. We still had eight quarter-hours of language when I was teaching with her, before I
became a dean. We lectured in French, provided outlines, and encouraged students to collaborate with
each other to understand them!
Taylor: Did these international programs just happen? Was there ever any decision about which ones
should develop and how they should happen?
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. Lots of talk. Faculty interested in language programs would get together in what we
called Culture and Language programs.
Taylor: Who was doing that?
Fiksdal: We were a sub group in a specialty area. That’s where we talked about it.
Taylor: There was no deanly direction?
Fiksdal: No, deans never helped us think about it, but we, the faculty, did. I remember we hired Art
Mulka, and he knew Latin and Greek. He was teaching something else entirely, I can’t even tell you
what it was. But I got talking to him because I realized he knew these languages and could probably
teach them. He said he could, and I said, “Why not have a classical studies program?” So he did. There
were people we hired that couldn’t do something like that. They might know another language but they
couldn’t teach it, or they didn’t know anything about the culture. Gordon Beck got involved in that.
Then we had Nancy Allen’s program that turned into Alice Nelson’s program. Setsuko Tsutsumi
and others taught in the Japanese program.
Taylor: And Russian.

9

Fiksdal: And the Russian program. The Russian program never took students abroad, but they told
people where they could go. Later on, there were summer programs, but students didn’t have to know
Russian to go on those.
Taylor: But the faculty just got together and said, “Okay, we’re going to offer Spanish one year and
we’re going to offer French the next year”? It was just the faculty that did it?
Fiksdal: Yeah, we decided on every other year that we would do these serious language programs in —
Japanese, French, Spanish—where we had expertise in the faculty. And when we didn’t have enough
faculty, it was a three year cycle. The Irish program which Sean Williams taught and the Chinese
program taught by Rose Jang. You have to wait for a confluence of available faculty. I do remember
Barbara Smith asking us to solve the problem of how to teach advanced programs or courses, but that
just was impossible. We would work with small groups of students on contracts to do advanced work in
language or literature.
Taylor: But now I notice—and it must have started with you, I don’t know—if you’re going to do a study
abroad program, it is approved by the deans.
Fiksdal: Things changed because of all the budgetary implications. Not when I first started taking
students abroad, but in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, the budge dean finally started not just paying for airfare,
but also per diem. That started costing the college more.
I remember it was Don Bantz that I met with, and it really made me mad that he declared that
study abroad programs would never cost more than 10 percent of the budget. I said, “I think it has
more value than that. Ten percent? We should talk about what value each area has, and how much
money they get.”
Because for those of us in humanities, it’s always very annoying when you start hearing more
about what the science programs get. They get people, they get equipment, they get field trips. It costs
the college a lot. Science matters, but humanities should get a large piece of the pie. Anyway, he said it
was 10 percent, so they stuck to that for quite a while.
Taylor: But you didn’t have any role in that decision.
Fiksdal: No.
Taylor: So what did International Studies Desk mean?
Fiksdal: We made agreements with lots of schools abroad to teach our students. When I became a
dean, for example, Judy Gabriele, our adjunct faculty member in French found a school in France that
10

could contract with us. They wanted an agreement with the college that our students would go there
and learn. We’d give them a certain amount of money, I can’t quite remember the amount. So students
in our French program started spending two weeks there at the very beginning of spring quarter. It
wasn’t in Paris, it was off in Brittany. The idea was that they would get used to being in France. They
would have language instruction and live with French families.
So, we had these kinds of agreements. I would have to write these agreements and then check
with our attorney general. These attorneys changed all the time, and they were really quite annoying to
work with. I remember one time I got so mad that I visited the UW and talked to the people there that
created these agreements. I found out what their AG had said; got several examples; brought them
down and said, “If the UW can do this, then we can.” So the agreement wasn’t all legalese. We had to
send these to other countries. They can’t figure out what you’re saying if it’s legalese. I was able to
write them much more informally. That process took time.
For a while, I was in charge of the students who came here on certain visas who were from
other countries. That job luckily moved to Student Services, but for a while I did that, and then the
faculty, too that we had on visas.
Then, against my objections, we passed a rule that there had to be at least 15 students that
went abroad to approve travel. There were issues where they had 14 or they had 13, and yet, it was
such a great thing. That was just really hard. Then, because I had the desk assignment, I had to talk to
the faculty and students, and I didn’t even support it. Well, I had to support it because it was my team’s
decision. I felt a strong allegiance to the team, but sometimes I thought our decisions were not good.
That was very hard.
Taylor: Is it still operating that same way, that the deans approve? I think they do.
Fiksdal: I am pretty sure. I know David McAvity, even though he was Budget Dean, took over the
International Studies Desk, or created it—because I think it lapsed or something—and he’s really
involved. He likes that kind of thing, and found more opportunities for students—one in Denmark, one
in Korea, one somewhere else. So he’s done a lot of good work in that area.
Anyway, being a dean was great. It was really nice to get away from teaching for a while. I
thought, oh, this will be great. It’ll be a 40-hour work week, not 80. Then on the evenings and
weekends, I can do my research. And in five years, I think I wrote one paper. I went to two conferences,
though. One time I didn’t present. Remember, we had deans’ budgets and so we could travel.

11

Taylor: But that was because you were a Dean of Part-time Studies, so you had all that evening work. I
think you worked harder than the rest of us.
Fiksdal: Well, for sure, I racked up the hours. Remember, we had to write down our hours every week
for Barbara. She insisted, because there were deans prior to us who apparently didn’t work hard.
Taylor: After you left the deanery, you went back to teach, and then you decided to apply to go on
exchange to Kobe, which I thought was wonderful because you had been so involved with everybody,
but you hadn’t been able to do it.
Fiksdal: Oh, yes. That’s the other thing that I had done under that desk assignment. I welcomed each
of the new exchange faculty we got from Japan. I met them at the airport, called relevant faculty to
welcome them, and made sure their apartment was stocked with food, which I paid for.
Taylor: And you had to find the apartment, because I remember the apartment that they had was really
inadequate.
Fiksdal: Yes, the Japanese faculty didn’t like the one near our campus, but we didn’t know. Finally, one
of the professors said, “This really isn’t a good apartment.” And I looked at it with new eyes and realized
it was a crummy apartment. I called the management and told them I was going to find another
apartment (after getting the provost’s approval). They said, “We’ll remodel. We’ll do anything you
want.” I said, “No, we’re going to find one in West Olympia.”
Taylor: It was that Ash apartment.
Fiksdal: Yeah, it was really close to the college, and if they didn’t have a car, it was just really difficult. I
found a place on the west side that was much better, where they were closer to the mall—they loved to
go to malls and shop.
Every year, I would help buy or sell things that they needed, like cars and rice cookers. It took
up a lot of my time. I always entertained them more than once so that they would feel welcome. I’d
organize things for them. That desk assignment turned into a huge thing.
One of the attractions to teach in Japan was because I knew all the recent exchange faculty.
When I filled out the application I felt odd because it was the application I had written as dean
[laughter]
Allen could only come for one month, but I was in Kobe, as you know, for four months. It was
very business-oriented even then. As a linguist, I decided to call upon all the experience I had from

12

teaching Hype and Hucksters, and I taught The Discourse of Advertising. That was great fun. The
students analyzed and created ads.
We even had a fieldtrip where the students went out and counted people carrying shopping
bags, and from which stores. I explained that we were looking at portable advertising. I couldn’t read
the words on the bags. [laughing] But I said, “We’re going to go and do this exercise, because
everybody here seems to carry shopping bags, and they can’t have all gone shopping that day” A
student raised her hand and said, “I’m not sure people do that.” Then she looked down and she had a
shopping bag, and then she looked around and everyone had one.
We went to the busiest intersection and students had a number of variables to watch for such
as age and gender. They figured out the middle-aged men were mostly businessmen with briefcases, but
everyone else basically had shopping bags. Then they were able to see which stores were most popular,
according to age. It seemed to fall out pretty much as they expected. That’s what really convinced them
that advertising seems to work. That was great fun.
That experience teaching in Japan was fabulous. We traveled to Miyazaki University. I knew
Mr. Hirashi very well because he had come to the college many times, and I always talked to him even
before I even thought about Japan, because he was visiting and he was interesting and funny. He loved
to joke. His English was so good. So we went to see him, and saw faculty and administrators that I had
met the previous time when I came with Barbara.
I knew a lot about Japanese culture, I had read so much, but I was reading even more. I loved
my course. All the faculty that I had helped at Evergreen felt obliged to invite me somewhere, so that
was quite wonderful. And the President was sure to come by a couple of times, I guess, not just once.
Everyone said, “Oh, that’s amazing.” Then they invited me to a potluck, and I’ll tell you, that was so
cool.
Taylor: Did the wives come?
Fiksdal: Yes. They made the food.
Taylor: That’s one of the things that Evergreen taught them.
Fiksdal: They learned, that’s right. They learned about creating community, and they learned how fun
that can be.
In the apartments where I lived, there were families that had also been on exchange. At one
point, we had a cleanup around the apartment. They didn’t really work very hard and announced that
13

work was done. I said, “But I’m not done.” They said, “We’ve worked hard enough.” [laughter] We
went up to have lunch, and they have these big jars of pickles and olives. I said, “Where did you get
this?” They said, “We go to Costco.” I said, “There’s a Costco?” So I got taken to Costco, which was
kind of an adventure because you just see rows and rows of Atlantic salmon!!
Taylor: That’s new. Costco wasn’t there when I was there.
Fiksdal: Atlantic farmed salmon isn’t very nice, but there were rows and rows of Japanese things. It was
fun to go there, actually. One of the families took us and then bought enchiladas, and then heated that
up and we had enchiladas for dinner. [laughter] It was so fun! They were probably the most
westernized as they had also lived in California for a year.
Fiksdal: The deaning was very good, but I did get kind of tired of it after a while. Basically, we were so
busy, and we were in meetings all the time, I didn’t even know where we were in the quarter. Like
suddenly, “No one’s here. Where are the faculty? Oh, it’s a break.” We were on such different
schedules, and we were so busy. I really wanted to get back to teaching.
Taylor: But you were glad you did it?
Fiksdal: I was very happy I did it.
Taylor: How many years did you teach after you finished deaning?
Fiksdal: A long time. Six more years.
Taylor: That’s when you went back and taught with newer people.
Fiksdal: I did, but then I also applied for a Fulbright. I decided I needed to get away. I had done that
when I went to the University of Michigan to get a degree in linguistics—that was three years—and then
I did take one or two quarters off. That was nice. I guess I had a sabbatical. That was very nice.
You get really tired and burned out, so I was looking at Fulbrights, and I found one in Hong Kong.
I told Allen and he said, “Hong Kong. Sounds great!” So I applied for it. It was an unusual one where
you join a team of five other faculty. The government had decided to move all public universities in
Hong Kong from a three-year college curriculum—which is the British way—to a four-year experience,
which was the American way, and add two years of general education. General education was a very
new concept for them.
A billionaire business man, Po Chung, had helped convince the government that this move would create
students who were innovative and collaborative. He also paid for four years of American faculty teams

14

to work in Hong Kong. He said, “Anyone he hired with a spark of intelligence came from somewhere in
the West. These people were not only intelligent, but they were creative.” Mostly, it was Americans.
Taylor: Was this a private university?
Fiksdal: No, we were placed in public universities, and then we were asked by private ones to come and
help, and we did that, too.
Taylor: Who’s the “we”?
Fiksdal: The six of us that got the Fulbrights. We were placed at these different universities.
Taylor: These are six people that you didn’t know.
Fiksdal: Oh, no. They came from all over the states. Our group, we know each other well. Not all of us
can get together all at the same time, it seems, but we do get together still. We like each other. It was a
wonderful way to make friends and to be in another culture. Like Japan, you arrive and you can’t read
anything. You can read street signs. Those are in English. But basically, it’s a Chinese culture. Hong
Kong is very crowded. There’s a lot going on. You can’t even see everything that’s going on.
Taylor: You were there for a full year?
Fiksdal: Yeah, we were there for ten months, and then I went back because the English Department
gave me a research fellowship. I went first in 2010-2011, and then I went back in the fall of 2013. Going
back was just—people said, “Hi. Have you been here all this time?” I said, “No, actually a whole year
went by since I saw you.”
Taylor: This second time you went back by yourself?
Fiksdal: This second time I went back by myself. Allen had retired.
Taylor: I mean without the team of six.
Fiksdal: There was not the team of six. I was the only one that was asked to go back. Allen came with
me because he was retired, so we had four months there. I told them, “I have to get back to
Evergreen,” because I was going to still teach, so I had to get everything done. [There was more
pressure on me than anything else. They were fine with that. I stayed for exams and grading.
Taylor: What were you teaching?
Fiksdal: For that class and the other one I taught for them, it was Introduction to Sociolinguistics, which
is my field.
Taylor: And you were teaching it in English, of course.
15

Fiksdal: In English, with an unfamiliar book. But the second time, I improved the class.
Taylor: Was their English good?
Fiksdal: Their English is quite good, not perfect. For the fellowship I researched how students disagreed
with each other. I found huge differences from the ways that students at Evergreen disagreed in
seminars. Because Hong Kong students are second-language learners. They only learn a few ways to
disagree, whereas when I looked at data I had from my seminar work, there were lots of ways to
disagree.
I also participated in a conference and gave a talk on my research. It was a rare opportunity.
When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I worked in the Office of General Education. That’s what we were all
supposed to be doing. So I had this desk and I had my own office, which turned out to be a very big
deal. I didn’t realize that it was such a big deal. They had asked me, “What should we call you?
Professor Susan Fiksdal or Dr. Susan Fiksdal?” I said, “Professor.” It sounded better to me, and I was a
professor, I figured, if I had been at another university. That turned out to be a lucky decision because it
turns out that a doctor is lower in status than a professor, so suddenly, I had my professional status
doubled. [laughing] That was fortuitous.
When I taught, I had a second office over in the English Department, so that was, I guess, cool,
but I couldn’t decorate it or anything. That was just too much for me.
Taylor: Did they provide housing?
Fiksdal: Oh, yeah. I had a beautiful, huge apartment, because it was out in the sticks. There’s a part of
China that was conceded to the British when they had Hong Kong, and I lived on that peninsula. So I
was, I don’t know, it’s not even halfway, maybe a quarter of the way to China where our apartment was.
I should look at a map. It might be halfway. But anyway, it’s called Sha Tin there.
Taylor: But you really didn’t know anything about Hong Kong when you went.
Fiksdal: Oh, no. I read a lot right before I left, because every time I go somewhere, I read papers on
language and power. I knew that there was English and there was Chinese, and I knew there were at
least two dialects there, if not more. I knew some things, but I had to really study up. It was nothing but
amazing. Hong Kong has a huge bureaucracy in the universities, in the government, probably all
institutions because it had been a British colony. It was just after I was dean, excuse me, I have to
backtrack, remember that just after I left the deanery, Russ Fox was dean, and a business woman and
some administrators came from Wuham University in China. Their goal was to partner with Evergreen so

16

their students would learn English. WE needed to send a group to Wuhan. Russ couldn’t go because his
mother was ill, so I had to go. Again, I thought, oh, my gosh, I’m so lucky. I got to go to China with our
then-Provost, Enrique Riveros- Schäfer.
Taylor: You did that, because eventually, I went on that exchange.
Fiksdal: Oh, you did?
Taylor: You met “the woman”?
Fiksdal: Yes, of course. There was a brash businesswoman who was very clear about she wanted. No
hedging around. She was part of the delegation that came to Evergreen. It was hard to understand their
partnership with her. When we visited Wuhan, we had some talks and then they organized a tour of
their southernmost province in China, which was an open economic development area. That meant you
could build anything without any restrictions. It’s very close to Vietnam. Beautiful weather. They were
building horrible-looking places that people could stay in, resorts with crazy themes like teepees. It was
really sort of a frightening experience to go there and see how they were kind of plundering the land.
They wanted to build a university there in one year and have lots of Evergreen faculty staff it along with
their faculty.
I insisted that Rose Jang accompany us because I knew that her English and her Chinese were
perfect. They had a translator that was from Olympia that accompanied us, but I didn’t want a
translator I didn’t know. I didn’t know whose side he was on, and this would be, I knew, a hard-driving
bargain. If there’s only one thing I have learned about the Chinese, it’s that they bargain. No one is a
match for the Chinese.
Taylor: That’s absolutely true.
Fiksdal: I called all kinds of universities with connections to China. I even talked to Yale Law School
because they had a branch there. I always said, “I’m a dean at the Evergreen State College.” I was not
saying that I used to be a dean. [laughing] I had to give myself some title. At Yale, my contact said,
“Don’t agree to anything. They don’t believe in contracts. They don’t understand contract law, and they
will break every agreement. All you have to do is look at some car companies.” I said, “I don’t have a lot
of time to do this research. Could you just summarize it?” [laughing] But he did, and he basically said,
“Your best answer is ‘no’ and just be very, very, very, very careful.”

17

They wined and dined us. They took us on this tour. They said they were going to build another
Evergreen in this gorgeous area, and everyone would want to come. I said, “But your faculty?” “We’ll
just assign them to come.” I said, “They don’t get to decide?” “No.”
Wuhan was one of the top 10 universities, and it was nothing like Evergreen. I just couldn’t
understand their interest, or if they could even understand our teaching approach.
Taylor: Did you go to Wuhan?
Fiksdal: We went to the university in Wuhan.
Taylor: Because there are three universities there.
Fiksdal: We didn’t see all three, we just saw one. It was just huge. The President was 40 years old.
There were generations lost during Mao’s time and the Cultural Revolution. We did meet the resident
scholar, who looked like you would expect a Chinese scholar to look. He had a really long beard that
kind of curled at the end. He was ancient, and he was sitting calmly in a huge beautiful office.
[laughing] I couldn’t really speak Chinese, which was embarrassing, so I just kind of did a little bow—a
vague bow—because I thought they used a bow, but who knows? It was just hard to know what was
polite at that moment.
So, they had a few intellectuals who were still alive, and they were apparently in each of these
universities. But everyone else was so young. I finally asked the president, “Is there anyone over 40
here?” He said, “Basically, no.”
Taylor: So you were with Enrique and you were with Rose?
Fiksdal: Yes. It was wonderful to be with Rose. She knew everything. Her parents were part of Chiang
Kai-Shek’s work group that escaped China. They moved to Taiwan thinking at any moment, they were
going back. So they raised Rose with a traditional Chinese education, which emphasized perfect
Mandarin, memorization of great poems, and rigor.
She stood before an ancient monument in Wuhan. I can’t remember what it was—and there
was the beginning of a poem, and she recited the poem, and then she kept going, and they all looked at
her and said, “We don’t know that.” They weren’t trained like she was trained. She was invaluable. She
knew so much about Chinese culture. It was only her second time back in China. She had only gone to a
famous women’s conference.
Taylor: Now she’s gone back many times.

18

Fiksdal: Many times. That really opened up the Chinese world to her. That was wonderful. So, that
was my experience. I knew something about Chinese culture, let’s just say that. You could argue that
being a dean was one of the best things I ever did.
I remember that you came up to me one day and you said, “So, you used to be focused towards
the West, and now you’re looking at the East.” I thought, well, that was perceptive. I didn’t understand
it myself. [laughter]
I remember in Hong Kong, one of the things they say in their literature of tourism is that Hong
Kong is “The gateway to Asia,” and we really took advantage of that. Allen and I went to China several
times, different places. We went to Myanmar. We went to Vietnam and Cambodia.
Taylor: You were in Hong Kong for 10 months.
Fiksdal: Yes and when we went back to Honk Kong, we visited Taiwan. We saw a lot of Asia, and that
really influenced me.
I should mention that I made a little time on my Fulbright to write. One day, I just announced I
was staying home. That day I worked on creating two chapters of a book on seminars.
Taylor: That was when you were in Hong Kong?
Fiksdal: I took the time to do it then.
Taylor: Because I thought you did that book before then.
Fiksdal: No. I had written lots of other stuff, but this was better. This was a different direction. I wrote
two chapters, and then I sent them off, one to Jossey-Bass, a publishing house that publishes “how to”
books for faculty. The other one was Routledge, which is really a big name. But I sent it to them
because I had things to say about my teaching in Hong Kong.
Routledge got back to me really fast, and they were very interested. I had these two chapters,
so they shopped them around, which means they send them to faculty readers. Then your editor sends
you their comments. The comments were very favorable, so Routledge said, “We’ll publish it.” I said, “I
have to write it first.” They said, “Fine.”
Taylor: I thought you published that book way before I retired, but you were in Hong Kong after I
retired, so that’s recent.
Fiksdal: It is recent. When I finally retired in 2013, I basically sat down and wrote the book. I just had
been waiting for time, and suddenly, I had all the time in the world until I was 98 or something. I just sat
down and it took me four months. I wrote the whole book.
19

Taylor: When was it published?
Fiksdal: It’s called A Guide to Teaching Effective Seminars: Conversation, Identity, and Power. It was
published in 2014.
Taylor: So you did seminars on seminaring many times.
Fiksdal: Many times.
Taylor: But the book actually comes out in 2014.
Fiksdal: Even though it’s called A Guide to Teaching Effective Seminars, it’s actually a guide to
conversation. It tells you how conversation works. At the end of every chapter, I have tips on seminars,
and I have lots of quotes from actual seminars in the text. It’s my clever way of teaching linguistics.
Teaching art of conversation. [laughing]
Taylor: Has Evergreen used this in faculty development in any way?
Fiksdal: Once. It’s really sad. I wrote it for Evergreen faculty. I really wanted this to be useful, and only
once did someone notice. I had led summer institutes on Seminars for a long time. Therese Saliba
managed to get enough money to give this book to all the faculty who signed up. Not everyone came
and not everyone read it. A whole bunch of adjuncts came because they just, I don’t know.
Taylor: They knew you.
Fiksdal: They decided they liked me and they knew me, yeah. But they don’t really have seminars in
four quarter-hour courses, so I was wondering why they were there, but it’s good for them to know
more about seminars.
Susan Preciso and Sarah Ryan sat really close to me, and had underlined and written all over
their texts, and were ready for a seminar. They were ready to seminar on the text, which I wanted to
do, but no one else was. Other people hadn’t really read much of it. There were other full-time faculty,
and they were wonderful, but they came with particular issues they wanted to discuss. It was like any
seminar, you’ve got some participants that are just brilliant and ready, and the rest are kind of floating
around. [laughing] But that was the only time that Therese was able to buy the books. They could have
gotten really good deals from this publisher.
Taylor: They should have done. It reminds me of when Don Finkel died, and he was such a presence in
the college. His teaching philosophy had made such an imprint on people, so he had published his book,
Teaching with Your Mouth Shut not too long before. That’s when I was dean and you were dean, too.
We were doing Summer Institutes, but we did one in honor of Don. Peter Elbow came and did a little
20

talk. I think there were about 100 people that came. They all got the book, and we worked through the
book, and they all created a Finkel workshop. It was, I thought, really significant. It was a way to honor
Don, but it was a way to get his teaching into the minds of a lot of Evergreen people. That’s what should
happen with us.
Fiksdal: I agree. I think it should happen, but it hasn’t. We don’t share enough. People were saying, “I
learned so much about you at the meeting where they nominate people for emeritus status.” That’s
when you hear what everyone has done. You don’t hear half of it, really, because it’s only if you’ve
taught with someone that you learn how they teach, and you learn teaching approaches that are so
useful and helpful. Often they come from someone else, or your colleague attributes them to someone
else. So you realize, okay, so these people know how to do this, these people know how to do that.
I know we had an integrated workshop with Heather Heying that she had learned from Paul
Przybylowicz, because we were teaching biological systems of communication, which are not language,
and human systems that are so different. In order to connect those, once a week we would ask a
question—I think we usually had two questions—and put students to work. Then we did our own work
together, like usually a business meeting and things like that. Then occasionally, listen to them, and
then they would talk about what the groups all decided. That was very good, I thought, as an integrative
method.
I tried all kinds of different things that I heard about in teaching, but there’s so much more. I
didn’t go to the Finkel workshop, but I had worked with him alone one time and I learned to do his type
of workshops. I talked about him in my book, too; I talked about his approach.
Taylor: There have been some efforts over time to share things. Truthfully, we’re better than major
universities where people are really isolated.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s really bad.
Taylor: They don’t have any idea what their colleagues do, except to maybe read their book once it gets
published. But I remember Leo Daugherty wrote a monograph on teaching writing at Evergreen. He
talked to a whole bunch of people that teach writing, and he wrote this little thing, which described
maybe 30 ways people teach writing.
Fiksdal: It was so helpful.
Taylor: It was very helpful. So that was one case, but there hasn’t been as much sharing as there should
be.
21

Fiksdal: And now is when we really need it, as more and more people are retiring. Because the sort of
usual practices are going to be forgotten and people aren’t going to realize what they are.
I don’t know whether seminars are so great actually anymore either. I’ve been talking to
faculty. There are students who really are triggered by any number of things. A mention of the word
“rape” in class can set them off. There are so many more issues now.
Taylor: Are you saying that you’re doubting . . .
Fiksdal: . . . the way we used to do seminar.
Taylor: As a means of study?
Fiksdal: I’m not so sure that good, collaborative learning is happening in seminars, unless a lot of
measures are taken to help students. Remember, I was talking to you, we both knew about Jose
Gomez’s First Amendment approach to seminar. That’s not working these days at all. Students are
much more aware of their own triggers. We’ve got to stop because we need a break.

22


Susan Fiksdal
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
May 28, 2019
Final, part 1b

Taylor: Now we’re on ZOOM 1, folder 4. We’re an hour into a conversation on May 28, 2019 with
Susan Fiksdal. We were just talking about programs that you taught, people that you learned from, and
things that you learned about teaching, and about content, and about students. That’s where we are.’
Fiksdal: I think one of the things that Carrie Margolin was really surprised at when we were planning
the program is that Doranne Crable—after we got a big, long list of books and various kinds of texts and
various kinds of things that wanted to do—said, “Okay, now let’s look at this list and make sure that we
have women, people of color, a good range of texts that will bring more to the program.” Carrie had
never thought about doing that before, and I think that was an eye-opener for her.
I enjoy doing that kind of thing, too, because often, you find sources that you didn’t know
existed. I don’t remember a lot more about that program, but I remember I taught a lot about gender
and conversation.
Taylor: What was it called?
Fiksdal: Mirrors of Language. We added an “s” so that we would have at least three mirrors for the
three of us that were teaching. The students really loved it, and that was a great program.
Taylor: Were they first-year students?
Fiksdal: Yes. That was the year that I taught Carrie Brownstein the first time. She worked with me
again about four years later. The program was interesting because I remember one good thing we did.
It was a three-quarter-long program. We decided not to move the students from their seminar groups
or their faculty sponsor. The students were with us all year, so that we really them, and we knew the
other students because each of us taught a module and we had lots of workshops.
I think that was the only program I was able to argue successfully for that structure, and it was
the only time that I felt that students were learning in a very deep way. Students didn’t drop out. Even
though they were having other kinds of experiences in the program, we had this wonderful continuity. I

1

remember at the end they had to all sorts of things, and one was to produce magazines. Another was
performance. I think linguistics and psych were connected in the magazine and in the performances. It
sounds silly—“Oh, they made magazine”—but it was wonderful. They were like zines, which was very
popular at the time so the students really loved it, and they poured their hearts and souls into it. Lots of
creativity—in photography, and in drawing, and in writing.
The reason I mention Carrie is that she became a very famous singer and guitar-player artist in
her band, Sleater-Kinney. It’s going to come back now after all these years. She also has collaborated in
a TV program called Portlandia, which was really amusing. She has written an autobiography, and I am
actually mentioned in it! She loved sociolinguistics, and I think it helped her a lot in thinking about
conversation. I think it helped her in Portlandia. She was a great student.
Taylor: Are there other students that stand out that you know you made a difference for?
Fiksdal: Amy Hitchcock worked a lot with me because she loved linguistics, and she was so smart, and
she would do everything better than I ever would imagine. I wanted to help her get to graduate school,
I remember. So I took her up to the UW when I was invited there by a former professor of mine, a
mentor. She was a bigwig then. She had become a star in linguistics. So I said, “Well, let’s go see Penny
Eckert and listen to her talk.” Her talk was just fabulous.
I introduced Amy to her. We didn’t talk a lot, but I just wanted Amy to see that you have your
teacher, and your teacher can be your mentor. That’s how it works. But I think it just helped to freak
her out. She is a very anxious student. She started teaching ESL in Shelton. That’s a place a lot of
students have gone because there’s a large population of Guatemalan and Central American people.
She was teaching adults. She got interested in that, and she got her master’s in adult development.
She’s really done well for someone with all that anxiety and brilliance.
I had only one quarter I taught Intro to Linguistics at some point early on, like in the ‘80s, and
Rick McKinnon took the course. I didn’t really remember everything about him then, but several years
later, he was back in town because he had grown up here, and he had gotten his PhD in
psycholinguistics. He told me he owed it all to me because of that one course. He didn’t owe me
anything! A psycholinguist looks at how children learn language and develop. He ended up going into
another field. I hired him for a while to teach at Evergreen, because he was excellent.
Then Siri Mehus was one of my wonderful students as well, and she got a PhD in
communication, after only two quarters with me. I had her working on an early project I was doing of
studying seminar talk. She helped with that. She was amazing.
2

In my class she took part, with two other students, in a study that ultimately failed. What they
were trying to do was record people as they were leaving a venue, and they decided to go to a small
church. They were recording people as they were leaving to try and figure out, how do people leave?
It’s really hard sometimes to stop talking. You stand out on the porch and pretty soon you’re walking
down the driveway, you’re standing at the car. What is it that’s keeping people there, and how do
people stop the conversation? But unfortunately, as they were doing the study, the participants began
to realize what they were doing and asked them, “Are you trying to figure out what we say as we
leave?” The experiment got ruined that way. The participants in a study can’t know what you’re doing
because then they adjust. They may help you out or they do something that’s not natural. We wanted
naturally occurring conversation at all times. We also videotaped for that reason, because there’s
always non-verbal interaction going on.
Taylor: Is this out of the program Art of Conversation? Is that where that came from?
Fiksdal: Yeah, it is. That’s where it came from. Anyway, she was brilliant. She went to the University of
Texas at Austin. Then she was free one year. She called me up and said she was back in Seattle, doing
not much. I think she had a job but it just wasn’t too interesting. That fall quarter, I was going to teach
Art of Conversation again, and I had something like 34 students crammed in the room.
I told them how hard it was going to be; that I was really tough; that they’d have so much work;
that it had to be 40 hours a week commitment or else. I just went on and on to get rid of them, because
I needed 25 not 34. They all said, “We’re not leaving.” I said, “Okay, let’s have a break. This is your
chance to escape and then we’ll talk some more, and we’ll do a little exercise.” None of them left.
Tom Wolmeldorf was the Dean of Curriculum at the time. I talked to him and I said, “You know,
I have a former student who has a PhD, and she’d be fabulous. If we could hire her, even half-time, then
she could help me out in this program. She already knows it the material, and probably knows more
than I do.” So he hired her.
Taylor: Wow! What was her name?
Fiksdal: Siri Mehus. She was fabulous. She was younger than me, and she, it turned out, was tougher
than me in grading assignments and things. I thought I was still tough, but I had loosened up apparently.
[laughing] That was so much fun because we knew each other’s expertise. She had gone more into
non-verbal communication. I had developed this program since she had left, so it was different than
what she had done. But she loved it, and she suggested a couple things that we, of course, did. It was
only one quarter, but I wish it could have been longer.
3

Taylor: The students did well?
Fiksdal: They did very well. They were happy. You never heard them say, “Oh, I wanted you, not Siri,
for my seminar leader.” You didn’t hear anything like that. We were really in tune.
Taylor: Where did the [A Guide to Teaching] Effective Seminars book come from?
Fiksdal: This came much later, so I’ll wait till we get to that topic.
Taylor: Okay.
Fiksdal: But for all of the ‘90s, I was working on videotaping seminars. The money came from an
assessment grant that we got somehow. Steve . . . hmm . . . right-hand arm for Barbara [Smith] . . .
Steve . . .
Taylor: Hunter?
Fiksdal: Hunter. Steven Hunter had assessment money. Faculty could apply for it and work in the
summer. I had been videotaping seminars during the year, so I started to analyze the data that summer.
And I wrote two monographs for the college—one called Seminar Talk and the other called Getting a
Word In. Both of those were circulated to the faculty. I don’t know if anyone read them. They were
linguistic, because I had chunks of what people actually said in seminar, and I had quotes from what
they said out of seminar when they were looking at the videotape, what they meant and what they
thought was going on. It was very eye-opening to me.
I kept working on this idea of seminars. I wanted to write a book, but boy, there wasn’t much
time. I did go to conferences regularly, and I did sometimes present. I didn’t always present, and that
kind of saved me, because I think if I had tried to always do it, I probably would have gone nuts.
Yeah, those were some amazing students. I’ll think of others as we’re talking.
Taylor: Thinking about seminars, seminars are such a central part of the classic Evergreen programs.
Obviously, you came to be a believer. But talk about how your teaching changed, in terms of philosophy
and in terms of what you felt was important, or how you changed as a teacher over the course of many,
many years.
Fiksdal: We also had a grant in the early years called the Libby Grant—you might remember—where
some faculty, I think they got a little training or something, and then they got to go into people’s classes
and observe, and then report back what they observed. Nancy Allen came into my seminar, and I
thought I was just doing this great job. I thought we had this great seminar. I was pretty excited to talk
to her afterwards. Her first, and pretty much only, comment was “Well, you teach seminar as though it
4

were a language class.” And I said, “What?” [laughter] She said, “Well, you keep looking around the
room expecting someone to answer the question that you have, that you asked. So you put people on
the spot. They feel like they have to respond.” I said, “But they did, and we had a really good seminar.”
[laughing] She said, “Yeah, but that’s not usually the way.” That was long before I even knew what
discourse analysis was.
The one thing that really annoyed me about the way we did our program planning, always—this
was always true, as far as I know—anyone I talk to, every way I always did it—our seminars were always
at the same time, so how could you visit someone else’s seminar? You could if you left your students
alone, but basically, you always feel you have to be with them, so you never know how everyone else is
doing things, so you have to figure it out on your own.
I interviewed a whole lot of faculty about these very questions, like, “How do you know what to
do?” Most of them said, “You know, I really don’t know how to do it.” [laughing] Even when I brought
Peter Elbow back years and years after he had left the college—he was there in the early years for quite
a while, 10 years or so?
Taylor: Might be.
Fiksdal: Then he came back much later when we needed a good writing workshop for the faculty. I
chatted with him at lunch and at dinner, and I asked him about seminars. I asked him about all kinds of
things, practices in the early years that we thought were so important to continue. He said, “I never did
understand seminars. I never did a good job, I’m sure.” [laughing] I just thought, how many of us were
like that?
I think by studying seminars in my way, the way I was trained to do—to analyze discourse and to
look at various ways people use to signal what’s going on in the conversation—I became a better
listener. I was not asking all the questions, and I was encouraging students, even if they could blurt out
only a few words, I would either help them develop that, or if they really couldn’t, I would sort of ask
everyone to help with that thought. I got much more collaborative and better at facilitating. And the
students always liked my seminars.
Taylor: Seminars were always the center of your programs?
Fiksdal: They were. They did go down to one time a week sometimes in various programs, because of
the other things that we needed to do, who I was teaching with, how much they were on campus, all
those kinds of things. There’re so many programs, so it’s hard to remember exactly which ones were
like that, but that did occur, I remember.
5

Going back to great programs and collaborations, I wanted to mention Hype and Hucksters that I
taught with Ginny Hill. This was a program she had taught before, I think at least twice. It was her
program. That’s another way you can do program planning—you walk into someone else’s program,
and then you create space in it for more questions. She was just really open to anything because she
loved linguistics, and she wanted a partner in this program.
The program was all about marketing and hyping things. We started with the autobiography of
George Barnum, for example. It was so fun to teach with her. She was really tough, and I liked her
manner in class. I couldn’t really quite adopt it because I wasn’t her, but she was the stronger force, one
would say.
Taylor: What did you learn from her?
Fiksdal: I learned to stay in control, like when the students start talking and going off on tangents—you
know, just bring them back and don’t mince words. Also she had this thing about getting work done.
She would just say, “As it says in our covenant, if you can’t get it done”— No incompletes.” That was a
real breakthrough to be more definite about how students have to get the work done, and on time.
Work can be late, but not much of it can be late. Things like that. She helped me with my work life
[laughing] so it wasn’t so horrible.
Taylor: In terms of content, I always thought that team teaching was the best faculty development
imaginable.
Fiksdal: Oh, yes.
Taylor: Because you’re teaching with people that know things that you don’t know, and that you need
to know to teach the programs. So, you learn.
Fiksdal: Oh! I learned.
Taylor: Do you have examples of where that happened?
Fiksdal: Ginny had these case studies from Harvard. They focus on particular businesses, and what
happened to them. These Harvard students would go out and research and talk to actors in various
businesses. One of her favorites, I remember, was California Dried Plums. They used to be called
prunes, but they rebranded to become plums. The marketers thought maybe they would sell better.
This whole case study is very interdisciplinary. It looks at how it’s marketed on TV and in jingles and on
radio. It looks at brochures. It looks at everything. The students had to learn how to do all those things.

6

So what was I supposed to do? I didn’t know anything about branding. It was kind of a dirty
word even at the college because people kept saying that we needed to rebrand Evergreen, and all of us
were like “Ooh! What’s that? We don’t want that!” I learned about it and decided that it wasn’t bad, it
was very interesting. It’s clever, and it’s what people do anyway. Criminals often rebrand themselves.
People just become someone else, and that’s what they do. I learned a lot from her in that.
Fitting in some exercises on discourse was perfect, so I taught them a lot about how to make
messages prominent, and how to write ads so the most important things are there, and how people talk,
and how it all matters. It was fun.
Then I taught Designing Languages with Judy Cushing twice. That was just a one-quarter
program, but it was so much fun. I would teach Introduction to Linguistics. It’s not really what I liked to
do. It’s the structure of language, so students get an overview of language—it has sound, it has little
meaningful parts, like “ly” makes it an adverb. It’s a morpheme. Then how syntax is created, and
semantics, how things mean. Pragmatics goes beyond the sentence in terms of meaning, and that’s my
area.
I’m teaching all this, and then she’s teaching computer science. Students are actually learning a
little computer language that she’s having them do that creates things. Then they’re supposed to design
a language at the end in groups. It can be a so-called natural language, or it can be a computer
language. That was really fun. I was meant to learn a lot more from her than I actually did. I found it
very frustrating that my math skills were not quite up to par, but teaching with her twice helped.
The second time, Brian Walter came into the program, unfortunately just part-time. We wanted
to have him full-time. But I could ask him questions about what she said, and somehow it was very
clear. He’s very clear.
Taylor: Yes, because he’s a mathematician and a systems analyst or something like that.
Fiksdal: He knows a lot about computer programming. He knows several languages. Whereas for me, I
was dipping my toe in. But it was great because it was cross-disciplinary and fun.
Judy learned a lot of linguistics, so the second time we taught together, she was able to help
students when they were working on problems. I didn’t feel comfortable helping students on their
problems with her side, I have to say, but I did learn a lot about computer languages—that was good—
and how they’re designed.

7

Taylor: I so often think about teaching at Evergreen versus teaching other places, and the opportunities
that we had just kept us there, because it was constant.
Fiksdal: It was constant.
Taylor: We were always learning new things and always having to go out beyond our comfort. It was
never boring.
Fiksdal: No, it was never boring. And you never know what’s going to happen. Like one time, I was just
having lunch, and Jose Gomez sat across from me, and we were talking. It turned out neither of us had
an idea of what we were doing in a couple of years. Then we kind of looked at each other and I said,
“Well, I guess we could teach together—language and law.” I didn’t know what else to say about it.
That became our program, Language and Law, because we didn’t quite know.
It wasn’t until I really started teaching with Jose that he started to understand what linguistics
was all about. No one knows what linguistics is, in the first place. You just have this sense of, I don’t
know, something about diagramming sentences. But there’s a lot, and he already had a lot to say also
about the language of law itself.
He had taught his own program alone so many times before, and he loved to have the students
have a Supreme Court where they’re the judges, and they’re the attorneys, and they have real cases
that are in the appellate court but not decided yet. He would love to do that. Other people had said to
me, “Watch out. He’s going to do that, and the end is just all about the Supreme Court, and it’s not
about your work or what students learn overall.”
I said, “Let’s think about the end of the program.” And I made sure that while they were
planning this Supreme Court, a dry run, we did something called Presentation of Self. The students
videotaped each other presenting arguments, and then analyzed it. The next week, they actually did the
Supreme Court. He had a lot of accoutrements and a lot were from Harvard, so we were joking around
about that a lot. He had graduated from Harvard. That’s a very big deal for a migrant farmer’s son,
someone who had worked with Caesar Chavez. He had gone to Harvard, but he did mention it a few too
many times. [laughter] I, having only gone to the University of Michigan, made a few comments once in
a while, and the students kind of picked up on this.
We had the third week before evals and I thought, oh, let’s have them do these creative
projects, and meanwhile, we can be writing. I was always trying to figure out a way to make evaluations
easier. They never were, but this was one more idea.

8

One group did a little play that was absolutely hysterical. They made fun of Jose by playing a
little song “You’re So Vain.” [laughter] Then showing some Harvard symbols. They interviewed him and
me at the end of it. It was all really crazy, but it was about the program. At the end, they talked to him,
supposedly years later. They said, “So, do you remember teaching Language and Law with Susan
Fiksdal?” He says, “No, I don’t remember her. Who is that? No idea.”
But I didn’t know what he said. They interviewed me, and I decided to just walk into this
classroom, and I started speaking French. The whole thing is in French, and every once in a while, they
said, “Now she says she wants chocolate.” [laughing] They didn’t know what I was saying!.
This was just a real hit in the program, because everyone showed their creative pieces. That one
was so nice, so I gave it to Greg Mullins to put in Archives because, as you know, Jose died too soon, and
now we have this joyous piece of a program where students are being creative.
That was a wonderful program, and I learned so much about constitutional law. We’ve had so
many attorneys on the TV talking about our presidents and things they’re doing or shouldn’t be doing or
whatever. In the Bush years, I really understood when attorneys got interviewed why they talked the
way they did, how they diverged a little bit from the question in order to go over here and talk about
this. I thought, I have learned so much about attorneys, and ways of talking about things, somehow
through this program, that I hadn’t realized.
Taylor: That’s super.
Fiksdal: Besides things you could point to, like I knew a bunch of cases by then, and I could cite the
date. Jose was really fun to work with.
Taylor: But very principled.
Fiksdal: He knew his stuff. He also was one of these people who—he’s a person of color. His
background is Mexican American. He had been born in the United States. But he told the students in
his seminar they could say anything they wanted, and I told him I just couldn’t do that in my seminar. I
said, “If they hurt someone by saying something racist, I’m going to have to stop them.” And he said,
“Well, let’s just say that we do what we do.” That was really helpful because I was really nervous.
Taylor: He was very interested in the First Amendment.
Fiksdal: Yes, for him, the First Amendment—and we read a counter-argument to the First Amendment.
I’ve forgotten the name that he had at that point for those attorneys, but they talked about how words
do hurt, and how you shouldn’t be allowed to just say anything you want. That debate, of course, has
9

gone on forever, and it’s in the academy and it’s outside the academy. But he was strongly for the First
Amendment and I was not.
We decided to group all Hispanics and people of color that we knew about into my seminar. I
don’t know why we didn’t put them in José’s, but that’s just what we did. We wanted to have a critical
mass so that students of color wouldn’t be divided in the program. Usually you have one or two, and
their personalities and backgrounds are different, so it doesn’t really help them feel safe, and we
wanted them to feel safe. However, there was a problem, because one of the students didn’t have a
Hispanic name but she was Hispanic and she confronted us. I didn’t really know what to say except “I’m
sorry.”
Taylor: Just a sideline. My small story about Jose, he was on the committee to select the President
when Jane Jervis was selected. I was chairing that committee. He was the most important person on
the committee. He was just amazing in terms of questions, in terms of the clarity of what he stood for.
He worked really hard on that committee. He was very, very helpful. That’s the only time I really got to
know him because I never taught with him, I just worked with him when he was working in the deans’
office.
Fiksdal: But you did a terrific job. You really did.
Taylor: But that was a terrific search. I think one of the reasons it was good is that there was no insider.
We were genuinely looking for the best person we could in the country. The committee, in the end, was
100 percent behind Jane, and she turned out to be wonderful. But Jose was very, very important.
Fiksdal: I think he was the leading person also—he would never say it—when we created the union.
He, with his legal training, understood the current contractual language that was needed. And he knew
how to negotiate, and he knew how to clarify. He was very good with that.
I remember when we wrote our first evaluations for each other—because it was a two-quarter
program. You’d send the seminar evaluations—and I can’t quite remember how we divided up that
program, but I think I had two evaluations per student, depending on whether they were in my
seminar—to give to him. He critiqued my evals and said I couldn’t be just saying “excellent.” I was
trying at the time to write really short evaluations, because there was a group that was trying to get us
to do that and I believed in that. But anyway, he really cared about words. He was an attorney. Every
word matters. Yeah, he was an amazing person.

10

Taylor: He was a wonderful member of the faculty, and he came in through difficult times. The college
was full of people that were, in a way, unlikely members of the faculty that really were important to the
[college].
Fiksdal: Early on, we had an attorney, Hap Freund—do you remember him?
Taylor: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I got to be friendly with him because we both were going to go to Mexico at the same time. I
think he went to the language school, too. I was just more advanced, so I wasn’t in the same class, and I
didn’t see him either. But anyway, we talked about it a lot the year before we left.
He was teaching in that program Lawmakers/Lawbreakers, and the lawbreaker was an ex-con,
Jim Martinez, who was such a nice guy. I’d run across him in the hall, and he really had pearls of
wisdom.
Taylor: But in the end, I guess, I don’t know if he got fired.
Fiksdal: Yeah, he got fired. It didn’t quite work out, but he was a good person. Yeah, that was an
unusual combination of people. They weren’t hired long-term, as I recall. But that idea,
Lawmaker/Lawbreaker was a good one.
I think Cruz Esquivel, even though he had to be fired, too, because he wasn’t quite truthful on
his resume, he was quite an amazing person. He wasn’t someone who really was rigorous or could
adhere to a college or university, but he was smart.
Taylor: I don’t think the college now, in hiring, dares take that kind of risk.
Fiksdal: No, they don’t.
Taylor: There were all kinds of cases where people were hired, and I think there was a known gamble at
the time.
Fiksdal: Yeah, exactly. This is a liberal arts college. You don’t want people in professions. You don’t
want an engineer, you don’t want certain kinds of professionals necessarily. And yet, José was able to
adapt so well, and excite the students about law. A lot of them, after working with him, didn’t want to
go into law anymore. His programs helped clarify what the law really was.
I was really happy, in the last years I taught, I took to heart—and I cannot remember who said
this to me, but someone—it was probably Barbara—said, “You need to mentor the new faculty. That’s
what older faculty should be doing in their last years at the college, instead of just teaching alone.”
Because, you know, as deans, we saw older faculty teaching alone quite often.
11

And so in the last years of my teaching, I really reached out to new faculty. I taught with
Heather Heying. I taught with Rachel Hastings, which was absolutely fabulous. She’s a linguist and a
mathematician, and has PhDs in both, which made me very nervous to even approach her, but she’s a
wonderful person. We taught together so happily. She’s quite a versatile faculty member. She’s going
to be one of the best hires we ever made. Brian Walter, too, is one of those people that can really
spread his wings, as he’s shown by teaching with Steven Hendricks and doing a lot with narrative and
that kind of work.
Taylor: And improv.
Fiksdal: He’s great at that. I took his improv class because I was teaching with him. Actually, I’ll talk
about that later, about why I took improv with him. Maybe we should move on?
Taylor: Okay.

12



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

FiksdalSusan_20190312_Transcript_Part1.pdf

FiksdalSusan_20190312_Transcript_Part2.pdf

FiksdalSusan_20190528_ Transcript_part1a.pdf

FiksdalSusan_20190528_Transcript_ part 3.pdf

FiksdalSusan_20190528_Transcript_part 2-.pdf

FiksdalSusan_20190528_Transcript_part1b-.pdf