Russ Fox Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

FoxRuss

Title

Russ Fox Oral History Interview

Date

27 August 2019

27 September 2019

Creator

Russ Fox

Contributor

Eric Stein

extracted text

Russ Fox
Interviewed by Eric Stein
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 27, 2017
FINAL

Stein: It is September 27, 2017, and I’m here with Russ Fox at his home in Olympia, Washington. We
are starting an oral history interview that’s going to be part of the Evergreen oral history archives. It
focuses on Emeritus Faculty.
I’m very lucky to have an opportunity to speak with Russ. We talked a few days ago and set out
some ideas for what we might want to discuss during this particular interview. I was really interested in
what Russ had to say about growing up in East Cleveland in the 1950s, and I wanted to ask how that
shaped your ideas about community.
Fox: Thank you, Eric. I’m delighted to have this opportunity. It’s going to be fun. Yes, I grew up in East
Cleveland, Ohio. I was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C. We moved back to Cleveland where my
mother and father were born and had grown up.
I was really raised by my mother and both sets of grandparents due to the fact that my father
was killed in a civil airplane crash in 1947 as he was just getting out of the Navy and had been in
Pittsburgh for an interview. My mother moved my brother and me back to Cleveland when I was only
three, and I lived there until I graduated from high school in 1962. So I really did grow up there; we
didn’t travel very much, pretty much just knew northeast Ohio.
The East Side of Cleveland at that time was so rich with different ethnic culture and
communities. It was a time when—as I realized later more than I realized it at the time—each
neighborhood or even each elementary school in East Cleveland was the hub or the center for a
different Central or Eastern European community of families that had immigrated to Cleveland.
Typically, the father was working in the steel mills or in the industrial section of Cleveland. Usually there
would be a grandparent or two speaking the native language, and mothers and kids pretty much staying
home.
But it was a time when we just played in the streets all the time. We played hockey or stick
hockey and baseball and soccer and basketball. Always outside playing with other kids. I went to school
part of the time on the city bus, where I would just pay three cents or a nickel to take a bus to school.
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Just part of the community life without really being very separate or isolated from a lot of either public
exposure to the realities of an urban life, or the messiness sometimes of growing up in a city.
It was just natural for me to grow up in a very publicly social community neighborhood
environment. I think that really did frame how I wanted to be a part of a community in the rest of my
life. When I went to college at the University of California Santa Barbara, I met my first roommate. We
did the usual “Where are you from? What are you going to major in?” He was from the suburbs of Los
Angeles and hadn’t had a lot of, I think, exposure to cultural diversity or richness or maybe even street
life that I’d had.
But when he said he was going to major in anthropology, I had never heard the word. I had
grown up in this industrial city where if you were male and in the upper third or fourth of your class, the
only counseling or vision of a future that anyone had for us—family as well as teachers—was “How are
you going to contribute to the industrial future of the Northeast or the Midwest? What kind of scientist
are you going to be?” All my friends and I went off to college saying that we were going to be a
chemistry major or a physics major. I was going to be a math major. That was our frame of reference
for going on with our educations.
When he said anthropology, I said, “What’s that?” He started talking about interest in different
ethnic communities around the world, and cultural experiences. To me, I said to myself—I probably said
it to him—“Look, you could just go and live in East Cleveland for a while because that sounds like what
you’re interested in.” It really did frame my sense of participation in community, of community as a
place where people’s experiences and values are important in a community context and not just in a
personal or family or professional way.
My mother was raising us—my brother and me--and we had another half-brother come along in
another year or so. She had finished a couple years of college and spent most of her career working as
secretarial support. She was the vice principal’s assistant or secretary in the junior high where I went.
So, it was a modest but very comfortable upbringing in our family life.
My one set of grandparents bought a house that we could share with them, sort of like a duplex.
It was a big house divided into two. My other set of grandparents lived just a mile away, so I had a really
wonderful intergenerational upbringing, which really added to the way that growing up affected my
sense of being in a community with multigenerational activities and experiences.
Stein: You said there was a pressure to become a chemistry major or a math major and build the future
of the city or the United States at that particular time. But you got to college and started off in math but
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then some of your interests changed. How did that come about and what was it that shaped your path
toward a career in urban planning and community-based studies?
Fox: I don’t know if pressure was quite the right word. That was just the frame of reference in all the
conversations. It was an assumption without saying I had to be a math major or a scientist in some way.
I was interested in science. It wasn’t something I was in any way moved into by others’ will rather than
my own interest and the environment around me.
But when I got into college and discovered that I was expected to take many other courses as
part of a liberal arts education, I just became fascinated in the arts, other social science, humanities. I
took 20 or 22 credits every term so that I could fit in more non-math or non-science courses to round
out my education or to discover new interests. I remember particularly art history, music appreciation,
different philosophy courses, literature of different times and places. They were all really fascinating to
me.
But I trudged along, and also did my math work, as I was in that major track. Fortunately—this
was the next step in developing both a connection to community in a way that I really still grew more
from, and also started some of the seeds that became my more graduate work and more professional
identity in the future—I’d also along the way taken French language every quarter during my first two
years. That let me qualify to apply for the University of California Study Abroad program in France.
It was only the second year of their program at the University of Bordeaux. The first year they
did not have any science students enroll, or they didn’t recruit science students for their program. I
think there were 100 students each year from all of the UC campuses. They’d all go in one group to the
University of Bordeaux. I said, really, this is a chance to get to know another part of the world. I
qualified having minimum French background that I needed. I’ll just take a chance and see if they’re
interested in someone who’s a math major.
It turns out that they were, and there were two of us—another woman from Berkeley who was
a biology major—who was accepted into the program in 1964-65, so I got to spend a year in France.
That further enriched me in the appreciation of community life in the sense of a lot of street activity, a
lot of pedestrian life, a lot of appreciating the relationship between city and town and countryside in
ways that were different from what I saw in the U.S., particularly being in California, the way cities were
just sprawling and spreading and there really didn’t seem to be a whole lot of clear distinction between
urban and rural. Even within urban, what could our neighborhoods be? That was another experience

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that added to my wondering about communities—how they happen, why they attract me in certain
ways.
I came back from that experience thinking about, what about architecture? I hadn’t even heard
the term urban planning yet, but I was thinking about city/countryside kinds of relationships, and the
natural world relating to the built-in human world. Among all these different kinds of classes, I was
really spreading myself into as many different other fields of inquiry as I could. As a senior, I took an
urban sociology class. It was a seminar class, the closest I ever had to an Evergreen seminar experience,
only a few students, 12 students and a faculty. We would read a book each week, and usually in the
faculty’s office or sitting around in small area, talk about that book, do our research, write papers, etc.
One of the books we read was Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
which had been published a few years before, and that really captured my. . . gave me some language
and concepts to frame my experience and interests around. Jane Jacobs was talking about the vitality of
cities being based on and needing to be planned for around people’s experience and values rather than
around more analytical, administrative, engineering ways of thinking about the physical aspect of cities.
Instead, we should be thinking about it, talking about it, and celebrating and planning around the more
human, experiential, value-based ways of thinking about our lives rather than the physical structures
that we have to live in, maneuver in, that frame us, define us, or limit us.
That book caught my attention and it led me to looking at graduate programs in urban planning
as a possibility. I wanted to stay on the West Coast because I was really enjoying that part of the world
and meeting friends there. By then my mother had moved my brothers and her father, my grandfather,
to California also because her sister had already moved there and it gave the family a gathering place
down in Southern California.
My other grandparents had moved to Baltimore to be closer to their son, who interestingly—
this is a side comment—was my father’s identical twin. I guess that was another interesting thing about
my growing up in a context of family. Whereas I didn’t get to know my father because he was killed in
the plane crash before I was three, yet I had an uncle who was an identical twin. Even though we didn’t
live in the same city, I always could use him as a framework of seeing and experiencing and knowing
something at least about what my father would have been like had he been alive and growing up in our
family.

4

I guess the point is there wasn’t a particular need to go back or feel a draw to go back to
Cleveland since the grandparents and my mother had migrated west and gone back to the East Coast in
Baltimore.
I applied to graduate programs in urban planning at the University of California Berkeley and the
University of Washington. It was a fascinating interview when I was invited up to Berkeley to see if I
might be interested in going there. They made an appointment with a faculty member. I was really
naïve about what I should have been doing. I hadn’t even looked up what is the professional journal in
this profession, and I hadn’t looked up who are some of the other important writers and thinkers and
activists. I just loved this Jane Jacobs’s whole way of talking and thinking and writing about cities and
how they can be more vital and humane and safe and viable economically. She wrote a lot about city
economics that related to her thinking about other aspects of city life.
I had my appointment with the faculty member at Berkeley. We were chatting along as he was
doing his interview, and when it came to the question about how did I get interested in city and regional
planning or urban planning from my math background, I said, “It really was more from having read this
book in this seminar class I had.” I mentioned The Death and Life of Great American Cities and it’s really
clear in my memory how the conversation changed at that moment. It was almost like there was
different body language, maybe he put down his pen or his notebook closed. He didn’t exactly look at
his watch, but he said, “Well, good. I think we’ve probably done all we need to do. Thank you for
coming.”
The interview was very quickly over, which I thought, well, maybe that’s fine, he got what he
needed and he seemed like a nice person. Later I realized that I had had this interview with somebody
who was one of the four or five top thinkers at the time about how to look at cities and city growth and
city planning as a systems analysis, not necessarily mathematical but a systems way of understanding
everything that wasn’t at all based on the kind of values and experiences that Jane Jacobs was
promoting as a way to be thinking about our cities and their futures. I quickly realized that to him –a
scholar in the prominent analytically-based paradigm of thinking about planning in the ‘60s--that Jane
Jacobs was a woman writing in a man’s profession and she was not trained as a planner. She was an
architectural historian and architectural critic, and the theories and the practices and the proposals that
she was making were, to some people, heresy.
This was an era of urban renewal where we were going into very healthy—in many ways, not all
ways—thriving, vital communities, and labeling them as slums or as poverty areas that need to be
5

replaced with modern, many times high-rise housing. In one big city—mainly in the East Coast—after
another, we moved in and replaced the kind of communities that I had grown up in with housing
projects or modern housing complexes, even if they were for more moderate and upper-income folks
rather than the folks who had been living there.
I can’t remember if I was accepted or not, but I didn’t go to the University of California Berkeley.
I’m sure that down the hall there would have been somebody—a graduate student or a younger up-andcoming professor—who was interested in some different ideas who would have loved to talk to me
about Jane Jacobs’s book, but it didn’t lead to an engaged conversation in the interview I had.
I went to the University of Washington graduate school Master’s Degree program in Urban
Planning. It was part of the School of Architecture—and still is—at the UW. This was 1966. It was a
time when not only in the profession of planning there were some of these new ideas of Jane Jacobs and
others interested in social planning and social justice issues rather than just efficiency of systems and
models. There was a lot of excitement about the potential of planning as a career or a field and that we
could make a difference in the world and we could get involved in organizing as well as zoning. It wasn’t
going to be only highway planning and zoning; that we could break out of that paradigm that had been
defining the profession.
Stein: How was your outlook on urban planning and community studies further shaped by your
graduate work at the University of Washington?
Fox: As I think now about my experience of community, being at the University of California Santa
Barbara living in student housing really didn’t add much to what I had experienced growing up in
Cleveland, but a little bit of the year in France did. Then when I went up to the University of
Washington, living in Seattle, I was back in an urban neighborhood again and a more complex,
interesting, to me, city than Santa Barbara had been.
So, in addition to the richness and the vitality and the challenging nature of our class—the
particular class of us that started in the fall of 1966—my work study job to help put me through the
expenses of going to college was as a social worker in one of the housing projects in South Seattle, the
Rainier Vista housing project. This put me right back into the experience of the richness, the diversity,
the struggles of people who are not just the wealthy and the upper-middle-class folks that we were
mostly reading about or talking about in a lot of the early city planning courses.
I was actually a group worker for young boys of the ages of 11 to 14. At that time in the Seattle
public schools, if students were not behaving as they were expected to they were pretty much put back
6

on the street until they behaved better. So a lot of the kids hung around the community center there at
the housing project. There were a couple other work study students on the staff and we just tried to
help these young people figure out how to navigate their lives given the things that were being thrown
at them, whether at home in their family life, or in the community context, or the systems such as
schools that were ignoring them or rejecting them. I really enjoyed working with those kids and how
much I learned from them, and how much I learned from getting to know their families. That was the
experiential part of being a part of a city neighborhood that was going through lots of social, economic,
and sometimes physical challenges of survival.
That was a really enriching part of my experience there. But back in the graduate program
classroom—I really liked the program because it had a lot of emphasis on small-group projects where
we were in teams and were given an assignment to work on either a neighborhood or community issue.
I was working on one team that worked on a planning problem with one of the local Native American
communities north of Seattle, so it had some real-world problem-solving components to it, which were
really the part I loved the best because the more historical and theoretical classroom work was still
pretty old school, as I understood later.
I found interestingly that the coursework for me was really easy compared to having been a
math major. The only Cs I ever got in college were in my major. I struggled in math even though I liked
logic and geometry and some aspects of it, but it wasn’t really my strength. That’s why I only took the
minimum needed to get a degree and discovered all these other life and intellectual and experiential
interests.
The coursework was easy because I discovered that what they were trying to teach us in urban
planning was how to take large issues or problems and break them down into smaller pieces that could
be looked at and put together differently, or how to build something more complex and larger out of
some smaller building block units of knowledge or of experience. I kind of learned how to do that in
math, the relationship between small data or larger solutions or theorems or whatever, so the
intellectual process was pretty easy. The knowledge was different, and some was interesting to me and
some wasn’t.
The part that was most interesting to me was what was increasingly being defined as social
planning, community organizing. The group of students in my class really pushed our department to
open up more options for us for our electives so we could take courses in social work, anthropology, and
have those be part of our degree rather than in addition to the required courses in public administration
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and housing and transportation planning, which was mostly engineering systems. It was a nice balance
to be able to find more of those humanities and social movement courses that became part of our
curriculum.
I kind of breezed through that. Most of my interest was in my work study job down at the
Rainier Vista housing project. I had that position for two years. Along the way, I read another book that
piqued my interest and framed my eventual thinking about pedagogy once I became a teacher, or found
myself in a position of being an educator in a college setting as well as in a community setting, which is
what I had expected to be doing. I expected myself to be more of a community educator, community
planner, community organizer.
When I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—which I thought later it was fascinating
that that would be a book that we would read in an urban planning course, or be an urban planning
approved elective—that was a real gift to me because it gave me a really challenging, theoretical, ethical
kind of way of thinking, another language to use in thinking about people’s experiences, and how people
themselves, in collaboration and partnership and unity with others, can define their own experience and
their own engagement with the community in ways that they weren’t really allowed to given the forces
and institutions of the societal context that they were in. Another way of thinking about how learning
happens and for whom, and the role of oppression in learning, which I hadn’t really thought about in the
same way or maybe even hardly at all. So, another book that got stuck in the back of my mind. There
were others, of course, but Jacobs and Freire were authors who influenced me greatly.
At the end of my two-year master’s program, for the second time I was faced with “what do I do
now?” given that my draft board back in East Cleveland was keeping an eye on me, and waiting for me
to finish whatever little deferments they might want to give me, and then send me to Vietnam, which
was not a very attractive thought in my mind. I had friends who went into the Army and the Navy right
after high school. Not all of them survived, and at least one good friend I specifically remember did not.
It’s sort of interesting because I’m starting to talk about this a little bit given that I’m watching
the PBS series on Vietnam last week and this week. For someone my age, just cascading waves of
emotions and memories. And now, new knowledge and new insights that we weren’t exposed to at that
time that we’re gaining out of this series on TV. I’ve already been talking to my son, and I’m hoping that
younger generations will be interested in learning that history, even though they won’t be able to
address it, lacking the experiential part of growing up at that time.

8

I wasn’t particularly interested in supporting our military efforts in Southeast Asia. I was,
however, very interested and committed to being of service. I was a pretty patriotic guy. I grew up in a
family where my father was in the Navy, my uncle was in the Army. Like most of us, I had a lot of
relatives that in earlier generations had been in the military--and were now. I wasn’t necessarily a
fanatic or a leader of antiwar movements. I participated—I gave my support in quiet ways, in solidarity
ways.
But I just wanted something other than more academic work. I felt I was ready to do something
in the community rather than immediately think about a PhD. I didn’t know if I would even want to do
that in the future. I was ready to get out in the communities and do some good work that would affect
people’s lives at a community level.
So, I looked at the Peace Corps as a possibility of serving. It turns out there were two Peace
Corps programs in 1968 that were specifically recruiting graduates from urban planning master’s
programs rather than the recruitment of anybody with a degree to do teaching of English or maybe
some low-level community development work that Peace Corps would train us to do.
These two programs were in two very interesting countries, both at that time and now--Iran and
Chile. I looked into both of them. The program in Iran, which I really didn’t know a lot about—I hadn’t
been as engaged in international politics and history and culture as maybe I should have been other
than being kind of intrigued based on my experience in France and European North American history
and relationships—but when I looked at the Iran Peace Corps program, it was pretty obvious that it was
very top-down. We’d be in the Ministry of Housing in the capital doing the planning for the people and
for the cities. It didn’t seem to have a lot of engagement with the community or with the population. It
was pretty much “We’re the planners. We know best and we’re going to build cities of the world.”
Again, mostly focusing on physical structures, assuming that people’s lives would fit into that in some
way that would work.
On the contrary, the program in Chile was almost the opposite. In the government of Chile at
the time, the president was Eduardo Frei, Sr., a Christian Democrat. His party was in power. It turns
out—I didn’t know this till later—that when Paulo Freire was kicked out of Brazil for being a little too
radical in how he was teaching people to think rather than teaching them literacy by teaching them the
alphabet, and Dick and Jane kinds of stories, he at the time was a friend of Eduardo Frei and kind of a
kitchen cabinet member to Frei’s government helping the government agencies think about ways that
they could decentralize their systems, whether it was education of healthcare or, in this case, housing,
9

to get more of the planning and the policymaking and the engagement of voices in government more at
the community level and not just at the ministry level in the capital with the professionals and the upper
and upper middle class folks that knew how to work those systems.
That program seemed really intriguing to me so I said, “This sounds like it would be really fun
and perhaps valuable.” I was interested in learning Spanish, so I signed up and was accepted. At that
time, the Peace Corps training—for all of the Americas at least—was being done in the U.S. Our training
was at a fraternity house in Rutgers University in New Jersey in the middle of summer. Very hot. No air
conditioning. We could only watch and listen to Spanish-speaking TV and radio. We had intensive
Spanish language for six hours a day. It was great. I learned some Spanish really quickly.
It wasn’t until I was at the end of the program—when I realized that we were getting called into
our final interviews or sessions with the staff, and the folks from Chile who were coming up to meet us
or welcome us—that there was some uncertainty about those meetings, which I hadn’t figured out or
realized. Essentially, we were given the information or the news that “We have a ticket in this envelope
for you to go to Chile. This is when we need you to be there.” Or, “This envelope has a ticket home
because you aren’t able to be accepted into this program.”
It was for one of two reasons. One is your draft board was not giving you a continued
deferment, or our staff—meaning our psychiatrist, who was watching us all the time—felt that we really
weren’t quite ready for the experiences we were going to have in terms of cultural immersion. It was
like, oh, my gosh, some of my friends that I had been with are not going to be going to Chile. There
were a few whose draft boards or the psychological powers-that-be felt that they were not appropriate
for this program. Ninety percent of us went. It was just unexpected. I was a little naïve about it. Oh,
this is all just going to work out fine for everybody.
So, I went off into the Peace Corps. I had a lot of good friends that I left behind from the UW
graduate program. One of them was Carolyn Dobbs, who had also come to Washington—in her case
from Tennessee and Kentucky—to join the graduate program in 1966. Carolyn already had a bachelor’s
degree in history, a master’s degree in political science from the University of Kentucky, and a year or
two of experience working as a planner in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. She had discovered
planning through getting what started as a political science internship, and then realized, oh, this is
something I want to now get some more education in. She already had a master’s degree, already had
some planning in the field experience, and was one of the 40 of us or so who were in the program I was
in.
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She and about another 8 or 10 of us were really close. We did a lot of things together. We did a
lot of mountain-climbing and skiing. In our community project work, she got engaged with working with
the neighborhood of the Queen Anne Hill in Seattle in some of their community development work,
where the community was empowered—or was both being given some authority by the City, but also
assuming and taking more on their own—to try to have more control themselves over the planning for
their neighborhood rather than just filling out a survey that the planners downtown would then take
back to their offices and tabulate and then make some decision based on that. It was an example of a
really urban neighborhood community participation, a neighborhood starting to push for more and
more opportunity to be engaged with their own experience and values rather than just input into
someone else’s either PhD research or planning policy and implementation of programs.
I’m mentioning Carolyn now because when I came back from the Peace Corps—I’ll come back to
the Peace Corps work in a second—I reconnected with some of the friends from that program.
Reconnecting with Carolyn is what led me to Evergreen. I’ll come back to that. I was just making that
initial connection.
The Peace Corps work was with the Ministry of Housing and Urbanization. Most of us, except
for a few, were sent out into the provinces. We each had a Chilean co-worker—a young graduate our
age coming out of the universities in Chile. They didn’t have urban planning programs, so they came
from political science or architecture or public administration.
Stein: Tell us a little bit more about your Peace Corps work in Chile.
Fox: That was a real highlight, and it really further framed the work I ended up going on and doing at
Evergreen and in the local communities here in my own community engagement and volunteer work.
As I mentioned, it was a program to get us, with our partners—young Chilean graduates—out
into the communities in the different provinces of Chile to work with the local communities—which
meant everything from having access to, or be invited to meet, the governor and the mayors, the
officialdom of the local communities, but also labor groups and neighborhood groups and other
organizations in segments in the community, whether they were organized or not—about their
community experience, and how their ideas could be fed back into the process of eventually the
Ministry of Housing deciding how to invest public monies in community infrastructure in these towns.
For example, I was working in the province of Aconcagua, which is the next province north of
Santiago in Chile, an agricultural province. It had two small cities of about 20,000 people, and lots of
smaller villages and agricultural lands and scattered housing with the farmworkers. We were pretty
11

much on our own to work in these communities to try to do some organizing, have some meetings, and
bring different perspectives of the community together.
We knew, for example, that the Ministry of Housing was going to spend, say, a million dollars in
housing or public works infrastructure—water systems, sewer systems—or different kinds of housing
programs in that province in the next year. We were given the data about how much different kinds of
programs cost. You could build a certain number of houses of this type or quality with this much money,
and this is what a water system costs for 500 families, etc.
They wanted input from the community about what their priorities might be for using that much
money in this kind of array of possible investment programs. Fortunately—this was some of the
forward thinking that Eduardo Frei’s government was generating—their thinking about what housing
meant was not just everybody having a nice, so-many-square-foot house per person with flush toilets
and running water and electricity, but that housing meant also just having a safe, secure parcel of land
that you could put up whatever you could afford or manage to put without either being over your head
in debt. Supporting folks that perhaps just settling in what became known in different countries as
“squatter communities”—”callampas” (mushrooms) in Chile—and just giving them a safe, secure parcel
of land with water and electrical power access, and letting them build whatever they could or afford to
build or manage to build.
We had a nice array of projects that could be supporting different segments of the community
rather than only the segment of the community that could afford a house of a standard that we might
expect in our communities here.
It was fascinating. The Peace Corps left us alone. They just said, “You’re working with the
Ministry of Housing. We’re not going to mess with you too much.” I had a great camaraderie with some
of the folks I met, young people as well as professional-level people, and people I hung out with in the
lower-income neighborhoods in the town of Los Andes where I lived. The first year, the priority that we
sent—that our community process sent back to the Ministry of Housing office in Santiago—was to
spend almost all of the available money on getting the 500 families living in the Aconcagua riverbed—
which flooded every other year and flooded them out and they had to go back in and try to rebuild—
families that were just building their own shacks or putting up whatever they could on land they didn’t
own but was a riverbed. We had participated in the 1970 census to do a census in that community, so
we were in there a lot, getting to know the people who lived there, and not only doing the census datagathering that was related to the housing work, but also getting more of a trusting, valuable relationship
12

with some of those folks in terms of letting them see that there is actually some potential of someone
asking them what they would like rather than just being another survey that they never hear anything
more about in the future. So, it builds some trust.
The community’s recommendation was that these 500 families be given ownership of a parcel
of land that’s dry, that won’t flood every other year, and be given water and sewer and electrical
service, and then still just build whatever they could afford. It wouldn’t be something that was putting
them in any kind of debt of having to pay a mortgage. There was no mortgage, it was just giving them
land.
The other projects that didn’t make it to the top of the list were more of the traditional ones,
like the Municipal Workers Union wanted to have some nicer houses for their union employees. They
were folks who already had a house but they wanted a better house. And the traditional—this was not
just in Chile at the time and not just South America, it was many of the southern continent countries,
then and now—decision-making or the influence of decisions about who gets the benefit with what kind
of facilities and services is based on who knows the people in power, who knows the senators or who
knows the cabinet ministers. Typically, those union worker houses would, by the more normal ways
that things get decided, be the ones who would get their project built because they were in the political
system that was in power, or they supported the right people at the right time to get their projects
supported.
This different perspective coming from the community was deliberately meant to muddle that a
little bit. But as we discovered, it didn’t replace it because six months later we would receive the
feedback from the Ministry of Housing and they’d say, “Well, your project number one has been moved
down to number 2C and these others have been moved ahead of it.” The others were the more
traditional ones.
On the other hand, the second year I was there, that project stayed up at the top. The seeds
were planted for that process, and that input would not at least be totally shelved and wasted, which
gave me a better feeling about being a foreigner coming into somebody else’s community. At least I
wasn’t in an assignment or a program or a mentality that assumed I knew anything that would be of use
to them, other than I might be helpful in a process of learning and getting engaged in civic or political
processes that may or may not lead to some fruition, short-term or long-term, so I put it in the back of
my mind as well. At least my Peace Corps experience was a do-no-harm—at least that I know of—

13

experience, so I felt good about it. I enjoyed the friendships that I made. Some of those people I’m still
in touch with.
The other thing that was going on at that time—this was 1968-70—it was the last two years of
Eduardo Frei’s government. I was there during the election in 1970 when Salvador Allende was elected
to be President of Chile. The Chilean constitution at that time—and it is again now—included a
requirement that the president is elected for six years but it’s not renewable. It’s a one-term six-year
term. They were also very proud at their—at that time—150-some years of uninterrupted democracy,
even though that meant that not 100 percent of the population was actually represented in the kind of
parties that kept being the winners back and forth.
Salvador Allende had been in the Chilean Senate for 35, 36 years. Very influential senator, a
socialist from one of the many socialist parties. He was the head of one of those. He had run for
president five different times as one of the socialist party candidates, so he was extremely well known
politically. He was one candidate that was running during 1970—again.
A man named Jorge Alessandri, who had been president before Frei and who represented the
titans of industry in Chile, whose family owned the paper mills, everything related to wood products as
well as other industries—people knew his policies—he represented the idea that Chile needs to
reinforce their industrial corporations to be better players in the international game of development.
He was representing that sector of the economy and the society. He was extremely well known because
he had been president.
Eduardo Frei, the current president, was extremely popular. He would have easily won again,
but he couldn’t run again. His party put up a man named Radomiro Tomic as their candidate. He had
been a senator, was at the time Chile’s representative at the United Nations, but he wasn’t as well
known as the other two.
The leftist parties never had been able to win because there were anywhere from six to 15 of
them. They would always split the more progressive, leftist vote. In this campaign, they organized what
they called Unidad Popular—the Popular Unity—and this was actually one of the programs that was
somewhat influenced by Paulo Freire’s thinking. They had this big conference to see if, among all of the
different communist and socialist parties, they could agree on one candidate to represent them. I
wasn’t privy to any of this, but it was fascinating reading in the papers about it.

14

The Communist Party candidate was Pablo Neruda. The Communist Party represented the
intellectual left. He, of course, was very well known, not as a politician but as a thinker and the
conscience of the country.
Then there was Salvador Allende and a whole bunch of others, some of whom had also run
before. Let me back up a little bit. Allende’s party had figured, “He’s had a chance five times.” They put
up somebody else, so Allende wasn’t in this initial group. But the Unidad Popular couldn’t agree on
anybody except Allende at the end.
So, they did have a Unidad Popular leftist candidate, an industrial/corporate family monopoly
representative of that segment and a vision of the future that was represented by that type of thinking
about development and future, and a relatively unknown candidate from the party who was in power
and whose current president could have easily won.
All the polls were always about 25 to 35 for each of them as it got closer and closer to the
election. The Christian Democrats’ candidate, Radomiro Tomic was increasingly realizing that the
general mood of the country was to support more leftist, progressive, either the Christian Democrat or
the Unidad Popular. But there was nervousness about the leftists being too leftist for some of the
Christian Democrat folks, so they increasingly were promoting more and more policies that sounded like
Allende’s policies. They were moving more and more progressively to the left. But the way Tomic
would present himself in these rallies would be “Viva Tomic! This is what I will do.” Because he was
trying to get his own name—my interpretation—well known. Whereas when I’d go to Allende’s rallies,
it would never be first-person singular. It would be “This is what we will do together.” It was just
fascinating. And yet, there was very little violence. These were three different futures for the country,
much more diverse than we’d end up having in most of our elections.
The constitution provided that if no one candidate wins 50 percent, then the National Congress
decides between the top two. None of them got 50 percent. The Congress was controlled by the
Christian Democratic Party, and their candidate came in third. The Congress then was left with deciding
between the right and the left candidates, Alessandri and Allende. They selected Allende to be the
President.
It was just really a fascinating time to be there. There were some other things that I could tell
more stories about. Allende did not take office until after our program was done. My two-year program
ended in December, so I didn’t get to be in Chile when he was in power for a few years before he was
assassinated by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
15

My experience had been at the community level there. It had kept alive my fascination and
experience of thinking about and experiencing how community building can happen with people at the
community level that are working with folks with technical and professional training, but whose
professional and technical training isn’t identifying themselves as folks who know the answers, but as
folks who know how to guide people through a process of learning and empowerment and engagement,
and that can be facilitated, supported, or in different ways informed by professional and technical folks
like us in the Peace Corps, or we planners in city planning departments here and in other places.
Stein: Did you apply for your doctoral studies at the University of Washington from Chile while you
were enmeshed in that community studies-based work?
Fox: No. I’ll do one step to get to that. I had one more little experience on the way back home. There
had been a really major earthquake in Peru in May of 1970, and any Peace Corps volunteer who was
finishing their program who wanted to continue and volunteer for a while longer from any of the South
American countries could go to Peru and increase the pool of help there. It was an earthquake with
devastation and tragedy, similar to what we’ve just seen in Mexico in these last few weeks.
So, I volunteered and went to Peru. I worked in Peru for six months, so I was taking my time
getting back. That experience actually—without going into a lot of detail—led to an opportunity, if I had
wanted to, to stay and have a job with the Peruvian government as a housing planner in Cuzco, which
was a pretty cool place as a young person. I had gone there mostly just to be able to go to Machu
Picchu and experience that segment of the mountains of Peru, which was different from where I’d been
working in the earthquake recovery.
I realized I needed to get back and finish up my degree. I was in the two-year master’s program
but hadn’t turned in my thesis yet because I wasn’t really happy with it. I was discouraged about it,
actually, and was getting more excited about just doing this Peace Corps experience. I came back and I
had already formed in my mind a whole different replacement thesis for my master’s degree based on
the Peace Corps experience and some other work I was already starting to be interested in in terms of
housing policy and housing programs that are defined by people’s experiences rather than architects.
I did come back to the UW. The one correction for the question, though, is that I didn’t enroll in
a PhD program, I finished my master’s program. While this was happening—while I was in Peru and
getting back, I think that’s about the time, or maybe I was still in Chile— the U.S. decided to have a
lottery for the draft rather than just enrollment. I did have a fairly low lottery number. Somehow by
then, maybe things were changing enough, or maybe there weren’t as many new people needed, or my
16

draft board had forgotten about me, but I snuck through a little longer, even after I’d finished my twoyear deferment for being in the Peace Corps. To be honest, the way our engagement in Vietnam had
evolved and, from my perspective, the tragedy of sending young people like me over there for reasons
that I really didn’t believe were our own justification for doing it, I was, among many others, ready to
just move a few miles north into Canada, but didn’t. I was still interested in knowing other ways I could
serve if needed.
I finished my dissertation. I was doing the post-Peace Corps immersion back into our culture of
a crisis of identity and, what am I going to do now in my life? How could it ever be as wonderful here as
it was there?
The experience overseas had been really deeply valuable to me, not just for the little, in my
case, sort of interesting professional work on my resume, but just for the humanness of being a minority
in another country where I didn’t speak the language well, making friends, and having an immersion that
was deep enough to be more than just a visitor, even though legitimately, in the eyes of many, dropping
into their lives for two years and then leaving was still just a visitor. We all, I think, are sensitive to
that—cultural exploitation and who benefits more in these exchanges? We have to come to some
resolution of that in our own identities and work.
I was doing some housing consulting with the Puget Sound Council of Governments—a kind of
regional planning consortium—and I reconnected with Carolyn Dobbs as well as with others. In the
meantime, while I was in the Peace Corps, she had gone on and finished her PhD. She was the first
woman to get a PhD in the University of Washington Urban Planning Department. During her last year,
while she was finishing her dissertation, she had been hired by a dean who was given the charge of
trying to create a few little experimental programs within the University system.
End Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 9-27-17
Begin Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 9-27-17
Fox: I came back and turned in my master’s thesis. The comment I got was similar to the comments
that I enjoy making at student evaluation time in my thinking back at teaching at Evergreen. What I was
told was “You’ve got this fascinating thesis that’s already the seeds and the roots and the branches and
some of the leaves of what could easily be a PhD dissertation.” I always enjoyed being able to tell
students, “This work you did is already master’s level work and could easily be continued on and
become the core of your graduate work.”

17

Carolyn had been hired at the University of Washington during her last year to be a halftime
faculty in an experimental program called The Environmental Community. It was a faculty member, two
resident assistants, and about 40 students who lived together on the top floor of Lander Hall. This
community was living together in the dorms, which included the faculty bringing guests and having
seminars and activities as part of the student’s learning experience. I think they each got like six credits
for the learning community experience and the additional knowledge about communities that was
brought into that living environment. Plus, they were music majors, geologists, whatever their academic
work was.
This was during the planning year for Evergreen and some of the Planning Faculty heard about
this program. They were trying to learn from as many different models around the country as they
could as they were putting together Evergreen’s pedagogy and model, so several times different
subgroups from the Evergreen Planning Faculty would come up and spend an evening, or an afternoon
and evening, with Carolyn and the students, and they would get engaged in all kinds of fascinating
discussions about learning as well as about what the students were doing.
Carolyn learned more about what they were doing about planning for Evergreen. Essentially,
she was almost on the spot offered a job in that first year of Evergreen teaching, so she did. She actually
brought a whole bunch of those UW students down to Evergreen with her because they wanted to have
more of this kind of experience.
Carolyn was hired in the first-year faculty group in 1971, so she said, “Come on down to
Olympia. There’s a lot of State government jobs, and I’m doing these interesting things at Evergreen.”
Our relationship started developing into a more intimate one than when we had been just friends and
part of a group.
I was in Olympia and I was interviewed for some jobs with the State. There was interestingly
one that I thought I did really well on the interview. It was for the Office of Economic Opportunity—
OEO—that was taking federal money that was for poverty relief and all these kinds of programs and
getting it out in the communities. I thought it sounded perfect for me. I didn’t get the job, but I later
became a good friend with one of people who was on the interviewing panel. I said, “Why didn’t I get
that job?” [chuckles] He says, “There was one person on that committee—I think each person on the
committee had one veto—who vetoed it because you had talked so enthusiastically about having
worked in your Peace Corps experience in a town with a socialist mayor”—which was true. That was
fortunate, I guess, maybe for me and Evergreen in the long run.
18

This is an interesting piece of college history. One of the programs in the first year of Evergreen
was called Environmental Design. It was one of the many four-faculty first-year programs. The faculty
were Carolyn Dobbs, Larry Eickstaedt, a marine biologist, Chuck Nisbet, an economist, and Phil Harding,
architect.
One of the assignments that Carolyn framed for the students was that the college was located
on Cooper Point—obviously, where it is now—but there was no land use planning, there was no zoning,
there were no guidelines about what was going to happen around the college. It was sort of open
territory. This was before we were doing land use planning in the rural areas—it was mostly city
planning at that time—and the County Commissioners were concerned about what was going to happen
around the college. They had created a typical blue-ribbon community leaders taskforce to be a
Planning Commission to come up with a proposal. The assignment for the students in the program was
to go and observe these hearings. They were using the early video equipment, these great, big cameras
with tripods to try to videotape these to document the planning process.
The students came back from those hearings just aghast at what they were seeing because here
was this proposal being given to the community. The students didn’t know whether it was a good
proposal or not given planning principles and practices because this was at the start of their year. But
what they were observing was the community’s reaction, which was almost universally “We don’t know
if we like this or not because we weren’t involved with any input into it. We don’t even know if we even
understand it because you’re just presenting it as a finished product”—which is typical. The Planning
Commission presents a plan, the community doesn’t like it, it gets shelved, and we start over. Or, it gets
rammed through and becomes the plan without people feeling they had an engagement in it.
The students and the faculty said, “Here’s an opportunity to engage with this a little bit.” They
organized a meeting for all the residents of Cooper Point—put fliers in everybody’s mailbox—for the
community to come to the fourth floor of the Library Building for a big meeting to talk as the follow-up
of the public meeting about what they had heard and what they learned; get a deeper understanding of
what was going on.
That led to a series of other meetings. People who were interested in transportation got a little
subgroup, others were interested in housing. How are we going to protect the environment and the
streams? Where should different kinds of housing be? Some folks said, “How do we keep it real rural
like it is now?” Other folks were saying, “Wait a minute. I own land here that is my retirement
investment and I want to develop this land and put some housing on it.” It was a conversation where
19

people could talk to each other rather than have three minutes in front of a microphone and not have to
listen to anyone else.
The students got all excited about this and they started working with these little subgroups,
subcommittees. But along the way, within a month or so, the residents realized that they needed to
somehow formalize this, so they created the Cooper Point Association. Then they said, “We need some
guidance to manage this process,” because the students weren’t able to do it themselves--this was just
one of their academic projects.
They put out this call for proposals and I said, “I’m sitting around looking for something to do.
Here’s what I would do”—because I was participating just as a person in the community. “Here’s how I
would facilitate some sequence of work—meetings, readings, research—over the next few months to
work toward our community members doing our own plan.” That led to what’s known as the Cooper
Point Plan. It was finished within six months. It was already supported by the membership of 750
people in the Association at that time.
When it was presented back to the Planning Commission and the County Commissioners there
was no legitimate way that people could say, “Where did this come from? We had no opportunity to
participate in it.” Even though some chose not to, at least it was there. This was a plan that actually was
adopted—because it had so much community support—really quickly.
For me, it was a lot of fun working with the combination of the students and the community,
and the kind of work I wanted to do. I’ll just keep floating around and getting these opportunities of
working with community organizations. But I also realized it was really fun working with the students.
There were 50 faculty hired the first year in ’71 and another 50 faculty were going to be hired in ’72.
The faculty positions were defined really broadly, much more so than they are now.
There was one something like “the relationship between the built and the natural
environment.” The applicants were landscape architects, architects, planners and probably
philosophers—all kinds of folks. PhD’s were not required. It was the last position hired that year. I
understand why. It was really a difficult decision for the Deans and the President. Everybody got
interviewed by the President in those days, all faculty candidates.
Because there were three finalists, all of us would have been equally wonderful, I think, at least
in terms of what we were bringing to start with. One had already been offered a position the year
before but didn’t take it because they wanted a position at another school, wasn’t happy, and applied
again. Another was a good friend of one of the other faculty, and this person had a really well-known
20

career in the private consulting sector. And then there was me, who represented this positive
relationship with the local community through the Cooper Point Association. And, I think, maybe my
interesting combination of Peace Corps and math.
I guess I was interesting enough of a candidate to be hired. When I was hired, I was still only 27
years old. I was hired at the end of August to start teaching before the end of September. I was
assigned to teach by myself in an advanced group contract, mostly with students coming out of that
Environmental Design program who wanted more advanced work.
That’s how I got here to Evergreen. That first year was an interesting one to talk about. I guess
we’ll probably come back in another session.
Stein: That sounds great. Thank you so much for your time.

21


Russ Fox
Interviewed by Eric Stein
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 27, 2019
FINAL
Stein: I am here with Russ Fox at Russ’s house. It is August 27, 2019. Russ and I are continuing on with
an interview that we started in 2017. In that interview, we heard a lot about Russ’s early studies and life
and career leading up to teaching at Evergreen. We are going to continue on that interview and I’m
hoping that we’ll hear a little bit about some of teaching in the early years and what Evergreen was like
at that time, especially your role in community-based studies.
Fox: Okay.
Stein: I think at the last interview, we finished up with you just arriving at Evergreen. I’m curious to
know what it was like to start teaching at that time, and what were some of the first programs that you
taught at Evergreen.
Fox: I was in the Peace Corps from 1968 to the early part of mid-1970 and then I was a Peace Corps
trainer. Like a lot of Peace Corps volunteers, when you come back you try to figure out what to do with
your life.
I reconnected with Carolyn Dobbs, who had been a classmate of mine at the University of
Washington in the master’s urban planning from ’66 to ’68. She was just being hired in 1970 to start
teaching in 1971 at Evergreen. In 1970, she was teaching at the University of Washington in an
experimental program there. Because of that—or maybe because of other reasons, too—she was hired
to teach at Evergreen. She said, “Come on down to Olympia. There’s a new college here, there’s State
government, there’s jobs potentially for people with planning and land use background.” So, I did. I
came down to check out Olympia. Carolyn and I established our deeper relationship and I hung around.
During the first year of the college—1971-72—Carolyn was teaching in a program called
Environmental Design with Larry Eickstaedt, Chuck Nisbet and Phil Harding. One of their projects that
year was to have students learn about land use planning by attending public hearings and meetings as
the County was deciding what to do about planning and zoning in the county, particularly in the Cooper
Point area. Because the location of the college had stimulated a lot of speculative and real changes in
the land use area, there was no planning for the area, so the County Commissioners asked their Planning
Commission to come up with a plan for Cooper Point Peninsula, and they did. The students went to
1

observe the public hearings and the meetings. They were taking great big video equipment and
videoing the hearings, both at the Planning Commission and the County Commissioners.
What the students were discovering was that lots and lots of people who were attending and
who were residents of the Cooper Point area were essentially saying, “This was done without our input.
We really don’t know if we like it or not.” In fact, it had been done primarily by the Planning
Commission as a blue-ribbon committee of citizens that were doing this because they were asked to, but
didn’t involve a lot of public input.
The students in the Environmental Design program and some of the residents that they were
meeting while going to these hearings decided to call a public meeting at the college up on the fourth
floor, which was the dining hall at that time. A couple hundred people came. It was obviously of real
interest. Out of that came, over a couple meetings and months, an organization called the Cooper Point
Association, as students were wanting to learn more with the residents about issues of housing, and
protecting critical habitat, and transportation, and commercial needs, if any, for a neighborhood outside
of the downtown area of Olympia.
That led to lots of meetings with residents and students. After a few months, the official
organization was incorporated and called the Cooper Point Association. It had both residents and
students on the board. They divided into different working study committees on housing, habitat
protection—the things I mentioned—but after a few months, they decided they really needed some
guidance in how to pull all this together into a process that might lead to some recommendations that
could go to the County Commission in response to what they had proposed.
I was looking for work. I interviewed for some State government jobs and was asked if I would
just help facilitate this process as a planner for the Association. I said I would, and it was month-tomonth based on how much money the Association could raise. I needed to get a little bit of income, so I
prepared something called a Plan for a Plan, which was how I would go about working with the
community and the students.
That led to the completion of a Plan for Cooper Point within about six months. By then, the
Association had 750 members, and it was quite an inclusive process. It was presented to the County
Commission as an alternative to what the Planning Commission had presented, and ultimately went
through a series of hearings and was adopted.
I realized this was kind of fun, working with the students in the community. In the spring and
summer of 1972, the college was expanding the faculty another 50 positions. I think there was an
2

original planning faculty of 12, and then 50 the first year—1971—and Carolyn Dobbs was one of them.
There were going to be 50 more positions in ’72.
One of the positions was really broadly described as relating to the interface between the
natural and built environment. That, of course, attracted applicants from geography, architecture,
landscape planning, and city and urban planning. I said, “I could fit that,” so I applied. My
understanding is it was the last position hired to start in 1972, and I wasn’t hired until right about now—
the end of August—to start on a contract September 15, and to start teaching at the end of September.
The other two finalists were people I knew well, and I guess it took so long because it was an
interesting decision to have to figure out which of many, many applicants—and then down to the
three—that were representing different contributions to the potential growth of the college in
environmental and community studies.
Anyway, I was the one selected. One of the others, Rainier Hasenstab, had been offered a
position on the faculty in 1971. I knew Rainier from graduate school days at the University of
Washington. He was an architect. He was a student or a PhD student or maybe a TA. He had not
accepted the Evergreen position in ’71; instead took a position at the State University of New York, one
of their campuses; was not happy and applied again to come back in 1972. So, obviously well known,
having been offered a position once. The third finalist was a principal from a major nationally known
landscape architecture firm with an office in Portland, also known for regional projects. So, we had an
architect who the college was already interested in his contribution that he could make, a well-known
landscape architect (they didn’t have a landscape architect on the faculty) and another land use
planner—Carolyn was already on the faculty.
In those days when we were hired, we were interviewed by each of the three deans as well as
meeting the President and the hiring committee. I think somehow I must have had some kind of
potential interest to each of the three deans. Charlie Teske was active in the community and a resident
of Cooper Point. He was a member of the Cooper Point Association. He really, I think, appreciated that
working with students in the community had potential, as well as the fact that first year, the students
working with the community on the Cooper Point Association was seen as one of the most significant
student/community or college/community interactions during that first year, which had lots of other
more contentious or mysterious relationships among individual students or smaller groups of students
working in the community.

3

I think I was probably of some interest to Don Humphrey, who was the dean for more of the
sciences, because I had a math background, and I could potentially contribute to quantitative work and
work with scientists with that background.
Merv Cadwallader, the third dean, I think he was particularly interested in my work in South
America and my having been influenced by Paulo Freire and participatory research, and some of the
more theoretical and academic aspects of the kind of work I had done both in my graduate work and in
the Peace Corps.
For whatever reason, I was hired. I was asked to teach an advanced urban planning program to
pick up students who had finished Environmental Design and wanted to do more advanced work. I was
to teach by myself in a full year-long program. It was not the ideal way to start at Evergreen by teaching
by yourself. I had no teaching experience. The closest I had was being a trainer for the Peace Corps
program for volunteers going to South America. I worked in the Peace Corps training center at the
Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico. That was as close as I could claim to any teaching experience.
Anyway, I used a strategy that I then subsequently used in other programs, particularly when I
was teaching by myself or with just one other colleague. That was to essentially spend the first two
weeks of the quarter creating the syllabus with the students, because I didn’t have a lot of history,
although I knew some of the students from working with them in the community. I knew some about
their academic background that they had had from that first year, but there were other students
applying and coming into the program. They just had to be juniors and seniors. There was no other
prerequisite.
We spent the first two weeks creating a syllabus, and I laid out the kind of things that I thought
would be important to learn and the kind of experiences I wanted students to be able to have as upperdivision students, primarily experiences in the community. At the end of two weeks, with all the
students having their input into what their backgrounds were, what their interests were, what they felt
their skills were, if they had particular books to suggest. Everybody was doing some research on
readings and potential speakers and workshops. We made this big list of all these things that could be
put into a syllabus for the year, and then we did it.
We spent the first quarter—the fall quarter—was mostly my presenting, bringing in guests and
using my own background, some of the principles and history and skills of community planning, and land
use planning. At the same time, starting to get the students to think about the kind of ways, or the
program to think about ways that we could try to do something with this background.
4

The winter term was more of a mix of starting to have some smaller groups researching
potential community projects, creating proposals for what those projects might entail in terms of more
in-depth work, and what kind of additional workshops and readings and skills they would need in order
to do those projects. We continued to build that pool of background that we could then rely upon, both
academic and skill-based, readings and theory, practice and skills.
Spring was to be pretty much full engagement in the community projects with reflection and
journals and coming back together to write about and talk about how their experiences were reflecting
the academic background, both from their previous studies (because some had come in with some
stronger background in political theory and economic background than I had) and our fall and winter
classwork.
Out of that came two major projects and a couple more. The biggest one, which became the
most famous—within the college and to some degree within Washington State—was working with the
town of North Bonneville, which was being faced with being told by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—
essentially, the U.S. government—that they were going to build a second powerhouse next to the
Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, and that the best site for that second powerhouse—which
entailed a new channel in the river—was the Washington side of the Bonneville Dam, which is where the
town of North Bonneville existed.
In the late fall of 1972, when we were starting to research potential projects, I was informed by
some colleagues in the Washington State Department of Planning and Community Affairs that this town
needed some assistance to figure out what it meant to become relocated or dispersed because of the
major federal construction project.
About 15 of us went down and attended a city council meeting. This would have been in early
December of 1972. The mayor had just been elected in that fall’s elections to be county commissioner,
so he could not also be mayor. The main agenda that evening was for the other five city
councilmembers to decide who was going to be the mayor to replace the mayor that was elected to
become county commissioner.
We sat and observed for about an hour and a half as they avoided making that decision because
nobody wanted to do it. They were all retired—as most of the people in North Bonneville were—
workers who had worked on building the original dam in the ‘30s and were now in their retirement age
and had settled in the area, or there were people who had worked in the logging industry or a couple
local businesspeople, but nobody who was obvious to any of them—we had no idea who these folks
5

were—to have the obvious nest step of leadership, especially with this huge uncertainty about the
relocation coming up, and what that might mean. Finally, a man who had been a painter on the original
crew that helped construct the Bonneville Dam in the ‘30s named Ernie Skala agreed that he would
accept the mayor position.
Then they could move on to find out who we were who were sitting watching this meeting. We
introduced ourselves, the students and I, and said that we were looking for the students to have an
opportunity to apply what they were learning about land use planning and city planning, and we were
looking for projects that would engage the community, participate with the community, and we were
exploring whether this might be something the community was interested in and that we could
facilitate, and that we could logistically make work because North Bonneville is about 140 or 150 miles
from the Evergreen campus.
We stayed overnight, we stayed another day, we had more meetings. The framework for a
working relationship was established. We came back to Olympia and the students, during the early part
of winter quarter, started formulating a more detailed plan for how we would work with the
community. That ended up being a really significant project. At least 15 other students came in and out
of the project. We worked pretty much fulltime from mid-winter quarter on through the end of the year
helping the community come up with a major document—it was in a three-ring binder—that organized
all of the research and background information that the students, working with residents who were
interested, came up with about their situation—what it meant, what the laws were, what the current
legal and economic and social, who the community really was, what was important to them, and what
the options were for what was going to have to be either dispersing broadly through the region, or
trying to stay together as a community having to be relocated. That included having to build some
political strategies for working with the State of Washington and the federal government.
I could go on and on with many, many stories about that. It was a fascinating project. It became
a four-year relationship between Evergreen and the town of North Bonneville. My significant role was
just in this first year, although I stayed on in an additional capacity just working with the faculty from
other programs or the contract sponsors who worked with students as they carried on over the next few
years.
Stein: Did other full-time academic programs take on this work as the core project of the curriculum?
Fox: Not as the core project of the curriculum but as a sub-piece, a smaller sub-piece. Phil Harding
worked with the students in whatever the next program he was teaching in. He had known some of the
6

students from having been in the first program with Carolyn in ’71, and being an architect as this project
moved into more of the working with the architectural firm that was being hired to help plan for the
new community. I think most of Phil’s work was through individual contract sponsorship, but they may
have been embedded within a program. I’m just not sure.
I think Hap Freund, who was an attorney on the faculty, was working with some of the students
and got involved in the college working with the community. Those were the main two. I stayed
involved to some degree, mostly through individual contract. What I preferred to do was a cluster of
two or three contracts working together as a group rather than just individually. That’s a good jog of my
memory.
The second most interesting and significant project coming out of that 1972-73 year was doing a
plan for Burfoot Park, which is a park out on the way to Johnson Point, on the way to Boston Harbor.
The county had purchased, I think, 20 acres and had wanted to have the students create a document
that would help them with some alternatives of how to either develop that park or let it stay natural.
That included some natural history inventory and some preliminary set of alternatives about recreation
versus non-recreation, passive versus active, beach access, as it’s on the waterfront.
That became a useful document to the Thurston County Parks Department who didn’t have the
capacity or the funding to do a park plan themselves. That’s become a very pleasant park that’s used as
an access to the waterfront as well as some trails.
Stein: It’s one of our favorite parks.
Fox: Good. That was an Evergreen project that helped lay the groundwork for that, also one that
probably a few students picked up and worked on the next year. I didn’t follow that one as much.
That was my first year, teaching by myself. I only taught by myself maybe one or two more
times in my whole history. I almost always taught in four-person programs in the early years. I liked
being a free agent, available for fitting into teams that needed someone with a community perspective,
or an applied in the community interest. I wasn’t usually the initiator of program themes. I just liked
being able to come in and enrich a program that other people had coalesced an idea around.
That led to some fascinating team-teaching offers. I only taught in year-long programs, which
probably no one else is going to be able to say that’s their Evergreen history of teaching. I can’t say I
only taught in team programs, but the vast majority. I think I taught in fulltime programs with 51 or 52
different faculty over the years, which was an incredible experience. I felt like I was still in grad school
because each one involved lots of other faculty’s interesting material and reading books from other
7

disciplines, and finding creative ways that I could offer, whether it was information about communities
or how communities change, theories of community, theories of planning, techniques, workshops, skill
work on how to work in community, connections to community organizations. It was a lot of fun
because I could be a bridge between community organizations and academic programs.
Carolyn and I were both really active in the community. We weren’t the only ones, but we
tended to be on lots of non-profit boards. In fact, as we started raising our family and having a farm, we
had to discipline ourselves to only be on a maximum of three boards, and we couldn’t have more than
two nights a week of meetings. It couldn’t be the same nights, and it was all logistics about how we
could make this work in our lives of having a family, doing our community work, and doing our teaching,
and somehow raising our own food.
We grew up in big cities and Olympia is not a big city. We decided we didn’t really want to live
in a suburban development, so what about living on a small farm? That meant that if we were going to
live on a small farm, if we’re going to eat meat, we’re going to raise our own meat so we know where it
comes from, and we’re going to try to be back-to-the-land hippie young people and just start gardens
and raise pigs and chickens. We did all of the above.
But being involved with community organizations led to us being a good source of being able to
bring community folks active in different issues onto the campus as guest speakers or as potential
workshop instructors.
The earliest of some of the programs I taught was one called Encountering America. Another
one is called Ways of Knowing. That one was one that Charlie Teske had initiated. He and I had talked
about wanting to have a program that could be a good experience for one of our faculty who was not
having good experiences in her early couple years of teaching. We didn’t want her to either just leave or
find herself teaching by herself or with just one other person that she could get along with or already
felt comfortable with. We took that on as almost like a faculty development opportunity for someone
that we both agreed was somebody we wanted to help. That helped define the program because that
person’s offering and specialty needed to become a central part of the program also. But a program like
Ways of Knowing can include everybody or anybody. Any four faculty could probably teach a program
like that and make it really interesting.
That gave us the opportunity also to teach with two faculty of color, so it was a very enriching
program with arts, humanities, social science, and a little bit of quantitative work that I was able to
offer, being the only person closest to being connected to the natural sciences and the physical sciences,
8

which was mostly my math and my interest in learning more about geology. But it was primarily arts
and humanities and social sciences.
There was an interesting structure for that program. As I remember, the first quarter we were
all together teaching our foundation work that we wanted the students to examine. The second two
quarters, we divided each quarter into five-week components. Each five weeks, two of us would team
teach two different offerings. The next quarter we scrambled and we made two different five-week
offerings with two other combinations of the four of us, so the students had opportunities to get a little
bit narrower, working with two faculty, and then the next level of in-depth versus the total breadth with
the four of us teaching in the fall did. That was a nice strategy. It gave each of us a chance to work with
each other over a five-week component.
Stein: What would the two faculty do who weren’t the main program faculty?
Fox: We had two different offerings each five weeks.
Stein: How would the students choose which offering they were going to take?
Fox: They were able to have a first and second choice because we had to have it to be fairly balanced.
Students that didn’t get their first choice in the first round, if there was a need to sort people in the
second round, would be given priority for the second time.
Stein: Would students stay through the whole year?
Fox: We did pretty well. Not everybody stays. Those of us really dedicated to teaching year-long
programs gave a lot of care and attention to how we structured the program so that at least winter
quarter, it was open and available and feasible for students to come in even if they hadn’t had the fall
quarter background. It was harder adding new students in the spring unless a few times we had
umbrella homes for people that otherwise would be on individual contracts and gave them a base to
work from. If we had a group of students who were going to work with some of our program students
on a project, they could come in and contribute in some way to that project. That was harder.
Some of those strategies were things that other faculty still do, I’m sure—offering some pre-first
week readings to do to catch up on. We would say, “The two most important seminar books from fall
quarter, we would like you to catch up by reading these over the winter break. Be prepared to have
these as part of our work the rest of the year—even though you’re not going to be involved with an indepth seminar as part of the background.” During the first week of winter we would have both social
and content overlap between where we had been and where we were going to be in the winter quarter;

9

activities that made sure that new students were interacting in collaborative ways with some short joint
projects with the ongoing students so it wasn’t a cliquish kind of separation or isolation.
Stein: Was there community-based aspect of that program as well?
Fox: There was, but they were small, more like little research projects that got the students in the
community rather than participatory building something. It was a little more challenging to do the fiveweek components than the quarter and a half or full quarter. I don’t remember any particular ones, but
they were some way that the students—and usually we were requiring them to be in small groups of
two or three or four—learning about something. Going to city council meetings, learning about some
issue, and in addition following up by talking to some of the people or some of the organizations that
were testifying to get a broader, in-depth perspective of what the issue was—follow up interviews of
the city staff—and come back and try to reflect on that in ways that came back to this exploration of
different ways of knowing, and how those get projected in input into community decision making, for
example. People who were coming from different not only lifestyles but ways of thinking and ways of
being in our community, and how those get presented, and how they present different opinions or
alternatives on different community issues.
Stein: It sounds like a great program, one that could be just as valuable today.
Fox: Yeah, it’s needed. [chuckles] I could try to reflect on some of the others, but in general, my
contributions were—lecturing was not my strength. I did my share of lecturing when needed.
Fortunately, when teaching with Charlie Teske, Charlie says, “Don’t worry. I have more lectures than we
could ever use in a year-long program.” [laughing] I learned more from him than he learned from me,
but of course, I say that for a lot of faculty colleagues. I’m just thinking particularly of Charlie because I
just went to his memorial three days ago. Wonderful colleague and one of the really intellectual and
pedagogical foundations of the college curriculum.
Stein: Let me just take a pause here.
End Part 1 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 2 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: One of the things that I was interested in was hearing more about how your participation in
different community organizations—serving on the board of different organizations—how that helped
strengthen the community’s relationship with the college, and what some of the benefits were. You

10

mentioned that sometimes you would bring in speakers from different organizations they were part of.
What are some of the ways that you saw that really facilitating the work of the college?
Fox: Good question. I could go on for a while on this. First of all, I benefited from the fact that
Evergreen at that point—and I still think this is true—did not have professional publications as a criteria
for reappointment or a continuing contract. For me, my scholarship and my developing and deepening
my work was able to be manifest through engaging in the community.
My community service—which to me was not just a service of the college to the community—
was my ability to learn and deepen my scholarship and my practice and my teaching by engaging with
organizations in the community, and that was recognized at evaluation time when I was evaluated by
the deans as an equivalent for my professional development to doing other kinds of research which may
have been more scholarly in some different ways. The fact that that was acknowledged and supported
in terms of it being a part of fulfilling my contract made it even easier and more natural for me to
engage. It’s my natural inclination anyway, I was just able to do more.
One really wonderful example of this was the program Encountering America. It was one where
the faculty team changed dramatically just before the start of the program. It was a program initially
conceived by Llyn De Danaan—then Lynn Patterson—and Oscar Soule—I think that’s correct. One was
appointed dean and the other—or maybe they were both appointed dean. Anyway, we had to change
faculty midstream from our planning, so it was a more difficult program and it had more bumps in the
road as we made it through the first quarter. I’m sorry, I’m going to correct myself. This program was
called “A Matter of Survival.”
It was a difficult one to coalesce a new faculty team at the last minute. Students were, I think,
perceiving some of that not being run really smoothly because we hadn’t built that team over the
months that it usually takes. Some of the students may even have had a nickname of the program of
Barely Surviving instead of A Matter of Survival.
The interesting part about that program, from the perspective of the question you asked, was
that I had been asked by a dear, wonderful community member, one of the original founders of the
Evergreen Community College Organization—ECCO it was called—which were community members
who really wanted to support Evergreen by creating an organization and engaging with the college.
Many, many really wonderful community people joined this organization and were a great support to
the college. Some of them came through also meeting me through the Cooper Point Association
process.
11

One of them was a man named Jess Spielholz. He had already retired from a long career. He
was a public health physician. He had been in his own practice, and then has been appointed to head
the State Department of Health. He had asked me if I would join the board of the senior center. I was
still in my early thirties, but I had a lot of respect for Jess. I had an interest in learning more about senior
issues and facilities and functions in our community to balance some of the other parts of the
community that I already knew more about or was also learning about.
I joined the board of the senior center, and Jess’s strategy for me was to chair a committee to
help do a plan for a new senior center. The old senior center was in a very small space catty-corner
from where the Olympia Community Center is now. It was a building that needed to be and eventually
was torn down and replaced by a more modern facility. He asked me to chair a committee, so my
strategy for doing that was to have a few members of the board, some other members or seniors who
came and hung out at the senior center, and other community people who I felt needed to have a voice
on a planning committee for a new senior center, such as someone who was very active in the faith
community—there was an interfaith council at that time—just trying to get a broader collection of
people.
There’s two ways that this story is going. One is that I ended up chairing committees that met
over two and a half to three years that ended up with our new Olympia Community Center in downtown
Olympia, which includes the senior center as well as a gym for the youth as well as many meeting rooms
and the cafeteria, a facility to be able to do food processing. It was a wonderful process that started
with a philosophy and ended with a building. The philosophy or ways of thinking about it included being
intergenerational versus just a community center as its own building, and being in the downtown versus
out in other parts of the community. So, we worked all the way through. That enabled me to make
many more connections among other people in the community as well as with the senior community,
which later I could use as an inroad, an opening, to have students be able to be engaging with seniors
and learning from their lives.
That started with the spring quarter of this Matter of Survival program. The program broke
apart at the end of winter. We stayed together as a program title, but it was more the individual faculty
doing group contracts. We lost one faculty, and I was able to hire Jess Spielholz as a visiting faculty to
teach with me in a piece of the spring program called Wisdom of the Elderly. We had some fascinating
readings. Jess had a wealth of people he could bring in as guest speakers, and he himself was just this

12

fascinating teacher and motivator of energy about caring about and caring for people in later stages of
their lives.
One of the projects was that all the students were to spend, I think it was eight, maybe 10 hours
a week over 10 weeks getting to know an elderly person, a grandparent-age person in the community
and to learn something from them. They were to find those on their own by going to the community
center or the centers around the community—assisted living facilities, senior housing complexes,
nursing homes, church groups if there was a senior reading group or consulting group or interest group.
That led to some really—and I still know of a few—longterm friendships.
That’s an example where I was able to draw upon community resources to enrich the program
in ways that students—we’ve had other programs and it’s not uncommon to have students go into the
community and work with, learn from, a different segment of the community, whether it be different
ethnic groups or age groups or religious groups. But this one was one that was particularly successful.
In part I think it set up a model for how other faculty could potentially do these kinds of projects.
Stein: Did the students have something that they then would also contribute back to the community or
to the individual as part of this work?
Fox: Yeah, in a couple ways. One is that as many as who wanted to or could of their new friends or
partners were invited to come to some of the classes, particularly at the end where we had a big
celebration. Among the different products at the end was something to give back to their person that
represented what they had learned and how much they appreciated that; giving back an
acknowledgment that what they had learned was valuable. A couple of those were done by creative
ways of poetry or video, but it was to be something that they would physically give back to the other
person. That seemed to be very well appreciated that it wasn’t just “Where did it go?” Help me follow
up with the question.
Stein: I’m curious about another program. I think it was called Health, Individual and Community
program that you taught a few times. You mentioned that, and maybe it had different names over the
years. I’m curious about that program and what you covered and what kind of community-based
engagement you had through that program.
Fox: That was a program I taught, I think, four times. It’s a freshman program. The basic question of
the program is, what is a healthy state of being? Each time we taught it, three of us were the same
faculty and those were Linda Kahan, a human physiologist representing, what is a healthy body and
bodily systems and health from a physiological perspective? Oscar Soule, who was an urban ecology
13

faculty, and it was, what is a healthy ecosystem? Each time we had a psychology faculty. This was the
one that was different each time, interestingly, for different reasons. The question there is, what is
healthy human development, the stages of development, personality development? I represented,
what is a healthy community, or what are healthy communities and how do they manifest themselves?
So, a fascinating group of interdisciplinary material we could bring together, and lots of fun
projects about students doing different kinds of assessment and self-monitoring of their bodies, their
thoughts, their experiences in the community, their experiences in nature. Lots of interesting reflective
journal writing that came out of that along the way.
We also wanted to increasingly over the year have students go from the broader fall quarter all
together, lots of baseline common foundation work toward a smaller, intermediate level, going a little
more into depth into a subset of that into some either more advanced research, which didn’t need to be
community based but it was an option.
One of the community ones that was very useful and kind of fun was—because Oscar Soule’s
wife, Barbara, was the epidemiologist at St. Peter Hospital, and Oscar is also very active in the
community in some different ways than I and Carolyn were, but another subset of the community that
was brought—including the medical community—through Barbara’s work. The hospital was really
interested in a study of how hazardous waste medical material was being handled and treated.
Interestingly it was at a time when that was not really well known yet and it needed to be—disposal of
needles, all kinds of things.
The students were able to provide the work source for a study that was able to be in large part
directed by the hospital, but also influenced by the students in a sense as to what they were able to do
in terms of their background and legal access to certain materials that they were trying to monitor. It
was an interesting epidemiological process of looking at how the hospital was treating its waste.
Another one that Oscar was also really interested in was doing a noise study for a neighborhood
along Interstate 5 that was wanting to see if they could convince the State Highway Department to
buffer their neighborhood a little more. That was not too long after I-5 had been widened and
expanded, more and more traffic. It was learning how to use noise-monitoring equipment and to go out
and monitor and to write up a report. It was working particularly with one neighborhood that had a
reason to have this knowledge that they could then use to argue their case. The students didn’t get
involved with the political aspect of that but more of trying to put together a credible, scientific-based

14

report using the data. We were able to both purchase and borrow some noise-monitoring equipment
that the students could use. That ended up in a report that the neighborhood organization could use.
That program also generated some more scientific biological research in working with Linda
Kahan. It was more individualized student research with her and maybe in her labs. I don’t remember
all the details of that part. But by spring, the students had an opportunity—and these were freshman
students—to do work that otherwise, in most other universities, they wouldn’t get to do until they were
at least juniors if not seniors.
Stein: It’s impressive that freshmen would go out with noise-monitoring equipment and complete a
study that would be useful for a community.
Fox: Yeah. Except for the first one I talked about—the Advanced Urban Planning and working in North
Bonneville—all these other programs that I’ve been talking about—in fact, my almost first decade of
teaching—was what we then called core programs. What do we call them now? First-year programs?
Stein: We have the First Year Experience, which is beginning just this upcoming fall.
Fox: It used to be called core programs. They were almost always four-person teams, year-long,
interdisciplinary studies for first-year students. That was really where I really, in my early years, just
loved teaching the first-year programs. It gave me the opportunity to teach broadly, and it gave me
more confidence and an opportunity for me to build my scholarship to a point where I felt more
comfortable and knowledgeable in expanding what I could with more advanced students. Because I
didn’t come in with a PhD, I didn’t come in with a lot of already well-deepened scholarship in my field. I
came with lots and lots of experience and lots of academic background, but not the same skills that
other people were coming in with, with their graduate and doctoral work. So, I needed to build both
confidence and a broader, deeper package to work my way into more—although I had a great
experience the program my first year. It was one that was directly using my academic expertise and
experience, but I didn’t want to limit myself to only doing that, working with advanced students.
Stein: Do you think the somewhat unplanned nature of Thurston County at the time in the 1970s—it
sounds like there was a lot of new development—that that provided opportunities for students to really
engage in the community in ways that they might not be able to right now?
Fox: It might have. Other than the Cooper Point Association, I don’t know of another one that was even
half that significant in terms of the land use and the planning. There were some sub-pieces of that.
That was also the era of a lot of new environmental laws like the Shoreline Management Act, so a lot of
things were new and there were opportunities for either internships or other small-group research in
15

that case. Carolyn was on the County Shoreline Advisory Board, so she was able to help some of the
marine science faculty that wanted to either learn themselves who was working on things in the
community and would get their students involved. She could be that conduit. Some students did work
on that.
I don’t know that it should be a lot more difficult now. Planning issues and land use issues are
still active, and the Growth Management Act brought a whole new era of planning that needs to be
reexamined every 10 years. Interesting question.
Stein: I was just thinking about it. I’m teaching a program with Julia Zay, who is a visual artist, in about
three years. It’s called Ruins. It’s a program we taught before, but one of the things that I’m hoping to
do is some community-based work with some urban planning components from an anthropological
ethnographic perspective. I’m really curious about land use, especially around the Tumwater Brewery,
which has had a fascinating and unfortunate history that I think reveals a lot about property ownership
and when the city does or does not get involved. I think it’s going to have an ongoing saga that students
might take part in in some way.
Fox: Yeah, I could immediately be interested if I were still teaching .
Stein: Okay.
Fox: I think you’re right. That is going to be an ongoing process that I think over, even if we said a
couple of years from now, that you’ll be able to plug into and maybe even start by making some initial
contacts such as who at the Tumwater City Hall is engaged in that? What are some of the other
environmental groups that are watching that? The Audubon Society is one. They have a couple of
active committees that work on monitoring local land use impacts on the natural environment because
one of their missions is to protect habitat for birds. It doesn’t take having to be on the board to join the
Audubon Society, go to their annual meetings, and just start to find out who’s on their habitat
committee that’s watching the political processes of planning. They’re a good source. They don’t have
staff, there are just volunteers who are active. I think that’s going to be an interesting one, and certainly
it’s one that fits in with your Ruin theme.
Some of the other historical sites in the community that haven’t yet been acknowledged but
maybe they should. The Parks Department tries to engage or revitalize or at least make more publicly
known some of the historical sites that maybe are not ruins but in some cases they are. They are
buildings that were homesteaded. I’m thinking of the ones down on the habitat . . . what is the name of
it? . . . it’s down near Little Rock, along I-5. I’ll get back to you on that. It was homesteaded and then
16

the building burned and they’re deciding what to do about it, whether to leave it as a monument that
there was a homestead there or . . . you know. It’s one of the natural reserves.
I think there’s always going to be a change going on in the community, and ones that have a
historic preservation potential, I think, are always going to be interesting projects. There’s always the
opportunity also to get students engaged with the community input into how decisions are made rather
than only just their own input by doing research. Finding out who else is interested in the issue,
whether it’s geographic or community wide.
Stein: I know you played a role in the formation of the CCBLA. You mentioned that that had several
different iterations, so I’m really curious to hear about the CCBLA [Center for Community-Based
Learning and Action]. Would you like to take a break before we talk about that?
Fox: Yeah.
End Part 2 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: We were just about to talk CCBLA and your role in the formation of the CCBLA and its various
iterations.
Fox: The hardest thing about creating the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action was getting
people to agree on the name of it. CCBLA does live on as a name but it’s an awkward one. But it does,
when you think about it, reflect the values that went into the intent and hopefully the functioning.
Over the years, both Carolyn and I would be asked by a faculty to help make a connection in the
community because the faculty wanted to do a project, and we—or at least I mostly—realized it would
be nice if this were institutionalized a little more, rather than just if somebody thinks about it or wants
to ask, or maybe find a connection on their own but really not know really how to do community-based
work even if they knew the right people to approach. So, it seemed to make sense to try to have a
location on campus where faculty or even students could come—and say, “I’m doing this community
project,” or, “I’m interested in doing a community project,” or, “I’m interested in finding out who’s in
the community that might be interested in what I’m interested in doing”—and somehow make that a
little more formalized than just random or somewhat haphazard, a place where faculty and students
from the on-campus perspective and community people from their perspective could find each other
and explore what might be ways to learn with and from each other.

17

There were, I think, three different attempts in different ways. One was a National Community
Service grant that lasted, I think, three years. I’m not remembering all the details of that one. I think it
included ways that faculty were given some release time to go out into the community and . . . I’m sorry,
I’m a little fuzzy. Anyway, we had a grant-based one that at the end of three years the grant was up and
there was nothing to carry it forward. We had another one or maybe two through another national
organization. There were a few attempts.
Stein: It sounds like it was a lot of work keeping this going, establishing grants, making connections.
Fox: Right, and it was slow trying to build a political foundation within the faculty and the college to say,
“This is important enough to have it be on ongoing small role.”
The Internship Office in the different ways that it was organized over the years, either
independently or through the Student Affairs and Academic Advising—it’s changed, I don’t know what it
now, it’s over the years—that’s one vehicle. Internships have always been a really important and
valuable piece of community-based learning opportunities.
I was also trying to find ways that we could go beyond internships and have group projects, or
even if there were internships, more ongoing ability to follow through and work with an organization
over time versus one quarter at a time or one student at a time.
At some point in the mid-’90s, there was a student of mine and a student of other faculty who
was an incredibly wonderful, engaging, motivating, stimulating person named Jacinta McCoy. Jacinta
was a student of mine at one point and I just loved her and wanted to follow her around and she wanted
to follow me around as we did our community work. She then became a staff person in the
Communications Building, so she stayed on at Evergreen. She always had a vision in her own words like
I did in mine about having more celebration of community and an opportunity for students and
community people to celebrate together, as well as have academic learning experiences together on
campus and in the community.
Jacinta, as a staff person, motivated me and others like Lin Nelson, other students, other faculty,
to see if we could create a committee—we used to call them Disappearing Task Forces, I don’t know if
there are still DTFs—to look into how this might be able to become a part of Evergreen in a more
structured way. We spent a couple years and engaged a lot of faculty into thinking about how they
could—we did surveys about the number of faculty already are engaged in some kind of community
activity, just to acknowledge the breadth that we have. A lot of it we don’t often think about, or even
faculty don’t think about it as being engaged in community service, such as being involved in their
18

church or being active in Kiwanis or different civic organizations. And just to acknowledge that being of
service in some ways in the community is something we all really do have a little piece of in our lives,
and if we start to think about it, how are there some creative ways that could become part of our work
life and our students’ enrichment life as well as our own work, and to get a sense of the community’s
interest in having students involved in their work.
Some surveys, some conversations, looking at other models led to a proposal to actually create
a center that would be an ongoing financial commitment on behalf of the college rather than grant
based so that we could build some sense of continuity, and that the community would have a sense of
continuity rather than uncertainty whether it’s one quarter or one year or three years.
We were able to integrate that into the building of Seminar II and have it become one of our
centers. We had other centers at that time. I think some of them still exist. We had an opportunity to
have a place that over time had increasing linkages with housing, and with Student Affairs, the Advising
Office. We were slowly able to build the political support from the faculty to have this be not just a few
people who thought it was a good idea, but the faculty realizing they could all benefit from this, or many
more of them could benefit from this if we had a center. It’s grown, I think, quite well.
Stein: It’s still going strong. I wanted to ask you about your work in reservation-based programs.
Fox: I taught also the on-campus Native American Studies program. I taught in that in maybe the late
‘70s, early ‘80s. That was fascinating. Because I kept myself open as a potential add-on to other
people’s program ideas, I was asked by Mary Ellen Hillaire—who wasn’t on the original founding nor was
she in the first year, I think she started the second year when I did—who was one of the first Native
American faculty we have. She was an elder, a member of the Lummi Nation up in the northwest north
of Seattle.
Mary Ellen wanted to work with Native Americans in their own communities and Maxine
Mimms wanted to work with adults in her community in Tacoma and they created the model to
facilitate that by having an on-campus Native American Studies program that was open and would have
anyone be invited to participate in that program. They used it as a home base for their working with
their off-campus programs, but to have an on-campus, legitimate base of operations, but in the
meantime open it to others.
The year I was invited to join the program, there ended up being, I think, either five or six of us.
It was Mary Ellen Hillaire, who was mostly working with the Native American communities in Northwest
Washington; Maxine Simms meeting with students in Tacoma in the Women’s Club and her own
19

community centers that she was creating in churches before we had a Tacoma facility; David Whitener
of the Squaxin community, a Squaxin elder and leader; Lovern King, who was from a Midwest Native
community; Betsy Diffendal, who lived in Tacoma and worked a lot with Maxine; and myself, but there
might have been one more. It was at least five faculty and we had over 100 students.
Other than many contentious issues around that particular pedagogy structure—which
essentially was we would meet once a week for all day or most of the day, Mary Ellen Hillaire would
present some philosophy and musing and history about Native American thinking, others of us would
then add and explore that theme. It might be a whole day just talking about the concept of time, or
hospitality. It was trying to say, “Here’s another way of thinking about, or at least here’s the way
indigenous people”—mostly thinking about the Northwest—“think about our life on this Earth, and the
way that we then organize our lives and communities and do our work.”
Everybody was invited to participate in that and was expected to, but not everybody did.
Everybody was also expected to have what otherwise would have been an individual internship. But it
did give an umbrella of some opportunity to be with a community to explore some Native American
thinking other than just being totally on your own with your internship possibility. It was up to the
students then to think about and reflect on what they were learning about when they came to these
gatherings, how it connected to whatever they were doing, whether it was some kind of research in the
sciences, or many of them were in the arts.
It was pretty loose in terms of structure. That was a concern by a lot of us on the faculty about,
is this rigorous? Do we know what the students are doing? It didn’t necessarily have to have the kind of
structure that an individual internship had. Some did and some didn’t, but others were less certain.
Legitimately, there was some angst or at least a feeling that we ought to know more collectively about
this pedagogical model. The deans asked that there be a DTF to critically examine the on-campus Native
American Studies model just to find out, what are students doing? Are they building the kind of
pathway towards a degree, or are they just always taking the same thing and always just taking this
program? Legitimate concerns, so somehow I ended up being one of the co-chairs of that committee,
with Lloyd Colfax, a Native American faculty.
We spent two years really in-depth, looking at the transcripts, the evaluations of students that
had been in the program, getting the students who had been in the program to look back and reflect on
how that year or years or one quarter or whatever it was—because it was open—fit into what else they
were doing, and try to just see in a more systematic way how it was being used by students, as well as to
20

then have a little bit more organized way that we could present to the faculty the syllabi and the actual
faculty work in those programs as well as the student work.
We did a lot of wonderful work, and along the way, we were able to build the data to alleviate a
lot of the expectations that students were just using this as a place to flake off and not do serious work,
or that students were just doing one thing for the whole three years. In actuality, most of the students
were using it quite wisely as a break from being a year and a half, perhaps, in something really intense
and just wanting to have somebody let them just digest and maybe add a little more of individual. And
none of the faculty that they already knew or knew them were available to take them on an individual
contract.
It really was for many students used as an outlet to what otherwise would have been an
individual contract at a time when faculty were not compensated additionally for taking on contracts.
Our programs tended to be many times quite full and there just needed to be more breathing room for
students to breathe in and out of some intense work that they were doing. A lot of students did use it
that way. They would come into the program for one quarter, two quarters, and then go back into
realizing they needed more structured upper-division work and they’d get into another program.
Then there were those for whom it looked kind of fuzzy and not very structured, but when you
started looking at the kinds of self-evaluations that they were writing, they were solid. They were
maybe unique and different—not that everybody was taking best advantage of the opportunity, but
enough were, and enough data was being able to be organized that our recommendations that
eventually came to the faculty meeting—it took two years—were largely accepted, so the program did
have legitimacy. It had some tightening up that we were recommending and that did happen in terms
of documentation and making sure as much as we could—and this happened the second time I taught
it—that students would be grouped into some subgroups. In addition to the one day a week major
grouping, there would be subgroups that got together to have a second level of connection.
For example, anybody who was doing individual work relating to housing—which I had several—
or community development kinds of things would also have an additional once a week seminar, half a
day workshop, something that they could all benefit from, and then keep going, to kind of have a little
more—which doesn’t happen in individual contracts.
Stein: It sounds like the SOS [Student-Originated Studies] model to a certain extent.
Fox: Yeah, it became more and more like what more and more of us started doing in SOS. But the other
piece that came out of this was a recommendation that we work with the Native American students and
21

the Tacoma students who were participating in this program differently, and that those students be less
hidden and isolated from the rest of the campus.
That led to our creating a proposal for an in-community Native American program that would be
entitled Community-Based . . . I’m losing the full title here . . . Community-Based Liberal Arts . . . anyway,
an academic program in the communities in our region, and that we would hire a faculty specifically to
work with those communities. That turned out to be Carol Minugh. Carol had been an Evergreen
graduate in the early version of the Native American Studies program. She went on and got her PhD at
the University of Pennsylvania and came back and established the program. I became the first other
person to team-teach with her.
When I taught with her we had—I think this was ’92-93—we had four different Native American
communities where we met in the community two nights a week. It was the Makah, the Quinault, the
Port Gamble S’Klallam and the Skokomish. The communities created a theme or a topic that they felt
would be beneficial for them to learn more about. One of the years I taught in the program was
leadership. Another one was community.
We tried as much as we could to use Native scholarship and sources. We used the tribal staff
and expertise in bringing in as co-teachers. It was a program that I just really loved teaching in,
particularly because my role could be support. I’m not an expert in anything about Native American
issues and studies, but I was able to work with students on research skills, communication skills—which
were a big part of the program—and each year, whether or not the theme was community or even
when it was leadership, how to find and help create the curriculum by having examples coming from
non-Native world as well as Native world of leadership and community. Each year the students in the
program would create a project to give back to their communities.
The program is still going, I think. It was a spinoff of a different way to work with the Native
American communities than the on-campus program. I taught in that program twice. One year we had
a site over in Montana with the Salish Kootenai, so I was over there a couple times. Increasingly it
evolved to having more and more leadership of the program coming from the communities themselves,
instead of having just faculty from Evergreen going out and doing the circuit to have each of the
communities have a halftime faculty member from the community as well as an Evergreen-based faculty
member. I think over the years some of the coming on campus changed a little bit as more and more
online learning became easier and more accessible.
Stein: Let’s take a break.
22

End Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Begin Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19
Stein: We’re going again. I want to hear the story about the Cooper Point Journal blowing up, is what I
have in my notes. [laughter]
Fox: I’ll try to do it fairly quickly. The second time I taught alone was quite a few years after that first
year. Again, I was available for whatever came up as an opportunity, and there were a group of
students that went to the deans and said, “We have 25 students. We have a syllabus. We just need a
faculty.” These were advanced students who had been in a variety of other programs and they wanted
to spend the year learning about the history and practice of anarchism.
I said, “I’d be interested in talking to these students.” So, I did. I met with them and I said, “I’m
interested in this, but as a program that is student-run—and it really is the practice of some of what
you’re trying to learn about—here’s my conditions. One is that we spend, as I did before, the first two
weeks creating the syllabus together so that it includes other people who are going to sign up for this
without already being in your group that’s already organized something, and that I have a chance then
to become a part of the mix of creating a syllabus, and that we run the program on consensus, and that
the students are responsible for the ongoing energy of the program, which includes that fact that
everybody has to write a self-evaluation.” Because I knew with anarchists, there were going to be some
that didn’t want to write a self-evaluation.
This program started off with the two weeks of going off-campus to a Girl Scout camp
intensively for a week, creating this model that essentially ran by itself. Intense meetings, continual
meetings. Many, many meetings. Some really deep intellectual scholarship work that the students
wanted to engage in. A great combination of what I liked to do and had learned how to do of some
common work we all do together, but chances to spin off into sub-interests and go deeper into things,
still staying in groups, and slowly then moving towards some opportunities for individual. It was a
program that was continually looking for applied work to go along, but not abandoning the seminars and
the writing and the on-campus work.
In looking for projects—this was halfway through the year—the Cooper Point Journal collapsed.
Whoever had been the people running the different segments of the Journal—the managing editor and
all the different components—all threw up their hands and quit. The Student Affairs said, “Are we just
going to let the Cooper Point Journal die for the rest of this year and start it up again next year?” The
group of these students in this program said, “No. We’re going to put in a proposal that we run this
23

Cooper Point Journal for the rest of this year as a collective. We will rotate the responsibilities so that
there’s no hierarchy. We will get the paper out every week.” There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of “No,
you won’t. It can’t be done that way.”
But the administration or at least Student Affairs didn’t have much other option other than just
let it go, so the students took it on. There were probably six or seven of them that had it as their major
work for the rest of the quarter—doing the research, writing the articles, figuring out how to do layout,
how to distribute, how to do all the pieces of putting out a weekly school newspaper, where the
responsibilities rotated and they all got a chance to do the different tasks.
So, the Cooper Point Journal came out every week and they got terrific experience. Some of
those went on into journalism. They just picked it up and made it continue in a way that reflected their
learning about the practice of a participatory, egalitarian kind of structure of getting something that
usually is done in a much more hierarchical separate specialty kind of way.
Stein: That’s a great story. Thanks for sharing that.
Fox: They did it. It was part of that Decentralization Program. Of all the programs I’ve taught, that’s the
one that I’m still in touch with the most students, they’re still in touch with each other. There have been
reunions.
Two of the best students who deserved to get their 48 credits but did not write self-evaluations
at the end of the year did not get their credit. They were testing me, and there was this little window of
if faculty didn’t submit an evaluation, it just stayed in limbo. Predictably, 10 or 15 years later, these two
students came back and said, “We really would like those credits now.” [laughing] In both cases, I’m
not going to name names, one is really well known in this community and is doing work we’re all proud
of and the other is a professional capacity in another county and they have worked their way into those
professional capacities without having finished their degree.
So, they wrote their self-evaluations. I had saved all the notes. I knew what I could write. They
did get their credit. I ended up hearing about it because it goes to the deans saying, “What are you
doing? You’re filing evaluations for somebody 10 years later? We don’t do this.” I said, “They earned
their credit. One of the conditions of getting their credit was that they write a self-evaluation. They did,
and I’m willing to give them their credit now.”
Stein: I’ve heard about this story, by the way. This is semi-famous at the college.

24

Fox: Anyway, that came out of that program that was called Decentralization. I said, “We’re not going
to be able to call it Anarchism, so how about Decentralization?”
Stein: Is that one that you’ve taught one time?
Fox: That was just a one time. That was the most extreme of all the times when I turned the program
really over to the students.
Stein: Sounds like it worked out pretty well.
Fox: It did.
Stein: Would you tell us a little bit about your work as a Dean and the Evening and Weekend Studies
position? That was what you did toward the end of your time at Evergreen.
Fox: All along, I’d been interested in taking my turn to offer to be a dean, and whether it worked out or
not, at least I felt I could do it and it was something I believed in, having rotating deans. I’d been
nominated twice.
One is a funny one. I was nominated to be one of the Curriculum Deans and there were two
positions available. You may have heard this from others, too. There were two openings and there
were only three applicants, or three people willing to stand. I was one of them. One of the others was
Carolyn. The third was Matt Smith. We kind of knew that there was no way they were going to appoint
two deans from the same family. [laughing] But I thought it was important to have an open
opportunity, so that was the year that Carolyn Dobbs and Matt Smith became deans.
A few years later, I was nominated—and I said, “I’ll stand”—to be the Hiring and Professional
Development Dean. I was really interested in that because of the professional development part. I had
an interest in hiring, mainly that it stay as broad as possible and not get too narrowly defined, but
mostly in terms of working with faculty to find individual ways that they could continue to grow and
enhance their scholarship or teaching or different components of what our expectations are.
On that one, I was on sabbatical all year. Carolyn and I saved up and we both had our sabbatical
at the same time so we could go off, and it was after the kids were out of the house. We were in
Ecuador for five or six months, so I ended up being interviewed for a dean on the phone from Ecuador,
where I had been immersed in speaking Spanish and all of a sudden I had to speak English.
That was fun to apply for that. I didn’t get that one. That was the year Nancy Taylor got the
position, and that was perfect. She certainly deserved that. I think there were one or two other
applicants. I did my duty, I applied. Then they came around at the end of Susan Fiksdal’s term for
25

Evening and Weekend Studies Dean. There weren’t being any applicants coming forward, so I started
getting lobbied to apply. I said, “I’d like there to be other applicants, too, but I’m willing to do it.” I
think we did get another applicant or two.
I did get selected for that deanship and I was Dean of Evening and Weekend Studies from 2001
to 2007, so I did my six-year term. I loved it. I think I did a pretty good job. It’s such a wonderful
position because it’s like you’re Dean for your own little sub-piece of the whole. You’ve got your own
little curriculum. I think now—and it needed to be then, but it was more difficult then to be as
integrated to the fulltime curriculum as it is, I think, now.
I got to hire adjunct faculty based on two things. One was what the fulltime curriculum was
saying they needed in supplemental courses, but also to make sure that we had a breadth of offerings
for people that could only come halftime or less than fulltime. I got to interview and hire or oversee 100
different faculty, including a cohort of continuing faculty on halftime contracts. They were my “planning
unit.”
I didn’t have to do any kinds of things that deans at other schools have to do, like fundraising. I
got to help faculty learn how to teach better. It was fun because the people coming from the
community, some didn’t have much teaching experience or not a lot, but they certainly had lots to offer
and a lot of enthusiasm. I got to go to observe classes, observe teaching and then meet and talk about
what went well and what didn’t, and “Here’s some ideas.” Or they would come and say, “What do you
think about this syllabus?” Just help new people with less teaching experience but lots of enthusiasm
learn how to teach a four-credit course at Evergreen.
Stein: Then you were dean of the summer curriculum also?
Fox: That evolved during my tenure. I wasn’t at the beginning. I guess all the way through I was also
the Dean of International Studies. That took a lot of time also, and a lot of controversy around some of
our international programs, and angst around a couple of them. No, the Summer—maybe it was even
when . . . who was next after me? . . . Allen Olson . . .
I thought it was really fun. I thought I did a pretty good job, even after I retired, when I started
getting asked, “Would you come back and teach, fill in for somebody for a quarter?” Because deans
always have needs of filling in for emergencies. I’d been out for a while, taking care of Carolyn. I
probably would have been willing to step in in an emergency way administratively, but I didn’t want to
have to get back into the scholarship of my field, which was getting old. The end of my teaching was
really at a good point to have it be a highlight. [chuckles]
26

Stein: That makes sense.
Fox: After I finished my deanship and before I retired, I taught Student-Originated Studies.
Stein: Was it around the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action?
Fox: I wasn’t the official person now that worked with them. No, it was just my own SOS programs. I
wanted to build a couple versions of that so that other faculty could see different ways, and there are
different ways that you can structure those SOS programs.
Stein: If we had another two hours to talk, what are some of the things that you might want to go back
to or revisit to talk about in more detail?
Fox: I don’t know. It’s been fun doing this. [laughing]
Stein: It’s really fascinating for me, especially to hear about some of the early programs.
Fox: I felt it’s been a little more scattered this time and it won’t be as coherent. I was going to mention
that one part of the strategy that Carolyn and I had about helping faculty see the possibilities of working
in the community is getting to know people in the community that they might already not know based
on their own individual networks, and that was to try to have a lot of social events here at our house.
There were some early ones where we invited all the faculty and staff to come.
I don’t know if anybody else has talked about the goat roasts. We were raising goats and Beryl
Crowe, who was one of the early founding faculty, said, “Let’s have a goat roast. I want to butcher the
goat and prepare the goat. Let’s just invite everybody.” I said, “Okay.” We did this for about four or
five years. I’d take a goat that was a year old. I would have it slaughtered and he would then take it and
do his marinades and whatever he was doing. We would invite the faculty and staff. It would be a big
potluck. This is not an example of a community one, it’s more the Evergreen one, although I did invite
community people in.
Beryl would come over. I had a barbecue set up where we’d put the goat on a spit. He would
come over in the morning and bring two gallon-jugs with him. One was his marinade sauce to keep
working with the goat, and the other was his red wine to drink while he was enjoying the time with the
goat. By the middle or late afternoon, people would show up with all kinds of food that was spread out
all over the place, and everybody would have a great potluck.
But usually we would try to find ways to have Evergreen faculty and staff meet, not strategically
but just invite a lot of other people, too. People would see opportunities to get to know more folks, plus
just that we needed to do it as Evergreen faculty.
27

Stein: Would you ever have students in a program over to your house to have class?
Fox: We did it, not as much maybe as some used to do in the early years. Once we started having our
own family dynamics with the kids, it was not quite as easy. There are a lot of students that remember
coming over here.
Stein: One of the things that I wanted to mention is that I accepted a position as the Learning and
Teaching Commons Fellow. As part of that work, I’m going to be exploring historical teaching practices
at Evergreen. I had talked with them about possibly putting together a podcast series, and it’s also
something that I think the oral history project in the college might be interested in. I’ve talked with Sam
Schrager about it. I’m curious if that’s something that you would be interested in having some of this
interview be turned into a podcast that might be available.
Fox: Sure, I don’t have any concern about that.
Stein: That’s great, thank you. If I do that, I would share it with you before we post it on whatever Web
site.
Fox: Okay. Great. Is Evergreen sponsoring this?
Stein: It would be through Evergreen, either through the Learning and Teaching Commons or through
the oral history project, or possibly both. It’s something that I like to do and I do it with students. I do a
lot of oral history work with students. They conduct in-depth interviews and what they do at the end is
create short podcasts, sometimes five to 10 minutes long, and we all listen to them and comment on
them.
I think it would be great to get faculty now and students to be able to hear some of the
historical teaching at the college. That’s still really important and vibrant. Some of these stories are
great.
Fox: I can’t remember everything that was going on at that time, but that was one cohort. Even
students who maybe their major project was something else, if the Cooper Point group needed some
extra emergency help, they had a few more people to draw upon. Like “We need a few more articles
about this.”
Stein: Thank you very much for your time. If you feel like you would like more time, let me know. I’m
happy to come back.
Fox: I think it’s been pretty [thorough].
Stein: It may be that you’ll remember a couple of things. Let me know. I’m happy to come back.
28

Fox: No, I think we’ve covered a lot.
Stein: Okay, great.
End Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 8-27-19

29



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

FoxRuss_20170927_Transcript pt2.pdf

FoxRuss_20190827_Transcript pt1.pdf