W. Joye Hardiman Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

HardimanJoye

Title

W. Joye Hardiman Oral History Interview

Date

21 September 2016

Creator

W. Joye Hardiman

Contributor

Rebecca Chamberlain

extracted text

W. Joye Hardiman
INTERVIEW 1: Parts 1-3
Sept. 21, 2016
Joye’s background and work at Evergreen
Interviewed by Rebecca Chamberlain (RC) (with Mingxia Li)(ML)
The Evergreen State College Oral History Project
Rebecca Chamberlain (Started formatting. Dec. 2016.)
Final Editing and formattingW. Joye Hardiman (June 2023 )
Transcribed by Cleo Li-Schwartz
ML/RC: So, it’s September 1, 2016. Zhang Er and Rebecca Chamberlain are here interviewing
Joye Hardiman as part of the Evergreen Oral History Project. We’re going to set up a series of
interviews that summarize the continuity and background of your education, what brought you to
Evergreen and some of the challenges and opportunities of those early years. The first interview
that we’re going to do today will focus on some of those issues and what were the issues on the
main campus around equity, inclusivity, diversity in the early years and the conversation bout
learning communities . . . how to best serve our students, their success and moving out into the
community and some of the decisions around setting up the Tacoma campus. Zhang Er is going to
do some follow up interviews about those challenges and opportunities with the Tacoma campus.
We also know that these conversations overlap, so these two campuses and all of the work that
people are doing in and around the communities overlap. So, our conversations, we hope, overlap
as well and it might take two or three interviews to delve into and to really give justice to the kinds
of conversation and information and bear witness to this historic time and reflection on Evergreen.
So did you have any questions before we start? I’m gonna go ahead and put this on. . .
WJH: No, I’m gonna just go with what we’ve got and see where we go.
RC: Great. So, tell us about your background, early years, growing up and
what informed you?
WJH: I was born in Buffalo New York in 1944. I’m gonna kind of like . .
. because I kind of thought about some of these questions that you asked
here, so I’m just gonna use that as a framework. So I was born in Buffalo,
New York and my father was away at the war when I was born. My mom
was living in Buffalo with her mother and my uncle David. The family had
moved up from Memphis, Tennessee. First my uncle had moved up and then my grandmother
moved up; my mother moved up, my aunt moved up; so, they were part of that Great Migration
from the South to the Northeast, the Rustbelt and stuff like that.
My uncle had a job in the jukebox business, and he was in slot machines, so we always had a
jukebox of great music in our house. As a kid I could go and press music that I wanted to hear; that
was always kind of like magical. He had a big Cadillac and we all thought we were really quite
hotshots running around in my uncle’s Cadillac and the numbers. He ended up being a [expatriate]
because of the disillusionment with America and he moved to East Berlin, lived there and in fact
died in Germany. Hadn’t thought about him in a while.

So that’s how my family moved up there. As a child I spent a lot of time with my grandfather
because my mother was a Special Ed teacher and eventually became a Special Ed administrator.
She was so in love with my father that she wanted to work so that when he came home, she gave
him every single check that he had sent her during his time in the Army because she had saved
them all. She took him down to Kleinman’s Men’s Store, bought him a business suit, bought him
a tuxedo, bought him some leisure wear, bought him a car, and had enough for a house down
payment. Needless to say, my father loved her for his entire life; they were married 50 years. None
of his buddies’ wives had done that. She wanted to do that for him. That was kind of the
environment I was raised in.
They gave me an appreciation for complimentary dualities because she was into Chivas Regal,
escargot and going to the Buffalo Symphony; while he was into pork and beans and wieners, spam,
going to Little Harlem and hanging out in the pool hall. She was kind of from the aristocracy,
landed gentry and he had to hobo his way to college on a full scholarship because he came from
the other side of the tracks in East St. Louis. Having those two of them growing up and seeing the
both/and of their lives really was a foregrounding for one of the major things that I try to teach to
students and to people about not operating from dichotomies, that you can operate from
complimentary dualities; that you can operate from healthy male/female relations because I have
seen all that growing up
.
I was the only child so my parents poured a lot of energy into me and so I grew up in a very
culturally enriched environment. In fact, in the third grade the principal called my mother and said
you have her at the Albright Knox Art Gallery taking art lessons; you have her at the Museum of
Science taking zoology, astronomy and how to build a fire lessons; you have her at the tap dance
studio trying to learn tap. She said, “Give that child some room to breathe.”
My mother had me in everything. The principal said, “She comes in so tired.” My mother thought
I should have drama lessons, but I grew up in segregated times, so there was no place for a young
black girl to get drama lessons. She found some Polish immigrant who lived in Lackawanna
[suburb of Buffalo] where Bethlehem Steel is; you wear white clothes there and they come out all
gray. She found this little old Polish immigrant man there who taught me “Joan of Arc” and “All
the World is a Stage.” I would do oral recitations with him in his garage on those two themes. “All
the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.”
I had that kind of depth and breadth. I was the youngest kid in the history of The Museum of
Science who earned 90 credits or something because my mother had me in there every single
minute. I was also the only black one; in most of these things I was the only black kid. When they
did the integration thing in 1954, I was in elementary school, so we were very much impacted by
segregation.
Another cultural thing which they did for me which kind of fed into who I am now was travel. My
father was in reconnaissance at Tuskegee, so he was really into navigation and knowing where you
were, as a result he wanted me to travel. He was a civil servant. He worked for the Department of
Employment Security, but he would have two weeks off every Summer. The family would get in
the car every summer because my father wanted me to see all 48 states by the time I got to high
school, so I would know the capitals. I didn’t care. I was in the backseat with Little Lulu and other
comic books and with Cherry Ames, Student Nurse and the other one, girl detective [Nancy Drew].

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I was a ferocious reader. I would just sit in the back seat and read while we were going to all these
different places.
I remember when we were at Old Faithful when they were trying to drag me out of the car to see
the geyser and I was like, ‘No, no I’m on the last chapter; I gotta know what happens.’ That was
the kind of childhood I had, and it laid a lot of patterns for things that were interesting. My mother
was from the days when historical black colleges needed to raise money, they would have groups
of people who would travel doing poetry, oratory, or stuff like that. My mother was one of those,
so the very first book she gave me which I used to read as a kid was called The Negro Caravan,
which was like 1,000 pages, a big thick book. I really loved it because one book could do
everything. I tried to get a copy of it recently, but it was like $150; it’s like a classic. Anyway, there
would be the poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Brer Rabbit stories and things like and so she
would read to me out of that book as my fairy book. Eventually when I became a reader, I read out
of it myself.
So, they [my parents] were into my knowing things, going places and doing things. We didn’t go
down South because the one time we went down South I insisted on drinking from a white fountain,
and they said that I could get killed. We traveled to the South just through it, but we didn’t stay
there. You couldn’t stay in places, you had to carry Maxwell House coffee cans with you because
that’s where you peed in the car. Because if you went to some places, you never knew when you
were gonna meet the Klan or anybody else.
We went to all the National Parks because the National Parks were integrated. They were one of
the few places, cross country-wise where you could go and sleep at night and so I thank the
National Parks for that. I grew up with these parents who modeled complimentary duality,
either/or. I grew up with parents who were committed to social service and community. My parents
were very, very involved in the community. My mother was on all these different boards and my
father worked with all these athletes. They started things like the Buffalo Negro Scholarship Fund.
.
My father was meeting all these athletes who couldn’t go to college, so my mother, Dr. Blackman
and a bunch of people started scholarship funds initially to help these young athletes, but then to
open it up to larger community. I made a documentary about the community I grew up in called
“The Yard People” which talks about this community I grew up in that was committed to
intergenerational transfer of knowledge, so there were kids there all the time. When my daughter
turned 18, I asked her where she wanted to go, how she wanted to spend her birthday; she said she
wanted to go back to The Yard. She had spent her Summers in Buffalo; those were her aunts and
uncles. So, she had her birthday with 80- and 90-year-olds. Which I felt was okay, we did a good
job.
I’m spending a lot of time on this and trying to show the ties, how it’s connected. Growing up in
Buffalo was really nice because we had a Carnegie Library in Buffalo. It was in the days when you
could go in a library and touch the books; you didn’t have to ask a librarian something to go off
and get you a book from far away. You could actually walk up and down the aisles; you could let
your fingers do your walking. I’d just go to the literature section and let my fingers do the talking.
If a book came up, I would sit down and look it.
Since both my parents worked, my babysitter was the library for a significant part of time. When
I was a little kid the Jefferson Library was like home— because my mother knew everybody —

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my Aunt Frances was the first black head librarian. When I walked in —my parents knew they
wouldn’t let me do anything out of place — so they would just take me to the library and drop me
off. When I got to high school, and I wanted to spend free time I would go to the big library
(Grosvenor). My love of literature got started from my mom telling me stories, from my
grandfather who watched me telling me stories and kind of this love of reading. My mom, as part
of her cultural activities, got me involved in the Great Books Club when I was in high school; so
I did that. I spent time at Chautauqua, which is a kind of an arts institute outside of Buffalo; I
would go up there for concerts and summer camps, in between going to Campfire Camps, Girl
Scout camps and YWCA camps.
Everything was not rosy, however. You asked about flipsides. I was doing all these things and it
was really great. I was a cheerleader; I was salutatorian of my elementary school and then when I
got to high school, I decided I didn’t want to be too smart because if you were too smart guys
didn’t like you. I figured out what it took to get a 90 average and that’s what I got. If I got over 90,
I would get freaked out because I thought nobody would like me because I’m smart. Even though
I was voted the most popular girl in my senior class in high school, I did not value it because I
thought I was too tall, I was too dark (because colorism is a major thing in the black community)
I was too smart and because I didn’t date a lot. The real reason I didn’t get a lot of dates I found
out when I was 40 years old by talking to the neighbor across the street who was my date for the
Junior Prom, was that all the parties were at my house. Every Friday night during high school you
would come to the Hardiman house and party. They were integrated parties because it was a safe
zone.
My mother was hyper-protective and hyper-vigilant of everything [and] Anyone who came she
would call their parents and tell them that they were at the Hardiman house, particularly the girls.
She would say, ‘The party’s starting at this time; my deadline is at this time. If your daughter’s not
home by that time, it’s not on me.’ So, it was a big thing to come to my house. But the flipside of
that is — nobody would date me because if we went out and we had a fight then they couldn’t
come to the parties anymore. People had seen what happened if my mother who was overprotective
thought anybody would hurt me, she would go after them like really crazy. She did some things to
a couple of boyfriends that got all over; so all the other boys said, ‘Oh no, I’m not going through
that.’ I thought nobody wanted to take me out and then Zellie told me that everybody was afraid
to take me out because nobody wanted to miss the parties. I said you could have just told me that
when I was in high school; my trajectory might have been a little bit different.
ML: Thank goodness.
WJH: My patents were kind of my early foundation laying for my commitment to community
which we’ll come back to, but I want to mention it now in case I don’t. One of the biggest tensions
for me at Evergreen throughout my career was the tension between commitment to community
and compliancy. The college that had started out in my idea as being committed to community and
in my perception right now about twenty years it has changed from commitment to compliancy.
And I am not compliant because I have this commitment to community. A lot of the things that
happened to me career-wise at a later point because of it. There was an incident when I had a
carwash for the kids from the Hilltop so that they could go to Disneyland, and somebody put in
whistleblower complaint against me. I had to pay back the amount of water that we used to wash
the cars to the state because I was using state property for private gain. There are other incidents.
The last incident was over at the computer club house after which I just said, ‘Hey, my rhythm,

4

my goals, are not the same as the college and I need to go back to faculty. I just wanted to mention
where all that came from at the beginning.
My commitment to community came from my upbringing; my commitment to diversity and
appreciative inquiry came from my growing up, particularly from my father. He could take
somebody that was a pool shark, work with them and help them change their resume into having
the perquisite skills for engineering because they understood aiming, alignment, et cetera. When
he was in Little Harlem, he would find women who were call girls, prostitutes, and stuff like that.
When he would introduce them to me, they would always let me know that he was never a client.
They would always say he’s a good man and that he would take them and shift their resumes, based
on what they were doing, into public relationists.
The whole notion of being able to see the potential in somebody is something I have witnessed
since I was a child. Community service and appreciative inquiry are the two things that come up
right now. Oh, and a love of cities. Besides being blessed by the people I was with and the parents
I had; I was blessed by the place I was in. Hamlin Park was part of a [Frederick Law] Olmsted
urban design that had occurred around the World’s Fair [1901]. I grew up on this beautiful street
that had purposely been designed to be a middle-class neighborhood first established for the
Germans, then the Jews and African Americans came into this beautiful little area. It was
designated as middle class. If you were middle class, this is kind of where you got to be. So, on
Hamlin Road and Humboldt Park there were doctors; there were civil servants, beauticians, and
number runners. We had everybody who could afford these houses, but they were all together; so,
growing up, you saw the possibilities.
My first act of civil protest actually . . . what’s his name I just hate him so much? He was New
York State transportation commissioner. . . Robert Moses. Robert Moses decided that white people
needed to get from downtown to the suburbs without any kind in hindrance. Olmsted had built
these incredible boulevards in Buffalo as part of the World’s Fair. It started at the Historical
Museum in Delaware Park and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and extended 10 miles to the
Museum of Science at the other end. You could just walk the promenade; you could go out and
play football. Families had picnics around it; it was a just a very vibrant community. Robert Moses
decided to put an expressway down the middle of it and totally destroyed the community. It
destroyed relationships because my boyfriend was on the other side of the expressway, and we
used to walk across the parkway. Robert Moses took neighborhood relationships and turned them
into long distances relations. I had a large cut on my leg; the scar is gone now where when they
were cutting down the trees I went and chained myself to a tree — because I had seen somebody
do it — for about an hour. It was getting really dark and that I was gonna get in trouble, so I had
to unchain myself from the tree. But when I turned around, I ran into a pipe that was on the ground
from the construction, so I gashed my knee and I had to go to the hospital.
In my head of fantasies, I said that I had given sacrifice for the tree; I had bled for these trees. It
just frustrated me and so I got into urban studies, what happens, how communities can be destroyed
and misnamed. I think I have always tried to save communities. I think the Hilltop became an
extension of Hamlin Road, to try to help preserve the multiple stories. When Robert Moses did
what he did, he didn’t just do it to black people; he did it to working class people. The Italians and
Polish people had a beautiful parkway all along the Niagara River, from Buffalo to Niagara Falls;
they were the ones who worked in the plants. When they would come home from the plants, they
could come out and have picnics around the Niagara River and he turned that into an express way.

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Domestic violence, divorce, abuse just doubled because the people had no outlet. All those things
kind of shaped and laid foundations for my actions and stuff. That’s background; that gets me out
of 8th grade, high school or something.
I went to University of Iowa for undergraduate school, and I learned every lesson about what
college should not be like and I think that influenced me as well. I never had an advisor in four
years; that wasn’t something that they really pushed. I had four majors and ended up in four years
with about a 1.8 GPA. I promised my parents I would give them some sort of degree or initials and
I hadn’t earned a B.A. so I got married and gave them an MRS. I got some initials; they’re not the
right ones, but that gave me a kind of umbrella to come back home to Buffalo where I went to the
University of Buffalo for two more years and pulled a 4.0 so I could go to graduate school.
I finally decided I wanted to be a college teacher, but it took me four years of jumping around in
Iowa which again was very interesting. Again, it was a very interesting place because I was one of
the few Blacks again. My parents said I should be a public relations person because I was good at
that, so I went to Iowa because that was furthest away from home of any Big Ten. Somehow in my
mind that’s what I was supposed to do, go to a Big Ten and Iowa was furthest away.
I was going to be a public relations person, but you had to be a journalism major, and you had to
take the typing test. I hadn’t taken typing in high school because I didn’t want to be labelled as
being as clerical. I didn’t want to be really smart, but I certainly didn’t want to be a secretary. I sat
down at the typewriter; I typed minus eight words a minute and they told me I shouldn’t even sit
down; so I changed my major to sociology. Then my friend — the only other minority in class, she
was Jewish — and I took a class in Race and Ethnic Relations and we both flunked it. This is Iowa.
She’s a Sephardic Jew and she had a gorgeous olive complexion. I don’t know what he thought
she was, but we both flunked. Then I became a drama major, and I became really sick of being
cast as maids. I wanted the lead in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” I thought I could play
Virginia very well; They wouldn’t let me, and I was crushed. I saw this woman walking across
campus and . . . I’m telling you guys too much.
ML This is good though.
WJH: I’m walking across campus, and I saw this woman with black hair flowing in the air. She
had a taffeta dress with polka dots. Who is she? I’m interested in that. Whoever she is I want to be
her. It turned out her name was Cassandra Kaufman, from Chicago and she was an artist. I decided
I want to be an artist. Just for history there are only three times that’s occurred. The other time
that’s occurred in my life is when I met Maxine.
When I came to Evergreen for a job, and I was trying to figure out whether I should get or not. I
was having dinner at the Governor Hotel in Olympia with Lynn DeDannan, and she said, ‘You
have to meet Maxine. Before you decide whether you will come here or not you have to meet
Maxine.’ Maxine came in the door, and she was wearing a red jumpsuit with a black boa and these
cowboy boots. They were like of Spanish leather and so gorgeous and she was like a size 12 at the
time, so she was petite. I looked at her and said, “Who is that? I want to be her.” Particularly after
she told the people she had just come from [Governor] Dan Evans and why wasn’t there
champagne on the table. They said what are you talking about? She said, “Dan Evans asked you
to give three bottles of champagne.” They said no that didn’t happen. Well, we ended up with four
bottles of champagne. That’s when I decided I wanted to be like her.

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I met Cassandra Kaufman; she was a writer and artist and she had been to New York. I wanted to
go to New York because I figured I wanted to be an artist and go to New York. My parents wouldn’t
let me drop out of school; it was totally verboten within our family structure. I figured out what I
needed to do to get kicked out of school, a violation of something or other, so I committed some
minor infraction, but they wouldn’t kick me out because I was the president of my dorm and it
would look like it was a racist thing if they kicked me out. Besides, I had to be an example for my
race and so they wouldn’t kick me out. I said let me do something bigger.
I broke into the snack bar in my dorm, and I made ice cream sundaes for everybody on the floor
and gave everybody full cartons of cigarettes. Then they had to suspend me. They suspended me
for a quarter; I went to New York. I saw Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” with Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee
and Maya Angelou when they were just starting. They were part of the Negro Ensemble Company
around 1964/65. That was another one of those aha/eureka moments. It was like art is perfection.
It also introduced me to the notion of mime, which comes back later in the story because as one of
my artistic disciplines I became a mime.
I did New York and I decided it was great being an artist, but artists didn’t make any money; I was
eating cat food with catsup on it and that wasn’t much fun, so I decided to go back to school. My
apartment situation was really crazy. I moved out of my apartment because I was the only one
paying rent and there were eight people in it. I lived in the Port Authority for a week and a half.
My job . . . I was still trying to get money to leave. I lived in Port Authority, and I worked on Wall
Street. I had one of these horrible jobs where you had one of these huge maps of New York and
you had to make little codes of them, like really low brain kind of stuff.
I had been a caretaker for a woman in the Bronx who threw things at me, so anything was better
than that. But I was still working, and I had no place to live. The people in the Port Authority
adopted me and there were a lot of rituals that you learn how to use — which benches you could
sleep on — and I had all my stuff and suitcases in lockers, and I would wash up there. I did that
for a week; then went back to Iowa and joined the Writers Workshop. I did that and then four years
ended, I didn’t have a major, didn’t have a grade point. So, I married Thomas Frederick and did
two more years focused on getting my grade point up studying western literature at the University
of Buffalo. There were some really great people and at that point — I think it had to do with “The
Blacks” got involved in studying Commedia dell’arte which is studying the 16th century Italian
comedy. I started studying that because “The Blacks” had the masks and stuff and I was interested
in mask theater so that’s why started studying Commedia dell’arte.
A pivotal point came in my academic focus when I was supposed to take a French test and I hadn’t
prepared so I was trying to find a viable excuse. I saw that they were doing some auditioning for
The New York City Theater Children’s Improvisational Workshop for staff work. I decided that
would be a good excuse not to take the French test; I could explain to my teacher I was taking a
job interview. I auditioned for an improvisational teacher because they said if you don’t have the
skills, we’ll teach you. I ended up being appointed the artistic director of it.
l was the artistic director over equity actors and dancers and then there was me a undergraduate
student from the University of Buffalo. It turned out to be quite amazing and quite careerlaunching. As I moved from undergraduate to graduate student to a graduate student teaching at
Erie County Community College, to lecturer teaching at a pre-college program for the University

7

of Buffalo called “The Co-op College,” a kind of pre-college program, I was doing theater equally
hard.
After summer training with the New York City Theater Workshop, we started the Buffalo Theater
Workshop, a Children’s Theater Company that did improvisational theater. I did that for about two
or three years then ended up creating a children’s Commedia dell’arte company that was in
residency at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; I got them to sponsor that. I’m still doing work in the
college, but I would use my summers and holidays to do theater. During that time, I was also a
mime at Woodstock for a Summer and lived in a tent along the Appalachian Trail.
We were like one of those companies who lives in tents in the woods, comes into town, does shows,
asks for money, and then goes back and lives in the tent. I did that for a Summer. I worked at La
Mama, Experimental Theater company, which was incredible and did work at that time with the
Open Theater with Joseph Chaikin who based his work on Viola Spolin, the mother of
improvisation theater, the woman who launched Second City and “Saturday Night Live” and all
those people out of that. Then I worked with this man named Jerzy Grotowski out of Poland and
they did physical theater where you turned yourselves in chairs and your body was your prop.
ML: What years were you at La Mama.
WJH: I was at La Mama when I was teaching at Co-Op College. I was teaching at the Co-Op
college from…let me do the years the ’62 to ’66 I went to Iowa; ’66-’68 I came back to UB and
was married to Thomas Frederick Peskin and worked to pull my grade point up; I did it. Then from
’68 to’70 I was in the graduate school at the University of Buffalo; so this would be in ’72. In 1970
I stopped going to graduate school because we had had the urban riots and everything and then the
student revolts which I was very, very active in. And as a result, the University of Buffalo answered
one of our demands which was to diversify the campus. To do that they wanted to have an urban
outreach center where people from the community could come and get the prerequisite skills that
they needed to go to UB.
ML: This is great. Should we just take a quick pause here? Now we’re back.
WJH: We’re back on these double careers between working . . .
ML Yes, yes. Since we’re pausing now, I think I’m just gonna play back and start another cycle,
another file.
WJH: And I’ll try to . . . and thank you about that.
Interveiw1_Part 2 W. Joye HardimanVOC_160921-1079.wav
RC: So, we’re underway on our second file here, September 21, 2016. So, you were just telling us
about your background at the University of Iowa and then moving on into graduate school at the
University of Buffalo and also your background in theater, performance and working with the
improv workshop, Commedia dell’arte, working as a mime, working in La Mama, Open Theater,
Second City, the origins of that work.
We just went through 1962 into 1970 and we’re starting with types of activism that were happening
on your campus and in your community about reaching out in the urban community centers

8

through art, through language, through your own journey as a scholar. It was interesting to hear
how your explorations at the University of Iowa really built the foundation to help you think about
how students push up against institutional structure in order to find what’s meaningful to them.
You were able to find your way through that in a circuitous way till you found what motivated you
and when you did that you went on to the University of Buffalo to find the independent structure
and support that you needed to deepen what was interesting to you. That was language, literature,
oral performance, and all of the work with language arts. That led into community work, activism,
managing theater groups, troupes, performances and really moving out into the community. Those
are foundational pieces for how education could, should happen and how it can happen despite
difficult circumstances. So that’s a good foundation
.
WJH: Exactly. I think it’s a good foundation. When I started working at the Co-op College it also
laid my foundation for interdisciplinary team teaching because we were organizing into teams.
I’ve always taught, except for the one year I taught at a community college by myself and that’s
one of my most embarrassing and shameful experiences. I was a Medievalist and they asked me
to teach a course in African history, so I made it up; I didn’t know. I just kind of made-up things. I
said oh no; this isn’t good, and I need to stop that. So, I went back to teaching what I really knew,
which was English, at the Co-Op College and at the college we were organized into
interdisciplinary teams with a scientist, a math person . . . I was the English person at the Co-Op
College. At the Co-Op College we were organized into interdisciplinary teams. I worked with a
scientist, a math person, I was the English person and Mrs. Asbury was the sociologist.
We didn’t do things like theme-based teaching, but we worked as a group and students moved
through us as a cohort. That was my grounding, so, when I teach alone, I feel very, very isolated,
and I try to collaborate with anybody I can. So even though I’m doing the Gateway’s program
alone, I created a peer mentorship, my own peer mentorship program and I have had that program
for the last five years. I’ve had a student (a recent graduate or a senior) work with me, lead the
seminars and be the student advocate because the older I get, the further I get from the students. I
need to know their language; I need to know how they walk, how they talk; so, by having peer
mentors I can do that. Having students work with me was introduced to me by the Co-Op College
as well as team teaching. I worked there for four years until they retrenched the department we
were working with; the reason why they did it was because of my activism. They had no daycare,
no health benefits, at all for these students. Some of the were working part-time jobs so they could
go to college; a lot of them were women with children. I didn’t see why the other units of the
college had childcare and health benefits for their students; so I organized a bunch of students. We
pushed it and they really did it
A couple of months later, they retrenched my position and that was okay because the students had
insurance. I decided I would do theatre fulltime; I made a commitment to myself that I wanted to
see one more time if I could make a full-time job doing theater. At the same time things were really,
really gray and I felt like I was repeating myself. I felt like I had accomplished my goals and I
didn’t have any new ones; so, I threw the I Ching and the I Ching said it behooves one to cross the
great mountains. Simultaneous to that we had a great snowstorm; it was really horrible, and I swore
I ‘d never spend another winter in the snow again and I started sending out resumes to everyplace.
I had a friend, and her name was Ida Daum in the Anthropology Department at the University of
Washington. She had been my best friend from high school. When I got married my husband was
her husband’s best friend and I had this whole fantasy that I would come back to Buffalo; we

9

would get apartments next to each other; we’d still be best friends; husbands would be best
friends and we’d all be best friends together. Shortly after we got married, Thomas and Michael
had a fight; so, they were no longer best friends. Ida and Michael moved to Toronto and then
they moved to Seattle. She called me up and she got a job at Evergreen; she was hired as a
faculty member of Evergreen in its second or third year. Her name was Ida Daum in
anthropology. She called me up and said, ‘There’s this weird college that I’ve just gotten a job at
and you’re weird, so why don’t you apply? We could hang out and be best friends again.’ I said
“Okay”, so I applied to Evergreen.
The only thing I knew about Washington was that it was west of the Mississippi. As an east coast
kid, I had no concept of Washington, I knew California was for surfers. But Washington and
Oregon they were just blurs. I drove across country with a guy I was going out with. We came to
Olympia, and I had an interview with Oscar Soule. That was in the beginning when there were
no hiring committees; you just met faculty wherever they were and you kind of talked to them; I
guess they either hired you or not. He was a dean. That was when I met Maxine.
This goes into that question about how, when, and why I came here. Lynn DeDannan had taken
me to dinner — as I mentioned before, she wanted me to meet Maxine — Maxine came in and
she was being very flamboyant, very authoritative; she was having people bow to her commands,
‘Give us champagne.’ She told me she had just come out of the Nixon Administration and all
these kinds of things. I said, ‘Whatever you know I want to know.’ I had never had a black
teacher before; and I had never had a black mentor.
It was very, very important to me to make the connection, but it wasn’t important enough for me
to take the job right away. I turned down the job because I had made this personal commitment to
myself about trying to see . . . I wanted to prove to myself that I could make a viable living off of
theater. That’s when we embedded the Commedia dell’arte Company at the Albright-Knox Art
Museum, at Chautauqua and at Art Park. I had set up several outside residencies and then we had
our base. We did it for a year and it was successful; I did make some money and I proved my point.
Maybe I needed a bigger dream, but that was my dream, and I did it.
During that time Willie Parsons, who had become the hiring dean, was in Niagara Falls at a
biological conference in the middle of the snowstorm. He drove, in the middle of the snowstorm,
from Niagara Falls to my mother’s house to tell my mother that she should get me to reconsider
Evergreen. At that point I said, yeah; I had done what I wanted to do. I said I’m getting a second
chance at this new experience; I don’t know if that’s going to come again. Yeah, I’ll take the job
at Evergreen. I was hired to teach Improvisational Theater at Evergreen because of my theater
background as opposed to my academic background. That played out in some very interesting
ways in terms of theater.
At the time there was a real push for musical theater at Evergreen and so things that were outside
the box were not supported by the existing faculty and the theater department. I ultimately
understood that it wasn’t personal because the same thing happened when we hired Pam Schick,
an experimental dance person, who in fact founded the Broadway Performance Theater in Seattle
after her contract at Evergreen was not renewed. She was doing experimental dance and she was
doing dance where you move your body, do contact improv and that kind of stuff. That was not
considered legitimate, just like improvisation was not considered legitimate. There was a lot of
kind of backbiting and nastiness. It was unexpected by me when I got there.

10

An interesting kind of thing when I was at Evergreen my first year in theater. I think my first four
years at Evergreen (because it’s always about tension) was going back and forth from tension to
exuberance . . . one of the reasons why I chose Evergreen was because it was a school I would
have wanted to graduate from. I said this is a school I would have wanted to go to. So, for the first
four years I was really a student at Evergreen. What was nice was that I got invited to be the class
speaker in my fourth year. I said, ‘Thank you very much for allowing me to give my graduation
speech; I’ve gone here for four years, and I learned a lot.’
That exuberance about new learning, experiences, and stuff like that was balanced by the tension
of some of the professional, racial and gender microaggressions that were pretty consistent. Things
from going in the library, which was a refuge for myself in my life, and having Gordon Beck who’s
an art historian, look at me and say, ‘Oh, you can read?’ to conversations with people who were
saying, ‘We don’t like this, and we don’t like that; we’re the intellectual elite and at lease we’re
not cheerleaders.’ Then I would say I was a cheerleader for three years; it was like where do I find
my legitimacy in my art and in my intellect.
My first year, I closed the school down; that’s really interesting because it’s not in the school’s
history. I think that’s very interesting because when I came — this is something I think is a little
criminal — they put me in a program that I didn’t know anything about with a parapsychologist
and a deviant sociologist (I mean that was her discipline deviant sociology. She also had a bit of
deviancy herself). I had a parapsychologist who was into out of body experiences and a deviant
psychologist who was into Sasquatch and then there was me. The program was called “The Shape
of Things to Come” based on Thomas Kuhn’s book about the future. The only thing I knew how
to do was teach improvisation One of the things that was happening at that time was the founding
fathers.
ML: Which year was that?
WJH: I came in ’74/’75 it was bicentennial, and I went to Eugene, Oregon for July 4th because I
wanted to do Americana in terms of the bicentennial. I had prepared for Evergreen by reading and
I did some interesting research. What prepared me to go to Evergreen was watching” Seven Brides
for Seven Brothers;” that was the whole Mercer Brothers thing, which was helpful to me to
understand the founding faculty. For me the founding faculty were eighteen men in search of
eighteen brides and I can tell that story in a second. But I have to remember that this is my history
of Evergreen’s founding (my version of it).
RC: This is right, that’s why we’re here.
WJH: My version of the founding and then the preparation to go there and then my treachery,
perceived treachery. So, let me try to tell it in sequence. When I was going to come to Evergreen,
because my father was in reconnaissance, he always said check out any place before you go. I’m
a reader and I like movies; so, I saw “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” which is all about how the
Mercer brothers founded Seattle and how they came as seven men, and they shipped off to the east
coast for seven women to build the Northwest. I read Ecotopia to prepare me for the world of
Birkenstocks, Priuses, and stuff like that. I read Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey, talking
about crazy people and insane asylums in the Northwest. I saw a movie called “Billy Jack” which
was about this woman who founded an experimental school in the Southwest with these kids and

11

the landowners are trying to take it over. Tom McLaughlin, I think it was, played a Native
American veteran named Billy Jack who came up on a horse and beat everybody up.
I had Billy Jack and all those things on my mind to understand where Evergreen was. So, when I
got here, I found out that all of them were true. My history of Evergreen as I saw it in my research
was 18 men decided that they were going to come to found the campus. These 18 men came but
they were lonely; some of them were married but many of them were still lonely in their marriage
or whatever, going through life changes. The commonality among many of the men is that they
came from fathers or families who were missionaries or in ministry. These men and said, ‘Oh, we
need some women.’ They brought 18 women and what’s interesting about the women, in my
perception, who came in the first year is that they’re all the same. Carolyn Dobbs, Nancy Taylor,
Lynn . . . they were all between 5’4” and 5’6.” They couldn’t be too big because the men weren’t
that big.
They were from the Midwest; they were homespun. They were from the University of Ohio,
Midwest places. These 18 women didn’t respond to the 18 men, so the next year they brought in
the mothers. They brought in Maxine; they brought in Mary Hillaire; they brought in Sandra
Simon. These were the big women; they were supposed to come and teach the young women how
to be better, more political, and more compliant. Half the young women decided to be lesbians
rather than be with the initial faculty. They said, ‘We’d rather be with another woman than to be
with you.’ That really made the guys unhappy because when they got divorces many of them ended
up marrying their students. You had this whole kind of interesting dynamic in the middle. There
was also this illusion of elitism, even though when I looked and found out that only Rob Knapp
was from Oxford, but many of the incoming faculty were from land grant colleges, but people
were acting as though they were from elitist colleges and that they had propriety from Meiklejohn.
There was another wave of people (the people who ended up being my friends). Evergreen at its
very beginning was very, very risky, so they said we wanted to hire people not only for degrees
but for life experience. They hired my friend Jim Martinez was a convicted felon; he taught in a
program with Hap Fromm “Lawmakers, Lawbreakers.” Pat was a lawyer and Jim was a felon. He
wasn’t a very good felon because he was a burglar and he had narcolepsy. He would break into
people’s houses and fall asleep and then he would get caught. He was like a gentle giant and the
students loved him. If you were a student that had any kind of imperfection — if you were big, or
people told you that you were ugly, or your hair was — Jim would take you and just spend hours
with you in the office.
They hired people like Cruz Esquivel. I had such a crush on Cruz. Cruz, Native American and
Mexican from the Colville Reservation, had been a Jesuit priest and ran into Ken Kesey. Kesey
had given him acid [LSD] and then his whole life changed, and he decided not to be a priest
anymore, but to deal with plants and go back, work with Indians, do sweat lodges and heal people
by using traditional ways of healing; he used to ride his horse to campus. It was like Billy Jack.
Oh, he was gorgeous.
Another Native American was Don Jordan, a poet; he came from Humboldt State. He also had a
place near campus with horses and stuff. I would go ride horses with him my first year. Then there
was Dumi who brought marimba playing to the Pacific Northwest. He was a master musician from
Zimbabwe, but he was also a polygamist.

12

RC: He went from Evergreen up to the University of Washington ethnomusicology
WJH: Yeah, when he got fired from Evergreen he went up to Seattle and spread it all over. Every
band that you see Dumi taught. Eventually he went back to Zimbabwe and became Minister of
Education there. But when he was at Evergreen, he was my friend. He was my friend and got fired.
It was ugly. It was ugly. That’s when I kind of lost respect for a lot of people at Evergreen. He was
a polygamist; he wasn’t smart, or he didn’t know where he was. He had multiple women living
with him, some from the town and a couple of them were older students. And what happened is
somebody complained, and they basically had a hearing in which they were asking the girls about
the size of his penis; whether he played the drums to hypnotize them; therefore, breaking their will
which is why they would be in such a malignant situation. They could have just said polygamy
doesn’t work, go away, but they didn’t need to go into the details. That was in my first year, so I
didn’t like that very much.
All my other friends got fired. I had another friend, Carrie Cable, who got fired because of class.
Carrie taught Japanese studies. She had very, very rich parents in Lakewood and was very, very
classy; she didn’t fit either. After a while I stopped making friends because I thought I had a curse
or something because every time I made a friend they got fired and that was really sad for me. At
the same time, I got this jubilance going on because I’m at Evergreen and I’m doing my thing.
In the Spring of ‘74/’75 Merv (Cadwallader) and the boys started talking privately about changing
the college. They were going to suggest that coordinated studies and interdisciplinary studies be
housed in an honors house kind of deal and everybody else would be taking traditional courses.
They were plotting that privately and I got to hear some of that because by that time Maxine
decided that I was going to be her heir apparent. And she would drag me around to different
meetings, so I was at this private meeting with her and the boys. I thought the secret plotting was
wrong, and I thought that we had been talking about transparency and this wasn’t transparency. I
said I thought the whole campus should talk about it; it wasn’t just me. It was myself and at that
time I was living with Susie Strasser. Susie was teaching with Stephanie Coontz. Susie wanted to
make her mark. The two of us decided we should stop the campus and have teach-in.
I organized my students to facilitate the teach-in and make sure that everybody’s voice was
included and there was no harm done. My students basically did a crash course in Robert’s Rules
of Order and agreed to be the student facilitators. Sharon Buchholzer from “Shape of Things to
Come,” facilitated it. I had the students placed around the library lobby so if it looked like
somebody was raising their hand or somebody wasn’t being heard that could do traffic control and
make sure that everybody got a chance to be heard.
Just like the guy’s [Colin Kaepernick] bending on his knee got taken as anti-military or antiveteran, my class and my intentions kind of got shifted around because Susie’s students [went and
ripped up the Curriculum Planning wall]. We had a marvelous thing at Evergreen; I wish we could
have it back, which was like a curriculum design wild card. There was a wall where students could
comment on the curriculum and students could propose things; it was like a dialogue between the
students and stuff like that. Well, her students tore it off the wall and somehow, we got blamed for
it. We were the active ones out there trying to make peace. I still feel good about it because it was
a three-day teach-in in which students were very active members and speaking to their own destiny
and speaking to the history of the college. The end result is we still have coordinated studies and
interdisciplinary studies around everywhere. However, when I go to the archives to look for the

13

teach-in, I don’t see any kind of mention of it. For me it was a victory for Evergreen, but after that
Merv and the guys stopped speaking to me.
RC: Did it feel hostile?
WJH: It felt hurtful. I felt misunderstood. It felt unfair, like the notion that they wouldn’t assume
Susie did it, and that they said I did. I felt unwanted. I think the physical effect was that I started
drinking heavily. Ultimately, I had to leave Olympia, when, after four years I realized that the way
I was dealing with the stress was by drinking. One day when I was teaching in the rotunda —that’s
where I always taught — it was a round space, it felt warm and inviting. Every time I taught on
the campus I always asked for the rotunda, it was around 11:00 am, when I looked in my purse
and realized that I had bottle of Dickel which is Kentucky whiskey in it. It was a new bottle when
I had bought it the prior evening; when I looked in my purse it was 3/4 gone. It was 11:00 in the
morning and I had drunk it. It was at that point I said I got to stop; whatever I’m doing it isn’t
working. At that point I asked Maxine if I could come and teach in Tacoma, it was too lonely.
which is why I became so student-centered socially
At the time, out of all of the faculty, administrators and senior administrators that were African
American, only one of them has a black wife, which was Willie and Sylvia. That’s why Willie had
to leave; he was ostracized. He and Sylvia did not get invited to the parties. He made one mistake
on a budget, $12, 000 or $1,200, something really small. They used that to say he wasn’t really
equipped, and he had come from a southern school and wasn’t qualified because he had made this
tiny mistake. It was so miniscule in the budget scheme.
RC: What was his last name?
WJH: Parsons, Dr. Willie Parsons. He was married to Sylvia, and he was the dean that found me
and brought me back. Everybody else was married to white women, so socially there was no
validation for me on the campus. In terms of the Olympia campus the colleagues that didn’t get
fired, I didn’t feel embraced by; I felt very embraced by the ones who were fired. I didn’t have
colleague validation as an African American woman and as a junior faculty and I didn’t have social
validation because all the guys who I would have gone out with were all going out with white
women. That was a tension, but what it did do was make my programs were amazing.
We had so much fun because my students were my life. In those days you were 24/7 with your
students; that was the cultural norm. Everybody did field trips and we were always going out in
the woods with our students and having them at the house. I used to have cocktail parties for my
students because if they were going to be in the theater, I said that they needed to know how to
socialize, how to mix and mingle — at that time we weren’t so strong about liquor — how to hold
their liquor and how to represent when you were in public.
RC: This is reminding me of your mother holding those Friday night gatherings in your home and
your father making sure that you knew where you were at and you could navigate people safely
here and there. So, you’re out in the woods having parties in your home.
WJH: Exactly, exactly. Just continuing that tradition. After “The Shape of Things to Come” Tom
Foote and I taught a Chautauqua program in which we took 60 students all around western
Washington playing the banjo, eating fire, singing, doing theater, doing such and such; This for me

14

was a way of promoting Evergreen because at that time people were saying bad things about us. I
thought if they could see the students; it would change their minds. It gave the students great
experience in terms of management, performance, community relations and so forth. I did that
program with Tom and then Tom and I has a parting of ways, so we had a divorce. The program
split in two; he took the musicians, and I took the theater people. Tom Foote was actually one of
the faculty who was very kind to me. There were some other faculty who were very kind to me.
The Knapp’s, Rob and Helena said, ‘Please come over to dinner. We want to make you feel
welcomed. Tom and I had some different pedagogical values; I don’t remember what. Anyway,
we split up.
After that I did a pure version of Commedia dell’arte Company program. We had costumes and
we dressed in satins that when we did the cocktails parties. We would go through the campus in
slow motion. It was just fun. Then we went up to Seattle and we performed at the Ethnic Cultural
Center at the University of Washington a play we wrote called “The Clown’s Play.” After that I
think in order just to be sane, I did a Season in Seattle. I got all the kids internships at ACT,
Seattle Rep, and Empty Space Theater and at Langston Hughes. They would work in the theater
companies and have seminars about their experiences, following that I moved to Tacoma.
ML Which year was that?
WJH: I started teaching on the Tacoma campus in 1980. It wasn’t at the Tacoma campus; at that
time, I started teaching at the Colored Women’s Club. I had been teaching before at the Olympia
campus and running down to Tacoma to help in some way; I rode along with Maxine as she worked
on her Ph. D. The Tacoma campus was her Ph. D. She didn’t have a degree when she came. I was
here in ’75; maybe 1978 or’79 is when she got the call from the community — I have to check my
dates — I was still at Evergreen when she got the call from the community to start teaching people
in Tacoma. I was with when she did her interviews.
She taught people for a year in Tacoma and then she started working on her Ph.D, interviewing
those people that she had taught to see what a curriculum would look like. I went on all of her
interviews with her, and I went on a couple of her [graduate]seminars because I was also interested
in the program. I also spent time driving with her, Betsy, and Mary Hillaire as Maxine helped Mary
set up the Native American program. We spent time going up to the Lummi Reservation and
having Mary be able to move into a position of authority, first within her own tribe because she
was not land-raised so they didn’t know her. When she went back to the Lummi she had to reenter, be humble, and be named and then she could have the legitimacy to speak about having the
program and having people at the Longhouse.
I officially, in terms of faculty assignment, got assigned to Tacoma in 1980; that was the year that
my daughter was born. Once I realized that I didn’t have the tools to become indigestible in a
primarily white institution I had to go and get them. I basically went through a period of
deprogramming and reprogramming by Maxine. The result was a documentary that was produced
on Channel 9 called “A Soul Comes Home.” The poster which is out in my hallway says, “This is
the story of Joye Hardiman, a 36-year-old black woman, who achieved success in the white world,
but felt her soul was dying.” It talked about my decision to commit to working in an urban
community with African American adults which was spurred on by the microaggressions and the
consistent fight for legitimacy that I felt when I was dealing with things that had to do with campus.
In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, avatars come. I had taken my Commedia kids down to

15

a juvenile facility which closed recently. I had taken them down there, doing some performances
for the youth. A white guard came up to me and said, ‘You’re really good; you’re an excellent
teacher. These kids are very disciplined and very skilled.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I put a lot of time and
energy into them.’ He looked at me and said, ‘If people like you put some energy into kids like
these — pointing to the kids — maybe half of them wouldn’t be here.’
And that was like, wow, OK. I’m spending all my time with kids from Malibu at Evergreen because
my kids in Chautauqua were rich. When graduation came their daddies would drive up with
Jaguars and things like that; suddenly, they’d cut their hair and go back to wherever they were
going, to the golf club. I had to think, he’s right — I’m putting energy into places . . . these kids
are going to make it anyway — but I’m not putting any energy into places where the kids are not
making it. Incidents like that and my own survival said that I needed to shift places. I still believed
in Evergreen, still believed in students, but I needed to be in an environment that was more
embracing, more affirmative where I didn’t have to fight so hard so that I could do good work and
not be always having to do reconstructive surgery.
I realized physically I had to do some cleansing. One of my students had a tepee and he said, “I’ll
give you my tepee for the summer if you can find a place to put it.” After living in a tent at
Woodstock, living in a tepee felt like I was in the rich suburbs. Maxine let me put the tepee up on
her land out in Kimilche; it was safer. I had lived in her house when I first got to Evergreen, but
when things started closing in, I ended up knocking out a support wall because I said there needed
to be more space. I think it was a matter of my own space. It turned out to improve her property
immensely, but it was not the nicest thing to do . . . to walk into somebody’s house and knock out
somebody’s wall. Marilyn Fresca helped me knock down the wall. Then we realized the ceiling
was about to collapse. We had to call Phil Harding; he came up and we got railroad ties and put
them up in Maxine’s house before she came in to find that she now had four rooms instead of five.
I moved the tepee to Maxine’s place. Marilyn again came to the rescue. She built a platform so the
bed wouldn’t be on the ground; we put a Persian rug in. I had a little red table that had a typewriter,
like a writer’s fantasy. I just needed to cleanse, drink a lot of water, do herbs, get the toxicity —
the alcohol and stuff — out of my system. It sounds rougher than it was. My tepee was probably
across the street and Maxine’s house was where my house is. I’d get up in the morning and build
my little fire that I learned from going to museum camp. Put my little coffee pot on, have my little
coffee, sit out with my typewriter, look at the water, write, think, and meditate. I’d turn around the
tepee and walk maybe 500 yards and there would be Maxine’s house; I’d go in and take a bath.
Then I’d go back to my tepee and pretend I was roughing it. I did that for a while, during this
deprogramming, I worked to figure out the ten-year period when I was white. I had to figure out
what was the cognitive dissonance? What were the external experiences? [what was the impact of]
always being told, if you want to be smart you have to be next to white people. If you want power,
you have to be next to white people. Therefore, you try to be like a white person, but you can’t
because you’re black.
I had to go through all of that and I had to relearn my blackness. I started reading only black books,
watching only black movies, and eating black foods so that I could immerse myself in myself to
know myself. That went on for about a year and a half and then shortly after that I had my child.
Her father is the one who did the sculpture on the door and in the house.
RC; It’s beautiful, incredible.

16

WJH: Incredible, incredible sculptor. He was an incredible sculpture, that’s enough to say. In my
early days at Evergreen, I just carried Salmh in her car seat and put her on the desk, so she grew
up on the desk at Evergreen or in a corner next to me. Her father and I did not stay together long
after her birth, she was a village child; she was raised by the Tacoma campus.
I left Evergreen and I came to Tacoma. First, I was a member of the faculty; then I taught in the
Bridge Program; I ran the Summer program and ran the day program. By the time I took over in
1990 or 1989 — I can’t remember which one it was — I was running the campus.
When I asked to come and teach at the campus, Maxine said I could come, but I couldn’t teach
theater, which I had been hired for. ‘People just think black people sing and dance you can’t teach
theater; you have to teach your academic discipline.’ My discipline was Medieval Literature,
Western Classical Literature. I freaked out because at that time we had great, big, retired military
guys. At that time people used to get out of the army in companies not individually. When one
person from the company would find out about the Tacoma program — the G.I. Bill was active
then — he would tell everybody else in the company. People were coming in groups of 10 or 15
in their old companies when they retired. The same thing started happening when we started getting
guys from the post office because people went to the post office in companies. We were getting
groups of people coming in and I didn’t know how I was going to teach these military men about
Western literature because I was afraid, they were going to have the same reaction that my dog
did. Rebecca, when you started speaking in old English and she started growling.
That’s what happened with my military guys once before. Charlie [Teske] came in and was
teaching Beowulf and one of the guys had a flashback because he thought it was Vietnamese or
something and he basically went into an [attack] stance position. Luckily, because they were all
retired military and carried, we had told them you have to leave your pistols and things in the car.
If this guy had had a gun . . . he just went into full attack stance; the noise was so triggering. So, I
was scared about teaching Old English.
RC: And even Middle English.
WJH: Part of my transitioning into blackness was going with Maxine and connecting with the Pan
African/Black Scholar movement. We went to New York, and we met Dr. Ben. Dr. Ben is the
person who fought in the 40s to let people know that Egypt was Black. Maxine said I had to have
different images in my life of blackness other than the media ones; so, I needed a new history; I
needed to understand what had happened before slavery in order to deprogram myself from myths
of inferiority or from fear, which was a major thing because when I was in 8th grade Emmett Till
was killed. That’s always been an image in my mind which was another reason why I never wanted
to be too smart because if you were too smart, you got killed; that was my adolescent idea. You
didn’t get asked out if you were smart and, if you did, go out you got killed.
We had met this man in New York [George Simmons] and he was a scholar. He taught me two
things about scholarship. For every point you make, you have to have three proofs because when
you’re pushing things that people don’t believe, so you’ve got to make sure that you’re grounded
in evidence. Two, read everything because you may find one line that can change your life. I was
asked to teach a class in Tacoma and Maxine said I had to teach my discipline. I found a book
called The Way of the Storyteller by Ruth Sawyer.

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RC: I know that book; I use it.
WJH: I have it in my library; I should have it on my altar. There was one line it that said most of
western literature has its prototypic beginnings in ancient Egypt. That was all I needed, and it
determined my academic career since then. I begin everything I do in ancient Egypt, and I do not
to use western civilization as the starting point.
RC: Who was the scholar who led that when you and Maxine were . . .
WJH: They call him Dr. Ben, but his full name is Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan.
RC: How do you spell that, or close?
WJH: If you Google Dr. Ben, you can get it. His father is Ethiopian, and his mother is Caribbean
[Puerto Rican]. His name is ben-Jochannan, but he’s known as Dr. Ben. He died last year. He was
part of that whole Harlem Street scholar thing where people stand on soapboxes and talk about
Garveyism, talk about reevaluating images and stuff like that. He particularly said we had to
reclaim Egypt.
Once I read The Way of the Storyteller, I knew what my Ph.D. had to be. Maxine said I couldn’t be
the director unless I had a Ph.D. So, I went to Union Graduate School, and I got a Ph.D in Ancient
Egyptian Literature and its Pedagogical Value to Urban Adults. I found that the ancient Egyptian
worldview affirm everything I knew in terms of things being complimentary dualities, not always
being linear; that time also be looked at as cyclic. Here was a society that was not grounded in
shame, blame and guilt like western society. Tragedy was a western invention. Other people in
indigenous cultures did not see life as finite and tragic; they always saw it as redemptive. All of
the philosophical concepts I was discovering in the ancient Egyptian worldview felt like they
would be transformative if they were introduced to the students of Tacoma, Olympia, and the
world. I started teaching autobiography in Tacoma and what I realized was that ancient Egyptian
autobiographical composition was one of the most powerful pedagogies I had encountered because
it allowed people to see themselves as victors and not victims.
JRC: It’s interesting that Joseph Campbell is coming out around that time talking about the power
of myth, story, and the roots of story to inform people’s personal lives and professional lives.
Taking that idea of archetype, myth, personal journey, and transformative journey and moving that
to get into a pedagogical function, so that the personal stories and the mythic stories that we tell
our aspirations and our dreams come together. We can, through imagination reconstruct our world,
our identity. We can’t change the past like, but like a phoenix, a mythical being, we can take what
we’re given and reconstruct it through myth and archetype and this mythic journey that we’re all
on . . .
WJH: You got it, right, right.
RC: It’s interesting how Campbell talks about the hero’s journey, but you can just talk about it as
the transformative journey. All people through different cycles . . . it doesn’t have to be a hero’s
myth; it’s a transformative story.

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WJH: Right, right, right, exactly. That’s what I saw. Maxine always had her students do
autobiographies in the program, but her lens was you write an autobiography, and you give it to
somebody because you wanted them to tell the truth about anything. She wanted people not to
write it for her, but to write it for their children, for history.
RC: You were also having these conversations with Mary Hillaire and with Betsy Diffendal and
Jan Kido
WJH: Jan wasn’t there yet.
RC: Okay, so you’re having these conversations around women and pedagogical practice; Betsy’s
background is in anthropology. So, you’re bringing these different disciplinary and academic
lenses to defining this curriculum.
WJH: Exactly. Betsy, myself, and Sally Riewald all did our Ph.Ds together.
RC: I knew Betsy before I came to Evergreen; she was finishing her Ph.D at Union as well. Who
was the third person?
WJH: Sally Riewald. She was our writing person. All three of us were doing it. Betsy and I were
doing ours through Union; Sally was doing it through someplace else. We all had a tiny bit of
competitiveness; so, it was really good. If Betsy got a paper in and I was behind it was like uh uh.
She finished like three months ahead of me.
RC: She was in and out of the main campus . . .
WJH: No, we both went down about the same time. Betsy was on the main campus . . .
RC: Okay, so that’s when she also moved to Tacoma.
WJH: No, Betsy and Maxine go back an eternity. Maxine and Betsy met when Maxine was a
principal in Bellevue and Betsy was graduate student doing research on something that Maxine
was doing; she was an evaluator, and she had skills. Maxine is very good about gathering people
around her who have skills that can serve her well. She recognized in Betsy somebody that was
very, very bright and had some excellent evaluation skills because Betsy was an excellent
educational evaluator before she was a faculty at Evergreen. When Maxine got her job in
Washington, DC, she brought Betsy with her. Betsy moved to Washington, DC and worked with
Maxine off and on. When Maxine came back, Betsy came back. They bought houses next to each
other because they were helping each other take care of their kids. Then Betsy moved to the north
end. So, Betsy has always lived in Tacoma after she lived in Seattle. She moved to the house on
the north end for a while, for at least five years before Jan came to teach at Evergreen. Then they
started working together and collaborating.
Maxine had always hidden the program; she never wanted people in Olympia to have any control.
She took a leave of absence I think in 1988 and Betsy became the interim director for a second.
Betsy said she was not going to pay for the program out of her pocket. Maxine could do it, but she
wasn’t going to. So, Betsy went to Olympia and said make this a budget line. For the very first
time it became a budget line with the operating budget and a faculty budget. I think it was 1988/89

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that Maxine had a leave. What was interesting is that she traded faculty positions with Barbara
Smith. Barbara Smith was teaching at the Goodrich Program. Maxine went to the Goodrich
Program for a year; Barbara Smith and David Paulsen came here to be visitors for a year. I think
it was 1988 because Salmh was born in 1980, but it now had a budget line. Before it didn’t have a
budget line. Betsy had put in a budget line.
One of the things I put in as a result of Betsy, Sally and I doing our Ph.D work. I say I, but of
course, everything was done in collaboration and consultation. I’ll just say ‘we: we instituted the
requirements of statistics and research methodology on the Tacoma campus. We said, even though
Olympia has no requirements, Maxine had a philosophy if you give people too many choices it
makes things very difficult, so people didn’t have a lot of choices on the Tacoma campus. They
had to take the prescribed curriculum, but it wasn’t repeatable. As a result of our experience in
graduate school, we said that research methodology and statistics had to be repeatable every year,
because those were the gatekeeper courses [that kept] students from getting masters. My goal was,
not just for the students to graduate, but be prepared enough to go on to a master’s program or a
Ph.D. We knew that we had had such a hard time with research methodology and statistics and felt
that if it was introduced to us at the undergraduate level, we wouldn’t have had to suffer so much.
That’s when that got institutionalized into the program.
One of the brilliant things that happened while Betsy, Maxine and I were still playing around with
the campus when Maxine was the director, was the establishment of the Bridge Program. I feel so
sorry for that because of lots of reasons it was not able to sustain itself in the way it was conceived.
It impacted enrollment and it impacted loyalty in a whole bunch of ways. Once Betsy asked for a
budget line, we had to go through the state legislature to officially be a branch campus; that had to
be negotiated and permission given to do that. Once we became a branch campus, we could only
be a junior/senior program, but we were finding out that there were a lot of people who didn’t have
90 credits; the majority of the people we ran across didn’t have 90 credits.
Maxine and Betsy did the initial negotiation with TCC for an articulation between TCC and
Evergreen for a memorandum of agreement. TCC would have classes on the Tacoma campus and
have a joint class with Evergreen’s lyceum. So, they would have all their classes in our space, but
they were joined together, with the idea that the Bridge Program could be a college prep program
to give them the incentive to move forward because they could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
They would be given skills. They would also be taught by the Evergreen faculty, so that when they
went up to Upper Division, they would know what was going on. For ten years or so, it was a
vibrant operation that gave people four years in an urban community, with an urban experience of
interdisciplinary team-taught thinking, themes-based seminars. It was an automatic feeder
program, so we were always able to keep the numbers up because we couldn’t just rely on transfers.
We had at least 20 or 30 students every year coming up from the Bridge; that always allowed us
to meet our numbers. It also turns out that the Bridge students ended up being the most loyal
Evergreen students. Pretty much 2/3 of consistent alumni/alumnae in the Sankofa Club all came
from the Bridge. The Bridge students had greater loyalty. Our four-year students have historically
— we don’t have any data — have done better than our two-year coming in transfers. We were the
first people in the area doing a two-plus -two articulation, but now almost everybody’s doing a
two-plus-two articulation, so it was not as attractive for TCC to continue the Bridge.
There was always a tension between TCC (who ran it, how they were running it, personal styles,
grading and stuff like that), but it was a very strategic move, particularly with the U of W [branch

20

campus] being established and having that pressure, ‘The U is coming; the U is coming. It’s coming
up the hill; it’s going to eat you. It’s going to consume you.’ So, we had a lot of faculty discussions
about how to do deal with that. The Bridge Program is something that was a very good problemsolving solution for 20 years.
During that early period where we were working to create this campus and serve the community,
we moved from Tacoma Community House to the Colored Women’s Club in 1980. From the
Colored Women’s Club, we moved downtown to 10th and Pacific to the OIC Building. Maxine had
been appointed … [transitional director]. The agency needed to close itself out and it still had its
lease for like a year and a half; so, they asked Maxine to close out that agency. She closed out the
agency and then moved the school there. It was rent-free and we didn’t have to pay anything, and
computers were just coming out; it was really crazy times there. They had had the Cuban boat
launch where Fidel had put everybody on boats, and they sent them all over to American cities.
Maxine volunteered — I don’t know what we thought we were going to do with them; perhaps it
was a way of getting money – to take 20 Cuban boatpeople/refugees/criminals. Castro basically
opened his jails, put everybody on boats and sent them. These were men who had never seen toilets
and stuff like that. We would go into our toilets and there’d be footprints on the seats because they
would stand on the toilet and squat as opposed to sitting.
We had no computers so the guys would go to PX [Post Exchange] and buy the early computers,
like Atari and Radio Shack. They’d bring them up the steps. Some of them were these great big
computers because that’s how they were then. We were trying to teach ourselves computers, so the
people brought them. We taught ourselves community work taking in boatpeople. That is the year
I brought Artee in when we were in the OIC building. I brought her in for a lecture because we
were good friends at the time and had been doing theater together and raising our kids together. I
brought her in to do one lecture and we tried to do all of western civilization in one lecture. Maxine
said to stay a quarter. We stayed a quarter, and we started bringing in other faculty people beyond
Evergreen.
After we lost that building, we moved to Martin Luther King. Joe Orlando was the president at
that time and so was Les Purce. Les kind of rotated in and out. They negotiated for us to be able
to get that building. There was a vice president who was also put money out to renovate it. That
was the first time we actually had a building that we could renovate and that was maybe in ’84.
[the Bridge started in that facility.]
RC: So, did Maxine teach on the main campus? Was she first hired to teach on the main campus?
WJH: Yes.
RC: When was Maxine hired to teach on the main campus?
WJH: She was in the third wave that came in the third year. First it was the guys; then it was the
girls; then it was the mamas.
RC: She’s teaching on the main campus, and something must have prompted her to say, I need to
do this community education that’s in service to my students where they are. From your perspective
what was she doing teaching on the main campus, what prompted her to say community
service/community learning is important and we need to meet students where they’re at, we need

21

to meet different kinds of needs and sets up a different opportunity? For Evergreen’s model. She’s
not making a break from Evergreen’s and yet she is. It’s this very contradictory, but very important,
strategic . . .
WJH: She came with that whole umbrella idea that you talk about. When she came to the campus,
she taught a couple of classes with Oscar Soule and someof the old boys on the main campus. In
Olympia she had worked with Matt Smith, and she started the state worker program. She worked
with him to do a nighttime program that would appeal to state workers who needed an Evergreen
degree but could not do it. So, she did that with him. Then she worked with Caroline Dobbs or
somebody; maybe she did it herself; and did a Women in Management program. A lot of the small
businesses downtown, like Archibald Sisters, were started by Maxine’s students in her Women in
Management. After that she started working with Mary with the Native Americans.
Just like I was told by someone you need to return your skills to the community [so was Maxine].
Maxine, who was working in Olympia, living in Tacoma, was at Brown Star Grill in Tacoma where
she heard a bunch of women talking about her, by name and about how she was this sellout who
was teaching these kids in Olympia when people in her own community were wanting information
and knowledge. She turned around to them, told them who she was and told them if they were
serious, they needed to come to her house, from 6 to 8 in the morning and from to 8 in the evening
and she would teach them. Then she took them under individual contract; they were four women.
That’s how she started the Tacoma program. It was the community kind of saying, ‘You’re taking
your skills out of the community, and you need to bring them back.’
RC: So, is she still teaching at Evergreen, or did she say I’m doing independent study, Evergreen
work here in Tacoma and I’m teaching out of my house?
WJH: What she did — because Maxine is a politician — Lynn and her were very good friends;
Lynn was a dean. Charlie McCann was also very good friends with her and he was the president.
Everybody knew what she was doing, but nobody was saying anything. She was taking students
under individual contract. She was still probably carrying some contracts; so, she moved herself
into the contract pool.
RC: At the same time Evergreen is trying to create this new identity. It’s supporting students,
individual learning and student success and it’s trying to think about learning communities. You
have people like Barbara Smith, Mary Hillaire, yourself, and different people talking about what
is a learning community? How does it function? The Washington Standard is starting to look at
the role of learning communities in higher education. How did all of that shape the climate and the
campus of Evergreen around the issues of diversity, equity, and social justice? The individual
versus the learning community or the individual within the learning community: how those two
types of learning reinforce each other. Patrick Hill is coming in; he’s a provost; he’s talking about
learning communities. There’re different people from different perspectives, but there’s something
very special with Gray’s Harbor, the Native American studies tribal programs, with what was
happening with the Tacoma campus, where we actually take the population off the main campus
and out into the community.
WJH: There were parallel structures out in the community, not necessarily intersecting. There were
some people who took very seriously Evergreen’s mission to say: serve the people of Southwest
Washington. Those people were interested in the workers; they were interested in Tacoma; they

22

were interested in reservations because that’s Southwest Washington. That’s how they interpreted
it. Some interpreted it as we supposed to be the innovative school that does this work A lot of times
there was not this intersection; that’s one of the things that Barbara did — I worked with Barbara
on that really strongly — when she came in . . . one of my proudest accomplishments are around
the idea of hiring, both in terms of the Tacoma campus and the Olympia campus I was chair of the
committee that hired Barbara Smith as Provost; that was work. She was against the old boys. It
was Rudy Martin and David Marr and those guys who wanted old Evergreen and Barbara who
wanted a renewed vision of Evergreen. It was a search that went on for eight months; it was all
internal and it was really ugly. I’m pleased that I was on her hiring committee; I’m pleased that I
was on Emily’s hiring committee to move on Barbara’s legacy, and I’m pleased that I was on
Chico’s hiring committee. I figure I got high scores on that.
RC: The Washington Center has been influential in shaping some of the pedagogical practices
around equity and diversity, around working through education and . . .
WJH: Totally, totally.
RC: . . . learning communities, around working with the teaching of writing and basic
communication and skills.
WJH: Barbara Smith initially came on a faculty exchange. She came back in and became a dean.
That was weird because she was the first outside dean; people didn’t trust her and stuff like that.
Barbara is very competent; she has a vision, and she can put it through, even though she has a style
which can be very off-putting sometimes to people, but she is good. When she became the provost,
she was also at the same time the president of AACU. She had really high status [nationally] in the
teaching and learning community arena Then she had the idea of forming The Washington Center
as a way of promoting what Evergreen was doing, securing our place with the legislature and
promoting our model nationally. When she took over there were two different strands: the diversity
strand and the academic excellence strand. What Barbara did through programmatic stuff on the
national level was to put both themes in both conferences: put diversity in academic platform and
vice-versa. As a result of that things were merged.
There has been, very little, in my opinion, trickled down between the work that the Washington
Center has done and the actual classroom practices and things that are happening. One of the
biggest fights with Barbara was a simple thing. Put your learning outcomes in your syllabus.
Simple, it’s accountability; tell them what you’re going to learn, what the expectation is. The
faculty fought her. ‘It was against academic freedom.’ We’re one of the few colleges left that does
not have uniform learning communities across the college. Just like the work being done in
Tacoma, I’m going to be really honest. Tacoma for years had done senior synthesis as a capstone
project, which had been refined over the years and was totally effective. Rather than building on
the pedagogical excellence and history of the Tacoma campus, Evergreen does something called
this little academic statement thing. The students I work with think it’s a joke and it’s not
infrastructurally supportable because students move from faculty to faculty. On the Tacoma
campus you basically kind of stick with the same advisor, so you can do that kind of work.
RC: It truly evolves over the context of your learning. You have an audience so it’s being shaped
by an audience/yourself through this bigger lens and you have some editorial support in terms of
helping you refine a final product for that audience.

23

WJH: Right, right. So, when [a student] sends something out to somebody it’s been proofread by
at least one or two times as opposed to sending out cold copies. That’s just one example of how
things don’t trickle down and how things are not valued from campus to campus. So, the
Washington Center is not valued, and the Tacoma stuff is not valued. You mentioned Patrick Hill.
When I became the director of the campus Joe Orlando was the president and Joe was my friend.
I like Joe; I’m probably the only person who liked Joe. I loved Joe; he was Sicilian. I love Sicilians
and he wore cowboy boots. Patrick was Irish; Joe was Sicilian and it felt like you were in the
middle of cops and robbers. I knew Joe was a visionary. I liked him; I thought he had style. Again,
somebody I liked got fired.
RC: I was just going to say, “You watch out for your friends because they are going to get tripped
up in a minute.
WJH; Joe recommended me [for the Harvard management program]. He said congratulations you
are now the director of Evergreen Tacoma. What we need to do is give you some training; we’ll
send you to Harvard. We’ll send you to Harvard Management Program.’ I said “Cool”. Patrick
rejected that offer and wrote a memo — that may still be someplace; maybe I threw it away —
saying he didn’t think it would be a good investment sending me to Harvard and that the money
could better spent on Xerox machines. people talk about Patrick and his love for . . .? I sued him.
I filed a grievance because I thought it was insulting. I’m better than I was when I was dealing
with microaggressions back in the library. I sued him. Rita Cooper was the affirmative action
officer at the time. I sued him because of race. She said, ‘No, I couldn’t do race because he clearly
had championed Rudy Martin and Angela Gilliam. There were [Olympia] Black people he had
championed so we couldn’t say it was race, but we could say it was denial of timely support for
position. Whatever it was, they ruled I should go to Harvard. Again, that speaks to that difficult
tension. We got the community thing going over here; we got good programs, Washington Center.
The peripheries of Evergreen for me, for me, is where the excitement still is. Nighttime and
weekend, Tacoma . . .
RC: Gateway.
WJH: I don’t really know about math projects, but I’ve made up stories about it and I love it . . .
about Paul getting people to love math. I see all these things going on on the edge, but I don’t see
anything being recognized by the middle, infused, and used to grow from and build upon. That’s
my saddest part. My happiest part is that I feel that there’s some amazing people, amazing teachers,
and amazing students; so that always becomes balanced. However, I just have become more real
about the difficulty of that recognition and then how sometimes you’re better off not even looking
for . . . I got kind of in trouble administratively because I had developed a philosophy of do it and
apologize later. That worked for a while and after a while it didn’t work; then it had to stop. It just
felt like that if there was something for the student, if it was something that they needed, just go
ahead and do it because if we ask it’ll be denied.
I went to Harvard; I was scared to death to go to Harvard. A friend of mine had a t-shirt that said,
“I walked on fire; I can do anything I choose.” I decided that’s what I wanted to wear on my first
day at Harvard. I asked for the t-shirt, and he wouldn’t give it to me, so I had to walk on fire to get
one. I went to Harvard and two things happened. One, I got elected president of my class at
Harvard, which I feel really bad about because I never did anything afterwards. When they made

24

the announcement, ‘Your class has voted you the president of the class” I cc’d the letter and sent
it to Patrick. That was it; that’s all I wanted to do. I just wanted to say, “Stick this in your . . .”
Also, I didn’t want to be an a senior level administrator; I didn’t want to go any further than where
I was. Director was cool. I didn’t want to be Provost; I didn’t want to be Vice President. It didn’t
seem like a good life.
RC: Because you were into the education and the teaching, so the administration would have put
you in another . . .
WJH: Another whole thing. I would be dealing with people I didn’t have a whole lot to talk about
and who were not very interesting.
RC: You have this community of people that were working together. I still have a couple more
questions for you. I did some research before coming down here and I don’t know if we have time
today, I’m going to put this on pause for a second.
WJH: Thank you for this opportunity.
Interview 1_Part 3 joyehardimanVOC_160921-1080.wav
WJH: And when we finish this, I would love for you...you teach on what days?
RC: I’m teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays this quarter.
WJH: I would love for you to come to my class and talk about story and storytelling.
RC: Oh, that would be fun.
WJH: I mean, I really...
RC: And when I taught with Carol Minugh she was doing Gateways, so I went down with her,
and she invited me in a couple of times to do presentations for students when she was off for a
conference. So, I stepped in for her for a week, during a presidential election year, it was '99, that
presidential year.
WJH: Alright cool. We'll talk; ask me the questions, then we'll...
RC: So, in doing some research, sort of digging back through the archives, I looked at DTF
reports on diversity and looked at the challenges of cultural diversity. There were some things on
cultural pluralism in Johnnella Butler's, some of the work that she brought to the campus. There
was a 2003 DTF on diversity and equity; we now have the Diversity and Equity standing
committee. There's a lot of work that's being done on the campus, and a quote that I found that
was interesting, this is from 1983, and you came on when?
WJH: Um, 1974, '75.
RC: Yeah, so this is in 1983, and this is in this newsletter from the college. "From the beginning
of Evergreen's existence, members of the faculty and staff have worked diligently and with

25

conviction to build an academic curriculum that meets the diverse cultural component of students
enrolled at Evergreen. So, building on that with the 2006 report from Rita Pougiales on Equity
and Diversity, looking at all the files on the Washington Center, looking back at the college
archives... This has been a big question, and a quest, with all of these different programs, the
tribal program, the Tacoma campus program, evening and weekend studies, and Grays Harbor, as
you mentioned earlier. We've had these questions about diversity and equity, and meeting
students' needs, and yet it seems that we're still asking those questions and working to try to
bring this into fruition on our campus, and in our society at large. And it's always been something
that we've taken an effort to do. I don't know how well we've done it, but I'm wondering what is
it that we've done, what have we done well, and what do we still need to do, what are we
missing?
And it seems to me that something about bringing the Tacoma campus to the diverse students
and meeting their needs in the community where they were, was really brilliant, and that in order
to ask these questions, we might have to ask some of those kinds of questions that you took on
through the Tacoma campus. And also, I want to then follow up later about how the Tacoma
campus and tribal communities have been bringing a lot of this wealth back to the main campus.
What are we doing, what are we doing well, what are we missing, and why does it seem we're
struggling with these issues as much or even more than ever, at this pivotal time in history, when
we're asking these questions nationally and within our community, as a learning community?
WJH: I think the starting point for me on both campuses and throughout Evergreen is
understanding who our students are. Not who we want them to be but meeting our students
where they truly are. Historically the Tacoma campus has done that; for example, when we found
out that we had all these retired military guys, and a lot of them were working for the post office.
People were jealous because they were people of color primarily, who looked like they might be
getting their BA, and other people maybe were not. They started shifting their jobs around, that
was the origin of our offering the same classes at night as in the daytime. Because the reason
why we did that had nothing to do with faculty comfortability; in fact, it's exhausting to do it.
But it had to be, if you were a day shift person, and you had a boss who wasn't interested in your
growth, and he put you on the night shift, you could take the same class and not be penalized.
And if you were a working mother, who had a kid who was sick, and you were in the day class,
then you could stay home with that kid, and come to the night class after. So that's just one
example of how you design something where your students are.
I think Evergreen has made a tremendous mistake in terms of its students; Evergreen does not
see who the students of color are. I have seen very little, very, very, very little, in the curriculum
that deals with the fact that a significant number of our students of color are from bicultural
environments. We keep treating them as if they're African American students and they're Chicano
students, etc. My students in the Gateways Program, at least 60 percent, whether they're Chicano
or black, are students of culturally mixed parentage, who in many cases have been raised in
white environments. And so, they're coming there with some major identity needs about can I
love both sides of myself. If you tell me I'm black, does that reject my white mama? If you tell
me I'm Chicano, do I have to reject my so-and-so? And I think George Freeman may have
touched on it once; Chico is very cognizant of it and works with it. But in systemic curriculum
design, I think Evergreen, and I'm going to try to think of it in positive ways it has, but right now
has not recognizing the peculiar nature of our student body. And I'm sure that the same thing may
hold true[in terms of high school students]; we keep looking at our high school students, but we

26

don't look and see that some of our best students are home school students and alternative high
school students. But we keep doing classes and things for people who might be going to Olympia
High School.
We're very good in terms of recognizing, say for example, the eco-environmental nature desires
of our students. I mean, for our students, things like sustainable agriculture in terms of urban
gardening, that kind of social action, I think that we have recognized our students' need to be
connected to social action, but I think that in terms of our students' heart and souls on the
Olympia campus, we have not reached out to maintain diversity. For example, I have a young
woman, African American woman, went to Charles Wright, a predominantly white private
school. She's going to be a freshman at Evergreen, and her aunt wanted me to help her enter. So,
I said, send me the orientation package, so I can tell you what things to go to and what things to
do. Well, first of all there's a book that she's supposed to read that I have not read, but from other
faculty talking on the hiring committee, say it's a very, very difficult book for a freshman to read,
and it's off putting. So, you've got a little scared freshman who's coming in, who's not sure if
they're going to be bright, not sure if they're going to be good, not sure if they're going to be
fitting in, and then they get hit with a book that is above their heads and obtuse, and does nothing
to recognize who the student is who's coming in.
Secondly, and I don't want to say this to Wendy because she's on the hiring committee, but
everything is so heavy. I mean, on the first day you learn how to keep your friends from being
hurt, where the safe spaces are in case there's abuse. It’s all so heavy...nobody's talking about
expectation, nobody's talking about the foci, nobody's talking about how you navigate this.
Nobody's talking about the fun. Nobody's talking about how kooky graduates...I mean, they're all
weird, but...none of the kind of like let's have fun, this is going to be good!
So, I think that's what I mean by not recognizing the hearts and souls of it, whereas if you go to
the Rez program, they would never start anything that didn't have cedar in it, you know what I
mean? Cause you have to recognize that not only your being is in the room, but also that the
spirit is in the room if you want to communicate in an indigenous way...So for me that's a way of
seeing who the students are, and what their needs are. The whole idea about tribal government,
you know, they have a master's in tribal government. I think that's recognizing what the students
need., When I came the first year, everybody was into community, it wasn't diversity, it was like
everybody's looking for a community, not recognizing that some of the students come with
community, so they're not looking for it and they don't want to spend all this time looking for it.
We keep looking at diversity, but I looked at the hiring, and there were fourteen hires, and they
did not look very diverse to me. It's like imagination, you have to have imagination, you have to
imagine where these people are and maybe these people don't have these traditional little boxes,
maybe there's something else, There are so many components to it, but my bottom line in trying
to make sense of all of this is that Evergreen will be successful when we really take time to
figure out who our students are..., the activity at orientation was face painting and popcorn. Well,
maybe some of the students want to watch Empire, maybe we have a seminar around Empire, or
RuPaul's show, or something else like that. But face painting and popcorn...
RC: With this heavy text, combined with the heavy text.
WJH: ...combined with the heavy text is not something a little eighteen-year-old colored girl is
going to come back to. When we see we lose them on the first year, it's like, what is happening,
and what is happening... When you go to the things that the Washington Center has, it's all the

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people from the margins, it's very few people from the [c]enter there, and the center are the ones
who are defining the image.
The Washington Center has been a godsend for me, I was a founding faculty. I was part of the
PEW grant for minority people that was for four years and two years colleges. I was part of the
Ford Foundation Cultural Pluralism grant, I was part of almost everything, and the number of
Evergreen faculty that participate in those was miniscule, there was nobody there, that's what I
meant about there was no trickledown. we talk the talk, but we don't walk the walk.
Stone Thomas was a great Dean of Student Services. He was cool because he was an ex-football
player. He'd get out there and throw the ball in Red Square. He was told by Patrick Hill that
Patrick wasn't going to promote him because of his diction, his lips were too big. Seriously, his
lips were too big, and they got in the way of his articulation, so he didn't think that he could
really promote him. Someone asked George Bridges for Felix Martin to be the interim person in
terms of the diversity and he said Felix was too young and he needed somebody else to do it.
Olympia does grow some of its own, I won't say it doesn't, cause there's some faculty from the
center whose kids are now teaching, and many of the faculty went to Evergreen, but I would like
to see more promoted from the margin, because I think that if we get a young, bright person of
color on our campus who wants to move forward, everything should be done to help that person
move forward. That's what schools are learning now, they're learning that if they want diverse
people, then they have to do activities that get diverse people. We need the majority of the
faculty and staff of color trying to promote those from the margin. Actually, what happens when
everybody keeps talking about diversity stuff, you go out there and fight, and you get worn out.
Naima Lowe has been fighting now for three years, she's tired. Now she just wants to teach and
do her art and try to make sure that students aren't done harm in her environment. You get worn
out when you're only one or two, so then you go back, and you cocoon. That's what many
people have done. Kabby's managed to still stay there, but he gets his applause by coming down
and teaching in Tacoma in the summer, or doing his work there, so he's found ways. But he
doesn't go into the fight anymore, he just teaches.
Rebecca, we pay lip service to the message, but we don't value the messenger. Like for example,
Tina could probably teach Expressive Arts and those people a whole bunch about how to
collaborate, because that whole area is just little silos. If we're talking about diversity, why aren't
we all get people to stop talking about it, and just get them together for a weekend and write
grants? If we write grants, that means you've got to talk about what the grant means, but then you
can get the money to support what's going on. I mean, we just keep doing the same old, same
old, same old. Unless there's diversity in philosophy, in lens, there can't be diversity in action.
Does that make any sense?
RC: Yeah, and I do love this idea about how does a community come together when you have
different points of view. We value critical thinking, and articulating our different points of view,
and that's done very well within different cultures and traditions, but there's different negotiation
styles and methods. I've seen different points of view or conflicts resolved in Longhouse settings,
or in communities where everybody's voice is heard. People make accommodations that enrich
everybody in the end, and everybody understands each other's points of view. Not that people
don't have hard feelings, but there are different negotiation styles. When we built the Long House
on the campus, there was a huge series of negotiations that needed to happen, and different
points of view. And people were very entrenched, but they used a style of negotiation that got

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over the loudest voices being heard, to having a conversation that allowed everybody's voice to
be heard and have everybody's needs be served. The whole community was enriched, because we
have this amazing building, and it brings all of these different people and opportunities together.
You came up against struggles and blocks in creating the Tacoma campus, but you took it step by
step, and used different negotiating styles, not only with your students but with the community
members here, and the employers of the students. I think there is something about those different
negotiation styles that we're trying to do at Evergreen, and which is important when we send our
students out into the community to do service learning. And also, the conversation hasn't been
resolved at a national level, and we're somehow a mirror of that as well. The stakes are really
high, and people have to take a stand, and we can't pat ourselves on the back for anything we've
done. This is our time to make change and make a difference because the issues aren't resolved.
And we are sending our students out into a diverse world, and we want our students to be
prepared for where they've come from, and supported in that, and for where they're going.
WJH: Right, and as you're talking, another thing occurs to me about the difference between the
rez, the margin and the center, is that the margin basically is into learning and seeking new
models and new ways. The center thinks it is the model.
RC: That's big.
WJH: We think we are the model; we don't realize that actually that we had the model, and our
model has been taken, and there are all these baby models everywhere, that are doing brilliant
work that we could learn from, but we don't. I mean even just going to Bothell.
RC: UW Bothell, yeah.
WJH: Bothell came and studied us inside out, they studied the Tacoma campus, they studied the
Olympia campus, and then they took the model, played with it, and then they adapted it. It's like
a parent learning from its children, Evergreen has had all these children, and we're not speaking
to them. The Rez base, they say, let's talk to the Māori’s, let's talk to the UN, let's talk to the
elders. I mean, we know we have this art and cultural center, but are there are other art and
cultural centers, places that we could learn from? We don't see ourselves as learning from
anybody, we see ourselves as learning from the world.
RC: And in a way, we're recreating these programs every year, so we are recreating ourselves,
year after year. And that takes a lot of energy. We get involved in those programs. Our faculty
training and faculty enrichment allow us those chances to talk around our work, and think about
equity pedagogy, and writing or quantitative skills. We look at what are these skills that we need
to teach our students to be accountable for, and what learning that they can take away with them
as they go out into the world. We want them to they know they've mastered these skills. At the
same time, we're inventing these creative new conversations and ways of thinking, in these
interdisciplinary ways, around important issues and conversations.
WJH: And that's it. What I think these other programs [from the margin] have done is to have ongoing conversation. I mean there's consistent conversation about teaching and learning, and what
practices can create the best teaching and learning environments for our students. The Rez is
always dealing with that, Tacoma always seems to deal with it. I certainly know that Gateways is

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really trying to figure out what are other programs out there, how do we keep track. Like, we
thought all the prisoners were black, no, they're all Samoans, what does that mean, we've got to
shift the books now. It's how hungry you are, and I think the center doesn't feel hungry, and I
think the edges feel hungry.
RC: At this time, I'm feeling there's a real concern on the campus about if we are teaching well,
how are we connecting with our students, what the students come here for, and what they need,
to what they understand what they're getting. How are we maybe failing them, or not meeting
their needs in teaching writing across the curriculum, or giving them certain skill sets that they
can then take away? Or just the fact that they're learning these different ways and styles of being
accountable within this learning community. The very things that they're doing at Evergreen are
the things that are going to be transferable to any job or any work that they do beyond Evergreen,
but maybe the students aren't getting that, maybe they don't see how their work in this program,
or their critical reading, writing, and thinking, is going to contribute to negotiating their future,
and the world change.
WJH: Right, we're not taking on that responsibility, that when these students get out, they've got
forty thousand dollars, minimum or something, of college loans to pay back. And we have an
obligation to get them to be there, and right now our students are yielding the lowest in terms of
incomes after graduation, after five years of graduation. While it may that they want to go into
nonprofits, we need to tell them how to go into nonprofits and make a living wage. I think the
core has privilege, that's what I mean by the hunger thing, and I think we need to listen. One of
the things about the other programs, people say it has to do with academic freedom, and I'm not
sure whether academic freedom is a culturally based demand or whether or not it is in fact
something that's important. But I do know, we don't even agree on the five foci, and if you go
into Tacoma and you walk in the door, you're hit with the values. We in Olympia don't hit with
our values; all we do is talk about some little geoduck who’ let it all hang out.” That's not enough
for retention...
RC: To anchor the students.
WJH: To anchor the students, right. That's good. Tacoma's anchored in urban culture; we need to
find what the anchor is for Olympia that allows for people to still feel that they can individually
express. Olympia doesn’t have an anchor; they are not articulating their anchor.
RC: And we have this beautiful location, we have our social justice issues, we have our
quantitative/qualitative work in the humanities and in the sciences, and we have these thematic
based programs that are asking big questions that open new doorways, but as a community we
don't have that anchor, like you said, we don't have the salt and pepper that just comes out and
enhances the flavor, with everybody getting the flavor through the salt and pepper of the spiced
exchange of those core pieces that everybody's sharing and agrees upon upfront.
WJH: Right, it's important to have a core, but we don't have a leadership, we've not had visionary
leadership since Barbara. Les was a manager, he kept the legislature happy, he kept the board
happy, and he never hired anybody that could outshine him. So, we got a series of milk toast
provosts. That was one of the reasons I really pushed to be on the provost committee, because
this is the crucial hire right now. If we do not get somebody that's got some vision, if we don't get
somebody who has some imagination, if we don't get somebody who has good problem-solving

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skills and is attuned to alternatives to what we're doing now, we're going to be in that same place
of Einstein, Einstein says that you can't fix problems by throwing the same solutions at them, and
that's what we're doing. We're just...doing that.
RC: So as a faculty, I came on in the fall of 1996, and I was part of a faculty institute, and it was
on diversity issues at Evergreen, and you led it. And it was just a powerful homecoming and
anchor, and welcoming experience for me as a new faculty. And you talked about inclusivity,
reciprocity, hospitality, respect, which is also civility. From that day, I put those principles in my
syllabus and in my covenant. We have these opportunities for faculty development, and exchange
of ideas, and I felt like you brought that vision into the main campus to orient new faculty.
There's so much that is being done and exchanged, and yet we're still missing people, and
missing that coordinated vision, that coordinated studies context that carries the water between
the different groups that are doing the work. The Washington Center is doing it, I think faculty
development institutes have the potential to do that, but I really want to think about how we
could do better as colleagues, and as a learning community, and how is collaboration and
diversity working among the faculty at Evergreen? Who we're hiring, the different roles and who
we value? You talked about a number of people who came to Evergreen that left, or might not
have been valued, and other people that were valued. It's a dicey conversation: who do we value
and what are the equity issues amongst our own community of faculty and scholars and artists
and community members? And how are we valuing those different strengths and different visions
and points of view, and how are we mentoring our new faculty? How are we valuing our elders,
elder faculty?
WJH: Yeah, there are a lot of issues, and that's what makes this an exciting place, is because
there are these issues, and we are trying to figure out how to get dialogue about them, and get
people to talk about them, and get people to live them. Another thing that was really different
from the beginning faculty and the faculty now, and I don't know all the faculty now, so I may
not be talking from an evidence position, but it seems to me that the beginning faculty were all
involved in the Olympia community. One of the problems, and I'll say this when Zhang Er is
here, because I've talked to people from the Tacoma campus, one of the problems they're having
with recruitment is that nobody lives in Tacoma anymore. The people, the faculty, either live in
Seattle or they live in Olympia. They do not go to the Greek to Me, they do not go to the Fred
Meyer, they do not go to the churches, and so it's very hard to talk about community and
diversity if one's life is not in the community. in the beginning, I don't know one faculty at all
who wasn't involved with something Olympia, the library, chamber of Commerce or involved
like [Lynn] with the book clubs, and Marilyn with the artists and Childhood End. They were
present everywhere.
I think if our faculty travelled into community, we would become much more enriched, because
then we would have skills to bring back to the campus. Right now, we have no skills to bring
back to the campus, because when we leave, we only go to see people who like us. If I had lots
of money, or if I was the provost or something, or if I was still running Tacoma, I would have my
faculty all write professional development grants for someplace that wasn't in their profession.
You could go to one conference that was in your discipline, but you'd have to go someplace else
that was out of your discipline, so you could learn something, get out of your comfort zone. We
become so comfortable in our Evergreen-ness, and we need to be uncomfortable for a little
while, because that's where growth happens.

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RC: I definitely want to have a further conversation with you about this idea of collaboration and
diversity, and faculty roles at Evergreen. I think that it needs to be really strategic. And in your
role on the provost hiring committee, that you can be thinking about how we're enhancing the
community that we have, valuing and recognizing and certainly noticing the disappointments
that you had when key people that could have been valued or supported haven't been, or have run
into walls or comments that were the microaggressions, so they feel deflated or undervalued, or
unappreciated. We really need to think about how we're doing that from the inside out, and then
how we're bringing that to our students when they're facing those challenges as well.
WJH: When I came to Evergreen, I had a research question. My friends who were in theater were
all sad, and it was dark times. [Donald Byrd’s Christa Redentor] kept playing everywhere. So,
my research question, that my students and I worked on a whole year was: if you're in the theater
and the performing arts, how do you stay sane, how do you revitalize yourself? You're in a field
where you're rejected consistently, with things that have nothing to do with you, just what type
you are. What we came up with, in the spring as a solution, is everyone needed a place where
they got applause. If you were in theater and you knew you weren't going to get the applause
there, you had to have something...become a Big Brother/Big Sister, or something, so that
somebody is applauding you every day. You know, find something outside where you can be
reinforced. I think those of us who've survived have done that.
Kabby [Mitchell lll] gets applauded in Seattle, and Tacoma. So, he can dismiss people who don't
think he's smart because he's a dancer, who don't realize that Kabby is very, very smart. He
understands popular culture, he understands African American studies, he understands history, he
understands a whole bunch of stuff. But he's a dancer, so they don't pay any attention to him. But
Seattle does, Seattle recognizes and says, you're an arts ambassador. It is about building moments
of applaud for those people who ever they are, in their transformational journey.
RC: And I think that the Native American community in the Longhouse does that well. They
create events where people get a moment to be thanked; that idea of gratitude and generosity is a
part of the tradition that's carried on through the Longhouse and through our native communities.
And inclusivity, reciprocity, respect, hospitality, those cores principles of the Tacoma campus,
giving each person a chance to stand in, be recognized and supported, whether they're succeeding
or struggling, with the opportunity or the challenge that they're faced with.
WJH: Mhmm...I love the way you phrase.
RC: And if they're not given those opportunities, you just have to be a little tougher and more
resourceful and find a way to create those opportunities for yourself and those around you. So,
you're nurturing yourself and your community.
WJH: And so, it's a way of thinking, it's a lens, but I really am intrigued by this idea, that we
don't go outside our model of ourselves, I'm just looking at George, George is coming in and he's
doing what he wants...I don't know. I'm still trying to see who he is. But I do know that when he
thinks of the solution, and it's not a bad solution, it's just a solution he's done before. he wants to
do an internship office. And I can understand, that's a national movement, and interns are good,
because it does prepare you for the job market and it is a good way of doing relationship with
community. But it's his model that he wants to bring in, and put down, and I would like to see
him say, this is a good model, how can we adapt it and make it work within the Evergreen

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context. And not just my models, let's have people who've done internships all over, and let's do a
model that doesn't assume that we know it all, or he knows it all. I guess for me it's like, one of
the things I love about the Washington Center, because it really makes me a better teacher every
year, [because we are learning about best practices], designing curriculum backwards, and
different things like that. I get a chance to revamp my whole curriculum. I mean, we don't
always get a chance to go someplace, get ideas, try them, maybe fail, and try them again so that
we grow. We're growing in our discipline…
RC: Evolving a pedagogical practice as a community. We're trying things within our program,
and we're sharing them in summer institutes, and faculty development opportunities. But it is that
strategic application of the new vision we're all looking for, [in order] to serve these students at
this time. We're moving into new kinds of challenges; we have to serve our students in new
ways. And we have statistical evidence and data, that's helping us refine what we think we're
doing, or at least what the students think we're doing, and whether or not we feel like we're
meeting their needs. So, we're asking new and different questions.
WJH: Right, and we're sometimes asking people to answer them in ways that they don't have
preparation for. I want to say, currently Evergreen’s IR [institutional research] is fairly
dysfunctional as far as what's happening on the national...Everybody's doing evidence-based
curriculum design; we are not.
RC: We're starting to.
WJH: Well, I'd like to see that. Because for example, on those academic statements, when the
data came out that our students' writing skills were ‘bad’, what that means, was not just teach
them more about grammar. We have to reexamine everything, none of the things I'm saying are
people based. But we do our students a big disservice when our writing center teaches voice.
Evergreen students have enough voice; I mean, some of them need it. My community's coming
in with a voice, they just need how to express it, and for people to just to say...
RC: And write it for that audience. Find your voice, now here's an audience, make it palatable for
your reader.
WJH: Right, exactly, and that's where we stop, we just say, we take the data and we say, oh,
there's a problem. But we don't look and see what systemically we're doing that's producing that,
and what we have to change.
RC: And it's tough to be a good writer. I'm thinking about this idea of critiquing equity pedagogy
through teaching and writing. So, how do we give students different types of essay styles, and
different writing styles so that they're writing to different audiences with different expectations.
One of the things that's happening nationally, that at least we're not doing at Evergreen yet, is
recognizing that many of our students don't have the skills or haven't come prepared. At least we
are still having them write in programs around meaningful work, ideas, and writing issues that
are important to them and supporting them in doing those multiple drafts and finding the tools to
refine, edit, and master those tips and tricks of being a good writer, that comes like any skill,
through repetition, writing over and over, and repeating and finally it sinks in, so that sentence
structure is not overwhelming or obscure. It's fun and interesting. So now. you're an artist with
how you're designing your sentences.

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And one of the things that some schools are doing, is they're creating remedial programs that
further alienate, discourage, and marginalize students who don't have those skills for whatever
reason; forcing students to take certain competency tests, and even if they have done well in
academic programs, locking them into some kind of remedial program that puts them further in
debt and leaves them less confident about their writing or their quantitative literacy skills. So
Evergreen is at least still trying [not] to do that, but we still haven't found that method to say,
here's how we're going to take you as a writer from this point, through to the next best place you
can be as a writer, the process. We're all on that process, and here's where you are and here's
where you can take your ideas. Here's where your growth area is on a continuum of writers. We
are still trying to figure that out, along with all of our work around writing across the curriculum.
We're still trying to figure out equity and diversity issues. We do it, and people take the ball
forward, and then we drop it, and we're back at the same place again, and we're somehow not
making the connections across the community, that keep everybody engaged around that
common theme that you're talking about.
WJH: I've said it before, and I guess I feel strongly about it, what we have to decide is - are we
looking for competency or are we looking for voice? Right now, we have a commitment to voice,
we really don't. have a commitment to the discussion about competency/process. Be we are
beginning.
RC: We are, because we have the evidence-based research that shows where we're missing our
students' needs.
WJH: Right, I’ve heard too many faculty say, they've got their voice and that's all they need. And
I say to them, you're operating from a totally privileged position. My people need to be able to
fill out a job application. They don't care about your voice when you're trying to apply for a job
as a so-and-so, you know? But what time is it?
RC: I'm looking, and we have about fifteen more minutes. I wanted to ask this question, I might
need to ask it again, but I’m going to at least try to get your reaction today, and we can develop
this further. This idea of “Enter to learn, depart to serve’: a vision for student centered learning
and learning communities, I see that as sort of the essence or the core of what you bring, what
you're doing when you come to the main campus to do a faculty institute like the one I was, what
you do consistently here at the Tacoma campus; what you're bringing to your Gateways students
this quarter. You talk about equity pedagogy, diversity, and appreciative inquiry. You talk about,
as the executive director of the Tacoma campus from '91 to 2007, value-based pedagogy of
inclusivity, hospitality, reciprocity, and civility or respect. That was part of the infrastructure of
the program, along with this ‘enter to learn, depart to serve’ mission statement.
You had a graduation retention rate of more than 89 percent. That's an impressive record, so in
order to do that, you were focused on student success, and what is essential to supporting student
success, particularly in relation to issues of diversity and equity? And that can be around the
skills of statistics and good writing. What were the issues, or are the issues, at Evergreen and in
the larger society that motivated, challenged, and supported you to develop inclusive pedagogies,
or pedagogies of appreciative inquiry in developing the essence of your theory around practices
that support student success? So, what do we do well, what could we do better, what are we

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missing, how can we serve our students as they enter to learn and depart to serve in a diverse
society?
WJH: The key to most of that, at least the key in Tacoma, was taking Evergreen at full value and
running with it, especially being student centered. Students were involved in every single one of
those things you said. What I did in Tacoma, was I never did anything without a student present
or a student voice. For example, we had a crisis. When I took over the Tacoma campus, because
Maxine likes to train by fire, she completely depleted my budget which came out in June. She
spent all the money between June and September. So when I started, [in September] I had no
money to run a program, buy supplies, nothing. She said, I started with nothing, you have to too.
So, I did, I got the community, and we got furniture donated, I got people stealing paper from
their offices... We made it work.
But another thing that happened was, it was a kind of slightly complicated story...Maxine made
some remarks in class that people who were looking for a way to attack the campus were able to
jump upon and file a reverse-racism suit against the campus. It was a big stink; it was in the
newspapers, and I was getting calls from Nazis. I had been in there like four days when this all
blew up from a speech that she had made when I asked her to come in and open the campus. At
the time, she was on the African American Commission, and the African American Commission
was being pushed by the gay community to go into coalition on this grant or law or something,
and the African American community was resisting, so the gay community was mad at the
African American community,, and Maxine was on the committee, and they wanted to use her as
a way of saying that the committee was racist or homophobic. So anyway, the things she said
were things I've heard her say before, but in this situation some students who were looking for
something took it...
RC: They took it out of context.
WJH: Oh, oh, they took it in context. One of the things that was reported in the newspaper was
that she hated to see women smoking, particularly black women smoking, because it was like
sucking small white dicks. And I was like, why Maxine, why did you [say that]? But anyway,
Jane [Jarvis] was the president then, and Jane was great. She got into crisis control mode and the
newspapers came, and she handled it with aplomb, and she was really, really good. But what that
left me with was, to say, okay, if you don't say what you're for, people are going to say what
you're against. So, we convened a group of students as part of a curriculum and [and I brought
in] Judith [Nilan], who I'd worked with on the Tacoma Art Museum Board, and who had a
marketing and advertising agency called Stone [McLaren] . She was really good; really good.
And so, I brought her in, and we worked with the students to come up with a motto. We said, we
have to define our own stuff before somebody else does, and right now it's just Maxine's
program. We have to be the Tacoma campus, that has a motto and values. So, I said, we need to
look at historical black colleges to find a motto. So, the students found the motto, enter to learn,
depart to serve, which is the motto of Bethune Cookman College in Florida. The students really
liked it, and they thought it was really good, so we said that that was going to be our thing.
Another student group that we had, we talked about values. And we went back to the whole
Chinese Maoism thing when they were trying to change people's minds, and they put things all
over the buildings, In the 60's, signs and things like that were the ways that you got people to
shift their programming. I said, we need four words to put all over the campus, so when people

35

come in, they understand who we are and what we're about and what we want to do. So that's
where the inclusivity, hospitality, and reciprocity came in; we dialogued about what we wanted
to do and what we wanted it to feel like. It's real because it came out of the students.
Then I said to them, this is my little pet peeve, I hate the geoduck, I don't just hate it because it's
embarrassing, I hate it because I think telling people to let it all hang out is irresponsible. I said,
if we're going to be a branch campus, we need our own emblem, we need our own motto. The
students looked at a whole bunch of symbols, we all talked about it, and we came up with the
Sankofa. The Sankofa bird is a Ghanaian symbol which means go back and fetch it, if you want
to move forward, you've got to know your history, you've got to know your past. That's how the
Sankofa symbol came up, from the students saying what they needed to have in order for them to
be successful, for them to feel good.
We did the same thing with the design of the building. I had students research paint colors, and
what colors were soothing for people who were commuter students. Know who your students
are; we have students who are in cars, who drive for an hour to get to class or sometimes longer.
So, what was the environment they needed to come in to, to make them feel good? That was the
question we gave to the students, and they ended up coming up with earth colors so it would feel
like a womb, and a color scheme with little pieces of lapis to remind us that there's a sky.
We researched the carpet, what carpet can you lay on that doesn't give you poison? Because
people were being poisoned by the carpet in the library building. There was that one floor in the
library where every single woman, Mary [Nelson], Maxine, somebody else...five of them all got
cancer. A study went out later that some of the glue that was used in the early days had a toxicity.
So, we researched carpets; in fact, I had a five-hour conversation with Mr. [Mayer], convincing
him that we needed to spend fifty thousand dollars more, it may even have been five hundred
thousand dollars. it was huge, the difference between the carpets that they were going to put in
and the carpet that the students wanted to put in. And we talked and presented him our data. He
eventually put in the carpet we wanted, even though it cost him more money.
Students as subject is something I carried over to my work I do with [Lumina], Achieving the
Dream. They wanted me to do a student panels, I said, I'm tired of doing student panels, it's
voyeuristic. Students get up and they say, I was lost, and now I've been found by my college or
by my class or something. No, the students need to be collaborators, and not objects, so now at
Achieving the Dream, what they do is pick what I call ‘embedded’ students. The colleges send
in student applications. We pick about five or six of them, and they go to every conference
workshop they are interested in. They're conference participants, and at the end, they participate
in a panel about what they heard, what they saw, and what works for them. That's how you get
diversity and inclusivity.
They were able to say to all of these people doing data, data, data, data...Data's fine, but you've
got to understand when you come at us with data, you have to understand our experience with
data as well as your experiences. As one girl said, as an undocumented person, I have no number.
Numbers have always been used to keep me from having a number. One of the guys who's an excon said, I had a number, and that dehumanized me. When I hear people doing statistics, I think
back to when I was just number so-and-so. The Native American; I had a really nice diverse
team, the Native American woman said, data basically defines my identity, fractions define my
identity, whether I’m three fourths or two fourths, define whether I can get to be from my people

36

or not. We have had negative life experiences with data, we want you to do data-based evidence,
but when you come to us with it, know who we are, see me, see us.
I think the Who had the answer to that question, when Tommy the little pinball guy, said, see me,
hear me, feel me. I think that that's the only way diversity and inclusivity is going to work, is that
we see each other beyond the single story. We look each other as a single story, and that's the
only thing we see. We don't see the multiplicities; we don't see the multiple stories. Until we do,
we're never going to be able, either at Evergreen or in the world, be able to deal with diversity.
Or inclusivity, or respect. When I look at George [Bridges], I have to see a little man with a
bowtie whose wife lives in Seattle, what's that mean? What's going on? Who is this man who
was so passionate about justice systems and stuff like that, who's never offered to come teach a
class at Gateways? But I can't label him, you know...
RC: I think you need to invite him out to your program.
WJH: We've invited him, we will do it again, and this time I’ll send a student. I think he's trying;
I saw the little clambake...That was great, people really got together. I see him as trying to do
something in the right direction, but you have to understand multiplicity. When I look at my
Black student, I say, she is black, she's an athlete, what does that mean? She grew up in San
Diego, what does that mean? Or her mama's white and her daddy's black, and her daddy was a
Rolling Stone, what does that mean? She's in a heterosexual relationship on a campus that
basically does not value heterosexual relationships; she's a minority in that way and feels it.
What does that mean? All those things that we were talking about, about reaching out to our
students, we've got to realize the composites that they have. Also, their wealth, I've been using
that cultural wealth thing of [Tara J.] Yosso, a Latina professor out of California, who says we've
got to stop looking at cultural trauma. I mean, Joy [Leary's] work is good about trauma, but
we've got to look at the wealth; what they're bringing to us, and then build our curriculums on the
wealth, not on the deficits.
RC: Right, and as a community at Evergreen, we do have some wonderful successes and a strong
legacy, so rather than reinforcing the fear-based model or what you said earlier on, the
measurements model, [we need] to come into a place where we're honoring our students for their
passions, their successes, their failures, their opportunities to transform and change and grow.
And as you said about yourself, I am a lifelong learner, scholar, educator, and untold storyteller.
Maybe in telling our stories we have to think about what it means to be defined as an untold
storyteller, what does that mean in terms of who we are, our identity, and grapple with these
issues?
WJH: Right, right, and that's why I think this project is so good, because you're telling the untold
stories. My quote in my email says, we will never know history until it's told by the lion as well
as the hunter. It's the untold stories that we need, otherwise we get Donald Trump, which is just
glaring to me.
RC: Yeah, it's a cabaret show, a dangerous one. The way you described yourself as the untold
storyteller, that's sort of the foundation of all this work that I think is fascinating.
WJH: And that's why I'm really excited that you're the one that's interviewing me, because your
feedback from your lens, the dialogue we're having from your lens, is a beautiful way of

37

capsulizing that. Or imagining that. We're getting close to 5:30. I have to do debriefing with
Mom; she's got a little bit of dementia and wants attention, rightly so, because I would want that
too if I was 96. But this has been really, really, really fun.
RC: Really great.
WJH: And I'm really looking forward to our next thing, and I hope didn't blather so much.
RC: No, it was wonderful! I'm going to go ahead and stop the tape now.

Joye Hardiman
INTERVIEW 2: Parts 1-2
October 2016
Focus: Joye’s Work on the Tacoma Campus
Interviewed by Mingxia Li (with Rebecca Chamberlain)
The Evergreen State College Oral History Project
Transcribed by Cleo Li-Schwartz;
First edit by Mingxia Li/Zhang Er 11/28/2016
Second edit and formatting: R.A. Chamberlain
(Started Dec. 2016--still in process. Formatting and editing of pp. 1-7 done.)
Final editing and formatting – W. Joye Hardiman June 2023
Working from audio files.
Zhang Er: Good morning, Dr. Hardiman
WJH: Good morning, Zhang Er, how are you?
ZE: I’m good; I’m good.
WJH: I’m so glad.
ZE: Everybody’s here. Rebecca Chamberlain, Dr. Joye Hardiman and Mingxia Lee are here for
the second interview of Dr. Hardiman on the oral history of Evergreen State College. Last week
we mainly focused on your early years: how you came to Evergreen, your upbringing, what led
you to choose a road as educator in Evergreen style. Today I would like to open the conversation
with how this idea of the Tacoma campus came to be and how did you get involved. Particularly,
I know Dr. Maxine Mims is one of the early founding mothers of the Tacoma campus.

38

WJH: Right.
ME: Tell us all the scoops, all the angles, and how it’s come to be, and the curricula designs, the
building designs, the underlying thought behind it, so you want to talk about is great. We will
leave that record for future Evergreen/Tacoma students and the Evergreen learning community in
general.
WJH: Okay, let me figure out where to start. Let me start chronologically and then maybe I’ll
end up thematically. I’m not going exactly give the years because I don’t quite remember them
all, but essentially the Tacoma campus started at Brown Star Grill, a bar on Martin Luther King
that was kind of like a juke joint where everybody hung out. It was like Pascal’s in Atlanta where
you got the politicians coming in. You had Martin Luther King coming in; you had the president
of Morehouse coming in; you had street people coming in; you had streetwalkers coming in; you
had everybody; it was a mixing point.
Maxine was in Brown Star Grill one night and she heard these women talking about the fact that
Evergreen State College had just opened; it was in Olympia and here again was an example of
the urban community being forgotten and erased because here was this campus on a 1000 acres
of Evergreen trees that basically hippies were gonna run around; in the meantime, the urban
community wasn’t being served. One of the women called out Maxine’s name actually, ‘Yeah, I
heard this Maxine Mims, who used to a principal in Seattle, is going to be teaching there.’ They
went into the whole notion of sell out and people who get into positions and don’t give back.
Maxine turned around, went up to them and said, ‘I’m Maxine Mims and if you’re serious about
education I’ll teach you. You come to my house at 6 to 8 in the morning and 6 to 8 at night. I’ll
put you on an individual contract and you will go to college.’
That’s how the concept and the ideas started around her dining room table when she was living
on Prospect Street, right down the street, off of Sixth Avenue. This was her community; she
lived in the community. That was really critically important about the campus: that everybody
who initially was involved all lived in the community. WE knew who they were; they knew who
the churches were; they knew how to do recruiting because they were part of the fabric of the
community.
Maxine started meeting people at her house and she started teaching. She was living next to
Betsy Diffendal because Betsy and her had done work in Washington, DC. when Maxine had a
job with the Women’s Bureau under Libby Kunz and Betsy was her researcher in the same area.
When the class got too big for Maxine’s kitchen table — which was like four people — it moved
over to Betsy’s dining room table when they were like eight people. It was still just a kind of
cluster of people on individual contracts. Maxine saw that this indicated a community need, so
she decided to go back and get her Ph. D. The Tacoma concept was her Ph. D.
She went to Union graduate school when it was first kind of coming together. She interviewed
16 of the students that she had under independent contract and came up with five principles that
she believed were crucial for the education of urban black adults. If I can remember them
correctly, the first was you had to understand something about your history, understand

39

something about those things that have been imposed upon you as well as those things you have
imposed upon others. It was meant to know yourself, your own culture.
The second principle was to know the culture of the other. It’s very important to understand that
we’re living in a western culture and what that culture was all about: along with that history, and
what was really the true history of that culture. The first one was so you could externalize the
blame and the second one was to gain some strategies and techniques for negotiation. Once you
realized what your purpose was the third step was you basically had to come together and
develop some power base. The fourth step was once you developed a powerbase and you had
given people tools so they could keep the powerbase, you could into an allyship, the fourth step.
Only when you had something in your hand, could you go in, negotiate and form allies with
other cultures and other people once you had your stuff together.
Some place in there you had to realize that a college degree wasn’t worth anything unless it
served the community; it’s bigger than yourself. A B.A. degree without destination or purpose
wasn’t any good and the fifth principle was that you had to realize in your community that could
think like Plato, paint like Picasso, and think like Einstein or something else like that. Looking at
the giftedness of your community. It was very familiar. So it was first know yourself, know the
other; form coalitions around mutually shared interests, realize that degree is a communal thing
and it has obligations for the community and don’t get arrogant in your wisdom [knowledge,
wisdom is knowledge correctly applied] because the community still has wisdom. Those were
the five principles she developed as a result of her Ph. D work which consisted of the interviews
with these people. After the Ph. D she kept doing the Tacoma campus.
ML: Which Year was this?
WJH: I came in ’75 we must be talking ‘76/’77; she had her degree by the time Salmh was born;
Salmh was born in 1980; it was my early years there. It must have been ‘76/’77 because she
hadn’t started it when I first came and then she started shortly after I came. She must have had
people start coming to her table around ’75; she must have started working on her doctoral
process around ‘76/’77. We used to meet at the Salvation Army when it was a nightclub; right
across the alley used to be the places where the homeless shelters used to be a little hotel that
went with the nightclub. She would meet some of the guys in the nightclub to do their one-toone; we’re talking about that period, I think.
My involvement started at the conceptual level when I was the road dog to her when she was
going around to all these different places. We’d drive to the seminars, and I’d just sit in the back
and listen. At that point I don’t think anybody knew the community demand. What happened is
that first she started off with the 4 women from Brown’s, then people from the Urban League,
then people who worked from the Tacoma Port Authority. Then random people who were in the
community who had been telling people that they had degrees and they didn’t have degrees.
They would sneak to her house at night, nobody would know and then they’d have their degree;
they were the kind of people who were in civil service management. There were also a couple of
street guys (ex-cons and people like that, ex-felons); it was a real mixture and she liked mixing
them all together.
I don’t know who our first military man was, but the program grew exponentially because of the
Masons and the Army. The G.I. Bill was still going, and I think it was gonna end in ’80 or ‘84. A
40

lot of the guys who had been putting off going to college, once they saw it going to end, decided
they needed to enroll. They wanted the money, and they could get the degree for advancement.
Many of these guys belonged to the Masons; they were a natural recruiting agent by word of
mouth because if the Worshipful Master told all the other people they needed to get degrees, they
were gonna get degrees. It is like the Asian culture where the elder says you do it and you do it.
That happened both with the Masons as well as with the Army because we were getting all these
guys who were Command Sergeant Majors, and they would bring in their troops.
In addition to the Masons and the Army, we got the Post Office. We started at Maxine’s and
Betsy’s houses and then we moved to the [Puyallup tribal Center, then to the Asian Community
Center, then to Tacoma Community House which was kind of a refugee center because it started
getting bigger.
At that point Maxine was still doing it by herself, but she was very smart because she invited
Charlie McCann down to do lectures and he was the president at the time. He knew about it and
kind of liked it. She also invited Susan Smith, the head of the library, to come down. She only
invited the heads of departments and the president. Llynn DeDannan was the dean at the time.
She was basically approving all these contracts. Everybody kind of knew what she was doing,
kind of.
After we left the Tacoma Community House, we moved down to the OIC Building which was a
building downtown that Maxine had some affiliation with; they asked her to close out the
building. The agency closed and they had a nine-month lease. They asked Maxine if she wanted
the building, and she said yes. We had Sir Edgar [Ware] we used to call him who was a
Command Sergeant Major, if he said something, everything happened. We didn’t have any
computers, so Tony Reynolds, another Sergeant Major and a bunch of guys went to the PX ,
bought computers and brought them to class every day in order for us to learn computers. Some
place in there was the Colored Women’s Club; I’m jumping around. Tacoma Community House,
Colored Women’s Club, OIC . . . Martin Luther King, present location; these were all the
movements. Different groups came at different times.
I officially joined as a faculty in 1980; Betsy and I came over at the same time. Betsy had been
working with Mary Hillaire in Native program helping her to set that up. I think at that point we
both asked to be assigned to Tacoma. All of a sudden people saw all of these black people
graduating, walking across the stage and couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Then
they said Maxine Mims is hiding them in Tacoma. Maxine wanted to continue hiding them, but
she wanted to go off to Goodrich that year for a faculty exchange and Betsy was gonna have to
run. Betsy said she wasn’t gonna pay for it out of her pocket. She went to Olympia and had it
become a budget line. It became line item, and we got our budget in 1982 because I was at the
Colored Women’s Club in 1980 and Salmh was born. The college started paying more attention
then. When the OIC contract ended; we were trying to figure out where to go. Virginia Taylor,
who was known as the Mayor of K Street, demanded that we come to the Hill. Maxine was kind
of liking being downtown — being professional, the suits and all — but Betsy and Virginia
Taylor made the case so strong that we started looking for places up on the Hill.
Virginia helped us locate in the old Comprehensive Health building on 12th and Martin Luther
King. Those were really fun days; we had a very good time. We were first state entity on K
41

Street. There was little city support. There was no police station; there was nothing. In the
beginning the Muslims were our security, the Nation. We knew that if there had been any kind of
incident when we first moved up the Hill, if a student was harassed or something else like that, or
felt intimidated, then it wasn't going to work, and they were going to shut the program down. We
had a student who was enrolled from the Nation of Islam; he overheard the conversation and he
said, ‘You all need security.’ The next thing you know the next day there were two guys there in
their suits and their bow ties. Two of them in the parking lot and two at the front door. The
parking lot people walked the students to the front door. The people stationed at the door opened
it and stood there. They did that for an entire year and a half until eventually the police decided
to move to K Street. They opened a police station, and it became a little bit ‘safer’ for everybody.
We also decriminalized the neighborhood. Some of our retired military guys were parole
officers. They had two bars on Martin Luther King other than the good one [Brown Star Grill]
where people hung out. There was the [Shub Dub], and that was a place where you get your
heroin, and there was a Bluebird, and that's where you get your weed. Maxine would have the
guys who were parole officers go and have lunch in these places. All of a sudden, the places got
real empty; these guys who were buying couldn’t be in there because they’d be breaking their
parole. We were able basically took over the street. Not quite like “The Magnificent Seven” or
anything like that, coming over the horizon. But the good people came to reclaim the
community, a business incubator moved in.
There had just been a major shoot-out about a year before we kind of moved in. Ash Street, it
was the hood versus the military. It was also racial thing. There was a lot of shootings, so people
were really afraid of the Hill. What Virginia said to us was, ‘I want you to help reclaim the Hill; I
want you to help bring our community back to being.’ That was our unspoken mission and raison
d’être in terms of how we did things. We brought in security for the people; we kind of cleaned
up as a place of destination for people who wanted to do business and we brought in foot traffic
so little businesses could come up in some way.
When we moved up there, we were also dealing with external threats. The University of
Washington announced it was going to open a branch campus [in Tacoma]. Everybody [in
Olympia] was terrified. Patrick was running around, ‘Oh, you’re gonna swallowed by the U.
Maybe you need to think about coming to campus.’ That led to a period that got really kind of
funky. We did not have a good relationship with the provost at that time. He really wanted to
close the campus down because it didn’t fit his model. Patrick wanted us to be more like
something else, more like Stonybrook where he had come from. Patrick brought in a team of
evaluators that were supposedly going to evaluate whether or not we had enough intellectual
rigor and whether or not we were a valid program and whether or not the college should continue
to make an investment. He brought in Angela [Gilliam]because he thought Angela could match
Maxine; he wanted to get somebody that had that kind presence and he also brought in a woman
named Charshee McIntyre, who had been his student at Stonybrook. She was married to a guy
named Ken McIntyre, a jazz musician. She had been involved with the Newport Jazz Festival
and that kind of thing. Also, a gentlemen named Jake Carruthers from Northeast Illinois
University’s Center for Inner City Studies.
Well, it turns out that both Charshee and Jake belonged to an organization I also belonged to
which was the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations; Jake, in fact, went on
to be the president of it. They were my friends and who all of a sudden said, ‘We’re gonna come
42

and evaluate you.’ I said, ‘Okay cool, but I’m not gonna tell anybody that I know you.’ They
came in and, ‘Whoa, this guy is gunning for you; he told us that he wanted us that he wanted us
to look for this, this and this.’ So, of course they said, ‘No, those things don’t exist; this is a highquality program. It’s serving the community; it has rigor and standing. We recommend not only
that it continue, but that it be supported.’
RC: I just wanted to clarify, that was Patrick Hill.
WJH: That was Patrick Hill, yeah, Patrick Hill.
ML The provost?
WJH: That was Patrick Hill, the Provost during that time.
There was a question in here about Joe Orlando; he was part of that same story about the same
time. [inaudible] Remember when I said last time that anybody that was my friend was fired?
Well, Joe was my friend. What happen was that Joe was really supportive of Tacoma, so he
became involved and part of the drama. Anything Joe liked Patrick didn’t like, whether it was
Tacoma or different things. That was the nature of their particular dance. Patrick was Provost
before Joe was president and that was a difficulty; that should never have happened. A school
should never hire a Provost and allow him to run the school like a president because you don’t
have [a functioning] president . . . I think Richard Schwartz was acting president and he was
distant, so Patrick became president and Provost. When the new president came in, he was not
willing to give up that power that he had, especially to someone who he thought didn’t have the
intellectual standing that he did. Those early years were interesting because we had to deal with
Patrick and to consistently prove that we were viable and legitimate. We had to fight off — the
hordes are coming; the hordes are coming — this whole panic on campus about the University of
Washington.
We decided to work on our niche and to say the U is the U and it can offer all those kinds of
things, but we can have a clear community support orientation; we can also have a clear
commitment to raise our own, to nurture our faculty and staff within ourselves . . . as Virginia
said, “To be the beacon on the Hill.” That was our niche.
Just to make sure that we had students coming in, did a partnership Bridge with Tacoma
Community College which was always a rough and rocky one, but ultimately in terms of student
success was an excellent 2 + 2 model. TCC did its first two years then we did the last two years.
The fact that it was co-located, so the Bridge students could see the upper division students in the
next room. And the fact that they did lyceum] together they gave them a chance to see who the
faculty were in the upper division.
The upper division became like gods. ‘Oh, you get to work with Zhang Er in two years!’ wow,
wow, yeah! We're going to wear a little science coat, or maybe we're going to do a poem, They
would be like really excited about it, and so that helped retention. Our retention — bridge and
upper division — was probably 90%; of 30 students that would come up every year maybe we
would lose two. That’s because it wouldn’t be a fit or maybe they went to Olympia or something.
This allowed us to hold on in terms of our numbers the University of Washington threat because

43

we had that feeder. We knew we were always gonna have 30 students every Spring coming in;
that was really helpful.
In those early years I can just remember us sitting in Brown Star Grill strategizing; we had an
interesting faculty. Maxine picked the first wave of faculty, and I had the privilege of working
with the next wave. What she did at that time — I see the image of us sitting around the table at
Brown’s where we had our faculty meanings — there was Willie Parsons, an African American
microbiologist, who was totally elegant. He wore gorgeous sweaters, Bill Cosby-kind of
sweaters; before Bill Cosby was a name we’re not supposed to say. You wouldn’t wear his
sweater now because people would say you’re like Bill Cosby, but back then it was cool. He had
these great sweaters, and he was an amazing cook.
Once a year we would go to his house, and he would cook. He was a refugee from the main
campus too; he had been there for a long time. He had been a dean and found it to be not a good
environment for him at all. When we put out the word, once we got the budget line and we were
‘legit’ then we needed faculty in four disciplines. He became the science person when he came to
the campus. Richard Brian was a math person, and he was a founding father. He was a neat
person; he was comfortable in himself. Richard was one of the first people that latched onto
Maxine. He said, ‘I’ll come; I’ll do math. I’ll do ever whatever you want me to.’ She said, ‘Even
though you’re white, I'm going to hire you because you're short, and I think it's really important
with a subject like math, for the students to stand over you and glare down at you, so they won't
intimidated by math. So, there was “Short” Richard, “Magnificent” Willie; there was Betsy (the
social science part); there was Sally Riewald a writing teacher and then Yves Duberglass, from
Haiti, was our media person. Yves had been on the main campus, but he needed to be around
people of color. He was misused and because he was Haitian, they thought he was stupid. He
wasn’t. He felt dishonored in the media area, so when he had a chance to do media in Tacoma. It
was like, “Yeah!” Tacoma was like the underground railroad stop. You went there and you got to
Canada. You got to work in the community with your people, with people that liked you and did
good work.
From the very beginning we had lots of fun; we did really kind of outrageous things. Did I
mention when I brought Maya Angelou . . .?
That was back in the days when there were less restrictions on the way student funds were spent;
students would spend their money in consultation with faculty. In the beginning, the money was
used to enhance their curricular and cultural opportunities. It’s not that way anymore and it’s too
bad. Faculty advisement has been removed and students are removed from access to wisdom,
and guidance on; if you’re going to have a revolution, you need a plan. You just can’t get up
there with a sign, written in pencil, and say, ‘Stop the Olympia convocation because Black Lives
Matter.’ Someone says, ‘What’d you want to do about it?’ ‘I don’t know, just kill white people.’
No, what’s your plan; what’s your action?’ When we were able to work with the students,
[knowledge was constructed], and skills were developed. If you want to have a protest, then
these are the things we have to do, and these are the things you have to think about. We would
have that kind of dialogue for our students all the time. [But back to Maya.]
Our SA [student association] had $5,000 because our retired military students had gone down to
Olympia and fought for Tacoma to have [its own SA budget], so we could have our own money
and its own alumni chapter... there are no other chapters; we are the only chapter. Robert
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[McMurray] went down and we had $5,000. We were sitting around, and I said, ‘We should get
Maya Angelou.’ We talked about it and the students decided that not only were they gonna use
their whole budget on Maya Angelou, but it was just gonna be for the Tacoma campus. It was
not gonna be for everybody. That was when she was $5,000; we brought her to Martin Luther
King — we put a rocking chair in the middle of the room; we got a little Persian rug to put
underneath the chair, a little table and put a cup of tea on it, and a glass of water so she would
feel like she was on her porch in Stamps [Arkansas]. She came and she talked. She was supposed
to talk for an hour, then she found out that Tony Reynolds, one of the students, was from Stamps.
She had him come up and pull up a chair to her chair and she stayed three hours. Just in that
building, just for those 60 students and their kids, which is something they’ll never forget in their
lives. Maya’s never forgotten that either; that’s how she and Maxine became very good friends.
They came back over to my house afterwards and Maya talked about what that experience was
for her.
Since we had money to play with, we could expose our students to [some of the best minds in
African Centered thought). During the time when we were on Martin Luther King, I belonged to
this organization the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. When we had
conferences, I would take students to the conferences, and they became community leaders.
Because the structures were not as tight as they were then in those early days on Martin Luther
King, we had money and we used it to bring in speakers. We brought in John Henrik Clarke; we
brought in Asa Hilliard, Edwin Nichols, Wade Nobles, Len and Rosalind Jeffries and other
scholars from the black pantheon. It was shortly after we brought in John Henrik Clarke that we
had reverse racism charge. This is still all on Martin Luther King. I took directorship in 1990. It
must have been 1990, my first year of administration. This is a story I’ve been telling you about
in terms of the faculty, Brown Star and fighting off the University all happened while Maxine
was the director during that period of the 80s and 90s.
When I met Maxine, she watched me play monopoly and that’s when she told me wanted me to
be her heir apparent. She said she’d never seen anybody play monopoly as cutthroat as I did. I
would get houses and turn Baltic Avenue into slums; people had to pay by the hour. Many parts
of my personality would come out in a monopoly game. When I first got to Olympia I was living
in her house because she offered me a place to stay; it’s in the woods in Shelton. I had just come
from New York, so I thought this was great; I was gonna have an Evergreen experience. I asked
her where the thermostat was, and she handed me axe; I said what, I have to chop wood to put in
the wood stove so the house would be warm? I lived in that house from September to November;
after November it was too dark and too cold and so I moved to Black Lake with Susie Strasser.
Maxine put me through a lot of roles on the campus so I would know them; by the time Maxine
left I was essentially running the school. I had been running summer school and bridge program
for about two years. The first thing that happened when I took it over, was that Maxine spent all
the money. The budget came out in June and when I came in September, there was no money.
She said she had started with no money, so I needed to start with no money. I said you started
around your kitchen table; I have a full-blown school, staff, paper clips; I have such and such.
She said be creative.
By the grace of the guys who would go to the PX and would bring me and the school reams of
paper, we struggled through it until I could figure out how to get some money. ‘Your little kid
has a pencil going to school; you go and take it because you need it at the campus’ Maxine
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trained by fire. During that time, she was a verb, People would say have you been Maxined?”
‘Yeah, I got a scar right here; where did she get you? I never know whether she did this on
purpose or not, whether it was just Maxine being Maxine. I should have known better than to
have her as my first speaker that first year. She was in an interesting position at the time …Have
I told you this?
RC: Well, just keep going.
WJH — okay I’m repeating; I’ll shorten it then. She was on the African American Commission
and the African American Commission that was in negotiation (not friendly) with the gay
community in Seattle because they wanted to pass an ordinance and the African American
Commission wasn’t sure if they were gonna endorse it the way that it was written, so there was a
lot of antagonism going on; it was not a good time. Maxine got up and gave the opening speech,
without us not knowing that one of the young men, who was heavily involved in the gay
community of Seattle, was a student. First of all, she said that she hated seeing black women
smoke because it was like they were sucking on a small white penis. Somebody said something
and she told them to be quiet because they were only a placeholder for the real people who were
supposed to come there. Artee was about to say something, and she told Artee to stop acting like
a silly little white girl.
All of those things were dutifully recorded and within two or three days there was a suit of
reverse racism against the Tacoma campus filed by the student and this committee. I think that
was week three of my being a director. Luckily, and I will praise her to this day, Jane Jarvis was
president. Jane was a very, very smart savvy woman and was not a hysterical woman. She called
the crisis center intervention team in to handle the PR. They sat down with me and told me what
to say if the press came and what to do with all the hate letters, I was getting from Eastern
Washington, from the KKK about this school that was promoting black ugliness. The other
examples of reverse- racism were -John Henrik Clarke was the guest speaker and he did not call
on any of the white kids; John Henrik was blind; he didn’t call on anybody because he couldn’t
see anybody. In fact, he talked to the wall for half of the time before I turned the chair around.
They said that Willie Parsons and Artee were racists because they were teaching a class called
Black Women’s History and they wouldn’t let a White student write a paper about their
Lithuanian grandmother. They were reaching so hard to find some stuff, but it eventually got
dismissed. [Freedom of speech not institution discrimination] Jane kind made it go away.
Back in the early days we had rituals and ceremonies. There used to be parades that would come
down Martin Luther King and part of our job was to be audience because everybody in the
community was in the parade so there was nobody to wave at them. We would come down and
wave at them; that would be our job. Sometimes we would be in front of the school at Ninth
Street then we would run down to Twelfth Street so it would look like they had a big audience.
The parade then led to our graduation ritual. . . the reason why the Tacoma graduates march
before graduation is that it is a recruitment effort. We want to show people in the community that
people who looked like them and who were sitting next to them on the same barstool, or in the
same place were now college graduates. At first when we walked, people used to think we were
a choir because they hadn’t seen people in BA robes, graduation robes; now they think the choirs
are all going to graduation. I think we impacted the community that way.

46

A lot of our rituals came out of Martin Luther King; I created the giveback there. During the
question-and-answer period, people weren’t asking questions, they were just standing up giving
speeches., so that the notion of listening was not real. We said no; we’re gonna take the ritual
from the black church, which is call and response. When the visiting choir comes, we always
give the visiting choir something back. So, we’re gonna do givebacks. When somebody comes
and gives us all of their energy, it is our obligation to give them something back, so that they
leave full when they drive home. That came out of the Martin Luther King site.
What other rituals did we have? The family/community givebacks. It used to be in the old days
— because we used to be small enough — when people graduated, they walked across the stage
and gave back to their community. I think that goes all the way back to Salmh’s graduation. It
was really nice because people would come across and they would thank whoever helped them.
They thanked their husband for cooking the food and watching the babies while he was there for
you. They had like one minute to just give back to anybody who had helped them along the way.
We did givebacks to speakers; we did givebacks at the end of classes to thank everybody in the
class for helping them in their intellectual development and then give back to the community at
the end to reinforce that point that the BA degree doesn’t mean anything unless you
acknowledge that you’re doing it, standing on someone’s shoulders. That really created a
excitement in the family because they’re all waiting for their names to be mentioned or to hear
what the person is going to say; that was a way we could bringing families in.
We realized very early if we didn’t bring the families in it wasn’t gonna work. Richard Brian was
beautiful at that; he would make all these math assignments that would involve family. They
would all get cameras; he would have them go out and take pictures of geometric/ mathematical
shapes in the environment and write about how they were used. You’d take the picture with your
family; you’d put the explanation together with your family; when you found out the answers
you went home and shared it with your family. It was a lot of fun. “
ML: How about the senior presentation is that part of your starting
WJH: Yeah, senior synthesis.” that was under my direction as well as the curriculum structure.
Maxine always had people write an autobiography, so we built on that. My Ph. D is on the
Ancient Egyptian autobiographical tradition and my Ph. D was on the Tacoma campus. I had the
students write their autobiographies from the ancient Egyptian perspective, writings from lessons
learned and wisdom earned from the hills and valleys of your life.2 The goal was to shift their
mind from victims to victors. If they learned something, [and applied their knowledge for the
common good], then they become victors I also decided in consultation there should be
requirements. That’s when research methodology and statistics came in and kind of anchored the
core. In the end we decided we decided we wanted to have a “senior synthesis.” That needed to
be a class itself because the faculty were trying to do so many other things, to add a synthesis
wasn’t gonna work. Because I wanted to teach, the senior synthesis became tied to the director.
That was the class I got to teach and that way I got to know all the students who would come
through.
I think that was a really good thing for students to sit down. They had a choice in writing; look at
their college career and either write a job application which synthesized what they were doing or
a graduate school application essay. It also allowed a final check on their writing. If there were
some writing deficits or something else like that, you could either fix them yourself or you could
47

refer them to some help, but they had to write drafts. Everything that went out from them, had
been proofed and focused. It was very, very effective. My personal opinion is that it worked
much better than the academic statements do, Right now they don’t have a lot relational
guidance; they take a workshop, kind of write it and maybe if they get faculty, they’re lucky.
They’re really all uneven in terms of the writing and because writing at Evergreen is so looseygoosey, it’s really important to have some time where you focus for a second and reflect on what
does this mean and so what.
Mary Hillaire had a great reflective frame. “What did you want to do; what did you do; what did
you learn and so what?’ When they are able to put all that together, then we can really say that
students are leaving with six expectations and the five foci in mind. That was another thing we
did on the Tacoma campus; we didn’t teach to the test. We decoded the vocabulary. We looked
at the NAPSI; we looked at the student satisfaction: what are the words they are using?
Sometimes the words like qualitative literacy — if you’ve never been exposed to those words —
you don’t know whether you were taught it or not. We just made sure that people knew that at
least these were the areas that we were trying to work in. So the senior synthesis I think was an
opportunity missed.
RC: I just want to say I think this was absolutely brilliant. We need you to come up to the main
campus and remind people of this really specific audience that the students are writing to and a
program that allows them to focus and synthesize their learning experiences. It’s really brilliant.
ML: The Tacoma campus right now is still doing it, it's still the director's job. Smith has been
over the years teaching regular classes, doing the director, on top of that he is the one really
synthesizing and holding the bar pretty high, giving them guidelines along the way, asking them
to write a little bit this, a little bit that, as their ideas becoming clearer, to find where their
academic goal is. And then they know how to synthesize their study and direct themselves which
way they need to go. It's really good.
WJH: Yeah, it's a good model. And I think people tried, I think Zhang Er and Gilda, I know
Kabby, went up to Olympia, and said, hey, we're doing it in Tacoma, and it works, why don't you
at least come down and look at it? And Michael didn't want to touch it cause he wanted to be the
one...
RC: This is also the work that you were doing in part with the Washington Center, so some of
this has been documented through the Washington Center and being used for colleges and
universities across the country. People have written about it in really interesting ways. And you,
you've been part of several articles, that talk about several pedagogical practices and the
outcomes of those in terms of diversity and culture and writing and thinking about how to make
learning meaningful to the students. there are pieces of it that we just need to remember and
recall and bring back, rather than reinventing the wheel; it's already been done, well.
WJH: That is a part I think that saddens me. All the emphasis has been on how Olympia can help
Tacoma as opposed to how can Tacoma help Olympia. I think there’s some lessons that have
been learned from the Tacoma campus that would make things so much easier.

48

ML: For the students, when they do the self-evaluation, it is really to look at what they learned:
okay, they learned all these little bits and pieces. When they look at the outcome, when they do
the self-evaluation, they all of a sudden realize, oh, that's what I've been doing! Even though
they've been doing all the work, the final click, it always happens on Week 11.
WJH: Maxine said two things, which I think colored the early part of the Tacoma campus. First,
if not laughter is not coming out of the classroom there’s no learning. Second, you have to teach,
knowing that what you say in class on Tuesday will be repeated in the barbershop on
Wednesday, in the beauty shop on Friday and from the pulpit on Sunday. So, you better make
sure that what you’re saying is true and it’s useful because the community is hungry and wants
the information. Therefore, the curriculum has always been relevant and really shouldn’t be like,
‘Oh, I think my name is Gilda Sheppard, I really love turnips, and I'm going to teach a whole
class on turnips. That doesn't happen. What happens is we're sitting in class today and so-andso's kid gets killed in a gang fight, so next quarter we're going to talk about gang violence in the
community. It is about going where people live and giving them resources and options to live
better. It becomes a loop. If you start with an autobiography and you end with a senior synthesis.
You begin with the autobiography of your personal life, you end with an articulation of your
academic life.
ML: Specifically, do you remember where the concept of RICH and the slogan of "enter to learn,
depart to serve" come from?
WJH: [ The bridge alumni came up with RICH. It’s Tacoma’s values -reciprocity inclusivity
civility and hospitality]. [the slogan came] when we were trying to defend the reverse racism
charges. We realized that we could be picked off because people didn’t know what we stood for
and that needed to be clear; we needed to state our values. In terms of the motto, I despised the
Evergreen motto – ‘let it all hang out’; I think that was a horrible thing to say to young people.
Then we wonder why they come to school in pajamas. The gooey duck looks like a limp phallus;
it looks like a school founded by 18 men, who obviously couldn’t get it up.. It's horrible. So, one
of the first things we said is we need a new motto; we needed a motto for the Tacoma campus
and we need a new mascot. Students got together and did some research. At that time we were
trying to model ourselves after historically black colleges. We were trying to figure out what
were those things that they have that made them so successful; that’s why we have lyceums.
Lyceum is modeled after the convocations at Morehouse, where the president gets up and he says
something wise to everybody and all the guys feel 'inspired'. That's a big thing in historical black
colleges, to bring everybody together once a week. So, we brought that in.
And then someone found the motto from Bethune Cookman College, and that motto is "enter to
learn, and depart to serve". And so, they decided to adopt that as our motto because it was a clear
indication of what we believed in and it was also an articulation of Maxine’s fourth principle
about a BA degree. and it went along with Evergreen’s social justice kind of thing. We decided
we were gonna adopt the Sankofa bird as the emblem because it has to do with the academic
curriculum and direction which is in order to move forward, you got to look backwards. You’ve
got to understand where you came from if you want to understand where you’re going. It was a
way of defining our ourselves. Again, it was the niche; we needed a brand. The woman who
worked with the students was a friend of mine, who was an advertising person; I basically said,
‘Judith, we need a brand.’ We need to put it on sweatshirts, so people were very clear who we
are, and it has to be inclusive.
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ML: It's interesting that you use the word brand because that's exactly what we're talking at
faculty meeting this Tuesday, because our student enrollment reached a new low. It's 140.
Hardiman: Mmhmm, okay.
ML: So, 60 down from our peak. Dr. Sheppard was suggesting, maybe we need our brand, and
then she said, I hate the word brand, it sounds so capitalist, but we need to somehow reach out to
our community with the brand that fit the contemporary, current need of the community.
WJH: What y’all really need is to get back into the community. One of the things I said in the
very beginning, all of us lived in the community and right now none of you live in the
community. Tyrus Smith is the closest but he’s Spanaway not Tacoma, that’s completely another
area. People need to know you. That’s how the recruitment happened. Even if you did a poetry
reading in Tacoma as well as Seattle, people go, ‘Oh, Zhang Er; she’s at Evergreen.’ You can
sell it . . . one of the things about Tacoma — and it’s why everyone loves it — it’s all about
relationships. You have to have a relationship with the community and then the community will
ML: Yes, right now our students are coming from different counties and Seattle and Olympia
WJH: My lived experience tells me that it’s more than . . . when Gilda first came down, she
brought a whole bunch of people down from Seattle Central because they knew her name.
ZE: We need to think about it; how do we define community nowadays? With computer, with
Internet, how do we define community?
WJH: I talked about all the different changes, and now we're in another change. I talked about
going from post office guys to Masons, now we were getting young art political activist kind of
people. We had church ladies, so I mean they come in in waves, and so you've got some new
waves. And so, where is the next wave that will come as you define what community means now.
Because if it's a school with a community base, who's your community?
ML: I think that's the deeper question; we need to think. And of course, you know the direct or
obvious factor is TCC is becoming a four-year school Quite a few regional community colleges
are become four years, so, our original student body doesn't come in anymore. So, at this point,
who are our communities? …What other things in terms of the curriculum you designed that you
think it's crucial for the school's success? And also, I would like to ask specifically about the
building.
WJH: I may have to come back to that at the end . . . Other things critical for students’ success . .
. I’m just going through my checklist in my head. The Tacoma campus has always incorporated
high impact practices.’ We may want to look at that a little bit more. For example, internships —
never a very large part of things — but with people right now wanting to be job-directed and
things like that; it maybe. . . I’m thinking right now; there’s a man who was a military guy and he
has a whole bunch of health workers who go into people’s houses and do cleaning, elder care and
stuff like that. If he could be given a program, some sort of partnership. ..I’m still thinking of that
question about you get people and how you find alliances.. In terms high impact practices,
learning communities, we do that, active pedagogy; we do that. In terms of service learning we
do that, the health fair and things like that, different projects. But Internships overseas, hmm?

50

ML: Community fair? Did you start that?
WJH: Willie and I started the Spring Community Fair and that was our way of giving back to the
community. One of the dictates of the Washington Center is that all learning needs to be public.
So as soon as I would learn something at Washington Center I would come back and apply it in
Tacoma. It was a way of serving the community and it was also a way of getting the community
to come in, recruitment. That’s another thing that has been to your disadvantage.
The building used to be available for community use, which was a marvelous way for people to
know about the campus, and to come and see what they were doing. I understand the buildings
closed on Saturdays and Sundays now. It used to be that community was flowing in and out; now
it’s mainly just school. Are you still having community groups meet there a lot?
ML: I think so. I think it is a budget issue. I don't think Sunday it's open, but the rest of the week,
even Sunday and Saturday, some groups still have access.
WJH: I’m gonna have to mull over that community question about what that can be done, so let
me just go to the building. This requires some new thought. I had four goals when I took over
leadership of the campus. One was to move us from a building to a block. I didn’t want us to be
in a storefront anymore; I wanted us to have our own building. It was always someone else’s
building; I wanted something that was designed from top to bottom by us for us. Two I wanted to
develop an organizational structure that was value based, collaborative and not based on a
charismatic leader. No matter who the leader was, an infra-structure should be in place where the
school will function either in spite of or because of. Three, I wanted to graduate over 500 African
Americans and four [I wanted to set up a technology corridor on the Hill]. The big one I feel
really good about was the infrastructure. I feel really good about the infrastructure. I feel very
good about how we set it up as a value-based structure and with a dictate that would help it
always maintain itself. And I feel good about the faculty and staff I recruited.
ML: I’m so glad!
WJH: Working on the infrastructure was challenging, rewarding and I learned a lot, but the
building was the most fun. We had been asking for a building for a long time; Les wanted to
make that building his legacy. He really negotiated with the board of trustees and the legislature
to give us the capital funds to design and lease a building. The lease process was really
interesting. Three people came up with designs for different sites that they owned. Mr. Mayer
was the most professional; he came with one of those architectural things that had 20 pages and
owned the back half of building and the whole lot. We decided we would go with Mr. Mayer.
We would have great conversations with he and I; because he was a Holocaust survivor, but he
was also a slum landlord. He made a lot of money over on the eastside on Salishan, where the
Section 8 housing is; he felt like he needed to give back. We used to have great fun because he
didn’t like Evergreen. He didn’t like working with Walter, and he didn’t like working with
Evergreen. He used to come in my office, just sit, complain, and complain. I’d just sit and listen
because I knew we wanted the building and we wanted him to like us, but he used to come all the
time. That was cool because when we said to him, we wanted the students to be involved in the
building he said, ‘Oh okay, this is interesting; sure, let the students be involved.’

51

He didn’t realize it was gonna cost him much more money because the students found out that
some of the products, he wanted to use were carcinogenic. When the students found out they
were like, ‘Oh no, he’s not gonna kill us.’ They came up with an alternative and poor Walter had
to go negotiate with him about the floor that was gonna cost $500,000 more than it was supposed
to be.
ML: $500,000 dollars?
WJH; Yup or maybe $50,000, whatever it was, it was a lot. There’s a glue that they used in the
library building and there was this one hallway where all these people were getting cancer; they
found out they were being poisoned by the carpet. There’s another kind of glue you can use, but
you have to let it dry for 48 hours. You have to lay it and get these huge fans to dry it. That’s
where the money comes in. The students made the proposal, drew it up, presented it and then he
changed it.
When we were looking at the original design, I had just finished reading a book called The
Temple of Man by Schwaller de Lubicz. It talked about how the temples in the Nile Valley were
all anthropomorphic. The notion “man know thyself” was an underlying kind of thing and by
studying the universals, you understand man/woman (the person). ..We worked with Mr. Mayer
and the architects . . . the building is really the shape of a human being .. When you walk into the
building you’re walking into the womb. We put the desk there so you could be greeted because
you have to know where the entrance is. The work I did with the Washington Center in
evaluating different colleges, trying to see whether their environments were inclusive or
exclusive, I found most of them were exclusive. You couldn’t find anybody; you didn’t where
the heart was; you didn’t know where the center was; you didn’t know where the kitchen was;
you didn’t know where the front door was. Like at Highline, they ask me why students are
having difficulty? They’re having difficulty because they’re walking around in circles because of
the way the buildings are situated. There is no front door. You need to do signages, so people
know where they can move. We didn’t want that to happen at Tacoma; when you walk in you
should be greeted warmly. ‘Glad you’re here.’
The lyceum room becomes the chest cavity — the heart, the pump — and the faculty offices on
either side become the arms. It’s the faculty that assist you by giving you tools. The stage
becomes the pineal gland where knowledge is integrated; in ancient Egypt it was called the holy
of holies. That’s where the students would present their senior synthesis papers because they
could only go to the holy of holies once they had gone through the work. They couldn’t get up on
the stage until they had done the work in the classrooms; if you go to the other end of the
building, you go to the legs which are the classrooms. Those are the spaces that move you to
where you need to go. We structured it so that the Bridge room was next to the Upper Division
room so there could be that interaction and so that Bridge students could see their future in front
of them.
We knew we had to create some type of living room, some type of dining room and some type of
kitchen. In the early days before things got regulated, we had the best food. We would have it
catered by this man — I can’t remember his name — I think it was Eddie [Hill]; he was also the
person who catered for the military base. He would bring us the food from the officer’s club after
the officers would eat from 5 PM to 6 PM. He would come over at 7:30 and sometimes we’d
have steaks. We’d have these little filer mignons, mashed potatoes, and peas. It was the best
52

food; it was so good. Then they said we had to have food from the state, and that we couldn’t
have outside vendors; that’s when the vending machines got put in. In the beginning Eddie
would just pull up and people would just eat and eat. We did have other vendors. Once we had
an Indian vendor with great Indian curry food; We [ate together] we did this so that was people
could feel at home.
We were particularly concerned about driving long distances. Another group of students worked
on a group contract looking at colors and trying to find out what were the best colors that you
could use as opposed to that puke green that they did in the new library. They should have just
let us design it; that building is so ugly. We knew that students are coming from a long distance,
so we want colors to be warm. That’s why the earth tones, the mauves, touches of blue — I
thought there was some blue some place — those were the colors that we got because it would
make people feel good.
Willie, Laurie Arnold, Walter, and I had great fun; we got a chance to go and pick out all the
furniture. We would get in the car, go up to Seattle and sit in chairs all day to pick them out. At
first, they were gonna give us chairs with desks. Have you seen our students? These are not
tiny/petite people. We needed tables and we had to figure out what kind of chairs would allow
people to spread out, so we sat in chairs, and we took little swatches of carpet home, threw things
on them so we could figure out what carpet could deal with coffee stains and red pop. We made a
decision that got picked up in the other buildings in Olympia which I think is a smart thing is to
get the carpet squares as opposed to rolls. We were the first to do that because if you spill
something you just replace a square; so, it was kid friendly. That was another thing that kind of
characterized Martin Luther King in the early days there were lots of kids.
Once again state came down. There were all sorts of liabilities about having kids around. We
could have one or two if they were anchored to the parent. However, the idea of having a [womb
to tomb] a wasn’t going to work, which then also cut off our access to the Clubhouse, which was
always problematic and ended up being a little fatal, but it was still a good idea.
I had made a promise to one of our graduates, Michelle Boucree, who made her transition too
early and had worked at the Urban League with Laurie Arnold, that Evergreen would help
establish a technology corridor that would bring technology to the Hilltop community. To that
end I actively sought and brought to that community a woman who was a technological genius
named Luversa Sullivan. Luversa was brilliant, an amazing teacher. The kids thar she taught at
the Clubhouse are getting master’s and PhD, from M.I.T. She and Willie had a Girl’s Math and
Science program. One of the girls now is a translator in Arabic; she works for the Army and does
the stuff for science and technology, incredible work. I got in a lot of trouble with Evergreen
because Luversa had strong respect from MIT Microsoft and Intel; they wanted to give her lots
of money for the Clubhouse that could have gone to Evergreen, Evergreen thought.
Our Clubhouse kids were the only brown and black kids invited to Microsoft’s big Youth Fair
where they bring in kids from all these private schools from around the region. We had to figure
out how to get clothes for our so our kids could wear clothes without holes in them. Microsoft
and all these people kept asking Luversa to apply for grants. Evergreen didn’t want Laversa to
apply for grants because they wanted the money to go other things; and they didn’t want two
applications coming in. Luversa was committed to her kids; she was not compliant. She ended up
violating state laws, like having raffles for kids. it got really bad, and I got yelled at; she got
53

yelled at. She paid a fine and people said I was a bad manager because I let friendship get in the
way of procedure and orders. It’s a period of time I reflect upon and think that I might have done
it a little differently knowing what I know now. Hindsight is always knowledge. I could have
been stronger, But I felt like I had to defend her because I had brought her, and I knew she was
doing for the community was generational and transformative. [We did great work, but I wish it
had not been so hard.]
Once we moved into a new building, I ended up getting a series of executive assistants who
would get into major fights with Luversa because they felt like their job was to tell her what to
do. Luversa was from Kansas City [MO, and no white person was gonna tell her what to do. You
could ask but you don’t tell dark-skinned girls from Kansas City what to do. She was darkskinned, in technology from Kansas; so, she was a fighter. Every time one of my administrative
assistants would leave to get another job, I would get a whistleblower thing on me about
something I had done with Laversa or Laversa had done. In my last year Laversa and I had
become an annoyance to Evergreen. it was like we were taking up too much energy. [Every time
I asked for about grants or technology, the answer was no] That’s ultimately when I decided it
was time for me to stop. [the fight was impacting my physical and mental health]. I’m committed
to community; I’m not a compliant person. It was a choice between community and compliance;
I had to go with community. So, I went to Olympia and became engaged in both the Washington
Center community and Gateways community because I could do my community work there; at
least I know the laws of the prison. I’m really clear about those; I cannot be noncompliant about
that…
All of that was involved in the building and how we got our technology vision. I think we did in
some ways introduce a technology corridor to the Hilltop and the Clubhouse is still going. M.I.T.
is still taking two Clubhouse kids a year. The young woman, who was Luversa protégé and who
is getting her doctorate at MIT, is also the head of the Black Lives Matter movement in Tacoma.
The Club House Kids are the cause of them re-doing the Tacoma Art Museum exhibit on AIDS
because Jeleasa and several other young women had been trained by Laversa. and who Gilda got
them into the Media Literacy; she used to work very closely with the Club House. They went
down to the Tacoma Art Museum and when they saw the opening of the exhibit on AIDS and
they realized that there were only no African American painters represented out of the 30. And
when you look at the population of who had AIDS, that whole black voice is totally silent, not
having an artistic and expression. They talked about it, wrote letters and stuff like that. As a
result of their campaign, TAM pulled the exhibit down; they revamped it before it went national
and now it is representative of the AIDS community. She just got back from South Africa
because they asked her to go to South Africa and talk about how art is used in AIDS education.
This all came out of the technology corridor that we wanted to establish because I had promised
Michelle before she died that we were gonna make that happen. At that time, we were gonna
connect the Urban League Academy, which was where she worked with kids who had been
expelled, with Evergreen.
When we designed the building, all of that was kind of in mind; that’s why the second floor is set
up the way it's set up. Laversa was my teacher as well; she taught me about technology,
troubleshooting and things. I had done a speaking engagement at Plano, TX, the home of Texas
Instruments. Their community college was totally tech; they put a lot of money and Plano is
very, very rich; so they put a lot of money into the community college. All of their disciplines
had labs and I thought that a great idea to have labs. The science people had labs, but the
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humanities people also had lab. The whole room was videos, audios, movies and you could
practice giving birth to a baby. The firemen had buildings they could burn, 15 types of fire. We
couldn’t do all of that on the second floor, but the idea was that it kind of told the story of
learning.
People would sit in a seminar room — we had four seminar rooms; that’s how many we had at
the time — people in the seminar would have an idea (maybe an environmental science idea), go
to the science lab, be able to experiment in the lab, get some hands on, try to test what’s going
on, go to the computer lab, look up research, cite things, explore something they learned in lab or
the seminar. Then go to the multimedia room and put together a PowerPoint or a presentation
and then go to the moot courtroom and practice proposing a policy for a public arena. That was
the sequence of the top floor. The bottom floor is an ancient culture, and the top floor is modern
technology.
Just to kind of round things off I wanted the building to be a teaching tool, both inside and out,
so we wrote a grant; that was a class. Elton Gatewood always came and taught the students grant
writing that they could write for school and other things. He came and helped us write a grant to
Paul Allen to bring artists from South Africa to paint the outside of a building that would depict
the multiple voices of the Hilltop. Again, this constant need to reimage the Hill, build the Hill,
[be the beacon on the Hill].
We did a program called Colors of Community because everything is always student-centered.
The students had to go out into the community, to pick an organization and interview that
organization so that they could write a one blurb description or a two-blurb paragraph about their
organization for the web page on the wall. They had to get a representative symbol; that symbol
was then given to the Ndebele who then created the mosaic from the symbol and taught the
students how to paint it as well.
The students not only found the symbols, but they were learned how to use feather brushes to
paint the symbols on the Wall. The symbols all have different meanings. One of the symbols,
right where the fire alarm is, it a fire truck. That’s because this old guy, a trustee at Highline in
Green River, was there painting; he had heatstroke and kind of fell out. The fire people came and
resurrected him. They looked at the building and said, ‘Where’s our symbol?’, ‘Oh, we’re gonna
put it right there.’ That’s how we got their symbol there because they wanted the symbol on the
wall. I think the symbol I like the best — because it goes to Gateway, well two symbols I like the
best — is one of a little gang person, a stick figure person, who has a little band around his head
and he’s marching toward the sunrise. When we talked to the Bloods and the Crips they said,
‘We are tired of them shoving us in jail and going down. We want some steps of us getting to a
better place,’ so one’s I really like. I also like the one on the side that has a slave ship on the
bottom, a fist and then a book on the top. I interpret that ‘as through knowledge, through study,
through our resistance’ we can move from the slave ship to scholarship; I like that.
The most interesting thing about when you finish doing a painting like that in Ndebele culture,
you have to seal the whole area with dung. There we were running around, trying to find cow
manure in Tacoma in order to come and wash the sidewalk in front of the building with dung.
Finally, somebody knew somebody in Yelm, so we got a ton of shit. People got on their knees,
mixed it with water and we did patterns in shit and sealed it. It was a great project. People came
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by, wanted to paint and said it made them happy. When they were going to the hospital, they’d
walk this way on purpose. They kept saying ‘you have all these ascending things and that makes
me happy That’s the story of the building. Oh. We wanted a big parking lot where we could have
graduation, so we wouldn’t have to rent a place that wasn’t home.
I feel good about my curricular legacy in Tacoma, my pedagogical legacy, and my building
legacy. My administrative . . . I think there are two types of leaders. There are managers and I
think there are visionaries. I’m a great visionary and I work really well when I’ve got a good
secretary who doesn’t report me to the authorities, first off. I don’t know how much of that was
me and how much of that was racism. I suspect in many ways a good percent of it was cultural. .
I think I’ve been reported four times. Every time when I’ve been reported, it’s been by a white
woman. The woman who I did the Ndebele painting with reported me as well. She was really
mad because she wanted to keep going and I said, ‘No; we’re gonna do the Wall and that’s it.’
‘But I can get this grant money and we can do a pavilion and steps and stuff like that.’ I said,
‘No, you’re trying to work on your paycheck; that’s your paycheck. We paid you a lot; we’re not
going to pay you anymore. It’s over.’
She got really mad at me [because I botched potential grantee interview] and filed a 14-point
grievance on me. She said some really crazy things. She said that I had been Salmh’s teacher for
four years and that her degree was bogus. Even though Salmh was never one of my students and
has always worked with other people, she had to end up doing a portfolio of all of her work for
four years at Evergreen and having it checked by an external person to make sure it looked like a
legitimate thing. Salmh was really mad at me at me. ‘Mom, why are they gonna come after me
when they want to get you?’ [ The case was dismissed. I was internally reprimanded, I decided it
was time to regroup. I had accomplished all my administrative goals and it was time to return to
teaching]. I learned that people are not gonna like me all the time. I learned in sad ways that
sometimes people that you love are gonna turn on you; that’s part of life and living. The whole
thing is not to let it make you act of your nature.
Life after Tacoma . . . I do have to say this. It was very hurtful for me to be put in exile when the
new director came in and I became a person non grata. It was hard because people in the
community were aware of it. There was a student at the Evergreen campus who came by, and he
was very upset because he had been in a closet, and he found my picture in a closet with my face
turned to the wall. He had taken the picture because he didn’t want my face to the wall. I said,
‘Oh no, you’ve got take it back. I don’t know how you snuck it out, but you’ve got to take it back
and put me back in the closet with my face to the wall. I don’t want you to get in trouble for
stealing school property or something.’ So that was really hard, but when I got invited back, I felt
— I have to say — like Nelson Mandela getting out of Robben Island prison; I really did. They
invited me back after three or four years. That’s another thing I started, drums after graduation
because Khalifoni was a student at the program and so we did ancestral drums at the end.
Khalifoni was there and he was playing the drums when I came back. I got to walk down the
middle of the aisle and I waved like Nelson Mandela. That was good; that felt really good. It felt
a bit like vindication.
ZR: The faculty loves you; we all love you. It's like at that point with the new director we don't
know how to pick a fight. But when the time came to discuss Lyceum speakers, talking about the
campus, of course, Joye Hardiman is our director, has always been. I think we all love you so
much, and over the years you are one of my heroes.
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WJH: Oh, thank you.
ML: Maybe hero is not the right term, what I would say?
WJH: Friend?
ML: No...
RC: Mentor? Like a mentor?
ML: Yeah, but Joye didn't...we don't have enough chance...
WJH: Yeah, right, cause she came in and I was gone.
ML: But I would say, someone I look up to. Whatever you tell me, I remember. And I model
after you. So, whether you know it or not, I just want to say you're really a spiritual leader for all
of us.
WJH: Well, thank you. Yeah, I didn't...I knew that...I just knew that...I didn't think y'all hated me.
ML: It's one of the reasons I keep on trying to see, maybe we can teach a class even in Olympia.
So, it didn't happen, remember just before you left, we were talking about trying to teach a class
together? Even if we had to go to Olympia.
Hardiman: Yeah, we were, right.
RC: And your legacy is up on the main campus as well, among the faculty and students there. It's
a strong legacy because you've come in, and you've mentored people at multiple junctures on
both campuses, and through the Washington Center. So, you have a national mentorship and
reputation. So, it's big work, and it's important work, and, you know, it leaves its imprint in
people and on people and within the community. It really does, because you know what you're
about. And that's why we're here today.
ML: If you would allow us to tag on, another question is, I know you have a huge side of your
life outside the school in the world, travelling to different parts of the world, Africa particularly.
You are interested in theater, art, and speak French. Would you share as an established faculty
and scholar, tell us how you link your own intellectual or artistic pursuit of outside projects with
your leadership on campus and teaching at Evergreen?
WJH: That’s a good question and also it ties in with the last question. As you were talking, two
words came up that describe a lot of my work and it has to do with resiliency and indigestibility.
I had a research question when I came to Evergreen. I was in the theater and all my friends were
depressed and sad. I wanted to know how you could be an artist and not totally internalize the
rejection because if you’re in theater you can be rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with
you. You’re not the right type; you’re not the right size or as a writer ‘your metaphors are not in
this year.’ So how do you deal with rejection? I posed that question to my students. I said, ‘Okay,
57

y’all are in the theater; how do we survive and not get crazy? How do we survive and not get
depressed?’ We found an answer by the end of the quarter and the answer is we have to have
something outside of theater where you get applause. There has to be something in your life
while you’re in a place [of appreciation.]
That understanding in some ways has in some ways, shaped a lot of my outside work.
Particularly, in terms of my teaching. I worked on themes of resistance and resiliency. In class I
taught with Kabby “Against all Odds for the Black Experience” we looked at what were the
factors that kept you from slapping somebody in the face when you think they’ve done you
wrong. Obviously, I was trying to work through some stuff. my outside research which was a
springboard from my doctoral work. I initially was interested in the African contribution to
world civilization. That got me interested into going to a lot of different places, not just to
Afrika, but to South America, Central America, India as well and some other places... When I
was traveling, it kept coming up; this question of how you sustain yourself. How do we do the
work we do and sustain ourselves and how have our people done it throughout history?
In Brazil, I studied the Afrikan presence and what I ended up finding out was that spirituality
was at the core of every single movement that I look at in Brazil. It wasn’t just in the churches
and the Sisters of the Good Death, which is the oldest organization (they call it fraternal
[sororal]) in the western world with an African base. It started in the 16 th century by Yoruba
priestess women from Angola who by legend were not taken captive but who volunteered
because they didn’t want their people to go without them; that’s what the legend says. When they
arrived in Brazil they had to convert to Catholicism, but decided they weren’t going to adopt
Jesus as their symbol. He died on a cross and that seemed like it was too painful; they adopt
Mary because she just went to sleep and went to heaven. That sounded a lot better; she died a
good death. They became the Sisters of the Good Death; and collected alms for Mary. They were
really collecting money to buy the freedom of enslaved Brazilians and so they were a community
service group. At their core, was traditional African religion; you couldn’t be a Sister of the
Good Death unless you were part of Candomblé́ .
I went up into the hills with the Maroons and the Amazon people to find out how did they sustain
themselves, how were they resistant? They talked about the importance of the spirit and the
circle. My travels since then have been spiritual quests to answer contemporary questions, both
personal and otherwise. My work at Evergreen also got me…traveling through a women
leadership studies lens. I put together some presentations on the commonalities of women from
Ancient Egypt, Senegal, Cuba, Brazil, and Tacoma Evergreen. All of these things became
teaching vehicles I brought back into the classroom, understandings I applied to my life and
career. My travels have always tied into my life and the work I’ve done.
You mention mentoring. I work with ASC AC (Association for the Study of Classical African
civilizations). We have a Northwest chapter and I’m proud to say that we’re one of the better
functioning chapters of this organization .... One of the things I did was teach people how to do
abstracts. We spent a whole year learning how to write abstracts, so that they could present
papers at national conferences. We now have a group of about 20 community scholars in Seattle.
They’re good. I taught them how to do presentation; how to work within time and how to make
your point. Each time I learn something, I teach it in this community as well as in other
communities. Outside of travel, research, and my community work, I build scholars, growing our
own, serving on doctoral committees. … and I have the Washington Center and Achieving the
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Dream. Achieving the Dream is an organization of over 200 two-year colleges, and I am their
student coach for their annual conference.
Every year they get a bunch of students together. The students attend as many workshops as they
can attend. At the end they report out to the plenary whatever their discoveries were. This was
my concept. At first, they just had me be being MC and calling on random students. I said, ‘No,
don’t just bring in students so you can hear them say how marvelous community college is and
how horrible they were until you found them and taught them. Make them real. They bought into
it and now the students come right at the beginning of the conference; I do an orientation with
them for the day. We meet every day and debrief and then they presented their discoveries. That
connects with my real passion about student voices needing to be heard and students needing to
be at the table. We have to stop objectifying students and treating them as subjects.
Whenever I do my workshops at the Washington Center and I’m kind of the person that they
come to when someone wants learning community work, integrated assignment work,
appreciative inquiry and now I’m moving into the area of equity and inclusive excellence. Those
are kind of my areas and I also do curricular stuff. I do a lot of different learning community
stuff, but no matter what I do I always tell them there has to be a student panel or they have to
run their ideas through a student, or a student has to be in the room.
That’s been a consistency in my history in terms of the integration of my schoolwork and my
field work. They feed upon each other. I can’t think of any other school I would rather be at than
Evergreen, intellectually. It's feeds my head with so many different ideas; there’s so many
different points of view. My involvement with the Washington Center . . . every time I go to a
workshop I go and change my syllabus. My Gateways fit into my community service work and
also into notions of resistance. My big question is now how do we keep them from going back?
It feels very, very natural.
I’m doing this work in the Cameroon which I’ really excited about which I want to bring back to
Evergreen... I went to the Cameroon and found it was a major disembarkation site for the slave
trade. They found there over 200 ships that left. I want to organize a field study research team, in
a year and a half, of community scholars, Evergreen scholars to just do some excavation work.
There are things that haven’t been excavated.
We need people who know things about trees, how to look at the moss on a tree and be able to
tell how long that tree was something or other and how to look at the soil; talk to people; collect
stories from people. I don’t know yet what the dimensions are, but it feels like it could be
exciting, an exciting part of history, to be able to write a story and to be able to have Evergreen
as an international consultation on the development of a world cultural site. That’s the latest
thing I am thinking about.
RC: I can see ethnography, and archaeology, and as you're saying botany. And then cultural
studies, and this whole ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork. It sounds very exciting.
WJH: Yeah, doesn't it sound exciting? An, it's got to be interdisciplinary, it's got to be with
people coming from...artists, scientists...

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RC: Excavating the past is a way forward into the future. With the lens of science, and the
perspective of story.
WJH: Right, exactly, exactly, I like that. You're right, the lens of science and the perspective of
story.
ML: mind is swimming...because Cameroon, when you said the word for someone who is in
medical field, immediately that's where all the new diseases come from.
WJH: Really, all the neurodiseases?
ML: No, no, it's a hotspot for, for lots of recognition of new pathogens, and new studies. And
because the region is very poor, it has the lowest health care personnel per population, The World
Health Organization has monitors, almost like a detective, monitoring the diseases arriving.
Cameroon, we have to go there, we have to learn what's happening, why there are so many new
pathogens coming from there. That's one of the hotspots, the other hotspot is like in Southeast
Asia, in, uh, Indonesia. Tropical hot places, where nature receding because of new developments,
humans getting into where nature used to be. Interesting. But then, what do you think about your
theater, Joye?
WJH: My theater?
ML: Yeah, the dream of theater; I know somehow in my mind, you are an artist. And so far,
we've talked a lot about administration and your vision, and would you think learning
community and theater...can theater be a learning community? Why not teaching theater in
Tacoma? Last week you said Maxine said you can't teach theater. But the most successful, at
least from public health point of view, outreach to the community in Africa, is through theater.
Pamphlets, conversations, doesn't help. But they put on a show, everybody comes, everybody
learns about AIDS.
WJH: Right, right.
ML: Theater parades, and theater. I mean, that's the part of outreach. Why would...try to hide
away?
WJH: No, but I don't! I can see it looks like that, but I started out teaching in order to do theater.
Then I did theater in order to do teaching, to do exactly what you're talking about. Then I came
back and did theater as a discipline. Now, my theater has gone to storytelling.
ML: I see...
WJH: Right, right. I feel like I'm doing theater, because when I do my stories, they're very
animated. I use my mime; I use my dance. In terms of story, the Griot tradition is a really critical
one, and so now it's me telling stories, but it's also helping other people to tell their stories, so
that we all become theater. It becomes theater. not so much in a Western sense, but much more in
a collective sense. It totally destroys the fourth wall, there's no fourth wall, it's theater without
walls. I use my techniques when I work with my students, we always end up doing an
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articulation and projection, cause they have such little voices, they just have such little voices. I
mean, they do, they have tiny, tiny voices. And it takes all year to get them to speak in their big
people voice. So, yeah, the theater is still there, and... it’s my creative production, I don’t do
PowerPoint, I do Prezi because I can make it move back and forth, and stuff like that, and...
ML: Very advanced, I don't know how to do that.
WJH: Oh, yeah, it's fun, only locks you into the form, that's the only thing. It locks you into
Prezi, and so you can transport it, but only as a Prezi, so now I'm learning how to take my Prezi
and make them into movies. Because then you can take them around, and you don't need to be
dependent on their technology.
Yeah...I'm just trying to think, is there anything else that I wanted to say? I talked about
Evergreen...you asked about my life since retiring. For the record, I really want to say that I
retired from the job, and not from the work. I'll never retire from the work.
Here is a memorable story about theater, people, student, staff, and presidents and trustees. And
about racism in the world. It still pisses me off, The interaction that Tacoma has had with the
trustees has always been very interesting, particularly categorized by the trustee who asked me if
the students in Tacoma could read. We told them that they [the students] were doing public
health, and they were doing the fairs, and these kinds of things, and she said, oh yeah, but can
they read? So, the next year when we had the school picture taken that was supposed to be in the
catalogue, everybody had a book. We all sat there reading our books for the picture. It was like,
come on, you know! Now That's theater, that's a little piece of theater. My anti-war guerilla
theater stuff comes up when I want to try to say something nasty to somebody but be nice.
And that I think is something that we always have to deal with, with neoliberalism, and people
saying, oh, yay for the good people in Tacoma. But …We're not going to have the same
expectations for them that we have for anybody else, because you are the Tacoma campus. You
and the Indians can be mis-seen. Because it's Tacoma. No, no, its students, it's students who
need to learn, and who need to get jobs, and have life. I just wanted to mention that sometimes
Olympia is a bit on the insulting side. So that's kind of all the notes that I took so far.
RC: I was going to comment, something that you said about Mary [Hillaire]. Her sister Colleen
was talking to me about some of the teachings and principles that she came up with in Native
American studies. One of the things that Colleen said about how she would reflect upon and help
student writing evaluations was, what did you do, how did you do it, and what difference did it
make? So, what did you do, how did you do it, and what difference did it make? And I ask that of
my students every time I have them write an evaluation. But they also reflect upon their learning
in a number of other ways. What did you do, how did you do it, and what difference did it make?
And I always say that came out of Mary [Hilaire], and American Indian Studies. But I heard that
through her sister, Colleen. What is your relationship to land, what is your relationship to self,
what is your relationship to others, and what is your relationship to work?
WJH: Exactly, as you mention that I remember that conversation about that.
RC: I can just see Mary and Maxine talking, and Betsy too, and that whole circle of early people,
feeding off of each other's ideas, and Mary going back to Lummi, and talking to her community,
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and then coming back to Evergreen, and how these different communities were receiving each
other's scholarship and each other's practice around community. Because this community-based
learning is and was happening within and for these communities, and the Washington Center
adapting that, and our campus now adapting that with the service learning. So it's happening in
these different ways, but I think it's really important to trace our lineage, and acknowledge our
roots, and that's where it was happening, on the cutting edge, like you were talking about last
week. So, the things that happen around the edge.
WJH: I can remember when Mary received her name [Hadoowitt]. And there was a group of
Evergreen students who went up to film it. And they filmed, and they came back, and we were
watching the film, and Mary just kept shaking her head, and shaking her head, and she said, oh
God, you missed the most essential part of the ritual. And they said, but we got the children, and
we got the drums, and we got the so-and-so. She said, yeah, but you didn't get the cedar. Nothing
originates, nothing grows, without the land. Before we see the people, we should have seen the
land. Before the building was full, you should have taken a picture of the cedar. You must go
back and do it again. And it was such a learning experience because we'd all been thinking about
the people, and not that land, …And that's what I mean about it being such an exciting place, is
that we get to have these intersections.
My teaching, eventually we're going to teach together, because I'm going to teach forever. But
that's why I loved teaching with Willie because he was a scientist and a microbiologist. My
favorite class ever was when we did the allegory of the cave, and I did the literary part, the story,
and what happens when you want to have change in society and people are resisting it. And he
did the biological part, what happens to your body when change occurs, what happens with the
endorphins, and how to use the millisecond where you can change your mind. then the students
had to write a contemporary version, and they had to describe what was happening biologically,
as well as what was happening narratively.
ML: Sounds fun. Let's think about some class.
WJH: Yeah, I mean, it was a great class. And where else can you do that kind of fertilization than
at Evergreen. We've got our problems, we're in crisis right now...
ML: You've been at Evergreen all your career. I know you're going to continue teaching, still
trying to influence which direction the school goes. So, I’m asking if you have any other wisdom
to share about the future, for Tacoma campus? You said in early days, someone keep on trying to
close it. But I don't think that's the case anymore, but every year we're talking about lines, cutting
lines, not cutting lines, enrollment, always feel the campus is not going to develop, that we're
constantly stretching, we're not going to have viable programs. So, what would be your wisdom
to share at this point in your career, as a past director and as a current important leader in the
Evergreen community. How does Tacoma campus...are we going to stay, are we going to...what
is the long-term vision?
WJH: Do you know that TV show Mr. Monk? He was a detective, and he used to walk into
rooms to try and figure out what the crime scene was, and he'd do it through his hands. He would
just go like this around the room, and then he could tell you stuff. I'd have to do that around
Tacoma because I don't know Tacoma right now. I would like to come and teach at Tacoma
again. And I even had thought volunteering, but I don't know enough...What I feel from Mr.
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Monk, I feel...there has to be a little bit more dynamic leadership presence in the community. It
keeps coming back to that community thing; there has to be some involvement in the community.
Right now, the campus is just being managed, and if there are some things that are innovative,
nobody knows about it in the community. So, like for example, I'll just speak about Paul's thing,
because I know something about that. If these people are looking for math attacks, my
understanding is that Paul's got a grant or something where people look at math in the
curriculum, and when they find math in the curriculum, they point it out...now that's a concept
that needs to be at Jason Lee. Tacoma has got to get back into the community. So, people know
about the good stuff that's going on there. But right now, it's too [isolated] The director has to
be...I mean, I don't know whether the director is Olga or whether the director is Tyrus, but...
ML: Both.
WJH: Well, they both need to get out there. People won't come because there's no visible face,
there's not a face. Even if your faces were on buses, that would even be better. Seriously, so that
people can recognize...nobody knows. Have you been, for example, to the Chinese memorial on
Ruston Way, the reconciliation project?
ML: Yeah.
WJH: Tacoma...you should do a poetry reading there.
ML: I did. It's not sanctioned by Evergreen though, because...I tried. I mean, let's talk about it
some other time, but I tried. I don't think developing relationships on Chinese studies, period, is
supported by Evergreen.
WJH: Right, but I'm just talking about poetry, as a poet, to organize a poetry reading. Cause
you're a poet...I'm just saying, we don't know that there's...I'm just using you as an example
because you're here. We don't know that there's this incredible poet scientist woman around, and
available.
ML: I have an opera next month, I'll invite you! At PLU, by the way. It's not at Evergreen. And I
tried to even bring money into...Anyway, it was a no, no, we can't do that. You're saying the same
thing, you want to do anything creative, it is difficult. Legalities, spies from mainland China, I
mean...Money...their dollars are just as good as your dollar.
WJH: Right, right, they're buying up Seattle, so why can't they buy up, you know...?
ML: Well, try to open a Chinese classroom, free. Free. They already been accepted into UW,
UPS, Pacific Lutheran. And this Pacific Lutheran project, when it started, I was trying to do it in
Evergreen, but they don't. And Lutheran said, yes, we do, come to our campus!
WJH: Ok, yeah, so that's the tension. So that's why this provost search for me is so important, is
for somebody to be there that can say yes sometimes. And not just no.
ML: They're so afraid...

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WJH But that's what I'm saying, unfortunately when Evergreen in Olympia has a cold, then that
means Tacoma gets pneumonia. There are some systemic changes that have to be done in
Olympia in order for Tacoma to be free. Or grow.
ML: And of course, I'm jumping the gun again. Okay, I want to say, Tacoma for me, the Tacoma
campus, is a black college. That's I treat it when I teach there, even though half of our students
are white. It is a black college, has their own philosophy, way of organizing, way of...your
fingerprints are still there, a family atmosphere. People bring food, babies come, and everybody
holds the baby while teaching. We have toys for kids, and all that. But as a black leader, what do
you think, what difference Tacoma campus made for your mission, original mission, to promote
literacy and social success among African Americans? Do you think that mission Tacoma
campus can still carry on?
WJH: I think it has to carry that on, because it's a value system that I think is needed in higher
education. And I don't think.... Umm…I’m not pleased with that answer. you're asking hard
questions I haven't really thought about, because you're asking me future questions and I was
thinking about past kind of things.
ML: Yeah, sorry.
WJH: No, no, no, no, it's good. It's good, I like to think, you know that. I like to think. Um,.the
Tacoma campus is still very much needed by this community, it's still very much needed. It is
important to have someplace like when I run across kids, or people, to say, here, you can go to
college, you can go to college here at Tacoma. It will be with adults, your learning style will be
matched, ...
I know we talked about branding, but it's really a matter of envisioning...I mean, what I would
like, let me say it this way, if I was a director of the campus right now at this very moment, one
of the things I probably would do, is I'd stay black, but I'd go global. Because that's the next
place where we have to... it's also a place where there's a lot of money in higher ed, in
globalization of the curriculum. what would I want to prepare our students for? I would want to
prepare them not to just live in the community, but to live in the world. And I would really
exploit the international nature of the faculty, I would still stay black, but I would move beyond
binaries. It used to be people came to Tacoma campus because it helped them deal with the black
community, or the black world. And now I would say, come to the Tacoma campus because it
will help you deal with the global world, which includes a lot of people of color. And I don't
think there's anybody that's doing that right now, and we're so primed to do it. I mean, just
because of the existing faculty, and the existing student body.
I would contact the Kenyan Society, there's a huge Kenyan society. The statistics are coming out
right now say students coming out of Africa are the highest achieving of any immigrant
populations, even higher than Southeast Asian ones. I would contact El Centro [Del Raza] in
Seattle, which is one of the really big Hispanic social agency I would advertise it, and really
promote it as a place where people of international differences could come and study together the
real world issues about their problems and stuff. I wouldn't go for necessarily the people who are
undocumented right now, because they don't have the money for tuition. But I would go with
those people who have come here...

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ML: As refugees.
WJH: As refugees.
ML: We already have a lot of Somalian students, who came in with your standard problems,
because they have been in refugee camps throughout their school years. They don't really have
any educated language, not just English. They would be in France for two years, and then Italy
for two years, and so they're fragmented, with a lot of learning needs. So, I think Tacoma's
curriculum has really helped them a lot.
WJH: Ok, right, and I'd use those as my ambassadors. Get one group in and tell them to bring
four more. And there are a lot of like people from South America, who had some education, had
degrees, but now they don't have degrees. One of the things that we don't push enough is that we
give credit for life experience. Not as much as we used to, but we still can give at least up to a
year. If they have certificates, or if they want to write. I don't know if we still have the...
RC: PLE, prior learning...program [experience?].
WJH: We still have that? Okay, I would try to push that like crazy. Because we're trying to figure
out how can we condense time in an environment that is conducive to you if you want to do
community work, or go back to your community, or something else like that. And because
[Phyllis] and those guys really want to come and do MIT in Tacoma. I would not go to TCC for
paras, I would go to the schools. I would go to University Place, and say, if people are interested,
get your BA in a way that you can combine [work and time?]. I'm just thinking of one of the
women who works with my mom. She's a para- at Clover Park. She's so smart, but she doesn't
have a BA. She keeps training people, and they keep becoming her boss. We also need some
money for people to pay off their federal loans. I would try to do is find some funds for people to
pay off their past schools. Because that's what I find a lot; people want to come, but they owe
money at another school. They owe TCC some money, they owe so and so some money. We
don't give money that way, but we need to find a rich person or a donor or somebody that says,
hey, I will pay off your loan. If you finish your BA, you don't have to pay back the money that
I'm loaning you to pay off your loan. But if you don't finish your BA, then you have to pay it
back. Something so that they can guarantee. That's where I see people being stopped, I've seen
people who want to go, but they messed up because they went to some school off a matchbook.
They just need 1000, they just need something or other. Because once they get in, they get the
FASA, then they can work some other things. I see people who have had some education, but
because of structural situations, refugeeism or something else like that, they are blocked. There's
so much money out there for that kind of retraining that I would look at that.
I'll think more about it, but I would say look at who you are now, and what is the current
configuration you can offered to the community, that can be the marketable. But I think
globalization with the idea of social service is a niche that we could fill really well,
ML: I think you're right, you're absolutely right.
WJH: Right, right, and even if we just said the word ‘globalization’, we could pull people from
Olympia as well, because there's no global hub. I mean, like Sean's doing the Irish class, and
Kabby's doing the black class, and somebody else is doing the Russian class, but students want
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to do things like stop trafficking. They're always trying to find a contract, always trying to find a
space. And one other thing, you may want to look at your curriculum, and decide whether you
want to do all coordinated studies as a theme thing, or do you want to allow more internships and
independent contracts for people who come in and have a purpose or something. But I think that
still comes under the globalization. I just know that what I hear outside, it's a buzzword. And
right now, nobody's really imaginatively trying to umbrella it. They just think of it right now as
going someplace and bringing somebody to.
ML: I immediately can see the special detailed needs to make that happen. First of all, we need
to have a language teacher who can teach English as a second language, right now we don't have
that. We need to have some mechanisms to make our students can study abroad. For our
American students who study abroad, they’d transformed when they are not being constantly
prejudiced against, when they don’t have to constantly feel their skin color. When they go to
another country, it's a completely different thing. They just need to be there for a month to a
quarter, and they will come home with a completely different attitude. But many of our students
have families, working two jobs, how they do that? Is there any financial ways, any
arrangements, so things like that. Because if our students go to another country to study, they can
be ambassador to our school.
WJH: So that would be a creative thing to figure out, how can you do that, how can you simulate
that experience. I mean going is critical, field study is critical, but maybe you don't go thirteen
thousand places, maybe you just go one place for ten days even. It's not a tour of the country, just
going right there, getting immersed in that. But I mean, it can be figured out, it can be figured out
in terms of... films, and simulations…you know.
ML: Field trips, rather than whole quarter. Just a week or two.
WJH: Right, yeah.
RC: I'm thinking about a community from another country coming in to really to immerse
themselves for a week or two at Tacoma, and then going back home. Having them learned about
a place and a community, and different aspects of language and culture and identity, and the arts
and social justice issues, and taking that back home. Tacoma is a perfect place for people to nest,
to come in and have a place and feel like they've been taken care of and go back.
WJH: Right, and it can be travel, but it also can be mind travel as well. I was listening to Amy
Goodman on Democracy Now...Larry [Muscadet] turned me onto it, so now I have it on my
phone, cause he said, the first thing I do every morning is, at 9 o'clock it turn on, that's where I
get my news and things. So yesterday she was talking about the intersectionality of climate
change, and what's happening with the native people.
RC: The North Dakota Standing Rock.
WJH: Standing Rock, and how they’re being affected, the fracking is impacting the water over
there. Someplace where people could go...just like the University of Washington has their policy
center. Tacoma could be a place where people could go and see those kinds of global
implications. Like, thinking locally, but acting globally, that kind of thing, about seeing how, and

66

being known as a think tank, in which issues of interconnected global issue are part of the
curriculum. It would be about a disease in Cameroon and the fact that so many African
Americans have Cameroonian DNA, so what does that mean in terms of susceptibility, does that
mean that there's more of a...
ML: That's the thing, the genetic richness in Africa is just so amazing. And all of us outside, all
Asians and Europeans and Pacific Islanders, all of us are very related, and very small band of
people from out of Africa, and then we spread. But the human genetic variations, the really
treasure trove, is in Africa. Because many people, the majority of them, didn't leave. So, they're
so different, geneticists now have proof.
WJH: Right, right, but see, that needs to be marketed.... everything else is really silos, they really
are little persons, the little man at the University of Washington who's trying to, wants to start an
Africana Studies department. And so far, he has a little exhibit in the library, cause he's a
librarian. But I'm just saying, there are these little pockets, but in terms of what we do, we do it
interdisciplinary, we can think about genetics, as opposed to just thinking about Africa. It's the
genetics, and it has to do with this here. That broad, broad, picture, we could market that, and it
would be a logical niche, from the Hilltop to the world. But always coming back to the Hill as an
identifier. Even though people may not come from the Hilltop anymore, it's critical that we want
to have the Hilltop at our center.
ML: How about the word “retool”?
WJH: Retool? Retool the image, as opposed to brand?
ML: Retool, that means acknowledge people come in, already has their method, their past
experience, their past knowledge, but with all the changes in the world, I mean US in the
economical global environment, we need to retool...
WJH: Retool, right exactly. And this is a place where you can do it, not only can you do it
theoretically, but you can do it as a lab. And that's what the other places can't give you.
ML: It's applicable. Retool, rather than learning, which is so vague, retool, that means you go out
with your new tools.
WJH: Right, right, we're going to give you a toolkit in order for you to function in the real world.
RC: I'm thinking, too, about you were mentioning global warming, and we're seeing a world that
is in crisis, where there are many kinds of refugees and climate refugees. And that word refuge,
refugee, faculty that have come to the Tacoma campus because it's a refuge. Students that come
to the Tacoma campus because it's a refuge. Now, that refuge can take on the local issues of
refugees coming here, but can they take on this global issue of a world in crisis, with many
refugees? But being a refuge, a place that people are welcome, and come to because they get the
support they need, and then can go out and serve. It's a refuge. And absorb and bear witness. It's
a [container] for the refugee to explore the issues of our time, a world in crisis.
I am thinking about Standing Rock, and when the police were surrounding those people who
were standing for earth and for the future, and in love of something that was more important than
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a few bucks and an oil pipeline. They were being surrounded by the police, and the leader said,
remember why you're here.” Guns were pointed, guns were being loaded, and people were
scared. And you start to react, and then panic sets in. the leader said, I was watching a video on
Facebook, just remember why you're here, remember why you're here. And so we're in crisis, all
of us are being stressed, all of us are being tested. We're going through this stress test, but if we
can remember why we're here, and that refuge for the refugees is where we all are, at this time in
history. It feels like it's seeding something powerful and important for this time; that work as a
storyteller and your work as a scientist, these pieces that we all bring together from our different
points of view. I think it's powerful.
WJH: Yeah, yeah.
ML: I like what you just said. Anything else you want to add to this?
WJH: No, except that this has been great, this opportunity to reflect and to be affirmed, and to be
stimulated. No, I don't have anything else to say, except I would like to work again in Tacoma, I
think about when I'm on that road going down to Olympia, driving 55 minutes when I can walk
over three minutes, you know. But it's not that; it's just the population, and I don't ever want to be
removed from it in some way, because I still care. I would love to do some work with the senior
synthesis again.
ML: Come to faculty meetings.
WJH: I could, yeah, when do you have faculty meetings? Tuesday afternoons now? Okay.
ML: And if you happen to be...
WJH: Around, then yeah, I can do it, yeah. Right. I teach at Green Hill on Tuesdays, but
sometimes we get out early.
ML: Thank you very much.
WJH: You're welcome
ML: Thank you, this has been wonderful.
WJH: Yes, this really has.
RC: Across this table at this planning meeting, we both just knew that this is what we wanted to
do.
ML: Yeah.
WJH: Well, I really am honored by that, so thank you, thank you very much.

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ML: It's one of the reasons I keep on trying to see, maybe we can teach a class even in Olympia.
It didn't happen, remember just before you left, we were talking about trying to teach a class
together? Even if we had to go to Olympia.
WJH Yeah, we were, right.
Chamberlain: And your legacy is up on the main campus as well, among the faculty and students
there. It's a strong legacy because you've come in, and you've mentored people at multiple
junctures on both campuses, and through the Washington Center. So you have a national
mentorship and reputation. So, it's big work, and it's important work, and, you know, it leaves its
imprint in people and on people and within the community. It really does, because you know
what you're about. And that's why we're here today.
ML: If you would allow us to tag on, another question is, I know you have a huge side of your
life outside the school in the world, travelling to different parts of the world, Africa particularly.
You are interested in theater, art, and speak French. Would you share as an established faculty
and scholar, tell us how you link your own intellectual or artistic pursuit of outside projects with
your leadership on campus and teaching at Evergreen?

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

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